Mrs Dalloway’s Dialogic Discourse and the Function of the Written Fragment

The text of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway is constructed from multiple character ‘voices’ or discourses in such a way that gives the novel a dialogic form. After discussing Mrs Dalloway’s dialogic model of sane and insane discourse and subjectivity—a model which is transposed into the text through the discourses of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith—by drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of novelistic discourse, this paper demonstrates how the novel makes use of its dialogic form and structure, positing a model of modern subjectivity by demonstrating the paradoxical inhabitation of ‘insanity’ within sanity, and the fundamental role which ‘unreason’ plays as a constituent of reason.