As we discussed in class, time plays a large—if subliminal—role in Mrs. Dalloway. Firstly, the structure of the novel is focused on how the characters perceive and experience time; Woolf jumps back and forth between the consciousnesses of various characters living the same moment (i.e. when the car backfires and we see both Clarissa’s and Septimus Warren Smith’s view of it) to show us how elastic time can be. Then there’s the fact that the main protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, is a woman in her early fifties, which many people would consider her twilight years, so time becomes a fairly obvious metaphor for the process of aging. She’s often reminiscing on the past, a sort of attempt to move back or cling onto her youth and further from the imminence of death, and begins to question her choices in life (reflected in her memories of her former love interest, Peter Walsh) and whether she has lived the life that she actually wants. A passage on page 30 fairly succinctly summarizes my main points:

But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton’s face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him, and the ways which threaten to break, but only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust as they just turn over the weeds with pearl.