Androgynous Time in Mrs. Dalloway Phạm Phương Thảo 10th Grade

Virginia Woolf grants us an access to a new concept of time in “Mrs. Dalloway”, through which temporality-moment is investigated in two contradictory ways: one is continuous, deadly, dissolving while the other is placid, immortal, infinite; hence the combination of them has created a new type of temporality – androgynous time.

The deadly and dissolving moment, belonging to physical time, is fully represented through the Big Ben clock. The Big Ben clock, with its appearance throughout the novel, reminds people the time of the real world, the past that will never return “Big Ben struck the half hour”(Mrs. Dalloway, 119). And moments are like “leaden circles dissolved in the air” (Woolf, 2). For every moment appears from nothing then just disappears to nothing, leaving no traces (Kuhlken, p357), ceaselessly, like a raindrop diminishes when coincides with the ground, it does not seem so significant. However that insignificance is significant to everybody, including Clarissa, for every moment is attributed to their death. If even moment can disappear, then “did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely[?]”, thought Clarissa (Woolf, p.6). The disappearance of moment represents Clarissa’s own disappearance, for time can...