On the Free Indirect Speech of Very Minor Characters in Mrs. Dalloway

ABSTRACT: "Very minor" characters in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway , who receive only a few sentences' attention before vanishing from the canvas of the novel, receive surprisingly consistent and intense depiction through free indirect speech, especially in the London street scene near the opening of the novel and the party scene near its close. Even in comparison with similar-looking scenes in Mrs. Dalloway 's modernist cousin, Ulysses , Woolf's interest in narrating her very minor characters' inner lives stands out. Woolf's application of free indirect speech to individuals in large groups generates an effect related to, but different from, the more unified "social mind" Alan Palmer identifies in novelistic narration of communities, and Alex Woloch's account of very minor characters as foils, notable for their paucity of detail. Instead, Woolf emphasizes both the distance between those individual minds, and the preoccupations and misperceptions resulting in their neglect of vulnerable or marginal characters such as Septimus Smith and Ellie Henderson. Woolf found in the use of free indirect speech to depict large groups of very minor characters a peculiar narrative tool for depicting how the collective mind can lose track of those who enjoy no special status within it.