‘Exquisite moments’: moments of epiphany in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925)

In Mrs Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf weaves together the fibres of her characters’ lives into an ever-moving, interconnected narrative fabric. Characters enter into a communal realm of being, their streams of individual existence entangling with the internal realms of others, and the external world around them. Woolf’s winding omniscient narration and free indirect discourse seamlessly enacts this entangling across the space of a single day. The progression of this day and its linear passage of time, marked by the rhythmic pulses of London’s Big Ben that swell throughout the characters’ narratives, finds itself strangely interrupted by sudden moments of epiphany which carry with them their own peculiar, fluctuating temporalities.
Reading Mrs Dalloway through the lens of the philosophical vision outlined in Woolf’s essay ‘A Sketch of the Past’ illuminates this strange relationship between past and present, and Woolf’s vision of the layered, wave-like texture of temporal streams. In Mrs Dalloway, epiphanic moments open up dream-like pools of being within the novel’s onward temporal flow, submerging Woolf’s characters into internal spaces where time moves differently. Within these moments, the past erupts into the present with a mystic intensity, and the membranes between memory and reality, sensation and imagination, and internal and communal thought become permeable. Immersion into these spaces of wonder and revelation, what Woolf refers to as ‘exquisite moments’, is often mobilised by a cultivated relationship with the mundane. Everyday objects and sensations that pattern the characters’ narratives become powerful gateways for epiphanic visions. The realms of the ordinary and the sublime overlap, the minutiae of existence illuminated in radiant detail. Tender attention to this detail of existence offers us a rich way of experiencing and embodying the world around us, a means through which we can access the ’divine vitality’ of ordinary life.