INTENSITIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS: DELUSION, DREAM, AND DELIRIUM IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MRS. DALLOWAY AND KATHERINE ANN PORTER’S “PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER”
INTENSITIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS: DELUSION, DREAM, AND DELIRIUM IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MRS. DALLOWAY AND KATHERINE ANN PORTER’S “PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER”

Summary/Abstract: "The chiming of Big Ben which punctuates and permeates the hours of Clarissa Dalloway’s day, “first a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable” celebrates, in part, the recovery of Londoners from the Great War (Woolf, 1925:4). Its following sound, the ringing of the bells of St Margaret’s, as conceived by Clarissa’s old suitor Peter Walsh, “glides into the heart and buries itself in ring after ring of sound, like something alive which wants to confide itself, to disperse itself, to be, with a tremor of delight, at rest—like Clarissa herself” (1925:50). The bells embody for Peter a moment of closeness with Clarissa in their youth. But if Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway is in part a celebration of life and recovery, it is as well a conversation with death. Thus for Peter the “languish [ing]” of the bells brings a sense that “the sound expressed languor and suffering” and finally, recalling that Clarissa has been ill and has a weakened heart, “the final stroke tolled for death in the midst of life” (1925:50). Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” might well serve as a companion piece for Mrs. Dalloway, even to the detail of Miranda, a newspaper writer in a mountain town in the United States, waking to the “gong” of war at the start of the story. "[...]

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