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Teaching Literature

How I Teach Structure in Mrs. Dalloway (Not Just Stream of Consciousness)

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Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith from Mrs. Dalloway rendered in a cubist styleBelieve it or not, Mrs. Dalloway might be one of my favorite books to teach. It definitely presents many challenges. It doesn’t divide neatly into chapters. It’s non-linear. It’s written in a stream of consciousness. Students struggle with it. Honestly, many teachers struggle with it! Common approaches, such as teaching the traditional plot arc (Freytag’s Pyramid) or teaching character development, simply don’t work with Mrs. Dalloway. The real difficulty students face when reading this novel is that they don’t understand its structure. The problem isn’t that students can’t read Mrs. Dalloway. It’s that they don’t yet know how to read a novel that isn’t built like a novel they’ve seen before.

The key move for me was to approach the novel’s structure rather than teach its style. While Woolf is experimenting stylistically in this novel, she’s doing much more than trying out stream of consciousness. She is playing with time and perspective. Characters’ thoughts turn to the past and move back to the present as seamlessly as our own. She follows the thoughts of several characters all at once. Moments that take place over seconds are stretched across pages. She juxtaposes the past and the present, characters, and events. Patterns reveal themselves. Once students see the structure, the novel becomes readable.

I approach teaching Mrs. Dalloway with three strands: Time and the Persistence of Memory; Sanity, Illness, and Social Authority; and Social Performance and Private Identity. These strands converge at the novel’s end when Clarissa learns of Septimus’s death at her party.

Time and the Persistence of Memory approaches the chiming of Big Ben as structure, not simply background. Memory consistently interrupts the present, as Clarissa thinks about her kiss with Sally and her days at Bourton. Time is pressure, not just a sequence of moments.

Sanity, Illness, and Social Authority focuses on teaching Septimus’s story not as a side plot but as a critical element of the story. In Septimus’s arc, institutions, represented by Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw, define “normal” and exert their authority. The language of authority matters: Bradshaw controls his patients through Proportion and Conversion.

Social Performance and Private Identity examines Clarissa’s performance at her party. It focuses on how she appears publicly, in contrast to her private thoughts, and treats the party as the novel’s structural convergence.

These strands give students a way to track patterns throughout the novel rather than reading it as a series of disconnected moments. They begin to see how Woolf builds meaning structurally rather than through plot.

One example lesson I teach introduces students to Woolf’s use of time as a structural force rather than a background detail through a close reading of the introduction of Big Ben’s chimes, a motif that runs through the novel.

First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

Students take apart the first sentence. What do these two parts suggest about time? Why construct the sentence in two parts? I play the Westminster chimes of Big Ben for students and ask them what it might be like to hear those chimes marking every hour of your life. Students invariably notice the pressure that time exerts when marked in this way, but also, there is a collective experience—time is a shared experience. Structurally, the sentence also prepares students for how to read this novel as a whole. I guide students to pay attention to the semicolon, acting as a hinge.

Students then analyze the novel’s beginning in small groups. They track how Woolf moves in and out of Clarissa’s mind, identifying where those shifts occur, what triggers them, and what changes as a result. It’s important to affirm that students do not need to be right; they just need to notice the structural movement.

As a class, we examine the Trigger → Shift → Effect pattern as a way of tracking how Woolf moves between consciousnesses. We discuss patterns, noting external triggers (such as sounds, movements, memory cues) and how they lead to an internal shift. Then we discuss the emotional or temporal effect of that shift.

I guide students to notice that time does not move linearly, and they reflect on how Woolf’s description of Big Ben suggests that time exerts pressure on characters.

When I approach the novel through structural focus, students stop asking “What is happening?” and start to notice “Why is Woolf structuring the novel this way?” Students can grasp concepts such as structure, meaning, and complexity with this focus.

When I first taught this novel, I didn’t know how to approach it and resorted to cobbling lessons together based on a few things I could find online. Over time, I realized I needed a more coherent way to teach the novel—not just a series of lessons, but a structure that helped students build understanding across the unit. I ended up building a full unit organized around these ideas, including lesson plans, slides, and multiple assessment pathways.

My full Mrs. Dalloway unit includes lesson plans, slides, and assessments built around this structure.

Teaching this novel matters, even in an age when students increasingly struggle to focus and are losing reading stamina. Students deserve opportunities to meaningfully experience difficult reading. Understanding structure is a skill they can transfer to other reading—and other complex texts. It’s worthwhile: when this novel hits, it cracks open new worlds for students.

Reflection, Slice of Life, Teaching Literature

Re-Reading

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books travel photo

For some reason, Emily Dickinson’s line, “There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away” is running through my mind after re-reading Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours. My AP Lit students read and studied Mrs. Dalloway before spring break, and I asked them to read Cunningham’s book over the break. Since it had been quite some time since I read it, a re-read was in order for me, too. I remember it didn’t quite land for me when I first read it. I recognized it was well written, but I couldn’t have foreseen I’d read it again. Because I really love the idea of intertextuality, and also because I borrowed my AP book list largely from a friend and colleague, I decided I’d do Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours together.

My students empathized with Septimus Warren Smith, and they really wanted to talk about him in our discussions, though they also marveled at Virginia Woolf’s writing and tried to connect to Mrs. Dalloway as a character, too. I think they did good work. I will be curious to see how they appreciated The Hours after having read Mrs. Dalloway first, because my first reading of The Hours was years before my first reading of Mrs. Dalloway, and I believe I appreciated The Hours more after understanding how it is in dialogue with Mrs. Dalloway.

What I have really been thinking about today, however, is re-reading. I often tell students that we bring everything we are, everything we’ve read, and everything we’ve done to each book. When we re-read with a gap of time, we often find we respond differently to a book the second time because we are not the same people we were the first time we’ve read, we’ve read more books, and we’ve lived more. In the case of The Hours, my response was entirely different. I connected deeply to the characters in a way I couldn’t when I first read the book 13 years ago.

I remember having the same reaction to re-reading The Catcher in the Rye. I read it as a teenager and despised Holden. Who cares about some ungrateful, annoying preppie teenager roaming New York? How horrified I was when a high school friend once told me he thought all teenage boys were Holden Caulfield. Years later, I saw Holden entirely differently, but it took becoming a mother and a teacher for me to empathize with Holden. Now I love that book and count it among my favorites.

While I know that there is a popular movement in English teaching today to throw out the whole-class novel study, I do still see value in it. I know for a fact that some of the books I am asking my students to read won’t land for them, not yet. I have told them so. And yet there is still value in reading and thinking about these books, letting them rattle around in our brains, and returning to them (if we want to) years later when perhaps we are ready for them to land. At the same time, I do think students need to learn what they like to read in order to become readers, and we should offer opportunities for students to choose what they read as well. The tricky part is not ruin a book so that students have no desire ever to return to it again. Of course, I never really know if students do return to books unless they make a point of telling me, and often they are living their lives, reading other books, and doing other things, so I never know for sure if they pick up a book we studied together, look at it again with their more experienced eyes, and connect to a book in a way they didn’t when they were in my class. But they do at least have the book, somewhere in their minds, and later, perhaps the book might just take them lands away.

Slice of LifeSlice of Life is a daily writing challenge during the month of March hosted by Two Writing Teachers. Visit their blog for more information about the challenge and for advice and ideas about how to participate.

Slice of Life, Teaching Literature

Distillation

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In my classes this week I tried out two ways of distilling the text. The first is what’s known as a Literary 3X3, which is a technique I hadn’t heard of until a few weeks ago. The Literary 3X3 asks students to write three sentences of three words each that capture the essence of a text. There are rules. Students should try to use abstract nouns, no proper nouns, no “to be” verbs, no articles, no repeated words, no pronouns, no cliches.

We wrote one about Septimus Warren Smith’s story in Mrs. Dalloway.

Septimus Warren Smith 3X3

Isn’t it great? They wrote the second line first, then the last line. I suggested they back up and write about what came before the other two lines and write a first line. They were so happy with their first line they clapped after they were finished.

One student said, “It’s like a poem!” Another added, “Yeah, like a haiku, but… not.” Man, my students make me laugh.

Another way we distilled a text this week was an adaptation of a Text Rendering Protocol.  We had read Margaret Atwood’s poem “Half-Hanged Mary” after finishing The Crucible. Students shared the line that they felt captured something essential about the poem. Then I asked each student to give me one word from the poem that captured something essential. As they shared, I typed their responses into Wordle. Here is what my D period American Lit came up with:

Half-Hanged MaryThe students said “Woah!” I asked, “What do you think? Does this capture what the poem is about?” They agreed that it did.

Here is what my F period American Lit class (smaller group) came up with:

Half-Hanged Mary

What I love about these activities is that it’s actually quite hard to reduce a text down to three sentences or down to a single word, and yet, the results were great.

As my D period students were filing out the door, one of them asked me about the Wordle: “Did you PLAN that?”

I loved that question. I had to admit truthfully that they could have said different words, but that yes, the idea is that these sorts of activities will yield results like this. Still, I love it that he has an idea I’m totally messing with their minds.

Spring break starts.
Exhausted teacher relaxes.
June watches nearby.

Slice of LifeSlice of Life is a daily writing challenge during the month of March hosted by Two Writing Teachers. Visit their blog for more information about the challenge and for advice and ideas about how to participate.