“To Live Even One Day”: A Comparative Narratological Study of the Representation of Characters’ Discourses in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Marleen Gorris’s Cinematic Adaptation

Modernist literature decidedly experiments with such modes of discourse representation as free indirect discourse (FID) to highlight the subjective nature of reality and reflect the estrangement of the modern subject. Accordingly, an analysis of discourse representation has proved to be integral in exploring Modernist narratives. The discourse representation in movies, however, has received little attention from film narratologists. After an overview of discourse representation in literature and film, the present paper examines Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece Mrs Dalloway (1925) and its cinematic adaptation of the same title by Marleen Gorris (1997) and its interconnectedness to present characters’ subjectivities. The basic claim of this study is that the (free) indirect discourses of the novel are turned into free direct discourse in the movie using the technique of internal sound or flashback. Although there are instances of internal focalisation in this movie, they are so disjointed or short that the dominant discourse remains that of the narrator. Therefore, the findings of the present essay demonstrate that Gorris’ film is not creative enough to bring about effects equal to or beyond those produced by Woolf’s or reproduce the underlying forces of “difference” at play in Woolf’s text.

“To Live Even One Day”: A Comparative Narratological Study of the Representation of Characters’ Discourses in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Marleen Gorris’s Cinematic Adaptation Keywords:

Narrative , Discourse Representation , Focalisation , Free Indirect Discourse , Cinematic Adaptation , Subjectivity , Mrs Dalloway (Novel) , Mrs Dalloway (Movie).