BIG BEN AND THE SOUND

The Soundscape In Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract

This article seeks to establish the basic parameters for the development of a study of the soundscape in the novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) by its author, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), using noises and sounds characteristic of London in June 1923, between ten o'clock in the morning and midnight. Considering the sound objects, human and non-human sounds, and noises that permeate the path that the reader takes with the characters in the work, I intend to establish that Woolf's work, in its architecture, has sound as part of its aesthetic project. To this end, I will mobilize scholars from the field of musicology, such as R. Murray Schafer, from philosophy, such as Cassey O'Callaghan, and from sound studies, such as Sam Haliday. I thus intend to indicate how this aesthetic project is outlined in Woolf's writing in Mrs. Dalloway.