Mapping Mrs. Dalloway: London as a Networked City

Abstract

Readers have been fascinated by the detailed references to London in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925); scholars and students have traced the characters’ precise routes; tourist sites offer guided walks along these paths. This on-line essay, however, concerns not what Woolf’s characters would have seen walking in London, but the patterns described by their movements. Starting with a pictorial map of London from 1923 (the year in which the novel is set) and superimposing the various routes as well as travelling sounds and ground/air vehicles, GIS mapping reveals Woolf’s London to be a complex, networked city. As Clarissa’s “self” extends into the world around her, even into people she doesn’t know, places she hasn’t been, the title “Mrs. Dalloway” expands into an alternative name for London. The city is a vast mind; the mind is a vast city. In this novel, mapping (whether of space or self) becomes a physical enactment of complex systems theory in the head and visualizing the complexity requires a multi-layered three-dimensional map.