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  • Tonal Cues and Uncertain Values:Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway
  • Molly Hite (bio)

One important kind of literary criticism involved in the "ethical turn" describes and theorizes the ethical relations that readers perceive among characters or between characters and the narrator.1 My interest in such value structures within a literary text, however, begins from an issue still rarely treated. I am concerned with experimental narratives with third-person narrators who deliberately make it difficult for readers to discern what evaluative stance they are supposed to have toward characters, events, or descriptions.2 In Virginia Woolf's middle-period fiction, the narrator's tonal cues within the text are frequently contradictory, inconclusive, or simply absent. By tonal cues I mean textual markers that prompt readers to have one affective response rather than another—a response like sympathy, condescension, irritation, suspicion, approval—and to make conscious or unconscious evaluations accordingly: a character is good, pompous, or inferior; a passage of dialogue or indirect discourse is misleading, pretentious, or to the point. In the fiction that interests me here, third-person narrators give conflicting or insufficient guidance about whether a character is admirable or trustworthy or about whether a passage in the narrative voice or an utterance by a character should be regarded seriously or ironically. In Peter Rabinowitz's terms, readers lack the wherewithal to make "snap moral judgments," a loss that makes moral judgment puzzling and thus important to the process of reading (Rabinowitz 84–93).

Mrs. Dalloway, one of the most beloved of Woolf's novels, is also one of the most experimental in terms of the values its third-person narrator complicates or withholds. Its affective indeterminacy leaves elements of the story open to different responses, and these responses cue conscious or unconscious judgments.3 For [End Page 249] instance, to like a character (find him or her sympathetic) is generally to attribute positive qualities to that character, even if these qualities are not immediately perceived as ethically positive. As a consequence, Mrs. Dalloway has a history of strikingly divergent interpretations that conflict on the value and role assigned to the title character, the nature of the climactic scene, and the attitude readers should have toward the second, shadow protagonist, Septimus Smith. These questions of evaluation arise in the context of perhaps the largest ethical-political question of the twentieth century, egalitarianism. Woolf's ambiguous tonal cues engage this question by stressing both its urgency and its resistance to being understood, much less practiced. Rebecca Walkowitz observes that modernists "sought to imagine models of social critique that would resist social codification" (80). By using third-person narrators who provide insufficient or contradictory tonal cues, Woolf enabled an intense concern with social categories without allowing attentive readers to slot narratorial observations into overall judgments of admiration or censure.

Rather than raising more usual questions in experimental fiction about the truth or reality of a represented situation or action (McHale, Postmodernist 3–25), Mrs. Dalloway traffics in affective uncertainty, leaving readers unclear how to feel about—or "take"—descriptions and utterances and, ultimately, events and characters. My use of "take" here invokes the colloquial American sense of having an attitude, or generally feeling about, as in "I don't know how to take his jokes." Note that in this instance of "taking" someone's jokes the speaker expresses both cognitive and affective confusion. In terms of affect, this confusion might lay out an array of possible responses to the joke-teller without clearly favoring any one of them. The possible responses might include humiliation at feeling oneself mocked, offense at the rejection of a value that the listener had assumed was shared with the joker, or ridicule of the inadequacies of the telling. I suggest that one radically experimental effect of Woolf's middle-period fiction arises from a calculated refusing or perplexing of authoritative directions that would enable readers to take crucial elements of her narrative discourse: to assign what they perceive to be authorially sanctioned feelings and thus values to the main events and characters.4 James Phelan has observed that tone is a quality of narrative voice that indicates the attitude a speaker has toward her...

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