Writing as Representation of“Presenc” and “Absence”：A Study of Metonymic and Metaphoric Perspectives in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

The approach of this paper is an attempt to examine the structure of the stream-of-consciousness novel Mrs. Dalloway in terms of Roman Jakobson’s theory of the two axes—“the metonymic way” and “the metaphoric way”—of language to distinguish and organize the two planes—presence and absence— interwoven in a complicated structure and perplexing network as in Virginia Woolf’s work, Mrs. Dalloway. According to Jakobson, a syntagmatic axis is about combination, contiguity and metonymy; whereas a paradigmatic axis is about selection, similarity and metaphor. The attempt to apply Jakobson’s two axes of metonymy and metaphor to examine the represented discourses in Mrs. Dalloway reveals that it is surprisingly meaningful for a clearer and more profound understanding of the book. In the book, there are events described along a syntagmatic axis on an ordinary day. In addition, along the syntagmatic axis, the linear time sequence of the story is frequently interrupted by the characters’ indirect interior monologues, which is a technique called montage in cinema, or metaphor in poetry. As for the symbolic analysis of the context, Todorov’s way of finding “textual indices” will help us explore what needs to be investigated from the hidden meaning in the story. With the help of this approach we are able to see what Woolf intends and criticizes in an intricate tapestry of presence and absence. The significance of examining Mrs. Dalloway from Jakobson’s metonymic and metaphoric perspectives, as well as the use of Todorov’s way of finding “textual indices,” shows it’s a valuable way to clear up the confusion of the presence and absence intermingling in a stream-of-consciousness novel as Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.