The Wall Grey, the Bananas Yellow: The Social Importance of Color in Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract: This article positions Virginia Woolf's invocation of color in Mrs. Dalloway as an aesthetic technique that has political effects at the level of narrative. Consulting Caroline Levine's recent work on Victorian forms—specifically the Dickensian social network—I argue that the network structure extends into modernism and is most visible in this text through the appearance and re-appearance of certain pigments. Woolf's experiments with color blend moments and characters into one another, resulting in the formulation of a plot that weaves "spider's thread[s] of attachment" and complicating the traditional linear model of narrative as causal chain. To support my claim, I also consult Emma Kafalenos's work on narrative causality, in which she posits that readerly interpretation of narrative events is always context-dependent and at least partially determined by the sequence in which events are presented. I suggest that Woolf's use of color actually works to lift certain moments out of their contexts and link them instead with their narrative twins, thereby re-contextualizing these events along more associational, rather than chronological, lines. Viewed in this way, the novel becomes an immense network of intersecting, colored threads: a narrative world where nothing exists in isolation; where even the smallest action or insignificant thought can have far-reaching social consequences.