The Leaden Circle of Life

As the characters of Mrs. Dalloway go about their contrasting lives, lost in individual sporadic thoughts (can they not), one thing remains a constant - the passing of time. In fact, Woolf essentially uses the time of day as concrete checkpoints for the often abstract stream of consciousness that embodies the bulk of the novel. So far in the piece, three particular times are noted by the striking of Big Ben: in the early morning as Clarissa sets out to buy flowers, at 11:30 AM as Peter Walsh departs from Clarissa's home, and at noon as Clarissa finishes mending her dress and the Warren Smiths make their way to Sir William Bradford. Despite the contrasts in setting and differences in character at each of these three scenes, each mention of Big Ben is followed by the line "the leaden circles dissolved in the air". This is a sentence speaks volumes about the novel's recurring motif of time.

Not really leaden or circular but that's ok

Because so much of the novel deals with the multiplicity of time, the striking of Big Ben serves as a reminder that as characters reflect intensively on past memories, the passage of time at the present occurs simultaneously. The repetition of this line stressing "leaden circles" creates a sense of weight and oppression, as if each character under the clock's strike has been burdened with yet another source of stress - the passage of time. This oppression is eternal and inclusive, for time is a phenomenon that never ceases to exist; it effectively shapes the past as well as gives way to life in the future. However, the passage of time is also ephemeral, as each moment of the present resonates only shortly before it "dissolves" into the amorphous body of the past. Thus, Big Ben's every strike takes the form of "leaden circle", snapping the characters from an abstraction of their pasts back to the weight of reality, reminding them ominously of "the hour, irrevocable" (4).