Distraction - Mrs. Dalloway IX

“But what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? Only for a moment did they lie still; then they moved and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky, and the aeroplane shot further away and again, in a fresh space of sky, began writing a K, an E, a Y perhaps?” (Woolf 20).

Virginia Woolf uses the symbol of the aeroplane to represent how short human attention spans can be; the people are all extremely interested in the car, and who is inside of the car, until they spot a shiny aeroplane. Then, the car is completely forgotten.

Woolf also uses the letters the plane is writing to symbolize the unclarity often found when analyzing symbols. After the letters are seen, the people all sit about trying to decipher the meaning of the letters; eventually, a few people agree that one of the words was “toffee,” but other than that, the letters stay muddled. 


Woolf, Virginia, and Francine Prose. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando: Harcourt, 2003. Print.