Virginia Woolf wrote her fourth novel Mrs Dalloway according to these innovative features, in which objective time is compressed into one single day. However, with the incorporation of flashbacks and memories, subjective time spans through decades. The fluidity of the text is moreover reinforced by the fact that the novel is not divided into chapters. Thus, the form invokes a sense of continuity, but also that of sameness and a kind of engulfing effect: since there are no structural divisions, reading the text feels like swimming and floating in the fluid texture of the novel. This overwhelming effect of the novel’s rhetoric can be paralleled with the more apparent sense of engulfment of the characters, which I believe is one of the most significant themes of the novel. According to the Free Online Dictionary, engulfment or the experience of being engulfed is “to swallow up or overwhelm by or as if by overflowing and enclosing.” Namely, a fear of engulfment is a fear of being “enclosed,” oppressed and gradually losing one’s identity. The fear of oppression can be detected in most of the characters in Mrs Dalloway to some extent, which fear Virginia Woolf tries to convey through vivid imagery and through portraying the characters’ internal worlds.