Teaching Notes: Mrs. Dalloway (Day 1/3)
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is today Woolf’s most widely-taught and widely-read novel, for good reason. The novel explores the nature of the self, the ineffable “mist” that links us all together as a society, the nature of marriage and relationships, and the world-view and experience of people with mental illness. It’s also the most accessible of the quartet of stunning books Woolf wrote in the 1920s -- including A Room of One’s Own, Orlando, and To The Lighthouse. The themes and methods of these various books overlap considerably, and the serious reader will want to read all four. In addition to the themes mentioned above, these books also make powerful arguments for women’s intellectual and artistic capabilities, something we’ll explore below.
Mrs. Dalloway’s structure and method is also highly innovative, with a narration that moves fluidly from consciousness to consciousness, with the majority of the focus on three main characters, Clarissa Dalloway, Septimus Smith, and Peter Walsh. There are no chapter breaks, and at times the lines between consciousnesses aren’t entirely obvious. Clarissa Dalloway is of course the heart of the book, though her character presents challenges and a genuine complexity. On the one hand, her affluence and social status have made her snobbish and at times shallow (she doesn’t want any “frumps” at a fancy party she is planning). Yet she is also remarkably perceptive and intuitive about the thin thread of consciousness and memory that links one human being to another.
Woolf wrote in her diaries about Mrs. Dalloway:
‘To give life & death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense’ (Diaries 2, 248)
One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoevsky. And do I? Or do I fabricate with words, loving them as I do? No, I think not. In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity 7 insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense-- But here I may be posting …. Am I writing The Hours from deep emotion? Of course the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squint so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it. It’s a question though of these characters. People, like Arnold Bennett, say I can’t create, or didn’t in [Jacob’s Room] …. I daresay it’s true, however, that I haven’t that ‘reality’ gift. I unsubstantiated, wilfully to some extent, distrusting reality--its cheapness. But to get further. Have I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about myself? (Virginia Woolf’s Diaries, Volume 2. June 19, 1923)
Also: described her writing as a ‘tunneling process’ (Diaries 2, 272). She ‘dig[s] out beautiful caves behind my characters’. The ‘caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment’ (Diaries 2, 263)
“I should say a good deal about The Hours & my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect & each comes to daylight at the present moment” (Wednesday August 30, 1923. Diaries 2, 263)
More on the “Discovery”:
It took me a year’s groping to discover what I call my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it. This is my prime discovery so far; & the fact that I’ve been so long finding it proves, I think, how false Percy Lubbock’s doctrine is--that you can do this sort of thing consciously. One feels about in a state of misery--indeed I made up my mind one night to abandon the book--& then one touches the hidden spring. (October 15, 1923. Diaries 2, 272)
Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway in about a year, in 1923 and 1924, and published it in 1925, just around the time she also published her first collection of literary critical essays, The Common Reader. Both books were very well-received, though Mrs. Dalloway did not sell very well initially.
Mrs. Dalloway is set in the aftermath of Word War I -- at a time when life in London had mostly returned to normal. The main vehicle for engaging World War I is of course the character of Septimus Warren Smith, a war veteran suffering from “shell shock” (which today we would call PTSD), whose mental illness is starkly represented in a number of scenes set from his point of view. Outside of Septimus Smith, the country seems largey untouched by catastrophic events that had ended just a couple of years earlier with such a vast cost in human lives. (England had 900,000 war dead in World War I, out of a population of 19 million. Nearly 5% of the population!)
Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s fourth novel. She had also published The Voyage Out, Night and Day, and Jacob’s Room. The latter is perhaps the most experimental and fragmentary of this early set of books -- written largely inspired by the sudden death of Woolf’s brother Thoby (and also inspired by World War I). Night and Day is sometimes overlooked as a confused effort -- Woolf was only just beginning to evolve her new style -- but it’s important as one of the few novels by Woolf that directly deals directly with the Women’s Suffrage movement in London in the early 1910s. The Voyage Out is also noteworthy for a number of reasons; it foregrounds a young woman’s coming of age and her awkward first encounters with sexuality and desire while on a sea voyage to Latin America. It also contains an early version of the characters of Richard and Clarissa Dalloway -- who enter and exit the novel as cheery conservatives. The personalities of these characters as they appear in Mrs. Dalloway retain some surface similarities, though Clarissa’s character in particular shows considerable hidden depths.
Mrs. Dalloway is sometimes thought of as Woolf’s version of Ulysses, and it does share with Joyce’s Ulysses the emphasis on the crystallization of the past in the present. Also, both novels are set largely in urban spaces (Dublin and London), with long sections that take us out of the subject positions of the main characters and into the lives and stories of unrelated people on the street. The experimentalism comes in the way Woolf moves from present experience into past memory without warning -- and from subject-position to subject position. Woolf is interested in breaking the wall of the individualized subject -- what can we learn if we think about characters relationally? Where might intersubjectivity take us (consciousness defined as a group project rather than an individual story)?
Both novels lack conventional chapter breaks or chapter enumeration, though they do have section breaks. In the first part of Mrs. Dalloway these breaks don’t seem especially significant, though the mysterious ‘solitary traveler’ sequence (where Peter Walsh takes a nap in a church) is marked off by section breaks before and after.
The idea overall is to move away from strict thinking of the novel as a linear progression -- characterized by strict chronological sequencing -- and instead as something more circular and loosely defined. It also gives both authors license to think a bit differently about plot and characterization. In a traditional Victorian novel, you might have these separate parallel plots, but at some point they have to converge and resolve. In Woolf, the convergence looks a little different than we might expect.
Despite those similarities, I would argue that Woolf’s approach to this new fluidity of form has a powerful feminist and queer sensibility that Joyce’s Ulysses lacks. The feminist and queer elements are explicitly thematized in Mrs. Dalloway in its characters (especially in the relationship between the young Clarissa and Sally Seton), but they might also be seen as visible in Woolf’s method. Which is to say, while Joyce explicitly ties his narrative to a Homer’s The Odyssey -- a patriarchal narrative if ever there was one -- Woolf has no grand mythological scheme in her book. Ulysses can be read not as exploding the English Canon and the dominance of the Bible in modern life but as encapsulating it all in one giant book; by contrast, Mrs. Dalloway consciously places itself outside of that tradition. It’s not as if there are no citations or literary lineages to be traced in Mrs. Dalloway (besides the inspiration from Joyce, there is also clearly allusions to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in the book; there are quotes from Shakespeare, and a good number of allusions to Dante). However, for reading Woolf, retracing these lineages is quite clearly besides the point.
There are several overlapping angles of attack. One is the displacement of the male-centered English Canon as a representation of masculine authority and masculine institutions (like Universities and the Church). This point of critique in the novel is also key in several other important texts by Woolf written in this period, especially Orlando and A Room of One’s Own, which make the marginalization of women in Literature even more explicit. Another is the displacement of men and masculine authority from Clarissa’s sense of who she is as a ‘self’. Clarissa is married to a Tory politician named Richard Dalloway; she is the mother of Elizabeth; she is hosting a party where the Prime Minister will be in attendance. But she is very aware that these aspects of her identity do not fully and satisfactorily define her. The most powerful, emotionally meaningful attachments in Clarissa’s life appear to be those that involve other women -- as a young woman, her intimate friendship with Sally Seton; as a mature woman, with her daughter and with other unnamed women whose friendship she has sought.
We can begin unpacking Woolf’s approach to feminism in Mrs. Dalloway by thinking about how family lineages and patrimony work in the novel. To some extent Mrs. Dalloway, as a middle-aged woman married to a prominent politician has no identity of her own:
But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing--nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.
There are two telling points here. One is the sense of invisibility Clarissa feels in the body of a middle-aged woman. She is past marriage and past the age where she might have more children: in a patriarchal society, she’s asking herself, what use does she have at this point in her life? The second prong of this thought process has to do with names and naming. Under traditional British patronymic social order, married women took legally their husband’s full names, meaning that legally, Clarissa is “Mrs. Richard Dalloway.”
This sense of belonging to her husband is worth thinking through. For Clarissa, as she goes about her day, does not really resist this social identity. Even as we follow her thoughts, we rarely see her reference her father’s family or her father as a person in her life. She often remembers, with considerable pleasure, the country house where she grew up -- Bourton. As the first half of the novel moves back and forth between her recollections of her life as a young woman there and Peter’s recollections of Clarissa there, Clarissa rarely thinks of her father. Indeed, the specific reference to her maiden name (that is to say, her father’s name) first appears in the novel in Peter Walsh’s thoughts, not Clarissa’s: “But he [Peter] had never got on well with old Parry, that querulous, weak-kneed old man, Clarissa's father, Justin Parry.” Clarissa does not mention her family name (or think of her father at all) until much later in the book:
To see your own sister killed by a falling tree (all Justin Parry's fault--all his carelessness) before your very eyes, a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them, Clarissa always said, was enough to turn one bitter. Later she wasn't so positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.
A reader could well be forgiven for not realizing that “Justin Parry” is actually Clarissa’s father.
This diminution of her family identity and lineage is very much an intentional decision on Woolf’s part. How should we name our protagonist? Is she Clarissa, Clarissa Parry, Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, or Mrs. Richard Dalloway? Which of these names does she own for herself? Indeed, the questions could also be asked about “Virginia Woolf.” Thinking about Virginia Woolf as her name as an author. The way she was often identified by her connection to her father and husband. Virginia Stephen, Mrs. Woolf, Mrs. Leonard Woolf... Virginia Woolf.
In an earlier version of the story, “Mrs. Dalloway on Bond Street” (published as a short story in 1923), Woolf did not shy away from having Clarissa name her family, and specifically her father. This is from the second paragraph of the short story version:
Only for Mrs Dalloway the moment was complete; for Mrs Dalloway June was fresh. A happy childhood--and it was not to his daughters only that Justin Parry had seemed a fine fellow (weak of course on the Bench); flowers at evening, smoke rising; the caw of rooks falling from ever so high, down down through the October air - there is nothing to take the place of childhood. A leaf of mint brings it back: or a cup with a blue ring.
In the more mature and thoughtfully crafted final version of the novel that we have, this reflection about Clarissa’s father is absent. She only thinks about Justin Parry with reference to the death of her sister Sylvia in a parenthetical aside: “(all Justin Parry’s fault--all his carelessness).”
In addition to being excluded from formal authority and power, both as a girl in her father’s house and now as the wife of a public figure, Clarissa has largely been excluded from access to education, whether formal or informal. Indeed, one of the points of attraction Clarissa feels for Sally Seton is the latter’s worldliness:
They sat up till all hours of the night talking. Sally it was who made her feel, for the first time, how sheltered the life at Bourton was. She knew nothing about sex--nothing about social problems. She had once seen an old man who had dropped dead in a field--she had seen cows just after their calves were born. But Aunt Helena never liked discussion of anything (when Sally gave her William Morris, it had to be wrapped in brown paper). There they sat, hour after hour, talking in her bedroom at the top of the house, talking about life, how they were to reform the world. They meant to found a society to abolish private property, and actually had a letter written, though not sent out. The ideas were Sally's, of course--but very soon she was just as excited--read Plato in bed before breakfast; read Morris; read Shelley by the hour.
The climactic moment between Sally and Clarissa is a kiss on the lips. But the background for that event is worth noting; it comes as a kind of interruption or pause in an evening dominated by men’s conversations:
All this was only a background for Sally. She stood by the fireplace talking, in that beautiful voice which made everything she said sound like a caress, to Papa, who had begun to be attracted rather against his will (he never got over lending her one of his books and finding it soaked on the terrace), when suddenly she said, "What a shame to sit indoors!" and they all went out on to the terrace and walked up and down. Peter Walsh and Joseph Breitkopf went on about Wagner. She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it--a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!
Note where this passage starts -- with a reference to Clarissa’s father (here identified as “Papa”), who had earlier been annoyed at Sally Seton for ruining a book he had lent her. This might a mark of Sally’s general unconventionalism, but the fact that it’s one of Justin Parry’s books is not an accident. Secondly, the immediate trigger for Sally and Clarissa’s detachment from the larger group comes when Peter Walsh and Joseph Breitkopf are “[going on] about Wagner” -- a modern composer, but one well known for his male-centered narrative. When Sally kisses Clarissa, Clarissa experiences it as a “present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it.” Many critics have interpreted this passage as a hint about Clarissa’s suppressed sexuality. That part might not be entirely decidable; what is undoubtedly clear is that for Woolf, the existence of a secret world of desire between women is something quite special.
On not entering the Church:
Then, while a seedy-looking nondescript man carrying a leather bag stood on the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral, and hesitated, for within was what balm, how great a welcome, how many tombs with banners waving over them, tokens of victories not over armies, but over, he thought, that plaguy spirit of truth seeking which leaves me at present without a situation, and more than that, the cathedral offers company, he thought, invites you to membership of a society; great men belong to it; martyrs have died for it; why not enter in, he thought, put this leather bag stuffed with pamphlets before an altar, a cross, the symbol of something which has soared beyond seeking and questing and knocking of words together and has become all spirit, disembodied, ghostly--why not enter in? he thought and while he hesitated out flew the aeroplane over Ludgate Circus.
Modernism is also present in the thematics: technology (motor cars, telephones, telegrams, airplanes, sky-writing), empire (the significance of Peter Walsh having gone to India for much of his adult life), the references to the impact of World War I, and changing approaches to sex and gender in British society.
The opening lines of the novel are of course famous:
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning — fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen;
But I actually think the passage on the second page is a better place to start thinking about the formal and thematic goals of the book:
For having lived in Westminster — how many years now? over twenty — one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
There are two threads here that I would pick up. One is the emphasis on the externalities that mark the passage of time -- here the sound of Big Ben striking the hour (“first a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable”). Time has special status in the novel -- it’s passage is marked externally almost as an act of violence. But in the moments when it’s not being interrupted by endings, there is an equally important interest in glorying in the present moment. That’s what I see in the second half of the paragraph above. The love for life -- and specifically aspects of it that are emphatically modern -- is a recurring theme.
[Discussion question: in these opening pages she’s thinking repeatedly about her old friend Peter Walsh, who has been working for the British colonial government in India for many years. How would you characterize her feelings for Peter?]
Over the years critics have puzzled a bit over Woolf’s decision to make the main female protagonist in the novel someone who is in some ways less likely to be sympathetic to readers than someone who might have more closely resembled herself. Woolf was of course highly educated (though she never had a formal college degree; she depended on tutors, her father’s books, and the ideas and conversations that her brother and his friends brought back from Cambridge). She was not a high society woman who hosted large parties; she did not marry a good-looking and well-connected person like Richard Dalloway (indeed, Leonard Woolf, as an un-charismatic man who had spent a number of years in "India" [Ceylon/Sri Lanka], might more closely resemble Peter Walsh).
But it’s in passages like the following one that perhaps we can see what Woolf was after. What about a woman who might not look heroic or transformative on the surface, but who has certain gifts that speak to the theme we alluded to earlier -- intersubjectivity?
Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat’s; or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seton — such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the waggons plodding past to market; and driving home across the Park. She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.
How might we compare her thinking about the impact of a single human life on others to what we might think of as a more traditional model of influence? Isn’t there something radical here in the way Clarissa Dalloway is imagining her impact on the world after her own death?
The first few pages of the novel the main externalities are 1) the sound of Big Ben, and 2) the beautiful June weather. A few pages in we hear the sound of a car backfiring, which acts as a new externality. This triggers a big swing away from Clarissa Dalloway and into the heads of an array of other characters, including people who effectively walk in and out of the novel in a couple of lines, as well as Septimus and Lucrezia Smith, who will be with us through much of the book.
Let’s start with a small, throwaway moment or character you thought was interesting. (My favorite is Mrs. Dempster [p. 27] of my book: “That girl, thought Mrs. Dempster…”
Another minor / throwaway character in this part of the novel is the Church. I find the representation of St. Paul’s Cathedral on p. 28 fascinating.
Now, what about Septimus Smith and Lucrezia Smith? What might we understand about Septimus from the first time we see him?
The car is a fancy official one with curtains that remain drawn for the entire time it’s in the book. We never learn exactly who was in it -- but how do the people who see the car react to it? What images do they project upon it?
After the car, we see the skywriting airplane. This also captivates public attention -- but it has a very different impact on viewers. If the car is an emissary of the state -- either as Prime Minister or as a member of the Royal Family -- the airplane represents pure commerce. The car makes some people who see it feel exalted. The skywriting airplane is simply selling candy. (But you have to imagine what it might have felt like the first time this happened in the sky above a city like London. The Wright brothers' first flights were in 1903, but the aviation industry didn’t really take off until World War I.)
Queer Thoughts!
One of the really interesting threads in the novel is Clarissa’s relationship with Sally Seton. You get the first intimations of same sex desire among women in the following passage (p. 31 in my book):
Lovely in girlhood, suddenly there came a moment — for example on the river beneath the woods at Clieveden — when, through some contraction of this cold spirit, she had failed him. And then at Constantinople, and again and again. She could see what she lacked. It was not beauty; it was not mind. It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. For THAT she could dimly perceive. She resented it, had a scruple picked up Heaven knows where, or, as she felt, sent by Nature (who is invariably wise); yet she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly. And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or that she was older, or some accident — like a faint scent, or a violin next door (so strange is the power of sounds at certain moments), she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over — the moment. Against such moments (with women too) there contrasted (as she laid her hat down) the bed and Baron Marbot and the candle half-burnt. Lying awake, the floor creaked; the lit house was suddenly darkened, and if she raised her head she could just hear the click of the handle released as gently as possible by Richard, who slipped upstairs in his socks and then, as often as not, dropped his hot-water bottle and swore! How she laughed!
But this question of love (she thought, putting her coat away), this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?
Sally Seton represents something new and transformative in the conservative, upper-class milieu that Clarissa grew up in (the Parry country house at Bourton). She’s the one who introduces Clarissa to modern thinkers of the 1890s (people like William Morris). She’s also the one who breaks certain taboos around sex and sexuality in their society -- as when she mentions that a certain member of the nobility who married his maidservant had actually fathered a child by that woman before they were married. “Every one wobbled…” (59)
Sexual harassment / #MeToo / #IBelieveSallySeton
Another passage we should talk about perhaps is the stalking sequence (starting in the paragraph that begins, “He had escaped!” [p. 52 in my book]).
Relatedly, there’s a passage that explains why Sally Seton hated Hugh Whitbread so much -- he seems to have kissed her without consent at one point and then failed to own up to it.
Are there similarities between Clarissa’s tendency towards intersubjectivity and the way Septimus Smith sometimes sees the world (see p. 69) ?
We do at least see that the idea of time (even the uttering of the word ‘time’) has a devastating impact on Septimus -- it drags him out of his visionary reveries and back to the bleakness of the present moment. (p. 69)