A threatening or deadly idea that most oppresses Clarissa is Conversion, which she associates with Miss Kilman and religion. Though depressed into thinking of a nunlike existence, she manages her thoughts sufficiently to pull herself out of the most monstrous phase of her thinking. Septimus goes from his hallucinations in the park to an interrogation by Sir William Bradshaw, who is in possession both of the title of knight of the empire and of a prominent address as a Harley Street physician. His car is of the same model that early in the novel transports the mysterious figure of royal or political power. Bradshaw requires almost no contact with Septimus to diagnose him with “complete physical and nervous breakdown” (93). He does not diagnose homosexuality; instead, those around him school Septimus in the manly and patriotic virtues of a British husband. Septimus’s sense of having committed a crime resonates with the legal prosecution of homosexuality, most visibly in the case of Oscar Wilde in 1895. Septimus tries to articulate his sense of being pursued, from this point on: “Once you fall . . . human nature is on you” (95). The human nature he laments is suggested by Bradshaw’s reasoning, “Health we must have; and health is proportion” (96).
At this point in the novel, Woolf tries on a different discourse that challenges genre, description. This is closer to the essay writing that she has been doing by turns with fiction; it partakes of classical figures that could easily have flowed from her concurrent reading of Greek texts; it has some flavor of fantasy but also serves as a parody of masculine oratory: “Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess, was acquired by Sir William walking hospitals, catching salmon, begetting one son in Harley Street by Lady Bradshaw . . . Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion” (97). This strange oration goes on to declare “Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged—in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short the climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own . . . Conversion is her name” (97). Woolf’s resistance to professional, imperial, and religious authority could not be clearer, even filtered through grandiose, yet witty, phrases. It is interesting to look for the appearance of other goddesses that lead characters in Mrs. Dalloway to various causes and dubious destinations: Clarissa is a goddess to her maid, Lucy. Peter has a goddess beckoning him into yet another group of trees. Isabel Pole, through her charisma as a teacher, sends Septimus off to fight for the nation of Shakespeare. With this segment of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf cultivates the political side of herself that will take on Fascism, at home and abroad, thirteen years later in Three Guineas.
London, the Party, and Life Itself
THE EARLIEST reviewers of Mrs. Dalloway praised the way that Woolf’s novel brought London vibrantly to life. We can see this in London’s streets and shops and parks, where we receive distinct impressions of individuals from various walks of life, as they cross paths or share public spaces in the course of their day. There is a sort of mechanical vitality as well in London’s well-run houses, monumental clocks, marching soldiers, measured and efficient medical consultations, newspaper editions, swift mail service, delivery vehicles, automobiles, and even the airplane that rises above it all, leaving a commercial message in the sky. As its central character, Mrs. Dalloway, having been ill, finds life precious, and fights the deadly effects of hate and fear with thoughts of connection. Her party, which culminates the novel, serves a concept of unity, which was precious to modernists and their interpreters, at least until postmodern concepts gained critical authority.
Woolf was concerned that her central character might be too slight and artificial to stand at the center of her novel. Indeed, Clarissa has had her detractors, starting with Lytton Strachey, who found Woolf alternately laughing at her female protagonist and covering her with aspects of herself (Diary 3: 32). Some recent interpreters see Clarissa as representative of a social class that Woolf subjected to satire. It is easy to discover Mrs. Dalloway in unflattering moments, where she may patronize her servants, exhibit snobbery in making up her guest list or ignorance in pondering Richard’s dealings with Armenians, or is it Albanians, when in fact the plight of the Armenians was desperate indeed (see notes, page 211).
But Clarissa—or should we say Virginia Woolf?—does not give a trivial party. That parties get trivialized is in itself a political point. Parties are a form of domestic labor, in this case, of woman’s work. We find a female collaboration across class where the cook, the maid, and Mrs. Dalloway cooperate in production. Standing up to those who trivialize her efforts, Clarissa functions as the outsider within patriarchy, building a mood and sensing, with the beating back of a curtain, that the party itself finally takes life. The early Mrs. Dalloway of The Voyage Out and the present Lady Bradshaw can be seen operating very much in the service of their husbands’ careers, and Lady Bradshaw goes under in the process. Mrs. Dalloway’s party is not centrally concerned with advancing her husband. Richard makes it clear that he could do without Clarissa’s parties, particularly if they put a strain upon her health. While the Prime Minister does make a much-anticipated appearance, Clarissa focuses elsewhere. Some sort of discussion between him and Lady Bruton takes place in a separate room, but we can hardly think this is of great significance, knowing the eugenicist nature of the idea Lady Bruton was advancing to the Times. Clarissa has invited the Bradshaws as part of their social circle, but she reserves the right to dislike them. There is a remote chance that by bringing Richard Dalloway and Bradshaw together on the evening of Septimus’s suicide, something may be done toward helping victims of shell shock. But Bradshaw is still an appalling snob as he scrutinizes the paintings, and so Woolf’s satire is sustained. This is not a group one leaves confidently in charge of the nation.
The party includes some people Clarissa hadn’t originally planned on, and they make a difference. She invites Peter to attend after he shows up at her house in the morning. Sally Seton comes uninvited, when she finds herself in London on the evening of the party. Clarissa gives a last-minute invitation to her dull relative Ellie Henderson, providing Woolf with an outsider to offer her specialized perspective on the party. Clarissa had feared that her daughter would not attend, but Elizabeth has extricated herself from Miss Kilman (who never would have come, even if invited). In a social situation where she is the object of scrutiny and floral metaphor, Elizabeth stages a quiet rebellion. She leaves us to wonder about the future of a young woman who a few hours earlier had exulted in riding on the top of a bus through lively areas of the Strand, where her family rarely ventured.
While we might expect Clarissa to be completed by the reassembly of her beloved trio, formed with Sally and Peter at the party, she postpones their reunion beyond the end of the novel. Her absence lets us sample the kind of conversational intimacy that Woolf liked at parties, as we find Sally and Peter reconstructing Bourton days once again, while they wait for her. This pair could not care less about the society assembled before them. But neither of them is very remarkable as an adult. Our sense of Peter’s failures has grown through the day. Sally may not have gone under like Mrs. Bradshaw, but she has lost every radical bone in her body. The party has a ghostly visitor in the form of Septimus Smith, and having heard of his death from the Bradshaws, Clarissa draws apart to accommodate him. She finds an affirmation of life from his throwing it away, her thoughts echoing his own feelings of the event. Even the earliest interpreters of Mrs. Dalloway were fascinated by the old woman Clarissa watches in the window opposite, another liminal visitor to the party, another affirmation of life going on in the simple act of going alone to bed. Thus the end of Mrs. Dalloway takes life into another register, remote, spiritual, and respectful of the difficulty of surviving even a single day. Survival has its fragmented pleasures, like Mrs. Dalloway’s
plunging into a perfect London morning in June, or Rezia and Septimus assembling an absurd little hat together, or Peter experiencing ecstasy and terror as the woman he once loved so desperately stands before him as we leave the party.
For their painstaking reading of drafts of this introduction, and their useful suggestions, I should like to thank Mark Hussey, Suzette Henke, Susan Gubar, and Heidi Cathryn Molly Scott.
WORKS CITED
Abel, Elizabeth. “Narrative Structure(s) and Female Development: The Case of Mrs. Dalloway” In The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, 161–85. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983.
Beja, Morris. Introduction to Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, xi–xxxi. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1996.
Bradshaw, David. “Explanatory Notes.” In Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, 166–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Caramagno, Thomas. The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Lewis, Wyndham. Men Without Art. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1987. Originally published in 1934.
Richter, Harvena. “The Ulysses Connection: Clarissa Dalloway’s Bloomsday.” Studies in the Novel 21.3 (Fall 1989): 305–19.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Produced by Lisa Katselas Paré and Stephen Bayly. Directed by Marleen Gorris. Screenplay by Eileen Atkins. First Look Pictures, 1999.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume Two: 1920–1924. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell, with Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
——. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 3: 1919–1924. Edited by Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.
——. “An Introduction to Mrs. Dalloway.” In The Mrs. Dalloway Reader. Edited by Francine Prose, 10–12. Orlando: Harcourt, 2003. Originally published in 1928.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume Three: 1923–1928. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.
——. “Modem Fiction.” The Common Reader, 150–58. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1953. Originally published in 1925.
——. “Modern Novels (Joyce).” Edited by Suzette Henke. In The Gender of Modernism. Edited by Bonnie Kime Scott, 642–45. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Wussow, Helen M., ed. Virginia Woolf ‘The Hours’: The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Pace University Press, 1997.
Mrs. Dalloway
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; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings like this about cabbages.
She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.
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.
For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven—over. It was June. The King and Queen were at the Palace. And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party. But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence; the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy ducks; the pouched birds waddling; and who should be coming along with his back against the Government buildings, most appropriately, carrying a despatch box stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh Whitbread; her old friend Hugh—the admirable Hugh!
“Good-morning to you, Clarissa!” said Hugh, rather extravagantly, for they had known each other as children. “Where are you off to?”
“I love walking in London,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Really it’s better than walking in the country.”
They had just come up—unfortunately—to see doctors. Other people came to see pictures; go to the opera; take their daughters out; the Whitbreads came “to see doctors.” Times without number Clarissa had visited Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing home. Was Evelyn ill again? Evelyn was a good deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his very well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly upholstered body (he was almost too well dressed always, but presumably had to be, with his little job at Court) that his wife had some internal ailment, nothing serious, which, as an old friend, Clarissa Dalloway would quite understand without requiring him to specify. Ah yes, she did of course; what a nuisance; and felt very
sisterly and oddly conscious at the same time of her hat. Not the right hat for the early morning, was that it? For Hugh always made her feel, as he bustled on, raising his hat rather extravagantly and assuring her that she might be a girl of eighteen, and of course he was coming to her party to-night, Evelyn absolutely insisted, only a little late he might be after the party at the Palace to which he had to take one of Jim’s boys,—she always felt a little skimpy beside Hugh; schoolgirlish; but attached to him, partly from having known him always, but she did think him a good sort in his own way, though Richard was nearly driven mad by him, and as for Peter Walsh, he had never to this day forgiven her for liking him.
She could remember scene after scene at Bourton—Peter furious; Hugh not, of course, his match in any way, but still not a positive imbecile as Peter made out; not a mere barber’s block. When his old mother wanted him to give up shooting or to take her to Bath he did it, without a word; he was really unselfish, and as for saying, as Peter did, that he had no heart, no brain, nothing but the manners and breeding of an English gentleman, that was only her dear Peter at his worst; and he could be intolerable; he could be impossible; but adorable to walk with on a morning like this.
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