When a certain type of novel
is published, readers often wonder, to what extent is it autobiographical? And
if the author is or becomes a literary celebrity, entire industries can develop
around such questions.
Virginia Woolf, because of
her difficult childhood, her episodic mental/emotional instability, her apparently
sexually sterile marriage and her unconventional friends, has been the subject
of endless inquiries along those lines – facilitated by extensive diaries and
letters as well as her fiction, essays and critical works. There’s no shortage
of fodder upon which to chew.
What, then, about Clarissa
Dalloway? Where did she come from and how does she relate to the author
herself?
Drawing upon Mrs. Woolf’s short
essay “Street Haunting,” I am going
to suggest that the creation of Clarissa could be viewed as shedding light on
Virginia, but in a fashion arguably more whimsical than deeply psychological.
At one point on her
late-afternoon winter walk, nominally to buy a pencil, Virginia stops at an
antique jewelry store and gazes at the displays of rings and necklaces.
“Let us choose these pearls,
for example, and then imagine how, if we put them on, life would be changed.”
She sees herself in fashionable Mayfair, between two or three in the morning,
perhaps after a party.
“Wearing pearls, wearing silk,
one steps out on a balcony” and while out there, Virginia thinks of, among
other things, an aged Prime Minister recounting to Lady So-and-So with curls
and emeralds “the true history of some great crisis in the affairs of the
land.”
One can’t help but associate
that image with Clarissa in her green silk mermaid dress, watching as the Prime
Minister of the day, during his brief attendance at her party, takes the
elderly Lady Millicent Bruton into a small side room and tells her something
about British policy in India before promptly departing.
How, Virginia asks in her
essay, can she herself be simultaneously walking to The Strand in January to by
a pencil and standing on a Mayfair balcony in June wearing pearls? “What could
be more absurd?”
When nature made man, she
argues in her essay, nature allowed each one of us to have “instincts and
desires which are utterly at variance with [our] main being.”
Isn’t man’s “true self,” she
asks, “something so varied and so wandering that it is only when we give rein
to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?”
The freedom to imagine
alternative lives, not because one is dissatisfied with one’s own, but because
there are so many intriguing possibilities, is what gave rise to the Dalloways,
to Clarissa’s earlier loves and to a daughter with a streak of independence, it
could be argued.
What about all the details?
The country place called Bourton, the house in Westminster?
Here’s “Street Haunting” again with Virginia window shopping a furniture
store.
“With no thought of buying,
the eye is sportive and generous; it creates; it adorns; it enhances. Standing
out in the street, one may build up all the chambers of an imaginary house and
furnish them at one’s will with sofa, table, carpet. That rug will do for the
hall. That alabaster bowl shall stand on a carved table in the window. Our
merrymaking shall be reflected in that thick round mirror. But, having built
and furnished the house, one is happily under no obligation to possess it; one
can dismantle it in the twinkling of an eye, and build and furnish another with
other chairs and other glasses.”
Is this the novelist at work?
With respect to Virginia, I think a case can be made that it is.
The imaginary Dalloways, what
they represent and the lives they led, were much on Virginia’s mind for a
considerable period of time. Readers meet them initially in Virginia’s first
novel “The Voyage Out,” published in 1915
after several years of revisions. Some years later they appear in the 1923
short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street”
(Clarissa goes out to buy gloves as opposed to flowers), which, along with the
unfinished short story “The Prime
Minister,” became “Mrs. Dalloway,”
published in 1925. But that was not all. After completing the book, Virginia went
on to write eight short stories set at Clarissa’s party.
Although Virginia Woolf is a
giant in our eyes, she lived for the most part a quiet middle-to-upper-middle
class life, somewhat bohemian in nature, but not as contrary to prevailing
societal mores as the life led by her older sister, Vanessa. While she was not
a member of the socio-political ruling class, the Dalloways were. As such, they
may have represented a life Virginia would have liked to experience – a life “utterly
at variance with [her] main being.”
If Clarissa was derived from one
of Virginia’s flights of imagination into alternative lifestyles, what about
the book’s other main character, Septimus Smith? His origins may be considerably different,
and thus not a topic for this posting.
Which life, if either, is
more significant for the overall story?
One can’t help but observe that
the book is entitled “Mrs. Dalloway.”
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