Clarissa Dalloway's Midlife Crisis And Other Observations

Is Clarissa Dalloway, as readers see her on a certain day in June, undergoing a somewhat conventional mid-life crisis, or is her fragility more deeply and perhaps fatally ingrained?

If it is the former, and I will argue such is the case, what is Septimus Smith doing in this book?

“Mrs. Dalloway” was arguably Virginia Woolf’s main literary attempt at elucidating her own high-wire walk between stability and the abyss and, perhaps not wanting to make the book too autobiographical, she made use of synchronicity, a concept advanced by Carl Jung in the early 1920s, to in effect make two unrelated people so psychosomatically connected that they arguably depict two sides of one person’s mental health coin.

Synchronicity holds that events can be meaningfully related even when there is no causal relationship linking them. Thus, coincidences in “Mrs. Dalloway” – and there are many – should be viewed not as stylistic short-cuts, but as portentous developments.

In a 1922 diary entry, Woolf wrote: “Mrs. Dalloway has branched into a book; and I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side--something like that.” Clarissa one side, Septimus Smith the other side, but so psychically intertwined that at one moment during her party, Clarissa feels in her body the described end of his life even though she has never encountered Septimus and knows nothing about who he is.

One can certainly understand that Virginia, having herself seen the world from both mental states, felt an urge to depict such a condition.  And she eventually did end her own life, but unlike Septimus Smith, Woolf appeared to have been perfectly rational when she did so. It has been suggested, however, that, as a pacifist, she was depressed by the outbreak of WWII and feared the onset of a new period of emotional and/or mental instability that would leave her unable to work and perhaps again living in a supervised state.

Smith, headed in that direction as a result of a consultation with Dr. Bradshaw (whom Clarissa distrusts), understands what he is doing when he takes his own life to avoid such a fate. But his underlying mental state at the time was far from stable. He was only intermittently able to successfully interact with his wife and engage in what might be called normal activities.

Not so Clarissa. Which raises the question: could Clarissa’s story, perhaps with a minor modification, stand on its own in a perfectly convincing fashion? I believe that it could.

With respect to Septimus, readers learn that his distress stemmed from service in WWI. Just before the war ended, his close friend and colleague, Evans, was killed and Smith, desensitized by the brutality of the conflict, didn’t feel a thing. When he belatedly understood what had happened to him, he lost his mind and, among other things, heard birds singing in Greek – something Virginia herself experienced during one of her breakdowns.

[How he knew it was Greek isn’t clear. At one point, readers are told Smith read Aeschylus in translation, implying that he didn’t speak the language.]

When Woolf first wrote about a mentally unbalanced Septimus Smith in a short story called “The Prime Minister,” – eventually merged with a story called “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond St.” -- there was no mention of World War I. And surely an effort to illuminate the contrasting truths of sanity and insanity doesn’t require a casualty of war.

My sense is that Virginia was initially reluctant to write about the conflict because she had no personal experience to draw upon. But she had been severely criticized for what some saw as the social irrelevance of her second novel, “Night and Day,” published in 1919. Katherine Mansfield, for instance, is reported as having lamented its indifference to the Great War. So after having edged toward dealing with the conflict in her third novel, “Jacob’s Room,” Virginia, highly sensitive and fearful of criticism, appears to have decided to take the bull by the horns in “Mrs. Dalloway.”  That, I suspect, is main reason Smith was redrawn as a victim of the conflict.

If Smith’s mental instability resulted from service in the war, what about Virginia’s own? Some commentators point to the traumatic effect of the death of her mother when Virginia was 13, shortly after which she suffered her first breakdown. About 10 years later, her difficult father died and she had another breakdown, and attempted suicide.  Or one can subscribe to the views of Roger Poole who in his 1978 book “The unknown Virginia Woolf” makes an extended case that her problems were mainly caused by early-in-life sex abuse instigated by both of her half-brothers – George and Gerald Duckworth.

Clarissa, however, is not Virginia. Moreover, as many authors have discovered, characters can also take on a life of their own – independent of the author’s original intentions.

So who is “Mrs. Dalloway?”

Clarissa, with her husband Richard, were on Virginia’s mind for a long time.  They initially appeared in Woolf’s first novel, “The Voyage Out,” and dominate about 50 pages of that book. “The Voyage Out” was published in 1915 with the Dalloways in their early 40s.  “Mrs. Dalloway” was published ten years later and Clarissa is identified as being just over 52. “Mrs. Dalloway” is full of coincidences, but that isn’t one of them. These are the same people.

In “The Voyage Out,” Clarissa is depicted as a more confident, self-assured woman than is the case a decade later. She shows no evidence of any emotional or mental instability and she seems to have been more physically connected with Richard.  At one point, for instance, they kissed passionately and Clarissa wondered, in view of what appeared to be Britain’s bright future, whether they should try to have a son.

A decade later, things are somewhat different.

A midlife crisis (no hyphen) is defined as a transition of identity and self-confidence that can occur in middle-aged individuals, typically 45–64 years old. It’s a psychological crisis typically brought about by advancing age and related thoughts of mortality, often compounded by feelings that one’s accomplishments haven’t met expectations, or wrong choices have been made.

The term “midlife crisis” did not appear until 1965, or well after Virginia’s death, but, significantly, the notion of a crisis in middle age apparently began with Sigmund Freud, who thought that during the middle years, everyone’s thoughts were driven by fear of impending death.

Virginia was familiar with Freud’s writings, if not entirely happy with what she viewed as their implications for fiction. But Clarissa does appear to fit the Freudian mold.

Soon after “Mrs. Dalloway” opens, Clarissa, heading for Bond St. to buy flowers,  thinks of death and wonders if parts of her will live on in other people and in nature. And then, looking in the window of Hatchard’s, her eye falls on an open book in which she reads:

              Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

                  Nor the furious winter’s rages.

Those are the first two lines of a poem by Shakespeare about impending death and they recur in the novel, initially very quickly.

Back home with her flowers, Clarissa first experiences a sense of well being only to have it shattered by news that her husband, Richard, will be lunching with Lady Bruton and she hasn’t been invited. “Fear no more,” she says, shivering and experiencing a sense of having been abandoned. She retreats to her small attic bedroom where, after a recent illness, Richard has insisted she sleep so he won’t disturb her upon returning late from Parliament’s typical evening sessions.

Why Richard doesn’t sleep in the attic instead of putting Clarissa up there is an interesting question since it seems out of character with everything we know about how he treats other people not to mention his devotion to his wife. But then Woolf wouldn’t have the following image to work with.

As Clarissa contemplates her small bed, white sheets stretched tight over it, “narrower and narrower would her bed be.” She is imagining her coffin; death is again on her mind.

While she’s there, readers also learn much about Clarissa’s problematic sexuality. “She could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth that clung to her like a sheet.”  In consequence, she’s failed her husband “again and again” and has even at times felt too cold to respond to women, for whom she feels a greater sexual attraction. Yet, she appears to have experienced, for brief moments, something akin to orgasm – “some pressure of rapture … which gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores!”

Where do these sexual issues come from? Those convinced by Poole have much to ponder.

Eventually, Clarissa remembers she has to mend her silk party dress and while doing so, thoughts of death come back again. The whole world seems to be saying “that is all,” and “Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea.”

At which point, Peter Walsh, just back from India, unexpectedly arrives, and Clarissa is brought back to the present.

But during their ensuing discussion, of the summer when he wanted to marry her, Peter bursts into tears and Clarissa comforts him, her emotions see-sawing up and down, ending again with desolation. “It was all over for her.” She figuratively reaches out for her husband, remembers he is lunching with Lady Bruton and thinks: “He has left me; I am alone forever.”

At which point The Dalloway’s daughter, Elizabeth, suddenly appears, Peter flees and Clarissa is back to the events of her day.

At this point in the book, on only about page 48, Virginia Woolf turns away from Clarissa, focusing alternatively on Peter Walsh; Septimus and Lucrezia Smith, and Lady Bruton’s lunch, before returning to Mrs. Dalloway herself only much later -- on about page 116. That’s when Richard gets back home from Lady Bruton’s, roses for Clarissa in hand, at the stroke of 3PM.

He had intended to say he loved her in so many words but can’t. No matter: receiving the flowers his wife realizes she is still “his Clarissa.”

Clarissa is next seen easily dealing with Elizabeth’s unpleasant friend, Miss Kilman, of green Mackintosh fame, leaving the latter seething with jealous rage. No sign of any mental incapacity there. But after Miss Kilman and Elizabeth leave, Clarissa contemplates the quotidian movements of an elderly woman, apparently living alone in a neighboring house, and mulls the appeal of the privacy of one’s soul, untroubled by love or religion.

Readers then again lose sight of Clarissa for another 35 pages until, somewhat suddenly, her party has begun and the Prime Minister will indeed be attending. Initially concerned, as all hostesses probably are, she soon realizes the event will be a success. While Peter Walsh laments her behavior as superficial – she effusively greets all her guests – Clarissa in fact has, as she apparently always has, risen to the occasion, playing her chosen role in society with great competence. Just why she has chosen this role will be discussed later.

Clarissa’s veneer, and readers know from earlier events that in some respects it is one, is shattered when, late in the evening, she learns of the death by suicide of a war casualty (Septimus Smith) who had just before that consulted a late-arriving guest, Dr. Bradshaw. Retreating to an adjacent, unoccupied room, she is both outraged that the topic of death has been brought into her party and physically impacted by the event – her dress flamed, her body burnt, the thud, the rusty spikes. She and Septimus are indeed one, Woolf would have readers believe.

She then looks out the window, sees the elderly lady across the way turning off her light as she goes to bed and those words again come back to her: fear no more the heat of the sun. It seems like death must, after all this, be near -- but it isn’t.

Far from incapacitated, Clarissa returns to her party and sees her guests out.

At the end, there she is, looking as she always has. “It is Clarissa,” Peter Walsh, who has lingered in hopes of a tete-a-tete, says to himself as the event comes to a close. “For there she was.” Older, but as she always had been, in his eyes, at least.

There she was, indeed. On the outside the perfectly competent society wife of a member of Parliament. On the inside, a vulnerable, middle-aged woman preoccupied with death just after a serious illness (influenza that may have impacted her heart, leaving her “grown very white”). And as certain events – the return of Peter Walsh among them – occurred during the day she wondered if she had made the right choices in life. Emotionally fragile? Yes. Mentally unstable? No. The very picture of a classic mid-life crisis, one could argue, and almost nothing akin to the problems Septimus Smith had been experiencing.

One can also argue that given her thoughts during the day, news – especially in the middle of her party – of the suicide of just about anyone could have upset Clarissa enough to cause her to retreat briefly to a side room to pull herself together – and to see the elderly widow across the way turning off her light and going to bed.  Smith didn’t have to be in the book at all.

Clarissa’s Joys In Life

Having first tried to assess the nature of Clarissa’s inner demons, it’s time to turn to the other side: her joy in existence, a determination to bring people together, and her appreciation of beauty.

On the topic of joy, here’s Peter Walsh thinking about Clarissa: “And of course she enjoyed life immensely … there was no bitterness in her … she enjoyed practically everything.”  Walking with her in Hyde Park “now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment. … She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out …”

Which brings us to her determination to bring people together.

To help understand that, it is useful to consider a passage from the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of E.M.  “Howards End” (a book also heavy on synchronicity).

The author of the introduction, David Lodge, talks of the philosopher G.E. Moore “whose “Principia Ethica” (1903) argued that affectionate personal relations and the contemplation of beauty are the supremely good states of mind. This teaching was enthusiastically adopted by some of the cleverest young men in Cambridge, such as Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes, who in due course carried it to London where, stripped of Moore’s own austere moral code, it became the hedonistic philosophy of the Bloomsbury group of writers and artists (including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry) …”

Before people can enjoy “affectionate personal relations,” they have to meet each other, and Clarissa views that as her role in life.

Recalling that Peter Walsh and her husband Richard had both laughed at her because of her parties, Clarissa contemplates the big question:  “… what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh it was very queer. Here was so-and-so in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater, someone else, say in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt that if only they could be brought together; so she did it.”

She views her parties as “an offering” – to life, or one might say, or to the betterment of society. They are not, as one might first presume, primarily an attempt to further her husband’s career. Richard understands that and it doesn’t bother him. Instead, he worries putting on a party might be bad for Clarissa’s health (even though it is clear the servants have done the vast amount of the work).

Life, it seems, teems with people. In “Mrs. Dalloway,” a relatively short novel, over 100 characters are referenced, the vast majority by name. There is, for instance, Clara Haydon, who apparently told the former Sally Seton about the party at which Sally, now Lady Rosseter and the mother of five boys with the mumps, subsequently appears, uninvited. Or readers may recall “Betty and Bertie,” young people with modern habits who Peter Walsh observes on a ship as he returns from India.

But “affectionate personal relations” apparently don’t come easily as Woolf made clear in the eight short stories she wrote about Clarissa’s party, separate from “Mrs. Dalloway.” They are:

1) The New Dress:  Mabel Waring is so preoccupied with her appearance in a new dress she realizes is out of fashion that she can’t successfully interact with anyone and leaves the party early.

2) Happiness:  Stuart Alton tells Mrs. Sutton, who is interested in getting to know him better, that he is happiest when he is alone. Alton strides off abruptly, “without thinking of Mrs. Sutton,” and picks up a paper knife somewhere else in the room.

3) Ancestors: Mrs. Vallance, who considers herself highly elevated as a result of her family background, views Jack Renshaw as conceited and probably uncultured because he says he doesn’t like watching cricket. Meanwhile, Jack looks around at other women and remarks on what a lovely frock one of them is wearing. 

4) The Introduction: Clarissa introduces the frail, beautiful, Shelley-loving Lily Everit, a shy ingenue, to the self-assured Bob Brinsley, just down from Oxford, who also loves Shelley. Lily is appalled when Bob pulls the wings off a fly as he talks.

5) Together and Apart:  Clarissa introduces Miss Ruth Anning to Roderick Searle, telling her she will like him. It turns out they both love Canterbury, but can’t find a thing to say to each other beyond that. Thankfully, Mira Cartwright taps Searle and accuses him of ignoring her at the opera, allowing Miss Anning to escape.

6) The Man Who Loved his Kind:  Richard Dalloway kindly invites an old acquaintance he meets by chance, Prickett Ellis, to the party and then introduces him to Miss O’Keefe, who, like Ellis, feels somewhat out of place at the event. Despite having in common an interest in society’s less fortunate, they fail dismally to connect and “hating each other, hating the whole household of people who had given them this painful, this disillusioning evening, these two lovers of their kind got up, and without a word parted forever.”

7) A Simple Melody:  George Carslake, a barrister, contemplates a landscape painting in the company of Miss Merewether, and thinks how he would rather be walking in the countryside with friends, relishing the “simple melody” that resides inside everyone while his imagined companions say little or nothing as they walk with him. The companions he imagines are Miss Merewether; Mabel Waring, who he sees departing “in her pretty yellow dress;” Stuart Alton who he observes standing alone with a paper knife; “that angry looking chap with the tooth brush moustache who seemed to know nobody” (Prickett Ellis), and Queen Mary (who isn’t at the party). Silence is best because most social converse “produces dissimilarity,” Carslake believes. Miss Merewether, who seems to largely conform to his notion of an ideal companion, thinks him “one of the nicest people she had ever met” but “there was no saying what he was after” – “a queer fish.” Then she remembered his butler, who readers are told “was like an older brother” and she smiled. George is presumably homosexual.

8) A Summing Up:  Sasha Latham is taken out into the Dalloway’s small garden by Bertram Prichard whom she has known all her life.  Incapable of easily making small talk, she is happy that Prichard, “an esteemed civil servant,” talks endlessly about insignificant matters in a disjointed fashion. “As so often happened talking to Bertram Prichard, she forgot his existence and began to think of something else.” Sasha “cherished a profound admiration for other people” and thought it would be marvelous to be like them. “But she was condemned to be herself and could only in this silent enthusiastic way, sitting outside in a garden, applaud the society of humanity from which she was excluded.” 

Loneliness is a recurring theme in the world of Clarissa Dalloway and she is far from the only one experiencing it.

What saves Clarissa from her demons, and the arguably Sisyphean nature of her quest to help society, is the other leg of G.E. Moore’s philosophy: the contemplation of beauty. For her, beauty has an ephemeral quality and derives mainly from nature and from life itself.

Most famously, of course, is her love of flowers (a theme found throughout Woolf’s writing), her rapture evident most graphically as she peruses the offerings of Miss Pym, the Bond St. florist. Her earlier thoughts of death dissipate as “this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her [she had been kind to the woman years ago]” flows over her and surmounts her troubled thoughts.

And then what sounds like a pistol shot outside intrudes: the car of an important person backfiring.

Clarissa associates feminine beauty – particularly women dressed in white – with floral beauty and with nature. In the shop, for instance, she associates sweet peas spreading in their bowls with girls in muslin frocks picking those flowers and roses “after the superb summer’s day.”  Closely related to that image are the “laughing girls in their transparent muslins, who even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd wooly dogs for a run.”  That she saw on her walk through the park on the way to Bond St.

And on the evening of “the most exquisite moment of her whole life,” when Sally Seton had first picked a flower and then kissed her on the lips, the then-young Clarissa had come down to dinner in a white frock that may have been accessorized with some pink gauze.  And one of the reasons Clarissa fell for Sally? “Her way with flowers.” She recalls Sally at one point in the past as having been “all in white, going about the house with her hands full of flowers.”

Lastly, there is the Dalloway’s 17-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. “People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, running water, and garden lilies.” But Elizabeth, a modern girl wears not white, but a straight pink dress to her mother’s party, which she dutifully attends.  On a walk earlier in the day, she contemplates becoming, among other occupations a doctor, the professions and the civil service having been opened to British women in 1919 (the “sacred year” as Woolf calls it in her lengthy essay “Three Guineas.”)

The wind, or at least a breeze, is another aspect of nature that Clarissa finds beautiful. Difficult to see directly, she apprehends it through the movement of blinds or curtains when windows are open in the summer. 

Virginia Woolf’s notion that natural beauty is critical to humans is even more evident in “The Waves” and “The Years,” two novels she wrote in later years. 

In “The Waves,” each section (there are no chapters) opens with passages in italics that describe the myriad beauties of coastal nature. And each section of “The Years” opens with a appreciative description of the season in which the narrative begins. Readers are clearly mean to associate what transpires thereafter with the prevailing state of nature.

But Virginia was also appreciative of beauty in the built environment – not so much admirable architecture or landscapes devised by man, but in the aesthetics of happenstance. 

The following is from Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting:” 

“How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, its long grooves of darkness, and on one side of it some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding itself to sleep …”  and “passing, glimpsing, everything seems accidentally but miraculously sprinkled with beauty, as if the tide of trade which deposits its burden so punctually and prosaically upon the shores of Oxford Street had this night cast up nothing but treasure.”

“For the eye has this strange property; it rests only on beauty, like a butterfly it seeks color and basks in warmth,” Woolf said in “Street Haunting,” – an observation Moore would surely have liked all of us to endorse if we wish to live a good life.

Clarissa, who loved walking in London more than in the country, tries to see her city at its best and thereby feel sustained. “What she liked was simply life.”

A Few Words About Virginia Woolf’s Technique

Virginia Woolf is rightly considered one of the great practitioners of literary Modernism, an approach to fiction where, perhaps most obviously, plot generally takes a back seat – if there is much of anything that can be called a plot at all.

Taking a front seat is character development, but in a fashion different than that employed by traditional all-seeing, god-like narrators.

Where Proust sized upon memory as illuminating of character, Joyce most famously deployed inner monologue. One thinks of Stephen Dedalus walking on the beach and, of course, Molly Bloom in bed at the end of the day.

Woolf (much to my liking) builds character in “Mrs. Dalloway” in large part through what I would describe as associative thinking – the phenomenon of one thought, perhaps flying into a person’s head as a result of an external stimulus, leading to another, and that thought to another yet, and so forth and so on.

As “Mrs. Dalloway” opens, Clarissa unexpectedly encounters her friend from childhood. Hugh Whitbread, and seeing him gets her thinking about her family home, Burton, which Hugh frequented, and that in turn reminds her of a certain summer when Peter Walsh fell in love with her, when she fell in love with Sally Seton and when it became clear she would marry Richard Dalloway.

Observing the ebb and flow of London traffic makes Clarissa think of the ebb and flow of life, and of the world as “a well of tears” as a result of WWI.  The thought of war deaths then prompts her to think of Lady Bexborough, (“the woman she admired most,” readers learn) opening a bazaar with a telegram in hand informing her that John, her favorite child, had been killed. (Strangely, Lady Bexborough, mentioned twice in the book, appears not to have attended Clarissa’s party.)

In Bond Street, Clarissa views the car of a person of great importance and that gets her thinking about the British class system and about the empire.

Later, blinds flapping in her own house remind her of blinds flapping at Burton and when she asks Peter Walsh if he, too, remembers that, he recalls her father’s proclivity not to get along with anyone interested in marrying his daughter.

And as the book proceeds, readers proceed via one association or another. 

Woolf makes use of this tendency with which we are all familiar – our minds traveling or jumping from one place to another as a result of associations embedded in our brains – to go backwards in time, or outwards in geography in a fashion that seems perfectly normal and natural. The result is a relatively short but very dense narrative that, if read closely leaves readers knowing a very great deal about Clarissa, Septimus, Peter, Richard, Sally, Elizabeth, Hugh, Lady Bruton and Miss Kilman.

There are a number of other things one could talk about including some minor shortcomings -- it’s not a perfect book -- but after all of the above, I will refrain.