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.
