There is an interesting passage in Katherine Mansfield's short story "At the Bay" in which Stanley Burnell returns from a routine day at work, in a state of some angst because he left home that morning without saying good-by to his wife, Linda. As readers know, the omission was deliberate: he wanted to punish Linda for perceived indifference to his patriarchal privileges.
But now remorseful -- Stanley is fundamentally insecure and badly needs the support of his wife -- he pretends it was at least in part an oversight.
"Forgive me, darling, forgive me," Stanley says, leaping across a flower bed and taking Linda into his arms.
"Forgive you?" smiled Linda. "But whatever for?"
"Good God! You can't have forgotten," cried Stanley Burnell. "I've thought of nothing else all day. I've had a hell of a day. I made up my mind to dash out and telegraph, and then I thought the wire mightn't reach you before I did. I've been in tortures, Linda."
"But, Stanley," said Linda, "what must I forgive you for?"
"Linda!" -- Stanley was very hurt -- "didn't you realize -- you must have realized -- I went away without saying goodby to you this morning? I can't imagine how I can have done such a thing. My confounded temper, of course, But -- well" -- and he sighed and took her in his arms again -- "I've suffered enough for it today."
Just after that, Linda notices that Stanley has a pair of new gloves and pulls one on her hand, smiling as she does so -- turning her hand this way and that.
Stanley wanted to say, 'I was thinking of you the whole time I bought them.' It was true, but for some reason he couldn't say it. "Let's go in," he said.
Stanley, for all his flaws -- one can easily view him as a pompous ass -- wants to tell the wife of his four children, a wife upon whom he is utterly emotionally dependent, that he loves her, but somehow he can't get it out, even indirectly. And when I read it, I was immediately reminded of a similar series of events in Virginia Woolf's book "Mrs. Dalloway."
Therein, Richard Dalloway, a member of Parliament, accepts an invitation to lunch with Lady Bruton, to which Clarissa isn't invited, leaving his emotionally fragile wife, on the eve of her big party, in a state of distress. At one point during the early afternoon, resting in a tiny bed, Clarissa has the urge to call out to her husband only to recall where he was lunching.
"He has left me; I am alone forever, she thought, folding her hands upon her knee."
To his credit, the ever-thoughtful Richard [readers see that characteristic a number of times in the story] is worried about his wife and and at the conclusion of the lunch [at which, as it turned out, his attendance was not really required], he wants to bring a significant present home to Clarissa, which he finds difficult to do because a bracelet he had once given her had not been a success. So he settles for a large bouquet of roses, and, of course, readers know Clarissa is first and foremost a lover of flowers.
For the next three pages of the book, readers follow along as Richard walks home, thinking of his happy, fulfilled life with Clarissa, and determined to tell her he loves her, in so many words.
"... here he was, in the prime of life, walking to Westminster to tell Clarissa that he loved her. Happiness is this, he thought."
But as he surprised her with the bouquet, he couldn't say it. "He could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words."
As was the case with Stanley and Linda Burnell, in a sense it didn't matter. Taking the flowers from Richard, "she understood; she understood without him speaking; his Clarissa."
The inability of husbands to tell their wives, in so many words, that they love them is, I suspect, not at all uncommon, probably because it makes men feel vulnerable. And vulnerability, so common a sensation for women, is probably the last emotion a man wants to experience.
Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield were both friends and rivals from 1917 to Mansfield's death in 1923 -- despite very considerable differences in background and social status. "At the Bay" was published in 1922 and then "Mrs. Dalloway" in 1925. Both stories are set within one day as is James Joyce's massive novel "Ulysses," serialized from 1918 to 1920 and first published in full in 1922.
Earlier, in 1918, Mansfield's story "Prelude" (one of her three stories about the Burnell family) had been completed at Virginia Woolf's urging and published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf. It was the second release from their hand-operated printing press, the first, entitled "Two Stories," contained Leonard's "Three Jews" and Virginia's "The Mark on the Wall." Such were the beginnings of the "The Hogarth Press."
Virginia Woolf was a strong believer in the notion that quotidian events should be the first and foremost concern of a writer -- and such is the focus of Katherine Mansfield's series of stories. It's a series one can view as a cycle on the state of women during the times in which she lived.
"Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day," Woolf said in her essay "Modern Fiction," which can be found in a book of her writing entitled "The Common Reader."
"Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incidence scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than what is commonly thought small."
And in such fashion readers learn of Stanley Burnell and Richard Dalloway struggling to relate to their wives what is in their hearts -- in the most ordinary of circumstances. Such is life.
Showing posts with label Richard Dalloway. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Dalloway. Show all posts
Thursday, May 28, 2020
Saturday, September 15, 2018
“Mrs. Dalloway,” like “Ulysses,” is a Saga of the Much-Denigrated Beta Male
“Mrs. Dalloway,” by Virginia Woolf, and “Ulysses,” by James Joyce, are sometimes mentioned in the same breath: they are both novels set in one day. “Ulysses,” published in 1922, came out first – and even earlier if one takes into consideration chapters released individually.
“Mrs. Dalloway” arrived in 1925 and one often hears, particularly from Joyceans, that Woolf copied Joyce in using the one-day format.
Woolf was familiar with “Ulysses,” having begun to read it in serial form and having been asked to publish the entire book through the Hogarth Press, which she operated with her husband, Leonard. That, they concluded, was impractical given the technical capabilities of the press and the length of Joyce’s book. But there are indications they also considered some of the content of “Ulysses” problematic (legally or otherwise), as did other publishers.
Woolf was initially unimpressed with “Ulysses.” At the time she first encountered it, she was much taken with Marcel Proust’s great novel, and, among other things, irritated that she might have to turn her attention away from it. But she revised her views on Joyce as time passed.
In my opinion, “Ulysses” and “Mrs. Dalloway” are similar in a fashion much more interesting than their common time frame: they both deal with a very difficult subject for readers to accept as worthy of consideration – what one might call the “beta male.”
When it comes to men, “alpha males” – men who take command and make things happen – are the chief protagonists of most works of literature and, indeed, almost all forms of public entertainment. They can be good or they can be evil so long as they are confident, assertive and bent on directing the course of events within whatever sphere they are operating. If unsuccessful, they fail in spectacular fashion, often only to get up, dust themselves off and try again – with even greater determination. They don’t just slink away, or fail to try at all.
Readers – woman as well as men in my personal experience – don’t like beta males. “Why do we care about this guy?” they tend of ask, in a plaintive or annoyed tone of voice.
In the post-war era, a good example of the beta male is Nick Jenkins, the chief protagonist of Anthony Powell’s 12-volume cycle of novels known as “A Dance to the Music of Time.” The subsequent BBC miniseries was a disappointment: in trying to keep Jenkins “beta,” he was depicted as far too sappy. Alphas are easy to cast, not so with betas meant to have top billing.
But let’s stick with Joyce and Woolf.
Leopold Bloom exemplifies just about everything an alpha male isn’t. He’s about to be made a cuckold (perhaps for the first time, perhaps not), knows it and does nothing about it – despite the fact that about half of Dublin also knows it is going to happen later in the day in question, or so it seems.
As he goes about his day, Bloom suffers one indignity after another. An ad canvasser for newspapers, he has no luck getting one renewed. And despite being in the publishing business, his name is misspelled – “Boom” – in a news item mentioning his attendance at a funeral. At one point he farts audibly and later masturbates in public. There is a lot more. In fact, the list of Bloom’s shortcomings is virtually endless.
The heroic highpoint of Leopold’s day comes when he stands his ground against the xenophobic, anti-Semitic views of a presumably inebriated man identified only as “the Citizen,” but that’s arguably not saying much. The worst “the Citizen” can do is hurl an empty cookie tin at Bloom as he departs and the object clatters harmlessly on the pavement.
Bloom is far from a man who parts the waters: he just tries to stay afloat. And I have no hesitation in saying that any number of readers have, over the years, wondered why in the world they should spend so much time with him.
In “Mrs. Dalloway,” the chief protagonist is, of course, a woman about whom a great deal can be said, but not here. Her opposite number is clearly Septimus Smith, a casualty of WWI, whose response to mental and emotional instability is meant to be a counterpoint to Clarissa’s struggle to keep her own psychological demons at bay.
While that is an exceptionally important issue for Woolf, and for her novel, it lies apart from what I want to discuss. Rather, I am restricting myself to the more superficial aspect of Clarissa’ life: how it turned out based on who she decided to marry – and the decision was clearly hers.
Here comes the beta male again – and not just one, but two of them. Neither Peter Walsh nor Richard Dalloway is a man of action, a leader, a man who commands deference and makes things happen. Quite the reverse, so why did Clarissa find both attractive, but in different ways?
Let’s start with Walsh, since he appears in the book well before Dalloway. The scion of “a respected Anglo-Indian family which for at least three generations had administered the affairs of a continent,” he himself has done nothing of the sort. Well, not quite: he did manage to invent a plow for his district in India where he has been for the past five years. While out there, his first marriage failed and it now seems he intends to make off with a much younger married woman, probably depriving her of her two children and likely leaving her an impoverished, socially disadvantaged widow at a relatively early age.
In their youth, he and Clarissa discussed, and argued about, things such as Socialism, which Clarissa found greatly stimulating and which she sometimes imagines would have made for an exciting life with Walsh. But on reflection, she notes he never did a thing along the lines of the issues they talked about. Meanwhile, across town, Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread (yet another beta male – he had known Prime Ministers, but not taken part in any of the great movements of his time) and Richard Dalloway agree over lunch that Walsh is a man impossible to help because “there was some flaw in his character.” In other words, he is a born loser, a person who almost always manages to make a mess of things.
Walsh can be charming and he knows it: that’s about the beginning and the end of him. In his self-assessments, at best, he thinks of himself as a man who filled his posts adequately and did just respectably; at worst he, too, thinks of himself as a failure, for which, at one point, he blames Clarissa. As he walks though London, about to stalk a young woman for amusement, he acknowledges he will at some point have to ask Richard Dalloway for help in getting a job. Good luck.
Do readers care about Peter Walsh? Should they?
All of which takes us to Clarissa’s husband himself, the man she married for “support” even if Richard believes she didn’t need it. Actually, she does need it, we discover, when she feels Richard has abandoned her by agreeing to lunch with Lady Bruton on the very day of her party.
Far from the sort of alpha-male who makes a conquest of an attractive, sought-after woman by sweeping his rivals aside, Dalloway considers it “a miracle” Clarissa agreed to be his wife and he remains devoted to her despite her episodic inability to respond to him sexually.
In one of the most poignant passages in the book, Clarissa understands that she remains “his Clarissa” when Richard, unable to tell her he loves her in so many words despite his determination to do so, presents her with roses instead. She knows she is cherished.
In Walsh’s eyes (and this seems to be an assessment shared by others), Dalloway, despite being “a thoroughly good sort,” is a bit limited, a bit thick in the head, devoid of imagination or brilliance. Where Walsh deploys charm, Dalloway seems to get by in large part by virtue of possessing “the inexplicable niceness of his type.”
But such characteristics mean Richard is wasted on politics and should have been a country gentleman, out in Norfolk, bandaging wounded dogs.
Clarissa’s husband appears to have gone into politics largely because there is, in the Dalloway family, a tradition of public service. But, we are told, family members weren’t brilliant in any of the positions they held and Richard has remained in that vein: he hasn’t become a government minister and everyone knows he never will become one. On the day of the party, he’s off to a Parliamentary committee meeting, but can’t recall if it is about the Armenians or the Albanians.
Richard initially made so little an impression on Clarissa that she could remember neither his name nor who had brought him to Burton, their family house. She introduced him to everyone there as “Wickham,” prompting Richard to “blurt out” that his name was Dalloway, much to the amusement of Sally Seaton who then relentlessly mocked his discomfort and lack of stature.
One could go on, except that there is an endearing side to Richard, ineffectual as he is in the affairs of the world, that Woolf teases out at some length. As she does, readers begin to understand why Dalloway may be worth their time.
For instance, he has taken pity on the problematic if not downright odious Miss Kilman, allowing her to teach history to the Dalloway’s daughter, Elizabeth. Miss Kilman, who detests Clarissa, in large part as a result of envy, thinks well of Richard. He was “really generous” to her, she believes, and that is a very significant concession on her part.
In Parliament, readers are told Dalloway doggedly championed the downtrodden of society; that he was concerned about police malpractice, wondered what could be done to help female vagrants and thought parks should be for children and that the trash they might generate could be picked up.
When Clarissa’s party finally gets underway, Richard is the only person unable to let poor Ellie Henderson stand there all evening by herself. He makes a point of asking her how she is doing, but before she can respond, none other than Peter Walsh pulls Richard away.
When the Prime Minister arrives, it isn’t clear he says a word to Dalloway – nothing worth recording at any rate – despite the fact that the party is presumably being given to help Richard’s prospects. Clarissa takes the elderly leader around until he disappears into a side room for a tete a tete with alpha-male-wannabe Lady Bruton, after which the PM promptly departs.
Then comes Sir William Bradshaw, the eminent therapist of his day and most definitely an alpha male. But he brings news of the death of Septimus Smith, a development that greatly upsets Clarissa even though she doesn’t know Smith.
Retreating into the same side room used by the PM and Lady Bruton, Clarissa confronts her demons and realizes she couldn’t have gotten through life without Richard, even if he just sat there reading The Times. “It was due to Richard, she had never been so happy.” (One thinks here of Virginia’s marriage to Leonard Woolf.)
And Richard is totally with Clarissa when it comes to her suspicions about Sir William Bradshaw -- in some way “obscurely evil,” she thinks. “Only Richard agreed with her, ‘didn’t like his taste, didn’t like his smell’,” Clarissa notes to herself, eyeing Sir William and his wife at her party.
The assessment is close to the truth, readers discover, when it comes to Bradshaw’s interaction with Clarissa’s psychological alter-ego, Septimus Smith. But to give Sir William his due, he does lobby Richard Dalloway at the party to have Parliament address shell-shock victims.
Lastly, as Clarissa’s party reaches a conclusion, Richard can’t help admiring his daughter, Elizabeth, although he initially doesn’t recognize her in her pink frock. Sensing rather than noticing his gaze, Elizabeth turns away from a young admirer and joins her father, who she adores. There are few things she would rather do, readers have been told earlier, than be alone in the country with her father and the dogs.
Richard hadn’t meant at that moment to tell Elizabeth how proud of her he was, but he could not help telling her so.
Looking on, Sally Seaton, initially so scornful of Dalloway, tells Peter Walsh that Richard has improved. She will go talk to him and say goodbye.
“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?” says Sally, now known as Lady Rosseter, in reference to Richard Dalloway -- just before the book ends.
“Mrs. Dalloway” arrived in 1925 and one often hears, particularly from Joyceans, that Woolf copied Joyce in using the one-day format.
Woolf was familiar with “Ulysses,” having begun to read it in serial form and having been asked to publish the entire book through the Hogarth Press, which she operated with her husband, Leonard. That, they concluded, was impractical given the technical capabilities of the press and the length of Joyce’s book. But there are indications they also considered some of the content of “Ulysses” problematic (legally or otherwise), as did other publishers.
Woolf was initially unimpressed with “Ulysses.” At the time she first encountered it, she was much taken with Marcel Proust’s great novel, and, among other things, irritated that she might have to turn her attention away from it. But she revised her views on Joyce as time passed.
In my opinion, “Ulysses” and “Mrs. Dalloway” are similar in a fashion much more interesting than their common time frame: they both deal with a very difficult subject for readers to accept as worthy of consideration – what one might call the “beta male.”
When it comes to men, “alpha males” – men who take command and make things happen – are the chief protagonists of most works of literature and, indeed, almost all forms of public entertainment. They can be good or they can be evil so long as they are confident, assertive and bent on directing the course of events within whatever sphere they are operating. If unsuccessful, they fail in spectacular fashion, often only to get up, dust themselves off and try again – with even greater determination. They don’t just slink away, or fail to try at all.
Readers – woman as well as men in my personal experience – don’t like beta males. “Why do we care about this guy?” they tend of ask, in a plaintive or annoyed tone of voice.
In the post-war era, a good example of the beta male is Nick Jenkins, the chief protagonist of Anthony Powell’s 12-volume cycle of novels known as “A Dance to the Music of Time.” The subsequent BBC miniseries was a disappointment: in trying to keep Jenkins “beta,” he was depicted as far too sappy. Alphas are easy to cast, not so with betas meant to have top billing.
But let’s stick with Joyce and Woolf.
Leopold Bloom exemplifies just about everything an alpha male isn’t. He’s about to be made a cuckold (perhaps for the first time, perhaps not), knows it and does nothing about it – despite the fact that about half of Dublin also knows it is going to happen later in the day in question, or so it seems.
As he goes about his day, Bloom suffers one indignity after another. An ad canvasser for newspapers, he has no luck getting one renewed. And despite being in the publishing business, his name is misspelled – “Boom” – in a news item mentioning his attendance at a funeral. At one point he farts audibly and later masturbates in public. There is a lot more. In fact, the list of Bloom’s shortcomings is virtually endless.
The heroic highpoint of Leopold’s day comes when he stands his ground against the xenophobic, anti-Semitic views of a presumably inebriated man identified only as “the Citizen,” but that’s arguably not saying much. The worst “the Citizen” can do is hurl an empty cookie tin at Bloom as he departs and the object clatters harmlessly on the pavement.
Bloom is far from a man who parts the waters: he just tries to stay afloat. And I have no hesitation in saying that any number of readers have, over the years, wondered why in the world they should spend so much time with him.
In “Mrs. Dalloway,” the chief protagonist is, of course, a woman about whom a great deal can be said, but not here. Her opposite number is clearly Septimus Smith, a casualty of WWI, whose response to mental and emotional instability is meant to be a counterpoint to Clarissa’s struggle to keep her own psychological demons at bay.
While that is an exceptionally important issue for Woolf, and for her novel, it lies apart from what I want to discuss. Rather, I am restricting myself to the more superficial aspect of Clarissa’ life: how it turned out based on who she decided to marry – and the decision was clearly hers.
Here comes the beta male again – and not just one, but two of them. Neither Peter Walsh nor Richard Dalloway is a man of action, a leader, a man who commands deference and makes things happen. Quite the reverse, so why did Clarissa find both attractive, but in different ways?
Let’s start with Walsh, since he appears in the book well before Dalloway. The scion of “a respected Anglo-Indian family which for at least three generations had administered the affairs of a continent,” he himself has done nothing of the sort. Well, not quite: he did manage to invent a plow for his district in India where he has been for the past five years. While out there, his first marriage failed and it now seems he intends to make off with a much younger married woman, probably depriving her of her two children and likely leaving her an impoverished, socially disadvantaged widow at a relatively early age.
In their youth, he and Clarissa discussed, and argued about, things such as Socialism, which Clarissa found greatly stimulating and which she sometimes imagines would have made for an exciting life with Walsh. But on reflection, she notes he never did a thing along the lines of the issues they talked about. Meanwhile, across town, Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread (yet another beta male – he had known Prime Ministers, but not taken part in any of the great movements of his time) and Richard Dalloway agree over lunch that Walsh is a man impossible to help because “there was some flaw in his character.” In other words, he is a born loser, a person who almost always manages to make a mess of things.
Walsh can be charming and he knows it: that’s about the beginning and the end of him. In his self-assessments, at best, he thinks of himself as a man who filled his posts adequately and did just respectably; at worst he, too, thinks of himself as a failure, for which, at one point, he blames Clarissa. As he walks though London, about to stalk a young woman for amusement, he acknowledges he will at some point have to ask Richard Dalloway for help in getting a job. Good luck.
Do readers care about Peter Walsh? Should they?
All of which takes us to Clarissa’s husband himself, the man she married for “support” even if Richard believes she didn’t need it. Actually, she does need it, we discover, when she feels Richard has abandoned her by agreeing to lunch with Lady Bruton on the very day of her party.
Far from the sort of alpha-male who makes a conquest of an attractive, sought-after woman by sweeping his rivals aside, Dalloway considers it “a miracle” Clarissa agreed to be his wife and he remains devoted to her despite her episodic inability to respond to him sexually.
In one of the most poignant passages in the book, Clarissa understands that she remains “his Clarissa” when Richard, unable to tell her he loves her in so many words despite his determination to do so, presents her with roses instead. She knows she is cherished.
In Walsh’s eyes (and this seems to be an assessment shared by others), Dalloway, despite being “a thoroughly good sort,” is a bit limited, a bit thick in the head, devoid of imagination or brilliance. Where Walsh deploys charm, Dalloway seems to get by in large part by virtue of possessing “the inexplicable niceness of his type.”
But such characteristics mean Richard is wasted on politics and should have been a country gentleman, out in Norfolk, bandaging wounded dogs.
Clarissa’s husband appears to have gone into politics largely because there is, in the Dalloway family, a tradition of public service. But, we are told, family members weren’t brilliant in any of the positions they held and Richard has remained in that vein: he hasn’t become a government minister and everyone knows he never will become one. On the day of the party, he’s off to a Parliamentary committee meeting, but can’t recall if it is about the Armenians or the Albanians.
Richard initially made so little an impression on Clarissa that she could remember neither his name nor who had brought him to Burton, their family house. She introduced him to everyone there as “Wickham,” prompting Richard to “blurt out” that his name was Dalloway, much to the amusement of Sally Seaton who then relentlessly mocked his discomfort and lack of stature.
One could go on, except that there is an endearing side to Richard, ineffectual as he is in the affairs of the world, that Woolf teases out at some length. As she does, readers begin to understand why Dalloway may be worth their time.
For instance, he has taken pity on the problematic if not downright odious Miss Kilman, allowing her to teach history to the Dalloway’s daughter, Elizabeth. Miss Kilman, who detests Clarissa, in large part as a result of envy, thinks well of Richard. He was “really generous” to her, she believes, and that is a very significant concession on her part.
In Parliament, readers are told Dalloway doggedly championed the downtrodden of society; that he was concerned about police malpractice, wondered what could be done to help female vagrants and thought parks should be for children and that the trash they might generate could be picked up.
When Clarissa’s party finally gets underway, Richard is the only person unable to let poor Ellie Henderson stand there all evening by herself. He makes a point of asking her how she is doing, but before she can respond, none other than Peter Walsh pulls Richard away.
When the Prime Minister arrives, it isn’t clear he says a word to Dalloway – nothing worth recording at any rate – despite the fact that the party is presumably being given to help Richard’s prospects. Clarissa takes the elderly leader around until he disappears into a side room for a tete a tete with alpha-male-wannabe Lady Bruton, after which the PM promptly departs.
Then comes Sir William Bradshaw, the eminent therapist of his day and most definitely an alpha male. But he brings news of the death of Septimus Smith, a development that greatly upsets Clarissa even though she doesn’t know Smith.
Retreating into the same side room used by the PM and Lady Bruton, Clarissa confronts her demons and realizes she couldn’t have gotten through life without Richard, even if he just sat there reading The Times. “It was due to Richard, she had never been so happy.” (One thinks here of Virginia’s marriage to Leonard Woolf.)
And Richard is totally with Clarissa when it comes to her suspicions about Sir William Bradshaw -- in some way “obscurely evil,” she thinks. “Only Richard agreed with her, ‘didn’t like his taste, didn’t like his smell’,” Clarissa notes to herself, eyeing Sir William and his wife at her party.
The assessment is close to the truth, readers discover, when it comes to Bradshaw’s interaction with Clarissa’s psychological alter-ego, Septimus Smith. But to give Sir William his due, he does lobby Richard Dalloway at the party to have Parliament address shell-shock victims.
Lastly, as Clarissa’s party reaches a conclusion, Richard can’t help admiring his daughter, Elizabeth, although he initially doesn’t recognize her in her pink frock. Sensing rather than noticing his gaze, Elizabeth turns away from a young admirer and joins her father, who she adores. There are few things she would rather do, readers have been told earlier, than be alone in the country with her father and the dogs.
Richard hadn’t meant at that moment to tell Elizabeth how proud of her he was, but he could not help telling her so.
Looking on, Sally Seaton, initially so scornful of Dalloway, tells Peter Walsh that Richard has improved. She will go talk to him and say goodbye.
“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?” says Sally, now known as Lady Rosseter, in reference to Richard Dalloway -- just before the book ends.
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