Virginia Woolf on Politics

 In her 1928 gender bending novel "Orlando," Virginia Woolf had the following to say about politics:

"No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party -- for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth, but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of perish."

I'll probably add more to this post in due course, but that's it for now.

 

Viewing "A Challenge You Have Overcome" Through Ghosts

 I suppose we are all to one degree or another creatures of our past, which in my case, in this particular instance, has to do with my having spent a lot of time reading and thinking about Virginia Woolf.

In that context, Allegra Goodman gets high marks for her short story "A Challenge You Have Overcome" in the Jan. 25, 2021 New Yorker in that it treats with ordinary people going about their ordinary days. But Goodman loses points when viewed through another Woolf filter for depicting her characters first and foremost through materialistic concerns -- whether someone will get into college, whether someone will lose a job, and so forth.

 Fundamentally, it is a gloomy story that Goodman makes a metaphorical attempt to redeem at the end in a fashion that also brings Woolf to mind. In "Mrs. Dalloway," Richard famously brings roses home to reassure Clarissa he hasn't abandoned her by accepting a lunch date without her. In "A Challenge," Steve first thinks to bring home flowers to his wife, Andrea, to reassure her as his job ends, but then ops for a rather impractical ficus plant, impractical because he has to carry it from Manhattan home to New Jersey on a crowded Jersey Transit commuter train. The ficus is metaphorical because it hearkens back to a song Steve and Andrea used to sing to their young children about the nature of life -- and Steve wants to start over again.

It's easy to see why because Ms Goodman's story fits nearly into a New Yorker short story trope: life is a downer. (Please click on that phrase to see what I have had to say on that topic.)

What was Steve and Andrea's house like? "Unhappiness filled every room." That extract gives the flavor of this story about professional disappointments and, first and foremost, a family in which communication between husband and wife, and especially between parents and child, has pretty much disappeared.

Well, perhaps Ms Goodman thinks that characterizes all too many American families and that is her point. But the title of her story suggests there is a way out, and readers can decide for themselves. There is also a hint of a sequel since this is apparently to be part of a cycle of short stories about Jewish family life (there is nothing in this story that jumps out at one as singularly Jewish) and, in one of the usual New Yorker author interviews, Ms Goodman declines to say whether what happened to one of the sons in the story was a favorable or unfavorable development for him. Presumably she intends to pick up on that in a follow-on effort.

In another respect, Ms Goodman's story brings to mind "The Dead" in which James Joyce depicts a dotted line between those who are living and those who are not. Joyce may well have borrowed this idea from one of his own favorite authors, Henrik Ibsen and his play "Ghosts" with which Joyce was very familiar.

The ghost in question in "A Challenge" is Andrea's deceased mother-in-law, Jeanne, who Andrea keeps hearing and whose "breathtaking honesty" she has come to appreciate -- after the fact. This is a bit like the relief many Americans apparently felt when Donald Trump dismissed the need for political correctness.

In this case, the ghost helps Andrea see life from more than just her own perspective, but does it matter? There, Ms Goodman is disappointing.

Tis the Season .. for "Mrs. Dalloway"

 First the The York Times and now The New Yorker: both in recent days have had essays on Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel "Mrs. Dalloway," and you can read what I had to say about the NYT piece in my preceding post.

The occasion for this appears to be a new edition of the book by Penguin due out Jan. 5, 2021 and, indeed, the New Yorker piece is a review of author Jenny Offill's forward to the new offering. The introduction to the book, by noted feminist Elaine Showalter, is not without merit, but it isn't new. It accompanied Penguin's 1992 publication of "Mr. Dalloway." 

While Showalter notes that Clarissa and Richard Dalloway first appeared (in about 50 pages) in Virginia Woolf's first novel, "The Voyage Out" (1915),  she doesn't mention Woolf's essay "Street Haunting," written in 1927 and published in 1930, that arguably sheds some light on how Clarissa Dalloway, the character, may have come into Virginia's head.

Offill's forward serves Penguin well in that it argues that readers can benefit from reading "Mrs. Dalloway" more than once -- indeed possibly several times -- because something new emerges each time one considers the text. In other words, if you don't have a copy on hand, buy another one and read it again.

Interestingly, she quotes the same passage from Woolf's essay "Modern Fiction" that I did in my preceding post in explaining the nature of the book as being about ordinary life.

Since "Mrs. Dalloway" is a book about which I have written extensively, I was eager to read what Offill might have to say.  It was a disappointment. Although she claims to have found something new every time she read the book (it appears she has read it three times), she offers no new insights on the work.

 

About Michael Cunningham's NYT Essay on Virginia Woolf

 Michael Cunningham, author of "The Hours," a Pulitzer-Prize-winning book built upon Virginia Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway" (itself named "The Hours" in draft form), has an essay in the Dec. 27, 2020, New York Times Book Review section entitled "How Virginia Woolf Revolutionized the Novel." 

One of the points he makes is that "Mrs. Dalloway," published in 1925, is set in a single day.  So was "Ulysses," published in 1922.

Another point he makes is that "a single, outwardly ordinary day in the life of a woman named Clarissa Dalloway, an outwardly very ordinary person, contains just about everything one needs to know about human life." 

That should come as no surprise.

In 1919, Woolf wrote an essay entitled "Modern Fiction" that was published in 1921. Within it, she says: "Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on a ordinary day. ... 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 incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought of as big than what is commonly thought of as small."

The emphasis is mine and in part because such sentiments underlie my own first work of fiction, "Manhattan Morning," which is related to Woolf in another respect -- to her essay "Street Haunting" even though I didn't know of that work until after I had published my novella. 

Well, "Ulysses," too, traces the day of a very ordinary person, Leopold Bloom, on a arguably more ordinary day than that of Clarissa in one respect -- he's not hosting a party at which the Prime Minister is going to appear -- but less ordinary in another. Whereas Bloom knows his wife Molly is going to commit adultery that day, the closest Clarissa comes to that is feeling abandoned when her husband, Richard, an inconsequential member of Parliament, accepts a luncheon engagement with an elderly woman seeking advice on how to get a political letter published in The Times of London and then, feeling guilty about it, comes rushing home with flowers for his wife.

My only point: by the time "Mrs. Dalloway" appeared, the notion that a very significant novel could be written about an ordinary person on an ordinary day was not revolutionary. Indeed, some have argued Woolf was influenced in that respect by James Joyce's story, but I think her 1919 essay suggests otherwise.

Woolf praises Joyce, about whom she initially had mixed feelings, in "Modern Fiction," as a spiritual writer as opposed to what she viewed as the more materialist approaches of writers such as the hugely popular James Galsworthy. 

And there are indeed some significantly spiritual aspects to "Mrs. Dalloway" that go unmentioned by Cunningham in his NYT essay.  This is too big a subject to pursue here, but chief among the spiritual aspects of the book is just why Clarissa is giving her now famous party. It is not, as might easily be assumed, to help her husband's political career. 

One good point Cummingham makes is that "Mrs. Dalloway" is a book about choices, or, to put it another way, about life's Y-junctions: should one take the right branch or the left?  Would Clarissa's life have been better if she had married Peter Walsh, who has never been able to get her out of his mind, or pursued a same-sex relationship with Sally Seton?  Both turn up at her party -- uninvited in the case of Sally, now a mother of five boys and married to a wealthy industrialist. 

I suspect many of us in what are sometimes called our sunset years look back at our own Y-junctions and wonder what might have happened if we had gone left instead of right. Interestingly, Woolf in no way concludes her heroine's decisions in such respects were incorrect.

Cunningham goes on to say that the book's "most singular innovation" (not all that convincing in my humble opinion) is the manner in which it alternates the stories of Clarissa and a mentally disturbed World War I veteran named Septimus Smith. While they never meet in person, Smith in effect arrives at her party in the form of a doctor who saw him earlier in the day only to have Smith then commit suicide rather than accept what the doctor has prescribed. Clarissa is horrified by the news and is briefly dramatically impacted, but emerges apparently unchanged.  That, at any rate, is as far as we know because Woolf doesn't take the story any further than Clarissa seeing her guests out in very much the same fashion as she always has.

"Though seldom discussed as such, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is one of the great novels of World War I," Cunningham says,

Well, yes and no.  This is another big topic, but based on the available evidence, one can conclude that Woolf brought the war into the book only reluctantly. For instance, when she first wrote of the mentally disturbed Smith, in an unfinished short story, he wasn't a war veteran. Rather, he represented one side of her own bifurcated personality -- a powerful intellectual on one hand, and an episodically mentally and/or emotionally unbalanced person on the other. At one point, she very briefly depicted "Mrs. Dalloway" as an attempt to address that state of affairs.

Although Woolf lived through the war, she had no personal experience with its horrors. But she was mindful of a need to be relevant and especially after her second novel, "Night and Day," was criticized on that score. Her third novel, "Jacob's Room," can, and has, also been interpreted as being about WWI, but the evidence there is slim and indirect. It can also be interpreted as being about, or influenced by, the fate of her beloved brother, Thoby, who died of disease in 1906, or well before the war broke out.

Nonetheless, a work of art, once launched, becomes whatever the public thinks it is, a phenomenon that explains, in a closely related sense, how T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" came to be viewed as a great poem about World War I even if there is little evidence that was what Eliot intended, and indeed, some evidence he intended something very different.

Mansfield and Woolf: Illumination Through Ordinary Lives

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.

A Curious Misunderstanding of Virginia Woolf in T Magazine

Perhaps I'm missing something, but the cover story of a recent issue of "T, the New York Times Style Magazine," contains a rather prominent misuse of Virginia Woolf's fiction.

The magazine runs an annual issue on "The Greats" and the lead article this time around is about Nick Cave, an African-American artist known for colorful, eclectic works of art. Megan O'Grady wrote the piece and in it, she describes Cave as having "a Dalloway-like genius for bringing people from different walks of life to the table in experiences of shared good will."

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.

Virginia Woolf on Fiction, and “Bleak House” in Particular

Man is a list-making animal.  Nothing, it seems, can be properly apprehended, digested, comprehended and then absorbed or rejected until it is first categorized in relation to its peers. 

Thus in her 1929 essay “Phases of Fiction,” Virginia Woolf divides the subject matter up into a list of six categories.  There are The Truth Tellers, The Romantics, The Character-Mongers and Comedians, The Psychologists, The Satirists and The Poets. 

By prevailing standards, this is a modest registry. “Writer’s Digest,” for instance, currently lists 21 genres of fiction. But let’s give Virginia the benefit of the doubt and say she was considering only what might be termed literature as opposed to, say, the broader realm of commercial fiction, the chief purpose of which is profitable entertainment. 

Significantly, in view of the three main books Bill has chosen for our seminar, Woolf focuses on “Bleak House” in the category of Character-Mongers and Comedians, eventually comparing and contrasting it with Jane Austin’s “Pride and Prejudice.” At the end of that section, George Eliot gets some consideration as well. 

The term “comedians” here does not mean authors whose aim is humor. Rather, it refers to authors who write books, in the English tradition, that have happy, or comedic (as opposed to tragic), endings. Such books generally conclude with successful marriages that often served to reinforce prevailing social norms after many trials and tribulations along the way. Woolf’s own second novel, “Night and Day” (her least highly regarded) easily fits within that category. 

But when one is in the mood for characters of extravagant force, one need look no further than “Bleak House,” Woolf maintains. “In Dickens, the character-making power is so prodigious that the very houses and streets and fields are strongly featured in sympathy with the people.” Thus, in “Bleak House,” one perceives a certain location as looking like or characterized by one thing or another because of the attributes of the character that inhabits it as opposed to the reverse. 

Thus, for instance, readers clearly see the chaotic conditions of the house in which poor Caddy Jellyby is brought up not because the place itself is much described, but because of the manner in which Dickens depicts Mrs. Jellyby’s preoccupation with the Borrioboola-Gha peoples of Africa at the expense of her family. 

Dickens works by way of exaggeration, Woolf says. “Who has met anyone who, whatever the day or the occasion, can be trusted to say the same phrase, to repeat the same action? This perpetual repetition has, of course, an enormous power to drive these characters home, to stabilize them.” 

Such characters, Woolf says, naming a few, serve as stationary points in the flow and confusion of the narrative and thereby firm up what she termed the extraordinary intricacy of the plot.

For me personally, the catatonic seizure-prone Mr. Smallweed, episodically shaken back into his senses by his granddaughter Judy, was one such character, albeit more significant to the plot than, say, the king of deportment, Mr. Turveydrop, who Woolf points to as one of the “gargoyles” of Dickens’ composition. 

There are times, Woolf says, when Dickens’ powers of character development pull readers away from his story because of the sentiments they generate.  She points in particular to Mademoiselle Hortense, dismissed from her presence by Lady Deadlock, walking shoeless through the wet grass. “She goes and leaves a strange wake of emotion behind her,” Woolf says. 

Similarly, in “Howards End,” Helen describes Ruth Wilcox walking off into the meadow. “Trail, trail, went her long dress over the sopping grass, and she came back with her hands full of the hay that was cut yesterday.” Another powerfully emotive image. 

But back to “Bleak House” where Woolf cites in the same context Mr. Tukinghorn’s friend (unnamed as I recall). “A man of the same mold and a lawyer, too, who lived the same kind of life until he was seventy-five years old, and then, suddenly conceiving (as it is supposed) an impression that it was too monotonous, gave his gold watch to his hairdresser one summer evening, and walked leisurely home to the Temple [an area between Fleet St. and the River Thames where lawyers lived and had their chambers], and hanged himself.” One can easily imagine Virginia pausing and dwelling on that depiction. 

The most interesting character in “Bleak House” for Woolf is Inspector Bucket. Rather than being static and extreme, he “is made up of contrasts and discrepancies,” she says. 

While at times bombastic, but very able in his official capacity, Bucket is also conscientious and even compassionate, Woolf says. “All these qualities are displayed by turns in the astonishingly vivid account of the drive through the night and the storm, in pursuit of Esther’s mother.” 

Dickens “uses this clear-cut, many-faced figure to sharpen his final scenes and then, letting Inspector Bucket of the detective force disappear, gathers the loose folds of the story into one prodigious armful and makes an end,” Woolf says. 

But while she clearly admires Dickens’ abilities (and, I suspect, greatly enjoyed “Bleak House”) Woolf also finds her literary predecessor lacking in an important respect.  His characters are unconvincing when it comes to intimacy with each other, she says, and thus fail to “interlock.” This, she argues, may be because Dickens’ own heart burned far more with indignation for public wrongs than for private relationships. 

“So it is that we begin to want something smaller, more intense, more intricate,” Woolf says, pointing to Jane Austin and in particular, to “Pride and Prejudice.” 

But back to lists and categories. 

In a previous post, I wrote about Virginia Woolf’s take on “Howards End,” material extracted from an essay in which she discusses all of Forster’s novels except for “Maurice,” which, dealing with homosexuality, was only published after first Woolf and then Forster had died. 

“We look, then as time goes by, for signs that Mr. Forster is committing himself; that he is allying himself to one of the two great camps into which most novelists belong,” Woolf said. 

She identified the two camps as “the preachers and teachers” headed by Tolstoy and Dickens on one hand, and “the pure artists” headed by Austin and Turgenev on the other.

Two categories this time, rather than six. 

Forster, Woolf says, has a strong impulse to belong to both camps at once and that may be one reason he is an author about whom “there is considerably disagreement” and whose gifts are “evasive.” 

He falls into the “pure artist” camp when it comes to “an exquisite prose style, an acute sense of comedy, (and) a power of creating characters in a few strokes which live in an atmosphere of their own.”  But at the same time, Woolf continues, “he is highly conscious of a message” and that tends to put him in with “the preachers and teachers.” 

Her own message: if a writer can’t be properly categorized, he or she can be hard to understand and digest. 

Well, how about Woolf herself?  That’s potentially a big topic since she experimented with different styles, but let’s keep it simple and stick with what Forster had to say about her. 

In his view, there are two categories as well – “The Temple of Art,” a rarified atmosphere within which beauty is pursued for the sake of itself, on one hand, and the real world on the other. 

Woolf’s writing, in Forster’s view, comes perilously close to the former, but in the end thankfully escapes, and in so doing, remains relevant. 

“She has all of the aesthete’s characteristics: selects and manipulates her impressions; is not a great creator of character; enforces patterns on her books; has no great cause at heart. So how did she avoid her appropriate pitfall and remain up in the fresh air where we can hear the sound of the stable boy’s boots, or boats bumping, or Big Ben; where we can taste really new bread, and touch real dahlias?”  

Because, Forster maintains, Woolf liked writing for fun and “in the midst of writing seriously, this other delight would spurt through.” 

“For you cannot enter the Palace of Art, therein to dwell, if you are tempted from time to time to play the fool,” he says.  It is by mixing and managing these two impulses – the serious and mischievousness – in masterly fashion that Woolf succeeds as few other writers can, Forster says. 

This aspect of her gifts is clearly evident, I believe, in “Mrs. Dalloway,” when, for instance she slyly pokes fun at the classes of society represented by Hugh Whitbread and Lady Bruton (that name alone says it all) on one hand, and Doris Kilman on the other. 

If, however, we return to Woolf’s six categories and ask Forster to place her in one of those, it would clearly be the last: The Poets. 

“She was a poet who wanted to write novels,” he says, pointing in particular to “The Waves” a novel often said to be her greatest work if not her most satisfying. “To the Lighthouse” is generally awarded that prize and I would certainly argue that “Mrs. Dalloway” is a very close second.