Mrs Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf (1925, Hogarth Press)

Originally titled The Hours - the chiming of the clocks provides its time sequence Mrs Dalloway is a modernist novel
in which Virginia Woolf explores new literary techniques.
Like Ulysses which takes place on 16 June 1904, Mrs Dalloway centres on a single day of mid-June 1923. Two crucial
events occur in the life of the middle-aged Clarissa Dalloway:
her former suitor, Peter Walsh, who loved her and wanted to marry her when she was young, visits her after
spending 5 years in India;
Septimus Warren Smith, a young middle-class veteran commits suicide, refusing to submit to the power of doctors.
Clarissa happens to hear the news of the suicide from Lady Bradshaw, during the party she organized (which is
another unifying element of the novel). Septimus suffered from delayed shell-shock and was mentally unbalanced.
Though Clarissa has never known him, she starts thinking about him and feeling compassion for him, his death in a
way is her own death.
Both Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway are city novels: Joyces is set in Dublin, Woolfs in post-war London. But to Joyces
innuendo to the mythical journey of Ulysses (Joyces parallel use of the Odyssey has according to T. S. Eliot the
importance of a scientific discovery), Woolf prefers the family name of an ordinary woman. There is no mythical echo;
her characters are failures, people who havent been able to fulfil their dreams. The interest does not simply lie in the
stories of the individual characters, but rather in the mental processes through which they react to events. It is worth
noting that Woolfs version of stream of consciousness is not a word for word transcription of the characters own
interior monologue but a narrative, artistic elaboration of the characters consciousness, a sort of poetical rendering of
their thoughts, in which the narrator still maintains some sense of narrative structure.
The novel is unusual in its plot and structure as well as in characterization. There is no linear or continuous story line.
The only coherent thread in this modern maze seems to lead to the party which is to be held at the Dalloways. And
significantly the novel starts with the arrangement for the party - 10 in the morning: Clarissa goes out for flowers - and
ends with it - midnight: the party ends.
The fragmented structure of the book has its own internal unity based on some technical and thematic devices:
The tunnelling process (defined in her Diary): which means that characters have in their own mind a series of
beautiful caves or past experiences; when the characters share the same memories their tunnels interconnect, so that
the same event can be rebuilt and described from a different perspective.
The narration shifts from one characters point of view to the other, from present to past, through the extensive use
of the stream of consciousness style (term coined by William James in his Principles of Psychology, 1890. First
instances of it in Sternes Tristam Shandy, then examples in Henry James, Dostoievski, Proust). With it sense
perceptions mingle with conscious and unconscious thoughts, fantasies, expectations, feelings and random
associations, still within a controlled framework of space (Londons streets) and time (chiming of the clocks).
The journey into the past explains Mrs Dalloways solitude and sterility, which derive from her decision to marry
Richard, who represents social conformism and psychological protection.
As they walk in London, whose topography is detailed, all the characters react to the city according to their social
and cultural identity. As in Ulysses, Woolfs purpose is also to give a sense of simultaneity, typical of modern life.
Virginia Woolf herself, who set many of her novels in London, was fascinated by its vitality: for her London was the
heart of life and of the modern world.
The Dalloways Westminster house is, on the contrary, a place of sterility; an idea which is reinforced by the great
number of precious objects constantly cleaned by a servant. Mrs Dalloway is sterile herself, alone, powerless,
estranged from her husband and her only daughter.
The chiming of the hours (Big Ben), that is, objective time, is a reminder of social activity, the presence of a material
world totally unconnected with human desires. By contrast, subjective time does not flow regularly; moreover, the
concept of time is present in the novel also in the form of historical time: the Great War; and of cosmic time: seen
from a Darwinian perspective, and in which death is always victorious.
The characters are entrapped inside their own sphere (Clarissa, Peter and Richard recall a distant summer in
Bourton; Septimus is obsessed with the killing of his friend Evans, an officer, in WW1: for him time has ceased to
flow during the war; his hallucinations and suicide condense the hysterical impact of the war in the novel).
The lives of Mrs Dalloway and Septimus, totally alien to each other, are linked by the same nervous fragility, swings
of mood, frigidity, fear of death. Both struggle to make sense of death, to find a way of thinking about it. Septimus
is Clarissas double in that he is a picture of what happens if the precarious balance of sanity is dislodged. Sanity in
Clarissa is not a stable condition, it is rather the ability to maintain a mask of gaiety and unconcern, it is retaining the
capacity to assemble oneself into a public person when hurt inside. With these two characters, Virginia Woolf seems
to show that in the novel the mental processes of those whom we recognise to be disturbed do not seem to be
fundamentally different from those of the healthy or normal characters. Furthermore, one can detect biographical
similarities between Septimuss madness and her own experiences (several nervous breakdowns, suicidal attempts).

 We perceive the narrators straightforward hostility against some characters and themes. The doctors, Mr Holmes
and Sir William Bradshaw, who should take care of Septimus, are totally unable to help him and cause, even though
indirectly, his suicide. In particular, Clarissa sees Sir William Bradshaw as an intruder, someone who would force or
invade other peoples souls. To her, Septimuss suicide is a positive act of defiance and self-defence. Miss Killman,
Clarissas daughters tutor, is represented as a blood-sucking tyrant trying to suffocate Elisabeth through her
frustrated possessiveness (see the episode when she is eating at the restaurant, symbolic of her greed). Other targets
of criticism are nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, socialism, the hypocrisy of the British Establishment and the
upper class who seem unaware of the decisive implications of the First World War (and of war in general).
The experience of WW1 shattered the ruling classes assumptions about the British Empire and its civilizing
mission, and cast doubts about military values, patriotism and cultural superiority over other races.
Characters like Sir William Bradshaw represent also a criticism of male self-importance and oppression in personal
relationships. Male violence is at work in the mentality and actions of the ruling class, in their military values,
imperial rule and racism.
With the unexpected appearance of Sally Seaton, an unconventional friend she was in love with, now respectable
mother of 5 sons, Clarissa realises that the evocation of the past does not bring peace, but disillusionment. Mrs
Dalloway must accept the flow of life and the bitter challenges of the future: For there she was.
Criticism:
Some critics emphasize and agree with Peter Walshs verdict that Clarissa suffers from a death of the soul and that she
makes a perfect hostess, which is to say that she is out of touch with life (politics, intelligence, love, sexuality) and
only exists as a kind of empty public mask or performance (effusive hypocrisy).
Others emphasise the opposite view, and find that Clarissa is predominantly a courageous woman who, unlike the more
superficial characters, does not suffer form self-deception and false pride, and is not blind to the facts of human life. She
is aware of the pain, agony, loneliness, grief and illness that people suffer and spends her life attempting to alleviate that
suffering in her own way. On this view, the female arts of relationship-building and attentiveness are at the basis of
civilization.
As for love and sexuality a similar difference is reported. Is frigidity unhealthy and neurotic or is it a mature
preservation of independence? Is it life or death of the soul?
Quotations:
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 for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.
Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this
varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little
mixture of the alien and external as possible? (Modern Fiction, 1919)
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.
I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its
most intense.
I should say a good deal about The Hours, and my discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I
think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each
come to daylight at the present moment. (A Writers Diary)
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the
seeds of truth.
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up
the steps of omnibuses.
Dearest, I feel certain that Im going mad again. I feel I cant go through another of those terrible times again. And
I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices and I cant concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to
do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I dont
think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I cant fight any longer. I know that I am
spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will, I know. You see I cant even write properly. I cant
read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and
incredibly good. I want to say that everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me, it would have been you.
Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I cant go on spoiling your life any longer. I dont
think two people could have been happier than we have been. (From a letter to her husband, Leonard Woolf)