Mrs Dalloway (2 page)

Woolf contrasts Clarissa's meditations on ageing and death with those of Peter Walsh. Walsh is six months older than Clarissa; indeed, when he comes to see her, the young maid Lucy perceives him as ‘elderly' (p. 43). But as a man he responds to ageing very differently, with a defiant attempt to recapture his sense of youth and virility in a romance with a married woman in India, a woman young enough to be his daughter. Constantly fiddling with the pocket-knife which symbolizes his masculinity, Walsh fantasizes about sexual adventures, and even follows women in the streets. His sense of the social changes in England since the war is primarily sexual – the newspapers are freer in their language, women use make-up in public, and couples are seen embracing. While women relive their lives vicariously through their daughters, men have the chance to renew their lives through action; if women, as Walsh muses, seem to live more in the past, it is because their lives are more bounded and determined by choices made early in youth. Yet Walsh is more deeply scarred by Clarissa's rejection than he wants to admit, and surely more deeply affected by the past than she has been. Behind his mask of masculine bravado is an immature man who cannot reconcile his alleged ideals with his real feelings and acts.

Woolf merges these narratives with a more sensational story: the suicide of a disturbed young war veteran,
Septimus Warren Smith. His day, juxtaposed with that of Clarissa and her friends, intersects with it at the party when she hears of his death. Septimus bears much of the novel's weight of social consciousness, and is the vehicle through which Woolf explored some of the meaning of her own bouts of psychosis which corresponded with the war years 1914–18. Through Septimus, and through the character of Doris Kilman, Woolf also considers the nature of fanaticism, both in its mad form of hallucination and delusions of grandeur, and in its socially approved manifestations as Proportion and Conversion.

In planning the novel, Woolf had wished ‘to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense.'
⁸
Five years have passed since the Armistice, and Peter Walsh, returning for the first time since the war, is struck by the changes. ‘People looked different. Newspapers seemed different.' There are major changes in English society as well. Alex Zwerdling has argued that indeed
Mrs. Dalloway
is a ‘sharply critical' examination of the ‘governing class' at the turning-point of its power. In 1923, there were two Conservative Prime Ministers – Bonar Law, who resigned because of ill health, and Stanley Baldwin, who succeeded him in May – but in January 1924 the party was voted out, and Ramsay MacDonald would become the first Labour Prime Minister. Clarissa's class ‘is living on borrowed time. Its values . . . are under attack . . . the empire was crumbling fast.'
⁹
Mrs. Dalloway
thus deals on several levels with people's ability to cope with change – Clarissa's experience of the ‘change of life'; the change from war to peace; the inevitable changes in the class system and the family wrought by the passage of time.

*

Mrs. Dalloway
also represents Virginia Woolf's farewell to the dreams of youth, and the beginning of her sense of artistic maturity. During 1922 and 1923, as she was working on the various drafts of the novel, Woolf came to feel that she had defined her own literary project in such an exhilarating way that its challenge could sustain her even in the face of critical attack. On 18 February 1922, she writes in her
Diary
, ‘I have made up my mind that I'm not going to be popular, & so genuinely that I look upon disregard or abuse as part of my bargain. I'm to write what I like; & they're to say what they like.'
¹⁰
Six months later she feels even more certain: ‘There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; & that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.'
¹¹

Finding her own voice meant pursuing the ideas about fiction that Woolf was also exploring in her reviews and critical essays, marking the difference of her generation of novelists, including Forster, Lawrence, and Joyce, from their Edwardian predecessors, Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells. In a famous essay called ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,' (1924),
¹²
Woolf argued that since 1910, ‘all human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change, there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.' Neither character nor these relationships, she maintained, could be sufficiently represented by the literary conventions of the Edwardians, such as reliance on material evidence and external fact. ‘For us,' she dramatically asserts, ‘those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.' Speculating on the story of a ‘clean, threadbare'
old lady she saw on a train, whom she calls ‘Mrs. Brown,' Woolf imagines how the Edwardians would have advised a young writer to describe her character:

And they said: ‘Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe' – But I cried ‘Stop! Stop!' And I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window, for I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs. Brown, that vision to which I cling though I know no way of imparting it to you, would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished for ever.

As her own generation of writers struggled with a new way of capturing character, Woolf warned, readers would have to get used to ‘a season of fragments or failures.' They would have to be patient, to tolerate the ‘spasmodic, the obscure.' But their patience would be rewarded, for, she predicted, ‘we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature.'

It's tempting to see Mrs. Brown as a poor relation of Mrs. Dalloway, and to read the essay as a manifesto for Woolf's own work in progress, in which external facts are thin upon the ground (for example, we have no idea when or how Clarissa's mother died), and consciousness is everything. It's also striking that while Woolf omits gender from her list of the variables affecting the novelist's point of view – ‘age, country, and temperament' – she names both her adversaries and her allies as male novelists wielding clumsy or violent tools, while their mutual object is imagined as an obscure and enigmatic old woman. Although she does not discuss her quarrel
with the Edwardians in feminist terms, the clumsiness and incongruity of the literary conventions she deplored seem connected to the problem of representing the feminine character. In her review of Dorothy Richardson's experimental novel,
The Tunnel
(1919),
¹³
Woolf had noted Richardson's ‘genuine conviction of the discrepancy between what she has to say and the form provided by tradition for her to say it in.' Gradually, Woolf's aesthetic theories came to incorporate gender as well as genre, feminism as well as modernism; and in
A Room of One's Own
(1929), she specifically addressed the problems of the woman novelist having to revise the language, syntax, sentence structure, literary conventions, and value system of the novel created by men.
¹⁴

Not only the conventions for representing character had changed for Woolf's generation, but also the very concept of character and personality. The human personality was not one given fixed monolithic entity, but a shifting conglomerate of impressions and emotions. Psychoanalysis was uncovering a multi-layered self, in which dreams, memories, and fantasies were as important as actions and thoughts. Philosophers were describing the self as a receiver of a tumult of sensations. Artists and painters were experimenting with versions of perception and reality. The Woolfs' Hogarth Press began to publish Freud's works in 1921, and although she was overtly dismissive of psychoanalysis, Woolf developed her own acute psychological method of explaining sensation, memory and repression, one which resembles Freud's in many respects and which uses a similar model of the levels of human consciousness.

Like Freud, Woolf believed that much in adult identity was formed in early childhood. In her novels, and
especially in
Mrs. Dalloway
, she made brilliant use of flashbacks and fragments from childhood experience, images that have stayed in a character's consciousness, preserved and frozen like photographs or snapshots, and that come up in unexpected contexts. Clarissa, for example, when she feels most deserted, jealous, and excluded, climbs the stairs to her room and thinks of herself as ‘a child exploring a tower' (p. 33). Later, the reader learns that this odd image, with its Freudian hint of the little girl's discovery of sexuality and the phallic, comes from an incident of Clarissa's childhood:

She had gone up into the tower alone and left them blackberrying in the sun. The door had shut, and there among the dust of fallen plaster and the litter of birds' nests how distant the view had looked, and the sounds came thin and chill (once on Leith Hill, she remembered) (p. 51).

The passage is one of great emotional subtlety: Woolf does not intervene with narrative explanations, but leaves the memory itself to resonate for us, with its echoes of fairy-tale princesses locked in towers, as well as with the more symbolic nuances of a Yeatsian winding tower of age, and of human isolation and loneliness. For the attentive reader, these memories or dreams can deepen our understanding and compassion for Woolf's characters in the way an Edwardian omniscient narration might not achieve. Even the domineering, obtuse Lady Bruton becomes more human when we enter her dreams, in which she is eternally a bedraggled little tomboy jumping the brooks in Devonshire on her pony, completely the equal of her brothers.

Woolf's psychological notation also reflected the
thinking of modernist philosophers. In
Time and Free Will
(1888), for example, Henri Bergson had dealt with the difference between historical time, which is external, linear, and measured in terms of the spatial distance travelled by a pendulum or the hands of a clock; and psychological time, which is internal, subjective, and measured by the relative emotional intensity of a moment. Bergson had also given guidance to writers seeking to capture the effects of emotional relativity, for he had suggested that a thought or feeling could be measured in terms of the number of perceptions, memories, and associations attached to it. For Woolf, the external event is significant primarily for the way it triggers and releases the inner life. While an exterior incident or perception may be only a brief flash of chronological time, its impact upon the individual consciousness may have a much greater duration and meaning. Like other modernist writers experimenting with the representation of consciousness, Woolf was interested in capturing the flux of random associations. In addition, she wanted to understand how half-buried memories and interpretations created mood.

Another major concern which Woolf shared with modernist thinkers and artists was the importance of perspective. Even concrete objects, the Cubists demonstrated, could only be partially represented from a single fixed perspective in the vocabulary of a realistic, mimetic painting. A Cubist painting attempted to render the object simultaneously from several points of view, and at several moments in time, combining these multiple perspectives in a kind of collage on the two-dimensional canvas plane. In the novel too, Proust had noted, there could be not only a two-dimensional ‘plane psychology,'
but also a depth ‘psychology in space and time.' People are the product of their past as well as their present, the sum of multiple perspectives upon them, the ways that a variety of others perceive them. Thus it can be said that in trying to show us her characters from a variety of embedded viewpoints rather than from the fixed perspective of the omniscient narrator, Woolf ‘breaks up the narrative plane . . . as the Cubists broke up the visual plane.'
¹⁵

In addition, the narrative technique of
Mrs. Dalloway
is very cinematic. Woolf makes use of such devices as montage, close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots, and rapid cuts in constructing a three-dimensional story.
¹⁶
Such transitional devices would have been familiar to her readers, who were flocking to the new cinema houses and seeing the latest American silent films. In
Mrs. Dalloway
, the cinema is one of the post-war developments that has altered the relation between the classes, and acted as a leveller. Everyone goes to the cinema, whereas the traditional entertainments of the music hall and the opera drew very different groups. At the party, the young socialites Lord Gayton and Nancy Blow are talking about the movies, but Peter Walsh also thinks how the young city workers will have ‘two hours at the pictures' before it gets dark.

Surprisingly, there are only a few scattered references to the movies in all Woolf's vast correspondence and journals. In the index to volume three of her letters, for example, spanning the years 1923 to 1928, under the entry for ‘recreations and habits' we find opera, concerts, theatre, woolwork, embroidery, stencilling, marionettes, polo, cricket, gardening, car-driving, walking, and cooking; but no movies. Nonetheless, in 1926, just after
publishing
Mrs. Dalloway
, Woolf wrote a brief but brilliant essay on ‘The cinema' which suggests how significant an impact this new medium was having on her work. She referred specifically to
Anna Karenina
and
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
as well as to newsreels and documentaries which poignantly recalled life before the war:

We are beholding a world which has gone beneath the waves . . . The war sprung its chasm at the feet of all this innocence and ignorance but it was thus that we danced and pirouetted, toiled and desired, thus that the sun shone and the clouds scudded up to the very end.