Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated) (4 page)

BY
B
ONNIE
K
IME
S
COTT

 

I
N HER OWN
introduction to
Mrs. Dalloway,
¹
Virginia Woolf took the attitude that “one has too much respect for the reader pure and simple to point out to him what he has missed, or to suggest to him what he should seek” (n). She dealt instead with misconceptions about her work that she felt the critics had encouraged, given their initial preoccupation with fitting the novel into a predefined artistic method. There is much to enjoy in just plunging into
Mrs. Dalloway
, “pure and simple,” and no guarantee that the critics will get it right. But as someone who has taught and enjoyed this work for many years, I can't resist pointing out a few things that shouldn't be missed. These include ways that Woolf's method evolved in the course of writing
Mrs. Dalloway
. Woolf helped with this genealogy of the text by leaving behind contemporary notebooks and diary entries commenting on her formal discoveries, as well as early drafts (see Wussow). Woolf also suspects in her introduction that readers will be curious about ways the author is reflected in her work: “Books are the flowers or fruit stuck here and there on a tree which has its roots deep down in the earth of our earliest life, of our first experiences” (n). Along these lines, we will want to consider attitudes as various as Woolf's love of social gatherings enriched by conversation, and her distrust of doctors, based on her own treatments by them. Her remark about the “roots” of her tree betrays her interest in psychology, which plays out in
the minds of her characters as they flash back to previous events and early acquaintances.

The novel is set in London on a Wednesday in mid-June 1923.
²
Both the place and the time grow increasingly remote from culture as we know it today. This gulf calls for the identifications and mappings that begin in this introduction and continue in the notes and the map of Mrs. Dalloway's London. With a closer knowledge of place-names, streets, shops, government buildings, and monuments, we can appreciate the rich political contexts and social commentary Woolf has packed into this novel, having said early on, “I want to criticize the social system, & show it at work, at its most intense” (
Diary
2: 248). Her concerns include the politics of a world war recently ended, of a questionable empire entering decline, and of people in power who have the dangerous options of passing judgment on and even controlling the lives of the outsiders who consistently won Woolf's attention.

 

Genealogy

 

W
ITH
Mrs. Dalloway
, Woolf entered her most productive and confident phase as a writer. At the age of forty, when she was at work on
Mrs. Dalloway
, she had three previous novels to her credit (
The Voyage Out
, 1915;
Night and Day
, 1919; and
Jacob's Room
, 1922), a collection of short fiction (
Monday or Tuesday
, 1921) that included the remarkable experimental works “Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall” (both written in 1917), and a growing reputation as an essayist and a reviewer of fiction, biography, drama, and art. Her work appeared in such prestigious periodicals as the
Times Literary Supplement, Criterion
(edited by T. S. Eliot), the British
Vogue
, and American publications including the
Dial
, the
New York Herald Tribune
, and the
New Republic
. She had entered into critical conversations defining the nature of modern fiction (“Modern Novels,” 1919; revised as “Modern Fiction,” 1925), and was thinking about the ways that character had changed in the modern world (“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 1923). Both of these topics no doubt stimulated the critics' interest in what she might do with her own method. On the political end of the creative spectrum, Woolf was beginning to venture with her essays and speaking engagements into polemics about feminism and imperialism.

Her first novel,
The Voyage Out
, gave Woolf a fine foundation for her future writing. In several ways this work looks ahead to the politics and plot of
Mrs. Dalloway
. Woolf explored a young woman's subjectivity as it developed on her travels out to South America, where she stayed near a hotel populated by English travelers. Rachel Vinrace encounters unfamiliar cultural and geographical terrain, as well as persistent British patriarchal forces, as does Elizabeth Dalloway in
Mrs. Dalloway
. Woolf also plays with the marriage plot in
The Voyage Out
, as Rachel becomes engaged to another vacationer, Terence Hewet, and begins to face up to societal expectations for her future.

Among those Rachel encounters while still aboard her father's ship, the
Euphrosyne
, is a couple named Dalloway. Their behavior, if not their social position, is very different from that of the same-named older pair we encounter in
Mrs. Dalloway
. They impress Rachel—Clarissa, with her exquisite features and air of control; Richard, with his machine-like grasp of politics. This early Clarissa is a delicate, fashionable woman who places a premium upon ladylike behavior as she assesses her shipmates. She is protected from the chill with veils and furs, and unlike the Vinrace women, must lie low from seasickness shortly into her voyage. Clarissa in
The Voyage
Out
supports her husband's mission abroad as his photographer and diarist, and acquiesces to his positions, including his denunciation of women's suffrage.
Speaking with Richard in their own cabin, she glories in English identity and his sense of empire—values that Woolf would shift somewhat to other characters in
Mrs. Dalloway
, making her central couple more likable in the later work. The early Clarissa does read
Antigone
(an important text of protest for Woolf), and seems to feel that Rachel will benefit from having her copy of Jane Austen's
Persuasion
. She competes to some extent with Rachel's aunt, Helen Ambrose, in affection for Rachel. One remarkable scene that has invited lesbian analysis finds Helen tumbling Rachel in the pampas grass, anticipating an enduring strain of interest in women loving women in Woolf's texts.

The Richard of
The Voyage Out
, though temporarily voted out of Parliament, is accustomed to being granted special arrangements—like transportation on the Vinraces' ship. He aims at impressing readers of the London
Times
with his ability to gather information about unsettled conditions abroad, and he gains the attention of Rachel with his programs to improve working women's problems at home. When he encounters Rachel alone, Richard exposes his vulnerable listener to his own ungoverned desires, kissing her passionately. Woolf takes us into subsequent nightmares Rachel experiences, and we are left to decide how traumatic this event has been for her. As Rachel dies of a fever, she moves metaphorically and mentally beyond the reach of her intended husband in the final pages of this first novel. Strategic deaths of her protagonists remained a powerful option for Woolf in later novels, including
Mrs. Dalloway
.

Night and Day
(1919) was Woolf's most traditionally plotted novel, as author Katherine Mansfield pointed out in a somewhat dismissive review that deeply troubled Woolf. As a representative of the genre of “new woman” fiction, however, it contributes to Woolf's clear feminist trajectory. Woolf is very much concerned with young women's use of their minds. One of the leading characters, Katharine Hilbery, is fascinated with
mathematical theory. The second female protagonist, Mary Datchet, labors stoically on behalf of the suffrage movement. As in her former novel, Woolf is concerned with the difficulties of finding a productive partnership between a woman and a man. Katharine's first engagement is to William Rodney, an aspiring writer who aspires also to control her. Katharine has much more to say to the young lawyer Ralph Denham, her eventual partner. Mary Datchet is much admired by both Ralph (whom she loves) and Katharine, suggesting an intricacy of early cross-gendered friendships. Both this sort of multivalent friendship and a woman's choice of a partner to preserve her own autonomy remain important in
Mrs. Dalloway
. Katharine's mother, who is perennially engaged in writing a biography of her poet father and other literary projects unlikely of completion, remains a part of Woolf's fictional universe. Dotty as ever, she attends Mrs. Dalloway's party.

With her third novel,
Jacob's Room
(1922), Woolf launched herself more than ever into experimental form. Her method involved the representation of the young man at its center from the perceptions of the characters who surround him. Politically, Woolf offered a study of the institutions and experiences that shape a young man of her own educated class, often at the expense of the women in their lives. Like so many of his generation, Jacob perishes in World War I. Both the experiment in rendering character, and the interest in the effects of war would persist in
Mrs. Dalloway
. In
Mrs. Dalloway
, we pass the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, who, like Jacob Flanders, fell in Belgium. Leonard Woolf (who typically read Woolf's novels in manuscript) suggested that she might build upon the discoveries she had made in rendering character for
Jacob's Room
in her subsequent work.

The writer who turned from
Jacob's Room
to new projects late in 1922 was an experienced and determined professional.

She was involved in an impressive variety of tasks, and management of all of them seems to have instilled self-confidence. She had a “quick change theory” that suggested that it was beneficial to switch from fiction to essays (
Diary
2: 189). In addition to writing two stories that would evolve into the first two segments of
Mrs. Dalloway
(“Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” and “The Prime Minister”), Woolf was also writing and revising essays for the collection she would call the
Common Reader
(published in April 1925, less than a month before the publication of
Mrs. Dalloway
). The mixed content of her notebooks attests to this variety of endeavors. Woolf kept up with her diary and letters, did background reading in the classics that contributed to both the fiction and the essays, and spent hours setting type for the Hogarth Press, an enterprise the Woolfs had undertaken in 1917. She muses that without this printing, she would be “an inbreeding rabbit” (
Diary
2: 323). Anticipating the critics' comments on
Jacob's Room
, she could draw from her variety of projects for an answer: “If they say this is all a clever experiment, I shall produce Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street as the finished product. If they say your fiction is impossible, I shall say what about Miss Ormerod,
³
a fantasy. If they say, You can't make us care a damn for any of your figures—I shall say, read my criticism then” (
Diary
2: 178–79).

 

Challenging Personal History

 

T
HERE IS
another side to this rich array of activities and imagined answers to her critics. As is well known (often to the extent of dominating accounts of her), Woolf was challenged by a pattern of recurrent mental breakdowns, which literary critics have diagnosed after the fact as manic-depressive illness or bipolar disorder (see Caramagno). This condition was complicated
by episodes of sexual abuse at the hands of her half brothers, Gerald and George Duckworth, starting in early childhood. Her first obvious episode of mental illness followed the death of her mother in 1895, when Woolf was thirteen. Anxiety over the critical reception of her works may have been a contributing factor to later recurrences of the illness, though something as routine as flu could take her out of action for a week or more. Woolf experienced a particularly severe set of episodes surrounding the publication of
The Voyage Out
(begun by 1907 but not published until 1915). She attempted suicide soon after the manuscript was sent to the publisher, Duckworth (her half brother Gerald's press), in 1913, and had another severe bout of mental illness after its much-delayed publication. Her second novel,
Night and Day
, was begun while she was still confined to bed for a rest cure. A half year of elevated temperature and influenza followed her completion of her third novel,
Jacob's Room
. Thus
Mrs. Dalloway
is the work of a survivor, and indeed takes survival and triumph over illness as a central subject. It also respects a suicide.