Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated) (6 page)

Writing character at depth was important for Woolf at this stage of her career because Woolf's
Jacob's Room
had been derided by Arnold Bennett, a prominent novelist and critic of the previous generation. His complaint was that “the characters do not vitally survive in the mind, because the author has been obsessed by details of originality and cleverness” (qtd.
Essays
3: 388). Woolf mulls over Bennett's comment in her diary, considering her potential weaknesses: “People, like Arnold Bennett, say I cant create, or didn't in J's R, characters that survive. My answer is—but I leave that to the
Nation
: its only the old argument that character is dissipated into shreds now. the old post-Dostoevsky argument.” Thus character has changed for modernists—an idea that she would develop further in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” She senses that she isn't good at the sort of reality Bennett achieves and praises, and she
wonders if she has achieved a different sort of “true reality” that is insubstantial (
Diary
2: 248). In the same diary entry, she admits, “The design is so queer & so masterful. I'm always having to wrench my substance to fit it. The design certainly original, & interests me hugely” (
Diary
2: 249). One of the things we might consider is whether it is the approach to character, rather than the characters themselves, that is more memorable in
Mrs. Dalloway
.

 

Contending with
Ulysses
and Qualifying for Modernism

 

W
OOLF'S SUCCESS
, on the verge of
Mrs. Dalloway
, had not come easily, and would not go unchallenged. As she would acknowledge a few years later in
A Room of One's Own
, she did have literary foremothers. Some, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, and Jane Austen, were quite well known. But with the exception of Austen, she finds that they had all struggled with literary forms and critical criteria that strained against their talents and inclinations. There had been many bestselling women novelists in the late nineteenth century whose names were largely forgotten by the twentieth because they had not been taken seriously by those who determined what would be canonized—what qualified as high culture, deserving of further study. In her frequently cited literary essay “Modern Fiction,” Woolf gravitated toward defining and practicing what was “modern.” She distinguished her method from that of “materialist” Edwardian writers, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy. Her own generation placed its accent differently—on random atoms of experience as recorded in the mind (155), or “in the dark places of psychology” (156). Despite advocating a new kind of writing, she was not universally welcomed by key makers of high, avant-garde modernism.

Wyndham Lewis is representative of early gatekeepers of modernism who thought of their project in terms of a masculine reclaiming, of culture from decadence and feminization. To him,
Mrs. Dalloway
presented “puerile copies” of the “realistic vigor” offered by James Joyce's 1922 novel
Ulysses
(
Men Without Art
138–39). Woolf could certainly have been influenced by
Ulysses
. She had read parts of the novel as early as 1918, when they were serialized in the
Little Review
magazine. That same year the Woolfs were offered the manuscript for publication at the Hogarth Press. They turned it down, ostensibly because of its length, but probably also because of their distaste for it. In “Modern Fiction,” Woolf takes Joyce as a primary example of her own generation of writers. She credits him with revealing “the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain” (155). Her notebooks, “Modern Novels (Joyce),” kept in preparing the earlier version of this essay, have even more positive observations. But in “Modern Fiction,” she does criticize
Ulysses
, for being “centered in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself.” Woolf also resists “the emphasis laid, perhaps didactically, upon indecency”—a quibble that may register class as well as gender difference between Joyce and Woolf. By the time
Ulysses
was published in full in 1922, Woolf finds it increasingly “unimportant” and doesn't “even trouble conscientiously to make out its meanings” (
Diary
2: 196). It is a “misfire. Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred.” She imagines a schoolboy “full of wits & powers, but so self-conscious & egotistical that he loses his head” (
Diary
2: 199). As was true with her thoughts about Katherine Mansfield, Woolf sees that envy may explain her reaction to Joyce. She concedes, “I was over stimulated by Tom's [T. S. Eliot's] praises” of Ulysses (
Diary
2: 200).

Eliot's contacts with the Woolfs began in 1918, and the following year they published a group of his poems. By 1922 they were facilitating what proved a fruitless scheme to release him from his job at a bank in order to work full-time on his writing. In a sketchy account of their conversations about
Ulysses
, Woolf is particularly attentive to the few negative concessions Eliot makes regarding Joyce: “I said he was virile—a he-goat; but didn't expect Tom to agree. Tom did tho'; & said he left out many things that were important. . . . Bloom told one nothing. Indeed, he said, this new method of giving the psychology proves to my mind that it doesn't work. It doesn't tell as much as some casual glance from outside often tells” (
Diary
2: 202–3). Of course, Woolf, like Dorothy Richardson and Marcel Proust, shared the technique of interior monologue with Joyce. Her admiration for his internal flickerings of the mind in “Modern Fiction” seems genuine. Still, in developing this technique, she sought to avoid the “damned egotistical self” she found in both Joyce and Richardson, “narrowing & restricting” their characters (
Diary
2: 14).

The parallels between these novels by Joyce and Woolf are probably best viewed as representative of formal and political concerns of their age. Both offer urban-centered novels that are confined in their actions to a single day, measuring out the commonplace actions of their characters against the elapsing hours. Both stroll their characters amid the commercial venues and political monuments of their respective cities, leaving the possibility for readers to infer rich cultural readings, particularly with the help of notes. Both enter the consciousness of their characters for extended periods and register variations in their energy levels and moods. Both make an unexpected switch from the character who seems to be central at the start of the novel to an outsider figure, establishing unusual connections that cross ethnicity, class, and age: Joyce's disillusioned young artist, Stephen Dedalus, yielding prominence after three episodes to the middle-aged Jewish advertising canvasser and scientific amateur, Leopold Bloom; Woolf turning from her society matron, Mrs. Dalloway, to follow the intellectually aspiring Septimus Smith, who is of humble provincial origin and shell-shocked in war service. While Joyce's characters eventually share actual experiences toward the end of the novel, Woolf's have a final meeting only in Clarissa Dalloway's mind. The mature characters in both novels flash back in time to the loves of their youth, testing the marriage plot, and the institution of marriage itself. There are smaller coincidences. Both books follow the route of an official vehicle traversing the city: Joyce's showy viceregal procession surveying colonially administered Dublin; Woolf's enclosed motorcar conveying a person of consequence—a prince or a prime minister—on some mission of importance. These displays demonstrate the appeal of spectacle and power to various people in the streets and invite the reader's more satirical observations on imperialism and class difference. Shakespeare shadows both stories.
Hamlet
offers an important backdrop for Stephen Dedalus in
Ulysses
. The plays of Shakespeare both inspire Septimus Smith to go to war for England and, later, to suspect human character. The bidding of Shakespeare's
Cymbeline
to “fear no more” runs through the minds of both of Woolf's traumatized protagonists. Having shared some of the qualifications of his admiration for Joyce with Woolf, T. S. Eliot would eventually focus upon the mythic method of
Ulysses
, with its classical Homeric underpinnings, in his essay “
Ulysses
, Order and Myth.” Woolf's reading of the
Odyssey
and Greek plays as she composed
Mrs. Dalloway
resulted in a less formal seepage of classical literature into her text, but it is a presence that has invited mythical interpretations for her work as well.

Increasingly, as
Ulysses
progresses, Joyce presents a different form for each episode, bringing us in “Oxen of the Sun” the styles of literature through the centuries, paralleling the
stages of human gestation at the maternity hospital, or the hallucinatory dramas of the “Circe” brothel episode, or what he took to be the eternal feminine in Molly Bloom's culminating “Penelope” monologue in bed. Unlike Joyce, with his well-demarcated episodes keyed to Homer's text, Woolf doesn't offer us chapter breaks but rather “very short intervals, not whole chapters” (Notes, October 6, 1922, in Wussow). In many of these intervals we encounter specialized discourses, some of them serving in her social critique. Going to lunch with Richard Dalloway, we find Hugh Whitbread crafting a persuasive political letter to the
Times
on behalf of Lady Bruton and a racist emigration scheme. Septimus and Rezia Smith hear the repressive voice of Proportion issuing from the mouth of the physician, Dr. Bradshaw. Septimus has hallucinatory episodes symptomatic of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder, and Peter Walsh has a dream sequence, with a discourse of its own, while snoozing in the park. It remains a rewarding and almost inexhaustible exercise to both compare and contrast
Ulysses
and
Mrs. Dalloway
.

 

W
OOLF WAS
brought into the canon of modernism initially for her aesthetic and formal traits that most resembled Joyce, rather than the political departures that later made her appealing to feminist and postmodern critics. Earliest critics did feel challenged by her method, as her 1928 introduction suggests. They sought to achieve a sense of unity or balance between Woolf's very different central characters, Clarissa and Septimus. Through the 1970s, critics focused upon Woolf's experimental craft of fiction, a topic that has endured but also been reconstrued. Critics have continued to note patterns, such as Woolf's strategic use of repetition and richly metaphoric language, applying these increasingly to cultural readings. There was also early interest in
the psychology of the work, and Septimus's recourse to suicide. The novel has encouraged spiritual readings that resurrect and negotiate ghosts and mythic figures from the past, to therapeutic effect. By the time deconstruction became a favored theoretical approach in the late 1970s, critics began to set less of a priority on unity, and favored more the various ways that Woolf challenged prevailing systems of order and masculine authority.

The 1980s brought a flourishing of feminist approaches to Woolf, beginning with her critique of patriarchy, and extending this focus into her biography, including her private accounts of her own treatments by physicians. By the 1990s the feminist interest in identities and sexualities found expression in lesbian studies, centering on Clarissa's feelings for Sally Seton, and extending to Miss Kilman's involvement with Elizabeth Dalloway, Septimus's feeling for his lost commanding officer, Evans, and to a queering or skewing of representation. The '90s also brought increased attention to ways that various systems of identification, including sexuality, class, and nation, interact with gender to produce a sense of self. Interest in global politics, and particularly the postcolonial critique of imperialism, emerged by the late '90s. The concept of modernity, with its typical urban setting, its awareness of technology, commodification, and international capitalism, all are relevant to Woolf's novel, which is frequently mentioned in illustrating modernity.
Mrs. Dalloway
has entered a new era of creative appropriation and popularization. It has been adapted for opera and film, and creatively reconceived for Michael Cunningham's novel
The Hours
, which has been further adapted as a film, and for Robin Lippincott's novella
Mr. Dalloway
. Despite its increasing remoteness in time,
Mrs. Dalloway
as well as other Woolf works like
Orlando
have moved with the times, proving applicable to enduring concerns.

 

Digging into Character and Politics

 

W
E TAKE
our first plunge into the caves Woolf described digging behind her characters with Mrs. Dalloway, her name conveniently supplied in the first two words of the novel. This moment occurs toward the start of a day that will culminate for many of its characters in Mrs. Dalloway's party. The slightness of having a party as the culmination of a plot is in keeping with the liberation from traditional form Woolf had claimed for her generation in “Modern Fiction” (154). Woolf's digging into an individual character proceeds with the play of the mind of each person she follows into an ordinary situation, calling up associations and memories—a process akin to psychoanalysis. The squeak of hinges on the door of her London home transports Mrs. Dalloway back to her childhood home at Bourton, where the French doors squeaked as she (when a girl of eighteen) thrust them open to plunge “into the open air” (3). But she also recalls falling into a solemn mood. The caves of characters have come together and surfaced at former moments, like this remembered one. At Bourton, more than twenty years ago, Peter Walsh appears with a critical remark, “Musing among the vegetables” (3), wanting to call attention to himself. He will reappear in the present, later on the same day in London, exposing both familiar and new sides of himself as he calls on Clarissa at her home in Westminster.