Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated) (7 page)

By tunneling back to Bourton, we get to the roots of Mrs. Dalloway, set in her home turf, in the company of her father and aunt, but most firmly bonded to her contemporaries. She is at the vulnerable age when marriage was the expectation for young women of her class. The marriage plot, a staple of novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is secondary and in need of political excavation in Woolf's modernist feminist novel. This excavation concentrates more on relationships not
sanctified and preserved, rather than on the Dalloway marriage, which has survived into the present. At Bourton we mine a rapturous moment for Clarissa in the garden, when she is kissed by Sally Seton, and a disastrous one, when Peter interrupts this scene. Peter has his own catastrophe, when he realizes that it is Richard, and not himself, whom Clarissa will wed. When Clarissa and Richard go off for an evening boating, Peter is left to interact with Clarissa's aunt Helena, and we dig in yet another direction. Miss Parry's botanical ventures, as a single woman of privilege in Burma, make her formidable. As we explore for her connections, we find that she joins with a large cast of characters who have made their way through empire, often uprooting more than orchids in the process. These figures include soldiers whose memorials line Whitehall, the ancestors of Lady Bruton, men sitting around in the Oriental Club, and, eventually, Peter himself.

When we visit Bourton in Peter's memory, more of Clarissa is exposed. We find her prudish and chaste in her reaction to the affair between a neighboring squire and his housemaid that has produced a child—a moment Peter “tickets,” or labels, severely, as the “death of her soul” (58). Peter thinks of her father, Justin Parry, in a way that suggests that Peter is still contending with the patriarch who never liked the young men who wanted to marry his daughter. In a moment revelatory of buried trauma, Peter holds Parry responsible for the death of Clarissa's sister, Sylvia, who was killed by a falling tree at Bourton. Peter's meeting with Clarissa in London brings her confirmation of her father's disdain for her suitors, but any trauma over Sylvia seems buried. Sylvia crosses her mind only in matter-of-fact ways. One has to wonder what Woolf must have felt in inventing this lost sister, given her very close connection to her surviving sister, Vanessa, and her loss of two half sisters, Laura Stephen (incarcerated in an institution for mental disability) and Stella
Duckworth (who succumbed to peritonitis, perhaps complicated by early pregnancy). Clarissa also frustrates any curiosity about her parents. She thinks briefly of standing with her mother and father by the lake, feeding ducks, and is touched to tears when the elderly Mrs. Hilbery finds a resemblance between Clarissa and her mother, recollected walking in the garden'in a grey hat (171). Woolf's more personal digging at parental roots would wait for
To the Lighthouse
.

Clarissa is the name that still resonates with Sally, Peter, and even Richard, but it has largely fallen from usage in her adult married life, as she deals with servants and merchants, in service of her domestic sphere, and entertaining colleagues of her husband. This suggested to early feminist critics that in marriage, Clarissa had relinquished a more feminine world, associated with the green world of the country (see Abel). This line of association of woman with nature has since been criticized as essentialist. Interestingly, we do not delve back to Bourton in any significant way through Richard's character, though he has his own country affiliation with the county of Norfolk.

In London, in middle age, Mrs. Dalloway takes considerable pleasure in traversing the city. She continues to connect with others, and indeed makes a project of it with her party. We find that Miss Pym, the florist she has done business with for years, likes her and is thankful for some kind of help Clarissa has given her. There is a “concord” between Mrs. Dalloway and her maid, Lucy, who treats her umbrella like the “sacred weapon” of a goddess who has “acquitted herself honourably in the field of battle” (29). Clarissa is disappointed not to be asked to lunch by Lady Bruton. Instead we follow Richard to aristocratic Mayfair, where he serves Lady Bruton's conservative political ends. He muses, helpfully for character construction: “She should have been a general of dragoons herself. And Richard would have served under her, cheerfully; he had the greatest respect for her;
he cherished these romantic views about well-set-up old women of pedigree” (102). Lady Bruton thinks of Clarissa in relation to the analysis of character: “She had never seen the sense of cutting people up, as Clarissa Dalloway did—cutting them up and sticking them together again” (101); she saw little difference between men, at her age. Indeed, we see Clarissa better, thanks to this contrast.

One of the most intriguing connections Clarissa makes, however, is negative and deeply troubling—her reaction to Doris Kilman, the tutor whom she suspects (correctly) of trying to alienate her daughter Elizabeth's affections. As noted above, Clarissa has herself experienced lesbian attraction to Sally Seton. Running naked through the hall at Bourton, bicycling around the parapet, making arrangements of floating flowers, and reading forbidden socialist texts, Sally is a far more attractive figure than Miss Kilman. Although she considers many other factors in analyzing her negative feelings, Clarissa does not address the lesbian potential of her daughter's relationship. Clarissa is able to appreciate other differences with Miss Kilman. We discover the hostile climate faced by people of German nationality on the home front of World War I. Despite her training as a historian, Miss Kilman has been dismissed from her teaching position because of her nationality. She has found solace in religion, and by encouraging Elizabeth to pray, she seems to be working toward the girl's religious conversion. Clarissa is sensitive to difference in class, though the evidence she focuses upon—matters of dress and grooming—suggest snobbery. “Year in year out she wore that coat; she perspired; she was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were” (11).

Clarissa tries to manage her own hatred: “For it was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had gathered
in to itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; had become one of those spectres with which one battles in the night; one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our life-blood, dominators and tyrants” (12). There is then, in this idea, something that diminishes or even destroys life, touching at a major theme of the novel, and in Woolf's sense of what fiction should be after, “life itself” (“Modern Fiction” 155). Woolf gives us the distinct impression that we have dug into a dark place in Clarissa's psychology: “It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul” (12). We go with Miss Kilman and Elizabeth Dalloway to the Army and Navy Stores, but leave Miss Kilman there, a deliberate loose end, not neatly channeled into the culminating party.

 

“The Sane and the Insane Side by Side”

 

T
HE TUNNELING
process can be pursued in this manner through many people in Clarissa Dalloway's life, and those they touch upon. It functions somewhat differently, it seems, in the case of Septimus Smith. While working on
Mrs. Dalloway
, Woolf makes the perhaps dubious suggestion in her notebook (November 19, 1922, in Wussow) that he “might be left vague—as a mad person is—not so much character as an idea.” This presumed difference may have called for a modified method. Contact is limited. A 1999 film version of the novel brings Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith into eye-to-eye contact, whereas Woolf merely places them in Bond Street, where they hear the same backfire from a car. Peter sees the Smiths in Regent's Park, but fails to comprehend their situation. He may hear the siren of the actual ambulance that bears away Septimus's remains, but
rather than contemplate the tragedy, Peter goes off on a line of thought that glories in the modernity of the capital city he has just returned to from India. Peter fails to come close to Septimus, unless inadvertently to suggest to readers that he has been sacrificed to supposedly progressive postwar modernity.

The tunneling process may work best where we can compare the variant interpretations of characters who know something about each other. Only Lucrezia Smith knows her husband well enough to present him thoroughly, tunneling to the surface during the war, when they met in Italy, and bringing to light incidents of their marriage, experienced on outings and walks, which bear upon his increasingly alarming symptoms of shell shock. In a limited manner, Septimus can think back to their meeting, and his failure of feeling for Rezia, both then and in the present. He also had a failure of feeling at the death in war of his commander, Evans. With Septimus providing only a few clues, Woolf leaves it to readers to excavate his homoerotic bond to Evans, and a related homophobic panic that led to his marriage. For Septimus, Woolf had to make parallel devices, rather than her tunneled connections, work.

One of the ways that Woolf enables us to see her characters side by side, politically and emotionally, is by allowing them to share images and ideas. Trees offer one of many parallel images. Walking through St. James's Park, Clarissa makes a metaphor for her life as mist in conjunction with the trees: “being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself” (9). Sitting in Regent's Park, Septimus is excited by “the elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling with all their leaves alight and the colour thinning and thickening from blue to the green of a
hollow wave” (21–22). Rezia only briefly brings him back to reality by placing her hand on his knee, or bidding him look at real things. By the time she has strolled briefly apart he is making proclamations, “Men must not cut down trees,” and hearing Greek words from birds singing from railings and trees, and sensing that Evans had returned (24).

A threatening or deadly idea that most oppresses Clarissa is Conversion, which she associates with Miss Kilman and religion. Though depressed into thinking of a nunlike existence, she manages her thoughts sufficiently to pull herself out of the most monstrous phase of her thinking. Septimus goes from his hallucinations in the park to an interrogation by Sir William Bradshaw, who is in possession both of the title of knight of the empire and of a prominent address as a Harley Street physician. His car is of the same model that early in the novel transports the mysterious figure of royal or political power. Bradshaw requires almost no contact with Septimus to diagnose him with “complete physical and nervous breakdown” (93). He does not diagnose homosexuality; instead, those around him school Septimus in the manly and patriotic virtues of a British husband. Septimus's sense of having committed a crime resonates with the legal prosecution of homosexuality, most visibly in the case of Oscar Wilde in 1895. Septimus tries to articulate his sense of being pursued, from this point on: “Once you fall . . . human nature is on you” (95). The human nature he laments is suggested by Bradshaw's reasoning, “Health we must have; and health is proportion” (96).

At this point in the novel, Woolf tries on a different discourse that challenges genre, description. This is closer to the essay writing that she has been doing by turns with fiction; it partakes of classical figures that could easily have flowed from her concurrent reading of Greek texts; it has some flavor of fantasy but also serves as a parody of masculine oratory: “Proportion,
divine proportion, Sir William's goddess, was acquired by Sir William walking hospitals, catching salmon, begetting one son in Harley Street by Lady Bradshaw . . . Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion” (97). This strange oration goes on to declare “Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged—in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short the climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own . . . Conversion is her name” (97). Woolf's resistance to professional, imperial, and religious authority could not be clearer, even filtered through grandiose, yet witty, phrases. It is interesting to look for the appearance of other goddesses that lead characters in
Mrs. Dalloway
to various causes and dubious destinations: Clarissa is a goddess to her maid, Lucy. Peter has a goddess beckoning him into yet another group of trees. Isabel Pole, through her charisma as a teacher, sends Septimus off to fight for the nation of Shakespeare. With this segment of
Mrs. Dalloway
, Woolf cultivates the political side of herself that will take on Fascism, at home and abroad, thirteen years later in
Three Guineas
.

 

London, the Party, and Life Itself

 

T
HE EARLIEST
reviewers of
Mrs. Dalloway
praised the way that Woolf's novel brought London vibrantly to life. We can see this in London's streets and shops and parks, where we receive distinct impressions of individuals from various walks of life, as they cross paths or share public spaces in the course of their day. There is a sort of mechanical vitality as well in London's
well-run houses, monumental clocks, marching soldiers, measured and efficient medical consultations, newspaper editions, swift mail service, delivery vehicles, automobiles, and even the airplane that rises above it all, leaving a commercial message in the sky. As its central character, Mrs. Dalloway, having been ill, finds life precious, and fights the deadly effects of hate and fear with thoughts of connection. Her party, which culminates the novel, serves a concept of unity, which was precious to modernists and their interpreters, at least until postmodern concepts gained critical authority.