Why did she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy?
‘Mrs Dalloway’ feels like a significantly better, fuller, more complete and significant novel than ‘Jacob’s Room’. But maybe that’s because it’s much more traditional and easier to read.
I powerfully disliked ‘Jacob’s Room’ because it felt, to me, packed with barely contained unhappiness and occasional hysteria, which I found badly triggering i.e. triggered the same feelings in me. ‘Mrs Dalloway’ contains some of the same technical tricks as Jacob, but feels much, much more contained and controlled and accessible.
Continuities between Jacob and this include:
- it’s set in London with an obsessive attention to the precise geography of the city and the exact routes taken by the main protagonists
- a large cast of secondary characters, often passersby or people just on the streets or parks or shops of London who the main characters momentarily notice, who pop up for a brief mention then disappear forever
- unexpected segues or jumps between scenes which neither begin nor end in a conventional way
But what makes it significantly easier than Jacob, is 1) there are far fewer lead characters, just 4 or 5 and 2) we get to know them in much, much more detail than in Jacob. Jacob went out of its way to omit any explanation of characters’ backgrounds and relationships to each other, leaving the reader in a permanent sense of frustration and bewilderment. Its extreme fragmentation and continual hopping about from one fragmented scene to another was its main artistic aim. By contrast, in ‘Dalloway’ there’s just a handful of characters and everything about their backstories is explained at great length. We get to know and walk around the characters. In this respect it is a far more conventional, ‘ordinary’ and accessible novel than its predecessor.
Main cast
The action of the novel follows one day in the life of its characters, a Wednesday in June 1923. Each of the main characters has some business to carry out and so the novel follows them going about their tasks, lightly jumping from one to another.
1. Mrs Clarissa Dalloway
Wife of Richard Dalloway, a Conservative MP. Just entering her 52nd year. Has a daughter, Elizabeth, 17 and serious. Lives in a lovely town house in Mayfair, complete with maids etc, notably Lucy. Was raised in a country house, Bourton, in Gloucestershire. When her father, old Mr Parry, Justin Parry, died, the house went to her brother, Herbert. A neighbour sees:
A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. (p.2)
Mrs Kilman sees:
her small pink face, her delicate body, her air of freshness and fashion
She thinks of herself as having:
a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing — nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown… (p.7)
When a wave of depression flows over her at not being invited to Lady Brunton’s, she feels ‘herself suddenly shrivelled, aged, breastless’ (p.26). She is essentially talentless: she has no gift for writing or talking, can’t play the piano, doesn’t follow her husband’s political campaigns, is astonishingly ignorant (she doesn’t know what the equator is) (p.107).
She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed…
Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever… (p.66)
She has the frigid anti-passion of her class and gender and especially of her author (I say this having read Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf which shows that theirs was a sexless marriage, probably never consummated, because Virginia became hysterical every time the subject of sex was even raised, let alone moved towards.) ‘Horrible passion! she thought. Degrading passion!’ Her main activity in life is bringing disparate people together at her parties. She really enjoys doing this and enjoys her life.
In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June. (p.2)
How unbelievable death was! — that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all!
Bravo to Woolf for not making her heroine a writer, poet, painter etc but a fairly ordinary upper-middle-class woman with few if any talents. She is therefore (in an admittedly narrow, upper class way) a sort of everywoman.
Task: Clarissa is organising things for a big party she’s hosting that evening.
2. Richard Dalloway
Clarissa’s husband is a conscientious Conservative MP, not top drawer material, never likely to make the Cabinet.
He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a spark of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type. He ought to have been a country gentleman—he was wasted on politics. He was at his best out of doors, with horses and dog… (p.65)
He is invited to luncheon with Lady Bruton, along with their old friend, the pompous Hugh Whitbread.
3. Peter Walsh
Clarissa has known since a boy. He’s six months older than her. He was always unconventional, got kicked out of Oxford for being a Socialist. Back in the 1890s when they were young, he proposed to Clarissa who turned him down. Years later he returns from India (where he’s been for 5 years, 1918 to 1923) and turns up unannounced at the Dalloway house. He is back in London to organise a divorce from his wife because he has fallen in love with a major’s wife, Daisy, aged just 24 i.e. less than half his age. Foolish man.
Task: Walsh has an appointment to see the lawyers Messrs. Hooper and Grateley of Lincoln’s Inn about his divorce.
4. Septimus Warren Smith
The outsider, completely outside the network of Clarissa’s friends and family which mostly dominates the text. Septimus is aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat. He is a shell-shocked World War One veteran who talks to himself and threatens suicide to his terrified, long-suffering wife Lucrezia.
Task: at noon Septimus and Lucrezia have an appointment with the Harley Street nerve specialist Sir William Bradshaw.
Lucrezia Warren Smith
Long-suffering wife of Septimus. Looks after him all day and shepherds him to the Harley Street appointment, then back to their rented room.
Secondary characters
Sally Seton
Unconventional woman Clarissa fell in love with and kissed back in the 1890s (p.30). And turns up out of the blue at Clarissa’s party. And is changed utterly. Clarissa compares their youthful hijinks with the plump conventional woman she’s become.
She smoked cigars,… she ran down the passage to fetch her sponge bag, without a stitch of clothing on her, and Ellen Atkins asked, ‘What if the gentlemen had met her?’ But everybody forgave her. She stole a chicken from the larder because she was hungry in the night; she smoked cigars in her bedroom; she left a priceless book in the punt. But everybody adored her (except perhaps Papa). It was her warmth; her vitality — she would paint, she would write. Old women in the village never to this day forgot to ask after ‘your friend in the red cloak who seemed so bright.’ She accused Hugh Whitbread, of all people (and there he was, her old friend Hugh, talking to the Portuguese Ambassador), of kissing her in the smoking-room to punish her for saying that women should have votes. Vulgar men did, she said. And Clarissa remembered having to persuade her not to denounce him at family prayers — which she was capable of doing with her daring, her recklessness, her melodramatic love of being the centre of everything and creating scenes, and it was bound, Clarissa used to think, to end in some awful tragedy; her death; her martyrdom; instead of which she had married, quite unexpectedly, a bald man with a large buttonhole who owned, it was said, cotton mills at Manchester. And she had five boys! (p.161)
Aunt Helena
Old Mr Parry’s sister, so Clarissa’s aunt (p.28), now in her 80s and with one glass eye. A great traveller in India in the 1860s and a keen watercolorist of rare orchids (p.158).
Tertiary characters
Scrope Purvis – neighbour in Westminster.
Sir John Buckhurst – venerable judge, caught up in the traffic jam in Brook Street (p.13).
Dr Holmes – physician to Septimus Smith who insists there’s nothing physically wrong with him.
Large, fresh coloured, handsome, flicking his boots, looking in the glass, he brushed it all aside — headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams — nerve symptoms and nothing more, he said.
(Compare and contrast the physician who shows up to pronounce Leonard Bast dead at the end of E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End, and the useless doctor who misdiagnoses the daughter with terrible consequences in D.H. Lawrence’s story England, My England. Doctors generally get a bad rap in the fiction of this period.)
Mr Brewer – managing clerk at Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land and estate agents, Septimus’s boss.
Lady Millicent Bruton – invites Richard Dalloway to lunch, but not Clarissa, upsetting her.
Miss Milly Brush (40) – Lady Bruton’s secretary, ‘knobbed, scraped, angular, and entirely without feminine charm’ (p.90).
Perkins – Lady Bruton’s servant (?) (p.91).
Miss Pym shop assistant at Mulberry’s the florists, hands always red (p.9).
Edgar J. Watkiss, a workman carrying a roll of lead piping round his arm (p.11).
Mrs Sarah Bletchley with her baby in her arms.
Mrs Emily Coates – passerby in Pall Mall.
Mr Bowley – appears in Jacob’s Room.
Maisie Johnson – freshly arrived from Edinburgh, encounters Septimus and Lucrezia in Regents Park.
Mrs. Dempster – worn-out old lady in Regents Park observes Maisie’s interaction with the Smiths.
The unknown young woman who Peter spots in Trafalgar Square, is suddenly infatuated with and follows north till she disappears into a house in Bloomsbury, leaving him feeling deflated.
The elderly nurse with a pram in Regent’s Park, sat knitting on the bench where Peter comes to rest and falls asleep.
Miss Isobel Pole – lectures about Shakespeare, Septimus attended and developed a crush on her, wrote her letters and poems and stalked her.
Mrs Filmer – older woman living in same boarding house as Septimus and Lucrezia.
Agnes the serving girl in the Smiths’ boarding house.
Sir William Bradshaw – Harley Street physician, calm recommender of a sense of proportion (p.87).
Lady William Bradshaw – wife, fusses about her son at Eton and her hobbies, namely:
Large dinner-parties every Thursday night to the profession; an occasional bazaar to be opened; Royalty greeted; too little time, alas, with her husband, whose work grew and grew; a boy doing well at Eton; she would have liked a daughter too; interests she had, however, in plenty; child welfare; the after-care of the epileptic, and photography… (p.80)
Doris Kilman – Kicked out of her school for her German ancestry during the war, Richard came across Miss Kilman and hired her as a history tutor for Elizabeth. Over 40, embarrassingly poor, ‘heavy, ugly, commonplace’, she had a mighty religious conversion 2 years and 3 months ago (109). Now when she comes Clarissa isn’t sure how much of their time is history and how much is religious zeal.
Rev. Edward Whittaker whose sermon converted Miss Kilman.
Mr Fletcher – retired, of the Treasury, ‘neat as a new pin’, worshipper in Westminster Abbey
Mrs Gorham – widow of the famous K.C., worshipper in Westminster Abbey
Mrs Burgess – a good sort and no chatterbox, who Peter confides in about his affair, advises that while he’s away in England, hopefully Daisy will come to her senses.
Old Joseph Breitkopf – a frequent guest at Bourton who liked singing Brahms but didn’t have any voice.
Events
‘Jacob’s Room’ was divided into 14 distinct chapters. ‘Mrs Dalloway’ doesn’t have any chapters or parts. From time to time there’s just a break in the text, which indicates a new scene or time:
10am
Mrs Dalloway is walking across Green Park towards the florists. She bumps into her old friend Hugh Whitbread. She walks along Piccadilly and into the shop window of Hatchards. She crosses into Bond Street and walks up to her florists, Mulberry’s. A car backfires in the street outside. Various passersby stop and notice. The road is blocked and we meet the shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Smith.
Ripple of excitement among passersby about who is inside the car (which has curtains over its windows), the Prime Minister, the Prince of Wales. The narrative takes us down the Mall to the crowd outside Buckingham Palace including, in Woolf’s usual manner, a clutch of casual bystanders who she bothers to name – shawled Moll Pratt with her flowers on the pavement, Mrs Emily Coates, Sarah Bletchley with babe in arms, little Mr Bowley.
All of them then witness something strange which is an airplane flying low over central London and emitting smoke as if writing letters in the air. In classic modernist confusion nobody can agree what the letters spell.
Cut to: Lucrezia sitting next to her depressed husband Septimus Smith in Regents Park. Her feelings of desperate loneliness now her husband is mad.
Maisie Johnson, a young woman freshly arrived from Edinburgh, asks them the way to Regents Park tube and thinks them a very strange couple. Mrs Dempster who has lunch in the park and feeds the squirrels observes their interaction. The plane eventually flies off, giving a few moments thought to a Mr Bentley mowing his lawn in Greenwich. A seedy-looking nondescript man carrying a leather bag hesitates at the entrance to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Woolf’s novels are packed with these inconsequential moments from random strangers’ lives. In fact she theorises it a bit, attributing this affinity with complete strangers to Clarissa:
Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter… (p.135)
Presumably this flitting between snippets of random strangers’ lives was part of the modernism which discombobulated the book’s first readers. All I can say is I took it in my stride and enjoyed this bird’s eye overview of London and random people doing random activities. A hundred years later the technique is thoroughly assimilated.
Clarissa arrives home, discovers her husband has been invited to luncheon with Lady Millicent Bruton, and is jealous. This triggers a wave of memories, her childhood at the family home at Bourton, her wooing by Peter Walsh. But much more she remembers her close friendship with the unconventional Sally Seton which ended with the latter kissing her (p.30).
She is awoken from her revery when the doorbell rings and it’s Peter Walsh, out of the blue. They sit and reminisce. He tells her he’s come back to organise a divorce so he can marry a woman (unfortunately, herself married) Daisy.
Their conversation is just becoming personal, and Clarissa is allowing herself to feel something for this silly loveable man, when the door opens and her daughter, Elizabeth walks in. Walsh had been pacing up and down and now he simply says ‘Goodbye’ and leaves the room, and their densely emotional conversation simply ends.
Reeling, Peter walks along Victoria Street and into Whitehall where he sees a procession of Boy Scouts leaving memorials at the Cenotaph.
11.30am
He is in Trafalgar Square looking at the statues. In a peculiar passage, he sees an attractive woman crossing the road and ends up following her, trailing her, fantasising about starting a completely new life with her, across Piccadilly, up Regents Street, across Oxford Street, up Great Portland Street, and off into a side street where she goes into a house.
The fantasy bursts, and he continues up towards Regents Park, dawdles till he finds a park bench with a nurse sitting on it, knitting, sits down and slowly falls asleep. Starts snoring.
He wakes with a start and painfully remembers the stay at Bourton, in the early 1890s, when he declared his love to Clarissa and she not only rejected him but very visibly fell in love with another guest, simple dashing young Richard Dalloway.
These memories are interrupted when the little girl who’s with the nanny accidentally runs into Lucrezia as she walks miserably with her husband. This takes us into 4 or 5 pages describing Smith’s worsening mental illness, delusions of grandeur (the secrets of the universe), hearing voices, seeing his dead friend Evans in unexpected places.
Peter is now up and walk and walks past the miserable Smiths sitting on their park bench. He is reflecting on the ship journey back to England, being struck that women now openly apply face powder and lipstick, something nobody did in his day.
He remembers how much he dislikes Clarissa’s old friend Hugh Whitbread, an utterly conventional pompous ass who married the Right Honourable Evelyn someone and has a post at Court; how conventional Richard Dalloway is; his disapproval of Shakespeare’s Sonnets for being disreputable etc. How much he still likes Clarissa, her sense of life and comedy, her sense of duty, always running round helping people; how, now into his 50s, he just doesn’t need people any more.
Exiting the Park he hears and sees an ancient crone singing for money. She is a kind of pivot because we also see her through Lucrezia’s eyes and the narrative switches to describing Lucrezia’s story, how she met Septimus. He had fallen in love with the lecturer in Shakespeare, Miss Isabel Pole, working at Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land and estate agents. He was one of the first to volunteer and served the full four years. He became very close to his officer, Evans, who was killed just before the Armistice. Now he hears Evans talking to him from behind trees and park benches.
The end of the war found Septimus in Milan, billetted with an innkeeper whose two daughters made hats. Lucrezia was the younger. They fell in love and married and came back to London, took rooms in Tottenham Court Road, and Septimus slowly became more (mentally) ill. He talks openly about killing himself and wonders how to do it most effectively.
Twelve noon (p.82)
The sound of Big Ben (which, I realise, tolls through the book on the hour, every hour). Septimus and Lucrezia have an appointment with Sir William Bradshaw, nerve specialist, in Harley Street. Woolf mocks Bradshaw and his pathetically inadequate advice to Septimus to cultivate a proper sense of ‘proportion’. To achieve this, Bradshaw says he’ll arrange for Septimus to be sent to a rest home, a care home (nobody uses the word asylum). Although presented sweetly, this obviously has a coercive element and leads onto a peculiar couple of pages where Woolf claims that, the (pathetically inadequate) concept of ‘proportion’ is accompanied by a ‘sister’ concept, ‘Conversion’. This is obscure but seems to refer to compulsion, to forcing his patients to acquiesce in his diagnoses, with the implication that he will be forced to go to this home (asylum). This sense of being forced against his will, plays a crucial role in the climax of Septimus’s story.
Like all contemporary physicians, Bradshaw knows nothing about the workings of the brain and central nervous system.
One thirty (p.90)
According to a clock in nearby Oxford Street where is walking Hugh Whitbread, 55, respected holder of a position at Court, ‘unbearably pompous’. He, too, has been invited to luncheon with Lady Bruton and arrives on the doorstep of her house in Brook Street at the same moment as Richard Dalloway.
She talks of this and that and mentions that Peter Walsh is back in England. But it turns out she has invited them both there simply because she needs their help writing a letter to The Times about her hobby horse, encouraging the emigration of the ‘surplus population’ to the colonies, specifically Canada. Hugh is a gluttonous creep in many respects but in this, writing formal letters in the style of the Establishment, he is outstanding and does a great job, developing and refining it at Lady Bruton’s instructions. Then lunch is over and the two men depart.
But a wind is blowing up Brook Street and for some indefinable reason they find it difficult to part and end up together going into a jewellers’s shop where Hugh buys a necklace for his wife, Evelyn. Talk of Peter Walsh has reminded him of his wooing of Clarissa and suddenly he wants to buy her a present. Lacking judgement of jewellery, in the blink of an eye he has bought some red and white roses and strides through Green Park towards their house, intending to give them to her and tell her he loves her.
Scholars think the Dalloways live in Great College Street, Westminster, though this is nowhere made explicit.
3pm (p.103)
Big Ben sounds the hour as Dalloway enters his house, surprising Clarissa. He gives her the roses but can’t quite bring himself to tell her he loves her. He quickly leaves to attend a committee, concerned with Armenian survivors of the genocide though Clarissa, characteristically, can’t remember whether it’s Armenians or Albanians.
Miss Kilman emerges from being cloistered with Elizabeth. She was hired as a history tutor for Elizabeth but during the war had a religious conversion. We get the story of her conversion. Now she and Elizabeth emerge to go shopping. There is a momentary standoff between Clarissa and Miss Kilman which Clarissa ends by laughing. They exit.
3.30pm (p.112)
Clarissa watches the old lady opposite laboriously climb her stairs and thinks that, that is life.
Meanwhile, Mrs Kilman is infuriated beyond measure by the way Mrs Dalloway laughed at her, seething with hatred for her dim, philistine privilege. She and Elizabeth go to the Army and Navy Story (to buy a petticoat) and then have tea and a chocolate eclair. Woolf gives us Miss Kilman’s thoughts which are almost as demented as Septimus’s in her seething anger at being ugly and poor and clumsy.
Miss Kilman goes into Westminster Abbey to share her misery with God and some other sniffling worshippers. Elizabeth, 17, loves being out in the busy streets and takes a bus down the Strand, across into Fleet Street and bravely ventures towards St Paul’s Cathedral, all the way thinking a confused, immature 17-year-old girl’s thoughts about what she might do when she grows up.
The passing backwards and forwards of omnibuses is a link to the Smiths, Septimus lying on the sofa in their lodgings while Lucrezia tries to fix a hat at their table, a hat for Mrs Filmers’ married daughter, Mrs Peters. For half an hour he comes out of his madness and actively helps Rezia design the little hat and she is deliriously happy but then Mrs Filmer’s grand-daughter arrives to deliver the paper, and Rezia gives her a sweet then accompanies her back to her flat, leaving Septimus by himself, and he has tremors of relapse.
When she comes back he suggests she gets out all his mad writings, the letters and poems and diagrams and drawings, and burns them all, but she wants to keep them, sorts them and ties them with string.
At this point the indefatigable Dr Holmes arrives downstairs and Rezia runs down to head him off but he insists on blundering up to see his ‘perfectly well’ patient, which triggers a panic attack. Because Septimus associates the doctors with Sr William’s air of polite coercion, of being confined to an asylum.
So as soon as hears Holmes’s voice, Septimus quickly considers various methods of suicide and, as Dr Holmes enters the room, throws himself out the window and down onto the area railings. So that he is impaled on the railings. Yuk.
What happens next is odd because instead of having hysterics, Rezia is given a sweet drink by the doctor and feels relaxed and has happy visions, presumably a powerful tranquilliser. And it isn’t made clear whether Septimus is dead or badly or lightly injured. Mystery.
The ambulance carrying Septimus whizzes past Peter Walsh out walking and he’s struck by how civilised the notion of the traffic pulling aside to let is pass is, after the chaos of the Orient (i.e. India). Peter reacts a bit deliriously, with a hint of the Woolf madness, which is disguised as his temperamental over-susceptibility.
6pm (p.137)
Peter arrives back at his hotel, a sad sterile place, his mind awash with memories of Clarissa on his many visits to Bourton. He is upset when these fantasies are punctured by a one-line note she’s had sent round which simply says ‘Heavenly to see you!’ So conventional, so middle-aged and disappointing. And he reflects on his affair with Daisy, her mad love for him, his jealousy, the whole thing utterly inappropriate and disreputable, as he gets dressed for Clarissa’s party. No wonder she married Richard.
He goes down to the hotel dining room where he is shy and sits at a table by himself. After dinner he gets into conversation with the Morris family, being old Mr Morris, young Charles Morris, Mrs Morris and Miss Elaine Morris.
Evening falls over the city. Peter realises he’ll go to the party simply because he wants a gossip and to hear the latest talk about the future of India. As night falls the streets light up and fill with lively young people. Peter prides himself at not being at the Oriental Club surrounded by harrumphing old bloaters, but sitting on a cane chair outside his hotel near the Tottenham Court Road enjoying the sense of youth and possibility.
He pays a penny for an evening paper, reads the cricket scores, then leaves it on the table and sets off walking through Bloomsbury, heading south and west to Westminster and a lovely description of people stepping out their houses and into cabs, of windows lighting up, the sound of gramophones through windows on this hot June evening, till he arrives at Clarissa’s house and braces himself.
The servants, Lucy bustling about front of house and Mrs Walker, the very harassed cook and old Mrs Barnett, Ellen Barnett, helping the grand ladies off with their cloaks. Mr Wilkins a sort of butler/announcer, hired specially for parties.
Clarissa is terrified that the party is not going well, people are not mingling, are standing around tutting about the draught (Peter desperately wishes he hadn’t come, he knows nobody). But then more guests arrive and it starts to go. Clarissa stands at the main door to the drawing room greeting them all as they’re announced by Wilkins. Lady Bruton has come and Clarissa is genuinely relieved. Then she is amazed that Sally Seton has gatecrashed, happened to be in London, heard about it etc. She is now Lady Rosseter with five strapping sons!
And then the Prime Minister, an amusingly non-descript little man. Peter Walsh, an outsider from India, is appalled at the snobbery of the English, and then amused to see pompous Hugh Whitbread dancing attendance like a toady. And then he is touched with how old but gracious Clarissa looks in her green dress, effortlessly managing her guests. And there’s pages of her dealing with each of these guests, maybe based on real people (?), certainly an interesting variety.
Coincidentally (it’s a small world; well it’s a big world actually, but fiction is a small world) Sir William Bradshaw arrives, with his wife. He’s the pompously expensive nerve doctor who was so fundamentally useless to Septimus, and who Lucrezia was so relieved to escape. Interestingly, Clarissa once went to him with a problem and had the same experience, being impressed by his tone and dignity, but everso relieved to escape back out onto the street. Lady B explains they are late because they were just leaving when someone rang up Sir William to tell him a sad case of his had just killed himself (p.162).
Aha. So Septimus succeeded in killing himself. I was wondering whether I’d have to look it up on the internet to find out what happened (as I had to Google it to find out what happened at the end of ‘Jacob’s Room’).
News of this death affects her badly and Clarissa withdraws into a little side room. She feels it has a special message, is meant as an act of defiance. (Surely in this we can hear Woolf defending madness and suicidal ideations as something more than just illness, but a rebellion, a defiance, suicide as a kind of treasure).
And Clarissa’s response is to find Sr William somehow, obscurely, evil. When she met him professionally she felt the evil of compulsion in him, forcing his patients at their most vulnerable time. It awakens in her a deep terror:
Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear.
Because:
Somehow it was her disaster — her disgrace. It was her punishment… She felt somehow very like him — the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. (p.165)
Mad though this sounds, I know exactly what she means. It feels profoundly true.
Meanwhile Sally and Peter sit together and have a long chat about old times. He is 53, she is 55. This I found very moving because I’m about their age and at parties have sat and talked to friends I met at university when we were 20 and full of dreams and now look at each other, grey and middle-aged and worried about our children. That feeling comes over very well indeed.
And Peter confides that he never got over his love for Clarissa, the rest of his life was a throwing-himself-away. Sally sympathises and insists she comes to stay with him in her huge house in Manchester and meet her husband, a vastly wealthy mine owner who started out a working man himself and brought himself up by his shoestraps.
And they both watch young Elizabeth, looking radiant, walk over to her doting father who tells her how beautiful she is. Sally says she’s getting up to go and talk to them. And then the novel ends on a kind of bombshell, which I shall quote in its entirety. Sally leaves him and:
‘I will come,’ said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.
Nothing will happen between them, we know too much about them to sentimentally think that. But it is like colour in the composition of a painting. It ends on a tremendous upbeat of something we have come to realise is much more potent than love or memory, something much deeper.
It really is about as beautiful and moving as a novel can possibly be.
Thoughts
1. ‘Mrs Dalloway’ is not at all the avant-garde, modernist text I’d been led to believe, but a remarkably conventional, normal novel, easy to read and understand.
2. Mrs Dalloway is a posh, upper-class wife of a Conservative MP, a classic lady who lunches, it’s not clear that she’s ever done a day’s work in her life, just orders around her servants and suppliers. As such she has 0% of my sympathy. My sympathies are always with people who work for a living and not the parasitic upper classes which throng so much classic bourgeois fiction. But not having much sympathy for her doesn’t at all prevent me from appreciating the craft and beauty of the novel.
3. As you know I had a severe abreaction to Jacob’s Room, a book which gave me a powerful sense of mental illness barely controlled. It is symptomatic of this book’s greater sense of control and order that the mental illness is still there but has been channelled into just one character, isolated and delimited, as it were. Still that figure is a major player, the opposite pole to Clarissa, Septimus Smith. Into this character Woolf was able to pour all her demons, the voices talking in her head, and the calm and practical planning how to kill yourself.
The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood — by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know. Holmes had won of course; the brute with the red nostrils had won. But even Holmes himself could not touch this last relic straying on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world.
A note in the Oxford University Press edition of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ tells me that Woolf suffered mental collapses in 1895, 1904 and 1913 to 1915; that she tried to kill herself in 1895 (aged 13) and again in 1913 (aged 31). In 1922 when she felt another attack coming on, she went to see a Harley Street specialist who was, predictably, useless.
So the novel dramatises her two states – being a posh sensitive woman in London, and being mentally ill unto making practical plans to commit suicide – in its two central characters. It is a bipolar book.
And the two halves are brought together in the climactic party in a very complex, moving, disturbing, but sympathetic way, as Clarissa sorts through her complex response to Lady William’s mention of Septimus’s suicide. It is really a wonderfully complex working of a stricken subject and her horrible experiences into a beautiful work of art.
Credit
‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in May 1925. References are to the 2004 Vintage paperback edition.
Related links
The Virginia Woolf Society holds a DallowayDay event on the Saturday before or after the third Wednesday in June.
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- 1920s reviews
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