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The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles by Martin Gayford (2006)

‘I should like to have been born a pig’ – Paul Gauguin

‘One cannot forgo a woman for too long with impunity’ – Vincent van Gogh

‘Calm down, eat well, fuck well, work well and you will die happy’ – Paul Gauguin

‘We painters must get our orgasms from the eye’ – Vincent van Gogh

‘… an art that offers consolation for the broken-hearted’ – Vincent van Gogh

Executive summary

From October to December 1888 two great artistic innovators, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, lived and worked, ate and collaborated and argued, in a small house in Arles in the south of France. It was a period of intense inventiveness and productivity – in the month from late November to late December van Gogh painted no fewer than 35 paintings! But as Christmas approached, Vincent’s mood became more troubled and his behaviour more difficult until finally, on 23 December, Gauguin announced he was leaving, prompting van Gogh to carry out the inexplicable atrocity of cutting off his own left ear.

This book, by long-established art critic Martin Gayford, is a fairly long (356 pages), detailed but very readable account of those torrid two months, shedding light on the two men’s careers up to the fateful stay, painting a picture of the networks of experimental and avant-garde artists they operated within, shedding light on aspects of contemporary French society and artistic practice, but mostly concentrating on the day-to-day nuts and bolts of their lives together – who did the cooking, which locals they got on with and painted, locations they chose as subjects of their paintings, letters to and from Vincent’s brother Theo, fellow artist Emile Bernard, and so on.

Longer synopsis

On 20 February 1888, Vincent van Gogh arrived in Arles in the South of France, after having lived and painted in Paris for two years. He had only started painting in 1880, at the age of 27 (born March 1853) but had developed a quirky and unique style, of composition, colour and technique.

Now 35, after staying in various rented rooms, in May 1888 Van Gogh rented what became known as ‘the yellow house’, at Number 2 Place Lamartine, for 15 francs per month. Here he lived and set up his studio. He hoped it would form the nexus of a community of artists, a commune, almost a monastery of ascetics devoted to ‘the new art’, and had reached out to several of his peers.

The Yellow House by Vincent van Gogh (1888) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation)

Early on the morning of 23 October the most talented of these friends, Paul Gauguin, having received many invitations, finally arrived in Arles and took the bedroom next to Vincent’s.

For the next two months the two artists lived and painted together, in intense camaraderie, but it was a fractious difficult relationship, Gauguin finding it hard to live with the increasingly unstable Vincent. He threatened to move out several times and the whole thing climaxed on the notorious evening of 23 December 1888 when, after Gauguin announced that he was moving out, van Gogh sliced off pretty much his entire left ear with a razor.

Gauguin went ahead and moved out but van Gogh stayed on in the Yellow House until February of the next year, when he checked himself into a hospital. He continued to work in Arles for a few more months but had himself interned voluntarily in the asylum in Saint-Rémy on 8 May 1889.

The totality of his time in Arles, from February 1888 to May 1889, was a period of intense artistic productivity during which he created over 300 works, including masterpieces like ‘Sunflowers’, ‘The Starry Night Over the Rhône’, ‘The Bedroom’ and ‘The Night Café’.

This book by English art critic Martin Gayford (b. 1952 and so 72 years old) is a retelling of this well-worn story. Does his retelling justify the cost of admission? Well, there are already 1) umpteen editions of Vincent’s letters, which any chronicler of the period has to quote and 2) umpteen other accounts of this famous period, including exhibitions devoted to it and accompanied by scholarly catalogues.

Gayford adds lots of details and spin-off facts, the banalities of life such as how, on the night of Saturday 13 October, Vincent slept for 16 hours straight. He has the letters and memoirs to go on, and so is able to produce a pretty much day-by-day account.

Notable factoids

Neither Gauguin nor van Gogh were leading figures in the art world of the time. That was probably 29-year-old Georges Seurat who had invented an entirely new way of painting (with dots – pointillisme) that had seduced some of the older generation of impressionists. Gauguin loathed it as the peak of rationality, the opposite of the dreamy symbolism he aspired to (p.124-5).

But lots of it is more along the lines of how on 29 September, van Gogh bought two beds for the house, at a cost of 150 francs. He spent more money having gas lighting installed.

Vincent’s drinking was sometimes ‘out of control’. When he was depressed he drank to liven himself up. When he was troubled by anguished thoughts he drank to stupor himself. So whatever mood, drink was the answer. He often stayed late drinking at the Café de la Gare, and spent three evenings making his famous painting of it.

The Night Café by Vincent van Gogh (September 1888) Yale University Art Gallery

Gauguin, by contrast, drank little or nothing, making a small glass last all night, mainly for appearance’ sake. After a couple of months Gauguin thought Vincent was an alcoholic.

That said, Vincent was ‘addicted’ to coffee and one of the first things he did after moving into the yellow House was buy coffee-making apparatus.

Both Gauguin and Vincent smoked pipes, the pipe prolétarienne, the Bohemian alternative to cigars.

They were both frank about visiting one of Arles’s six brothels or maisons de tolerances, agreeing that sex was good for the health. About once a fortnight, though a local later remembered that Vincent was always ‘hanging round’ the brothels.

Prostitution was part of Vincent’s life and long had been. The only women he ever went with, he remarked rather bitterly to Theo, were whores at 2 francs intended for Zouaves. At one time Vincent had lived with a reformed prostitute; now in Arles his only sexual relations were bought with small sums of money. (p.119)

(In fact van Gogh had lived for 21 months with a prostitute, from January 1882 to September 1883 – Cristina or Sien Hoornick in the Hague. She had a four-year-old daughter and during their time together gave birth to a son by another man. Van Gogh declared he wanted to marry her until his scandalised family stepped in and threatened to suspend his financial support. Regretfully Vincent left her, moving away, but was haunted by a sense of loss which informs some of his greatest paintings – pages 228 to 231.)

Prostitution, Vincent felt, would have been bad if society were ‘pure and well-regulated’. As it was, materialism and sanctimonious morality ruled; prostitutes seemed more like ‘sisters of mercy’ to an outcast such as Vincent. He felt no scruple about associating with them; he liked their company. There was something ‘human’ about them. (p.230)

The rent for the Yellow House was paid to Bernard Soulé, manager of the hotel on the Avenue Montmajour.

Vincent liked creating gangs, introducing his friends to each other, choreographing their relationships, trying and continually failing to create a community of artists.

Someone who lives in Arles is a called an Arlésien, or Arlésienne for a woman. The Arlésiens spoke a dialect of French known as Provencal or Occitan, which was closer to Catalan than French. Neither Vincent nor Gauguin could understand them. In any case, Vincent spoke French more purely than Gauguin who had been born and raised abroad.

Paul Cézanne (born 1839), the prototypical painter of the French south, was a god to Gauguin but van Gogh disliked him, thinking his work to finicky and controlled. On the one occasion when Vincent showed the older man his work, Cézanne told him he was a madman.

Gauguin was a keen fencer and brought his foil, gloves and mask with him from Brittany. He also liked boxing. He played board games. He could also play the piano, badly. Vincent could do none of these things.

Gauguin was a detached, rational almost scientific painter, making painstaking preparations. He believed art was an intellectual activity and involved generating abstract patterns from what was in front of you.

‘Do not paint too much from nature. Art is an abstraction; extract it from nature, while dreaming in front of it.’ (quoted on page 69)

‘Abstract’ was a favourite word of Gauguin’s (p.101).

Van Gogh was the direct opposite, working feverishly, impetuously, long splashes of paint worked into swirls and whorls resonating with his passion – ‘very rapidly in one exhilarating rush’.

Which is why van Gogh produced in a working career of just under ten years more paintings than Gauguin produced in 30 (p.113).

Van Gogh wanted to paint what was in front of him but in a feverishly stylised way, especially the heightened colouring. Gauguin didn’t give a damn what was in front of him but wanted to extract the essence of the dream. Which is why he was soon to be invited into Symbolist circle of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé (p.101).

When van Gogh lost his religious faith he discovered a fervent belief in contemporary literature (p.145). Vincent loved the writings of Émile Zola and read his realistic novels avidly. He was reading Zola’s latest novel, The Dream. Gauguin disliked Zola, thinking his style false. Vincent also liked Guy de Maupassant, the Goncourt brothers, Alphonse Daudet and the popular novelist Pierre Loti.

The best art quote is from Gauguin and not about life in the South but in the Brittany he’d just come from, and is a good insight into his painting.

I love Brittany. I find here the savage and the primitive. When my clogs clang on this granite earth, I hear the dull, muffled tone, flat and powerful, that I try to achieve in painting.
(quoted page 58)

Gauguin was designated the cook of the household, he had a feel for good food. Van Gogh on the other hand, had a functional attitude: food was fuel which kept going his intense mind and perceptions. Plus he had a long history of stomach problems, exacerbated by long spells of poverty and/or religious zeal in which he deliberately starved himself. (Both men took a similarly functional attitude towards sex; it was a healthy release from what really mattered, which was painting.) Disappointingly, neither of them left any record of what Gauguin cooked.

Gauguin had attended Roman Catholic school and been drilled in his catechism. Van Gogh was the son of a Protestant pastor. In England he got work as a teaching assistant in a Protestant school and gave sermons (the first, on the subject of pilgrimage, at the Wesleyan chapel in Richmond, p.106). By the time they were at the Yellow House, both men had lost their faiths but Vincent never lost his northern, Protestant earnestness.

Van Gogh wrote repeatedly about wanting to paint the ordinary men and women of his time with the intensity the olden artists reserved for Christian saints. A noble wish but Gayford thinks he was crippled by his Protestant honesty, his dogged commitment to the truth in front of him, ‘too truthful, too wedded to the facts, too Dutch’ (p.250).

Gauguin, with his background in a Catholic seminary, found it much easier to create paintings with a Christian resonance and later would paint works with explicitly religious imagery, invoking Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Fall, the Crucifixion and much more (p.248).

Both van Gogh and Gauguin were essentially self-taught, picking up tips and ideas from everywhere and their contemporaries.

They had picked it up from other artists and, in Vincent’s case, from life classes at which he tended to clash angrily with the teachers. Essentially, they were self-taught, and that made them more open to innovations of every kind: stylistic, spiritual, technical. (p.71)

This was one of the great objections made by academic artists and critics to the impressionists and the wave of artists who followed them – that they went through none of the careful preparation for a painting enjoined on students, but used their own slapdash methods. (Gayford explains the correct academic stages for creating a painting – consisting of: preliminary sketch; sketch; study; then final tableau – page 104.)

Van Gogh was very messy; he never put the lids back on the paint tubes which were always oozing paint all over the place, which drove Gauguin nuts. And he wasn’t the only one. Half a century later the daughter of a local shopkeeper remembered van Gogh as ‘very ugly, ungracious, impolite, crazy and bad-smelling’ (p.73).

They walked and moved differently. Plenty of eye witnesses testified to van Gogh’s ‘short, quick, irregular’ steps which were echoed by his whole bodily movement which was jerky and ungainly (p.289). All this contrasted with Gauguin who cultivated a calm and stately air, sober gestures and dignity which could come across as aloofness (p.114).

Van Gogh was intolerably prolix. Once started, he tried to persuade everyone he was talking to of his views, yoking in examples from art, music, philosophy, literature and his experiences. His friend, the young painter Emile Bernard, remembered him as ‘vehement in discourse, interminably explaining and developing his ideas’ (p.162). This came over in his letters, which sometimes ran to 16 pages of rambling argumentation. Just one of the things that wore Gauguin down.

Gauguin heard a great deal of Vincent’s views about portraiture, as about everything else. (p.241)

Gauguin was very excited when he learned that Edgar Degas liked his latest paintings. Degas (born 1834) was from the generation above Vincent and Gauguin. According to Gayford he was a ‘crabby and caustic man, known for displays of acerbic wit at Parisian dinner parties’ (p.222).

Gauguin humorously signed his many letters PGo, which could be pronounced as ‘pego’ which, apparently, is French slang for penis.

Les Alyscamps

In the first weeks of the joint stay, Gauguin and van Gogh spent days in Arles’ ancient cemetery, Les Alyscamps, which dated back to Roman times, still very atmospheric despite being encroached on by a big factory and cut across by a modern railways line.

Their different approaches to the purpose of art, their styles and techniques are vividly distinguished in the paintings they made. Gauguin extracted from the scene an abstract view of mysterious figures in a portentous landscape, coloured with rich and unnaturalistic colours.

‘Les Alyscamps or the three graces at the temple of Venus’ by Paul Gauguin (1888) Musée d’Orsay

Van Gogh used colours intensely but a) left in all the modern details, included the factory with smoke coming from its chimneys and b) his people are almost accidental details, giving a sense of the everyday and contingent but made feverishly intense. You can see how messily – and incompletely – the paint has been applied in the foreground.

‘Les Alyscamps, Avenue in Arles’ by Vincent van Gogh (October 1888) Source/Photographer: Goulandris Foundation

Two portraits of Mrs Roulin

Showing just how different two portraits of the same person can be, when executed by two such very different sensibilities. Augustine-Alix Roulin, born in 1851 and so 37, was the wife of a local postal official, Joseph Roulin. In December 1888, Vincent persuaded the entire family to sit for their portraits, including the children and the little baby Marcelle.

On the first occasion, Vincent and Gauguin both painted Madame Roulin at the same sitting, sitting in the same chair, wearing the same clothes, against the same background. The resulting portraits not only show the two artists’ contrasting styles but are a revelation of how utterly differently two people can see exactly the same thing. In fact van Gogh is quoted saying as much, saying of portraits that ‘one and the same person may furnish motifs for very different portraits’ (p.239).

Here’s Vincent’s rendering.

‘Portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin’ by Vincent van Gogh (November to December 1888) Winterthur: Oskar Reinhart Collection

And Gauguin’s. They could barely be more unalike in composition but also the handling of the paint.

‘Madame Roulin’ by Paul Gauguin (1888)

Gayford tells us it was by his portraits that van Gogh wished to be judged whereas Gauguin wasn’t much of a portraitist, except of himself (p.254).

Comments

Gayford’s book is enjoyable partly because it has a great subject and that subject is absolutely awash with sources to draw on. Van Gogh’s paintings, his letters (‘Few people have left a fuller self-portrait in words than Vincent did, p.315); Gauguin’s letters, his later memoirs; the memoirs of their correspondents (notably brother Theo van Gogh and the young painter Emile Bernard); and memories of inhabitants of Arles – there is a wealth of information, before you even start on the secondary material, namely loads of biographies of both men, thousands of essays by art critics and scholars, the catalogues of countless exhibitions, and so on.

Gayford synthesises all this into a competent, interesting and – in the final scenes around the notorious ear-cutting incident – quite gripping narrative. It is told in a straightforward, magazine style, with fairly interesting inserts about Zola or the academic process for creating a painting, the merits of jute versus canvas as a support for an oil painting, a light summary of van Gogh’s rather incoherent colour theory, and so on and so on.

But for such an eminent art writer, and a man who loses no opportunity to remind us how he’s good friends with contemporary artists such as David Hockney and Lucien Freud, Gayford’s commentary is often surprisingly banal.

When he tells us that in the late nineteenth century a lot of people lost their Christian faith and goes on to quote Matthew Arnold’s super famous poem, Dover Beach, as proof, I felt the heavy thump of banality and obviousness. This is A-level standard, if not GCSE English level.

Same with his page and a half explaining Zola’s sequence of Les Rougon-Macquart novels (pages 212 to 213), or telling us that Wagner was a revolutionary composer. GCSE level. Everywhere you look, Gayford states the fairly obvious in an amiably anodyne style. The first page of Sue Prideaux’s epic biography of Gauguin is more arresting and insightful than anything in Gayford.

It’s a good enough book but nowhere does Gayford rise to the eloquence you feel is really required to do justice to van Gogh’s extraordinary genius and the astonishingly creative symbiotic relationship between him and Gauguin. It has puffs on the back from the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times. Well, quite. Sunday supplement stuff. Intelligent, thorough, competent, but lacking any fire.

Oh yes, the illustrations The paper quality is poor, cardboardy and the illustrations are in poor quality black and white and small. I had to look all the paintings up online in order to appreciate them. Since this is a book about artists who were revolutionaries in the use of colour, giving the paintings themselves as tiny, poor quality black and white reproductions is so poor as to be absurd.

All in all, it demonstrates Simon’s Law of Books which is: the more you pay for a book, the more you’re likely to be disappointed.

Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence by Martin Bailey

In the Royal Academy shop I just saw a copy of this book, ‘Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence’ by Martin Bailey. This looks like it’s a different league from the Gayford. It’s not only more recent (2021 compared to 2006), but it’s a bigger format book with lovely shiny paper and lavish full colour illustrations. I haven’t read the text but for the illustrations alone, I’d ignore the Gayford and go with Bailey.

Lautrec’s van Gogh

One of the best things I learned from Gayford’s book was the existence of a portrait of van Gogh done by fellow Bohemian Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, before Vincent left Paris in early 1888. Lautrec was just 23. Genius, isn’t it? And for all its brash technique and colour palette, figuratively accurate in a way nothing by Vincent or Gauguin is.

Vincent van Gogh by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1887) Pastel on cardboard

Credit

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles by Martin Gayford was first published by Fig Tree books in 2006. I read the 2024 revised Penguin paperback edition.

Related reviews

Kiefer / Van Gogh @ the Royal Academy (September 2025)
Van Gogh: Lovers and Poets @ the National Gallery (September 2024)
Van Gogh and Britain @ Tate Britain (May 2019)
The Post-Impressionists by Belinda Thompson (1990)

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by Simon on October 6, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Biography, Books

Tagged alcoholism, Alphonse Daudet, Arlésien, Arlésienne, Arles, art book, art history, asylum, Augustine-Alix Roulin, Émile Bernard, Bernard Soulé, Biography, book, Brittany, brothel, Catalan, Cezanne, David Hockney, Dover Beach, Edgar Degas, Emile Zola, fancing, Georges Seurat, Goncourts, Guy de Maupassant, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Joseph Roulin, Les Alyscamps, Les Rougon-Macquart novels, Lucien Freud, madness, maison de tolerances, Martin Bailey, Martin Gayford, Matthew Arnold, modern art, modern painting, Mrs Roulin, Occitan, Painting, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, PGo, Pierre Loti, pipe prolétarienne, Place Lamartine, pointillisme, prostitution, Provencal, Saint-Rémy, sex, Sien Hoornick, South of France, Stéphane Mallarmé, Sue Prideaux, sunflowers, Symbolism, The Bedroom, The Hague, The Night Café, The Starry Night Over the Rhône, The Yellow House, Vincent van Gogh, Wagner, Zouaves

Posted by Simon on October 6, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/06/the-yellow-house-van-gogh-gauguin-martin-gayford/

Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie (1940)

‘It looks, does it not, as though we return to our muttons?’
(Translation of a French phrase which means, ‘go back to the start’, part 2, chapter 2)

‘I’m not one to gossip!’
(In the pantomime world of Agatha Christie, this always the preliminary to someone launching into a massive gossip, in this case gabby Nurse O’Brien)

‘Just like the pictures, isn’t it?’
(Nurse O’Brien sums up the pop culture cheesiness of the plot)

‘Old sins have long shadows, as they say!’
(Pithy proverb from Nurse Nolan)

Mrs. Bishop’s bust heaved with a flash of jet.

Part 1. The murder of Mary Gerrard

The narrative is cast in three parts. Part one gives us the events leading up to The Murder.

Old Mrs Laura Welman is bed-ridden after a stroke. She is attended round the clock by two nurses, older, plump Nurse Jessie Hopkins and Nurse O’Brien, and periodically visited by the handsome, humorous local doctor, Dr Peter Lord.

Laura’s husband died years ago and she is the owner and sole inhabitant of the Hunterbury estate (well, along with the raft of servants). At the end of the drive is the village of Maidensford. When she dies it is expected that she will divide the estate between her niece, Elinor, and her late husband’s nephew, Roderick ‘Roddy’ Welman.

We are shown numerous scenes between Roddy and Elinor where it becomes clear that 1) they have been in love since they were boy and girl playing on the lovely Hunterbury estate; 2) neither of them have plans to get a job or career because their plans for their future entirely depend on inheriting Aunt Laura’s money; 3) Elinor is cold and calculating, deliberately restraining her love for Roddy, and wondering how long before Aunt Laura finally dies.

The fly in the ointment who queers the whole situation is Mary Gerrard. She is the same age as Elinor and Roddy but born into a different class. She’s the daughter of the grumpy old lodge keeper to the estate, angry old Ephraim Gerrard. But here’s the thing: when Mary was a girl, Laura Welman, with no child of her own, took a shine to her and paid for her to go to private school, have French and piano lessons and be sent abroad to finishing school. She is just back from two years in Germany. Thus she has been educated ‘above her station’.

Not only this, but here, right at the start of the narrative, Elinor receives a letter which is really a scrawled, illiterate note, warning her that someone is sucking up to the old lady in the hope of winning her fortune. This can only refer to Mary, but the question is: who wrote and sent Elinor this note? And why?

The scenes between Elinor and Roddy quite cleverly build up the picture of two immature and naive young people who think they’re in love because they’ve been such jolly good friends for so long, and who’ve put their lives on hold while they wait for the old lady to pass away, but whose love is not real. It is a kind of formality or type of politeness to each other. They way they continually ask each other whether they love each other indicates its superficiality and fragility.

All this is exposed by the simple event of Roddy walking by himself through the grounds wondering about the future and pondering his love for Elinor when out of the woods, illuminated by sunlight, walks Mary Gerrard like a vision of beauty. I’ll quote the entire little scene because it shows how clearly Christie writes, with a beautiful limpidity and simplicity. As Christie’s biographer Laura Thompson says (and maybe it’s an obvious enough remark) Christie’s popularity is less down to her plots or characters, than to her immense readability.

He went out of the walled garden by the gate at the far end. From there he wandered into the little wood where the daffodils were in spring. They were over now, of course. But the green light was very lovely where the sunlight came filtering through the trees.

Just for a moment an odd restlessness came to him – a rippling of his previous placidity. He felt: ‘There’s something – something I haven’t got – something I want – I want – I want….’

The golden green light, the softness in the air – with them came a quickened pulse, a stirring of the blood, a sudden impatience.

A girl came through the trees towards him – a girl with pale, gleaming hair and a rose-flushed skin. He thought, ‘How beautiful – how unutterably beautiful.’

Something gripped him; he stood quite still, as though frozen into immobility. The world, he felt, was spinning, was topsy-turvy, was suddenly and impossibly and gloriously crazy!

The girl stopped suddenly, then she came on. She came up to him where he stood, dumb and absurdly fishlike, his mouth open. She said with a little hesitation:

‘Don’t you remember me, Mr. Roderick? It’s a long time of course. I’m Mary Gerrard, from the lodge.’

Short sentences. Short paragraphs. Simple characters. Child-like psychology. Easily understood. Perfect undemanding holiday reading for generations of satisfied readers.

So Roddy not so much falls in love with as is transfixed by this vision of young beauty. And Elinor sees it. In every subsequent scene where Mary appears, Roddy stops in the middle of what he’s saying to follow her with his eyes, with the result that Elinor becomes a seething cauldron of hate and jealousy.

Roddy and Elinor are both based in London where they have their separate flats. They visit Aunt Laura one or two times more before they get a message that she’s had another stroke and is a bad way. They rush down to Hunterbury to comfort the poor woman who now can’t speak. But the nurses and the doctor, when he attends, can see that Laura is upset about something and between them work out that she is very concerned about her will. She appears to want to make provision for her beloved Mary in it. Elinor (witnessed by the two nurses) promises she’ll do this, and also call the family solicitor Mr Seddon to come and see her tomorrow.

But tomorrow never comes. Aunt Laura dies in the night intestate i.e. she never made a will. In these circumstances the entire estate, and her considerable fortune, go to her next of kin who is Laura, with nothing to Roddy and nothing to Mary. Says the family lawyer:

‘The death duties, I am afraid, will be somewhat heavy, but even after their payment, the fortune will still be a considerable one, and it is very well invested in sound gilt-edged securities.’

In the event Elinor does the decent thing: she gifts Mary £2,000 which everyone thinks is very generous. But when she tries to offer Roddy some of the money he says he doesn’t want her charity and they end up having a row. In other words, the money which was meant to bring them together and ensure they lived happily ever after, ends up diving them more bitterly. They have broken off their engagement. Elinor suggests that Roddy goes away, abroad, takes a long break, to decide whether it’s she (Elinor) or Mary that he loves, so off he goes.

More than once Elinor is shown thinking ‘If only Mary wasn’t here… But for Mary… If only Mary were gone…’ maybe things between her and Roddy would return to ‘normal’.

Worse is to come because, now that they are not going to get married, Elinor is left as the sole inhabitant of the big old house at Hunterbury and decides she can’t bear to live there amid the ruins of her dreams. So she decides to sell it. All its rooms and gardens which she fondly planned to share in her happy marriage to Roddy, all these taste of ashes because of that damn Mary Gerrard! And so the narrative amply conveys all the reasons Elinor has for hating Mary, and how Elinor’s character becomes increasingly cold, calculating and bitter.

(I should have mentioned that shortly before Aunt Laura’s second stroke, Nurse Hopkins had mentioned to Nurse O’Brien that she can’t find one of the tubes of morphine in her nurse’s bag (it’s for a different patient of theirs: Eliza Rykin with cancer). She either mislaid it or, while her bag was left open in the hall, someone must have stolen it… a thought which neither of them fully acknowledge and quickly stifle, because it would imply that someone is up to no good.)

To cut a long story short, Mary dies and is thought to have been murdered. The actual death takes place at an innocent sandwich lunch. Laura has put Hunterbury up for sale. She therefore has to clear out all the furniture and writes asking Mary to come and do the same for the lodge where she grew up. Mary asks Nurse Hopkins to help her. On this particular day we are shown Elinor going shopping in the village high street and, at the butcher’s, buying types of paste to make sandwiches with. She frivolously mentions the fact that some fish pastes have been reported as causing food poisoning which the butcher assures her are not true of his.

Anyway, come lunchtime, Elinor invites Mary and Nurse Nolan from the lodge (where they’re cleaning out) up to the big house. Here she offers them the fish paste sandwiches we saw her making from the fish paste we saw her buying. Nurse Hopkins makes a pot of tea. Mary has a cup but Elinor doesn’t. Then Elinor invites Nurse Hopkins upstairs to take a look at the clothes she plans to throw out: maybe some of them can be redistributed to the poor and elderly in the village.

They do this for some time and when they come downstairs find Mary slumped in her chair, unconscious and blue. Nurse Hopkins immediately diagnoses poisoning, speaks very harshly to Elinor (obviously suspecting her of foul play) and barks at her to phone Dr Lord.

Here, on this dramatic scene, ends Part 1 of the novel.

Red herrings

According to Wikipedia:

A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or audiences toward a false conclusion. A red herring may be used intentionally, as in mystery fiction or as part of rhetorical strategies (e.g., in politics), or may be used in argumentation inadvertently.

The term was popularized in 1807 by English polemicist William Cobbett, who told a story of having used a strong-smelling smoked fish to divert and distract hounds from chasing a rabbit.

Euthenasia? Anyway, there are several red herrings I haven’t got round to mentioning yet. One is that we are shown old Aunt Laura confiding in Dr Lord, a sympathetic man, that she doesn’t want to end up helpless and gaga, being washed and cared for like a vegetable.

‘She’d talked to me about it. Asked me more than once if I couldn’t ‘finish her off.’ She hated illness, the helplessness of it…’

She would much rather the doctor put her out of her misery, something he cheerfully refuses to do, saying he didn’t intend to be hanged for murder. But did he? Put her quietly to sleep, as per her wishes?

Talking of Lord, it becomes clear in part 2 that he (rather inexplicably) carries a torch for Elinor. Could the doctor conceivably, somehow have poisoned Mary to make Elinor’s life better? Wildly improbable, but I’ve read worse things in Christie.

Ted Bigland’s anger This is Mary’s boyfriend, from her own (working) class. He is ‘a fine sturdy specimen’ who grew up with Mary and they obviously had some kind of understanding. We are shown a couple of scenes in which Ted asks to go out with her but Mary refuses and we are shown Ted’s frustration and then anger that Mary now thinks she’s ‘too good’ for him etc. Could this anger be motive enough for ted to murder her?

Mary’s mysterious parentage Late in part 1, looking through paperwork in the Lodge, Nurse Hopkins comes across a marriage certificate for old Gerrard and his wife but the date of the marriage is a year after Mary (now 21) was born. Further enquiry reveals that Mary wasn’t old Gerrard’s daughter at all. He confirms this in person. Mary’s father was an unnamed ‘gentleman’ who impregnated a lady’s maid to old Mrs Welman. She subsequently married Gerrard after Mary was born. No wonder he resented Mary, and she said she often felt he didn’t behave like a father to her. The obvious question is who was the father and could it have any possible bearing on Mary’s murder?

Lewis Rycroft On one of her last nights, Mrs Welman called out ‘Lewis, Lewis, photograph’. She directed Nurse O’Brien to get an old photograph out of her (locked) tallboy, an old photo in a silver frame depicting a handsome young man. She held and admired it for a while and then ordered it be locked away again. Well, some time later, after Mrs Welman’s death, Nurse O’Brien moves to a new job with a new client, Lady Rattery, staying at a place called Laborough Court where, by the kind of fantastic coincidence beloved of Christie and romance authors in general, she sees on the grand piano the exact same photo, of a dashing young man. When she asks the butler, he tells her it’s a photo of Lady Rattery’s brother – Sir Lewis Rycroft. He lived locally and was killed in the War. She further finds out that Lewis was married but that his wife (Lady Rycroft) went into a lunatic asylum soon after the marriage, but remained living. In other words, according to the laws of the day, he was unable to divorce and remarry. Nurse O’Brien then speculates that this Sir Lewis and Mrs Welman must have had a love affair but couldn’t marry because of the mad wife problem. As she comments:

They must have been very fond of each other, he and Mrs W., and unable to marry because of the wife being in an asylum. Just like the pictures, isn’t it?

So I’m guessing this solves the mystery of Mary’s parentage. What if not only Mary’s father was Lewis Rycroft but somehow, he got Mrs Welman pregnant, and Mary was Mrs Welman’s natural daughter!!!

So that’s the state of play and information, as part 1 ends on the dramatic scene of Mary dying of poisoning in the sitting room at Hunterbury, as Elinor Welman looks on cold-eyed and Nurse Hopkins turns to accuse her, ‘her eyes hard with suspicion’.

Part 2. Enter Hercule Poirot

Part 2 opens with young Dr Lord visiting Poirot and begging him to help find the evidence to get Elinor off the charge of murder. She has been arrested and charged and the trial will take place soon. Poirot asks Dr Lord to give him a complete summary of all the characters and the events leading up to Mary Gerrard’s death – which is a very handy recap for the reader, too.

Poirot agrees to help and sets off on the usual round of interviews. A chapter apiece is devoted to his extended interviews of: Nurse Nolan; Mrs Bishop; Ted Bigland; Roderick Welman; Mr Seddon the family lawyer; Chief Inspector Marsden; Nurse O’Brien; then Elinor herself, in prison. Then he meets with Dr Lord and tramps about the scene of the crime, throughout the empty house, but also along the land running beside the house from which, they realise, anyone could have had a clear view through the kitchen window of Elinor making the sandwiches on the fatal morning.

Poirot returns alone to interview Nurse O’Brien and she confirms what I suspected about Mary being Mrs Welman’s illegitimate daughter. It’s spelled out in black and white in an old letter she found at the Lodge, written by Mary’s ostensible mother, the lady’s maid Eliza Riley, who took the baby as her own and married Ephraim Gerrard.

Part 3. In court

Christie was constantly experimenting with the format of her novels. More often than not someone is murdered and the narrative describes the process of finding the killer. This one plays a variation on the theme which is that it is the first novel in the Poirot series to feature significant part of the narrative in a courtroom.

The novel actually opens with a preliminary scene in court, with Elinor standing in the dock, being accused of the murder of Mary Gerrard and asked to enter a plea, before the scene shimmers and fades before our eyes and transports us back to the origins of the story (part 1) and Poirot’s investigations (part 2), which I have summarised above.

I say ‘experimentation’ but, of course, by 1940 this kind of brief opening in the present which quickly gives way to flashbacks explaining how we got to this point, had become commonplace in popular fiction and especially in the movies. And having a good deal of a murder mystery set in court as different witnesses present the evidence which slowly pieces together the truth, this device has obviously been used in tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of movies and TV crime series since.

But it was new in Christie’s oeuvre to include such a courtroom scene and to use it to reveal the truth. We’d gotten used to Poirot calling all the suspects together and doing one of his Big Explanations.

Cast

Aunt Laura Welman – owner of the Hunterbury estate, old lady, bed-ridden after a stroke
Henry Welman – her husband, died decades earlier after just five years of marriage
Sir Lewis Rycroft – who Laura was in love with decades earlier, during the Great War, in which he was killed
Miss Elinor Carlisle – young niece of Laura Welman, in love with Roddy – ‘I’ve always fancied that you had, perhaps, rather an intense nature—that kind of temperament runs in our family. It isn’t a very happy one for its possessor’ – says to herself, ‘ It’s that beastly brooding, possessive mind of yours’
Roddy Welman – Mrs Welman’s (dead) husband’s nephew, posh, nervous, attended Eton
Mary Gerrard – daughter of the lodge keeper of the Welman estate who Aunt Laura took a shine to and had educated, piano, French etc, beyond her station ‘At twenty-one, Mary Gerrard was a lovely creature with a kind of wild-rose unreality about her: a long delicate neck, pale golden hair lying close to her exquisitely shaped head in soft natural waves, and eyes of a deep vivid blue’ – Nurse Hopkins thinks ‘Mary was one of the most beautiful girls you’ve ever seen. Might have gone on the films any time’
Ephraim Gerrard – Mary’s father who has angrily rejected her since her posh education gave her hoity-toity ways: ‘an elderly man with a bent back was painfully hobbling down the two steps’; in the opinion of Horlicks the gardener, ‘always grumbling, and crusty as they make them’
Eliza Gerrard née Riley – lady’s maid to Mrs Welman, who had a baby and married Ephraim Gerrard
Ted Bigland – Mary’s boyfriend, from her original (working) class, works at Henderson’s garage – ‘a fine sturdy specimen’, a ‘good-looking, fair young giant’
Mrs Bishop – housekeeper at Hunterbury for 18 years, ‘a stately figure of ample proportions, handsomely dressed in black’
Nurse Jessie Hopkins – the District Nurse who came every morning to assist with the bed making and toilet of the heavy old lady, was a homely-looking middle-aged woman with a capable air and a brisk manner’ – ‘the biggest gossip in the village’ – according to Dr Lord, ‘the town crier’
Nurse O’Brien – ‘a tall red-haired woman of thirty with flashing white teeth, a freckled face and an engaging smile. Her cheerfulness and vitality made her a favourite with her patients’
Dr Peter Lord – ‘a young man of thirty-two. He had sandy hair, a pleasantly ugly freckled face and a remarkably square jaw. His eyes were a keen, piercing light blue’
Horlick the gardener – ‘a tall, good-looking young fellow wheeling a barrow’
Dr Ransom – Dr Lord’s predecessor, now retired
Mrs Slattery – Dr Ransom’s housekeeper
Mr. Seddon of Bloomsbury Square – Aunt Laura’s lawyer
Mr Abbot – the butcher
Chief Inspector Marsden – police officer in charge of the criminal investigation, an experienced, kindly looking man’

In court

Sir Samuel Attenbury – counsel for the prosecution – there’s a flicker of Christie’s casual antisemitism when she has Elinor describe him as ‘the horrible man with the Jewish nose’
Sir Edwin Bulmer, K.C. – leading barrister assigned to defend Elinor; he is described as ‘the forlorn hope man’ because he takes on hopeless cases – a specialist in ‘sob stuff – stressing the prisoner’s youth’ etc
Dr Alan Garcia – distinguished forensic analyst
Inspector Brill – police officer in charge
Alfred James Wargrave – rose grower from Emsworth, Berkshire
James Littledale – qualified chemist employed by the wholesale chemists, Jenkins & Hale
Amelia Sedley of Boonamba, Auckland, New Zealand
Edward of Auckland, New Zealand, now living in Deptford

Nurses

I’ve been reading Laura Thompson’s account of Christie’s time as a nurse working for a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) at Torquay Hospital during the First World War. It’s a happy coincidence that this novel is the one which contains more nurses, and comment about the profession of nursing, than any others to this point.

Dr Lord numerous times emphasises the professionalism of the two nurses, but also how they’d be scared to death of lapsing in their duties. When interviewing Nurse Nolan, Poirot is a little patronising and she quickly corrects him in the tone of brisk practicality which is what the reader also picks up from Thompson’s account of Agatha’s own time as a nurse.

Poirot sighed. He said: ‘As you say, men fight shy of illness. It is the women who are the ministering angels. What should we do without them? Especially women of your profession – a truly noble calling.’
Nurse Hopkins, slightly red in the face, said: ‘It’s very kind of you to say that. I’ve never thought of it that way myself. Too much hard work in nursing to think about the noble side of it.’
(Part 2, chapter 3)

Bookishness

Hercule Poirot said: ‘One does not practise detection with a textbook! One uses one’s natural intelligence.’
Peter Lord said: ‘You might find a clue of some sort there.’
Poirot sighed: ‘You read too much detective fiction.’

‘Her mother had been a lady’s maid to old Mrs Welman. She married Gerrard after Mary was born.’
‘As you say, quite a romance – a mystery romance.’

Wordsworth

Suddenly, out of the blue, Poirot quotes a fragment of Wordsworth and tells us he is a fan.

‘Therefore, the next step logically would seem to be: Mary Gerrard was not killed! But that, alas, is not so. She was killed!’
He added, slightly melodramatically:

“But she is in her grave, and oh,
The difference to me!”

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Roddy.
Hercule Poirot explained:
‘Wordsworth. I read him much.’

Period vocabulary

Says Nurse Nolan:

‘She wasn’t one of these girls who are all S.A. and IT. She was a quiet girl!’

Where S.A. obviously stands for ‘sex appeal’, a phrase Nolan can’t even bring herself to utter, and IT refers to It Girl:

The expression ‘It Girl’ originated in British upper-class society around the turn of the 20th century. It gained further attention in 1927 with the popularity of the Paramount Studios film It, starring Clara Bow.

Summary

The two Agatha Christie novels I’ve enjoyed most have been The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery because they are the funniest, most high spirited books, the silly far-fetched plots being part of the comedy.

But of Christie’s mid-period novels this may be the one I’ve enjoyed reading most. The final explanation is as preposterously contrived as all her other plots but there’s something perilously close to depth and real psychology in the characterisation of Elinor Welman. And the penultimate scene where Dr Lord drives her to a sanatorium where she can finally rest and be at peace, had, for a moment, a flicker of the depth and real emotion you look for in proper literature.

But then the final scene of the novel has Poirot conveniently tidying up any loose ends for the benefit of the holiday reader and it turns back into pantomime again.

Credit

‘Sad Cypress’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in March 1940.

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by Simon on August 29, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Antisemitism, Detective stories, Novel

Tagged 1940, Agatha Christie, Alfred James Wargrave, Amelia Sedley, Antisemitism, Auckland, Aunt Laura, Berkshire, Bloomsbury Square, Boonamba, cancer, Chief Inspector Marsden, Clara Bow, Collins Crime Club, crime fiction, crime novel, Deptford, detective novel, Dr Alan Garcia, Dr Lord, Dr Peter Lord, Dr Ransom, Edward of Auckland, Elinor, Elinor Carlisle, Eliza Gerrard, Eliza Riley, Eliza Rykin, Emsworth, Ephraim Gerrard, Eton, euthanasia, First World War, food poisoning, Great War, Henry Welman, Hercule Poirot, Horlick, Hunterbury, Inspector Brill, It Girl, James Littledale, Jenkins & Hale, Laborough Court, Lady Rattery, Laura Thompson, Laura Welman, Lewis Rycroft, lunatic asylum, madness, Maidensford, Mary Gerrard, Mr Abbot, Mr Roderick, Mr Seddon, Mrs Bishop, Mrs Laura Welman, Mrs Slattery, Mrs Welman, murder, narrative, New Zealand, novel, Nurse Hopkins, Nurse Jessie Hopkins, Nurse Nolan, Nurse O'Brien, Peter Lord, red herrings, Roddy Welman, Roderick Welman, Sad Cypress, sex appeal, Sir Edwin Bulmer, Sir Lewis Rycroft, Sir Samuel Attenbury, Ted Bigland, Torquay Hospital, trial, VAD, Voluntary Aid Detachment, William Cobbett, Wordsworth

Posted by Simon on August 29, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/08/29/sad-cypress-agatha-christie/

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf (1941)

She was given to increasing the bounds of the moment by flights into past or future; or sidelong down corridors and alley.
(Old Mrs Swithin, describing Woolf’s own technique, page 8)

She gave him an arch roguish twinkle, as if to say—but the end of that sentence was cut short.
(One of many instances of interruption and incompletion which characterise the novel at every level, p.182)

‘Bless my soul, what a dither!’
(An unknown member of the audience as it disperses at the end of the pageant which forms the centrepiece of the narrative, p.180)

Virginia Woolf killed herself before her last novel, Between the Acts, was published. She drowned herself in the River Ouse on 28 March 1941 and the novel was published on 17 July 1941.

According to her biographer, after the long, gruelling process of writing and rewriting her previous work, the long novel The Years, which covers 55 years in the lives of the extended Pargiter family, the writing of Between The Acts flowed much more easily. It stems from one simple concept: all the events are set on just one day in the summer of 1939 (p.48), on the day of the annual village pageant at Pointz Hall, at the heart of a remote and idyllic rural community in the south of England.

As usual, the narrative describes not only of events, but the thoughts and memories of half a dozen of the central characters. And the pageant itself reviews and celebrates English history just at the moment when the nation was poised on the brink of another world war, which would rewrite or even obliterate much of that history.

Shadows

Born in 1882, Woolf was approaching 50 when she wrote Between The Acts. She had been a prolific author, but had also lived a life plagued with mental illness and periodic collapses into complete madness. So the idea of a rural village pageant sounds as idyllic as can be, but the book is darkened by multiple shadows, details and themes.

So, for example, Isabella (Isa) dawdling in the library of the big house at the centre of the novel, picks up a copy of The Times and starts idly reading it. What could be more privileged and tony? Except that she finds herself reading the account of what seems to be an assault or rape case, of some British soldiers accused of luring a women into their barracks, throwing her on a bed and tearing off some of her clothing, at which point she started to slap the soldier…

This upsetting image recurs to Isa throughout the book, only a few times but enough to add a very dark thread to the fabric. Also regarding Isa, she is very obviously unhappily married to Giles, son of the village’s posh landowner, and her day is punctuated by thoughts of not just unhappiness, but active hatred for him. She tries to counter these by repeating the mantra that he is ‘the father to my children’ but it doesn’t really help.

As I say, dark shadows…

Threads and themes

So there’s this ancient house, Pointz Hall, sitting in a dip in remote and unspoilt English countryside. In it live old Mr Oliver who’s accompanied everywhere by his big Afghan hound, and his widowed sister, Mrs Swithin, who he calls Sindy though her given name was Lucy. They’re both in their 70s.

Old Oliver doesn’t understand how his sister, like him in so many ways, can believe in God, wears a big crucifix, is always off to church. a) Woolf herself, in either her novels or essays, gives no indication of understanding religion: this is another massive gap in her sense of human nature and experience, along with her timidity about sex and her inability to grasp most aspects of masculinity. b) But Oliver’s incomprehension doesn’t affect the deep affection of brother and sister. c) Which reminds me of the deep affection between the 70-something brother and sister, Eleanor and Edward, in The Years, one of the many ways that themes from the previous book spill over into this one.

Lucy / Mrs Swithin is the classic Woolfian absent-minded and dreamy older woman cf Eleanor in The Years.

Was it that she had no body? Up in the clouds, like an air ball, her mind touched ground now and then with a shock of surprise.

With Bart and Lucy lives Bart’s son, Giles Oliver, who is a stockbroker in London, and his wife, Isabella, generally called Isa. Isa is identified from the start as another typically dreamy Woolf woman, not interested in details, drifting off when people talk, preferring her dream world of disconnected thoughts and perceptions. Isa writes poetry but does so in a book disguised as an accounts book so as to hide it from her husband.

Isa is not a slip of a thing. When she takes Dodge to see the greenhouses, the narrative tells us she is ‘broad’ and ‘fairly filled the path’ (p.101).

At one point there’s a really pure expression of the dream aesthetic underlying Woolf’s entire approach, the non-human stasis and timelessness she aspires to.

Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence. (p.33)

If only life, or art, could have that perfection. but things keep changing, moving on, everything is in flux, and so no record of it can be perfect.

The young people of the village – Jim, Iris, David, Jessica – are busy decorating the old stone barn where the pageant will be held. A stage has been erected at one end. They call Mrs Swithin ‘Old Flimsy’.

Enter Mrs Manresa and William Dodge

Uninvited, two people show up at the house, Mrs Manresa, 45, and her friend, William Dodge. Through Isa’s eyes we learn that Mrs Manresa is a well-known local eccentric, married to a well-off City financier, with homes in London and down here, well known for playing jazz, roaming round in unusual clothes, insisting on teaching the village girls basket weaving.

Isa affectionately mocks Mrs Manresa as ‘the wild child of nature’ but she represents enjoyment of life, what Woolf mockingly refers to as the importance of ‘the jolly human heart’. She stirs some sugar into her coffee and:

She looked before she drank. Looking was part of drinking. Why waste sensation, she seemed to ask, why waste a single drop that can be pressed out of this ripe, this melting, this adorable world? (p.51)

It is identical to the sentiment expressed several times in Mrs Dalloway, about the sheer delight in living, in being live and sensitive to everything around you, no matter how small.

The stories that never are

It was in Orlando that I realised something distinctive about Woolf: given that her characters hardly ever do anything except drift from house to house, stroll through the streets, catch buses or cabs, and attend luncheons and dinner parties – for action, for interest, to liven up conversations, they often refer to ‘stories’, are described as telling ‘stories’, remind each other of the old ‘story’ about so-and-so.

But here’s my point: we never get to hear these stories. The promised stories are never told.

This was most flagrant in Orlando where we are repeatedly told about the months Orlando spent with buccaneers and whores in the East End and the stories they told! How the knackered old playwright Nicholas Green told him story after story about his contemporaries Shakespeare and Marlowe! About his time with the Turkish gypsies who told many a fine yarn round their campfires! And here’s the point: we never hear one of these stories.

In her big long novel, The Years, characters threaten to tell each other ‘stories’ about the old days, but never do.

Partly this has a modernist feel, a deliberate strategy of indirection, reminiscent of The Waste Land or The Cantos, which are made of unfinished fragments. But it’s also, I think, because Woolf couldn’t actually tell a story; she was one of those people who doesn’t remember stories, isn’t really interested in stories; her thing is moments of being, her characters noticing luminous details, dreams. Each of her novels features a leading woman protagonist who is the first to admit how forgetful they are: Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay, Eleanor Pargiter and here’s inattentive old Mrs Swithin.

‘A bishop; a traveller;—I’ve forgotten even their names. I ignore. I forget.’ (p.64)

The never-told stories are closely connected to another phenomenon, which is something to do with incompletion. Characters start to say something that may be a story, but are interrupted, shouted down, talked over, or someone laughs and the character listening doesn’t hear the crucial part. Woolf’s narratives revel in incompletion and frustration. The classic instance is at the end of The Years when Nicholas attempts to cap the big party which forms the final section of the book with a speech, but he is interrupted once, tries again and is interrupted again, tries a third time but other people walk by, talk over him, suggest someone else makes a speech, and so it never happens.

That sense of an action, generally a narrative, of someone trying to tell a story or a speech but not being completed, left hanging, frustrated, is a fundamental aspect of Woolf’s fictions, and the same happens here in Between The Acts. Here is a typical Woolf anecdote, Mrs Manresa rattling on to the Oliver family:

On she went to offer them a sample of her life; a few gobbets of gossip; mere trash; but she gave it for what it was worth; how last Tuesday she had been sitting next so and so; and she added, very casually a Christian name; then a nickname; and he’d said—for, as a mere nobody they didn’t mind what they said to her—and ‘in strict confidence, I needn’t tell you,’ she told them. And they all pricked their ears. And then, with a gesture of her hands as if tossing overboard that odious crackling-under-the-pot London life—so—she exclaimed ‘There!…And what’s the first thing I do when I come down here?’ They had only come last night, driving through June lanes… (p.38)

What happened to the ‘story’? We are not told it. I think Mrs Manresa actually does tell it and Woolf simply doesn’t report it, though it’s not very clear. What is certainly clear is that Woolf doesn’t share it. She never does. In all these novels we never get to hear any ancillary or subsidiary stories.

Here’s another typical moment. Old Bart is telling the unexpected lunch guests, Mrs Manresa and William, about the paintings hanging in the dining room.

Dodge [said] ‘I like that picture.’
‘And you’re right,’ said Bartholomew. ‘A man—I forget his name—a man connected with some Institute, a man who goes about giving advice, gratis, to descendants like ourselves, degenerate descendants, said…said…’ He paused. They all looked at the lady. But she looked over their heads, looking at nothing. She led them down green glades into the heart of silence.
‘Said it was by Sir Joshua?’ Mrs. Manresa broke the silence abruptly.
‘No, no,’ William Dodge said hastily, but under his breath. (p.45)

And that’s it. Things move on to Mrs Manresa counting out the stones from the cherries in her tart. In other words the story, or anecdote, about the expert who assessed the Oliver paintings, is never completed.

Later, in the interval of the pageant, Mrs Manresa is tempted to tell an off-colour story, but, of course, doesn’t.

Mrs. Manresa laughed. She remembered. An anecdote was on the tip of her tongue, about a public lavatory built to celebrate the same occasion, and how the Mayor… Could she tell it? No.

No, we never get to hear this as we never get to hear hundreds of other ‘stories’ referred to but never told. Woolf conversations are full of these interruptions and incompletions, it’s her trademark move. Thus at the very end of this book, the vicar starts to make a speech but is interrupted in mid-word by a flight of airplanes overhead.

‘But there is still a deficit’ (he consulted his paper) ‘of one hundred and seventy-five pounds odd. So that each of us who has enjoyed this pageant has still an opp…’ The word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead. That was the music. The audience gaped; the audience gazed. Then zoom became drone. The planes had passed. ‘…portunity,’ Mr. Streatfield continued, ‘to make a contribution.’

We, like the author, want things to form a unity, to be whole. But life is never whole, life is really a litany of interruptions and distractions.

‘One thing follows another’

Giles Oliver, Isa’s husband, arrives by train from London. He is nettled that they have unexpected guests i.e. Mrs Manresa has imposed on them. Giles bolts his lunch (the fish) to catch up with the others, then they take their coffee on the terrace with a view.

If his wife is a Woolfian dreamer, Giles represents a type of the Angry Man. He is angry that Mrs Manresa is breaking the family mood he came down to enjoy. This spills over into his acute awareness that war is coming and his seething frustration that all these old fogies just sit around in their deckchairs admiring the view as if nothing’s up. He instantly forms a bad opinion of Dodge and, as the coffee conversation wears on, decides he is a ****, a word he cannot say. Presumably he means gay.

The narrative meanders on. On the face of it Old Bart commences an inconsequential conversation asking why the British are so indifferent to their painters but so much more devoted to their writers (because the writers are better is the short answer). But while these middle-class types noodle on their inconsequential conversation, other things go on. The narrative ponders the subtle affiliation between cross Giles and self-professed wild child Mrs Manresa.

A thread united them—visible, invisible, like those threads, now seen, now not, that unite trembling grass blades in autumn before the sun rises. She had met him once only, at a cricket match. And then had been spun between them an early morning thread before the twigs and leaves of real friendship emerge.

Woolf isn’t interested in ‘stories’ and her novels have next to no plot because this is what interests her: the invisible threads that link people, places, memories…

Miss La Trobe

Only now, a quarter into the text, are we introduced to a figure who’s going to dominate it, Miss La Trobe, the impresario who stages the village pageant every year.

Outwardly she was swarthy, sturdy and thick set; strode about the fields in a smock frock; sometimes with a cigarette in her mouth; often with a whip in her hand; and used rather strong language…

This commanding figure has decided that the country house’s terrace would be the ideal place to perform the play. Now the lunch party (the Olivers, Giles and Isa, Mrs M etc) hear voices coming from the dip beyond the lily pond because it is here that Miss La Trobe is organising her troops for the day ahead. (Her nickname among the village actors is ‘Bossy’.)

Mr Streatfield the vicar arrives, with his ‘handsome, grizzled head’.

Rhymes

Isa is a poet so we see her continually versifying and looking for rhymes. It’s her shtick, her identifier.

‘Where we know not, where we go not, neither know nor care,’ she hummed. ‘Flying, rushing through the ambient, incandescent, summer silent…’ The rhyme was ‘air’. She put down her brush. She took up the telephone.

But somewhere, this cloud, this crust, this doubt, this dust—She waited for a rhyme, it failed her…

Here she is, taking Dodge to see the greenhouses:

‘Fly then, follow,’ she hummed, ‘the dappled herds in the cedar grove, who, sporting, play, the red with the roe, the stag with the doe. Fly, away. I grieving stay. Alone I linger, I pluck the bitter herb by the ruined wall, the churchyard wall, and press its sour, its sweet, its sour, long grey leaf, so, twixt thumb and finger…’

This fondness for rhymes is occasionally present not just in Isa but in the narrator themselves. In the first third of the book it occasionally spills over into the narrative text but once the pageant gets going, it becomes far more present (see below).

A tour of the house

There’s an odd jump cut from Miss La Trobe fussing with props to the narrative suddenly showing us Mrs Swithin showing young Mr Dodge round their house. For some reason this tour by the 70-year-old lady becomes freighted with an almost symbolical weight:

‘The nursery,’ said Mrs. Swithin. Words raised themselves and became symbolical. ‘The cradle of our race,’ she seemed to say. (p.66)

And for his part Dodge feels a sudden urge to confess his life story, to tell her he was bullied at school and that, yes, he is a **** (the word which Giles thinks can’t be mentioned, presumably poof or some such slur meaning gay) and so describes himself as a ‘half-man’.

The sound of cars in the drive reminds them that guests are arriving to watch the pageant. It is half past three on a June day in 1939.

Rows of chairs, deck chairs, gilt chairs, hired cane chairs, and indigenous garden seats had been drawn up on the terrace.

Into these the guests start fumbling and sitting. And then, without any preparation from the narrator, a child steps onstage and starts reciting, meaning the pageant has started.

The pageant 1. Elizabethan age

The pageant is surprisingly incoherent and confusing. Woolf deliberately makes it so. Thus a child comes onto the terrace/stage and starts declaiming but half the audience can’t hear. A chorus of villages comes on and sings but the audience can’t hear the words etc. It’s a continuation of the non-stories and interrupted speech theme. Nothing can get finished or completely understood. In a way, it’s like a nightmare where you’re running full pelt but not moving.

Anyway it appears to be a pageant overview of English history, starting with Chaucer and people in medieval garb miming the Canterbury pilgrims. Then a local figure, Mrs Clark, who runs the local shops (‘licensed to sell tobacco’) comes on impressively made up as Queen Elizabeth.

First play with the play

She recites some (bad) verse describing herself but is interrupted and mocked by the village idiot, Albert, skipping around, mocking her and the audience. Elizabeth introduces a play within a play. This appears to be a pastiche of an Elizabethan play with lost relatives and far-fetched coincidences but the real point is that, characteristically, it is badly explained and we don’t see it all acted out.

She bawled. They bawled. All together they bawled, and so loud that it was difficult to make out what they were saying.

First interval: tea in the barn

The play with a play is interrupted and incomplete when the Interval arrives, much to the chagrin of Miss La Trobe, yet another example of incompletion. Here is Isa’s confused response:

There was such a medley of things going on, what with the beldame’s deafness, the bawling of the youths, and the confusion of the plot that she could make nothing of it. Did the plot matter?… Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing.

You can’t help reading that as Woolf’s instructions about her own novels: ‘the plot’s nothing’.

But the other thing about the pageants is the way format of poetry, rhyme and repetition infects the narrative. At the interval all the characters and the narrator have picked up the habit of rhyming, repeating short phrases, poetic diction, as if it’s catching. Here’s how the narrative describes the audience returning to their seats. See how it’s become… what exactly? Impressionistic? Certainly with fanciful rhymes.

Feet crunched the gravel. Voices chattered. The inner voice, the other voice was saying: How can we deny that this brave music, wafted from the bushes, is expressive of some inner harmony? “When we wake” (some were thinking) “the day breaks us with its hard mallet blows.” “The office” (some were thinking) “compels disparity. Scattered, shattered, hither thither summoned by the bell. ‘Ping-ping-ping’ that’s the phone. ‘Forward!’ ‘Serving!’—that’s the shop.” So we answer to the infernal, agelong and eternal order issued from on high. And obey. “Working, serving, pushing, striving, earning wages—to be spent—here? Oh dear no. Now? No, by and by. When ears are deaf and the heart is dry.” (p.107)

At the interval everyone crowds into the ancient barn where tea and cakes are being served. Woolf takes the time to emphasise that both are disgusting, the tea tasting like ‘rust boiled in water’. There’s a great press of people all talking at the same time, overhearing each other’s fragments of speech, never finishing their sentences, a festival of inconsequentiality.

Symbolical voices they seemed to her, half hearing…. feeling invisible threads connecting the bodiless voices.

Woolf likes this kind of thing, mocking but also enjoying the hubbub and sustained inconsequentiality of banal conversation, an atmosphere of ‘scraps and fragments’ (a phrase she repeats six times). She staged the same sort of thing in Mrs Dalloway’s party which forms the climax to the novel of the same name, in the Ramsay family dinner in To The Lighthouse and in Delia’s party which forms the climax of The Years.

Thus Mrs Swithin rambles on to Mrs Manresa about the swallows which nest in the barn every year, someone comments on the King and Queen’s upcoming trip to India, someone else points out it’s actually Canada they’re going to, random voices interrupt asking for a splash more milk or another slice of cake. Isa and Dodge find themselves in a corner and jokingly quote bits of the play to each other. Dodge is an alienated outsider, the role played by North at Delia’s party. He is just thinking he’s made a bit of connection with poetry-quoting Isa when here whole expression changes and her little boy George comes running over to her, while Dodge catches sight of her husband, Giles, by the door, virile and still angry about everything.

New faces at the pageant

Albert, the village idiot
old Cobbet of Cobbs Corner, who worked out East for a while
Lady Haslip, of Haslip Manor
Mrs Parker
Mrs Neale who runs the village post office
Mrs Moore the keeper’s wife
Mr Pinsent with his bad leg
Mabel Hopkins
Major and Mrs Mayhew
Mrs Lynn-Jones who shares a house with Etty Springett, both being widows
Mr Page the village reporter, who is used to point out many of the above

On being gay

On a whim, Isa offers to show Dodge the greenhouses and off they wander. He knows she’s realised he’s gay.

‘And you—married?’ she asked. From her tone he knew she guessed, as women always guessed, everything. They knew at once they had nothing to fear, nothing to hope. At first they resented—serving as statues in a greenhouse. Then they liked it. For then they could say—as she did—whatever came into their heads…. ‘I’m William,’ he said, taking the furry leaf and pressing it between thumb and finger. ‘I’m Isa,’ she answered. Then they talked as if they had known each other all their lives; which was odd, she said, as they always did, considering she’d known him perhaps one hour. (p.102),

The pageant part 2. Restoration comedy

The audience drifts back to the seating in front of the terrace-stage, with much fragmented and inconsequential chatter, many of them repeating an irritatingly catchy line from the first half:

‘O sister swallow, O sister swallow,
How can thy heart be full of the spring?’

Out onto the stage steps Mabel Hodges, one of the family nannies, in costume with make-up and starts to recite more poetry about Reason but, in the classic style, the audience doesn’t catch many of her words. Behind her a troupe of villages pass to and fro among the trees chanting something which also cannot be heard, for ‘the wind blew their words away’, which itself becomes a catchphrase, repeated three times, even though Miss la Trobe furiously yells at them to chat the words louder.

Then the wind rose, and in the rustle of the leaves even the great words became inaudible; and the audience sat staring at the villagers, whose mouths opened, but no sound came.

Second play within a play: a restoration comedy

If the play within a play in the first half was from the Elizabethan era, this one is from the age of reason, and so is a Restoration comedy. It is a very bad pastiche. The point of Restoration comedy is the rapier wit, the cut and thrust of dialogue. Woolf is useless at this, as she showed in Orlando. The characters keep drifting off into Woolfian reverie, dreaming, free association. Also Restoration comedy is funny. Woolf is rarely funny.

It’s actually quite long this pastiche play, consisting of four scenes, between which we see some members of the audience clapping, shouting ‘hear hear’, commenting on the action, or Mrs Elmhurst reading out the plot summary in the programme to her deaf husband.

It’s a pastiche of a Restoration comedy in which Lady Harraden, the aunt of a pretty young virgin, Flavinda, conspires with an old gent, Sir Spaniel Lilyliver, for him to marry the virgin so that she will inherit a fortune which the old couple can divide between them, when all the time young Flavinda is, of course, in love with handsome young Valentine.

Cast of the Restoration comedy

Lady Asphodilla Harraden, played by Mrs Otter from the End House
Deb, her maid: ?
Sir Spaniel Lilyliver: ?
Flavinda, played by Millie Loder, shop assistant at Messrs. Hunt and Dicksons, drapery emporium
Valentine: ?

In the characteristic Woolfian way which I’ve been emphasising, one of the four scenes is missing, was never written, and the programme gives a short prose summary of it (it’s the key scene in the plot). As I’m said quite a few times, Woolf is all about incompletion and absence.

Second interval

Mrs Swithin breaks convention by going into the bushes where Miss La Trobe is supervising the actors getting dress, to congratulate her, for activating invisible strings, for waking the sense of history in her. Miss La Trobe hastily dresses Mrs Rogers and Hammond in Victorian clothes.

The pageant part 3. Victorian age

Mr Budge the publican steps on stage in the costume of a Victorian policeman directing the traffic. In his speech Woolf mocks the Victorian age, its racist assumption of white superiority, the white man’s burden to rule the world etc. Then:

There was a pause. The voices of the pilgrims singing, as they wound in and out between the trees, could be heard; but the words were inaudible. The audience sat waiting.

Inaudibility. Fragments. Incompletion.

Third play within the play

The Picnic Party. About 1860. Scene: A Lake.

Quite a few actors in Victorian dress perform the creation of a large picnic party. There’s a young couple, Edgar and Eleanor, who very earnestly discuss getting married and going out to Africa to convert the heathen. There’s a chorus of young men and a chorus of young women. It’s as big as an opera! Ladies sing a song. Mr Hardcastle leads Victorian prayers.

The picnic party pack up and leave, as Budge-as-constable returns and stands on his dais, painting a picture of the hard-working Victorian bourgeois returning to the bosom of his family, while the gramophone, offstage, plays Home Sweet Home.

Third interval

Mrs Swithin, Mrs Manresa, William, Isa and Giles witter on.

The pageant part 4. The present day

The program tells the audience that the last part of the pageant represents ‘the present day’. Obviously the use of that phrase, ‘the present day’, recalls the end of her previous novel, The Waves, the long final section of which was titled ‘Present Day’. It brings out the way the structure of all her mature novels reuse a handful of the same themes, settings or ideas.

Tick tick

I haven’t mentioned yet that during the interludes and a bit during the performances, the audience can hear the sound of the gramophone turning but not playing anything and that this sound is a ‘tick tick tick’. Obviously this is the sound of time, and the more the phrase is repeated, the more ominous and oppressive it becomes…

Only the tick of the gramophone needle was heard. The tick, tick, tick seemed to hold them together, tranced… Tick, tick, tick the machine continued…

Tick, tick, tick, the machine continued. Time was passing. The audience was wandering, dispersing. Only the tick tick of the gramophone held them together…

Tick, tick, tick, went the machine in the bushes… Tick tick tick the machine reiterated.

What is time? Why are we trapped in time? How is it that we vividly remember events from our childhood but can’t remember what we did this morning? Can we ever recapture lost time? Time is a trap.

They were all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle. Nothing happened. The tick of the machine was maddening. (p.158)

The audience becomes restive, grumbling among themselves. Cut away to Miss La Trobe and it is a deliberate strategy: nothing happens for ten minutes so the audience can experience the present moment.

After ten minutes of this, something happens. The cast come onstage holding a variety of mirrors, large and small and silver surfaces, moving around to reflect an image of the audience back at themselves, but in shimmering fragments. Hmm. Could Virginia be saying something about art? Or the novelist’s art?

Then a scene is quickly concocted, a backdrop showing a ruined wall, and some workers in front rebuilding it. It symbolises our civilisation (ruined by the Great War?) and the endless labour needed to maintain it.

Suddenly an unseen voice sets off on a long surreal and bracing accusation of the audience declaimed through a megaphone, which reminded me of W.H. Auden’s many minatory verses from the 1930s.

Let’s break the rhythm and forget the rhyme. And calmly consider ourselves. Ourselves. Some bony. Some fat. Liars most of us. Thieves too. The poor are as bad as the rich are. Perhaps worse. Don’t hide among rags. Or let our cloth protect us. Or for the matter of that book learning; or skilful practice on pianos; or laying on of paint. Or presume there’s innocency in childhood.

Then the vicar, the Reverend G. W. Streatfield, appears and delivers a speech. Characteristically, his first words are inaudible. Life, Woolf insists, is a thing of fragments and incompletion.

He says he is speaking simply as a member of the audience, as puzzled as everyone else, but he thinks one of the pageant’s meanings was that we are all one, that one person plays many parts, that there is a spirit which pervades all things. His speech is interrupted mid-word by the roaring of a flight of airplanes flying overhead, the machine, the modern world intruding into this idyll. Interruptions and fragments.

Moving on, the Reverend congratulates everyone because the pageant has raised thirty-six pounds ten shillings and eightpence towards the fund for installing electric light in the church. But a hundred and seventy-five pounds is still required so he asks everyone to give to the collection tins which come round.

Lastly he goes to offer a vote of thanks to the impresario of the afternoon’s entertainment but Miss La Trobe is nowhere to be seen. This is very like the climax of Delia’s party in The Waves, which Nicholas repeatedly tries to make a speech to provide a climax to the evening but is repeatedly interrupted and shouted down and eventually gives up. Fragments and frustration.

Similitudes

And it’s not the only repetition or echo of earlier works. Some of the characters are so similar to ones in this novel’s predecessor, The Years, as to be virtually identical.

Old Lucy Swithin, in her good-natured vagueness, is very like good-natured, vague Eleanor Pargiter.

Isa’s sharp observations remind me of critical young North. But her habit of misquoting long streams of poetry, or making up long streams of verse in more or less every situation she finds herself in, reminded me very much of the eccentric Sara or Sally, who does exactly the same in The Years.

In the event his puzzlement is ended when someone puts the National Anthem on the gramophone and everyone stands and sings along. Then that’s it. The actors are still onstage chatting to each other and the audience, a bit puzzled, start to disperse. The gramophone plays a song, first heard earlier, with the refrain ‘Dispersed are we’, and the audience disperse with four pages of what Woolf enjoys, scraps and fragments of random conversation.

Coda

The audience packs up, gets into their cars, and leaves, leaving the family as in the first quarter: old Bart, Lucy / Mrs Swithin, Mrs Manresa and William, Giles and Isa.

Lucy asks whether they oughtn’t to go and thank Miss La Trobe. Bart gruffly says she doesn’t need thanks, she’ll go to the pub with the actors and stumps off with his dog. Thank God the bloody thing’s over for another year. Lucy stays to watch the fish in the big pool and reflect on God and the unity of all things.

William Dodge casts a shadow on the fish pool as he finds Lucy and thanks her and shakes her hand.

Isa listens to the bells in the nearby church, the one the pageant has raised money to illuminate. When they stop she knows the service is starting. So presumably it’s a Sunday. She notices William Dodge making for the car park and hastening thither, discovers her husband talking up close to Mrs Manresa. She has entranced him. But at that moment (gay) William arrives, Mrs Manresa flirtatiously tells him to jump in and the car roars off.

Miss La Trobe

She avoided everyone, refused to go forward to take the vicar’s thanks, waited until everyone left, and then packed up the gramophone and records. She is an emblem of the artist, of Woolf herself and the creative agony. if only she had had more time, more money, more resources, she might have said the thing she wanted to but instead… hurry, imperfection, incompletion. She is haunted by her failure.

For what it’s worth we learn that she shares her bed with an actress and is shunned by the village women.

She was an outcast. Nature had somehow set her apart from her kind.

So I think that pretty much confirms she is a lesbian, as William Dodge is gay. Interesting that Woolf made these queer identities not exactly prominent but just notable, in her last novel.

She goes to the local pub where the talk stops when she enters because they’d been talking about her, using her nickname ‘Bossy’. She doesn’t care and doesn’t hear, orders a drink and the whole world fades out as the nurses a vision, two figures onstage by a rock at midnight, and the shape of her next project starts to come to her. She is moving onto the next work. Which we imagine is how Woolf felt as each new project began to take shape in her (troubled) mind.

The Oliver family

Everyone has gone leaving the Oliver family to have dinner (prepared, served and cleared away by the unknown servants). Bartholomew, Lucy, Giles and Isa. They discuss the play and its meaning without any great ideas, for example Bartholomew simply thinks it was too ambitious. Isa regards her husband, dressed in formal evening wear and reflects that she loves and hates him. The second post of the day is handed into the drawing room by the butler Candish. The reader is a little awed at how flat and boring their lives are.

Darkness falls deeper and deeper. The flowers close up. The windows are closed. Lucy draws her shawl tighter as she resumes reading H.G. Wells’s Outline of History (a book which also crops up in D.H. Lawrence’s novella, St Mawr).

The end

The ending may be the best thing about it. All day long there had been barely suppressed tension between Giles and Isa. Old Bart and Lucy go to bed leaving them alone and they both know a fight is coming, but after the fight what we nowadays call ‘make-up sex’. The last three paragraphs are really powerful.

The old people had gone up to bed. Giles crumpled the newspaper and turned out the light. Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night.

Isa let her sewing drop. The great hooded chairs had become enormous. And Giles too. And Isa too against the window. The window was all sky without colour. The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks.

Then the curtain rose. They spoke.

‘As the dog fox fights with the vixen’ sounds like D.H. Lawrence, and for the only time in the seven Woolf novels I’ve read, you get a real sense of the human depths, not polite and glossed over with dreams and memories and vivid impressions, but hard and dark and brutal. Wow.

Last thought

On the subject of thematic repetitions and echoes (or the very limited plot elements that Woolf chose to work with), Mrs Dalloway follows the lives of half a dozen characters during one day in London, whereas Between The Acts follows the lives of half a dozen characters during one day in the heart of the countryside. Town and country.

Make of this what you will but my interpretation is that High Modernism was an urban phenomenon which describes the fragmentation of experience and mentality in the modern (1920s) city: The Waste Land, Ulysses, Berlin Alexanderplatz, these are all intensely urban works.

But 20 years later, at the end of the 1930s, the modernist wave had retreated and there was a revival of interest in life in the country: T.S. Eliot transitioned from the intense alienation of The Waste Land (1922) to the powerfully rural descriptions of Burnt Norton (1936), and Virginia Woolf transitioned from the intensely London setting of Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the intensely rural setting of Between The Acts (1941) i.e. these two great modernists travelled in the same direction.

But it was also part of a broader cultural shift. In art the movement is called Neo-romanticism which turned against the city and revived interest in depicting an idealised, stylised (sometimes nightmarish) English countryside. In her own understated way, I think Woolf’s novel was part of that general cultural shift as the bitter end of the 1930s turned into the catastrophe of the 1940s.

Cast

Posh people

Mr Rupert Haines, the old gentleman farmer, his face ravaged by time and work

Mrs Haines, the wife of the gentleman farmer

Isabella, generally called Isa, the wife of their son – she is a dreamer, a quoter of poetry, haunting the library wondering which book to read

Mr Bartholomew Oliver, of the Indian Service, retired, who owns Pointz Hall, ‘A very tall old man, with gleaming eyes, wrinkled cheeks, and a head with no hair on it.’ Referred to by servants as The Master, or when no-one’s around, ‘Bartie’.

Mr Giles Oliver, a stockbroker, Old Bartholomew’s son, Isa’s husband. They met salmon fishing in Scotland.

Mrs Giles Oliver, daughter of Sir Richard ?, wife of old Oliver’s son, herself the mother of toddler George.

Old Mrs Cindy Swithin, sister of old Mr Oliver, Cindy is a nickname for Lucy. She married a squire, now dead, and two children, one in Canada, the other, married, in Birmingham. The staff call her ‘old mother Swithin’. The young people of the village call her ‘Old Flimsy’.

Sunny the cat, nickname of Sung-Yen.

Mrs Manresa, married to Ralph Manresa, a Jew who works in City finance.

Miss La Trobe, organiser of the pageant.

Servants and suppliers

Bates the dentist (up in London)

Mitchell the fishmonger and Mitchell’s boy who delivers orders on a motorbike.

Candish, the butler, fond of ‘gambling and drinking’.

Mrs Sands the Olivers’ cook, known to friends as Trixie, ‘the thin, acid woman, red-haired, sharp and clean, who never dashed off masterpieces, it was true; but then never dropped hairpins in the soup’ as her predecessor, Jessie Pook, had done.

Jane the kitchenmaid

Unnamed ‘girls’, maids and kitchen staff e.g. ‘the scullery maid’, dismissed as silly and superstitious, believers in ghosts etc.

Gardeners.

Billy, Mrs. Sands’s nephew, apprenticed to the butcher.

Bond the cowman

The future shadowed their present, like the sun coming through the many-veined transparent vine leaf; a criss-cross of lines making no pattern.

Credit

‘Between the Acts’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1941. Page references are to the 1992 Oxford World Classics paperback edition, although the text is easily available online.

Related reviews

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by Simon on April 11, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Novel

Tagged 1939, 1941, Afghan hound, Albert, art, Bartie, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Between The Acts, Billy, Candish, Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, Cobbs Corner, David, Deb, DH Lawrence's novella, Eleanor Pargiter, Elizabethan Age, England, English history, English literature, Etty Springett, fiction, Flavinda, free association, gay, George Oliver, Giles, Giles Oliver, Great War, Haslip Manor, HG Wells, homosexuality, Iris, Isa, Isabella, Isabella Oliver, Jessica, Jessie Pook, Jim, Lady Asphodilla Harraden, Lady Harraden, Lady Haslip, lesbian, lesbianism, Literature, Lucy, Mabel Hopkins, madness, Major Mayhew, mental illness, Messrs. Hunt and Dicksons, Millie Loder, Miss La Trobe, Mitchell, Mitchell's boy, Mr Budge, Mr Hardcastle, Mr Oliver, Mr Page, Mr Pinsent, Mr Streatfield, Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Lynn-Jones, Mrs Manresa, Mrs Mayhew, Mrs Moore, Mrs Neale, Mrs Otter, Mrs Parker, Mrs Ramsay, Mrs Rogers, Mrs Sands, Mrs Swithin, National Anthem, Neo-Romanticism, novel, Old Bart, old Cobbet, Old Flimsy, Orlando, Outline of History, poetry, Pointz Hall, Queen Elizabeth I, queer, Ralph Manresa, Restoration comedy, River Ouse, Rupert Haines, Sindy, Sir Spaniel Lilyliver, St Mawr, Sung-Yen, Sunny, the Cantos, the End House, the Hogarth Press, the Reverend GW Streatfield, The Times, The Waste Land, The Years, Valentine, Victorian age, village pageant, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, William Dodge, World War Two

Posted by Simon on April 11, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/11/between-the-acts-virginia-woolf/

The Waves by Virginia Woolf (1931)

‘When we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.’

All for a moment wavered and bent in uncertainty and ambiguity…

‘The Waves’ is an experimental novel made up of highly poetic, sometimes almost abstract and visionary monologues, delivered by six characters, depicting their lives over 30 years or more as they grow from children through maturity to old men and women. The six are:

Bernard (fancies himself a novelist; never goes anywhere without his notebook in which he jots down notes for novels which never get written)
Susan (wants to be a rural materfamilias like her mother)
Rhoda (nervous, anxious)
Neville (fancies himself a poet)
Jinny (party-loving Londoner)
Louis (fancies himself heir to Egypt and all the ages; acutely self-conscious of his Australian accent and his father a banker in Brisbane)

Early on the image of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five appeared in my mind (Julian, Dick, Anne, George and their dog Timmy) and I never quite managed to lose the association. This book is about the Sensitive Six.

Here’s how it opens, to indicate the schematicness of the structure, and the stilted, hieratic nature of the prose.

‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’
‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan, ‘spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.’
‘I hear a sound,’ said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up and down.’
‘I see a globe,’ said Neville, ‘hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.’
‘I see a crimson tassel,’ said Jinny, ‘twisted with gold threads.’
‘I hear something stamping,’ said Louis. ‘A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.’

In her great novels, ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To The Lighthouse’, and to a lesser extent in ‘Orlando’, the narrator – or the characters the narrator describes – are continually noticing small details in the world around them: the toot of a car horn, a bird arcing in the sky, a fragment of dress someone’s wearing, the tinkle of cutlery. Quite often the pressure of all these details pressing in on the characters’ senses becomes too much, sensual overload giving rise to a sort of hysteria which I thought I detected in ‘Jacob’s Room’.

In a sense ‘The Waves’ represents the triumph of this detail-noticing approach over conventional plot or characters. The text consists of nothing but random details, hundreds and hundreds of them, described in isolation like jewels hanging in space.

There is the stable clock with its gilt hands shining. Those are the flats and heights of the roofs of the great house. There is the stable-boy clattering in the yard in rubber boots… That is the close-clipped hedge of the ladies’ garden… The ferns smell very strong, and there are red funguses growing beneath them… That is a wood-pigeon breaking cover in the tops of the beech trees… The lady sits between the two long windows, writing. The gardeners sweep the lawn with giant brooms… Listen! That is the flop of a giant toad in the undergrowth; that is the patter of some primeval fir-cone falling to rot among the ferns…

From the start there’s no indication how old the characters are or where any of this is happening: it is a set of free-floating and deliberately random observations which is, to begin with, quite disorientating.

Children

In the event, the initial level of abstraction can’t be maintained for long – the speaker’s speeches become longer and start to contain circumstantial details. We learn that they are all together in one place and are children waiting for ‘lessons’ to begin. ‘My mother still knits white socks for me and hems pinafores and I am a child,’ says Susan. We learn who they all are because Louis very bluntly tells us:

‘My father is a banker in Brisbane and I speak with an Australian accent. I will wait and copy Bernard. He is English. They are all English. Susan’s father is a clergyman. Rhoda has no father. Bernard and Neville are the sons of gentlemen. Jinny lives with her grandmother in London…’

But they don’t speak like children at all. They talk in the fixed hieratic style of adults reciting the words of a play. Around the same time Woolf produced this experimental drama-novel other writers were doing something similar. T.S. Eliot tried to revive plays in verse starting in the early 1930s with ‘Sweeney Agonistes’. W.H. Auden wrote plays in verse starting as early as ‘The Orators’ in 1932. Woolf’s characters, also, speak like characters on a stage, standing facing an audience, reciting the words of a poetic play. Woolf herself referred to it not as a novel but a ‘playpoem’. No pre-school child talks like this:

‘Now the stricture and rigidity are over; and I will continue to make my survey of the purlieus of the house in the late afternoon, in the sunset, when the sun makes oleaginous spots on the linoleum, and a crack of light kneels on the wall, making the chair legs look broken.’ (Neville)

They are children talking in adult terms, using adult language.

Starting time and place

We learn that the children are all together in a country house named Elvedon. They are supervised and catered to by an extensive staff. It is the Edwardian decade because one of the girls refers to Queen Alexandra, wife of King Edward VII, who reigned 1901 to 1910.

Structure

There are no chapters, as in ‘Orlando’, or parts as in ‘To The Lighthouse’. Instead the text is broken up into nine long sections in Roman text, each one preceded by ten short descriptive sections printed in italics. After a while I realised the italicised sections describe the transit of the sun across the sky during a single day. Not just that, it is the sun rising over the sea, over a seascape, necessarily characterised by waves. So each time we cut back to one of these passages the sun is just rising or is half-way up the sky or stands at noon etc, shedding its light on the sea and its endless waves, and that these also change appearance and character at these different times of the day.

These sections are highly formalised, almost all of them opening with the same key words, ‘The sun…’ and containing some reference to the endless waves.

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky…

The sun rose higher. Blue waves, green waves swept a quick fan over the beach…

The sun rose. Bars of yellow and green fell on the shore, gilding the ribs of the eaten-out boat and making the sea-holly and its mailed leaves gleam blue as steel. Light almost pierced the thin swift waves as they raced fan-shaped over the beach…

The sun, risen, no longer couched on a green mattress darting a fitful glance through watery jewels, bared its face and looked straight over the waves. They fell with a regular thud. They fell with the concussion of horses’ hooves on the turf…

The sun had risen to its full height. It was no longer half seen and guessed at, from hints and gleams…

The sun no longer stood in the middle of the sky. Its light slanted, falling obliquely. Here it caught on the edge of a cloud and burnt it into a slice of light, a blazing island on which no foot could rest. Then another cloud was caught in the light and another and another, so that the waves beneath were arrow-struck with fiery feathered darts that shot erratically across the quivering blue…

The sun had now sunk lower in the sky. The islands of cloud had gained in density and drew themselves across the sun so that the rocks went suddenly black, and the trembling sea holly lost its blue and turned silver, and shadows were blown like grey cloths over the sea. The waves no longer visited the further pools or reached the dotted black line which lay irregularly upon the beach.

The sun was sinking. The hard stone of the day was cracked and light poured through its splinters. Red and gold shot through the waves, in rapid running arrows, feathered with darkness.

Now the sun had sunk. Sky and sea were indistinguishable. The waves breaking spread their white fans far out over the shore…

So it is not just about the passage of the sun through the sky, it is about the interplay between the slow-moving, inevitable sun and the ever-changing sea, the endless waves which, clearly, give the book its title. Right at the end, the text concludes with the briefest of these italicised passages, just one short sentence:

The waves broke on the shore.

So although the prose sections take us through the growth from childhood to adulthood of the six main characters, in some sense their entire lives are compassed within the frame not even of 24 hours, but in the 12 or so hours from the sun rising to the sun setting, as if part of some larger, natural cycle.

No dialogue

I thought the style would loosen up and the characters would get to talk to each other, but they don’t, at all. There is no dialogue. The characters never interact. To all intents and purposes they might be lined up on a stage, facing the audience, declaiming their parts and never facing or interacting with any of the others. Talking of complete lack of interaction…

Aspergers syndrome?

Lack of awareness of others or how to interact with other people are classic symptoms of being on the spectrum from Aspergers syndrome to full-blown autism. Here are the symptoms of Aspergers:

difficulty understanding social cues, body language, and facial expressions
difficulty relating to others
difficulty making eye contact
difficulty responding to people in conversation
difficulty staying on task and understanding or following directions
unusual speech patterns
formal style of speaking that’s advanced for their age
repeating words, phrases, or movements (‘it is not you, it is not you, it is not you’)
hypersensitivity to lights, sounds, and textures
sensitivity to loud noises, odours, clothing, or food textures

These are exactly the traits demonstrated by all six characters throughout this strange book.

Section 1. Childhood (13 pages)

We meet the six children, all for some reason living in the same house and sketchily follow a day in their lives, playing in the garden, sitting through lessons. There are several key moments: one when Susan sees Jinny kiss Louis which throws her into a rage. One when Bernard convinces the others the gardeners are after them with their shotguns and persuades them to all runs away and hide in terror. Rhoda is described as floating flower petals on the water in a basin, pretending they’re ships, and this image recurs throughout her sections in the rest of the book.

Then (rather abruptly) they are being bathed and put to bed.

Section 2. School days (29 pages)

They set off for their first days at school, by train, so there’s a description of a railway station and a train arriving. The gaggle of children, the Edwardian formality made me visualise The Railway Children, which is set in 1905, so the children would have worn similar clothes.

Train journeys have for a century and a half been the pretext for random observations, fragments seen out the window cf The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin. Woolf utilises it to the maximum, here as they head to school and even more at the end of the section, where Susan, Jinny and Rhoda all describe the fleeting images they see through the speeding carriage windows.

There a white church; there a mast among the spires. There a canal. Now there are open spaces with asphalt paths upon which it is strange that people should now be walking. There is a hill striped with red houses. A man crosses a bridge with a dog at his heels. Now the red boy begins firing at a pheasant. The blue boy shoves him aside…

The boys arrive at a private school with its quadrangles, statue of the founding father, promise of Latin lessons, the lobsided headmaster, Crane. The girls go to a separate school. At this point you start wondering whether it’s a problem that they all sound alike and that they all sound like Virginia Woolf i.e. no attempt is made to give them childish turns of phrase or to distinguish between them – the opposite, these children are all gifted with Woolf’s lyrical turn of phrase and describe Woolf’s great theme, ‘identity’.

This great company, all dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity. We are all callous, unfriended. I will seek out a face, a composed, a monumental face, and will endow it with omniscience… (Rhoda)

Here’s Louis reacting to the sight of Dr Crane entering the chapel:

I rejoice; my heart expands in his bulk, in his authority. He lays the whirling dust clouds in my tremulous, my ignominiously agitated mind… (p.23)

Although they are given different opinions the opinions are secondary to the style, and the style is all the same. Yes, I think this is a flaw, a failing. Woolf substitutes any feel for how children actually think and speak, with her own lyrical but sometimes ponderous, almost pompous phraseology.

From discord, from hatred… my shattered mind is pieced together by some sudden perception. I take the trees, the clouds, to be witnesses of my complete integration. I, Louis, I, who shall walk the earth these seventy years, am born entire, out of hatred, out of discord. Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees wave, the clouds pass. The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared. (p.26)

There’s a service in the chapel. Cricket, of course. Bernard already wants to become a novelist, God help us. He is described as turning everything into stories – except that Woolf doesn’t turn everything into stories. There are hardly any stories in her novels, just page after page after page of lyrical descriptions. Louis envies the other boys, the ones with eminent fathers who dominate sports and clubs. Neville develops a hatred for the sign of the cross and becomes passionately devoted to the Latin poets, Catullus, Horace, Lucretius. Susan hates her school and would like to bury it.

Here, as in ‘Orlando’, Woolf claims a character (Bernard) is always bubbling over with stories, just as she claims various people in ‘Orlando’ (notably Nicholas Greene) are bubbling over with stories, and yet… there are never any stories. Not one, not one anecdote, tale or joke, nothing you could retell to anyone who hasn’t read the book. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Woolf couldn’t tell a story – with a beginning, middle and an end – to save her life.

It is extremely symptomatic that Bernard is good at setting scenes but that even he acknowledges that his so-called ‘stories’ always fizzle out, ‘tail off absurdly’ (p.34). What Woolf really means when she talks about ‘stories’ is the unstoppable flow of her own dizzyingly acute observations. But listing thousands of acute details and insights is very much not telling a story. In fact it’s the opposite of telling a story. A story is a sequence of linked events in the shape of a narrative. That doesn’t appear in any of Woolf’s novels.

I can sketch the surroundings up to a point with extraordinary ease. But can I make it work? (Bernard)

No. No he (and she) can’t make it work. Instead the tsunami of details never ends. They flood her mind and her text with a stricken profusion, a thousand snapshots, a million moments brilliantly lit.

Passing the open door leading into the private garden, I saw Fenwick with his mallet raised. The steam from the tea-urn rose in the middle of the lawn. There were banks of blue flowers.

When I wake early… I lie and watch the brass handles on the cupboard grow clear; then the basin; then the towel-horse. As each thing in the bedroom grows clear, my heart beats quicker.

I catch sight of something moving – a speck of sun perhaps on a picture, or the donkey drawing the mowing-machine across the lawn; or a sail that passes between the laurel leaves…

Then their school days are over, and they look back at what they’ve learned. Susan gives a half page impression of London which triggers memories of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘Orlando’ before she catches a train back to her country home. And then the perceptions of Jinny, Rhoda, Louis and Neville on their respective train journeys home. Neville is 18.

Section 3. University (21 pages)

University, Cambridge of course (because that was the Bloomsbury University). Bernard ponders how he is multiple selves (the great theme described at the end of ‘Orlando’). He models himself on Byron (amazingly, given that Byron died 80 years previously). He tries to dash off a letter to his girlfriend but is crippled by self consciousness. It is thumpingly clear that what he means by a ‘story’ is in fact a thousand and one cluttered details with not the slightest sense of a narrative. In the same way Louis and Neville both fancy themselves poets but can’t write a line (see ‘The Bloomsbury Error’, below). They punt up the river and eat fruit from a bag, watching the cows in the meadows.

Susan was sent to finishing school in Switzerland but now she’s gone back to her parents’ farm where she lives a rural life, walking out to see cows and pick mushrooms. She wants to get married and have babies, like her mother.

Jinny lives in London and lives for elegant society parties, large lit rooms full of gilt chairs and being swept off her feet by handsome young men.

Rhoda also lives in London but struggles to make sense of her life, to hold her selves together, lacking the rural conviction of Susan or the society confidence of Jinny.

Section 4. Dinner for Percival (25 pages)

Bernard is engaged and catches a train to London, then stands in the busy street. All six are reuniting for a farewell dinner for their mutual friend Percival (who we haven’t seen much), ‘a hero’, who is leaving for India. Each of the six imagines Percival acting with godlike decision in India, to sort out ‘the Oriental problem’. They all genuinely believe this Percival would have been a great governor who would have ruled India widely and benevolently: ‘He would have done justice. He would have protected.’

Section 5. Percival’s death (10 pages)

News comes that Percival is dead. He was playing some game out in India when his horse threw him and he died on the spot. The Sensitive Six each give their responses which are, predictably, hyperbolic and immoderate:

All is over. The lights of the world have gone out.
We are doomed, all of us.
All palpable forms of life have failed me. Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors for ever.
I am alone in a hostile world. The human face is hideous.

And so, immoderately, on.

Section 6. Success and babies (11 pages)

Louis has become a successful businessman. He loves his office, his desk and his telephone. He’d like to write poetry but is too busy advancing trade around the world. He and Rhoda are lovers. To do this, he has had to deal with the identity problem and from the many men inside him, make one.

Susan is married with babies. She feels replete, complete, and waxes lyrical about getting them to sleep in her country farm.

Jinny, the London party girl, is now past 30. She seems to be describing her life to a man she’s met, including gossip about loads of society figures, but also a lyric delirium about her body and her wish to go off in a ship over the sea.

Neville delivers an impassioned monologue to a woman he has a troubled relationship with, they walked round London together but then she abandoned him at the Tube but later that night arrived at his front door, so…

Section 7. Middle age (16 pages)

If you can’t think what to do next, send your characters abroad. Bored of middle-aged life, Bernard travels to Italy, to Rome. He is middle-aged and has, at last, acknowledged that he has no real talent, that all those clever hopes come to nothing.

I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories? (Bernard)

In other words, there is no final statement, there is no Masterwork all these observations are building towards. The observations themselves, in all their brilliant fragmentation, are the work. Or at least, they are in Woolfworld.

Meanwhile, Susan is very content with her rural life bringing up two children in a world of butterfly nets and home-made jam, and visiting the rural poor, especially the dying in their cottages.

Jinny appears to be single but forces herself to rejoice in London life, in the energy and excitement of the Tube and buses and the hectic streets.

Neville feels himself getting old. He’s lost the old anger and bitterness. Now he reads Shakespeare and drifts from party to friend’s house, all passion spent. His section feels more than usually demented, stricken, mad.

Back to Louis who is a successful businessman, well turned-out in spats and a gold-handled cane. He tells us Rhoda left him so he’s taken up with a slatternly Cockney mistress. He is still attracted to his first love – poetry – and fantasises about writing the one Great Poem which will make sense of everything.

Rhoda has been scared all her life, copying the others to give the right appearance of living normally. Now she is in Spain, on a pilgrimage to go by donkey to the top of a mountain where she hopes she’ll be able to see Africa.

Section 8. Lunch at Hampton Court (19 pages)

They all meet up to have lunch at a restaurant in Hampton Court. Unexpressed jealousies and resentments like stags clashing antlers.

Neville despises Susan for waking up every morning to the same husband, when he has a succession of different women, sensations and conversations every season.

Louis wants everyone to notice his smart clothes and success and yet feels the perennial outsider.

Jinny wants them to acknowledge her fascination with people and life.

Rhoda is terrified of the simplest things and imagines her bed at night falling over the edge of the world. She’s the most mental of the lot:

After all these callings hither and thither, these pluckings and searchings, I shall fall alone through this thin sheet into gulfs of fire. And you will not help me. More cruel than the old torturers, you will let me fall, and will tear me to pieces when I am fallen. Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now. (Rhoda)

And indeed, right at the end of the book, in a throwaway remark, Bernard indicates that Rhoda kills herself: Woolf’s avatar, in this respect. She jumped out the upper story of a house to her death, as Woolf tried to when she was 13…

As I talked I felt “I am you”. This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome

Then they all go for a wistful sad walk by the river, arm in arm and hand in hand.

Section 9. Bernard’s recap (40 pages)

Oddly and disappointingly a lot of this final section consists of a recapitulation of stuff we’ve read before.

Woolf has finished with all the other characters, we see and hear them no more, but for Bernard. This section consists entirely of Bernard’s voice and lugubrious reminiscences. It consists of him addressing someone over a meal in the West End, a barely known stranger he remembers boarding a ship to Africa with years ago and has recently bumped into, a virtual stranger to tell his life story and the story of the six characters to. So the text finishes with Bernard ‘winning’ and his version of events being the crowning and defining one. Shame. I preferred the women characters, Susan, Rhoda and Jinny. Tant pis.

Early on in his 40-page monologue, Bernard complains that he’s fed up of telling ‘so many stories’. This is a bit rich seeing as how nowhere at all has there been an indication of him producing even a half-decent anecdote let alone a full-blown story.

He also says he is sick of flamboyantly beautiful phrases, which is maybe Woolf being ironic against herself, seeing as Woolf is praised above all for her lyrical (and often delirious) prose style, and this book consists entirely of fine phrases almost completely bereft of plot, event or psychology. (I say bereft of psychology because, despite a handful of superficial differences, all the characters think and speak exactly like Virginia Woolf.)

Anyway, all Bernard does, at great length, is recapitulate many of the scenes we have already had described to us, described in the childhood, school and university sections. But a scene is not a story, it is just a scene. Repeatedly telling us that Rhoda liked stirring flower petals in a basin and Neville like the Roman poets is not a story, it is creating images which, through repetition, acquire a kind of talismanic power. (Woolf does it in her factual works, as well, for example the image of the officious beadle who shooed her off a lawn in Cambridge which is repeated throughout ‘A Room of One’s Own’ and even in ‘Three Guineas’ to become a kind of looming symbol of the patriarchy.)

And on and on it goes, by far the longest section of the book and essentially a recapitulation of everything we’ve heard before. Tragically, as I’ve mentioned, as he gets towards the end of this bald list of impressions and mild events, he says ‘that’s enough of stories’ and the reader thinks ‘what stories?’ His idea of a story seems to be that Percival died when his horse threw him. Not a scintillating story, is it? Not the most complex of narratives. Woolf is the great writer of anti-stories.

Another one of his cracking stories, so good he repeats it half a dozen times, is that once, Percival invited him to accompany him to Hampton Court but he said no. That’s it. Not the ‘Thousand and One Nights’, is it? It’s more of a motif, a (very small) incident which Bernard keeps remembering and which comes to haunt him. But a story it is not.

This long final section not only recapitulates many of the events (to over-describe them), the feelings and intuitions of the previous chapters, it makes great play of repeating certain memories which have become recurring motifs – like Jinny kissing Louis, Rhoda sailing her flower-petal boats, Bernard turning down Percival’s invitation to go to Hampton Court – and alongside this, repeating certain key phrases. Presumably the intention is to give them a kind of poetic or psychological charge, but I found it just made them more and more inconsequential, like the harmless words of a lullaby.

The mind grows rings… the being grows rings… The being grows rings, like a tree…
Life is pleasant, life is tolerable. Tuesday follows Monday… Something always has to be done next. Tuesday follows Monday… I put on my hat, and went out to earn my living. After Monday, Tuesday comes… Life is pleasant; life is good. After Monday comes Tuesday, and Wednesday follows…

Empty rhythmic lulling, like the waves which wash across the empty beach, slowly wearing the mind down into utter indifference.

Right at the very end, on the last few pages, Bernard describes an epiphany he had in the countryside, leaning on a gate looking out over a valley, when he felt like his ‘self’ disappear completely, with the result that he blundered on through the countryside, a man without a self.

Now, here, in this restaurant off Shaftesbury Avenue, he begins to doubt the reality of the here and now. And then wonders if any of them are real. Who is he? Maybe he’s not one of them, Bernard, but all of them, Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, Louis?

As I talked I felt ‘I am you’. This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome…

It’s the same theme which surfaced towards the end of ‘Orlando’, the suggestion that our so-called identities are almost infinitely malleable and interchangeable.

On the very last page of the book Bernard explains that no matter how old and tired you are, each day the waves come and lift you to start the day again, dawn, rising from your bed, breakfast and the whole day to be faced again. Again and again we are lifted and propelled forward by the endless waves.

And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back.

For the waves endlessly driving us forward are life, and the only enemy of all of this, of this long, dense, verbose, lyrical, empty-headed text, is death. So down with death and on with life, and its endless waves.

Sex

There is no sex. The six characters go through puberty, adolescence and young adulthood without developing genitals, bodily hair, breasts, discovering masturbation, orgasms or having sex. None of them lose their virginities, they just marry and have children without the apparent involvement of sex at all.

Woolf was a Victorian lady. Like most of her class and generation she was too well bred to mention sex. But she also had a personal aversion to it, as well. Victoria Glendinning’s biography of her husband, Leonard Woolf, tells us that every time he broached the subject early on in the marriage, presumably with kissing and touching etc, she began to have a panic attack, beginning to display the symptoms of her full-blown madness. Understandably, he backed off and after a while, stopped trying, and so the marriage was never consummated.

Hence the strange absence of any sexual drive in any of her novels. The entire thing repelled her, was alien to her, she knew nothing about it, and so couldn’t write about it. Hence the impression all her books give of valuing a certain kind of billowing, purely verbal lyricism above anything to do with the body.

(Hence also her revulsion at James Joyce’s novel ‘Ulysses’ with its vivid descriptions of physical activities – not just the sexual ones, but peeing and defecating. She realised ‘Ulysses’ was a great book but couldn’t overcome the revulsion of her class at the vulgar goings-on of plebeians, and the revulsion peculiar to her against any descriptions of human corporeality. Taken together this explains why she couldn’t get past its ‘obscenity’. It’s a big blind spot.)

On the broader issue of physicality, none of the six characters have any physical oddities or ever become ill. That would drag the narrative down into the realm of the physical and, on one level, all of Woolf’s works are attempts to fly above and deny human physicality.

Mental illness, dissociation and fragile identity(ies)

I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am. (Bernard)

Woolf was stricken throughout her life with mental illness, nowadays through to be bipolar disease, striking her down with sustained periods of depression shelving into mania and madness. It’s fairly obvious that a lot of the heightened and often dissociated perceptions which litter her books derive from her own experience of altered psychological states, what Bernard calls his ‘states of detachment.’

Am I not, as I walk, trembling with strange oscillations and vibrations of sympathy… (Bernard)

There is nothing to lay hold of. I am made and remade continually. (Bernard)

Woolf triumphed by turning her illness into a style, into a worldview. Still, some passages stick out as more than usually deranged, vividly describing the alienated, dissociated effects of mental illness.

I flicker between the set face of Susan and Rhoda’s vagueness; I leap like one of those flames that run between the cracks of the earth; I move, I dance; I never cease to move and to dance. I move like the leaf that moved in the hedge as a child and frightened me. I dance over these streaked, these impersonal, distempered walls with their yellow skirting as firelight dances over teapots. (Jinny)

‘That is my face,’ said Rhoda, ‘in the looking-glass behind Susan’s shoulder – that face is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. (Rhoda)

There is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back. (Rhoda)

Is it significant, maybe, that these shimmering states of mind are assigned to the girls? No. Bernard feels just the same if not more so. In fact all six characters routinely feel like this. Sometimes the descriptions dwindle down to something approaching a catalogue of symptoms more than anything else:

I choke. I am rocked from side to side by the violence of my emotion. I imagine these nameless, these immaculate people, watching me from behind bushes.

I hate looking-glasses which show me my real face. Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

Unstoppable images

More and more bubbles into my mind as I talk, images and images. (Neville)

So many times it feels as if Woolf is barely in control of the never-ceasing bubbling up of images and similes which throng her mind, all the characters plight of being incurably ‘aware, awake; intensely conscious of one thing, one object in particular’.

I feel at once, as I sit down at a table, the delicious jostle of confusion, of uncertainty, of possibility, of speculation. Images breed instantly. (Bernard)

The bubbles are rising like the silver bubbles from the floor of a saucepan; image on top of image. I cannot sit down to my book, like Louis, with ferocious tenacity. I must open the little trap-door and let out these linked phrases in which I run together whatever happens, so that instead of incoherence there is perceived a wandering thread, lightly joining one thing to another. (Bernard)

Endless lists, lists, lists of things seen, random collocations:

People holding forth under chandeliers in full evening dress, wearing stars and decorations, some spray in a hedge, or a sunset over a flat winter field, or the way some old woman sits, arms akimbo, in an omnibus with a basket… (Neville)

Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter – all are stories. (Bernard)

A view over chimneypots; cats scraping their mangy sides upon blistered chimney-stacks; broken windows; and the hoarse clangour of bells from the steeple of some brick chapel. (Louis)

Sometimes it feels claustrophobic, makes you want to put down the book and run out into the fresh air in order to escape the relentless bombardment of her text. And in some places the characters express the same sense of borderline hysteria:

I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do – I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate… (Rhoda)

So Woolf’s texts are matrices of these never-ending perceptions oppressing characters who can never switch off, never lose themselves in action or laughter or any physical activity, trapped in consciousnesses endlessly enmeshed and enmeshing themselves:

Thus we spin round us infinitely fine filaments and construct a system. (Neville)

And always watching themselves like hawks, afflicted with never-ending bombardment of brilliant and oppressive images till they feel like they’re going to burst.

I tremble, I quiver, like the leaf in the hedge, as I sit dangling my feet, on the edge of the bed, with a new day to break open. (Jinny)

There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. (Rhoda)

Identity(ies)

Which of these people am I? It depends so much upon the room. (Bernard)

Who am I, who lean on this gate and watch my setter nose in a circle? (Susan)

What am I? There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything?(Bernard)

The characters are continually assailed by the fragility of their own identity, rarely if ever feeling their ‘true’ selves, struggling to define what a true self even is.

In the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when, holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather, I was wafted down tunnels. (Rhoda)

I am the ghost of Louis, an ephemeral passer-by, in whose mind dreams have power, and garden sounds when in the early morning petals float on fathomless depths and the birds sing. I dash and sprinkle myself with the bright waters of childhood. Its thin veil quivers. (Louis)

I feel insignificant, lost… I will let the others get out before me. I will sit still one moment before I emerge into that chaos, that tumult… The huge uproar is in my ears… We are cast down on the platform with our handbags. We are whirled asunder. My sense of self almost perishes… (Neville)

I am more selves than Neville thinks. (Bernard)

The woods had vanished; the earth was a waste of shadow. No sound broke the silence of the wintry landscape. No cock crowed; no smoke rose; no train moved. A man without a self, I said. A heavy body leaning on a gate. A dead man. (Bernard)

The ‘message’ of the last part of ‘Orlando’ is not that we are male or female, or even made up of aspects of male and female mingled, but instead that we have scores, hundreds, maybe thousands of selves, which all appear, mix and mingle continuously. Same here. It is Woolf’s central theme and message, expressed again and again and again:

‘What am I?’ I ask. ‘This? No, I am that.’ Especially now, when I have left a room, and people talking, and the stone flags ring out with my solitary footsteps, and I behold the moon rising, sublimely, indifferently, over the ancient chapel – then it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many. (Bernard)

I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am. (Neville)

Alone, I rock my basins; I am mistress of my fleet of ships. But here, twisting the tassels of this brocaded curtain in my hostess’s window, I am broken into separate pieces; I am no longer one. (Rhoda)

To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self. (Bernard)

The Bloomsbury Error

Bernard, Louis and Neville are convinced they are going to be Great Novelists and Poets because of the depth and sincerity of their perceptions, just as Lily Briscoe in ‘To The Lighthouse’ is convinced she will be a great painter because of the vividness with which she perceives things.

Wrong. Just because you feel things deeply doesn’t mean you can express them well. The latter, especially being a poet and an artist, are matters of technique rather than feeling. It’s not clear that John Singer Sargent perceived things particularly strongly, it was his technique which makes him a master painter. (I think of Sargent because the old Granada paperback of ‘The Waves’ which I own has a painting by him, The Black Brook, on the cover.) Ditto what made T.S. Eliot the giant poet he was, wasn’t his depth of feeling (though he harboured terrible depths of feeling) but the dazzling effectiveness of his phrasing. It’s not about feeling, it’s about technique, craft, skill.

What makes reading a bunch of Virginia Woolf novels back to back a bit tedious is her unchanging, unevolving, naive conviction that deep feeling must inevitably lead to the ability to write Great Novels or Great Poetry. It is a fundamental error but one she apparently held and makes all her characters hold.

It is boring reading Bernard and Louis and Neville going on and on and on about how wonderfully intensely they feel things and yet, when they try to get them down on paper, their stories or attempts at poetry just fizzle out. It’s because they’re making the fundamental Bloomsbury Error of confusing deep feeling with artistic ability. It’s not clear that Picasso had particularly fine and sensitive feelings, in fact all the evidence suggests the opposite. Yet he had breath-taking technique which made him the artist of the century. QED.

Death and travel as basic narrative devices

The only significant things which happen in a Woolf novel are death and travel. Having run out of ideas what to do with Jacob in ‘Jacob’s Room’, she packs him off to Italy and Greece, ending up in Constantinople. Unsure how to end it, she simply has him killed off in the Great War.

The meandering mellifluousness of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ builds to an unexpectedly harsh climax with the suicide of Septimus Smith, which overshadows the book’s ending and Mrs Dalloway’s party. Arguably it’s a regrettable stain on an otherwise charming Cath Kidston drawing room of a book.

The dominating event in ‘To The Lighthouse’ is the death in the intermezzo of Mrs Ramsay, which completely changes the flavour of the book and dictates the events of the final part (the journey to the lighthouse undertaken as a sort of penance).

At a loss what to do with Orlando, Woolf has the bright idea of packing him off to Constantinople, ostensibly as British Ambassador and it’s here, abroad, that the decisive event of the book takes place, Orlando’s transformation from a man into a woman. (‘Orlando’ is by way of being the exception that proves the rule, in having no death of a major character; in fact part of the joke is that the central characters very much don’t die but live for hundreds of years.)

Here, in ‘The Waves’, first she bumps off the rather obscure character Percival, who all the others loved but whose voice we never hear; then she sends Bernard off to Rome, admittedly a minor excursion; but then, towards the end, in a throwaway remark we learn that the attractive character Rhoda has killed herself. So it was these deaths and excursions which triggered the reflections that death and travel are Woolf’s only two narrative devices.

Secondary characters

For me, the secondary or tertiary characters in a Woolf novel have a special interest, the characters which peep round from behind the curtain of the main narrative. It’s especially true of the servants, the unspeaking lackeys whose reliable labours enable the privileged lives of the main characters. As I argued in some of my reviews of E.M. Forster, I think part of the reason these classic novels are so enduringly popular derives from the way they provide the reader with the lovely, consoling, escapist fantasy that we, the readers, while we are immersed in the narrative, are living just such a pampered, privileged life – surrounded by cooks and cleaners and maids and servants to cater to our every whim, our only worries which shoes to wear with this skirt and who to invite to dinner. They’re the literary equivalent of the Sunday Times Luxury section.

There’s another aspect of the supporting characters which is how many there are. All of her novels rotate around a handful of main characters, as most novels do, but in each one I’ve been struck by the sheer number of tertiary characters she bothers to identify and name. Here’s a list of tertiary characters in ‘The Waves’:

Two gardeners sweeping the lawn with brooms
Miss Hudson the teacher
Miss Curry, another teacher
The cook
Florrie, a maid
Ernest, a male servant
Mrs Constable, who bathes the children
George, a servant with bandy legs who carries Bernard’s suitcase
The housemaid cleaning the steps
The boot-boy made love to the scullery-maid in the kitchen garden
The stableboy
The railway guard blowing his whistle
The headmaster, Old Crane
Mrs Crane, his wife, fan of French memoirs
The boy who Susan leaves her squirrel (in a cage) and her doves to
The fat woman, presumably the matron at the boys’ school
Teachers at the boys’ school: Mr Barker, Mr Wickham
Older boys, the ‘boasting boys’, at the boys’ school: Larpent, Smith, Archie, Hugh, Parker, Dalton, Fenwick, Baker, Roper
Teachers at the girls’ school: Miss Lambert, Madame Carlo the music teacher, Miss Matthews, Miss Cutting and Miss Bard
Lady Hampton, wife of General Hampton, one of the boys’ school governors (?)
Boys at university: Simes, Billy Jackson, Canon, Lycett, Peters, Hawkins, Larpent, Neville
Mrs Moffat, Bernard’s cleaner at university
Miss Johnson, Louis’s secretary
Louis’s business associates: Mr Burchard, Mr Prentice, Mr Eyres
Bernard’s parlourmaid
Bernard’s hairdresser

Conclusion

Despite dwelling at length on what I take to be its shortcomings and limitations, the overall impression of reading ‘The Waves’ is strange and haunting. It is an awesome book and Woolf was a great, great writer.

Credit

‘The Waves’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1931. Page references are to the 1977 Granada paperback edition, although the text is easily available online.

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by Simon on April 7, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Novel

Tagged Africa, Archie, Aspergers syndrome, Baker, Bernard, Billy Jackson, bipolar disease, Brisbane, Cambridge, Canon, Catullus, Constantinople, Dalton, Depression, Dr Crane, E.M. Forster, Elvedon, English literature, Enid Blyton, Ernest, experimental fiction, experimental literature, experimental novel, Famous Five, Fenwick, Florrie, General Hampton, George, Great War, Hampton Court, Hawkins, Horace, Hugh, identity, India, Italy, Jacob's Room, James Joyce, Jinny, John Singer Sargent, King Edward VII, Lady Hampton, Larpent, Lily Briscoe, London, Louis, Lucretius, Lycett, Madame Carlo, madness, mania, mental illness, Miss Bard, Miss Curry, Miss Cutting, Miss Hudson, Miss Johnson, Miss Lambert, Miss Matthews, monologue, Mr Barker, Mr Burchard, Mr Eyres, Mr Prentice, Mr Wickham, Mrs Constable, Mrs Crane, Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Moffat, Mrs Ramsay, Neville, novel, Orlando, Parker, Percival, Peters, Philip Larkin, Picasso, playpoem, poetry, Queen Alexandra, Rhoda, Rome, Roper, selves, Sensitive Six, sex, Shaftesbury Avenue, Shakespeare, Simes, Smith, states of detachment, Sunday Times, Susan, Sweeney Agonistes, T.S. Eliot, The Bloomsbury Error, The Orators, the Oriental problem, The Railway Children, the Tube, The Waves, The Whitsun Weddings, Thousand and One Nights, To The Lighthouse, Ulysses, W.H. Auden, West End, Woolfworld

Posted by Simon on April 7, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/07/the-waves-virginia-woolf/

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)

One could not say what one meant.
(Mrs Ramsay laments, p.23)

Who knows what we are, what we feel?
(Lily Briscoe ponders, p.159)

No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again…
(Lily ponders some more, p.165)

‘To The Lighthouse’ is Virginia Woolf’s fifth novel and generally considered to be her most popular. It is really quite brilliant. It showcases her phenomenal strengths as a writer and also her limitations. It is divided into three parts.

Part 1. The Window (105 pages)

Mr and Mrs Ramsay are the parents of no fewer than eight children who are, of course, in the approved upper middle-class way, all exceptional.

Andrew (extraordinary gift for mathematics)
Jasper (likes shooting birds)
Roger
James (aged 6)

Prue (takes your breath away with her beauty)
Rose (wonderfully gifted with her hands)
Nancy
Cam (aged 7)

The Ramsays take their children for their annual holiday to an island in the Hebrides (called Finlay? p.56), where every summer they rent the same ramshackle old house. The rent of the house (presumably for a week), along with the garden and tennis court, is precisely two-pence ha’penny, or about one modern penny (p.29).

It is a Victorian family so Mrs Ramsay has also brought servants – Mildred the cook, and two maids, one named Marie from Switzerland (her father is dying of cancer, poor thing, p.30), the other named Ellen. (Back at home, in Oxford (?) they have Kennedy the gardener who Mrs R routinely accuses of being lazy, p.63. You just can’t get the servants!)

Mr Ramsay tends to abrupt and unfeeling truth-telling, often upsetting their children. Mrs Ramsay (aged 50) is, of course, much more conciliatory and supportive. She is a great empathiser. She visits the sick and poor of their parish, helping them out, writing down in her notebook details of their wages and spending. She wants to go out to the lighthouse on an island in the bay purely to give gifts to the lighthouse keeper, Sorley, and his son who is afflicted with a tuberculous hip, lonely souls!

Mr Ramsay supports all this by being an academic philosopher, writing about ‘Subject and object and the nature of reality’ as his son, Andrew, sums it up (p.26).

Mrs Ramsay is, of course, too busy being a mother to read any of his books or the books given to her by the poets and authors of their acquaintance (‘Croom on the Mind and Bates on the Savage Customs of Polynesia’). Like Mrs Dalloway, she has a superficial smattering of culture but isn’t that bothered. But then she has something more important than education or culture; she has feeling.

She knew then — she knew without having learnt. Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. Her singleness of mind made her drop plumb like a stone, alight exact as a bird, gave her, naturally, this swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth which delighted, eased, sustained… (p.31)

The novel opens with Mrs Ramsay promising one of her children, James, aged 8, that they will go out to the lighthouse on the island, tomorrow. To her irritation, her husband immediately contradicts her, saying the wind is in the wrong direction.

Her husband is a successful academic and author, a philosopher, and has an irritating habit of attracting fan students, young men who come and stay with them and the rest of the family has to put up with. On this holiday it is a bony youth, a ‘conspicuous atheist’ named Charles Tansley. (For Mr Ramsay’s supposed ‘thoughts’, see ‘Intellectual shallowness’ below.) When Mr Ramsay says the wind is in the wrong direction, he is immediately backed up by Tansley to Mrs Ramsay’s irritation.

After breakfast one day Mrs Ramsay invites Charles to accompany her into the nearest village to do a few chores. They pass a Mr Augustus Carmichael, the old poet, lying out in the sun. In town she sees a one-armed man pasting up a big poster on a wall for a circus that’s coming to town. She finds out more about Tansley, that he’s one of nine children, his father was a lowly chemist, he paid his way from the age of 13, he’s dragged himself up by his shoestrings to become a junior academic and is now writing a book about the influence of someone on someone else. (Mrs Ramsay is a mother of a certain age; she’s not interested in the details, she doesn’t really listen to whatever Tansley’s dissertation is about, a point so important to Woolf she repeats it, on pages 16, 64 and 96).

They go to a house where Mrs Ramsay disappears upstairs, presumably to talk to the wife or mother, Elsie (?), maybe bed-bound. As they walk the street, a workman stops his digging to look at her. Tansley realises he’s half in love with her.

Cut back to the present where Mrs Ramsay is cheering James up by selecting pictures in the Army and Navy catalogue to cut out. The other children are playing cricket. She, Mrs R, is being painted by another guest, young Lily Briscoe (33). In fact Lily is staying in a house in the village, along with William Bankes (60), ‘old enough to be her father too, a botanist, a widower, smelling of soap, very scrupulous and clean’.

Twitchy young Charles Tansley has made an enemy of Lily by boldly telling her women can’t paint and women can’t write, a phrase she remembers with scorn half a dozen times, more or less every time she looks at him. (And comes to realise is typical of the way people say things which aren’t meant to be true but feed some kind of need in themselves.)

Tradition and innovation

At the time, the way the narrative of ‘To The Lighthouse’ weaves in and out of the characters’ thoughts and memories which, by definition, are from various points in the past, was considered highly innovative. A hundred years later, we have become so used to mixed-up narratives, not just in high literature, but in popular films and TV shows, that the technique feels completely natural and accessible, more or less transparent.

No, what comes over instead is the deep, deep traditonalness of the subject matter: the sensitive feelings of an upper middle-class mother and those around her, with a central focus on Love. As Anthony Burgess says in his biography of D.H. Lawrence, the novel is an essentially bourgeois art form and Virginia Woolf’s novels describe characters at the upper end of the bourgeoisie. Lovely people having lovely thoughts, no wonder they have remained popular to this day with bookish ladies who pride themselves on their sensitivity.

One of the commenters on one of her novels on Amazon says how lovely and elegant Woolf’s prose is. Exactly. It is exactly this quality which holds it back. No matter how ‘modernist’ her enjoyment of flitting between her characters’ points of view, the actual sentences themselves are constrained by good manners. Their vocabulary is limited by good taste. They always strive for the same effect of melliflousness, of politesse and refinement. The result is that they delve, exquisitely and with perfect decorum, but into a very limited, narrow, blinkered experience of the world: the same calm and demure and polite good taste.

Here’s an example. It’s a long sentence but the subordinate clauses are arranged clearly and logically, so it flows simply enough.

Qualities that in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the Polar region would have made him the leader, the guide, the counsellor, whose temper, neither sanguine nor despondent, surveys with equanimity what is to be and faces it, came to his help again.

The balancing of antitheses – ‘neither sanguine nor despondent’ – and the vocabulary itself – counsellor, temper, equanimity – hark back to the stately elegancies of the eighteenth century. Although her perceptions are often ‘modern’, Woolf’s style is almost always Georgian.

Woolf’s novels radiate all the pampered privilege of her class while mocking the very men – the politicians and financiers and businessmen and imperial soldiers – which made her life of sensitive impressions possible, whose farflung empire provided the flowers and foodstuffs and finery which her privileged female protagonists enjoy sampling and savouring. And she is aware of it and expresses it.

A square root? What was that? Her sons knew. She leant on them; on cubes and square roots; that was what they were talking about now; on Voltaire and Madame de Staël; on the character of Napoleon; on the French system of land tenure; on Lord Rosebery; on Creevey’s Memoirs: she let it uphold her and sustain her, this admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way and that, like iron girders spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world, so that she could trust herself to it utterly, even shut her eyes, or flicker them for a moment, as a child staring up from its pillow winks at the myriad layers of the leaves of a tree. (p.98)

It just doesn’t matter to her. It’s not what she’s about. Men are the adults who create and maintain the structure of the world, and women…? Women do something else, no less important, subtle and enduring.

Intellectual shallowness (Mr Ramsay)

Like so many novelists, Woolf would have us believe that her male protagonist is a successful and respected Thinker, a philosopher with a post at Oxford (I think, since there’s mention of Balliol College). He is said to be frequently distracted from everyday life by Great Thoughts about philosophy. And yet, when she comes to portray these Great Thoughts, they are pitifully inadequate. In fact they aren’t philosophy at all. Does he ponder on the mathematical bases of philosophy like Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead, does he respond to the dazzling theories of the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, does he engage with the moral philosophy of G.E. Moore, is he aware of the turn to linguistics signalled by the rise of the logical positivists or the Vienna Circle, does he engage with the sociocultural implications thrown up by Darwin’s theory of evolution or its recasting into the scientific positivism of Herbert Spencer? Has he heard of Continental philosophy? What does he make of the German tradition of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, or Nietzsche? Does he have views on the creative evolution of Henri Bergson?

No. Instead Woolf has Mr Ramsay wandering up and down his garden with a head full of tragically simple-minded, obvious, trite and clichéd cultural questions from mid-nineteenth century magazines: would culture have been different if Shakespeare had never lived? Is culture the product of great men? How do you measure culture and civilisation, by how it affects everyone, or as a product for an elite? And so on (pages 43 to 44).

These are not the questions asked by professional philosophers anywhere, they are the tired, hackneyed themes of thousands of half-baked essays by half-educated litterateurs. What a complete failure to understand or depict the thoughts of a supposed ‘philosopher’. Mr Ramsay is (rather hilariously) described as ‘so brave a man in thought’ and yet, on the evidence of these ‘thoughts’, he could barely think his way out of a paper bag; is not much different from the guide on a coachload of American tourists: ‘And on our left, ladies and gentlemen, the birthplace of William Shakespeare, the jewel in the crown of our national culture’ etc.

(Same happens a bit later when Mr Ramsay walks by chuckling to himself at the thought of the philosopher David Hume grown so fat he once got stuck in a bog. Is he given a witty joke about Hume’s philosophical scepticism and metaphysical naturalism, his devastating demolition of the argument from induction? No. Instead, Ramsay chuckles over Hume getting fat and falling in a bog. This is Laurel and Hardy, not philosophy. And Woolf likes it so much she has Mr Ramsay think about it on three separate occasions, pages 62, 66 and 70)

It is not for the quality of her ‘thought’ that anyone reads Virginia Woolf. There isn’t much ‘thought’ on display. Move Woolf a few inches outside her comfort zone of bookish book chat and she is lost. It is the extraordinary quality of her art which makes her great – which means a combination of her perceptions and insights into human psychology, arranged into beautiful patterns, and expressed in elegant and mellifluous prose.

The beautiful protagonist (Mrs Ramsay)

It helps a lot when your protagonist is effortlessly beautiful, ‘astonishingly beautiful’ (p.112):

She bore about with her, she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty; she carried it erect into any room that she entered; and after all, veil it as she might, and shrink from the monotony of bearing that it imposed on her, her beauty was apparent. She had been admired. She had been loved.

This – being beautiful and sensitive – is much more important than reading books and knowing things. Woolf is a great feminist saint but I always find it ironic how counter-feminist her fictions actually are. Mrs Ramsay, like Clarissa Dalloway, isn’t clever or well-read or particularly cultured or well-informed, but she is valued by Woolf simply because she is beautiful and sensitive.

And because she wants to give. Mrs Dalloway thinks her own strength is in bringing posh people together at her house, being a wonderful party host. Mrs Ramsay thinks her strength is caring for her eight children plus all sorts of miscellaneous good causes – ‘this desire of hers to give, to help’. Both, as you can see, live for others in the most clichéd stereotype of the selfless, empathetic upper middle-class woman.

The core subject of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To The Lighthouse’ is Love. Women are depicted as a) a bit dim and ineffectual but that’s OK because they are b) continually thinking about lost loves, past loves, present loves – as if a woman’s life was entirely one of emotions and feelings, and nothing to do with rational thought and achievement. What could be more sexist?

More events in part 1

‘Plot summary’ or ‘synopsis’ are both a bit too precise for what happens in a Woolf novel. Things happen but mostly people have sensitive feelings, memories, perceptions and polite conversations.

Lily just can’t capture on canvas the vivid colours she sees in real life. She is embarrassed when Mr Ramsay wanders by and sees her canvas.

Two other young people are staying, Minta Doyle (24; a tomboy) and Paul Rayley. As is the way with classic bourgeois fiction, the interest here is in whether Paul will propose to Minta and whether she will accept him. Women, in this ideology, have only one purpose and that is to get married – at least, this is Mrs Ramsay’s view.

Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world, whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. (p.49)

Later, Mrs R suddenly wants young Lily Briscoe to marry William Bankes. ‘What an admirable idea! They must marry’ (p.68). Maybe it’s only here, though. At the end of the novel, Lily wonders what lay behind Mrs Ramsay’s ‘mania’ for marriage (p.163).

Mrs Ramsay reads her son, James, the story of the Fisherman and his Wife, continually interrupted by her own thoughts about her husband, her marriage, her children (they grow up so fast, don’t they?), wondering whether Paul has proposed to Minta, worrying why they haven’t come back for a walk.

She finishes the story and James goes off to have supper with the rest of the children. Mrs Ramsay mentions them all being given baths and then put to bed, activities she seems to have no involvement in and so, presumably, are conducted by the three woman servants. Hard life.

During all this the lighthouse light is lit and she observes the triple beam which swings over sea and shore. Sometimes she wakes and sees it on the floor of the bedroom.

She is continually worrying that repairs to the greenhouse back home are going to cost £50 and she hasn’t plucked up the courage to tell her husband yet. She thinks their gardener, Kennedy, is lazy. She remembers her Aunt Camilla who was, of course, ‘the most beautiful woman I ever saw,’ said Mrs Ramsay. (She also has an Uncle James, in India.)

Mr and Mrs R are walking in the garden. It’s just past 7pm. They arrive at the gap in the red hot pokers and see the lights of the town twinkling on the sea. He wants to apologise for being a bit harsh when rebuffing her suggestion they all go to the lighthouse tomorrow, but can’t. They are happily married but there are gulfs between them.

Lily sees them walking and, as dusk falls, has a vision of them as perfect emblems, ‘symbols of marriage, husband and wife’.

Early on in the book we learned that old Mr Ramsay is developing the habit of wandering round declaiming poetry out loud, because the early pages have lines from Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade scattered through them. Once again it’s not the idiosyncrasy it’s the extreme ancientness of the poem, published in 1854, which is striking.

Minta and Paul had indeed gone down to the beach as Mrs Ramsay suspected, taking with them not only Andrew but Nancy, too. They are still children and scatter to explore rock pools. When the tide starts coming in, Nancy squeals and runs up the beach, round a big rock and bang into Minta and Paul who are having a kiss. They separate and Nancy and Andrew are bad tempered on the walk back because of the embarrassment. Half way back Minta realises she’s lost the brooch her grandmother gave to her and starts crying. They go back to look but the tide’s coming in and it’s getting dark. Paul promises to get up at dawn and come and find it tomorrow.

The dinner

It’s getting dark as they arrive back at the house and the lamps are being lit for dinner. There are fifteen for dinner (Mr and Mrs R and their 8 children, Charles Tansley, Minta and Paul, Mr Carmichael, and Mr Bankes has agreed to dine with them for the first time.)

Mrs Ramsay looks out the window at the rooks settling in the trees. She’s nicknamed the oldest one Old Joseph.

A servant rings the gong for dinner, Mrs Ramsay proceeds in stately manner to the dining room, everyone assembles and sits and starts on the soup, and there is a Woolfian smorgasboard of everyone’s thoughts intertwining.

Young uncomfortable Charles Tansley covers his embarrassment by despising everyone for their dinner tittle-tattle. Mrs Ramsay talks to Mr Bankes about a mutual friend, Carrie Manning whose house at Marlow she used to visit, who she hasn’t thought about in decades. Mrs Ramsay is interrupted to give orders to the servants and Bankes wistfully wonders how perishable human friendships are, wonders what it’s all about, really etc.

Charles is twitching with frustration so Lily very consciously, as a favour to Mrs Ramsay, speaks to him and sparks a torrent of feeling about the plight of poor fishermen, which involves criticising the present government, and both Lily and Mrs R can sit back and let the men crap on. God, how boring they and their politics are!

It’s dark and Mrs Ramsay orders the candles to be lit which suddenly transforms the room and the long table into a fairy land. Minta and Paul burst into the dining room, very late indeed, Minta crying about losing her grandmother’s brooch. Minta sits down next to Mr Ramsay and he immediately starts flirting with her. Mrs Ramsay is jealous but, then again, likes the way the young women he likes surrounding himself with keep him young. Also, Minta has a golden aura about her and Mrs R guesses Paul proposed and she said yes (since getting married is, in her eyes, the most important thing a young woman can do with her life).

When Paul tells his end of the table that he’s planning to get up at the crack of dawn and go and find the brooch, Lily is swept with enthusiasm and asks if she can come and help him, to which he is suddenly brutally indifferent. Please yourself. Mrs Ramsay notices this, thinking how cruel love can be, has made the handsome Paul. Sitting near him both plain Lilly and ugly Charles suffer in comparison.

Some argument starts up about Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels and when someone says something about work which lasts she knows that will trigger her husband, who is very conscious of not being truly great, that his best years are behind him, that he is already turning into a back number. But luckily Minta with her golden glow says something flattering and defuses the tension.

Incidentally, the centrepiece of the dinner is a big chunk of beef, cooked Bœuf en Daube according to a recipe of Mrs Ramsay’s grandmother. (There’s a passage of conversation about how lamentable British cooking is.)

Most people have finished eating when she hears her husband reciting a poem to golden Minta and slowly the general conversation dies down as they all listen. Mrs Ramsay stands and walks to the door, taking Minta’s arm. This rather glorious family dinner is over.

The party breaks up. Mr Bankes takes Charles Tansley out onto the terrace to carry on talking about politics, as men will. Lily watches Mrs Ramsay walk stately upstairs to check on the younger children who should be in bed. It has been a memorable evening, one everyone present will remember. She pauses to look out the window at the black outline of the elm trees, to steady and centre herself. The ghost of Woolf’s madness momentarily casts its shadow…

Irritatingly, the children are still awake, not least because someone called Edward (not otherwise mentioned in the text) had sent the children the skull of a pig which someone nailed to the wall of their bedroom and now they can’t sleep for fear of it. So Mrs Ramsay covers it in her shawl and tells her impressionable young daughter, Cam, that now it’s like a lovely bird’s nest.

As she goes back downstairs Prue calls up that some of them had thought of going down to the sea to watch the waves, and Mrs Ramsay is transfigured with girlish enthusiasm. Off they go but, in fact, something keeps her behind; it is her duty to go into the living room and be with her husband who is anxiously reading a novel by Walter Scott, anxious because he is always anxious whether his work will last.

She picks up a volume of poetry and they both read in companionable silence. Marriage, reflects Mr Ramsay, probably reflecting an opinion of Woolf’s, is not all about going to bed with a woman. There are also these moments of soul peace.

Suddenly he wants her to tell him she loves him. She knows it but rarely says it. She stands at the window looking at the beams of the lighthouse. Then she turns and, astonishingly beautiful as she is, gives him a radiant smile.

Part 2. Time Passes (15 pages)

I was expecting some major change of time or setting but part two follows on without a break from part 1. Mrs Bankes, Prue and Andrew come back from the beach. It was so dark they couldn’t distinguish between the sea and the sand. Slowly the lamps go out all round the house. Darkness falls and cheeky little draughts explore the old house.

But then it kicks in, and part 2 becomes a wild farrago of purple prose, about winter winds, hails, waves destroying, ravages, tattered flags, gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and bones bleaching in faraway deserts. I presume this all refers to the First World War. In the long dark winter Mrs (Maggie) McNab the housekeeper comes to air and tidy the house. Spring comes round and summer and another winter.

Meanwhile, bracketed against the long convoluted paragraphs of purple prose, is a series of short, factual declarations which tell us the news of the family, in hard square brackets. It is hard, heart-breaking news.

In a throwaway sentence we learn that Mrs Ramsay, heart and soul of part one, has died.
In May Prue, looking beautiful, gets married.
A year later Prue dies from complications of childbirth.
Andrew, in the British Army in France, is killed instantly by a shell.
Old Carmichael brings out a volume of poetry which has an unexpected success. War has given the public a taste for poetry.

It is some years later and Mrs McNab surveys the mouldering old house, all the clothes rotting in their wardrobes, the pipes overflowed and the carpet ruined. Rats in the attic. The garden overgrown and alive with rabbits. The family had promised to return but the war made travel difficult.

Suddenly after years of silence Mrs McNab receives a letter asking her to make the place ready. It is such a ruin she has to recruit the help of her friend Mrs Bast and her son, George. Builders have to replaster, fix doors, and locks. It is an epic amount of work.

Then one day Lily Briscoe arrives, followed by old Mr Carmichael. Mrs Beckwith (who we’ve never heard of before) comes to stay.

Part 23 The Lighthouse [ten years later] (55 pages)

Overnight, as if by magic, the other surviving members of the family have arrived – Mr Ramsay, Nancy, James and Cam. And somehow, the next morning they breakfast early because it has been arranged to go out to the lighthouse.

And Lily, rather like the reader, dazed and confused by everything which has happened, sits at the breakfast table wondering what it’s all about: What does it mean then, what can it all mean? What does one do? Why is one sitting here after all?

I’ve mentioned Woolf’s mental illness more than once: here again, in the sense of profound disorientation, the reader feels it again.

Sitting alone (for Nancy went out again) among the clean cups at the long table she felt cut off from other people, and able only to go on watching, asking, wondering. The house, the place, the morning, all seemed strangers to her. She had no attachment here, she felt, no relations with it, anything might happen, and whatever did happen, a step outside, a voice calling (‘It’s not in the cupboard; it’s on the landing,’ some one cried), was a question, as if the link that usually bound things together had been cut, and they floated up here, down there, off, anyhow. How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought, looking at her empty coffee cup. (p.138)

The extraordinary unreality was frightening… Such were some of the parts, but how bring them together?… If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things…

Here, as in the mad sections of ‘Mrs Dalloway’, it feels like Woolf is recycling her many weeks and months and years of illness and mania, of the special peripheral vision it gives you, of the world and of yourself.

It is ten years since Lily left her painting unfinished (which is why commentators generally take the dates of the two visits to be 1910 and 1920). She is now 44 with an ‘old maidish’ manner. A long passage is devoted to Mr Ramsay coming up to her where she’s painting and exerting the full weight of his grief, his need, his exorbitant self pity, on her, demanding that she say something sympathetic, but she just stands there, hostile and dumb.

Suddenly, randomly, she notices his lovely brown boots and says out loud how nice they are, and to both their astonishment, he bucks up, becomes proud and lively and shows them off, and a knot he uses, of his own invention. Cam and James arrive (sulky 16 and 17 year olds) and Mr Ramsay declares they’re off to the lighthouse and marches them down the garden.

Leaving Lily facing a blank white canvas and riddled with doubts and conflicting emotions. Woolf spends quite a while describing the feelings she has as she makes the first marks on the canvas. It is an essay on the feeling of painting. It’s also mixed up with her love-hate relationship with patronising poor Charles Tansley. She remembered a happy moment when they took to playing ducks and drakes across the sea, and how it only happened because Mrs Ramsay, like God in Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy, watched it happen.

What is the meaning of life? Is there a meaning to life? No. There is no one great Revelation. Instead there’s a steady stream of epiphanies and insights.

What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark… (p.150)

She walks over to a view of the sea and sees the little boat with Mrs Ramsay, James and Cam in it set sail and move out beyond the others, towards the lighthouse.

In the little sailing boat Mr Ramsay gets impatient. He has forced two more new characters, Macalister and Macalister’s boy, to come with them. He makes Macalister tell him about the great storm last Christmas, which drove 11 ships into the bay of which three were shipwrecked. When the wind picks up and they start properly sailing, tense Mr Ramsay can relax. But Cam and James are surly and resentful at having been forced to go on this trip, purely to lay their father’s ghosts. They really hate him, Cam in particular remembering:

that crass blindness and tyranny of his which had poisoned her childhood and raised bitter storms, so that even now she woke in the night trembling with rage and remembered some command of his; some insolence: ‘Do this,’ ‘Do that’; his dominance: his ‘Submit to me.’ (p.158)

Back in the garden, Lily continues trying to pain, her mind aswirl with memories of Mrs Ramsay’s presence, when she last tried to paint here, when she played ducks and drakes with Charles Tansley, moments in time, why does she remember some and forget huge stretches of others?

She remembers going to visit the Rayleys (Paul and Minta after they married) in their place at Rickmansworth and finding the atmosphere terribly strained. Some time later she went back and found them reconciled and friendly, and this was because Paul had taken a mistress with radical political views like his, and Minta thoroughly approved.

From this Lily rambles on to thinking about her own relationship with the much older William Bankes. How Mrs Ramsay wanted them to get married and how they dated and went places together and felt great affection but never enough to marry. This long passage of meandering thought has taken us deep into mysteries:

What was it then? What did it mean? Could things thrust their hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the fist grasp? Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?—startling, unexpected, unknown? (p.167)

And she finds herself crying and saying Mrs Ramsay’s name out loud.

Cut to James in the sailing boat. The wind slackens and the sail flaps and James lives in terror of his father looking up from the book he’s studiously reading and reprimanding. James lives in permanent terror of his father’s reprimands and hates him with a white-hot hatred. He remembers being seven and wanting to go to the lighthouse and the harshness of his father’s refusal – the scene which opens the novel, a resentment he’s never forgotten. His memories of boyhood are like grains of misery.

Cut to Cam remembering being small and coming across her father sitting quietly in his study, accompanied by another venerable old gentleman, a copy of the Times crinkling in someone’s hand, as her father wrote slowly and neatly across the pages of his book. And she looks at her father now, curled up in the middle of the boat and quietly, purposefully reading, and her heart softens towards him.

Cut to Lily on land thinking about what you feel for things depends on whether they’re far or near: the nearer, the more familiar and funny; the further away, the more hazy and venerable. Then the light changes, the mood of the sea changes, and she is unhappy. She looks at her painting and thinks she hasn’t caught it at all. And Woolf delivers a little lecture on the struggle to create, to capture life in art.

Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything. Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh; she said desperately, pitching herself firmly again before her easel. It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on. (p.178)

Compare T.S. Eliot 1940:

and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion…

Samuel Beckett in 1983:

Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.

And plenty of other examples in between. The inability of language to adequately express our feelings and perceptions is a fairly common trope in the literary world.

Lily looks at slumbering Mr Carmichael. He’s famous now but still the same polite old geezer she’s always known. People can be two people, in fact people can be many people. One thing leads to another and she tells us that Charles Tansley got his fellowship, got married, lives in Golders Green. She went to hear him speak during the war, in a half-empty hall droning on about brotherly love, and again she remembers for the third or fourth time the occasion when she and he played ducks and drakes at some cask which came floating in on the waves while Mrs Ramsay watched them.

Lily remembers countless times seeing Mr Ramsay losing his temper, shouting, behaving badly, throwing a plate through the air, then loitering round his wife waiting for her forgiveness. Odd that all this comes out at the very end of the text because only now does it make sense of the scene which opens the novel, the couple’s sharp disagreement about whether to go to the lighthouse on the morrow. Canny withholding.

Lily notices someone has finally gotten up and is moving about inside the house and for a mad moment she thinks it’s her beloved Mrs Ramsay.

Cut to James in the sailboat. They are getting close to the lighthouse now and he can see it, a tall tower on jagged rocks. He observes his father getting to the end of the book he’s been reading. Finally he finishes it and announces he’s hungry. He opens the packet with their sandwiches in. Out of respect to Macalister he stops Cam throwing a half-eaten sandwich over the side. Macalister is 75 and Mr Ramsay shares that he’s 71.

And his father finally praises James’s steering. All this time James’s hatred is based on his father’s unerring criticism. Just one word of praise makes him pitifully grateful. All through this Cam lives in two worlds, part of her seeing her shabby father, the other part excited because he is taking them on an adventure. Freudian ambivalence.

Finally the boat reaches the lighthouse jetty, Mr Ramsay buttons his jacket, puts on his hat, tells the kids to get the packets which Nancy had wrapped for the lighthouse keeper, stands erect at the bow and steps ashore.

Cut back to Lily on the island who is joined by Mr Carmichael standing up. They both look towards the lighthouse which has become hazy and agree they must have arrived by now. And Lily looks from the steps up to the terrace, then back at her painting, and then has the inspiration on how to finish it. And the novel ends with a symbolic phrase which describes not only what Lily has seen and captured, but what Woolf the author has also done – achieved her vision.

She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. (p.192)

It’s a masterpiece.

Cast

Woolf’s fictions overflow with people, not just the primary characters but also a throng of secondary and tertiary characters, people who pop up sometimes for just one mention, for one sighting only, but who add to the sense her novels give of a dense tapestry of human lives all impinging on each other.

The Ramsays

1. Mr Ramsay

2. Mrs Ramsay

3. Lily Briscoe

4. Andrew Ramsay

5. Jasper Ramsay

6. Roger Ramsay

7. James Ramsay

8. Prue Ramsay

9. Rose Ramsay

10. Nancy Ramsay

11. Cam Ramsay

House guests

16. Charles Tansley, student writing his dissertation

17. Augustus Carmichael, old poet with white beard stained yellow

18. Lily Briscoe, painter

19. Minta Doyle, tomboy

20. Paul Rayley, young and handsome

21. William Bankes, scientist

Servants

12. Mildred the cook

13. Marie the Swiss maid

14. Ellen the maid

15. Kennedy the gardener

22. Aunt Camilla

23. Uncle James

24. Mrs McNab

25. Mrs Bast, helps Mrs McNab clean up the old house

26. George Bast, scythes the grass

27. Mrs Beckwith, turns up as a guest in part 3

28. Old Macalister

29. Macalister’s boy

30. Miss Giddings – mentioned just once, as being startled when Mr Ramsay suddenly, randomly quoted some poetry at her.

31. Mr Langley – also mentioned precisely once, in an anecdote Mrs Ramsay tells, that he had been round the world dozens of times but told her he never suffered as he did when my husband took him across to the lighthouse (p.85).

32. Mrs McNab – the housekeeper who airs and maintains the house in the family’s absence, through the long dark winters.

Credit

‘To The Lighthouse’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1927. Page references are to the 1977 Granada paperback edition, although the text is easily available online.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews
1920s reviews

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by Simon on March 28, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Novel

Tagged Alfred Whitehead, Andrew Ramsay, Anthony Burgess, Augustus Carmichael, Aunt Camilla, Balliol College, Bertrand Russell, Bishop Berkeley, Bœuf en Daube, Cam Ramsay, Charles Tansley, Creevey’s Memoirs, Darwin, David Hume, Ellen, English literature, Feuerbach, fiction, Finlay, First World War, G.E. Moore, George Bast, Golders Green, Hegel, Henri Bergson, Herbert Spencer, James Ramsay, Jasper Ramsay, Kant, Keith Douglas, Kennedy the gardener, Laurel and Hardy, Lily Briscoe, Lord Rosebery, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Macalister, Macalister’s boy, Madame de Staël, madness, Maggie McNab, Marie, Marx, mental illness, Mildred the cook, Minta Doyle, Miss Giddings, Mr Ramsay, Mrs Beckwith, Mrs McNab, Mrs Ramsay, Nancy Ramsay, Napoleon, Nietzsche, novel, Oxford University, Paul Rayley, Prue Ramsay, Roger Ramsay, Rose Ramsay, Samuel Beckett, scientific positivism, Shakespeare, Sorley, T.S. Eliot, Tennyson, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Fisherman and his Wife, the Hebrides, the Hogarth Press, To The Lighthouse, Uncle James, Vienna Circle, Virginia Woolf, Voltaire, Walter Scott, William Bankes

Posted by Simon on March 28, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/03/28/to-the-lighthouse-virginia-woolf/

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

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.

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by Simon on March 26, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Novel

Tagged asylum, Aunt Helena, Big Ben, bipolar disease, Bloomsbury, Bond Street, Bourton, Boy Scouts, British Empire, Brook Street, Canada, Charles Morris, Clarissa Dalloway, conversion, D.H. Lawrence, daisy, DallowayDay, Doris Kilman, Dr Holmes, E.M. Forster, Edgar J. Watkiss, Edinburgh, Elizabeth Dalloway, Ellen Barnett, England My England, English literature, Eton, fiction, Fleet Street, Gloucestershire, Great College Street, Great Portland Street, Green Park, Greenwich, Harley Street, Hatchard's, Herbert Parry, Hooper and Grateley, Howard's End, Hugh Whitbread, India, Jacob's Room, June 1923, Justin Parry, Lady Millicent Bruton, Lady Rosseter, Lady William Bradshaw, Leonard Bast, Leonard Woolf, Lincoln’s Inn, London, love, Lucrezia, Lucrezia Warren Smith, madness, Maisie Johnson, Mayfair, mental illness, Milly Brush, Miss Elaine Morris, Miss Isobel Pole, Miss Kilman, Miss Pym, Modernism, Moll Pratt, Mr Bentley, Mr Bowley, Mr Brewer, Mr Fletcher, Mr Morris, Mr Parry, Mrs Barnett, Mrs Burgess, Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Dempster, Mrs Emily Coates, Mrs Filmer, Mrs Filmers, Mrs Gorham, Mrs Kilman, Mrs Morris, Mrs Peters, Mrs Sarah Bletchley, Mrs Walker, novel, Old Joseph Breitkopf, Oxford Street, Pall Mall, Perkins, Peter Walsh, Politics, Prime Minister, proportion, Regents Park, Rev. Edward Whittaker, Rezia, Richard Dalloway, s divorce, Sally Seton, Sarah Bletchley, schizophrenia, Scrope Purvis, Septimus, Septimus Smith, Septimus Warren Smith, Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets, shell-shock, Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, Sir John Buckhurst, Sir William Bradshaw, St Paul's cathedral, stream-of-consciousness, suicide, the Cenotaph, the Oriental Club, the Strand, The Times, Tottenham Court Road, Trafalgar Square, Victoria Glendinning, Victoria Street, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf Society, Westminster, Westminster Abbey, Whitehall, World War One

Posted by Simon on March 26, 2025

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Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf (1922)

Words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street…
(Woolf’s sense of exhaustion and futility, page 88)

What people go through in half an hour!
(Woolf’s profound sense of the unhappiness of life)

Virginia Woolf was mad* and, I think, in this book as elsewhere, it really shows. She had a lifelong history of mental illness and ended up committing suicide. Reading this book, her third novel, helps you, I think, to understand why.

The basic subject matter is simple, insultingly simple, really: it’s another Bildungsroman or coming-of-age or growing-up novel about a clever young man from ‘the provinces’ named Jacob Flanders. The novel twist is the way the nominal protagonist, Jacob, is actually absent from most of the narrative.

We first meet Jacob as a boy on a beach holiday in Cornwall with his (widowed) mother, Betty Flanders. Then we see him roaming up the hill behind the family house in Scarborough. The local vicar and schoolmaster recommend him for Cambridge and lo and behold, in the following chapter we meet him there, hanging with other undergraduates, declaring, as if he’d invented the thought, that Greek literature is better than all modern literature. Virginia takes the opportunity to mock crusty old dons. Then he graduates and moves to London where he meets ‘Life’ in the form of boring parties, does boring research at the British Museum and, as far as I could tell from the text, becomes involved with a prostitute, Florinda (in fact, I was wrong: Wikipedia tells me that Florinda is a sexually permissive art student; my mistake indicative of the way it’s often hard to make out exactly what’s going on.)

So far, so boring, so very like E.M. Forster’s worst novel, The Longest Journey, which describes the growth from boyhood of another provincial youth who goes up to Cambridge, knocks around with other callow undergraduates who all worship Greek literature and think they’ve invented being clever, before going on to discover how disappointing the world of work is (he becomes a teacher and is slowly crushed by the mundanity of it). So far, so dull, narrow and predictable.

But in literature it’s not the (over-familiar) subject matter, it’s the treatment of it which you pay for, and it’s here that Woolf is either a genius or a deeply disturbed individual, depending on your point of view.

A personal digression on mental illness

My sister had serious post-natal depression for years and is still on medication. Both her kids have mental health issues. At uni I went out with a woman whose mother was a schizophrenic, a trait she passed onto my girlfriend’s (deeply disturbed) brother and which darkened the lives of everyone in their family. My best friend at school had a nervous breakdown at university, jacked it in and ran off to the Continent, to the distress of his parents. Both of my children had troubled teenage years, my daughter cutting herself, my son developing month-long psychosomatic migraines which kept him off school for over two years. In the end I packed in my job to look after them both and try to get their lives back on track, but I found myself suffering a kind of secondary stress from the endless worry and ended up needing anti-depressant medication myself.

A few years ago my wife had the bright idea of taking me to see the stage production of ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ in the West End. The production used flashing white lights and loud sound affects to do an excellent job of taking you inside the mind of a severely autistic boy, so good that after ten minutes or so I had a panic attack and, at first, sat with my fingers jammed in my ears, rocking backwards and forwards, humming loudly myself to try and block out the chaos. Eventually I could stand it no longer and pushed along the aisle of seats and ran through the labyrinth of corridors till I burst out into the fresh air of Soho, leaned against a lamp-post and threw up. It took me the rest of the evening to calm down and days and days to get back to feeling ‘normal’ and being able to smile.

Reading ‘Jacob’s Room’ made me feel a bit like that. I experienced it as a kind of assault on my mental health and equilibrium. I’m glad it is so short (160 pages) because much more would have been bad for my sanity. Having finished it I went out in the garden and start the weeding and pruning, in the winter sunshine, to try and regain my balance.

Fragments

‘Jacob’s Room’ was Woolf’s third novel and the one in which she really announced herself as an experimental novelist, shedding Victorian novelistic conventions left, right and centre in order to achieve her effects. Fans of Woolf focus on her concern to ignore the traditional contexts of plot, scene or character, and instead zero in on fragments and details. These include:

focusing on very peripheral details of a scene or location
giving fragments of speech with no attempt to report a complete or coherent dialogue
jumping from one half-completed scene to a completely new scene with no explanation or introduction
jumping into the middle of conversations without bothering to report the start or finish
mentioning characters as if we ought to know who they are despite never having mentioned them before (e.g. ‘old Mrs. Temple’ who pops up for a passing appearance in chapter 7)

The London chapters are littered with descriptions of London street scenes which describe random passers-by, people begging or pitifully selling shoe laces or whatnot, crammed into paragraphs which either convey a marvellous panorama of London life or are the dazed fragments of an alienated mind, according to taste.

The book is all about fragments and a deliberately skittish, mosquito jumping from fragment to fragment. At moments I enjoyed this, at others I didn’t. Why?

I very much liked the opening chapter which is, I think, brilliant. It starts with Jacob’s mum, Mrs Betty Flanders, on holiday in Cornwall, sitting on the beach writing a letter, and something’s made her start to cry and the scene is depicted through her tears.

Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor’s little yacht was bending like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular; the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.

I see what Woolf did here, I understand the effect she’s aiming for, I thought it was brilliant and fresh. Incidentally the sentence ‘Accidents were awful things’, jarringly pasted into the stream of her thoughts, indicates the cause of her crying, thinking about an accident in which a friend has died. So you have a brilliant description of what she sees through tears and a deliberately hyper-elliptical reference to the cause of the tears.

It starts to rain and Betty makes her kids pack up their things and scamper from the beach up to the boarding house. Here she gives them tea and puts them to bed as the rainstorm continues outside and the chapter ends by zooming in on one of the kids’ buckets abandoned in the garden.

Outside the rain poured down more directly and powerfully as the wind fell in the early hours of the morning. The aster was beaten to the earth. The child’s bucket was half-full of rainwater; and the opal-shelled crab slowly circled round the bottom, trying with its weakly legs to climb the steep side; trying again and falling back, and trying again and again.

Brilliant.

I think I liked the two details I’ve selected, crying on the beach and the garden in the rain, (or I understood them) because they are both visual effects, they paint a very vivid visual picture indeed. In subsequent chapters the incidence of these visual details falls away as the book becomes increasingly psychological. As Jacob grows into a student he becomes steadily less interesting (having had two of my own, I know that student-aged people are a lot, lot less interesting than small children: small children are joyous and funny, students not so much). By the time we see Jacob attend some posh party or studying in the British Museum or walking through the busy streets, the disconnected fragments are no longer visual but psychological.

So Woolf finds herself applying her technique of fragments and pieces to people and situations which are 1) increasingly psychological and 2) of increasingly narrow subject matter (students at Cambridge, Cambridge graduates in London) and so 3) increasingly boring.

And unbearable to the narrator. What I found increasingly hard to read was not so much the tedious portraits of bright Cambridge students (God help us) or the descriptions of dinner parties or tea parties (give me strength) but the strong feeling Woolf gives of these things being too much for her.

In chapter 3 Jacob is invited to a tea party with his Cambridge tutor and wife and finds it stiflingly conventional and boring and, the second he escapes from the house,

‘Oh God, oh God, oh God!’ exclaimed Jacob, as the four undergraduates left the house. ‘Oh, my God!’ Bloody beastly!’ he said, scanning the street for lilac or bicycle — anything to restore his sense of freedom.

That’s how I felt every time I put this book down and I escaped from the prison house of mental illness, of a narrator who comes under such pressure she feels she’ll start screaming – and back into my world of birds in my garden and sunshine and freedom.

There’s a vivid example of this Woolf pressure-cooker effect in chapter 4 when Jacob takes Florinda, a girl who fancies him (I think), to dinner at some restaurant. As more and more people come in, the noise level in the big echoing restaurant goes up and up:

The room was filling; the heat increasing. Talk in a restaurant is dazed sleep-walkers’ talk, so many things to look at — so much noise — other people talking. Can one overhear?

Until:

The room got fuller and fuller; talk louder; knives more clattering.

Knives more clattering. As you read, you can feel the mental stress of the narrator building and building until, the next thing we know, someone at a nearby table, a woman, suddenly leaps to her feet, sweeps the contents of the table onto the floor and shouts something at the man she’s lunching with, clearly the climax of some kind of argument.

I can see how Woolf fans would appreciate the technique used here and it’s powerfully vivid. But what I took from it was the sense of a super-sensitive sensibility being overloaded, being oppressed by the growing roar of the large echoing room, by the clattering of the knives and then… snapping, standing screaming, smashing plates, making a scene. I felt like I was standing outside that West End theatre again, my insides screaming in distress, pushed over the edge and beyond.

Why would I read a book that makes me feel like I’m having a panic attack? And when I wasn’t having panic attack flashbacks, I just felt desperately sad for her, for Woolf. She has, it seems to me, two modes: pent-up screaming panic mode or, when her mania is under control, a sense of glum, defeated depression. At the end of chapter 4 the narrator observes:

The thought saddened him. It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Woolf was 36 when ‘Jacob’s Room’ was published. Reading that little bit of authorial wisdom didn’t strike me as very wise, it just made me feel sorry for her. Sorry for a woman who found the most commonplace sights and sounds too much to bear, which either made her want to scream and run out the room, or made her feel like they were aging and killing her. All her thoughts saddened me.

Tired of life

Here are some more examples of Woolf just sounding tired:

‘Holborn straight ahead of you,’ says the policeman. Ah, but where are you going if instead of brushing past the old man with the white beard, the silver medal, and the cheap violin, you let him go on with his story, which ends in an invitation to step somewhere, to his room, presumably, off Queen’s Square, and there he shows you a collection of birds’ eggs and a letter from the Prince of Wales’s secretary, and this (skipping the intermediate stages) brings you one winter’s day to the Essex coast, where the little boat makes off to the ship, and the ship sails and you behold on the skyline the Azores; and the flamingoes rise; and there you sit on the verge of the marsh drinking rum-punch, an outcast from civilization, for you have committed a crime, are infected with yellow fever as likely as not, and — fill in the sketch as you like. As frequent as street corners in Holborn are these chasms in the continuity of our ways. Yet we keep straight on. (p.91)

Is this an inspiring flight of fantasy? Or a kind of delirium? You can choose to be thrilled by the imaginative fantasia she projects onto the old man with the white beard she walks past in a London street – yes, excellent – or notice the tone of the last sentence: how we all ignore the fantasies of the street, walk straight past, missing out, leading blinkered lives. A sad thought.

And in the following, the never-ending people you see, lost and abandoned in the street, carries over into the powerful sense of the futility of trying to find meaning anywhere, which spills (characteristically) into the futility of reading, of seeking an answer which can’t be found.

The little man fingering the meat must have squatted before the fire in innumerable lodging-houses, and heard and seen and known so much that it seems to utter itself even volubly from dark eyes, loose lips, as he fingers the meat silently, his face sad as a poet’s, and never a song sung. Shawled women carry babies with purple eyelids; boys stand at street corners; girls look across the road — rude illustrations, pictures in a book whose pages we turn over and over as if we should at last find what we look for. Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned — in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages… (p.92)

She has lots of these descriptions of London streets, London street scenes, which are superficially attractive – which, as a Londoner, I really enjoyed – except that they all end on the same note of futility or exhaustion. ‘Yet we keep on… What do we seek…?’

‘Come to tea, come to dinner, what’s the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is gay; the Russian dancers….’ These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe. And yet, and yet… when we go to dinner, when pressing finger-tips we hope to meet somewhere soon, a doubt insinuates itself; is this the way to spend our days? the rare, the limited, so soon dealt out to us — drinking tea? dining out? And the notes accumulate. And the telephones ring. And everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices that try to penetrate before the last card is dealt and the days are over. ‘Try to penetrate,’ for as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express the hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be certain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which fall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments, while life dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps — who knows? — we might talk by the way.

Doubt, doom, is this all? She sounds as depressed as T.S. Eliot:

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

So that eventually I learned that whenever she sets off on one of her digressions, I know it’s going to end up being depressing. ‘Is this all? Am I doomed? Why do we bother reading books? We have to keep on.’ On every page of this book there is the heavy, lowering sense of Woolf’s struggle against depression and futility.

He sat at the table reading the Globe. The pinkish sheet was spread flat before him. He propped his face in his hand, so that the skin of his cheek was wrinkled in deep folds. Terribly severe he looked, set, and defiant. (What people go through in half an hour! But nothing could save him. These events are features of our landscape. A foreigner coming to London could scarcely miss seeing St. Paul’s.) He judged life. These pinkish and greenish newspapers are thin sheets of gelatine pressed nightly over the brain and heart of the world. They take the impression of the whole. Jacob cast his eye over it. A strike, a murder, football, bodies found; vociferation from all parts of England simultaneously. How miserable it is that the Globe newspaper offers nothing better to Jacob Flanders!

‘How miserable it is…’ could be Woolf’s motto.

A window tinged yellow about two feet across alone combated the white fields and the black trees …. At six o’clock a man’s figure carrying a lantern crossed the field …. A raft of twig stayed upon a stone, suddenly detached itself, and floated towards the culvert …. A load of snow slipped and fell from a fir branch …. Later there was a mournful cry …. A motor car came along the road shoving the dark before it …. The dark shut down behind it….

Spaces of complete immobility separated each of these movements. The land seemed to lie dead …. Then the old shepherd returned stiffly across the field. Stiffly and painfully the frozen earth was trodden under and gave beneath pressure like a treadmill. The worn voices of clocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long.

Mrs Jarvis wonders why we all run round doing foolish unnecessary things, in tones which sound just like her creator:

‘I never pity the dead,’ said Mrs. Jarvis, shifting the cushion at her back, and clasping her hands behind her head. Betty Flanders did not hear, for her scissors made so much noise on the table. ‘They are at rest,’ said Mrs. Jarvis. ‘And we spend our days doing foolish unnecessary things without knowing why.’ (p.124)

Chapter 9 contains an extended description of scholars working in the British Museum Reading Room. I suppose it’s intended to be satirical but the effect isn’t funny, it’s just sad. It conveys all too vividly the immense waste of life in futile scribbling.

Nobody laughed in the reading-room. There were shirtings, murmurings, apologetic sneezes, and sudden unashamed devastating coughs. The lesson hour was almost over. Ushers were collecting exercises. Lazy children wanted to stretch. Good ones scribbled assiduously — ah, another day over and so little done! And now and then was to be heard from the whole collection of human beings a heavy sigh, after which the humiliating old man would cough shamelessly, and Miss Marchmont hinnied like a horse. (p.101)

There’s lots of sighing in the book.

‘The Daily Mail isn’t to be trusted,’ Jacob said to himself, looking about for something else to read. And he sighed again, being indeed so profoundly gloomy that gloom must have been lodged in him to cloud him at any moment… (p.132)

What is the point, of this, of anything?

It all seemed to him very distasteful. Something ought to be done about it. And from being moderately depressed he became like a man about to be executed…

This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern invention.

The artist’s model, Fanny Elmer, falls in love with Jacob but he doesn’t even notice which makes her feel suicidal.

‘Anyhow, I can drown myself in the Thames,’ Fanny cried, as she hurried past the Foundling Hospital. (p.132)

Hard not to read that and remember that Woolf, of course, eventually killed herself by drowning. On every page the characters sigh, are filled with gloom, wonder what the point is of all this fuss and fret.

Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. There he saw three Greeks in kilts; the masts of ships; idle or busy people of the lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into groups and gesticulating with their hands. Their lack of concern for him was not the cause of his gloom; but some more profound conviction — it was not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are. (p.133)

Lonely, lonely and sad. The over-familiar line from Pink Floyd came to mind: ‘Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.’ In this book Woolf seemed to me a perfect epitome of quiet, well-mannered desperation.

Strolling in at dusk, Sandra would open the books and her eyes would brighten (but not at the print), and subsiding into the arm-chair she would suck back again the soul of the moment; or, for sometimes she was restless, would pull out book after book and swing across the whole space of her life like an acrobat from bar to bar. She had had her moments. Meanwhile, the great clock on the landing ticked and Sandra would hear time accumulating, and ask herself, ‘What for? What for?‘ (p.153)

‘What for? What for?’ I wonder if Woolf made repeated suicide attempts before she finally succeeded. It sounds like it. Misery dribbles from every page of this grimly depressing book.

The thought saddened him. It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

(A few days later, I read in the notes to the Oxford University Press edition of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ that Woolf suffered mental collapses in 1895, 1904 and 1913 to 1915; that she tried to kill herself by jumping out a window 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. Anyway: I wasn’t wrong to feel through the pages of this book a profound experience of barely controlled unhappiness, gloom, misery and mental dislocation.)

Muddle

It’s odd that the ‘serious’ authors of the 1900s, 1910s and 1920s went out of their way to indicate how puzzled and perplexed they were by the world around them. The buzzword which recurs in so many of these novelists is ‘muddle’, as they throw up their hands and declare: ‘It’s too complicated for me to understand; it’s all a big muddle’. E.M. Forster routinely gives up trying to understand his own narratives and admits it’s all a ‘muddle’. Woolf isn’t much better. Here she is in the Cornish holiday home in chapter 1:

There was a click in the front sitting-room. Mr. Pearce had extinguished the lamp. The garden went out. It was but a dark patch. Every inch was rained upon. Every blade of grass was bent by rain. Eyelids would have been fastened down by the rain. Lying on one’s back one would have seen nothing but muddle and confusion — clouds turning and turning, and something yellow-tinted and sulphurous in the darkness.

And now in central London:

Indeed, drums and trumpets is no phrase. Indeed, Piccadilly and Holborn, and the empty sitting-room and the sitting-room with fifty people in it are liable at any moment to blow music into the air. Women perhaps are more excitable than men. It is seldom that any one says anything about it, and to see the hordes crossing Waterloo Bridge to catch the non-stop to Surbiton one might think that reason impelled them. No, no. It is the drums and trumpets. Only, should you turn aside into one of those little bays on Waterloo Bridge to think the matter over, it will probably seem to you all a muddle — all a mystery. (p.106)

So many of Woolf’s digressions kick off with bold declaration, with fine phrases, then get bogged down in her digressive meandering, and then completely give up, admitting it’s ‘all a muddle — all a mystery.’ Joseph Conrad’s more discursive passages quickly turn into moralising about Man and the Cruel Universe. E.M. Forster’s frequent digressions tend to bring in the Greek gods. Woolf’s digressions again and again end in the admission of defeat, failure to understand and a stifling sense of futility.

Send your hero abroad…

Like so many of the authors of the day, when Woolf couldn’t think what to do with her protagonist she sent him off abroad in the hope that something interesting might crop up, first to Italy, then to Greece. Just like Forster sending Lucy Honeychurch to Florence (A Room with a View) and Lawrence sending Aaron to Florence (Aaron’s Rod). So we are treated to descriptions of train journeys across Italy, views of the hot dry landscape, sturdy Italian peasants, Florence, the Colosseum blah blah, then – shazam! – we are in Greece, Patras, more trains, even hotter drier landscapes, Athens, the Parthenon.

Woolf may be a clever writer but this feels like a desperately tired expedience. Her views on the timeless beauty of the Acropolis join the exact same views of the thousands and thousands of other British tourists and diarists and journal-writers and essayists and archaeologists and historians and novelists who preceded her. Boring. And her protagonist is (rightly) bored. He diligently visits all the sights, reads all the guidebook facts but is stubbornly ‘morose’ (p.141).

I was hoping he’d get run over and killed by a tram, in the completely pointless way the protagonist of ‘The Longest Journey’ is run over by a train at the abrupt ending of that book, but no such luck. Instead, in Italy he falls in with an older couple, Evan Wentworth Williams who is a frustrated would-be politician, and his wife, Sandra Wentworth Williams, who sensitively swans around Athens in a long white dress.

It is made clear that Sandra wants to collect Jacob, to leech on to his youthful gaucheness, and that her husband acquiesces, staying behind in their hotel while Sandra and Jacob go for a walk up the Parthenon in the moonlight. But then, in a characteristic move to frustrate our conventional expectations, just as we are expecting something to happen (a kiss in the moonlight!), the narrative cuts away to Jacob’s mother in bed in her house in Scarborough. And after a few pages with her, when it cuts back to Athens, Jacob and Sandra have disappeared. It is a deliberate strategy of obliquity and evasion.

Then it’s the next morning, they all get up early and journey on to Constantinople. I don’t think anything at all happened between them, even a kiss. The only practical outcome is that Jacob gives Sandra the copy of John Donne’s poems which he’s reading and annotating and we are told it joins the select number of volumes the older lady keeps on her dressing table, and occasionally picks up as she moons over her old lovers. He has been collected.

All the important moments in these little scenes is deliberately omitted leaving a narrative made of fragments built around absences. The central character and all his key experiences, those character-forming experiences you expect from a Bildungsroman, have been carefully excised to leave a hole in the middle of the text.

… then bring him back

The penultimate chapter, chapter 13, gives a kind of panoramic overview of all the characters we have met so far, in the course of one day of coming and going, mostly in London.

Jacob is back in London, lean, brown and boring everyone with his trite opinions about the glories of Greece. He is walking through Hyde Park with his best buddy Dick Bonamy who is unhappy (of course) because of his frustrated love affair with the elusive Clara Durrant.

From one point of view the entire History of The Novel is a record of the long, pitifully useless efforts of adult human beings to manage even the simplest affairs of the heart, to manage their love lives. Whenever anybody gets up on their hind legs and starts pontificating about ‘human wisdom’ and what a clever species we are, even before you get out the history books with their mountainous records of wars and tortures, just hand them a couple of classic novels and say ‘Here: this is the evidence against’. Here are a half dozen examples of the human race who couldn’t manage the most basic aspects of human relationships and ended up killing themselves – Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina.

We are introduced to Mr Bowley, a new character, an older gentleman, who accompanies Clara as she puts her dog Troy on a leash and takes him for a walk in the park. They are disturbed when a horse which has thrown its rider goes galloping by. Characteristically for Woolf, this tear in the fragile surface of good manners and etiquette, is all it takes to trigger Clara to tears, just like the slow crescendo of knives and forks clattering triggered the unnamed woman in the restaurant.

“‘This statue was erected by the women of England…'” Clara read out with a foolish little laugh. ‘Oh, Mr. Bowley! Oh!’ Gallop—gallop—gallop—a horse galloped past without a rider. The stirrups swung; the pebbles spurted. ‘Oh, stop! Stop it, Mr. Bowley!’ she cried, white, trembling, gripping his arm, utterly unconscious, the tears coming. (p.159)

‘White, trembling, gripping his arm.’ It is my contention that this hysteria lies just below the surface of every sentence, every perception in the book, just waiting to burst out. Nice polite well-mannered young women are poised to snap and burst into tears at the slightest provocation.

This horse bolting is a symbol which is used to bring together disparate strands right at the end of the book. Assiduous visitor of the sick, Mrs Julia Eliot, saw the incident too, en route to her appointment with Lady Congreve in Bruton Street.

At that precise moment Florinda (the sexually permissive art student) who’s discovered she’s pregnant, watches the arrival of the painter Nick Bramham, at the restaurant, Verrey’s, where she’s booked a table. Have they agreed to marry? Has he agreed to pretend to be the father? Is he the father? Or is he stepping in for Jacob who is the real father? I can see that the way it isn’t spelled out is deliberate and artful. It joins the collection of many other issues which are elided and cut off. It creates the sense of a panorama of puzzles, allusions, mysteries, which is clearly how Woolf saw life.

At that moment far away in her country house, Sandra Wentworth Evans fondles the volume of Donne and wonders whether she can emotionally manipulate Jacob. Meanwhile, back in Hyde Park, abandoned by a cross Bonamy, Jacob idly draws in the dirt with the end of his umbrella what may or may not be a sort of diagram of the Parthenon.

A deckchair attendant asks him for a penny, but Jacob can only find half a crown which he gives the man, with some asperity.

Fanny Elmer loves Jacob more than ever and writes him notes and postcards which she never sends. She’s taken to hanging round the British Museum in the hope of sighting him. Why did no-one tell her that life is grim and frustrating?

‘One’s godmothers ought to have told one,’ said Fanny, looking in at the window of Bacon, the mapseller, in the Strand — told one that it is no use making a fuss; this is life, they should have said, as Fanny said it now, looking at the large yellow globe marked with steamship lines. ‘This is life. This is life,’ said Fanny. (p.163)

At which point, with Woolfian misery, she bursts into tears. She catches a bus which is held up in the Charing Cross Road because there’s a big political rally marching down Whitehall, past the various government ministries and Woolf gives us the last of what have been quite a few page-long digressions about international politics, about the enormous reach of the British Empire and the need to address issues with Kaisers and Rajahs and so on all around the world. Because of my own personal interest in history, these were the only bits of the novel I really enjoyed, because of their sense of range, of the wider world rising above the petty, small-minded backbiting of most of the ‘characters’.

Back to individuals: Timmy Durrant (Clara’s brother) is at work in one of these government departments which Fanny is walking past. He is aided by Miss Thomas, one of the typists who doesn’t want to be late to meet her beau at the Gaiety Theatre.

Jacob gets up from his deckchair. It’s past five and the sun is setting. Far away in Scarborough his mother is writing a letter to his older brother, Archer, who works in Singapore.

Coming out of Carter’s shop in Piccadilly, the Reverend Andrew Lloyd half recognises Jacob as he walks past because it was he, Floyd, back in chapter 2, who recommended Betty to try her son for Cambridge i.e. had a hand in the formation of Jacob’s personality, in a sense is partly responsible for the entire narrative. But he hesitates to approach Jacob just long enough for the latter to disappear into the crowd. It is a world of lost opportunities. Fleeting glimpses and unfulfillment.

In a cab in a traffic jam in Long Acre sit smooth Mr Wortley, Clara and her mother Mrs Durrant, who is concerned about arriving late to the opera and missing the overture.

Far away on the edge of the moors overlooking the sea, Mrs Pasco watches two ships pass each other out on the waves.

Even further away, Greek housewives knit their stockings while the sunset colours the Parthenon red. Artillery fires over the Piraeus to mark the end of the day.

Betty Flanders is woken by a distant booming but can hear nothing distinct. It connects back to the guns in Greece but (being 1920), was it a prolepsis or anticipation of the sound of the guns of the Great War which was to sweep all this away?

I liked the panoramic effect of this chapter very much, although maybe it was simply from the relief of having gotten to the end of the book on one piece.

Chapter 14

The final chapter is precisely one page long and shows Jacob’s friend Dick Bonamy in Jacob’s room tutting about the chaos and the letters scattered everywhere. Then Jacob’s mother, Betty, enters, asking what is she to do with these, holding up a pair of Jacob’s old shoes? Is Jacob dead? Thank God! But how? There is no clue whatsoever, so I turned to the internet for help.

The SuperSummary web page tells me that:

When World War I breaks out in Europe, Jacob enlists in the British army and is killed in combat. The novel ends with a scene of Betty Flanders and Richard Bonamy clearing out Jacob’s London apartment in the wake of Jacob’s death.

Ah. OK. but none of that is expressed in the text. I had picked up on the booming of the guns but was misled because I thought Betty heard them on the same evening when Jacob was strolling through Hyde Park. No. Turns out that all the events the SuperSummary lists (war breaking out, Jacob enlisting, training, being shipped to France, fighting, dying, Betty receiving notification of his death and travelling to his London room) takes place with no mention or description in the narrative. Offstage. That’s a really significant amount of information, data, events, to completely omit from your story, wouldn’t you say?

It was already a strikingly non-conformist book, a revolutionary book in its understated way, simply ignoring most of the conventions of the novel up to that date. This highly elliptical conclusion really rams that home. Contemporary readers must have been mystified.

The implied author

I happily admit that the picture I’ve built up here of Woolf-the-author may bear no close relationship to the actual Virginia Woolf of 1920. Here’s the Wikipedia definition of ‘the implied author’:

The implied author is a concept of literary criticism developed in the 20th century. Distinct from the author and the narrator, the term refers to the ‘authorial character’ that a reader infers from a text based on the way a literary work is written. In other words, the implied author is a construct, the image of the writer produced by a reader as called forth from the text. The implied author may or may not coincide with the author’s expressed intentions or known personality traits.

Many people’s main reaction to a novel they’re reading, whether they like it or not, is in fact a response to the character of its implied author – whether they find them warm and sympathetic or cold and brutal, whimsical and funny or difficult and literary, etc.

And canny authors exploit this, creating a persona which is not identical even with the narrator, but a larger thing – the book’s personality. As every reader knows, liking or disliking a novel often relies on your response to the total mood of the text, to the implied author, to the book’s personality.

I like literature which adds something to life, which adds factually or psychologically a richness or strangeness. Everything by D.H. Lawrence explodes with life and enhanced perception, even when he’s at his most messianic and delusional. My enthusiasm even extends to the wildest of Samuel Beckett’s prose works, a man renowned for concentrating on futility and despair, works such as the very strange How It Is. What is exhilarating about Beckett’s works is the totality of their commitment. They are bleak as hell but written with a visionary intensity.

By comparison, Woolf, to me, seems half-hearted. She is like E.M. Forster seen through a kaleidoscope, a distorting mirror. Her works radiate a kind of wet unhappiness. She – well the author implied by this book, its authorial persona – is very clever, very perceptive, very artful, but very wounded.

* A note on the word madness

I wondered whether I’m allowed to use the term ‘mad’ and ‘madness’. Surely I should be more sympathetic, up-to-date and use terms like ‘mental illness’ or ‘neurodivergent’? So I was struck by the way the author biography on the inner sleeves of the Granada paperback editions of Woolf’s works which I read bluntly states:

Recurring bouts of madness plagued both her childhood and married life and in April 1941 Virginia Woolf took her own life.

And it’s not just here. Throughout Victorian Glendinning’s excellent biography of Leonard Woolf, Glendinning refers to Virginia’s ‘madness’. And in her own writings and diary, Woolf freely uses the term mad and madness. She used it in the intensely moving suicide note she left for her husband – ‘Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again’. So I’m not using the word flippantly or insensitively. I’m using the same word used by her editors, publishers, biographers and by Virginia herself to describe her condition.

Credit

‘Jacob’s Room’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1922. References are to the 1965 Penguin paperback edition, 1971 reprint.

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by Simon on March 24, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Novel

Tagged 1922, Aaron's Rod, absence, Athens, Betty Flanders, Bildungsroman, British Empire, British Museum, Bruton Street, Cambridge, Cambridge University, Charing Cross Road, Clara Durrant, coming-of-age novel, Cornwall, D.H. Lawrence, Dick Bonamy, E.M. Forster, English literature, Evan Wentworth Williams, Fanny Elmer, fiction, First World War, Florence, Florinda, fragments, futility, Gaiety Theatre, Greece, Greek literature, Holborn, Hyde Park, Italy, Jacob Flanders, Jacob's Room, John Donne, Joseph Conrad, Lady Congreve, London, Long Acre, Lucy Honeychurch, madness, mania, Miss Marchmont, Miss Thomas, Mr Bowley, Mr Pearce, Mr Wortley, Mrs Betty Flanders, Mrs Durrant, Mrs Jarvis, Mrs Julia Eliot, Mrs Pasco, muddle, Nick Bramham, novel, old Mrs. Temple, Panic, panic attack, Piccadilly, Queen's Square, Reverend Andrew Lloyd, Samuel Beckett, Sandra Wentworth Williams, Scarborough, St. Paul's, stream-of-consciousness, street scenes, suicide, Surbiton, T.S. Eliot, Thames, the Acropolis, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The Daily Mail, the Foundling Hospital, the Great War, the Hogarth Press, The Longest Journey, the Parthenon, the Piraeus, the Strand, Timmy Durrant, Troy, Verrey's, Virginia Woolf, Waterloo bridge

Posted by Simon on March 24, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/03/24/jacobs-room-virginia-woolf/

Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen (1886)

Another beautifully constructed, weighty play about family secrets and lies, involving politics, idealism and conservatism, but focusing more on the mysteries of character and psychology.

Cast

John Rosmer, of Rosmersholm, an ex-clergyman
Rebecca West, one of his household, originally engaged as a companion to Beata, the late Mrs Rosmer
Kroll, headmaster of the local grammar school, Rosmer’s brother-in-law i.e. brother of Beata
Ulrik Brendel, a drunken poet
Peter Mortensgaard, editor of the left-wing Searchlight newspaper
Mrs Helseth, Rosmer’s housekeeper

Act 1

John Rosmer, of Rosmersholm, is the latest representative of the Rosmer family who have been pillars of the community for centuries, ‘the foremost family in the district’, providing it with clergymen, military officers and other officials.

The play opens with Miss Rebecca West, who is his companion, and the housekeepers, Mrs Helseth, looking out the window waiting for Rosmer to return from a walk. He is taking the long way home while they spy another man, Mr Kroll, headmaster of the local grammar school, walking directly to the house.

He enters and in the ensuing dialogue with Rebecca we learn a huge amount. We learn that Rosmer was married to Kroll’s sister, Beata; that it was not a happy marriage; that Beata became unwell and Rebecca was hired to be a companion for her; that she managed this despite the opposition of her father, old Captain West, her crippled foster-father, who was very unpleasant until he, too, passed away; that Rebecca became Beata’s rock and stay as she experienced mental decline and breakdown; that one day 18 months ago Beata walked down to the bridge over the millpool and threw herself in, drowning; that Rebecca has been providing companionship to the widower Rosmer ever since, and tells Kroll she will stay as long as he (Rosmer) needs her.

In passing Kroll determines that Rebecca is 29 and Rosmer is 43. If he should ever want a new wife…but Rebecca tuts and says how can he think of such a thing!

But, leaving the unhappy past, we learn that Kroll has become involved in local politics, in a conflict between the Radicals and the Conservatives which has become so bitter that Kroll refers to it as a civil war.

Rosmer enters and says how relieved he is to see Kroll. He’s always regarded Kroll as a teacher and mentor and was upset that he hasn’t visited for a year. He and Rebecca thought there was some kind of breach.

Now the talk turns to politics. The Radicals have taken power, egged on by a radical newspaper called The Searchlight and edited by one Peter Mortensgaard. Kroll is dismayed that the cleverest boys at his school now read it and that its influence has penetrated into his own family, where his children read it and even his wife blames him for raising them too strictly.

We get an insight into the authoritarian mind when Kroll states that hitherto his family had been of one mind, a place where ‘obedience and order have always ruled’. He therefore sees the rise as the Radicals as the triumph of chaos and disorder. And he sees the current times (1885 or so) as uniquely ruinous and decadent.

KROLL: You have no conception of the state of affairs that is going on all over the country. Every single idea is turned upside down, or very nearly so. It will be a hard fight to get all the errors straightened out again.

And now we get to the reason for Kroll’s visit after such a long absence. Kroll tells Rosmer they want him to join them. It’s all very well living out in the sticks and carrying on historical researches (into family trees) but the world is going to hell and they need Rosmer’s support. He and his party have just recently bought the Country Times paper and now what they need is an editor. Will Rosmer edit it for them? Rosmer says he’s got no feel for politics and is the last man for the job. Kroll reluctantly accedes but then asks if they can use his name, will he lend the renowned Rosmer name to their cause.

As the conversation progresses Rebecca has been pressing Rosmer to say something and he’s refused but the conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Ulrik Brendel. The two men remember that this Brendel was a) Rosmer’s tutor when he was a boy and still has a soft spot for but b) a disreputable waster who Rosmer’s father drove from the house with a horsewhip.

Brendel is an impressive figure of a man though now down on his luck and dressed like a tramp. He speaks grandiloquently of the way he has reached a fork in the road, has many bold and exciting ideas which he has not yet committed to paper all the while experiencing the ‘mysterious bliss of creation’ and expecting the applause of the grateful masses. Presumably he’s intended to be the type of the ineffectual radical.

In a broadly comical scene he says he has no interest in material things but could they possibly loan him a dress shirt. And an overcoat. And some boots. And, say, two ten crown notes. And with much bowing and scraping he exits to continue on h is way into town.

And now Brendel is out of the way Rosmer can get back to what he was about to say which is that he has joined the other party. Well, not joined exactly, but he has thought long and hard and come out on the side of independence and freedom. He aspires to bring all sides in the dispute together in a spirit of democracy.

Kroll is appalled, saying his old friend is a renegade, lending his hand to the corrupting and perverting of this unhappy country. Rosmer calls it a work of liberation, of liberating the minds and purifying the wills of the people. Kroll calls it ‘poisoning our whole social life’ and dragging everyone down into the mud.

This is why, after much thought, he left the church and ceased to be a clergyman and now a ‘great world of truth and freedom’ has been revealed to him. In fact Kroll helped crystallise his decision. Rosmer has read the bitter, sarcastic, sneering articles Kroll has written and this made him realise the country is descending into civil war and anger. Rosmer sees it as his job to restore peace via democracy.

Kroll is disgusted and says he can’t remain in the house a moment longer. He predicts that Rosmer will come round, after all it is hard for a man to hold out by himself. But Rosmer replies he is not alone, there are two of them, just as Rebecca returns to the stage after seeing Brendel off.

Kroll notes this and makes some muttered remarks along the lines of ‘hah! Just as Beata said’ implying that Rosmer’s dead wife, Kroll’s sister, predicted Rosmer and Rebecca were becoming an item … And with that he sweeps out.

So Rosmer confirms that he has finally spilt the beans and taken his stand and gotten it off his chest and thanks Rebecca before saying he’ll turn in for the night. All of which he does in a brotherly way i.e. no declarations of love or kisses or anything. It’s clear that he regards them only as friends, something which will become important later on.

Act 2

This act, as a whole, depicts the wonderful, intricate and appalling entrapment of Rosmer in a number of webs and nets he never imagined. The sense of liberation and release he felt after telling Kroll about his new-found liberation is comprehensively trashed and turned into its opposite, angst-ridden guilt and apprehension.

So: Next morning Rosmer tells Rebecca he feels a huge relief getting the secret of his new allegiance off his chest, he slept like a baby and feels wonderfully light and optimistic. Rebecca disconcerts him by saying she sent Brendel on his way with a short hand-written message for him to give to Mortensgaard. Hmmm. It was done with the best intentions but links his name with both Brendel and Mortensgaard which he didn’t want to do…

To their surprise Kroll is paying them a visit bright and early. In an important detail, he is surprised to discover ‘Miss West’ walking round in her dressing gown and takes this for precisely the kind of disorderly overturning of conventions which is ruining society, in fact he will take it as an indication that Rosmer and Rebecca are living in a state of free love.

Next he informs Rosmer what Brendel got up to the night before, namely he pawned the greatcoat Rosmer lent him and spent all the money Rosmer gave him on booze, getting drunk and then rounding on his low drinking pals as a bunch of lowlife losers at which he was physically thrown out of the tavern. What this is really doing is showing how the Real World turns our best intentions astray. To put it another way, demonstrates how, no matter how pure your intentions, the world always twists and compromises them.

Next Kroll informs Rosmer that Miss West has been corresponding with the editor of The Searchlight. Rosmer knows about this because Rebecca just told him, but still Kroll makes it sound sinister. Also it hugely offends him because – key fact – Mortenson uses the pages of his paper, The Searchlight, to ceaselessly pillory and mock Kroll.

When Rosmer says Rebecca is a free woman and they both cherish their freedom, Kroll makes his next attack. This is the suggestion that Rebecca is deceiving him and he is the innocent dupe of her schemes.

To do this he backtracks a bit to discuss the mental state of the wife who committed suicide, Beata. Rosmer repeats that his wife had mental issues and cites two aspects: one was that she repeatedly had fits when she made sensual advances to him which he quite rightly rebuffed (reminding us that Rosmer is not a romantic revolutionary but a clergyman), second that they discovered she couldn’t bear children and she beat herself up about this, and the two factors helped undermine her reason and led her to suicide while mentally unbalanced.

Now Kroll delivers a killer blow: what if Beata wasn’t unhinged at all but had long suspected Rebecca and Rosmer were having a relationship, saw that she made him happy, knew that she could probably bear him children, and so did away with herself in complete lucidity of mind for Rosmer’s sake, to clear the way for him and Rebecca to marry, to make him happy!

And now Kroll drops his bombshell evidence: Before she killed herself, Beata came to see him – twice. First time Beata told Kroll that Rosmer was losing his faith, something Kroll found so fantastic that he didn’t believe her. Second time she told him to expect White Horses (the local legend associated with death) at Rosmershal and said: ‘I haven’t much time left because now Johannes must marry Rebecca.’ That was on the Thursday and on the Saturday she killed herself.

Kroll is implying Rosmer was having an affair with Rebecca, that Beata realised this and did away with herself to let them be together. Rosmer insists he and Rebecca are nothing but close friends.

Kroll moves on to make the point that, setting aside his own distaste for whatever setup Rosmer’s got going with Rebecca, he’s advising him not to publicise it: not to publicise that he’s apostasised from his faith. Rosmer replies that he wants to tell The Truth but Kroll warns it will have dire consequences for him.

KROLL: You have no idea of the fury of the storm which will break over your head.

Mortensgaard

To both of their surprise, the editor of the Searchlight newspaper, Peter Mortensgaard arrives. Kroll is incensed and says this confirms all his worst fears about Rosmer conspiring with the enemy, pauses just long enough to exchange insults with Mortensgaard, then storms out slamming the door.

Mortensgaard has come to confirm the rumour that Rosmer has joined the progressive party. If so this is big news, a man of his standing, and he’ll publish an article about it next day. Rosmer confirms that he has come down on the side of the radicals and has also abandoned, or been liberated from, his faith.

But Mortensgaard is not pleased to hear this. Rosmer’s entire value to the movement would be that he is Pastor Rosmer. If he’s also abandoned his faith he becomes just one more freethinker, in fact they have too many freethinkers in the movement, plus people will be upset about his apostasy. All things considered, he must hush it up.

Rosmer is, of course, appalled, because his whole idea was to live in truth. He criticises Mortensgaard for being cynical but Mortensgaard replies he has no choice. he is a ‘marked man’ and who marked him? It was Rosmer, back in his fully believing days, who excoriated Mortensgaard for his lapse and was instrumental in having him sacked from his position at the local school. Now Mortensgaard says the tables are turned – it may be Rosmer who becomes the marked man.

Does he understand how Kroll and his pals at Country Times will be after his blood. They will sniff out anything, any black mark, even the slightest transgression in order to drag his name into the mud.

Then Mortensgaard reveals that Rosmer’s wife, Beata, sent him a letter. In it she begged Mortensgaard to be forgiving of her husband, stating there were many people who wished him ill, saying that he was struggling with his faith, and ending by insisting that there was no impropriety going on at Rosmersholm, none at all.

To recap, Mortensgaard tells Rosmer to be very careful. If rumours do spread about his apostasy and his free love with Rebecca it will not only do Rosmer harm, of more concern to Mortensgaard is that it will damage the radical cause. And with that, he exits.

Rebecca

It transpires that Rebecca was hiding in the bedroom off the main room where these two dialogues (with Kroll and Mortensgaard) took place. She heard everything. Rosmer laments that their ‘pure and beautiful friendship’ which he thought he took so much care to hide is turning out to cause so much trouble.

Also he’s beginning to doubt whether Beata was indeed insane. Kroll and Mortensgaard’s accounts suggest she was very much in command of her wits. Rosmer now starts to pace up and down in an agony of guilt. Did Beata think they were having an affair? Did she notice how much they liked to be together, talking about the same books and so on? She must have gone about sick with jealousy and humiliation but bottling it all up.

This morning he felt so happy but now he feels like he is stifling under a crushing weight. He will never again know joy etc. He will always be nagged by this doubt that his wife knew everything and, in her wretchedness, killed herself.

Rebecca tries to cheer him up, reminds him he is a free man who wants to live the free life, his visions of going door to door spreading joy and enlightenment. At which he picks up the idea and says there is one way to blot out the past, by creating a bright present. Which is why he asks her to marry him. He thinks it will help him throw off the nightmare of the past and live ‘in freedom, in joy, in passion’.

Rebecca is ecstatic for about 30 seconds and then masters herself and says, no, she can never be his wife, never. And he must never ask her why! If he proposes again she will be forced to leave and will never come back! And she exits leaving Rosmer utterly confused.

Act 3

Morning of the next day. Mrs Helseth and Rebecca are chatting. We learn that Mortensgaard was dismissed from his post at the school because he made pregnant a married woman who was separated from her husband.

One thing leads to another and Mrs Helseth reveals it was she who took the letter Beata wrote to Mortensgaard. We witness, I think, Rebecca gently coercing Mrs Helseth to agree to the proposition that Beata was mad. She suggests it began when they learned she couldn’t have children. Rebecca comments it’s probably just as well the pastor didn’t have children what with all that crying, and Mrs Helseth points out the spooky fact that children at Rosmersholm never cry and, when they grow up, never laugh.

Enter Rosmer. He asks why Rebecca didn’t come into his bedroom to see him this morning nor brought the paper. This is unusual. She is being friendly but distant.

When he opens the Country Times it is to discover a torrent of abuse aimed at him and Rebecca. He puts it down in disgust and says this kind of thing will ruin mankind; it must be countered with a spirit of love and forgiveness.

But his thoughts now don’t roam far from guilt about Beata. He tells Rebecca that all their fine words about a pure and noble friendship between them, maybe they were fooling themselves, maybe they always were in love and Beata saw it more clearly than them and was so distraught she killed herself. Oh the guilt the guilt! When she reminds him he has a noble cause to fulfil, bringing love and forgiveness etc, he says no cause ever flourished if led by a guilty man. Tiring of this self-pity Rebecca gets his hat and stick and tells him to go for a big walk.

Once Rosmer is out of the way, Rebecca gets Mrs Helseth to let Kroll in. He has been waiting all this time to see her. There is another great revelation which rearranges our understanding of the play. Kroll reveals that he once had feelings for Rebecca, she once bewitched him – and he believes she led him on, she fooled him because all she wanted was an introduction to Rosmer, he was just a stepping stone to her getting the place there.

Rebecca counters that it was Beata who begged for Rebecca to come and be her companion, but Kroll says that’s because she (Rebecca) bewitched her, too, resulting in a kind of desperate infatuation. In a remarkably frank exchange she sits and listens while he accuses her of seeking her ends with cold calculation.

Kroll launches a new attack. He says all her (immoral calculating) behaviour can be traced to her background. And in particular the fact that she is a bastard born out of wedlock. Her mother died when she was a baby and she was taken into the household of Dr West but Kroll is at pains to explain that this is because she was West’s love child with her mother. She counters that Dr West didn’t come to town till after she was born but Kroll has been doing research and has discovered that West made a visit about the time Rebecca was conceived. She was his love child.

Kroll develops his attack. Why is she, an ’emancipated’ woman, so upset about the possibility of her illegitimacy? It just goes to prove one of his premises which is that emancipated ‘freethinkers’ just read fancy books full of big ideas but don’t really absorb them, don’t really change their values.

Kroll is saying all this because he can’t really believe the pastor has abandoned his faith. He can’t believe the scion of such a distinguished family has betrayed his values and his legacy. He thinks it is all book learning and Rosmer will revert.

Above all, Kroll tells Rebecca he must get Rosmer to legalise the relationship. They must be married or a world of fury will fall on Rosmer’s head: he will be hunted and exposed to ruthless attack.

At that moment she sees Rosmer returning from his walk. Kroll wants to skip out the back to avoid seeing his old friend but Rebecca begs and insists he stay. And when Rosmer walks in he is amazed to see Kroll here, especially after the vicious insults he read in that morning’s Country Times (Kroll says he had no part in writing them).

But Rebecca calmly takes control and tells the two men to sit down then she makes a dramatic confession. It was she who drove Beata to commit suicide. When she came down from the North of the country it felt like she was entering a new world of opportunities. She learned from Brendel that his old pupil the famous Johannes Rosmer was struggling with his faith, with new ideas, with intellectual emancipation. She was inspired to cleave to this man and go on a great journey of exploration together. She inveigled her way into the household by bewitching Beata, a weak personality, making the sickly woman utterly dependent on her. And she persuaded Johannes they were soul partners, intellectual mates. Then – and this is the bit that makes both men gasp – she slowly worked on Beata, step by step, using different arguments: the two main ones seem to have been that she was childless and therefore depriving the pastor of heirs; and the most shameful/intense one that Rebecca and Johannes’s relationship was becoming so intense that soon they… and she doesn’t even say it but I think the implication is that risked becoming lovers i.e. having sex.

In other words it was Rebecca’s constant chipping away at Beata’s confidence and morale which eventually pointed her the way to walk down to the millstream and throw herself in. Both the men are horrified. Kroll says, See Johannes? See the kind of woman you’re sharing your home and life with.

Horrified beyond any kind of response Rosmer simply asks whether Kroll is going into town and whether he may accompany him, then both men get up and exit without even looking at her. Rebecca stares out the window for a while and then asks Mrs Helseth to fetch the big trunk. She’s leaving and she will never return.

Act 4

It is the evening and all Rebecca’s bags are packed to go away. Rosmer is still in town. Act 4 opens with a brief dialogue between Rebecca and Mrs Helseth in which the latter declares she thinks it mean of the pastor to get Rebecca in the family way and force her to leave like this. On further questioning Mrs Helseth says she’s prepared to believe this of the pastor, who she’s known for years, ever since the accusations were printed about him in the Country Times. And what can you expect of a man who goes over to Mortensgaard’s side. In other words, she epitomises how easily swayed uneducated population is.

But then Rosmer returns. He is surprised to find Rebecca with her bags packed. She explains that she feels quite broken, all her hopes are crushed. Then Rosmer confesses that he met all his old friends at Kroll’s house and they persuaded him to give up his evangelising about freedom and whatnot. It’s not really him.

And he now thinks Rebecca used him. He was wax in her hands. She agrees that coming to Rosmersholm was part of a plan but then says something new. What wasn’t part of her plan was to find herself swept up in an overwhelming lust for Johannes, something she couldn’t control (obviously she doesn’t use the word ‘lust’, she says ‘wild uncontrollable passion’). It took control of her and it was this which drove her rivalry with Beata, which became ‘a fight to the death’.

What Rosmer doesn’t understand is why she’s leaving at precisely the moment when she has everything she wanted: her rival is out of the way and last night he proposed to her – why the devil did she turn him down?

Because once she was living with him as brother and sister or as very good friends, once he started confiding his thoughts and feelings in her, she found ‘that horrible, sensual passion’ fading away. But what followed was complicated. Because on the one hand she felt a great ennobling love, while at the other…a sense of powerlessness and helplessness which overcame her, weakened her, infected her. Suddenly she feels her compromised past as a barrier she can’t penetrate.

But then it’s Rosmer’s turn to tell her he just doesn’t believe a word she says any more. If only she could prove to him she loves him. Instead he is stricken with doubt and not just about her, about himself. If he gives up his dream of evangelising men for happiness, what does he have left? What is there worth living for?

At which point there’s a knock at the door. Surprisingly, it’s the rambling poet Brendel. He announces that he’s leaving town. he stood up to give a lecture and finally put into words the grand ideas he’s been harbouring for 25 years only to discover that…he had nothing to say, the cupboard was bare.

He asks Rosmer for a loan but then surprises him by saying a loan of any ideals he can spare a man now bereft of ideals or hope. As to Rosmer, he warns him against building any hope on Rebecca, this ‘enchanting little mermaid’, unless – and he goes into weird visionary mode – she chops off her little finger at the joint and then cuts off her ear! And with that he walks out into the night.

Rebecca is still determined to leave. Rosmer calls her to sit by him and explains that he has provided for her future. If he dies she is the legatee of his will. But, she says, you won’t die for a long time. Well, Rosmer hints at taking his own life. After all he has proved a complete failure, abandoning the traditions of his forebears, failing to have any heirs, and then abandoning the brave fight for freedom he crapped on about without even starting to take part in the battle. What a failure!

She rejects this, saying he has made at least one convert, her; he has raised and ennobled her above her sensual passion to a selfless love. He refuses to believe it. She says is there nothing, nothing I can do to convince you?

And this leads to the climax of the play when Rosmer says, If she really believes it, if she has the courage of her convictions, if she truly loves him, then… she will go the same way as Beata!

Rosmer (or Ibsen) twists it into a real challenge: If she kills herself she will prove herself as worthy as Beata, prove that she loves him, prove that such love exists and so reinspire him with the faith to re-undertake his mission, to bring nobility to the minds of men, faith in man’s power etc.

Then Rosmer falters and wonders what he’s said, but Rebecca is calm and focused. Yes, she will do it. She just asks that they drag the stream and bring up her body quickly.

Ibsen loads Rebecca with reasons to do it: to make amends for Beata, to atone for her crime; to prove she is as brave as Beata; to prove to Rosmer she loves him; to restore his faith in nobility; to save what is best in him; otherwise she will be like an anchor weighing him down; and a slave dragging behind herself a crippled existence.

He lays his hand on her head and says they are man and wife. There is no God, no institution has rights over them. They make their own rules and if they choose to be married, they are. He will go with her. He will go as far as her.

I thought he was probably going to watch her from the window walk down the path to the bridge etc but in fact Rosmer intones a lot of pious bunkum – ‘the husband shall go with his wife, as the wife with her husband…We go together, Rebecca, I go with you, you with me…For now we too are one’ – and they exit hand in hand.

Of course someone has to tell us what happens to Mrs Helseth, the housekeeper, conveniently enters at this point, looks around for them both, goes to the window, sees them in the middle of the bridge, leaning against the railing, and throwing themselves in, and screams.

And, interestingly enough, after all this tortuous talk about nobility and freedom and emancipation and so on, she sees events in a completely different light. In a more folk, uneducated way, she sees their double suicide as the revenge of Beata, ‘The dead woman has taken them’!

I don’t know if Ibsen intended it, but I love the idea that the previous four acts of fancy talk and high-falutin’ ideals all have the rug pulled from under them with the revelation that it has been a ghost story all along, and Beata is the unseen ghost who works via the foibles and frailties of the humans who let her die in order to get her macabre revenge!

James McFarlane’s introduction

In his introduction to the World’s Classics edition of the play James McFarlane makes interesting points. He says one of the sources of the play was the deep disappointment Ibsen felt on returning to Norway in 1885 after eleven years in exile. He wanted to settle in h is native land but was sickened and nauseated by what he found. Above all he loathed politicians and journalists of all stripes. Apparently in the notes for ‘The Wild Duck’ he said politicians and journalists would make excellent subjects for vivisectionists i.e. to be cut open while alive.

Hence the portrait of Kroll, a type of the tyrannical and sneering right-wing politician; but the equally negative portrait of Mortensgaard, willing to sacrifice principle for expediency. Hence his contempt for a figure like Brendel, a would-be poet, overflowing with fine sentiments who finds it impossible to put anything down on paper.

He gave a speech to a workers’ meeting in which he said democracy is only as good as the people in it; what was needed was a transformation of character, an ennobling of individuals, very much Rosmer’s prospectus.

The play shows how characters are changed and not for the better. Rosmer represents intellect, the academic personality, conservative by family and tradition, of great personal integrity; Rebecca represents sensual passion, advanced thinking, action and energy and ambition. To some extent they awaken or exchange these qualities in each other, Rosmer becoming roused for action to change society, while Rebecca finds her sensual drive being burned away by a more selfless love.

However, this doesn’t ennoble them as you might expect, but has a wholly negative effect. Rebecca comes to feel paralysed, infected with loss of willpower, while Rosmer’s dreams of social transformation collapse as he realises he’s really not the man for the job. Having abandoned their origins for new lives and then discovered their new lives simply don’t work for them, there’s only one way out.

Rosmersholm is a place which drains everyone of life, where the children never cry and the adults never laugh, where first the wife and then the husband and his lover are driven to suicide, a place where all ideals are drained and stifled and in this way, McFarlane suggests, it is a metaphor for the Norway which Ibsen so hated and despised.

Credit

I read ‘Rosmersholm’ in the 1960 translation by James McFarlane which was packaged up, along with his translations of ‘The Wild Duck’ and ‘An Enemy of the People’, into a World’s Classics paperback in 1988. I read the 2009 reprint.

Ibsen reviews

The Doll’s House (1879)
Ghosts (1881)
An Enemy of the People (1882)
The Wild Duck (1884)
Rosmersholm (1886)
Hedda Gabler (1890)
The Master Builder (1892)

Drama reviews

Play reviews

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by Simon on October 7, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Theatre, Translation

Posted by Simon on October 7, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/10/07/rosmersholm-henrik-ibsen/

The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen (1884)

‘Oh really! There’s no end to all these comings and goings!’
(Hjalmar Ekdal accurately summarising the busyness of an Ibsen play)

The backstory is carefully concealed and takes two acts to leak out but it is this: a generation ago Old Ekdal and Haakon Werle were in business together. Something happened whereby Old Ekdal was sent to prison, to do hard labour, and emerged a broken man, whereas Werle went on to become a business tycoon, managing a booming timber company. The play starts 20 or so years later and focuses on the sons of these two men, Hjalmar Ekdal, Old Ekdal’s son (who has become a photographer and lives in shabby poverty with his uneducated, former-serving girl wife Gina) – and rich old Werle’s son, Gregers Werle, who has grown up in a wealthy household but has a yen to improve the world. Feeling guilty for his unspecified role in Old Ekdal’s fate, Werle has given broken old Ekdel a sinecure of a job ‘copying’ papers which helps keep the Ekdal household afloat, but otherwise keeps him hidden away like a shameful secret…

Cast

Werle – merchant, factory owner and so on
Gregers Werle – his son
Mrs Sörby – Werle’s housekeeper who he plans to marry

Old Ekdal, broken, alcoholic fantasist
Hjalmar Ekdal – Old Ekdal’s son, a photographer
Gina Ekdal – Hjalmar’s wife
Hedvig – their daughter, 14 years old

Dr Relling – a doctor who lives downstairs from the Ekdals
Molvik – a former theology student who lives downstairs from the Ekdals

Graberg – book-keeper to Werle
Pettersen – servant to Werle
Jensen – hired waiter

Act 1

A grand dinner at Werle’s house which he is giving for his son, Gregers. The pair, father and son, don’t get on and only communicate via business letters. Werle is cross that Gregers invited his old schoolfriend Hjalmar because it took the number of guests to unlucky 13. We are introduced to two or three of the guests who are portrayed as fat and greedy (and named only as types – the bald guest, the fat guest, the short-sighted guest) although it is also repeated that they move in ‘Court circles’, strongly suggesting the ambience of wealth and influence which old Werle operates in.

The play starts in a studiedly indirect way: instead of going straight in with the main characters we are shown below-stairs chat between Werle’s servants, gossiping about the old man, about his reputation for being a lad when he was young and about the fate of Old Ekdal, hiw one-time business partner who ended up in prison.

The main events in Act 1 are:

1. Gregers talks to his old school-friend Hjalmar who he hasn’t seen for years and discovers that a) his training as a photographer was funded by Werle and b) Hjalmar married a former servant woman at the Werle house, Gina Hansen.

Interrupting this, Old Ekdal himself appears, he’s been working late with a colleague named Graberg the book-keeper and, the other gates being locked, the only way the pair can exit is via the living room where the grand party is happening. Old Ekdal’s appearance is like Banquo’s ghost, all the guests fall silent as he shuffles across the room and his own son, Hjalmar, turns to the fireplace in order to ignore him. Shame all round…once he’s gone conversation picks up and Mrs Sörby promises to play the piano to entertain the guests.

After interacting badly with the rich sophisticated guests (very pointedly he is made not to understand the idea that ‘vintage’ wines are older and more valued), Hjalmar makes his apologies and leaves. The other guests are being entertained by Werle’s housekeeper Mrs Sörby in the back room, which allows for:

2. A confrontation between Gregers and his father in which all kinds of things come out:

it was Werle who set Hjalmar up as a photographer, out of guilt at ruining his father
around the same time Werle fixed up for Hjalmar to marry the former maid Gina and this was because…
Gina was just the latest female servant Werle had been carrying on with, then tired off and so dismissed from his service, sent her home to live with her mother, but engineered her marriage to Hjalmar
Werle’s wife, Gregers’s mother, knew all about her husband’s infidelities and told Gregers

As to why Werle has given this whole party for his son, and invited so many outsiders, Werle says he wants to make Gregers a business opportunity, he wants to bring him into the family firm as a partner. But Gregers discerns the Machiavellian scheme beneath this – Werle is going to marry his housekeeper Mrs Sörby and so he set up this party because … he wanted to present a respectable face to the important people in his community – this is why the guests Gregers doesn’t know are at ‘his’ party, because it’s nothing to do with him, it’s to do with his father wanting to put on a show of happy father and son and, by implication, of his son happily accepting his (Werle’s) forthcoming marriage to Mrs Sörby. A tableau for public consumption.

Werle has, typically, used his son, as he always has, and as he always used and betrayed his mother. Gregers is beyond angry, he overflows with contempt for his father, who feels it.

In their final skirmishing Werle renews his offer of a partnership in the business but Gregers turns this down, revealing that he has just discovered a new purpose in life. The rest of the play reveal that this purpose is to save and redeem the much-abused Ekdel family…

Act 2

The setting switches to Hjalmar Ekdel’s photography studio, which is also the main room for Hjalmar and Gina. It’s the same evening as Werle’s dinner. Gina is sitting with their 14-year-old daughter Hedwig. Their conversation is designed to show how poor they are, not illiterate peasant poor but scrimping to make ends meet. Gina talks about the high cost of butter and both are thrilled that they’ve managed to let their spare room which will bring in a bit of extra money.

(Apparently, in the original language Gina’s speech is littered with grammar mistakes and malapropisms i.e. getting words mixed up, to indicate her lack of education, though English translations struggle to convey this.)

Old Ekdal appears with a bundle of documents to copy and shuffles across to his room. Although he tries to hide it Gina and Hedvig realise he’s got a bottle of booze. Years in prison broke him. He is an alcoholic.

Hjalmar arrives, he shows off some of the knowledge he acquired at the party (the banter about vintages) which impresses the girls but Hedvig had been telling Gina how excited she was because he promised to bring her something, but he forgot. He rummages around for the menu from the party to give her but Hedvig can’t help crying with disappointment.

Then Gregers arrives. He is rather shame-faced in front of Gina. His polite enquiries reveal that Hedvig is 14 and Gina and Hjalmar married 15 years ago. I think we are meant to deduce that Hedvig is old Werle’s child i.e. the old man got his serving maid pregnant, sent her home to her mum, who then engineered for her to be married off to the naive Hjalmar.

When she is out of the room fetching their guest a beer, Gina and Hjalmar also reveal that Hedvig has a degenerative disease of the eyes. They haven’t told her but a doctor has confirmed it. When Hjalmar says the doctor said it was hereditary Gregers starts in a way that suggests he realises it was inherited from his father. As in Ghosts, the implication seems to be that sexually transmitted infections are hereditary, which is incorrect. The symptoms of an STI such as syphilis would only be passed to Hedvig if the mother, Gina, had them but here she is apparently right as rain.

The act ends when, as part of telling them about the apartment, Gina and Hjalmar mention that there’s a spare room they want to let out. Now in fact, before the men arrived home, Gina and Hedvig had been gleefully celebrating that they’d managed to let the room and would thus be generating family income but had agreed not to tell Hjalmar till the following day. The result of this decision is that Hjalmar doesn’t know the spare room is let and when Gregers asks if he can have it, Hjalmar promptly says yes, although the girls look at each in mortification.

But the most important part of the act is when Old Man Ekdal insists on letting Gregers into their secret – this is that the entire back part of the loft, which they reveal by rolling apart two sliding doors, is a kind of menagerie: it contains hutches for rabbits and hens along with loads of pigeon roosts.

And Old Ekdal proudly displays his latest acquisition, a wild duck which was shot by Gregers’s father during a shoot, which was winged and fell into the lake and down into the water but was rescued by a plucky hunting dog. They took it back to Werle’s grand house where it didn’t thrive to Werle ordered it killed but his servant, Pettersen, who we met in Act 1, is friendly with Old Ekdal and saved it and passed it on to him. And now it’s been given pride of place in a special manger, here in the Ekdal attic.

Act 3

Same scene, the main room at Hjalmar Ekdal’s which is to be the setting of all the remaining scenes. Next morning. Hjalmar is grumpily getting on with touching up the most recent photographs. He snaps at Gina who has booked a couple to come and have their photo done. It becomes plain that he is a difficult man to live with, partly because he feels the weight of so many responsibilities.

Gregers and Hedvig: Gregers finds himself alone with Hedvig and finds out more about her, discovers that Hjalmar has stopped her going to school (because of the strain on her sight, though she doesn’t know that), promised to home school her but hasn’t found the time. Instead she helps out round the house and spends her spare time in the back room which, besides being a menageries is a lumber room full of old books which she loves to read or rather gaze at the pictures. Hjalmar realises she is a sensitive child full of untapped potential.

Gregers and Hjalmar: a lengthy exchange in which Hjalmar reveals that he doesn’t like photography and leaves most of that to Gina. His heart lies in his inventions. Some of this is tinkering, for example making not just the sliding doors which partition off the menagerie but also a kind of curtain which can be raised from the floor. He also likes stripping down, oiling and fixing his father’s antique rifle. He is, in other words, good with his hands, not with the aesthetics of photography.

And it’s now that Hjalmar reveals to Gregers he’s working on a marvellous invention which will restore the good name of the Ekdel family name. It’s only commitment to this project which keeps his head up above all these ‘petty things’ i.e. the shabby life he is forced to lead. We don’t get any detail about the invention but a strong feeling that Hjalmar is bonkers.

He also has a pistol, in fact to Gregers’ alarm he fires it in the menageries then, realising Hjalmar is here, emerges to explain that he indulges his father’s whim and fantasy that he is a still a proud lieutenant in the army. He places the gun on a shelf telling Hedvig to be careful with it as it still has a round in the chamber.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to instantly suspect that a loaded gun, on a stage, must inevitably go off. From this point onwards the only question is who is going to get killed.

In fact talk of the gun triggers a monologue explaining how brave and proud Lieutenant Ekdel was in his prime, a hunter of bears, a commander of man but reveals that when he was sentenced there was a moment when he was alone with his pistol and put it to his head but… failed to pull the trigger. And then, even more upsettingly, tells Gregers about the time that he, Hjalmar, the son of a disgraced army officer, crushed by circumstance, also held the gun against his breast, but also bottled out – despite all his ill fate, determined to live (p.166).

Trying to make light of all this, Gregers says there’s something of the wild duck about Hjalmar, what with being shot and winged, and mauled by a hunting dog and plunged down to the depths of a lake. He continues the metaphor, telling his friend he is living in a poisoned atmosphere, a swamp (from which Gregers obviously means to save him) but Hjalmar becomes offended and asks him to stop (p.167).

Lunch. Gina has invited to the two men who live downstairs, Dr Relling, a doctor, and Molvik, formerly a student of theology. Lunch is, of course, the setting for several further revelations. Just as the two guests from downstairs are greedily tucking in, Old Ekdal emerges from the loft with a fresh rabbit skin, announcing that he’s just killed, skinned and salted a rabbit. Tender-stomached Molvik makes to vomit and rushes out the room.

But the main revelation is Dr Relling telling everyone that, when he was young, Gregers used to go among the cottages of the labourers up at his father’s works preaching about ‘the claim of the ideal’. In other words, Gregers is an inveterate idealist, preacher and saver of souls. This adds depth to his attempts to heal the Ekdel household.

Hjalmar has just offended everyone, especially Gina, by telling them he doesn’t like the poisonous atmosphere, when there’s a knock at the door. Just as in ‘An Enemy of the People’, the set is busier than Piccadilly Circus.

To everyone’s surprise it is the villain of the piece, old Håkon Werle. He asks to see his son in private so the others vacate the stage. Werle asks Gregers if there’s any chance of his returning home or accepting the partnership in the firm to which his son, inevitably, says No. What does he expect to achieve here? To open Hjalmar’s eyes to the truth. And does he expect Hjalmar to thank him for having his eyes opened?

Lastly the father asks his son if he’s going to return up to the works? No, he regards himself as having quit his employ. How is he going to live? Oh he has a few savings which will last as long as it takes. This exchange strongly confirms the sense that Gregers is going to carry out his mission then kill himself.

His father leaves, the other characters re-enter the stage and Gregers invites Hjalmar for a walk, he has a few things to tell him. Both Relling the doctor and Gina tell him not to go but Hjalmar asks what possible harm could there be?

Well, the audience realises, the vast harm of having the bottom ripped out of his world.

Act 4

Later the same day, Gina had handled the appointment with the couple who wanted to be photographed and is getting anxious about Hjalmar. He arrives home and is a changed man. Gregers has foolishly and selfishly told him everything. For a start he forgets that it’s his daughter’s 15th birthday tomorrow. When she mentions the wild duck he rashly says he wishes he could wring its neck which reduces her to tears. He hugs her and sends her off for her evening walk.

This allows Hjalmar to confront Gina with all the lies she’s told. She clarifies that she didn’t sleep with Werle when she was in her service, it was afterwards, when she’d gone back to live with her mother and her mother encouraged her to in order to make money. So Hedvig is old Werle’s child.

One last point: Gina has always done the household accounts so Hjalmar’s never realised how much money Werle contributed to them, allegedly pay for Old Ekdal’s copying work. Hjalmar thought he was supporting his family but turns out even this is a lie.

Gregers, in his idealistic stupidity, knocks and comes in expecting to find a scene of seraphic sweetness and light so is disappointed to find the couple in deep gloom. Gina curses him. Relling the doctor comes in, quickly learns the situation and warns them all that it’s the children who suffer most in broken marriage.

At which point there’s another knock on the door and it’s Mrs Sörby. She’s come to say goodbye because she’s going up to the works at Höidal because she’s getting married to old Werle. They all react surprised but Dr Relling reminisces when they knew each other when they were younger. At least Werle won’t beat her up like her first husband, now dead. Gregers toys with telling his father his new wife once had a thing for Dr Relling but Mrs Sörby says she’s told her husband-to-be everything about her past, no secrets at all.

She reveals she will be a useful housemeet to Werle considering that he’s going blind. Now we see the genetic link between Werle and Hedvig.

Hjalmar now invokes the same stupid idea Dr Relling accused Gregers of peddling to the labourers, ‘the claim of the ideal’, and in this spirit announces to Mrs Sörby that he pledges to pay off the entire ‘debt of honour’ i.e. all the money Werle has given to his household under cover of paying Old Ekdal. This is, obviously, a stupid and impractical thing to do.

Re-enter Hedvig who is girlishly excited because she met Mrs Sörby going out who gave her an advance present for her birthday, a letter. When she shows it the others realise it is addressed in Old Werle’s hand. Hjalmar opens it and it is a splendid gift from old Werle; that Old Ekdal need do no more work but will be awarded a pension of 100 crowns a month and when he dies, this sum will pass to Hedvig! Hedvig is, of course, thrilled and says she’ll give it to her mummy and daddy and asks why they aren’t happy.

Gregers asks Hjalmar what kind of man he is and, in effect, goads him until Hjalmar calmly tears the letter in two. He then asks Gina why the old man encouraged her to marry him and Gina reluctantly explains that Werle expected to be able to call by and shag her after her marriage. Hjalmar asks Gina point blank whether Hedvig is his child and she says she doesn’t know.

Hjalmar says he can’t stay in the same house a moment longer. Gregers says he must stay in order to win through to ‘that sublime mood of magnanimity and forgiveness’ which he is so obsessed with promoting, like all zealots, like all interfering busybodies.

Hedvig comes out of the kitchen as Hjalmar prepares to leave, he refuses to hug her, she clings on to him screaming, he can’t bear it, pushes her away and walks out. Gina says he’ll go fetch him back and exit.

This leaves Gregers along with Hedvig. She doesn’t understand why her Daddy has left, was it something she did? She mentions the wild duck and Gregers decoys the conversation onto that. Turns out she’s added the wild duck to her regular evening prayer for her father. Gregers makes the preposterous proposal that Hedvig should kill the wild duck as a sacrifice in order to win her father back, to show that she is ready to make the biggest sacrifice in her world for his love.

Gina comes back saying Hjalmar’s gone out with Dr Relling and Molvik on the piss, and ruing the interference of clever strangers.

Act 5

Next morning, heavy snow on the skylights. Gina discovers Hjalmar did go out with the boys the night before and spent the night at Dr Relling’s i.e. downstairs.

Dr Relling arrives and delivers a blistering reality check. he tells Gregers he has a bad case of inflamed scruples; he is addicted to finding heroes to worship who are not heroes at all, like this Hjalmar who was very plausible at college because he was handsome and could quote other people’s ideas and words but was always a hollow man.

Dr Relling goes on to deliver what may be the play’s Big Idea which is the crucial importance of the LIFE-LIE. This is the lie about ourselves which enables us to go on living. Dr Relling has invented a category, the demoniac, to describe Molvik, who wears it as a badge of pride which explains his behaviour. Old Ekdal has invented his own life-lie and treats the loft with its old Christmas trees and rabbits as if it’s a vast forest which the he-man hunter bravely treks through. And Hjamar had a life-lie of himself as Provider for his family who was on the cusp of making the Great Invention which would free his family, until Gregers came along to destroy it.

Gregers disapprovingly asks if Dr Relling equates his ‘life-lie’ with Gregers’ notion of ‘the ideal’ and Dr Relling says, Damn right he does.

Hedvig enters. When Gregers points out that she hasn’t killed the wild duck, Hedvig very sensibly says she woke up this morning and it seemed like a silly idea. Ah, says Gregers, that is because you are a mere child and haven’t learned the ‘joyous spirit of self-sacrifice’. He really is a sanctimonious wanker.

Gregers leaves and Old Ekdal enters from the loft. Hedvig gets him to describe how he would go about hunting and shooting a wild duck – in the chest, that’s the place, he explains. After he’s pottered out Hedvig goes over to the shelf where Hjalmar left the pistol with one bullet in it and is touching it when Gina enters and she quickly turns away.

Hjalmar knocks and enters. Hedvig runs crying over to him but he cruelly pushes her away. He’s only come for his scientific books. (It’s a telling detail that Gina tells him these books a) lack spines i.e. they’re knackered and old but at the same time b) haven’t had the pages cut i.e. he’s never read them. The entire inventor thing is a palpable life-lie.)

When Hjalmar goes to go into a bedroom to look for his autobiography and other papers he sees Hedvig again. She comes out and tries to cling to her but he pushes her away. It’s then that she starts to think about the wild duck, about Gregers’s suggestion to sacrifice it. She goes to the shelf, takes down the pistol, hides it and sneaks backstage into the loft without her parents noticing, as they fuss and fret about which suitcase Hjalmar can use to take his stuff etc.

Gina asks if he wants to take his flute but he says no, just the pistol. They both look for it but can’t find it and assume the old man’s gone off with it.

Gina is admirably restrained. With the common sense of the uneducated she doesn’t make a scene or listen to any of Hjalmar’s fluff about the ideal and instead makes him a hot breakfast and cup of coffee. Erst fressen, den der Moral. Even as he craps on with his typically male grandiloquence and self-flattering visions of going from door to door in the snow asking someone to give him shelter, Gina tops up his coffee, brings him butter and feeds the animal, and the animal softens and asks, well, would it be possible for him to maybe bunk down in the living room for a few days. A process of healing the mind through the body.

In a similar spirit he comes across the letter from old Werle which he tore up yesterday, fingers it a bit, then asks Gina to bring some glue and more paper, and pastes it back together. After all, what right does he have to deprive someone else (his father) of their property.

Unfortunately the meddling imbecile Gregers arrives but Hjalmar is tired of his guff. When Gregers tells him he has his invention to live for, Hjalmar pooh-poohs that there’ll ever be an invention; anything good has already been invented. He reveals it was Dr Relling who gave him the idea of making a Great Invention in Photography, at which Gregers and we the audience go, aha – so this was the life-lie Dr Relling gave him – and that it made Hjalmar intensely happy to have one.

Now his life is in ruins. Above all he wonders whether Hedvig has ever loved him or whether she’s overheard Mrs Sörby and the other women talking, has realised she isn’t Hjalmar’s child, and has played him for a fool, just waiting for the opportunity to get money from her real grandfather and leave. What if Werle and Mrs Sörby come along and entice her away with a better life. Now his love for his daughter has been crushed.

It’s at this point that the gunshot we’ve been waiting for ever since we saw the pistol rings out. Gregers explains that Hedvig got her grandfather to shoot the thing that means most to her, the wild duck, in order to prove her love for her father. Hjalmar takes this at face value and is transformed, saying everything’s going to be alright now.

Unfortunately Old Ekdal comes out his bedroom door wondering what the shot was about. Gregers is even more impressed, that Hedvig has shot the wild duck by herself, but when they throw open the door to the animal loft they, of course, see her lying on the floor.

They carry her out and lay her on the table while Gina shouts down the stairs for Dr Relling who comes running and, after an examination, declares her dead, shot in the heart.

Hjalmar is thrown into an absolute delirium of anguish, if only he could call her back just for a minute, just long enough to tell her how much he infinitely loves her, oh God God, why won’t you allow me to tell her etc.

They carry her body into her bedroom for privacy and Gina tells Hjalmar that now they are the child’s parents, united in sorrow.

Dr Relling tells Gregers it was suicide. The powder burn on the dress indicates it was pressed right up against her chest. Gregers tries to salvage something by saying at least the child’s death will have an ennobling effect on the parents. Dr Relling witheringly replies, Give it nine months. Hjalmar is no poet or hero. He will spend the rest of his life wallowing in sentimentality and self pity. And Dr Relling sums up, maybe, the moral of the story:

RELLING: Life wouldn’t be too bad if only these blessed people who come canvassing their ideals round everyone’s door would leave us poor souls in peace.

Comments

Secrets and lies in marriage (yawn), combined with two of the half dozen oldest stories in the world – the rich and powerful man who has adulterous affairs and children with his servants and the innocent man who is palmed off with someone else’s child.

As the play went on, the simple-minded religiose language of Gregers, who insists his friend is undergoing a great spiritual revival, began to really irritate me. He’s an interfering twat.

Similarly, I got tired of his repeated use of the key phrase ‘claim of the ideal’. a) It’s such a stupid phrase in itself, but b) Ibsen has Gregers repeat it in a totally unrealistic way, more like a parrot than a man. This obtrusive repetition of the play’s catchphrase reminded me of the over-use of the phrase ‘enemy of the people’ which dominates the second half of the play of the same name.

According to the introduction, many critics consider ‘The Wild Duck’ Ibsen’s greatest play and, certainly, all the backstories and information are released in instalments with great cunning and artistry. But, in my opinion, all this artistry is in support of a dull premise. A poor man discovers his child may not be his after all and that his family is secretly supported by wealthy man who’s probably the child’s real father…

The symbolism of the wild duck hung very heavy round the neck of the narrative from its first mention – is it a poor, delicate, wounded and vulnerable creature like the girl who adopts it? Yes.

On top of this is the sheer dumb obviousness of the loaded gun. Everyone knows if you bring a loaded gun onstage in a play it is sooner or later going to be fired, from the moment it appeared the only question was who was going to snuff it and Ibsen plays with this by having Hjalmar tell Gregers about both his and his father’s suicide attempts. But these turn out to be not-so-clever decoys from the true victim.

And I was very upset by the suicide which ends the play but not in the way Ibsen intended: rather than bursting into tears at the sacrifice of this sweet innocent I was upset by how flagrantly manipulative it was.

A digression about opera: in my late 20s and 30s I went to lots of operas, at the Royal Opera House and the English National Opera, at festivals and experimental theatres. All in all I went to about 100 operas. Eventually I started to get a bit fed up with several things about seeing opera, like how long they are and how hot it gets up in the gods at opera houses. But it was something very specific which made me stop buying tickets. I happened to see a run of four or five nineteenth-century operas in a row and in every single one the female lead died. Carmen, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, La Traviata, suddenly I had a kind of revelation. I looked around me and saw hundreds of people all being entertained by the spectacle of women being tortured, blackmailed, threatened, dying of disease or tormented into killing themselves and suddenly, in a flash, it disgusted me. The whole notion of women being subjected to grotesque suffering for my entertainment sickened me. I stopped and I’ve never been back.

So that is the mood in which I read the description of poor sweet Hedvig’s suicide and I felt that same revulsion all over again, that I was being emotionally manipulated and that a 14-year-old girl was the tool of my manipulation. Yuk!

In the same scene Hjalmar’s thrashing around begging for God to give him just one more minute so he could tell his daughter how much he loved her etc… I’d had enough.

It’s extremely well constructed, deeply pondered, the work of a master, but I didn’t like it at all.

Repelled by the exploitative melodrama of the climax, I realised I most enjoyed the opening scenes at old Werle’s party. I liked the banter between the servants Pettersen and Jensen. I liked the simple honest excess of the fat man and the bald man boasting about how much they could eat at a sitting. Gross but in a straightforward way which does nobody any harm except themselves.

A bit more subtly I liked the way Gina, with the wisdom of the uneducated, knew she didn’t have to engage in all this man talk about ideals and life-lies but simply had to lay on coffee and toast to begin to win her man back. I liked the subtlety of that scene and I think Gina emerges as the most sympathetic character, with almost all the men behaving like idiots.

But the constantly reappearing figure of Gregers, whose idiotic ‘idealism’ ruined every life he touched and killed a lovely little girl, left a very bad taste in my mouth.

James McFarlane’s introduction

In 1881 Ibsen began to draught an autobiography. He didn’t get further than his boyhood but that was enough to revive memories of: his sister, who was called Hedvig (!); his father who was bankrupted, suffering social ostracism and reducing the family to penury; the cramped attic where the Ibsen family was forced to live; the mess of furniture, old books and junk left by the previous occupants. In other words, there’s a surprising amount of autobiography in ‘The Wild Duck’.

McFarlane brings out how the world of the Ekdal household, although built on ‘a lie’ is a lovely fantasy. Hedvig lives a child’s fantasy of her father. Old Ekdal is away in his fantasies of hunting in the great pine forests. Hjalmar lives for his fantasy of becoming the Great Inventor, despite the complete lack of evidence for this. Only the down-to-earth Gina doesn’t live in a fantasy which is ironic because she is the one at the heart of the ‘lie’ i.e. the knowledge of how the entire fantasy world is sustained by Old Werle who used her as his mistress.

Like many of Ibsen’s plays ‘The Wild Duck’ comes ready-made for critical analysis. It is perfectly designed to be converted into a Sparks Notes summary of characters and themes. It is prime A-level material. ‘Discuss the role of truth and deception in…’ etc.

The central conceptual clash, I suppose, is between Dr Relling’s notion of the life-lie, the self-deceptions necessary to make the harsh realities of life bearable, to give life a meaning – and Gregers’ insistence on the claim of the wretched ‘ideal’, namely remorseless truth-telling at any cost. There’s enough there for a good essay. What McFarlane’s introduction made me realise was there’s a third big philosophy of life, which isn’t given a big name and is hiding in plain sight, and this is the worldly wisdom of Old Werle.

Werle makes no great speeches, wields no big ideas, but he represents the triumph of savoir faire, how to get on in the world, how to run a successful business for decades, how to arrange and manipulate everyone around you to suit your needs. As the play proceeds, what we see and sympathise with is the systematic destruction of all Hjalmar’s delusions: he thought he was happily married, he thought his wife was faithful, he thought he had fathered a beautiful little girl, he thought he was the provider and keeper of his little family – and he is wrong on every single on of those counts. Werle is presented as his nemesis, as the evil wizard behind all his woes. What’s not so obvious is to see it from the other end of the telescope, as a play about Werle’s triumph. This is what worldly wisdom looks like.

Apparently, we have Ibsen’s drafts of many of his plays and McFarlane explains what the drafts of ‘The Wild Duck’ tell us. This is that all the characters existed in early drafts but then he moved them around, gave them names or removed names, to create a sense of foreground and background characters. And the same with issues or events. McFarlane points out how the precise details of Old Ekdal’s crime, the murky references to Old Werle mistreating his wife, and above all the exact status of Hedvig’s paternity, these are all important but left deliberately vague and blurred, like the background in a painting.

Lastly, McFarlane devotes a page to the symbol of the wild duck itself which I found boring. He says it fulfils two functions: it means something but something different to every individual in the play; and it binds together the many strands of the play. Although it is never seen and not mentioned for long periods, in some sense it binds together not only the characters but the many themes of the play.

I can see how this is true and I can appreciate the extraordinary skill of the play’s construction. But it’s an entertainment based on the killing of a 14-year-old girl and I couldn’t overcome my simple revulsion at that fact.

Credit

I read ‘The Wild Duck’ in the 1960 translation by James McFarlane which was packaged up, along with his translations of ‘An Enemy of the People’ and ‘Rosmersholm’ into a World’s Classics paperback in 1988. I read the 2009 reprint.

Ibsen reviews

The Doll’s House (1879)
Ghosts (1881)
An Enemy of the People (1882)
The Wild Duck (1884)
Rosmersholm (1886)
Hedda Gabler (1890)
The Master Builder (1892)

Play reviews

Play reviews

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by Simon on October 4, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Theatre, Translation

Posted by Simon on October 4, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/10/04/the-wild-duck-henrik-ibsen/

Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen (1881)

‘Here I go battling on with ghosts, both within and without…’
(Old Mrs Alving lamenting her lot in Ghosts, page 126)

A drama about not only the sexual and religious hypocrisies of late-nineteenth century bourgeois society but of the multiple levels of deceit and, more profoundly than that, the dead hand of old ways of thinking, which lie like ghosts upon the lives of the living.

Act 1

Pastor Manders arrives at the estate of widowed old Mrs Alving, situated near a fjord. The next day he is due to deliver a speech at the opening of a new orphanage named in honour of her dead husband, the Captain Alving memorial Home (p.103)

Mrs A is attended on by a young buxom serving girl, Regine. Regine’s crippled, often drunk carpenter father, Jacob Engstrand, has been over on the estate helping to build the new orphanage. He shambolically tries to persuade Regine to accompany him on a ferry back to his house in town but she refuses. Engstrand has a plan to set up a refuge for merchant seamen. He wants Regine to help out but this quickly degenerates into a vision of her dancing and entertaining the sailors in the evenings, and the suggestion that if she plays her cards right she’ll wangle herself a ship’s officer or even captain. And she wouldn’t have to marry them, just extract money in return for…At which point a furious Regine threatens him and forces him to back out through the French windows.

After some time away in Paris, her artistic son Oswald has returned for a visit.

There’s a long conversation between Manders and Mrs Alving which reveals a whole load of scandalous family secrets. Manders triggers it all by accusing Mrs A of being a bad wife for running away from her husband after just a year of marriage and seeking refuge with him, the pastor.

Nettled, Mrs Alving decides to reveal the truth. During that miserable first year of marriage she had discovered that Alving was a womaniser and a philanderer and how wretched it made her feel. Manders dismisses this by pontificating about the duties of a wife and mother:

MANDERS: All this demanding to be happy in life, it’s all part of this same wanton idea. What right have people to happiness? No, we have our duty to do, Mrs Alving! And your duty was to stand by the man you had chosen and to whom you were bound by sacred ties.

And:

MANDERS: It is not a wife’s place to sit in judgement on her husband. Your duty should have been to bear with humility the cross which a higher power had judged proper for you.

As if accusing her of being a bad wife isn’t enough, Manders then goes on to accuse her of being a bad mother, in that she sent her son away when he was only seven to be raised in a different household.

‘Slowly and with control’ Mrs Alving then unleashes the truth. Her husband never reformed, her husband carried on being a corrupt womaniser till the day he died. He forced her to sit with him getting drunk on wine and listening to his stupid stories before she had to roll him into bed. For nineteen long years of married purgatory she had to put up with his dire behaviour.

And he had an affair with their maid. She overheard them in the conservatory, her husband making a move, the maid (Johanna) trying to push him away. He got the maid pregnant. The whole thing was only hushed up by giving her a big cash sum ($300) and packing her back to the arms of her boyfriend, the very same ramshackle old Jacob Engstrand we saw at the start. So Regine is the illegitimate daughter of her ex-husband. Engstrand was flattered by her returning to him and then, she came with a tidy sum of cash and a story about some passing some rich foreigner who’d taken advantage of her, so shamefacedly went to Pastor Manders to get them married in a hurry (p.122).

It was because, aged seven, Oswald was getting old enough to ask questions that she sent him away. Not because she was a bad mother, because she was a good mother who didn’t want him raised in a household full of corruption and lies (p.118).

This is why she has devoted a lot of money to building the orphanage in her husband’s name, to try and prevent any whiff of scandal. But there’s another, buried motive. The orphanage cost exactly as much as her bride price. She wanted to get rid of it because ‘I don’t want any of that money to pass to Oswald. Anything my son gets is to come from me.’

When, on the morrow, the orphanage is opened, Mrs Alving will feel it like an exorcism. At long last the ghost will be laid and ‘this long, ghastly farce will be over’ (p.120).

But then something strange happens. In a way which breaches realism but is packed with symbolic meaning, both the pastor and Mrs A hear a scuffled coming from the dining room and then Regine’s voice urgently whispering: ‘Oswald! Are you made? let me go!’

The heavily moralising or symbolic point is that – the young generation are repeating the sins of their parents. Or, as Mrs Alving puts it:

MRS ALVING: ‘Ghosts! Those two in the conservatory…come back to haunt us.’ (p.120)

Act 2

Act 2 picks up in the same drawing room immediately after dinner i.e. an hour later, and shows Mrs Alving still reeling from the revelation that his son is trying it on with her maid and Manders reeling from the way everyone involved lied to him. Manders reassures himself that the marriages were all carried out according to law and order but Mrs Alving blasphemously wonders whether it’s the law and order which cause all the trouble and delivers a Nora Helming outburst:

MRS ALVING: I’m not putting up with it any longer, all these ties and restrictions. I can’t stand it! I must work myself free! (p.124)

This leads into a classic ‘moral’ quandary, namely should Mrs Alving tell her son the truth about his father. Pastor Manders, as representative of social morality, finds himself arguing no, that she shouldn’t burst his illusions and ideals. But Mrs Alving now feels that observing the proprieties i.e. lying, for all those years, and continuing to lie to her son, just indicts her as a coward.

She starts out saying she needs to get Regine out of her house as soon as possible, to send her back to her father. But then, pondering her reluctance to go home, she voices another scenario: maybe she should encourage Oswald and Regine, if not to marry, then at least to commit to live together, unconventionally but honestly.

Manders is horrified because…it would be incest – they both share the same father, they are half-brother and sister. To which Mrs Alving delivers the devastating response:

MRS ALVING: Do you think there aren’t plenty of couples all over the country who are every bit as closely related? (p.125)

So now we can see how incest brought about by male philandering is the core of the plotline. But Mrs Alving goes on to deliver a little speech which rises above this ‘issue’ to address a more imaginative or symbolic level:

MRS ALVING: Ghosts! When I heard Regina and Oswald in there, it was just like seeing ghosts. But then I’m inclined to think that we are all ghosts, Pastor Manders, every one of us. It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. It’s all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they actually live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get rid of them. I’ve only to pick up a newspaper and I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. Over the whole country there must be ghosts, as numerous as the sands of the sea. And here we are, all of us, abysmally afraid of the light. (p.126)

Impressive speech and compelling vision, especially to someone like me with my view of the unchangeability of human nature which condemns each new generation to repeat the behaviours of the previous ones.

Because now there’s another revelation (Ibsen’s plays seem to proceed from one devastating revelation to another) which is that back then, nineteen years ago, when Mrs Alving ran away from her unfaithful husband, she ran to Pastor Manders because she was in love with him and she knew he was in love with her. In the pastor’s mind, the greatest achievement of his life was overcoming his own personal wishes, putting duty and responsibility first and telling Mrs Alving to return to her husband. Now her revelations that this led to 19 years of purgatory throw into doubt the meaning of that great ‘victory’. He calls it a victory over himself but Mrs Alving calls it ‘a crime against both of us’.

What’s more it led her to rethink the entire notion of religious faith, honour, duty and so on, and the harder she thought about them the more they fell to pieces in her hands:

MRS ALVING: Yes, when you forced me to submit to what you called my duty and obligations. When you praised as right and proper what my whole mind revolted against, as against some loathsome thing. It was then I began to examine the fabric of your teachings. I began picking at one of the knots but as soon as I’d got that undone, the whole thing came apart at the seams. It was then I realised it was just tacked together.

So she’s quite the speech maker and quite the social radical.

Scene: Engstrand plays the pastor

Then enters Engstrand. He puts on a big performance for the pastor, claiming that now the orphanage is finished he and the lads would like the pastor to mark it with a little service. Manders hits him between the eyes with everything Mrs Alving’s told him, that Engstrand only took Johanna back for the money and lied and lied to him (Manders) about getting her pregnant etc etc. But Engstrand (who needs, I imagine, to be played by a slyly comic actor) comes over all working class piety, clutching his hat in his hand and yes my lord no my lord-ing Manders. He spins events to place himself in the light of a pious hard-working soul who saw it as his duty to rescue this poor sinner woman (Johanna) etc. When directly accused of only marrying her for her money (the $300) Engstrand loftily insists he never touched a cent of it but used it all to educate his (legal) daughter, Regine.

Manders is completely taken in and enchanted. When Engstrand exits to go and prepare the building for a little service Manders turns triumphantly to Mrs Alving and says ‘Well?’ but she (presumably like the audience) has completely seen through Engstrand and finds Manders’ naivety touching: ‘I say you are a great big baby and always will be’ and goes as if to hug him till the pastor flinches back in naive horror. He exits to go carry out the promised service.

Scene: Oswald’s illness

In the silence that follows Mrs Alving hears the tink of glass from the dining room and is disconcerted to realise Oswald is still in the dining room. She thought he’s gone for a walk. She calls him in to the living room (the main set) worried he might have overheard some of their talk. But this is quickly eclipsed by Oswald making a revelation to her (another of Ibsen’s revelations) that he is ill, very ill, so ill that he thinks he’ll never be able to work again.

In Paris, he’s been having more and more severe headaches and he went to see a specialist who confirmed that he has some kind of inherited sexual disease, or, as the doctor put it, ‘The sins of the father are visited upon the children.’ But Oswald shows the doc all the letters from his mother (Mrs A) praising her husband, Oswald’s father, to the skies (lying, as required by social convention), and so proved it couldn’t have been an inherited STI.

At which point Oswald blames himself for leading an indulgent bohemian lifestyle. He reiterates that it’s all his own fault and he can’t live with the guilt of wrecking his own life. If only he had someone else to blame it on…

Well, there’s a ton of dramatic irony here because half an hour earlier we learned that it almost certainly was inherited from his dissolute father (though the genetics and/or disease theory of all this is pretty ropey: he could, in fact, only have been infected via his mother i.e. the captain gave Mrs A syphilis or some such which she transmitted to Oswald at birth. The Wikipedia entry has a footnote dealing with the science).

Anyway, obviously Mrs Alving paces up and down in anguish, knowing that with a few sentences she could release her son from his crushing guilt but only at the cost of destroying his illusions about his father. I know it’s meant to be heart-wrenching scene of a poor mother torn between etc etc, but the patness of it, the cunning artifice of it, is quite funny.

But Mrs Alving doesn’t get to tell the truth because first he a) desperately asks for something to drink to wash away his headful of anguish and then b) makes his mother sit with him while he drinks champagne and…asks her opinion about Regine: ‘Isn’t she marvellous looking, Mother?’

He is, in other words, unconsciously copying his father, drinking far too much, forcing her to listen to him burble on, and fancying the maid. But then he goes further (as I say, Ibsen’s plays seem to consists of a succession of revelations).

He tells his mum that last time he was home he was waxing lyrical about the joys of life in gay Paris when one thing led to another and he playfully said: ‘You must come with me there’. Now, on his return, he’s discovered that Regine remembered that remark and took him literally. (This is why she’s been learning French and explains why Regine’s character keeps popping little French tags into her conversation). Anyway, she asked him: ‘What about my trip to Paris?’ and it suddenly made sense to him – that Regine, so full of life and certainty, can be the cure for the dread and anxiety he feels.

During the scene Mrs Alving had asked Regine to fetch a half bottle of champagne. Now Mrs Oswald tells her to bring another, whole, bottle and Oswald adds, ‘as a glass for yourself.’ As Regine returns with the bottle and the third glass and, very nervously accepts a drink, Oswald tells his mother his mind is made up. He’s returning to Paris and taking Regine with him.

This finally stings Mrs Alving into action and she stands and announces she has something to tell them (obviously a) his father’s immorality and b) their incestuous consanguinity). But at that moment, probably meant to be dramatic but also has a comic impact, the parson enters, as in a Whitehall farce.

He is surprised to see Regine sitting with the other two and holding a glass of champagne as if she is their social equal but flabbergasted when Oswald announces that she (Regine) is leaving with him for Paris as his wife! For the second time Mrs Alving stands and says now she is going to speak plainly but, for a second time is interrupted. For this time they hear shouting in the distance, throw open the windows and see that the brand-new orphanage, which was due to be opened the next day, is on fire!

Act 3

Scene 1

They’re all back in the main house later the same night, with the embers of the ruined orphanage glowing in the distance. It burned to the ground. Nothing was saved.

Remember how I described the scene where Engstrand posed as the embodiment of aggrieved piety, insisting that he married Joahnna out of Christian charity rather than for her little nest egg, in order to wrap the pastor round his little finger? Well, that scene has its sequel here. For we find Engstrand with mock reluctance persuading the pastor that it was him (Pastor Manders) who started the fire, it was he who they left to put out the candles, who they all saw pinch one out with his fingers and chuck the stub away, unfortunately into a pile of shavings.

Manders doesn’t remember any of this and insists that he never puts candles out that way, but Engstrand’s mock-apologetic insistence wins him round. The con man (for that is what he is) insists that he’ll stand by Manders at the public hearing, which there’ll have to be, and will do his best to deflect the anger of the townspeople at the loss of the orphanage which was going to be benefit everyone (by taking parentless children off the rates).

And one last thing: the money to find the maintenance and expenses of the orphanage was to come from the interest from her bride price which Mrs Alving had invested. Now that money needs a purpose at which point Engstrand usefully pipes up to remind the pastor about his plan for a Seaman’s Home.

Just in case there was any doubt whatsoever that Engstrand invited the pastor down to the orphanage to carry out a ‘service’ precisely in order to burn it down and blame him, and thus secure the funding and support for his own project, Ibsen gives Engstrand an ‘aside’ to his daughter in which he says: ‘Now we’ve got him nicely, my girl.’ Ibsen is routinely described as a giant of modern theatre but moments like this are as subtle as a stage villain twirling the ends of his black moustache and cackling, ‘My evil plan is working!’

There’s a final joke so broad surely the audience was meant to laugh. Engstrand helps Manders on with his coat and makes a parting promise:

ENGSTRAND: And this place for seafaring men, it’s going to be called the ‘Captain Alving Home’, and if I can run it my way, I think I can promise it’ll be a place worthy of the Captain’s memory. (p.152)

Well, as we learned earlier, the captain turned out to have been a world class philanderer, adulterer and womaniser, and this confirms the passage of the opening scene where Engstrand was trying to encourage his own daughter to come back to the city with him so as to provide ‘entertainment’ for the sailors, in the form of singing, dancing and sexual favours. I was surprised to find Ibsen doing such broad comedy.

Scene 2

So the comedy duo of Manders and Engstrand exit, leaving the tragic trio of Mrs Alving, Oswald and Regine. Oswald has only just staggered in from the scene of the fire in a semi-catatonic state. He sits stiffly while his mother cleans his face and then calls for all the doors to be closed to try and shut out his terrible feeling of dread. He starts to talk wildly, almost cackling. Basically, the actor has to give the impression of someone who’s mind is genuinely going.

Mrs Alving hurries to comfort him but poor Regine is, understandably, bewildered. Nobody told her her posh knight in shining armour was going mad.

So Mrs Alving proceeds to tell her son that his father was just like him, full of joy and energy but, finding himself trapped in a provincial town with a wife confined by her sense of duty, he felt trapped and took it out in womanising and getting drunk. And then, elliptically, refers to the fact that Regine is his father’s daughter i.e his half-sister. That makes them both sit up!

And Regine announces she will leave at once. She was having second thoughts about mad Oswald and this thunderbolt clinches it:

REGINE: No, you won’t catch me staying out in the country, working myself to death looking after invalids. (p.156)

So she wraps her shawl around her and announces she’ll hurry off to try and catch the same ferry as the pastor and her ‘father’ or ‘that rotten old carpenter’ as he calls him. Angry at being lied to, and being brought up as a servant instead of on equal terms to Oswald, she storms out, leaving the sad mother and mad son.

Scene 3

The thrust of the scene is that Oswald doesn’t feel anything for his dead father. He barely knew him and has one and only one memory of him, as a boy, making him smoke a cigar till he was sick. When Mrs Alving gives way to convention (contradicting her speeches earlier in the play) and says surely a son ought to have a duty to love a father, Oswald replies that’s just one of those old superstitions, just a relic lying around, to which Mrs Alving replies, ‘Ghosts’, and the audience go, ‘Yes, the title, the theme, we get it.’

But Oswald reveals a dismayingly instrumental view of Mrs Alving, he likes her and she will do to look after him in his illness. But then he makes her pull up a chair and reveals (remember how Ibsen plays consist of a carefully paced series of revelations?) that his illness is not physical, it’s in his head. He had an attack in Paris which rendered him helpless as a baby.

Mrs Alving is horrified but promises to be a mother to him when these attacks happen. But Oswald explains that the next attack might be permanent, infantilise him forever, and he’d be a bed-bound baby until he was old and grey. This is the course of his dread.

Which is why he shows her the small box he keeps in his breast pocket. In it are 12 shots of morphine. When he has his next attack he wants her to administer them and kill him. She screams and says, ‘What? Me who gave you life?’ to which Oswald makes the slightly teenage reply:

OSWALD: I never asked you for life. And what sort of life is this you’ve given me. I don’t want it! Take it back!

So from having been about incest this has become a play about euthanasia. Packs in the topical issues, doesn’t he, Ibsen? Mrs Alving promises she will, if he has an attack, administer the poison. Oswals calms down. She pulls up her chair and promises to look after him like a mother looks after a child. Dawn breaks over the mountains and the fjord.

And it’s at this moment that Oswald has an attack, saying, ‘Mother give me the sun,’ then shrinking in his chair, going flaccid, losing his mind, repeating flatly ‘the sun, the sun’. Mrs Alving leaps to her feet and screams, struggles to find the box Oswald just gave her, says yes, yes, then no, no, and stands staring at him in horror as the curtain falls.

Comment

I thought it was going to be a predictable number about Victorian sexual hypocrisy and double standards but the central plot of Regine and Oswald being half-siblings by the same father and the threatened risk of their incest takes things to a higher, more dangerous level.

But then, in the last few pages, the entirely new topic of a mother faced with the euthanasia of her stricken son has a blistering intensity which blots out everything which came before it.

A searing, intense, deeply disturbing experience.

The title

According to Wikipedia:

Ibsen disliked the English translator William Archer’s use of the word ‘Ghosts’ as the play’s title, the Danish or Norwegian Gengangere would be more accurately translated as ‘The Revenants’ which literally means ‘The Ones Who Return’…It has a double meaning of both ‘ghosts’ and ‘events that repeat themselves’ which the English title ‘Ghosts’ fails to capture.

Ibsen reviews

The Doll’s House (1879)
Ghosts (1881)
An Enemy of the People (1882)
The Wild Duck (1884)
Rosmersholm (1886)
Hedda Gabler (1890)
The Master Builder (1892)

Play reviews

Play reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on September 30, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Theatre, Translation

Posted by Simon on September 30, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/09/30/ghosts-henrik-ibsen/

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All posts tagged madness

Executive summary

Longer synopsis

Notable factoids

Les Alyscamps

Two portraits of Mrs Roulin

Comments

Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence by Martin Bailey

Lautrec’s van Gogh

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Part 1. The murder of Mary Gerrard

Red herrings

Part 2. Enter Hercule Poirot

Part 3. In court

Cast

In court

Nurses

Bookishness

Wordsworth

Period vocabulary

Summary

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Shadows

Threads and themes

Enter Mrs Manresa and William Dodge

The stories that never are

‘One thing follows another’

Miss La Trobe

Rhymes

A tour of the house

The pageant 1. Elizabethan age

First play with the play

First interval: tea in the barn

New faces at the pageant

On being gay

The pageant part 2. Restoration comedy

Second play within a play: a restoration comedy

Cast of the Restoration comedy

Second interval

The pageant part 3. Victorian age

Third play within the play

Third interval

The pageant part 4. The present day

Tick tick

Similitudes

Coda

Miss La Trobe

The Oliver family

The end

Last thought

Cast

Posh people

Servants and suppliers

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Children

Starting time and place

Structure

No dialogue

Aspergers syndrome?

Section 1. Childhood (13 pages)

Section 2. School days (29 pages)

Section 3. University (21 pages)

Section 4. Dinner for Percival (25 pages)

Section 5. Percival’s death (10 pages)

Section 6. Success and babies (11 pages)

Section 7. Middle age (16 pages)

Section 8. Lunch at Hampton Court (19 pages)

Section 9. Bernard’s recap (40 pages)

Sex

Mental illness, dissociation and fragile identity(ies)

Unstoppable images