A book group is a great chance to read or re-read things one might not have chosen, and to discuss them with others. And so, I recently re-read Mrs. Dalloway, which I first encountered many years ago; and it really struck me in a way that it did not even remotely do the first time around, when I didn’t have all the historical and cultural context, not to mention the education in Literature and the years of experience editing books, which requires one to understand their architecture and the conditions of their production. Virginia Woolf uses the fundamental oppositions of her society at the time to drive the dynamic of a narrative in which a good deal more happens internally than externally. It is largely, though not entirely, about interiority -- as are the works of her Modernist contemporaries Marcel Proust and James Joyce.
The oppositions in which she anchors this novel are several basic ones, so obvious as to be invisible: class and wealth, rich and poor, male and female, inner and outer. They are further highlighted through the personalities of the … I almost I want to say players, because the piece also feels like a theatrical drama … of the novel’s characters. There is the mismatch between the mad Septimus and his sane wife Lucrezia, between the hedonism of Clarissa and the religious rigidity of Miss Kilman – not to mention between Clarissa’s prettiness and Miss Kilman’s repeatedly noted lack of charm or beauty -- and the clash between Richard Dalloway’s adherence to duty and Hugh Whitbread’s search for pleasure. People are sorted by their status, one man is “distinguished” another “shoddy;” events and feelings are driven by the powerful contrast between the hapless Peter Walsh and the competent Lady Brouton, or the hapless Ellie Henderson and the highly competent Miss Brush. People are either distinctly happy or unhappy, well-adjusted or discontented, stable or unstable.
But inside of these familiar, fundamental dichotomies, Woolf takes quiet swerves that undermine the strict divisions. At first these are relatively subtle deviations. Peter appeals to women precisely because he is not too ‘masculine’, which may after all only be an unconscious style. Clarissa is “in love” with Sally Seton in their youth, but it is marked as merely a youthful crush she has outgrown. But then there is a rather profound shift towards the end of the book, when we find that Clarissa identifies with Septimus. “She felt very like him”, we are told.
There are several key things in the social-historical context that I would not have been quite as keenly aware of in my first reading as I am today. Politically, for example, the fact that the milieu of these people is that of Conservatives is for me worth noting explicitly: Woolf has managed to make me sympathizing with people with whom I would have strongly differing opinions. Another aspect worth noting is that, historically, this is the aftermath of WW I (few people seem to have watches!) and thus there is a generation of men missing and of survivors destroyed by the trauma of war, like Septimus. There was no concept of PTSD, but the impact was widely felt. [The excellent trilogy by Pat Barker on WWI is worth digesting as background to reading anything written in 1920s Britain and Europe.] Culturally and economically, one of the consequences of that “Great” War was the upending of traditional power dynamics in both class and gender. It was a moment when the servant class began to see other options (vividly illustrated in Downton Abbey) and women began to see possibility of having a meaningful life as individuals without being married. Those things are the wider context, but the title character of this work, whom I must confess I did not “like” very much, is a woman and it is her interior domestic life, however relatively socially exalted (Prime Ministers and other Important People attend her parties) and its small compass of concern that we are offered.
Having mentioned Woolf’s modernist colleagues Marcel Proust and James Joyce, (she and Joyce being exact contemporaries and Proust being 11 years older and dying in the 1920s) I would point to the fact that those two writers were fundamentally writing from the point of view of “outsiders” by virtue of their heightened sensitivity and insight, but also of Proust’s homosexuality and Jewishness and Joyce’s exile from Ireland. In Mrs. Dalloway Clarissa is an ultimate social “insider” (although it must be remembered that as a female she had far from full participation in the working of power and politics and any influence had to be asserted through the ‘soft power’ of side conversations and dinner party seating arrangements.) But then we get the diffusion of her point of view as the perspective swoops around omnisciently in a literal stream of consciousnesses. We get what people really think of one another, quick mood shifts, fragmentation [the Modern] set within the classical structure of the unity of one day [the Ancients].
As for the literary status of this book, which is not an easy read even today, I suspect it can be seen by contemporary standards as banal but in 1925 it was a work of remarkable originality.
Hi, I have found 1 of your published works in a box of books I was given via the estate of Margaret Morse.
Prose 1990s -Marina LaPalma
published in April 1997
If you would like me to send it to you I would be happy to do so. Please feel free to reach out to me if interested. I can be found on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/diannamullins/ Take care. -dianna