‘A delicious idea comes to me that I will write anything I want to write.’
Some closing THOUGHTS and OBSERVATIONS on Mrs Dalloway.
Hello friends!
This will be my final post on Mrs Dalloway for now. There is a lot of detailed discussion happening in the comments for the previous post – I encourage you to have a look if you haven’t already (and of course, feel free to join in).
In this post, I pull together some closing THOUGHTS and OBSERVATIONS, taking a bit of a wider view this time, to look at Woolf the writer and the modernist experiment she was engaged in.
THOUGHTS and OBSERVATIONS
Woolf the writer
Virginia Woolf began writing Mrs Dalloway in October 1922. She had recently been very ill. In the summer of 1921, she’d had another serious mental breakdown, again experiencing hallucinations. Then in the spring of 1922, she’d had a bad flu and then been diagnosed with a heart murmur (an incorrect diagnosis, it turned out) and told to rest. At various points, doctors informed her that her lung was diseased and her heart inflamed and implied that death might be only weeks away.1
These brushes with ill-health and mortality profoundly affected the development of the novel.2 In the story, Clarissa, herself, has recently suffered from a severe bout of illness – something to do with her heart, as Peter Walsh recalls. At recurring moments, Clarissa thinks of her mortality and what will be left behind.
In her notes about the novel in November 1922, Woolf wrote: ‘Suppose the idea of the book is the contrast between life and death.’ ‘All must bear finally upon the party,’ she wrote in another note, ‘which expresses life in every variety & full of conviction; while S dies.’3
While working on the novel, Woolf struggled, as she commonly did, to overcome her sensitivity to criticism of her writing. As Lee describes it, Woolf had a ‘horror of being laughed at or looked at’ along with a ‘resistance to being put right or put down, especially by men’ and a ‘desire to be loved and admired, especially by women’. And then above all, there was ‘her fear of being thought mad.’4 In the middle of 1923, Woolf wrote in her diary, ‘After a dose of criticism I feel that I’m writing sideways, using only an angle of my mind.’5 Woolf’s first truly experimental novel – Jacob’s Room (the novel that precedes Mrs Dalloway) – had been criticised in some quarters; Woolf ‘couldn’t create characters that survive’, wrote Arnold Bennett; Woolf had, through neglect of plot and story, ‘brought the novel to an impasse’, wrote John Middleton Murry.6
The fact that Woolf was able to surmount her fear of criticism to write such an ambitious and decidedly experimental follow-up is a testament to her dedication to her craft. She tried her best not to be always ‘totting up compliments, & comparing reviews.’7 ‘To get to the bones,’ she wrote in her diary in 1923, ‘now I’m writing fiction again I feel my force glow straight from me at its fullest.’8 Nearly a year later, in the manuscript for Mrs Dalloway in brackets, she wrote: ‘A delicious idea comes to me that I will write anything I want to write.’9
Modernist experiment
When writing Jacob’s Room, Woolf had written to Katherine Mansfield: ‘I think what I’m at is to change the consciousness, and so to break up the awful stodge.’10 In her diary in 1923 while working on Mrs Dalloway, Woolf wrote: ‘I haven’t that “reality” gift. I insubstantise, wilfully to some extent, distrusting reality – its cheapness.’11
But in her essay, ‘Modern Fiction,’ included in The Common Reader (published the same year as Mrs Dalloway), Woolf developed her thinking on what fiction might be capable of, if not tied down to the literary conventions of the past:
Let us record the atoms as they fall on the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.12
In the same essay, Woolf remarked:
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display…13
Quentin Bell (Woolf’s nephew and biographer) observed that: ‘It is possible in Mrs Dalloway to find […] a desire to make literature ‘radial’ rather than ‘linear’.14
We see this in the novel in the way the narrative ripples outwards from sense impressions or memories, passing backwards and forwards through time, often leaving gaps in the description of the sequential physical movement of the characters through space. And yet, this radial effect is counterbalanced by the forward movement of linear time in the story – the regular peeling of bells and tolling of clocks (the leaden circles dissolving in the air) which move the reader forward through a single London day.
The party
The party, as noted above, seems to represent the profusion of life in direct contrast to Septimus’s death. Not only that, suicide and the party also call up the contrast between individual and group consciousness, solitude versus company.15
Clarissa and Septimus never meet – though they both hear the motor car backfire early in the story, and Septimus crosses paths with Peter Walsh who later hears the ambulance rushing to the aid of Septimus who has thrown himself out of a window and is already dead. Clarissa and Septimus’s stories only really come together at the party when she hears from Lady Bradshaw of his death: ‘Oh, thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought.’
This is followed by an interesting collision of consciousnesses when Clarissa is brought out of the group consciousness of the party and into the stark individual consciousness of death and dying): ‘He had killed himself—but how? Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it.’
Despite the news of Septimus’s death brought to the party by the Bradshaws, the party seems to go off well. The window is open and the breeze lifts the curtain, but a man standing near the curtain beats it back while continuing his conversation with one of the other party guests. Clarissa takes this as a sign that the party will not be a failure.
Indeed, throughout the novel particularly in the second half, winds buffet the characters, mingle on street corners, and carve up the clouds. For me, the presence of those winds enhanced the pervading atmosphere of time passing, of the ephemeral nature of things. Perhaps, in a way, the man beating back the curtain was beating back time – so lost was he in the pleasures of the party, in profusive life. I was also reminded of Clarissa saying to Peter Walsh, ‘Do you remember how the blinds used to flap at Bourton?’ The wind is almost like nature’s tolling bells. Its presence lets us know that we’re in motion, that nothing stands still, that time gallops on.
What’s next?
Great question! First, please do leave any thoughts or comments below about the novel as a whole or anything interesting you noticed in the second half. (There were about five hundred other things I wanted to say in this post but unfortunately I don’t have the time or space to get them in.)
I’m planning to put up a post soon in which I debrief on the experience of running this reading group (it’s been fun!) and explain what happens next. But for now, let me just thank you so much for coming along for the ride. I hope you got something from it. I’ve so enjoyed hearing your thoughts on the book and have been really very chuffed at everyone’s willingness to read closely and engage constructively in a spirit of openness and inquiry.
THANK YOU!
Hermoine Lee, Virginia Woolf, Vintage, 1996, p 449.
See Lee, p 449.
Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, Harcourt, 2005, p 142.
Lee, p 449.
Virginia Woolf’s diary, 19 June 1923, quoted in Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography 1912-1941, Triad Granada, 1976, p 100.
Bennett and Murry quoted in Lee, p 450.
Virginia Woolf’s diary, 29 Oct 1922, 7 Nov 1922, quoted in Lee, p 450.
Virginia Woolf’s diary, 19 June 1923, quoted in Bell, p 100.
Woolf quoted in Lee, p 450.
Letter from Virginia Woolf to Katherine Mansfield, 13 Feb 1921, quoted in Briggs, p 132.
Virginia Woolf’s diary, 19 June 1923, quoted in Bell, p 99.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Common Reader, Vol 1, Vintage Books London.
Woolf, The Common Reader.
Bell, p 107.
See Briggs, p 134.
One thing I intended to convey in my discussion of the party (but which I accidentally left out) was also how the party makes for a frivolous 'papering over' of the recent past and the collective trauma of war - but Septimus's death shows that violent past very much in evidence just below the surface, at times tearing through.
I'd like to say how monstrously enjoyable and intellectually stimulating I've found this whole discussion. I first read "Mrs. Dalloway" a year or so ago and thought it was a book I'd have to come back to some day, and the VW Reading Group offered the perfect opportunity to do so. So, many thanks to Tash for hosting this whole shenanigan and providing her own knowledge and insights into the writings of Virginia Woolf.
And many thanks as well to Alyssa the Nerdy Nurse and her weekly newsletter, without which I would never have heard of, let alone thought to look for, the VW Reading Group.