People don't experience the world in a vacuum. Each person, each object, each sound or smell evokes old memories, as well as creates new ones. What is the present, anyway? Does such a thing even exist? Septimus is an extreme case, his present all shaky and mixed up. But even Mrs. Dalloway, for all intents and purposes a regular person, can't make two steps without speaking to the ghost of Peter Walsh, without seeing young Hugh walking arm in arm with his older self. Without remembering long-lost mornings and flower fields. Young Maisie will be old one day and she will remember that odd couple instead of the panic she felt, because of the panic she felt. Synapses are formed and we bring them along, and don't they get all tangled up? Woolf deeply understands this, how people are shaped by thousands little contexts. One roll of the dice, we could have been loved. Another roll, birds are talking to us in Greek. And we're all together in this, and all fundamentally alone, the dictionary to decipher ourselves hidden even to us.
I wonder whether reading and writing are, in part, a way to try and find and use the dictionary to place oneself in context and give the synapses a chance to unravel, or at least show themselves and be understood; they can’t be undone because as @Nancy Miller says in her reply to you, they are so often caused by external realities. And then, like Mrs D, we will go forth again to all intents and purposes regular people, whilst at the while we too speak again to the ghosts of our own pasts and remember our own Bourton.
Beautiful comment, Ellie. Yes, Woolf's present is all mixed up because it's intimately tangled with her past, which she can never move beyond. In her real life, she first lost her mother, then her sister, then her brother, and then her father. There was so much death in the early part of her life. More of her family died than were alive, and all before she was even a teenager or young adult. So this is coloring all of her experience, this idea of life hanging by a proverbial thread, how it's so tenuous, fragile, and how the individual moment is so important. Yet in the end, each of us is in this alone, and no one is coming to save us.
A very trivial one sorry to start but Septimus's brown shoes are a social faux pas. In the 1920s a gentleman does not wear brown shoes in town (ie in London). Whereas upper middle class Mrs D observes social proprieties.
Hey, I’m not so sure it’s trivial. I think it draws the inner:outer thing between Septmjs and Clarissa, just as you say. Poor Septimus is beyond his footwear, and Rezia doesn’t get it, maybe doesn’t even know…so there’s the poor guy showing every other gentleman that things aren’t good with him.
It's part of the contrast between them, even they are opposites as Septimus wears brown shoes in town and talks to himself in the park while Clarissa changes her outfit in the middle of the day (reading ahead now) and is concerned with the silverware. But in their different ways both are bewildered in the world.
Tash, the first connection I wanted to draw here was one you brought up first, which is great. This "beak like nose" that both Septimus and Mrs. D share. This is no accident, no. And if you notice, there are many references to birds (sparrows in particular, but there are numerous other references to ducks, swans, etc.). One major theme of the book is the intersection of love and death. I've always thought the party represented life, and also love, inasmuch as D's love is coming to this party, and the party itself is an expression of love (well, maybe...I'm still thinking about this). But Septimus is associated with death, and in the medieval period during plague breakouts, the physicians of the day often presented with bird-like masks to protect against the disease. They in fact looked like birds, but were also reflective of death. I don't have anything to base this on, but I thought it could be a symbol for Woolf of death, and here we have two main characters looking like birds. And they are both thinking of their mortality, S. in particular. The party as life, represents the whole of human experience; and then we have death (getting ready to barge into it all, but I don't want to get ahead of myself).
When Septimus begins to sob at the beauty he perceives surrounding him, we get this idea that this poignant beauty he is experiencing is also providing a painful existential contrast for him. In fact, for Woolf, all of life was about contrast. (She states this in one of her diaries.) So you are always seeing contrasts, between: life and death; death and beauty; love and death; intimacy and alienation (Rezia is so lonely, yet she longs for an old intimacy she once shared with S).
And one other thing to look at is how Mrs. D's -- and every other character's -- perceptions change in direct relationship to their physical locations to other people or objects. That is, as they move closer to something, their feelings and perceptions change. As they move closer, or as they move further away, their feelings magnify or recede. This is more of a general comment, a theme though that runs through most of her novels. Just keep your antennae up, and look for these moments.
And as I mentioned in some earlier post, my take on this novel's primary theme is how Woolf valorizes the domestic sphere of life, which is for her, the epitome of all life. It's also the domain of the feminine, so she's really valorizing the feminine element.
In all these details that Clarissa is overseeing in preparation for her party, too, we see this fervor. It's the same energy you would expect to hear in a novel about a soldier going off to fight some battle. Instead, we see Clarissa, seeing to the flowers, opening the window, and even then (another contrast or duality), knowing "something awful was about to happen."
Great stuff! So excited to be part of this group and delving into this fantastic classic!
'the domestic sphere of life': how Clarissa takes on mending her dress herself, and how she and Lucy have different ideas of which way the elephant on the mantle should face. Such tiny things, but meaningful.
Yes, Kevin, and she's mending her dress herself, just as she's buying the flowers for the party herself. Clarissa is exercising her agency, and now that she's 50, maybe it's because she knows she's aging, getting closer to death herself, and is charting her own course more assertively. We may think buying flowers or mending a dress are not big deals in and of themselves, but this is the thing -- these activities are often seen as not so meaningful because they are the domain of the feminine, but in fact the act of mending is an act of restoration, of care giving. Flowers represent love, and also the cycle of life, since flowers bloom into their prime, then die, as we do. I don't know if I'm making sense ultimately, but something weird just also happened. As I was contemplating this novel and reading it more, outside on my deck, a sparrow just flew straight into my window. It was flying one moment, down the next. I was sitting there in abject horror, and then realized the symbolism wasn't lost on me. Woolf is always focusing on birds, and this little bird, which I thought was dead, lay there on the deck for about a half hour, then flipped itself over, and it's still there, though I moved -- albeit slow as a turtle so as not to startle the poor thing -- into the house. I'm still keeping an eye on it, but it hasn't moved.
Life.
Death.
Something, or someone has to die in order for others to appreciate life more. This is one of the themes, too, of Mrs. Dalloway.
p.s. Please send a little healing thought -- or prayer if you are so inclined -- for my little sparrow.
One other item about the mending and the flower-buying: she's doing tasks that her maid would ordinarily be doing. I think throughout the book Clarissa exhibits a solidarity of sorts with her staff. Never having had a staff, I don't know how that really works, but I think for Clarissa it's a genuine feeling, not dilettantish or condescending. It's one thing to admire about her.
Thank you, Kevin, and it does look like my little sparrow has flown off. I only hope it's not slowly dying from a brain bleed, as birds can do.
But yes, Clarissa is also taking on the duties of her servants. Now whether this is because she wants to be in control of all decisions surrounding the party (because maybe she also doesn't trust the servant to select the "right" flowers) or whether this represents her sense of solidarity or community with the servants, I'm not sure. It's going to be interesting to hear others' views on this.
Hey, I think it was quite a thing: that genuine working together when having servants/being in service was the cultural norm. As you say with Clarissa, it wasn’t necessarily condescending at all or dilettantish (cool use of the word). I think there was a loyalty, an interplay, that went on so it wasn’t necessarily as exploitative as we might see it from our own twenty first century lens.
There also seems to be that element of 'wanting to be liked' at play here. Clarissa likes to be liked by her servants. There is that chitchat with Lucy about the play (for others reading this comment, this occurs a little after page 25). Then Lucy asks if she can help with the mending and Mrs Dalloway says that surely Lucy has enough on her hands already. And then Mrs Dalloway says 'But, thank you, Lucy, oh, thank you,' said Mrs Dalloway, and thank you, thank you, she went on saying (sitting down on the sofa with her dress over her knees, her scissors, her silks), thank you, thank you, she went on saying in gratitude to her servants generally for helping her to be like this, to be what she wanted, gentle, generous-hearted. Her servants liked her.'
And in case you're in any doubt about that, a page earlier, Lucy thinks, 'Of all, her mistress was the loveliest...'
re the value of flower buying and mending in the story, I think what you point out is true. These are acts of doing something to keep the world in a sense of order,of being in Mrs. D’s control; a reduction/dismissal of them to a less meaningful status because they are customary associated with women shouldn’t hide or deny their universal ability to have meaning for all of us.
Ah, very good, this idea of order vs. chaos. Which is, I think, another theme that always interested Woolf. And in her mind, perhaps death was that chaos, and life was to be ordered to somehow fend it off as long as possible.
Oh, I'm so interested to hear your ideas about the allusions to birds. It's funny - after I put up my post, I thought, 'That thing about D and S both having beaked noses - that was probably a silly comment to make...' So I'm rather pleased and relieved to read your fascinating take on this.
Also. I absolutely agree with your point about the party being a symbol of life but death being ever-present, particular in the figure of Septimus. In her notes, Woolf wrote: 'All must bear finally upon the party at the end; which expresses life in every variety & full of conviction...' which Woolf noted contrasted with that other theme of death and mortality.
I hadn't tuned into the idea that characters' perceptions and feelings magnify and recede depending on their proximity to other people and objects. Fascinating! Thank you! I'll keep this in mind as I read.
There is something about birds, Tash, and I wish I knew more about Woolf's use of them, because they do show up a lot. Maybe they symbolized freedom for her (freedom in flight), or their ability to flee from danger, while we are unable to do that so easily. This may be a digression, but it's interesting that Flannery O'Connor was kind of obsessed with birds as well. She had an aviary in Georgia where she kept peacocks and chickens, which also show up in her stories. Birds as symbols....any other thoughts?
Couple of thoughts on this. I bet Woolf considered herself to have a 'beaky' nose - I have a female friend with a V Woolf type nose - which just looks like a nose to me but she's very self conscious about it! Also, the plague masks you mention - Woolf is writing in the aftermath not just of WW1 but also of the Spanish Flu epidemic - which was rather worse than the one we just went through.
Hey Tash, thank you for your piece and for introducing both Lee and Briggs. There is so much going on from the start, I don’t feel that quality of putting in the leg work at the beginning of a novel…the setting of the scene, the characters, waiting for the action to start. Woolf (‘What a plunge!’) plunges us straight in to the external London city world (no world building here: the world of Westminster is built and there we are) of Clarissa and the inner turmoil of Septimus and anxiety of Rezia and that can - or can for me - feel confusing and exhilarating. So…your unravelling it all a bit is a help in keeping perspective.
Your inclusion of Julia Briggs’s point about the way Woolf works with the individual and the group is great, I think partly because Briggs herself writes so well (this kind of explanation of complex writing always works better if the explainer writes beautifully). We kind of know Clarissa and Septimus are the indiviuals around which our reading of the self is going to revolve, and we know that in doing so we can be both of them which in itself is quite a deal, but - for me - it’s the rush of all those other people. It’s exactly like that in the city, any city, anywhere, all these people all of us, our own lives and observations and names and experience all crashing into one another like molecules and then moving on, or moving on with images of those little molecular crashes remaining with us years and years after them (as per Maisie Johnson) I think Woolf’s naming of them here is brilliant, it underlines the whole individual : group shtick perfectly, making them stay with us. And the way she gives each of them names, Maisie Johnson, Mrs Dempster and somehow rounds them up into very real individuals (sealed little Mr Bowley…is the ‘little’ a little patronising? Woolf was a woman of her time and class: judgemental and certain after all), even though Woolf’s task, or part of it here, was to show them as the group.
And then…as if all this isn’t enough for us to work with and think through…we’ve got all the machines. Oh man, that car, that plane. All that brute mechanical, motor driven non human scene. That’s a stretch. And she keeps us and the characters having to work with their presence…and, as if that weren’t enough…to deal with the message the plane may or may not be making. It is all dizzying.
Does anyone else think Woolf has gone a bit imaginative with the seasons and the flowers…lilac is well over by the time sweet peas appear…but the imagery is beautiful and the capture of the evening after a summer’s day so well drawn.
And…I really dig Miss Pym who, for me, will always be Eileen Atkins so good was her scene with Streep in The Hours.
Nicolas, what a great comment in which you reflect back at me exactly how I feel when I read this novel. 'Confusing and exhilarating' is exactly it.
It was a long weekend where I live so I've been away visiting family - it's been very lovely but I've been dying to get back to my desk and respond to you and all the others here in the comments!
I really liked your description of how the rush of people is like molecules mixing and colliding; All those lives and observations and experiences mixing and crashing together is exactly like a city, you said. Yes - I agree and I think this is what is so interesting and enjoyable about this novel. It's a portrait of Mrs Dalloway but it's also a portrait of a city. A tapestry of different minds merging at times, at times devolving into distinctiveness.
Briggs does write beautifully, doesn't she. Thank you for noticing that. I really love her bio of Woolf.
You mentioned the patronising reference to Mr Bowley as 'little.' This reminded me of Mrs Dalloway's patronising reference to Hugh Whitbread's 'little job at Court'.
On the subject of Miss Pym, can I just highlight this rather delightful description: '...button-faced Miss Pym, whose hands were always bright red, as if they had been stood in cold water with the flowers.' Love it. Anyway, I'm going to have to revisit the movie 'The Hours' - it's been so long since I saw it - I don't remember Eileen Atkins.
Hey Tash, I hope you’re finding the experience as rewarding as we, obviously, are here.
I am big style not a book group man…but I think this format works well. People read and comment and listen and get back to one another, without grandstanding, and elaborate our understanding.
Thank you for all your work on it. Mrs. D - for all her brilliance - is not an easy woman, so holding all this together is quite an undertaking for you.
I like your attention to the machines, the Bond street car, the plane, and later there's a giant limousine and a ride on a double-decker bus. I think about them in contrast to scenes at Bourton, where I think there is only a bicycle and a rowboat in what almost sounds like a sylvan glade, and also in contrast to how much walking happens within London by many characters. A lot goes on outdoors, a lot of attention is paid to the outdoors, but every once in a while the machines take over and everything else disappears. Even, the vision of the plane overpowers the mystery of the car.
I'd never considered that contrast with the scenes at Bourton, Kevin. How interesting. You're right. And it enhances that feeling of Bourton as remote, representing a place in the distant past, before the advent of planes, trains and automobiles, dreamy, no longer accessible, but somehow still front of mind for Clarissa.
Maybe the book is meant to contrast the innocence, impetuousness, even sensuality of Bourton with how things have turned out for the characters. You get the sense whenever Bourton is described that it's a world apart, magical, even with sprites (Sally just arriving, then running through the corridors naked), but London is crowded, has machines, death, worries about children, disappointment, as well as raptures about beautiful June days.
I can't help but think of the Blitz when i read the passage about the plane overhead, how everyone is captivated, stuck where they're standing, looking up. It's almost as if VW wrote this after WW2 and was foreshadowing.
Until you mentioned this, I hadn't quite realised that I might be bringing a post WW2 mentality to the depiction of the plane - but yes, I think I was also subconsciously thinking of the Blitz. Certainly the plane is an ominous force in my reading.
Well , there were Zeppelin bombing raids over London, and elsewhere in Britain, during the Great War. There were also bombing raids carried out by German twin-engine Gotha bombers. Check out "German bombing of Britain, 1914-1918" in Wiki for a brief overview. I agree that the sound of an aeroplane overhead would have raised neck hairs on Londoners of the time.
I was curious to see if VW ever flew in a plane herself, so did a quick search online. It doesn't appear that she ever did have any flying experience, though she did write a brief, six-page essay called, "Flying Over London" published posthumously in Vogue magazine in March 1950, in which she seems to have imagined herself as the passenger in a two-seater de Havilland Gypsy Moth biplane flying over London.
As for the motor car and the plane, I think they represent old VS new, the right of kings on its last leg VS the power of capital about to take over, people forgetting king and country the moment a new trinket shines their way. Both entities are shallows if you think about it, one wants your body, the other your money. But what isn't shallow after all? How much depth can there be in a woman going to fetch flowers? And isn't her inner life rich and worthy of being known anyways? Woolf's characters are so real in their mundanity, carrying little joys, hidden tragedies and a sense of melancholy, like little Memento Mori around their necks: we're going to die tomorrow, so why not look in wonder at a plane in the sky today? It's gonna make us happy, even if it is only trying to sell us toffee.
Another excellent comment. Yes, I also had the feeling of the car and plane being a depiction of old vs new. Love this: 'Woolf's characters are so real in their mundanity, carrying little joys, hidden tragedies and a sense of melancholy, like little Memento Mori around their necks...' Yes, exactly.
Also, I think cars, planes, trains, modes of travel are also symbolic of the progression of life, of life moving forward....
"In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, onmibuses, 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."
It's as though these modes of transport are also transporting her in this ecstasy and appreciation of how much she loves this moment, this city, this summer in June.
One other thing, which is Woolf's use of the semi-colon. Notice how many she uses, and I think this reflects something about how she experiences connection and intimacy. Even at the sentence level, she is joining so many sensory perceptions, but they are connected, not separate. The punctuation mark, her favorite, I think reflects this idea that everything in the world is connected.
I'm so glad someone brought up Woolf's use of the semi-colon - ha! It's exactly as you say - there are these mounds of impressions and memories, sometimes lists (like the quote you included) but each element is connected. There is an intuitive logic. It allows almost a form of impressionism - daubs of colour and movement - step back and there's a picture of London.
Personally I adore her use of parenthesis, throwing in one more tidbit of information that doesn't add anything to the plot but everything to the portrait of a character. And she does that adding to the rhythm of her prose, never breaking it.
Ellie, thank you so much for bringing this up about her use of parentheses. When Woolf uses them, as she did in "To The Lighthouse" to announce the main character's death half way through the book, it's not in any kind of traditional use. That is, generally, parenthetical statements are those that are not necessarily integral to the action. They are sort of afterthoughts or additional commentary that may not be seen to be necessary to the action.
But Woolf turns this upside down. Pay close attention to anything she puts in parentheses, as these are likely the most important things she wants to convey. So once again, if we look at parentheses as "feminine," insofar as they are literally a kind of womb, closing off what comes before and after -- and the enclosed text, like a baby, is the most important part, we see her use of usurping patriarchal power again at the level of literary structure.
A side note: the duke of Westminster was married this past week. No word on if any Dalloways were present; most likely Hugh Whitbread served some function.
“She sliced like a knife through everything, at the same time was outside, looking on” - I keep thinking about this sentence. What do others make of it?
Yes, this is a really curious sentence. I'm not completely sure of what to make of it.
My sense when she says that she sliced like a knife through everything is that she feels an incisive insight into life, into everyone around her (in the next para she mentions her gift for knowing people almost by instinct) - yet at the same time (like all of us really) she feels like an outsider. This, despite the fact that she hosts parties in which she is, literally and figuratively, at the very centre, and where she is a creative force bringing people together. It's an example of Clarissa (and VW) holding two contrasting ideas together - of Clarissa simultaneously feeling a sense of being inner and outer, of feeling 'absolutely absorb[ed]' by the city and people all around while also feeling 'far out to sea and alone.' At the end of the para, she says, 'she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.' Her inner life is lit now by this influence, now by that one, now by this emotion, now by that opinion. It is not fixed.
When I worked in young offender and child protection services, we used to talk about using our "third eye", by which we meant the ability to carry on a conversation, interview, or just about any other face-to-face interaction with a child and/or parent, while at the same time reserving part of our attention to assessing objectively how we were thinking and feeling, and how successful we were in connecting with our clients.
It sounds as if Clarissa does the same thing; she watches herself interact with others in social gatherings, almost as if she were observing a separate person altogether. This ability to step back and take things in, sort of as a connoisseur of human behaviour, is where I think Clarissa--and Peter, too--derive much of their enjoyment of life.
About symbols and symbolism ... On Wednesday on 'About Mountains' I'm posting V Woolf's late short story 'The Symbol' – it's about a mountain! With some commentary about it a week later, Wed 19th – readers of VW Reading Group would be extremely welcome. it's very short, 1200 words. But concentrated, of course. I turned up some opinions of Woolf herself on symbolism - and she doesn't really go for it! Writing to Roger Fry in 1927 about the lighthouse in 'To the Lighthouse': "I meant nothing ['nothing' in italics] by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together. I saw that all sorts of feelings would accrue to this, but I refused to think them out, and trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions—which they have done, one thinking it means one thing another another. I can't manage Symbolism except in this vague, generalised way. Whether its right or wrong I don't know, but directly I'm told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me."
I haven't read 'The Symbol' - I'll definitely stop by!
And also - what an interesting comment from Woolf about symbolism. That surprises me because I often feel like her writing is littered with symbols but perhaps what I'm perceiving is a certain 'charge' that particular objects or ideas accrue in her writing. Repeated phrases or things. And then, as Woolf says, it's up to us to interpret all of this ourselves.
People don't experience the world in a vacuum. Each person, each object, each sound or smell evokes old memories, as well as creates new ones. What is the present, anyway? Does such a thing even exist? Septimus is an extreme case, his present all shaky and mixed up. But even Mrs. Dalloway, for all intents and purposes a regular person, can't make two steps without speaking to the ghost of Peter Walsh, without seeing young Hugh walking arm in arm with his older self. Without remembering long-lost mornings and flower fields. Young Maisie will be old one day and she will remember that odd couple instead of the panic she felt, because of the panic she felt. Synapses are formed and we bring them along, and don't they get all tangled up? Woolf deeply understands this, how people are shaped by thousands little contexts. One roll of the dice, we could have been loved. Another roll, birds are talking to us in Greek. And we're all together in this, and all fundamentally alone, the dictionary to decipher ourselves hidden even to us.
Beautifully put. Exactly.
Yes I agree!
I wonder whether reading and writing are, in part, a way to try and find and use the dictionary to place oneself in context and give the synapses a chance to unravel, or at least show themselves and be understood; they can’t be undone because as @Nancy Miller says in her reply to you, they are so often caused by external realities. And then, like Mrs D, we will go forth again to all intents and purposes regular people, whilst at the while we too speak again to the ghosts of our own pasts and remember our own Bourton.
Beautiful comment, Ellie. Yes, Woolf's present is all mixed up because it's intimately tangled with her past, which she can never move beyond. In her real life, she first lost her mother, then her sister, then her brother, and then her father. There was so much death in the early part of her life. More of her family died than were alive, and all before she was even a teenager or young adult. So this is coloring all of her experience, this idea of life hanging by a proverbial thread, how it's so tenuous, fragile, and how the individual moment is so important. Yet in the end, each of us is in this alone, and no one is coming to save us.
Woolf writes about imaginary people and you just can feel her world views and experiences with each line.
Yes! She often writes her family into her novels, as well as their experiences, their perceptions, their dysfunctions.
A very trivial one sorry to start but Septimus's brown shoes are a social faux pas. In the 1920s a gentleman does not wear brown shoes in town (ie in London). Whereas upper middle class Mrs D observes social proprieties.
Hey, I’m not so sure it’s trivial. I think it draws the inner:outer thing between Septmjs and Clarissa, just as you say. Poor Septimus is beyond his footwear, and Rezia doesn’t get it, maybe doesn’t even know…so there’s the poor guy showing every other gentleman that things aren’t good with him.
It's part of the contrast between them, even they are opposites as Septimus wears brown shoes in town and talks to himself in the park while Clarissa changes her outfit in the middle of the day (reading ahead now) and is concerned with the silverware. But in their different ways both are bewildered in the world.
How interesting. I hadn't tuned into this.
Tash, the first connection I wanted to draw here was one you brought up first, which is great. This "beak like nose" that both Septimus and Mrs. D share. This is no accident, no. And if you notice, there are many references to birds (sparrows in particular, but there are numerous other references to ducks, swans, etc.). One major theme of the book is the intersection of love and death. I've always thought the party represented life, and also love, inasmuch as D's love is coming to this party, and the party itself is an expression of love (well, maybe...I'm still thinking about this). But Septimus is associated with death, and in the medieval period during plague breakouts, the physicians of the day often presented with bird-like masks to protect against the disease. They in fact looked like birds, but were also reflective of death. I don't have anything to base this on, but I thought it could be a symbol for Woolf of death, and here we have two main characters looking like birds. And they are both thinking of their mortality, S. in particular. The party as life, represents the whole of human experience; and then we have death (getting ready to barge into it all, but I don't want to get ahead of myself).
When Septimus begins to sob at the beauty he perceives surrounding him, we get this idea that this poignant beauty he is experiencing is also providing a painful existential contrast for him. In fact, for Woolf, all of life was about contrast. (She states this in one of her diaries.) So you are always seeing contrasts, between: life and death; death and beauty; love and death; intimacy and alienation (Rezia is so lonely, yet she longs for an old intimacy she once shared with S).
And one other thing to look at is how Mrs. D's -- and every other character's -- perceptions change in direct relationship to their physical locations to other people or objects. That is, as they move closer to something, their feelings and perceptions change. As they move closer, or as they move further away, their feelings magnify or recede. This is more of a general comment, a theme though that runs through most of her novels. Just keep your antennae up, and look for these moments.
And as I mentioned in some earlier post, my take on this novel's primary theme is how Woolf valorizes the domestic sphere of life, which is for her, the epitome of all life. It's also the domain of the feminine, so she's really valorizing the feminine element.
In all these details that Clarissa is overseeing in preparation for her party, too, we see this fervor. It's the same energy you would expect to hear in a novel about a soldier going off to fight some battle. Instead, we see Clarissa, seeing to the flowers, opening the window, and even then (another contrast or duality), knowing "something awful was about to happen."
Great stuff! So excited to be part of this group and delving into this fantastic classic!
'the domestic sphere of life': how Clarissa takes on mending her dress herself, and how she and Lucy have different ideas of which way the elephant on the mantle should face. Such tiny things, but meaningful.
Yes, Kevin, and she's mending her dress herself, just as she's buying the flowers for the party herself. Clarissa is exercising her agency, and now that she's 50, maybe it's because she knows she's aging, getting closer to death herself, and is charting her own course more assertively. We may think buying flowers or mending a dress are not big deals in and of themselves, but this is the thing -- these activities are often seen as not so meaningful because they are the domain of the feminine, but in fact the act of mending is an act of restoration, of care giving. Flowers represent love, and also the cycle of life, since flowers bloom into their prime, then die, as we do. I don't know if I'm making sense ultimately, but something weird just also happened. As I was contemplating this novel and reading it more, outside on my deck, a sparrow just flew straight into my window. It was flying one moment, down the next. I was sitting there in abject horror, and then realized the symbolism wasn't lost on me. Woolf is always focusing on birds, and this little bird, which I thought was dead, lay there on the deck for about a half hour, then flipped itself over, and it's still there, though I moved -- albeit slow as a turtle so as not to startle the poor thing -- into the house. I'm still keeping an eye on it, but it hasn't moved.
Life.
Death.
Something, or someone has to die in order for others to appreciate life more. This is one of the themes, too, of Mrs. Dalloway.
p.s. Please send a little healing thought -- or prayer if you are so inclined -- for my little sparrow.
I'm sorry for your sparrow. Poor little thing.
One other item about the mending and the flower-buying: she's doing tasks that her maid would ordinarily be doing. I think throughout the book Clarissa exhibits a solidarity of sorts with her staff. Never having had a staff, I don't know how that really works, but I think for Clarissa it's a genuine feeling, not dilettantish or condescending. It's one thing to admire about her.
Thank you, Kevin, and it does look like my little sparrow has flown off. I only hope it's not slowly dying from a brain bleed, as birds can do.
But yes, Clarissa is also taking on the duties of her servants. Now whether this is because she wants to be in control of all decisions surrounding the party (because maybe she also doesn't trust the servant to select the "right" flowers) or whether this represents her sense of solidarity or community with the servants, I'm not sure. It's going to be interesting to hear others' views on this.
Hey, I think it was quite a thing: that genuine working together when having servants/being in service was the cultural norm. As you say with Clarissa, it wasn’t necessarily condescending at all or dilettantish (cool use of the word). I think there was a loyalty, an interplay, that went on so it wasn’t necessarily as exploitative as we might see it from our own twenty first century lens.
There also seems to be that element of 'wanting to be liked' at play here. Clarissa likes to be liked by her servants. There is that chitchat with Lucy about the play (for others reading this comment, this occurs a little after page 25). Then Lucy asks if she can help with the mending and Mrs Dalloway says that surely Lucy has enough on her hands already. And then Mrs Dalloway says 'But, thank you, Lucy, oh, thank you,' said Mrs Dalloway, and thank you, thank you, she went on saying (sitting down on the sofa with her dress over her knees, her scissors, her silks), thank you, thank you, she went on saying in gratitude to her servants generally for helping her to be like this, to be what she wanted, gentle, generous-hearted. Her servants liked her.'
And in case you're in any doubt about that, a page earlier, Lucy thinks, 'Of all, her mistress was the loveliest...'
Yes, there is, isn’t there.
Clarissa the loveliest. Quite the accolade.
Hey Nancy, here’s a thought for the sparrow.
re the value of flower buying and mending in the story, I think what you point out is true. These are acts of doing something to keep the world in a sense of order,of being in Mrs. D’s control; a reduction/dismissal of them to a less meaningful status because they are customary associated with women shouldn’t hide or deny their universal ability to have meaning for all of us.
Ah, very good, this idea of order vs. chaos. Which is, I think, another theme that always interested Woolf. And in her mind, perhaps death was that chaos, and life was to be ordered to somehow fend it off as long as possible.
Oh, I'm so interested to hear your ideas about the allusions to birds. It's funny - after I put up my post, I thought, 'That thing about D and S both having beaked noses - that was probably a silly comment to make...' So I'm rather pleased and relieved to read your fascinating take on this.
Also. I absolutely agree with your point about the party being a symbol of life but death being ever-present, particular in the figure of Septimus. In her notes, Woolf wrote: 'All must bear finally upon the party at the end; which expresses life in every variety & full of conviction...' which Woolf noted contrasted with that other theme of death and mortality.
I hadn't tuned into the idea that characters' perceptions and feelings magnify and recede depending on their proximity to other people and objects. Fascinating! Thank you! I'll keep this in mind as I read.
There is something about birds, Tash, and I wish I knew more about Woolf's use of them, because they do show up a lot. Maybe they symbolized freedom for her (freedom in flight), or their ability to flee from danger, while we are unable to do that so easily. This may be a digression, but it's interesting that Flannery O'Connor was kind of obsessed with birds as well. She had an aviary in Georgia where she kept peacocks and chickens, which also show up in her stories. Birds as symbols....any other thoughts?
Couple of thoughts on this. I bet Woolf considered herself to have a 'beaky' nose - I have a female friend with a V Woolf type nose - which just looks like a nose to me but she's very self conscious about it! Also, the plague masks you mention - Woolf is writing in the aftermath not just of WW1 but also of the Spanish Flu epidemic - which was rather worse than the one we just went through.
I loved the way the stream of consciousness kept jumping from person to person and then back to Clarissa or Septimus.
Hey Tash, thank you for your piece and for introducing both Lee and Briggs. There is so much going on from the start, I don’t feel that quality of putting in the leg work at the beginning of a novel…the setting of the scene, the characters, waiting for the action to start. Woolf (‘What a plunge!’) plunges us straight in to the external London city world (no world building here: the world of Westminster is built and there we are) of Clarissa and the inner turmoil of Septimus and anxiety of Rezia and that can - or can for me - feel confusing and exhilarating. So…your unravelling it all a bit is a help in keeping perspective.
Your inclusion of Julia Briggs’s point about the way Woolf works with the individual and the group is great, I think partly because Briggs herself writes so well (this kind of explanation of complex writing always works better if the explainer writes beautifully). We kind of know Clarissa and Septimus are the indiviuals around which our reading of the self is going to revolve, and we know that in doing so we can be both of them which in itself is quite a deal, but - for me - it’s the rush of all those other people. It’s exactly like that in the city, any city, anywhere, all these people all of us, our own lives and observations and names and experience all crashing into one another like molecules and then moving on, or moving on with images of those little molecular crashes remaining with us years and years after them (as per Maisie Johnson) I think Woolf’s naming of them here is brilliant, it underlines the whole individual : group shtick perfectly, making them stay with us. And the way she gives each of them names, Maisie Johnson, Mrs Dempster and somehow rounds them up into very real individuals (sealed little Mr Bowley…is the ‘little’ a little patronising? Woolf was a woman of her time and class: judgemental and certain after all), even though Woolf’s task, or part of it here, was to show them as the group.
And then…as if all this isn’t enough for us to work with and think through…we’ve got all the machines. Oh man, that car, that plane. All that brute mechanical, motor driven non human scene. That’s a stretch. And she keeps us and the characters having to work with their presence…and, as if that weren’t enough…to deal with the message the plane may or may not be making. It is all dizzying.
Does anyone else think Woolf has gone a bit imaginative with the seasons and the flowers…lilac is well over by the time sweet peas appear…but the imagery is beautiful and the capture of the evening after a summer’s day so well drawn.
And…I really dig Miss Pym who, for me, will always be Eileen Atkins so good was her scene with Streep in The Hours.
Nicolas, what a great comment in which you reflect back at me exactly how I feel when I read this novel. 'Confusing and exhilarating' is exactly it.
It was a long weekend where I live so I've been away visiting family - it's been very lovely but I've been dying to get back to my desk and respond to you and all the others here in the comments!
I really liked your description of how the rush of people is like molecules mixing and colliding; All those lives and observations and experiences mixing and crashing together is exactly like a city, you said. Yes - I agree and I think this is what is so interesting and enjoyable about this novel. It's a portrait of Mrs Dalloway but it's also a portrait of a city. A tapestry of different minds merging at times, at times devolving into distinctiveness.
Briggs does write beautifully, doesn't she. Thank you for noticing that. I really love her bio of Woolf.
You mentioned the patronising reference to Mr Bowley as 'little.' This reminded me of Mrs Dalloway's patronising reference to Hugh Whitbread's 'little job at Court'.
On the subject of Miss Pym, can I just highlight this rather delightful description: '...button-faced Miss Pym, whose hands were always bright red, as if they had been stood in cold water with the flowers.' Love it. Anyway, I'm going to have to revisit the movie 'The Hours' - it's been so long since I saw it - I don't remember Eileen Atkins.
Hey Tash, I hope you’re finding the experience as rewarding as we, obviously, are here.
I am big style not a book group man…but I think this format works well. People read and comment and listen and get back to one another, without grandstanding, and elaborate our understanding.
Thank you for all your work on it. Mrs. D - for all her brilliance - is not an easy woman, so holding all this together is quite an undertaking for you.
Oh thanks Nicolas! I am definitely finding the experience rewarding. It's already exceeded all my expectations. Thanks for being here!
I like your attention to the machines, the Bond street car, the plane, and later there's a giant limousine and a ride on a double-decker bus. I think about them in contrast to scenes at Bourton, where I think there is only a bicycle and a rowboat in what almost sounds like a sylvan glade, and also in contrast to how much walking happens within London by many characters. A lot goes on outdoors, a lot of attention is paid to the outdoors, but every once in a while the machines take over and everything else disappears. Even, the vision of the plane overpowers the mystery of the car.
I'd never considered that contrast with the scenes at Bourton, Kevin. How interesting. You're right. And it enhances that feeling of Bourton as remote, representing a place in the distant past, before the advent of planes, trains and automobiles, dreamy, no longer accessible, but somehow still front of mind for Clarissa.
Maybe the book is meant to contrast the innocence, impetuousness, even sensuality of Bourton with how things have turned out for the characters. You get the sense whenever Bourton is described that it's a world apart, magical, even with sprites (Sally just arriving, then running through the corridors naked), but London is crowded, has machines, death, worries about children, disappointment, as well as raptures about beautiful June days.
I can't help but think of the Blitz when i read the passage about the plane overhead, how everyone is captivated, stuck where they're standing, looking up. It's almost as if VW wrote this after WW2 and was foreshadowing.
Until you mentioned this, I hadn't quite realised that I might be bringing a post WW2 mentality to the depiction of the plane - but yes, I think I was also subconsciously thinking of the Blitz. Certainly the plane is an ominous force in my reading.
Well , there were Zeppelin bombing raids over London, and elsewhere in Britain, during the Great War. There were also bombing raids carried out by German twin-engine Gotha bombers. Check out "German bombing of Britain, 1914-1918" in Wiki for a brief overview. I agree that the sound of an aeroplane overhead would have raised neck hairs on Londoners of the time.
Oh good - I was hoping someone would explain this to me - thank you Tom!
I was curious to see if VW ever flew in a plane herself, so did a quick search online. It doesn't appear that she ever did have any flying experience, though she did write a brief, six-page essay called, "Flying Over London" published posthumously in Vogue magazine in March 1950, in which she seems to have imagined herself as the passenger in a two-seater de Havilland Gypsy Moth biplane flying over London.
As for the motor car and the plane, I think they represent old VS new, the right of kings on its last leg VS the power of capital about to take over, people forgetting king and country the moment a new trinket shines their way. Both entities are shallows if you think about it, one wants your body, the other your money. But what isn't shallow after all? How much depth can there be in a woman going to fetch flowers? And isn't her inner life rich and worthy of being known anyways? Woolf's characters are so real in their mundanity, carrying little joys, hidden tragedies and a sense of melancholy, like little Memento Mori around their necks: we're going to die tomorrow, so why not look in wonder at a plane in the sky today? It's gonna make us happy, even if it is only trying to sell us toffee.
Another excellent comment. Yes, I also had the feeling of the car and plane being a depiction of old vs new. Love this: 'Woolf's characters are so real in their mundanity, carrying little joys, hidden tragedies and a sense of melancholy, like little Memento Mori around their necks...' Yes, exactly.
Also, I think cars, planes, trains, modes of travel are also symbolic of the progression of life, of life moving forward....
"In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, onmibuses, 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."
It's as though these modes of transport are also transporting her in this ecstasy and appreciation of how much she loves this moment, this city, this summer in June.
One other thing, which is Woolf's use of the semi-colon. Notice how many she uses, and I think this reflects something about how she experiences connection and intimacy. Even at the sentence level, she is joining so many sensory perceptions, but they are connected, not separate. The punctuation mark, her favorite, I think reflects this idea that everything in the world is connected.
I'm so glad someone brought up Woolf's use of the semi-colon - ha! It's exactly as you say - there are these mounds of impressions and memories, sometimes lists (like the quote you included) but each element is connected. There is an intuitive logic. It allows almost a form of impressionism - daubs of colour and movement - step back and there's a picture of London.
Indeed re ;
They are wonderful, aren’t they, at giving writers the ability to signify connection; and, at giving readers the connection.
The other writer who I always think of in connections to them is Mantel; connections play a huge part in her work.
Each word Mantel writes hides a thousand meanings and connections, she's stunning.
Personally I adore her use of parenthesis, throwing in one more tidbit of information that doesn't add anything to the plot but everything to the portrait of a character. And she does that adding to the rhythm of her prose, never breaking it.
Ellie, thank you so much for bringing this up about her use of parentheses. When Woolf uses them, as she did in "To The Lighthouse" to announce the main character's death half way through the book, it's not in any kind of traditional use. That is, generally, parenthetical statements are those that are not necessarily integral to the action. They are sort of afterthoughts or additional commentary that may not be seen to be necessary to the action.
But Woolf turns this upside down. Pay close attention to anything she puts in parentheses, as these are likely the most important things she wants to convey. So once again, if we look at parentheses as "feminine," insofar as they are literally a kind of womb, closing off what comes before and after -- and the enclosed text, like a baby, is the most important part, we see her use of usurping patriarchal power again at the level of literary structure.
A side note: the duke of Westminster was married this past week. No word on if any Dalloways were present; most likely Hugh Whitbread served some function.
Haha
“She sliced like a knife through everything, at the same time was outside, looking on” - I keep thinking about this sentence. What do others make of it?
Yes, this is a really curious sentence. I'm not completely sure of what to make of it.
My sense when she says that she sliced like a knife through everything is that she feels an incisive insight into life, into everyone around her (in the next para she mentions her gift for knowing people almost by instinct) - yet at the same time (like all of us really) she feels like an outsider. This, despite the fact that she hosts parties in which she is, literally and figuratively, at the very centre, and where she is a creative force bringing people together. It's an example of Clarissa (and VW) holding two contrasting ideas together - of Clarissa simultaneously feeling a sense of being inner and outer, of feeling 'absolutely absorb[ed]' by the city and people all around while also feeling 'far out to sea and alone.' At the end of the para, she says, 'she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.' Her inner life is lit now by this influence, now by that one, now by this emotion, now by that opinion. It is not fixed.
When I worked in young offender and child protection services, we used to talk about using our "third eye", by which we meant the ability to carry on a conversation, interview, or just about any other face-to-face interaction with a child and/or parent, while at the same time reserving part of our attention to assessing objectively how we were thinking and feeling, and how successful we were in connecting with our clients.
It sounds as if Clarissa does the same thing; she watches herself interact with others in social gatherings, almost as if she were observing a separate person altogether. This ability to step back and take things in, sort of as a connoisseur of human behaviour, is where I think Clarissa--and Peter, too--derive much of their enjoyment of life.
About symbols and symbolism ... On Wednesday on 'About Mountains' I'm posting V Woolf's late short story 'The Symbol' – it's about a mountain! With some commentary about it a week later, Wed 19th – readers of VW Reading Group would be extremely welcome. it's very short, 1200 words. But concentrated, of course. I turned up some opinions of Woolf herself on symbolism - and she doesn't really go for it! Writing to Roger Fry in 1927 about the lighthouse in 'To the Lighthouse': "I meant nothing ['nothing' in italics] by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together. I saw that all sorts of feelings would accrue to this, but I refused to think them out, and trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions—which they have done, one thinking it means one thing another another. I can't manage Symbolism except in this vague, generalised way. Whether its right or wrong I don't know, but directly I'm told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me."
I haven't read 'The Symbol' - I'll definitely stop by!
And also - what an interesting comment from Woolf about symbolism. That surprises me because I often feel like her writing is littered with symbols but perhaps what I'm perceiving is a certain 'charge' that particular objects or ideas accrue in her writing. Repeated phrases or things. And then, as Woolf says, it's up to us to interpret all of this ourselves.