'The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?'
THOUGHTS and OBSERVATIONS on the first twenty-five pages
Hello friends,
Here I will share some THOUGHTS and OBSERVATIONS about the first twenty-five pages of Mrs Dalloway. If you are looking for a SUMMARY of those pages, look no further than here. And if you’re new to Woolf or have found her writing challenging in the past, you might like to check out this primer first, in which I give a few pointers on how to approach her writing.
All our reading group activity for Mrs Dalloway can be found in one place on my substack under the Mrs Dalloway tab at the top.
Key to abbreviations
D = Mrs Dalloway; PW = Peter Walsh; S = Septimus Warren Smith; R = Rezia (aka Lucrezia).1
Thoughts and observations
In compiling these thoughts, I’ve been helped along in places by two of Woolf’s biographers: Julia Briggs and Hermoine Lee.
Mrs Dalloway; bird-like; loves walking in London and giving parties
D is middle-aged (later it’s revealed that she is fifty-two) and lives in Westminster, London with Richard, her husband, and Elizabeth, her teenaged daughter. D is proper and appreciates social graces and stoicism. Physically, she has ‘a touch of the bird about her’ and, in her own words, has ‘a narrow pea-stick figure’ and ‘a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird’s’.
D doesn’t read much and is not interested in politics (though she admires this in other women like Lady Bexborough). She loves the vibrant hustle and bustle of London, the immediacy of the moment. Julia Briggs writes that D ‘leads a frivolous and snobbish life, yet beneath that there is something genuinely creative in her delight in London and her pleasure in giving parties’.2
Mrs Dalloway; good instincts about people; likes to be liked
D’s only gift, as she sees it, is ‘knowing people almost by instinct’. ‘If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat’s; or she purred.’ She also likes being liked and chides herself for this – for allowing that approval-seeking mentality to drive her behaviour.
Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew […] for no one was ever for a second taken in.
This indicates that D has a certain amount of honesty and self-insight. Later PW will say of D that ‘You could always get her to own up if you took the trouble; she was honest.’
Mrs Dalloway; prone to strong emotions after recent serious illness
We find out that D has recently had a serious illness and, at times, her thoughts turn to mortality – to what remains behind after one’s death. She also finds herself more prone to strong emotions like hatred, imagining hatred to be a sort of rampaging monster:
It rasped her, though, to have stirring about her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred, which, especially since her illness, had power to make her feel scraped, hurt in her spine; gave her physical pain, and made all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved and making her home delightful rock, quiver, and bend as if indeed there were a monster grubbing at the roots, as if the whole panoply of content were nothing but self love! this hatred!
Peter Walsh; passionate and unconventional
In their youth, D and PW nearly married but D ended up marrying Richard Dalloway instead. We have an early impression that PW is more passionate and unconventional than D. He’s also more cerebral (he has to be told to look and notice what’s around him). He’s critical. He demanded a lot of D. With PW ‘everything had to be shared; everything gone into.’ All those years ago, PW told D that ‘She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her (she had cried over it in her bedroom); she had the makings of the perfect hostess, he said.’
D remembers being hurt by this – the barb hit its mark – yet here she is decades later about to host a party, about to be exactly that – the perfect hostess.
Septimus Warren Smith; traumatised by war; visited by florid visions
S, a former soldier, is home from war suffering PTSD and serious mental illness. He is described as ‘aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat…’ (Is it a coincidence that he is beak-nosed like D? Is there anything significant about them both having this same, bird-like feature?)3
S is D’s opposite number in the story. Woolf later wrote that ‘the character of Septimus […] was invented to complete the character of Mrs Dalloway’.4 In her early notes for the novel from 1922, Woolf wrote of a ‘world seen by the sane & the insane, side by side.’ In further notes in 1923, she wrote: ‘Mrs. D. seeing the truth. SS seeing the insane truth.’5
‘Shell shock’ and the depiction of mental illness
After hearing the car backfire on Bond Street, S and R repair to Regent’s Park where S is visited by florid imagery and ideas. Here (as Woolf’s notebooks record), Woolf intended S to ‘[fall] into discoveries – like a trapdoor opening.’ He feels the borderlines of his self dissolve, sensing that the trees are alive: ‘the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement.’
Woolf wrote about mental illness from personal experience which makes the scenes involving S so very moving. When S hears the birds around him singing in Greek, Woolf is giving him the same experience she had in 1904 during one of her breakdowns. Julia Briggs speculates that S’s name – ‘Septimus,’ the seventh – perhaps referred to the number of breakdowns Woolf had herself experienced.6
At the time Woolf was writing, ‘shell shock’ was a new term and while mental illness brought on by PTSD has its own qualities distinct from the mental illness Woolf suffered, Julia Briggs points out that many of the symptoms were comparable, as was the treatment. Citing the scholar Elaine Showalter, Briggs explains that ‘treatment of shell-shocked soldiers was influenced by that of pre-war women patients, and for both, class distinctions often determined the nature of their treatment. As an officer, Septimus Warren Smith would be forced to undergo a rest cure, as Virginia had been, and ‘neurasthenics’ were. Had he been a private, he might have been subjected to the electric shocks and cigarette burns administered to the lower ranks, when they suffered breakdowns.’7
Conflicting interpretations of symbols
It seems noteworthy that D and S both see a symbol associated with the passing motor car and have utterly different reactions. S sees something frightening:
And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.
Whereas D sees a symbol that brings a comforting reminder of king and country and a raft of positive associations:
[Clarissa] had seen something white, magical, circular, in the footman’s hand, a disc inscribed with a name, – the Queen’s, the Prince of Wales’s, the Prime Minister’s? – which, by force of its own lustre, burnt its way through (Clarissa saw the car diminishing, disappearing), to blaze among candelabras, glittering stars, breasts stiff with oak leaves, Hugh Whitbread and all his colleagues, the gentlemen of England, that night in Buckingham Palace.
It's not surprising that this mystery symbol – a symbol of power or government or monarchy – is a thing of terror for S. Britain, nationalism, sovereign power – these are ideas that have visited death and violence on S. They’ve sent him to war. They’ve killed his friend. D, on the other hand, has an entirely different view having not experienced war directly and having lived her life as a member of the ruling class. Her associations with the symbol she sees are reassuring: a social order headed by men like Hugh Whitbread and her husband, breast pockets embroidered with oak leaves, functions at Buckingham Palace.
S sees a tree pattern on the car’s blind. D sees something white and circular in the footman’s hand. S sees something threatening to burst into flames. D sees something blazing among candelabras. S’s vision is of something frightening from the natural world. D’s is of something reassuring from the human world, the world of empire and social hierarchy.
The depiction of crowds vs individuals
Mrs Dalloway involves a close encounter with individual consciousness. But how to also capture the consciousness of the group? Here is Julia Briggs explaining how Woolf confronted this challenge:
Writing Jacob’s Room had alerted her to a problem created by interior monologue – that it risked producing a series of self-absorbed, non-interactive characters. Mrs Dalloway is centrally concerned with the relationship between the individual and the group, and in it, Woolf solved this problem triumphantly, so that, though individual characters affect one another in powerful (and sometimes powerfully oppressive) ways, all respond to shared experiences – an explosion in Bond Street as a car backfires, an aeroplane skywriting, an old woman singing in Regent’s Park, the striking of clocks, the heat of the day, the excitement of the London season, and, most nebulous of all yet also most significant, the mood of post-war disillusion, the mood of a society that has resumed its former way of life, as if the millions of young men had not died, as if the war had been no more than a test of British stoicism in the face of adversity.8
The car and the plane
There is obviously something interesting going on with the car and the plane. They call up images of the future along with reminders of the past, of recent war – the swooping plane trailing smoke, the car backfiring, making a sound like a gunshot.
They also bring with them strong associations of power, those wheels of influence in the lives of the many – the car symbolising political or monarchical power; the plane, perhaps mercantile or economic power (the people watching think it is advertising something). Is it significant that the crowd clustered at the gates of Buckingham Palace have their attention drawn away from the car towards the plane?
Both car and plane allow the narrative viewpoint to take flight and pass effortlessly through and over London and into the minds of a range of bystanders. We see the car ripple through the crowd and cause gossip to pass up and down the streets of London. We see the plane flying over St Paul’s cathedral.
Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination, thought Mr Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory - away the aeroplane shot.
But what is the significance of the skywriting?9
Over to you!
Please share your own thoughts and observations if you’d like to in the comments below. Here, again, some possible lines of inquiry (some of which are discussed above):
What we know of Mrs Dalloway at this point
What we know of Septimus and Rezia at this point
The depiction of crowds vs individuals
The meaning of the car and the plane
The depiction of Septimus’s mental illness
The shadow of recent war
The peregrinations of the narrative voice (in and out of different heads, over the city of London)
Representations of time (interlacing of present with visions of the past and even, at times, the future; the tolling at various moments of clocks – noting that the working title for this book was The Hours).
What’s next?
Next read up to halfway by 14 JUNE. This is about where there is a line break and the next paragraph begins with – ‘It was precisely twelve o’clock; twelve by Big Ben…’ So stop at the line break. In other words, stop after the scenes between Septimus and Holmes.
On 14 JUNE I’ll post a SUMMARY of what we’ve read so far followed by a CLOSE LOOK at one of the scenes from the first half of the novel.
See you in the comments and then on 14 June!
Main sources:
Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, Harcourt, 2005.
Hermoine Lee, Virginia Woolf, Vintage, 1996.
Sorry about my excessive abbreviation practices. Please indulge me (PIM).
Briggs, p 133.
Scrope Purvis compares D to a jay. Later R compares S to a young hawk.
Woolf quoted in Briggs, p 141.
Woolf quoted in Lee, p 450.
See Briggs, p 146.
See Briggs, p 146.
Briggs, p 134.
Skywriting was a new invention at the time Woolf was writing; it was first used for advertising over the Derby at Epsom Downs Racecourse in 1922.
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.
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.