Mrs Dalloway Mrs Dalloway was published on 14 May 1925, and

is regarded as the first of Virginia Woolf's major works. Woolf

created it from two of her short stories, “Mrs Dalloway in Bond
Street” and the unfinished “The Prime Minister”. In October 2005,
Mrs Dalloway was included on Time magazine’s list of the 100 best
English-language novels written since 1923. In psychoanalysis firsts
are crucial. When a patient comes for his /her first session with the
analyst, she is told to ‘let herself go’. As Freud would say: ‘speak as
you would do in a conversation in which you were rambling on quite
disconnectedly and at random.’ Mrs Dalloway follows free
association, acquiring a certain fluidity through the stream of
consciousness technique and in keeping with Bergson’s concept of
psychological time. The time of the thing told and the time of
narration merge in Mrs Dalloway in a continuous mix of past and
present. The background story, rather than being told through a
narrator, Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway 26 Institute of Lifelong
Learning, University of Delhi emerges through memories. According
to J. Hillis Miller, Mrs Dalloway is “a brilliant exposition of the
functioning of memory as a form of repetition”. Mrs Dalloway lends
itself well to psychoanalysis. The text has two principal characters
who never meet, but act as a foil to each other. The protagonist
Clarissa Dalloway is quite complex. On the one hand, she is
constantly dipping into her past, yet wanting to keep the folds of the
present intact. The novel captures the trauma and shell shock of the
First World War through her double, Septimus Warren Smith. The
writing style is unusual, the pace of sentences often mirroring the
thoughts of the characters – sometimes moving rapidly, sometimes
slow and poetic. Parentheses are used frequently, indicating
thoughts within thoughts, sometimes quite unrelated to each other.
Woolf uses free indirect speech most of the time. Quotation marks
are rarely used to indicate dialogue. Thus the divide between
characters’ interior and exterior selves remains fluid. Woolf’s view
that the structure of a novel is like a spider’s web has been quoted
elsewhere. For Mrs Dalloway, she carefully crafts this web-like
structure. The characters are placed on the edges of the web and
slowly they gravitate towards the centre. Most of the characters in
Mrs Dalloway are introduced as and when Clarissa Dalloway thinks of
them. In the opening pages, Clarissa refers to Hugh Whitbread, Peter
Walsh, Elizabeth, Richard and Sally Seton, but the reader does not
learn until later who these people are and what part they play in
Clarissa’s life. As the novel progresses, we learn more about the
characters and several of them interact. Finally all the threads meet
at the centre, which is Clarissa Dalloway’s party at the end of the
novel where Elizabeth, Richard, Sally, Peter and Clarissa all get
together. Through a psychoanalytic reading we become aware of
their unconscious wishes, desires and processes of grief, loss,
mourning and melancholia in the novel. Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
27 Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi Time and
Memory The opening sentence of Mrs Dalloway is “Mrs Dalloway
said she would buy the flowers herself”. In a psychoanalytic reading,
the opening lines of the novel evoke a character – Clarissa Dalloway,
her nuances, some narcissism, a certain choice of flowers perhaps,
and a lonely sojourn through a day in June, for hosting a party in the
evening. When Clarissa steps outside, she remembers her life in
Bourton, the past takes over, then a memory of her former suitor
Peter Walsh brings her back into the present with, “he would be back
from India one of these days”(3). That the past is told through
memory, rather than the omniscient narrator, means the past truth
is as subjective as is the present. In Clarissa there is an unconscious
wish to meet Peter Walsh. Bourton appears in her consciousness
many times in the text, expressing her longing for the countryside,
much like Woolf’s own. Even as other characters are introduced and
we are given an insight into their psyche in which there exists a kind
of timelessness, Big Ben (which stands for chronological time) brings
us back to London, and to Mrs Dalloway. The life of Clarissa Dalloway
in London is punctuated accurately, irrevocably by the chimes of Big
Ben, which is a symbol of England and its imperial power. The chimes
sound unremittingly, always reminding one about the passage of
time and the consciousness of death. However, Woolf strives to say
how transient, how ephemeral time is, no matter how one clamours
after it. London, in 1923, is still a city where there are clocks which
tell the time. Such clocks chime on the quarters of time passing, life
frittering by followed by the finality of the sounding of the hour. Big
Ben: “... Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning,
musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in
the air.” (4) Another, St. Margaret’s, strikes as Peter is remembering
that Clarissa “has been ill... her heart, he remembered … and the
sudden loudness of the final stroke tolled for death that surprised in
the midst of life, Clarissa falling where she stood, in her drawing-
room.” (41) Unconsciously it suggests rage that Peter holds against
Clarissa for rejecting him, but he does not reveal it. A striking
characteristic of the novel is that it is not divided into chapters. It is
presented as one continuous chapter entitled Mrs Dalloway.
However, the narrative is divided into units as Big Ben strikes the
hours. Every hour has its own importance for the characters.
Septimus and his Italian wife Lucrezia (Rezia) sit in the park waiting
for the doctor's Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway 28 Institute of Lifelong
Learning, University of Delhi appointment. “‘It is time,’ said Rezia.
The word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from
his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making
them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach
themselves to their places in an ode to Time ... ” (56-57) It is time for
Septimus’s appointment with the psychiatrist Sir William Bradshaw.
There is a suggestion in the novel that the human predicament
knows no limits of time. The old woman at the Regent’s Park Tube
station, for instance, continues to sing the same song for what seems
like eternity. Indeed, time is of such importance in the novel that
Woolf initially gave it the working title The Hours. Time sometimes
also takes on fluid qualities for Clarissa, such as when the chime from
Big Ben “flood[s]” her room, marking another passing hour. Rezia, in
a rare moment of happiness with Septimus after he has helped her
make a hat, allows her words to trail off “like a contented tap left
running.”(116) One character’s thoughts appear, intensify, then fade
into another’s, much like breakers in the sea that rise up, then fall.
Memories consist of repressed material which is remembered,
repeated and gone through. In Rezia, the act of Septimus’s suicide is
met by denial and loss of grief, bordering on amnesia. “The clock was
striking – one, two, three: how sensible the sound was; compared
with all this thumping and whispering; like Septimus himself. She was
falling asleep. But the clock went on striking, four, five, six and Mrs
Filmer waving her apron (they wouldn’t bring the body in here,
would they?) seemed part of that garden; or a flag. She had once
seen a flag slowly rippling out from a mast when she stayed with her
aunt at Venice. Men killed in battle were thus saluted, and Septimus
had been through the war. Of her memories, most were happy.”
(121) Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway 29 Institute of Lifelong Learning,
University of Delhi Waves: Maternal Waters A frequent association is
that of Clarissa experiencing “the flap of a wave”, “the kiss of a
wave”. Virginia Woolf makes a number of references to water and to
country life in Bourton, based on her own experiences. The sea,
sometimes tranquil, powerful, other times choppy, has a deep
impact on Clarissa, nearly always suggesting the possibility of
extinction or death. While Clarissa mends her party dress, she thinks
about the peaceful cycle of waves collecting and falling on a summer
day: “Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing
the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds
together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a
summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; and the whole
world seems to be saying ‘that is all’ more and more ponderously,
until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach
says too, that is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says
the heart, committing its sorrows to some sea …” (32)
Psychoanalytically the sea would correspond to maternal waters, a
wish for exclusive fusion with the mother. There are references to
her mother as an ‘invisible presence’, to use Woolf's own phrase, as
an ‘internal object’ in the language of psychoanalysis. There is
intense ‘ambivalence’ towards the figure of the mother in Woolf.
Laplanche and Pontalis (26-27) define ambivalence as “The
simultaneous existence of contrary tendencies, attitudes or feelings
in the relationship to a single object, especially the coexistence of
love and hate”. Elizabeth Abel has traced the increasing ‘narrative
centrality’ of the mother in Woolf’s writing in the 1920s — Mrs.
Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and A Room of One's
Own (1929). According to Abel, these three texts show an evolving
pattern in which the figure of the mother has become increasingly
central over the course of time. Moreover, the more central she
becomes, the more ambivalence the texts reveal. Abel relates this
shift to the theoretical discussions going on within psychoanalysis
during this period. This movement in Woolf’s writing, Abel claims,
indicates an increasing ‘alignment’ with the position of Melanie
Klein. Melanie Klein made her seminal contributions to
psychoanalytic thought with her objectrelations theory, which is a
system of psychological explanation based on the premise that the
mind is comprised of elements taken in from outside by means of the
processes of internalization. I return to Woolf’s relationship with her
mother. In Klein’s theory, the first Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway 30
Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi object for the infant
is a part object. The infant does not respond to the mother as a
whole person, but simply as a ‘breast’, a supplier of its needs. In turn,
the breast becomes an object of desire in its own right. The ego is
strengthened by the finding of good objects. Their internalization
(introjection and identification) is important for the development of
psychic structures and mental functioning. Woolf’s early emotional
life is characterized by a sense of losing and regaining the good
object. The innate conflict between love and hate leads to the
internalization of good objects and bad objects. These ideas are
applied below to understand Clarissa’s relationships with her
daughter Elizabeth and with Sally. Flowers are also symbolic of her
mother’s presence for Virginia Woolf. In Mrs Dalloway, there is a
long passage about Clarissa buying flowers. The description of
flowers is so alive, almost poetic. “There were flowers: delphiniums,
sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations.
There were roses; there were irises.... roses, carnations, irises –
glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by
itself ... Over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses.” (11) It
brings to mind a description from A Sketch of the Past. The first
memory is of Virginia sitting in her mother’s lap and on her mother’s
dress she describes the red and purple flowers on a black ground.
“Flowers itself were part of the earth, that a ring enclosed what was
the flower, and that was the real flower, part earth, part flower.”
(Woolf 1985:79) Clarissa needs the presence of the maternal all the
time. “‘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.” (32) These lines are
indicative of a hysteric need for the maternal, needing the mother
figure and her approval all the time. Clarissa, her daughter Elizabeth
and her tutor and friend Miss Kilman are caught in a triangular
relationship. Clarissa is proud to show off Elizabeth, especially to
Peter, an attempt which is again quite narcissistic. Elizabeth however
rebels at an ‘insincere’ (40) introduction by her mother. The jealousy
evoked by this triangle can be examined through a Kleinian
approach. According to Klein, “Jealousy is based on envy, but
involves a relation to a least two other people. It pertains to a
triangular (oedipal) relationship, i.e. it is wholeobject oriented. It is
commonly experienced with respect to love that a person feels is
their Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway 31 Institute of Lifelong Learning,
University of Delhi due and has been taken away, or is in danger of
being taken away, by a rival. Jealousy aims at the possession of the
loved object and removal of the rival. It is usually the rival that is the
target for aggression, which might suppress a more deeply felt envy
towards the loved object. Also, in jealousy there may be a fear of
losing what one has.” (Hiles 2007) Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway 32
Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi Desire and Loss
Jacques Lacan said that “it is only once it is formulated, named in the
presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the
term.” It is interesting to note that, in Mrs Dalloway, desire is hardly
recognized and expressed. “Come to my party tonight” is one
recurrent wish laden with anxiety. It is a narcissistic wish; Clarissa
wants applause. Peter Walsh’s desire for Clarissa keeps shifting
between the past and present. Peter is unsparing in his criticism of
Clarissa’s hysterical manner, making her feel extremely self
conscious. She does not retaliate. “Clarissa came up, with her perfect
manners, like a real hostess, and wanted to introduce him to
someone – spoke as if they had never met before, which enraged
him.” (50) Peter’s rejection by Clarissa is deeply hurtful and quite a
narcissistic injury for him. “‘We’ve had enough of that feeble joke.’
That was all; but for him it was as if she had said ‘I’m only amusing
myself with you; I’ve an understanding with Richard Dalloway.’” (52)
When talking to Clarissa, Peter keeps playing with his pocket-knife.
The phallic significance is obvious. T. E. Apter, however, has a
different view: “The crude symbol of his all-too-present pocket knife
is not a sign of sexual aggression – at least there is nothing else in the
novel other than the possible association of the knife with the
phallus to support an erotic interpretation of Peter’s pocket knife;
rather, it is a mark of his desire to intrude upon Clarissa’s mental
privacy and to defend himself against others’ scrutiny and criticism
which makes him insensitive to them.” (Apter 1979: 62) After
shopping for flowers, Clarissa returns home to a house “cool as a
vault” (24). It is not warm, neither with cheer, nor with sexuality. The
room has a very virginal feel: “The sheets were clean, tight stretched
in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower
would her bed be.” (25) Clarissa feels a sense of repetition, the need
to find meaning in her mundane life, reflecting on her own mortality,
her angst. Even though she has a family, Clarissa is very lonely, and
tries hard to cope with it. She yearns for love, and her first
association is with her friend Sally Seton in Bourton. Clarissa’s
sexuality is complex. Her intense longing is for Sally, yet she likes
Peter’s attention and Richard’s security. Clarissa remembers going
downstairs in a white dress to meet Sally, thinking of a line from
Shakespeare’s Othello—“if it were now to die ’twere now to be most
happy.” The most Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway 33 Institute of
Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi exquisite moment of Clarissa’s
life occurred on the terrace at Bourton when, one evening, Sally
picked a flower and kissed her on the lips. “Sally stopped; picked a
flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned
upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with
Sally.” (29) “ ... It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which
one tried to check, and then, as it spread, one yielded to its
expansion” (26) Sally was radical, cigarette smoking, much of a rebel
“who read Plato in bed and before breakfast; read Morris; read
Shelley by the hour”. Woolf elaborates more on Clarissa’s
idealisation of Sally. “But all that evening she could not take her eyes
off Sally. It was an extraordinary beauty of the kind she admired,
dark, large-eyed, with that quality which, since she hadn’t got it in
herself, she always envied – a sort of abandonment…” (27) To look at
it within the discourse of psychoanalysis, it is unconscious envy in the
words of Klein. For Lacan, “desire is neither the appetite for
satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results
from the subtraction of the first from the second”. Lacan adds that
“desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand
becomes separated from need.” Hence desire can never be satisfied,
for it is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack. Septimus
too had experienced desire. Before the war scarred him, he was an
aspiring poet and was in love with Miss Isabel Pole, who used to
lecture on Shakespeare. On this June day, he sees his friend the dead
Evans walking towards him. The intensity with which Septimus
misses Evans not only suggests a homosexual relationship, but also a
strong death wish in Septimus. After Evans’ death, Septimus was left
numb, without feeling. Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway 34 Institute of
Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi Homosexuality Virginia Woolf’s
own life was marked by maternal figures with whom she shared very
close relationships. Her first relationship was with Violet Dickenson.
The two went on holiday to Venice, Florence and Paris. Later in her
life, as mentioned elsewhere, she had a very intimate relationship
with the poet Vita Sackville-West which continued till her death.
Scholarly writing on Mrs Dalloway has recognised the importance of
the kiss that Clarissa shared with Sally Seton. What did the kiss
mean? That remains to be questioned. Is it simply the innocence of
childhood friendship, or is it evidence of a repressed lesbian identity?
Recently, the kiss has sparked debate among queer theorists
regarding its relationship to temporality. Some theorists, as Kate
Haffey says, tend to focus on the kiss between Clarissa and Sally “as a
moment that temporarily interrupts her inevitable movement
towards marriage and reproduction. This is a moment that is out of
sync with the dominant narratives about heterosexual development.
... This moment is thus an “erotic pause”, part of the novel’s
tendency to create pockets where time functions in a different
manner.” In Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis,
Elizabeth Abel refers to the Clarissa in the Bourton scenes as
“adolescent Clarissa” and speaks of the division between adolescent
and adult Clarissa “as a binary opposition between past and
present”. Unconsciously Sally is able to “immediately spark love in
the eighteen-year old Clarissa.” In this way, Sally “replaces Clarissa’s
dead mother and sister” and inspires a love “equivalent in
absoluteness to a daughter’s earliest bond with the mother, a bond
too early ruptured for Clarissa.” The unconscious wish in Clarissa is to
be the man to the mother. Other possible homosexual relationships
in the novel are between Elizabeth and Miss Kilman and Septimus
and the dead Evans. Clarissa is disapproving of her daughter’s
relationship with her tutor. “And there was Elizabeth closeted all the
time with Miss Kilman. Anything more nauseating she could not
conceive. Prayer at this hour with that woman.” (95) Further, Clarissa
reports to Richard: “‘Kilman arrives just as we’ve done lunch,’ she
said. ‘Elizabeth turns pink. They shut themselves. I suppose they’re
praying.’ Lord! He didn’t like Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway 35
Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi it; but these things
pass over if you let them.” (96) There is a clear hint here of a lesbian
relationship. Miss Kilman has channelized her sexuality into gorging
herself with food. “Elizabeth rather wondered whether Miss Kilman
could be hungry. It was her way of eating, eating with intensity, then
looking, again and again, at a plate of sugared cakes on the table
next them; then, when a lady and a child sat down and the child took
the cake could Miss Kilman really mind it? Yes, Miss Kilman did mind
it. She had wanted that cake – the pink one. The pleasure of eating
was almost the only pure pleasure left her, and then to be baffled
even in that!” (105) Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway 36 Institute of
Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi War, Trauma and Mental Illness
‘In adopting the term [trauma], psychoanalysis carries the three
ideas implicit in it over on to the psychical level: the idea of a violent
shock, the idea of a wound and the idea of consequences affecting
the whole organisation.’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, p. 466) The First
World War forms a backdrop to the novel, even though the action
takes place in 1923, four years after the Armistice. The text captures
the relief felt by the English people after the War. Modernism and
change follow. The War – which has been like paternal domination –
has changed people’s notions about what English society ought to be
like. The characters are lost in this modern world. Meaningful links in
this dissociated post war world are not easy to make, no matter how
much effort the characters make. Clarissa Dalloway stops at a shop
where before the war one ‘could buy almost perfect gloves.’ She
quickly returns to realise that her daughter Elizabeth doesn’t care
either about gloves or shoes. Elizabeth seems to be falling in love
with her history teacher Miss Kilman who is German, and Clarissa
doesn’t quite approve of that. In 1923, the old establishment, with
its oppressive values, is beginning to crumble. English citizens,
including most of the characters in the novel, feel the failure of the
British empire as strongly as they feel their own personal failures.
Peter has just returned from his imperialist adventures in India and is
in love with an Indian girl. There are people who still believe in and
uphold English tradition, such as Aunt Helena and Lady Bruton, but
they are old. Lady Bruton is a “physically powerful, emphatically
phallic woman” (Minow-Pinkney 2010:75), but she belongs decisively
to the past. Anticipating the end of the Conservative Party’s reign,
Richard plans to write a history of the Brutons, whom he thinks of as
the great British military family, who are already part of the past. The
British empire faces an impending demise, and the loss of the
traditional and familiar social order leaves the English at a loss. The
militaristic Lady Bruton, the epitome of the English ruling classes,
“never spoke of England, but this isle of men, this dear, dear land
was in her blood (without reading Shakespeare), and if ever a woman
could have worn the helmet and shot the arrow, could have led
troops to attack … that woman was Millicent Bruton.” Virginia Woolf:
Mrs Dalloway 37 Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi
Clarissa’s double in the novel is a war victim – Septimus Warren
Smith, “aged about thirty, pale faced, beak- nosed, wearing brown
shoes and a shabby overcoat…” (12) Septimus cannot get over the
trauma of the War and is delusional. A motor car comes to a sudden
halt. “Passers-by who of course, stopped and stared, had just time to
see a face of the very greatest importance against the dove grey
upholstery, before a male hand drew a blind and there was nothing
to be seen except a square of dove grey.” (12) Septimus feels he is
responsible for the traffic congestion, for the motor car which has
stopped. Septimus hallucinates about “everything coming together
to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had almost come to
the surface and was about to burst into flames…” (12-13). The shock
of war has been so deeply disturbing, so overwhelming that it is
difficult for Septimus to either repress it or experience it fully. In his
character, at an unconscious level, there is deep omnipotence. There
is a wish to control, perhaps an unconscious wish to be different. In
his case too, Germany represents the tyrannical father who has
punished him and left him as a war victim. The rage is finally turned
inward and Septimus seeks to punish himself, which he ultimately
does by jumping out of the window. Septimus suffers from
melancholia throughout the novel. In his 1917 essay “Mourning and
Melancholia,” Freud suggested that certain depressions were caused
by turning guilt-ridden anger on the self. The clinical picture
presented by melancholia reveals the violence of a compulsion to
self punishment that can go as far as suicide. In the words of Melanie
Klein, “Reality passes its verdict – that the object no longer exists –
upon each single one of the memories and hopes through which the
libido was attached to the lost object, and the ego, confronted as it
were with the decision whether it will share this fate, is persuaded by
the sum of its ‘narcissistic satisfactions’ in being alive to sever its
attachment to the nonexistent object.” (Mitchell 161) There are his
moments of madness in the text which his wife Rezia does not
understand. Septimus looks for a purpose in life and there lies
Woolf’s irony: ‘what purpose’? An aeroplane which flies overhead
seems to form the letters TOFFEE. Septimus thinks it is some kind of
coded language. He hallucinates, and hears the birds sing to him in
Greek. “Men must not cut down trees. There is a God (He noted such
revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one
kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He waited. He
listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped
Septimus, Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway 38 Institute of Lifelong
Learning, University of Delhi Septimus, four or five times over and
went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek
words …” (20) This is an autobiographical reference, since Woolf had
experienced something similar in one of her breakdowns. Roger
Poole (1995) has discussed in detail the role played by Greek in
Woolf’s consciousness as well as unconscious mind. “For Virginia,
Greek was a symbol for everything that she personally would never
be able to attain to. Greek was an ideal, a touchstone, an abstraction
of pure intellection. … It was a symbol for her own failure, her own
impracticality, her shifting nature, her irrepressible unlearnedness”
(175) Woolf gives us a criticism of psychiatry as it was in those times,
linking with her own mental illness. Mirroring her own experience
with psychiatrists, Woolf creates insensitive doctors who provide no
empathy. Doctor Holmes in the novel dismisses Septimus’ illness. “Dr
Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him.” It is a cold
diagnosis. Dr Holmes wants Septimus to look outside of himself,
offering Septimus no space to look within and translate the
experience of madness into meaning, and then perhaps a possibility
to heal. Dr. Holmes recommends Sir William Bradshaw, a renowned
London psychiatrist – a “rich self obsessed careerist”. Sir William
proceeds by force of personality and his capacity to know when a
patient, such as Septimus is “a case of extreme gravity, complete
breakdown” within two or three minutes of meeting him. Septimus
expresses guilt and threatens to end his life, for he has committed a
terrible crime. Sir William determines that Septimus has suffered a
complete nervous breakdown and prescribes a long period of bed
rest in one of his homes in the country. Septimus will have to be
separated from Rezia, though. Sir William does not use the term
“madness,” preferring instead to speak of a “lack of proportion.”
Septimus feels he is being “tortured by human nature” by Dr Holmes
and Sir William, who “forbade childbirth, penalised despair.” Virginia
Woolf: Mrs Dalloway 39 Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of
Delhi Loneliness and Death As Woolf describes Clarissa, there was “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.” (3)
Clarissa has both the experiences: feeling very young and at the
same time unspeakably aged. Woolf dives into Clarissa’s mind – she
is intuitive; she can judge people by instinct. On the one hand Mrs
Dalloway looks forward to life; on the other she is unspeakably
dreadful about life itself. It is almost as if she has already pre-empted
the day’s events. ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun Nor the furious
winter’s rages.’ These lines from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (IV ii. 258-
9) are echoed throughout the text by both Clarissa and Septimus.
The line is from a funeral song that celebrates death as a comfort
after a difficult life. The central conflict in Clarissa’s life is to choose
between solitude and communication. She identifies with the old
woman in the house across from hers. She projects her own anxiety
about being alone on to her. Even as Clarissa admires and envies the
old woman’s solitude, she knows it comes with an inevitable
loneliness. The doors and windows that form a recurrent motif in the
novel represent this conflict symbolically. At her house, workers
remove the doors from the hinges for the party, where Clarissa will
gather people together. In Bourton she had valued space to realise
both solitude and company. She remembers how the blinds used to
flap there. There is a gulf between Richard and Clarissa, even though
the marriage endures. After lunch at Lady Bruton’s, Richard buys
Clarissa a bunch of roses but cannot give them to her or say that he
loves her. Even though she values the privacy she is able to maintain
in her marriage, considering it vital to the success of the relationship,
at the same time she finds slightly disturbing the fact that Richard
doesn’t know everything about her. Clarissa’s comment on marriage,
in her choosing Richard Dalloway who’s a Member of Parliament and
declining her suitor Peter Walsh, is: “So she would find herself
arguing at St James’s Park, still making out that she had been right –
and she had too – not to marry him. For in marriage, a little licence, a
little Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway 40 Institute of Lifelong Learning,
University of Delhi independence there must be between people
living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave
her, and she him. (Where was he this morning, for instance? Some
committee, she never asked what.) But with Peter everything had to
be shared; everything gone into.”(6) Rezia too is pained by her
loneliness, for Septimus is too far away in his own world and can’t
relate to her. Perhaps Virginia Woolf’s comment is that it is difficult
to relate to insanity. Rezia and Septimus present a contrast, one
looks within, the other at the outer world. Death in the novel is both
meaningful and threatening. Death is the ultimate quietude and
ageing a primary concern. Clarissa keeps anxious about when the
circle of life will stop. Septimus’s suicidal embrace of death
ultimately helps her to be at peace with her own mortality. When Dr
Holmes arrives, Septimus – who is soon to be taken to the asylum –
commits suicide by throwing himself out of the window. In the words
of Jean Thomson (2004): “… through Septimus, Virginia Woolf is able
to describe both death and the brink of insanity, where it is difficult
to know what is really there, and the deep depression which the
sufferer believes is only to be resolved by suicide. Her own
experiences of excitement and depression are woven into the book,
giving authenticity to the portrayal of the ex-soldier and his states of
mind.” As the text comes to a close, two things happen. On the one
hand, people get together at Clariss’a party – Sally, now the mother
of five sons, the gentry including Lady Bruton, even the Prime
Minister. Woolf focuses on Sir William Bradshaw, who brings the
news of Septimus’s suicide. Clarissa goes into a little room so she can
be alone. Death is close, yet Clarissa feels that Septimus has taken on
the burden of her own life. Perhaps he has preserved something that
is lost for her. Septimus has finally succeeded in being Clarissa’s
double. Clarissa returns to life, painfully. Virginia Woolf: Mrs
Dalloway 41 Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi
Adaptations A film based on the novel, with the same title, was made
in 1997. It was directed by Marleen Gorris and starred Vanessa
Redgrave in the lead role, with Rupert Graves as Septimus Warren
Smith. Available online: click here (check legal status) The Hours is a
1998 novel written by Michael Cunningham. It won the 1999 Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction as well as the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
The book depicts three generations of women affected by the novel
Mrs Dalloway. The first is Woolf herself writing Mrs. Dalloway in
1923 and struggling with her own mental illness. The second is Mrs.
Brown, wife of a World War II veteran, who is reading Mrs. Dalloway
in 1949 as she plans her husband's birthday party. The third is
Clarissa Vaughan, a lesbian, who plans a party in 2001 to celebrate a
major literary award received by her good friend and former lover,
the poet Richard, who is dying of an AIDS-related illness. The Hours is
a 2002 film directed by Stephen Daldry, and starring Nicole Kidman,
Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Ed Harris. The screenplay by David
Hare is based on the Michael Cunningham novel. For her
performance in the film as Virginia Woolf, Nicole Kidman received
the Oscar for Best Actress. For a trailer, click here. Conclusion Mrs
Dalloway keeps a delicate balance between life and death. They
seem to run parallel. Woolf wrote furiously and marvellously, but at
the cost of her health, denying life. Woolf determinedly refused
treatment, choosing repeated bouts of madness but retaining her
creativity. We can recall the view of Alix Strachey, quoted earlier: “…
if you had stopped the madness you might have stopped the
creativeness too ... It may be preferable to be mad and be creative
than to be treated by analysis and become ordinary.” Virginia Woolf:
Mrs Dalloway 42 Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi I
am left wondering: if she had sought psychoanalytic treatment and
lived longer, would she have been as brilliant a writer? I close with a
letter she wrote to her husband before her suicide. Tuesday.
Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go
through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this
time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing
what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest
possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could
be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible
disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your
life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I
can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I
owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely
patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody
knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you.
Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I
can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people
could have been happier than we have been. V. Summary The lesson
begins with a detailed biography of Virginia Woolf. Her involvement
with the Bloomsbury Group is described in a separate