On 'Mrs Dalloway' By Virginia Woolf
If I had to vouch for the sustaining appeal of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway one hundred years on, I would emphasise its capacity to produce happiness, joy even from a set of intensely felt present tense moments. And so despite everything – war, illness, traumatic death, mental breakdown, failed friendships and marriages, the ceaseless loss of human existence --- Mrs. Dalloway is a joyful novel, celebrating as it does the end of the Great War in Europe and the end of a period of illness in the life of Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, aged fifty, who, on this day in June is preparing for a party, most importantly, her party. Woolf’s focus is a simple and radiant one: the recognition of moments of acute happiness, joy at being alive, despite the terrible scars of war. And yet war is most certainly still with us in the figure of Septimus Smith who sits out with his anguished wife in Regent’s Park wrestling with his demons; Smith the traumatised soldier whose sees his friend Evans explode to smithereens from behind every park bush. Smith’s fate is unforgettable because war is a permanent fact of human history; but it is Clarissa’s indomitable mood which shapes this novel. Her commitment to life, to living, to the flow of existence.
‘What a lark! What a plunge!’ she declares at the prospect of a day full of enjoyment; before we are indeed plunged into Mrs. Dalloway’s private world of past and present selves and events. For this is a novel of commemoration and remembrance of chiefly private moments; and Clarissa’s party is an attempt to give public commemoration to a set of private forms. As readers, we are asked to build upon as though these moments as though they were our own. To collaborate in an atmosphere of trust and intimacy; a subterranean world of feelings and evaluations of felt experience, as if feelings and experiences were somehow a set of exquisite objects we must sort though. Much of this is happy and uplifting work because Mrs. Dalloway sustains herself with chiefly happy reflections. She eschews those in a more despondent mood: the embittered seamstress, Miss Kilman, brought low by poverty and her rigid religion; and the agitating Peter Walsh who won’t relinquish the past, who simply won’t enjoy.
For enjoyment, we learn, is central to Clarissa’s personality, a fact noted by Peter Walsh, her former suitor, as he too sits out in Regents Park – in close proximity to Septimus but in an entirely different history --- reflecting upon his reunion with Clarissa on this day in June. Years have passed and they have both reached their early fifties. Peter, who Clarissa might once have married had things gone differently; had he been different; more agreeable, more spur of the moment:
And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy . . . She enjoyed practically everything. It you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment.
If I had to have a go at summarising Mrs. Dalloway’s method for living, which is the ethos of the entire novel, it might go something like this: Life is a series of passing moments and it is impossible to note all of them, but each, potentially, might flower into something extraordinary; a revelation, a moment of ripening knowledge; so be sure to honour this moment for what it can bring you both now and in the future because you will find yourself recalling your past and it will take imagination and courage to recall what it is you love, who you love and how. And always, there will be deviations and interruptions; moments and selves you cannot assimilate, and you will not comprehend, as you try to assemble an authentic version of yourself for posterity.
And so, in the middle of a moment of private recollection --- Peter Walsh assimilating his personal biography; collating his memoirs; assembling the sum of his parts in “the old days” --- the narrator interrupts with an “ancient song” of love from an old woman outside Regent’s Park tube station. Here is a song of ‘primeval May’ on an ancient May Day (and today as I write, it is in fact May Day, and I think of all the young bodies carousing and singing and flinging themselves into the river around Oxford as they try to join up with something more ancient than themselves). Her primitive sounds interrupt Peter’s mental march as he crosses from Westminster to Regent’s Park; as he passes “the exalted statues” of dead Generals which make up a public version of history told by men, and enacted by men, excluding women and children; a history which violates the ancient rhythms of organic life. And so the old lady sings a song of the earth as she also sings an ancient ballad of long-lost love. As she redistributes our sympathies.
Love and happiness are often sung for in this novel as they are often sourced. Richard Dalloway is a clear source of love and security, for it is his position and his salary, we presume, which allows Clarissa to live in Westminster; permits Mrs. Dalloway her ‘secret deposit of exquisite moments.’ I don’t see any problem with Woolf the feminist admitting to this source of financial and social security; after all, she was paid £50.00 for the manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway, which in today’s terms is £3,884, or thereabouts, in buying power. Not nearly enough, but something, because the writer must be paid.
Nonetheless, Mr. Richard Dalloway is a necessity, and not just financially. He is also a source of love and trust, and here Woolf is generous, truthful even. No woman or writer is an island: “Richard her husband who was the foundation of it --- of the gay sounds, of the green lights, of the cook even whistling . . . one must pay back for this secret deposit of exquisite moments, she thought . . .” And the paying back is the attention she gives to those around her: an acknowledgement of the exquisite fragments of existence that make a compete life.
I now see several such moments are sourced by green life--- the natural world --- which my younger self would have raced over. Green, the colour rinsed out by Mrs. Dalloway’s illness, has now returned, hence all the mention of parks and gardens; for this is also a recovery novel and nature is essential for restoration. And so it is this green life which Mrs. Dalloway brings back from her walk across London; the secret life of trees she carries back into the holy ‘vault’ of her house; arboreal images gathered as invisible cuttings she will arrange within her inner world to remind herself of who she truly is -- a woman of taste ---- but also a woman with a secret soul. And so she releases into her home sustaining moments of beauty and transcendence: ‘moments like this are buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness they are, she thought (as if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only).
And the source of this abundance? Not God but the imagination of the novelist; and then the sensibility of Mrs. Dalloway herself with her capacity to absorb and see ‘the colours, salts, tones of existence.’ Her ability to plunge (that verb again) as a diver might into the sea as the waves ‘gently split their surface’ revealing pearls beneath the weeds. Those extraordinary sets of images this novel draws up and puts on display as Mrs. Dalloway puts out flowers for her guests.
We see things on the surface, but underneath, in our hidden world, we must create a repository of cherished moments; what it is we wish to remember of our life. We must strive to produce what Clive Bell, husband of her sister Vanessa, would describe in his essay on Art (1914) as a significant form; a shape, outline, object or image from which we compose meaning. For a work of art to exist, Bell sustains, it must provoke a private set of emotions arising from personal experience.
And so Clarissa returns to ‘scene after scene at Bourton,’ her childhood home where she recollects her courtship to Richard Dalloway, and her fraught feelings for Peter Walsh. At Bourton both relationships end: one in marriage and the other as an intense but unsustainable friendship until now, the day of her party, also a day of reunion. Woolf’s novel encourages us to evaluate private experience for its vital effeupon vivivid toll upon our imagination. To consider what makes history --- if by history we mean a set of aesthetic images we can put together to form a whole; a series of relational forms or patterns which strike us as beautiful and affecting, worth keeping, as you might consider keeping a striking set of souvenirs from a memorable visit.
Mrs. Dalloway reminds me that I have agency over my own historic emotions: what I might treasure or cast aside; a personal system of curation in an effort to recover the more soulful or truthful moments of life lived; the past as it meets with the extended present. (‘But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to recover?) For while we may continue to recollect, we must also continue to live; life must flow like the traffic down Bond Street and Piccadilly until her browsing is interrupted by a significant event: a royal personage – it is hard to tell who --- perhaps passing through the traffic in a motor car. The moment is a mystery waiting to be claimed, to be known, interpreted.
Life is worth living if we can allow for the ebb and flow and also the interruptions; never clinging to one historical moment or incident as Peter Walsh seems to cling to Clarissa’s rejection of him. We must let go of our slights; cover our wounds; accept death as a fact of life and remember we all live in each other, part to part as we strive to make a cherished whole.
Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.”
1880 words
Brief Biography:
Sally Bayley is the author of The Private Life of the Diary and a coming-of-age trilogy, Girl with Dove, No Boys Play Here and The Green Lady. Her forthcoming book, Pond Life, will be published by The New Menard Press next year. She regularly hosts and performs a podcast, A Reading Life, A Writing Life, a source of creative inspiration for writers and artists.
Alongside her rereading of Mrs. Dalloway, she has just finished reading The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington (1974)