Mrs Dalloway

Upon writing the book

Initially, Virginia Woolf wanted to write The Hours, which later on became Mrs Dalloway, involving only Clarissa’s character who would have eventually committed suicide or would have died at the end of the party.

Paying a rather unpleasant visit to a lady made her change her mind and she wrote in her diary that she wanted ‘to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.’

Issues

Divergent ideas – the woman - symbol of intuitive knowledge; the man – symbol of intellectual knowledge

Time functions as a vehicle by which the reader and the characters fill in the gaps. We are facing with the idea of a “fictive experience of time”. For example, the bells signify the inevitability of change.

When Sally kisses her, she experiences rapture – their femininity is reflected in each other.

Victorian treatment on mental illness and Woolf’s perception of it

It was thought that women were more likely to suffer from pathological grief.

The “rest cure” had been prescribed to Woolf before, so she wrote about it in Mrs Dalloway conveying the bad effects of feminizing and giving medicine for grief through Septimus’ character. Suffering from “melancholia” (in Freudian terms) he hallucinates, mistaking Peter Walsh for his dead comrade Evans. Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw don’t acknowledge his illness.

Clarissa on the other hand sees rest as preparation for death as her bed becomes the grave, narrowing.

Actual Death vs. Symbolic Death

For Septimus, death is the only means by which his soul, his essence, remains "untainted." His insanity comes from his heroism and intellectual sensitivity, hence he gets no validation of his mental illness.

Clarissa’s love of flowers is her attempt to beautify the world- the "ugly, evil dungeon".

These two are connected, because their experiences and their consciousness occur after and are contrasted by the bells that strike. The leaden circles, product of the striking of Big Ben’s bells, also signify the pulse of life itself.

Structural Outline for MD

The book begins with Clarissa Dalloway preparing to leave her house to buy flowers for her party. She remembers how she was 18 at her parent’s house in Bourton the summer she refused to marry Peter Walsh. Walking to Bond Street she thinks on how Elizabeth doesn’t care to shop; she is distressed by the hold religious Miss Kilman has on her daughter. At Mulberry’s, the florists, she sees a car with drawn blinds blocking the street. Everyone ruminates about who sits in the car; all believe that it must be an important person.. Suddenly their attention is drawn to an airplane skywriting. Septimus, Clarissa, and all passersby are linked by their cogitation on what the plane is writing.

Clarissa returns home to discover that her husband, Richard, has gone to lunch with Lady Millicent Bruton and she feels abandoned. Thinking about Sally Seton, upon whom she had a crush, she takes the dress she plans to wear that night downstairs and has begun to mend it when she is interrupted by Peter. As they talk, both remember the summer she refused to marry him. Peter leaves when Elizabeth comes in, and he walks aimlessly through London. He follows a young lady and pretends she cares for him. Then he falls asleep in Regent’s Park and dreams of a solitary traveler and an elderly woman.

In the same park, Septimus and Rezia wait for their appointment with Sir William Bradshaw. Septimus thinks he sees his dead friend Evans, but it is only Peter, who thinks Rezia and Septimus are having a lover’s quarrel. As Peter gets into a taxi, Septimus’ past is revealed -- how he loved Shakespeare and Miss Isabel Pole, to whom he used to write poetry. After the war he married Rezia because he was afraid he could not feel. He has been to see Dr. Holmes, a psychiatrist who he wants to escape. Sir William tells Rezia that Septimus simply needs a sense of proportion and he will place him in a home. Rezia is distraught because she does not want to be separated from her husband.

Hugh Whitbread brings Lady Bruton flowers at the lunch with Richard Dalloway where they are to help her draft a letter to the Times about emigration. Lady Bruton mentions that Peter is back in London. Hugh and

Richard leave together and go into a jewelry store where Richard decides he wants to buy Clarissa something. He settles on roses, which he brings to her. Clarissa voices her concerns about Elizabeth and Miss Kilman, who soon thereafter come down and leave to go to the army and navy stores. After shopping, Elizabeth and Kilman have tea but Elizabeth is desperate to leave, which she does, leaving Kilman desolate.

Septimus helps Rezia make a hat and she thinks everything will be all right. They are happy for that moment. She decides she will not let Septimus be taken to a home. When she gets up to pack she hears a noise of someone coming up to their rooms. It is Dr. Holmes. Septimus jumps from the window rather than being captured by "human nature," Dr. Holmes.

Peter, going to his hotel, hears Septimus’ ambulance and reflects on the wonders of civilization. After dinner he walks to Clarissa’s home for the party. He later regrets having come and Clarissa herself thinks her party will be a failure. Then Sally Seton, now Lady Rosseter, arrives at the party which now completes the gathering of those from Bourton thirty years earlier. The party begins to get better; the prime minister puts in an appearance. Clarissa is unhappy when Lady Bradshaw tells her about the suicide of Sir William’s patient. She thinks about the young man in another room and realizes that he was significant to her life. Sally and Peter sit together on a couch remembering the past. The party breaks up and Clarissa comes over to Peter, who is very excited to see her come.

Some Woolfian Comments on Mrs. Dalloway

A study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side--something like that.

I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most

intense. . .

Flow of the storyline achieved through:

• Indirect Interior Monologue - allows her to move easily from one character to the next and allows the reader insight into each character’s mind. The narrative leaves one mind and enters another, hovering between the minds of the characters. • Stream of Consciousness - Woolf uses this to allow the reader to receive everything - the reader momentarily enters the character’s consciousness.

• Omniscient Narrator - Achieves unity and cohesion which the character, Clarissa Dalloway, lacks. Big Ben is utilized as an interruption in the process of life.There are three identifiable times Woolf wants us to recognize as integral to the structure of the novel: The past of the narrator, the time of Clarissa’s youth, and the time of this single day in June.

A little something about some of the characters

As the novel opens, the reader is acutely aware of the formality, of the decorum, of her marriage to Richard. He completes who she is. People are more concerned with identifying her as his wife, rather than acknowledging her as an individual.

Peter is painfully aware that Clarissa has tremendous power and influence over him, and Clarissa reminisces, for a moment, how animated her life would have been if she had married Peter.

Peter felt the pulse of life very deeply and infinitely; it was this quality that drew Clarissa to him in the first place. Peter internalizes things. He is extremely introspective, always looking for deeper meanings. Superficiality really doesn’t exist in his persona, or in his thoughts.

Elizabeth finds the male presence exceedingly dull. She begins her initiation into the world of womanhood, and she is already very disillusioned and disinterested when it comes to the necessity of men.

Septimus is perceived as weak and feminine because he is unafraid to cry, to show his emotions. Many people, including his wife and the doctors, dismiss his grief and sorrow as irrational. No one is willing to allow or accept his despair resulting from his shocking war experiences.

Lucrezia knows that Septimus’s illness is worsening. She takes some comfort in her knowledge of that instance, that moment of time and space, in which they were happy, as they sat and created Mrs. Peter’s hat.

Basic stuff about the Novel

Set on a single June day in 1923, the novel tracks the parallel lives of two very different Londoners, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. Clarissa is 51-years old who is giving a party that night for her husband, Richard Dalloway, a Conservative member of Parliament. She moves in the upper reaches of British society (the prime minister will attend her party), but she is not a titled aristocrat, and she is thrilled about the prime minister’s actually showing up at the party.

Several narrative events (e.g., the car that backfires in Bond St.) link Clarissa and Septimus, although the characters never meet.  In addition, two Shakespearean quotations link the two characters.  The first is:

“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,Nor the furious winter’s rage “

 Clarissa sees these lines in a book open in a bookstore window and then thinks of them again. Septimus thinks of the quotation and then after Clarissa hears about his suicide, she thinks of it again and feels connected to him: “and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. . . .  She felt somehow very like him. . . .  She felt glad he had done it; thrown it away.  The clock was striking.  The leaden circles dissolved in the air.  He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun”.

The second Shakespearean quotation is in Clarissa’s thoughts in that same scene when she is reflecting on Septimus’ death:

“If it were now to die, ‘twere now to be most happy”

Clarissa recalls thinking of it during that summer house party at Burton 33 years ago when she was 18 and enamored of Sally Seton, the same house party where she met Richard Dalloway, whom she chose over the more emotional and romantic suitor Peter Walsh. At Burton, it was herself she imagined dying happy, not for the love of Peter or Richard, but for lovely Sally Seton, who kisses her on the lips. 

Some sort of odd conclusion

In Mrs. Dalloway, those London street scenes and the characters’ meditations on them are key to the theme of relatedness and connection, to the meaning of life (and death), and the reason why it is worthwhile to just go on living.