Mrs. Dalloway

Reading Mrs. Dalloway almost 100 years after its initial publication is a thought-provoking experience. One understands that Wolfe’s experimentation in modernism – the stream-of-consciousness narration, the deliberate manipulations of time and space – were daringly new at the time of their writing. Since then, however, authors have played with these concepts and taken them in so many new directions, it’s become harder to appreciate the novelty, the literary accomplishment, of those who first set us on this path. (Imagine being expected to pay homage to the guy who invented pagers now, in the era of cell phones.) I found myself asking, as I polished off the last page: “I get why this was a big deal back in the day, but aside show more from literary context and some passages of lovely, artful prose, what (if anything) does this novel have to offer?”

On the one hand, the novel does explore some universal themes. For instance, many of the characters are hiding their true natures behind caricatures that either society or their own choices have forced upon them. (Richard, the politician who would really rather be a country gentleman; Peter, the colonial administrator who would really rather be a radical; Lady Bruton, the society matron who would really rather be a military leader.) It could be argued that Mrs. Dalloway is one of the few characters who doesn’t let others shape her, but instead pursues her own happiness with unusual clarity and determination. (Other reviewers have interpreted her fixation on giving parties as a sign that she is motivated by social position, but I would argue that she gives parties because she finds them interesting to HER – SHE enjoys the challenge of putting people together, of providing a context in which she exposes the true nature of others. Note how unimpressed she is when the Prime Minister shows up at her shindig? She’s far more interested in how her other guests react to his presence.)

Many of the novel’s other themes, however, are only very shallowly explored: mental instability (Septimus), the limited roles for women in society (Lady Bruton, Elizabeth, Ellie), homosexuality (Clarissa & Sally, possibly Septimus & Evan), social pretention (Hugh), people who impose their will upon others (Dr. Bradshaw). I constantly found myself referring back to contemporary texts by writers like Greene, Forster, and Lessing that explored these themes in much more comprehensive ways.

There are other aspects of the novel that fail to satisfy. I’ve tried to understand how Clarissa and Septimus are “dopplegangers,” but I’m not sure I get it – unless it’s as simple as “some people figure out how to be content with their lives, others don’t.” I’ve tried to understand the novel as a feminist text, but Mrs. Dalloway manages to find her happiness without having to challenge any social, gender, or cultural norms. I gather Wolfe at one time intended Clarissa to commit suicide at the penultimate party. While the final version of the story rejects this ending, Wolfe has left much of the foreshadowing intact (references to Clarissa’s “recent illness,” scenes in which she revisits her past life & decisions – much as authors would have us believe people nearing the end of their lives are wont to do), which feels like narrative carelessness. Finally, Wolfe’s characters – whether defined over the course of pages or paragraphs – rarely venture beyond caricatures. Her most successful character isn’t even Mrs. Dalloway - it is post-war London, the only entity to emerge from the pages vibrant, complex, and fully realized.

In summary, I think the argument can be made that Mrs. Dalloway deserves its place on any list of 100 Most Important Works of Fiction. But I’m not ready to nominate it for a spot on 100 Best Works of Fiction – not in a world gifted with 100 additional years of texts that blend literary experimentation AND essential, consequential content. show less

5 out of 5. I find that, more than with many other re-reads, my response to this reading is not a critical one about the book but rather a reaction to the last time I read it. I want to upbraid my younger self and say, “no, you fool, this book is transcendent.” I wonder if, when I inevitably read this book again many years from now, I’ll look back at this review and say “you had no idea” or something like that. I hope so. The raw charge of this book is refreshing, revitalizing. It reminds me of London, of springtime, of late nights and happy lives and the knowledge that any human being contains untold and unplumbable multitudes. An ordinary day, every single one of them, is anything but – and it’s enough to make you cry, show more to cheer, to laugh, to gasp — for there she was.

More at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2015/03/16/mrs-dalloway-2/ show less

Nearly impossible to sustain the meteoric thrill of the first third, a novel assembling itself in an almost evolutionary process; Woolf's confounding sentences are made up of discrete, microbial fragments, bonded with a generous infusion of punctuation and some admirably sneaky transitions. Settles into a lovely, if more conventional meditation on age and memory. I have very little use for the final scene, which ties things off with a pretty rote interior climax. Rote, of course, within the context of Woolf's achievement, which is its own astonishing invention after all. Musing over it now it's still surprising that the vivid descriptions of Septimus's madness can exist in the same novel that eyes tea cakes with such petty jealousy.

I'm reading through Virginia Woolf's work and this book is both my first on the theme, and my first book of the year. It's a surprisingly difficult novel on a simple single day in the life of a of the wife of a not quite successful MP, who is throwing party in her Westminster home for friends and political connections. The Prime Minister will stop by. But the novel is anything but simple, and the reader can tell this right away from the famous opening line, "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.". The complexity is in every moment, in every sentence, and it's really glorious. The narrative doesn't stay with Clarissa Dalloway, but roams around various characters with various perspectives and issues. We see the same show more events, or the same times of the day, from different characters who know nothing about what our last character just experienced. The narrative has the reader making associations all over the place, between characters and perspectives, between times, between now and wherever their memories take them, and how the events and feelings in these memories fit into who these characters are right now. And all of this is just the bones, the structure into how Woolf brings about the affects she is trying to create.

I'm going to say here, I'm not her best reader. But I adored this book, and everything about it. I enjoyed hacking away at it, paragraph by paragraph. When I was sharp, it was a "quick" 3 minutes a page. When tired, impossible. When in between there was a lot of rereading. There was a lot of rereading anyway. And a lot of notes.

The story of Mrs. Dalloway is only partially about our central figure. First, it's a contrast. We see our a settled, pat, confused in life and herself, changing, menopausal, fading, wealthy, sheltered, shallow but also appealing Mrs. Dalloway in parallel with Septimus Smith, a WWI veteran and war hero who lost his ability to feel after the war, and eventually, by the time we get here on this one day, his mind. The entire novel takes place on June 23, 1923, in some dialogue with [Ulysses] which has a similar one-day in June take. The other reason it's not about Clarissa Dalloway, nee Parry, is because we spend so much time in the minds and views of so many other characters - Peter Walsh, her childhood love-interest, Rezia, the loving and worried Italian wife of Septimus, Lady Rosseter - nee Sally Seton - a savvy childhood friend, the well-educated Doris Kilman who lost her wealth and has become impoverished and religious, Elizabeth Dalloway - Clarissa's daughter, Richard Dalloway, her husband, political influencer Lady Mullicent Bruton who admires Richard, Ellie Henderson - Clarissa's discarded childhood friend, and many others.

A few impressions by paragraph:

We are deep in modernism. Now, this moment, this stream of consciousness, also means deep emotional dives into the past. And it means technology in life. Back-firing cars and noisy airplanes advertising with smoke, whaling ambulances. We walk the streets around Westminster and Regents Park. We ride the bus and feel the weather, which blows into windows. Private noises make their way onto the city streets, and the pedestrians' imaginations. We are rich in sensation and changing perspectives. (The introduction compares these changing perspectives to cinema and to Cubism.)

And we are deep in Woolf's elegance. Loneliness is conveyed by the "trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there in the darkness" at night. Peter, just off a boat from India, reflects "the earth, after the voyage, still seemed an island to him, the strangeness of standing alone, alive, unknown, at half-past eleven in Trafalgar square overcame him." An attractive woman disappears "as the light of a lamp goes wavering at night over the hedges in the darkness." Or Clarissa, momentarily, before it passes "cried, as a sleeper in the night, starts and stretches a hand in the darkness." And, near the end at the party, Clarissa steps in a quiet room, and "The party's splender fell to the floor..."

And we are in time. The long working title of this novel in draft form, for a couple years, was "The Hours". Time rings as Big Ben tolls through the day. Time effects everyone - the decades of their pasts, the biological clocks. Clarissa is 52, dealing with menopause. Walsh, the same age, is in an outright mid-life crisis. The book is peppered with women from all different stages of their lives, from childhood and elderly.

------

One of many interesting aspects of this book is the way it came about. Woolf's original plan was to write six loosely connected short stories. But she felt a need to connect them in the narrative. And she slowly reworked and developed her novel over several years, reworking the style until she felt comfortable, reworking the structure, adding major characters later in the process. What's cool is all this is documented because Woolf wrote everything out in longhand in her notebooks and we still have them. So every variation is preserved. See more here, including a notebook: https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/introduction-to-mrs-dalloway/

I'll conclude by noting, as I'm prone to, that as much as I try, I can't capture what this book is doing, or how it does it. How all within is mixed together in a stream of conscious, keeping the reader in string of associations within the book. And how it touches our own lives. The life trajectory is in here. Clarissa has lived, and now past her best years, she will be looking to preparing herself for death, even at only age 52. She is at the cusp, just over it, on the downward slide. And us, dear readers, washed over with the prose, the structure and experience, the cast of characters, and so many Shakespeare references, can't help but seeing our own lives end to end, as we read this, and orienting our present within our full lifeline. Perhaps the book is a little call to life.

2026
https://www.librarything.com/topic/377230#9085268 show less

I was quite leery of reading Mrs. Dalloway, my second Virginia Woolf as I wasn’t a fan of my first attempt, Jacob’s Room. Once again the dreaded words “stream of consciousness” arose and I approached the book with trepidation. I chose to listen to the book as read by Juliet Stevenson, and this was an excellence choice as she did a stellar job and made the book come alive.

Mrs. Dalloway is a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high society woman in post WW I England. Mrs. Dalloway’s main concerns revolve around relationships and connections. On this particular day she is preparing to host a party and as she goes through the day getting ready for the evening, she muses on her past relationships and how her life has turned show more out. One gets the sense that somewhere along the way, she has lost her inner self to the Mayfair hostess she shows to the outside world.

We don’t spend the whole book locked in Mrs. Dalloways’ head. There is another storyline that runs parallel to that of Clarissa’s. This one involves a war veteran, Septimus Smith and his wife Lucrezia. Septimus is suffering from post traumatic stress and although he and Clarissa do not meet on this day, his actions are to affect her. We also meet and are given an insight into her past with encounters with her past suitor, Peter Walsh and her childhood best friend Sally Seton.

Surprise, surprise! I loved this book. The author was able to place me inside this woman’s head and make me privy to her inner most thoughts. Although some would find her shallow and selfish, I found myself relating to her. I think most everyone thinks about their choices and wonder what life would be like if they had chosen a different path. This is a short book but is packed with unforgettable images and beautiful language and ultimately is a story about wasted potential. show less

This book is why I give three stars to many books I enjoyed reading. If I were to give every good book five stars, then I’d have to try to find a way to give this one ten.

I’ll admit, though, that I made a stab at it many years ago and didn’t get very far. Sometimes, there is the right time for a book. In this case, I picked it up again one hundred years after it was published, on a June day, much like the one on which Clarissa Dalloway sets out to buy flowers for the party she will give that evening.

The stream of consciousness and change from Clarissa’s perspective to that of other characters, particularly that of her polar opposite, Septimus Warren Smith, drew me in. Above all, I was taken with the appreciation of the miracle show more of life (in each precious moment) in the face of our awareness of death. This recurs in Clarissa’s thoughts but is also felt by others, for instance, Peter Walsh, an old suitor who returns from India that day: “By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by surprise with moments of extraordinary exaltation.” show less

'For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not “here, here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter — even trees, or barns.'

My chronological, very strict, Virginia Woolf book club has finally come up to this heavy hitter in our rotation, show more and I think I loved it even more reading it at 43 than I did reading for the first time at 30 (which I wrote about here, because in 2007 I was still blogging it up: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2007/05/life-is-not-series-of-gig-lamps.html). I'm still about 10 years younger than Clarissa Dalloway and her friends, but the themes of decades-long friendships, aging relationships, and reflections on the past all ring very true.

Reading this in chronological context with Woolf's other published works also brings some new depth to my experience of the book. We've met Clarissa and Richard Dalloway before, on the boat in The Voyage Out (although they, and Woolf, were a little different then). We also have the experience of younger well-off Londoners in Night and Day, and a whole series of fictional experiments and reflections in Woolf's short stories (like those in Monday or Tuesday) and literary criticism (in The Common Reader, our most recent read before this one). And, of course, the breakthrough of Jacob's Room. Mrs. Dalloway initially seems more personal and more conventional than Jacob's Room, but on closer reflection, I think Woolf is expanding on her earlier experiments with narrative and description and building out a fuller view of her character. Jacob, you'll remember, was hardly there at all, but Clarissa is everywhere.

***
Initial review (2007): http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2007/05/life-is-not-series-of-gig-lamps.html show less