VIRGINIA WOOLF

1882-1941

Mrs Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway (published in 1925) takes place on a single June day in 1923 and tracks the parallel lives of two very different Londoners, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. Clarissa is a 51-year old woman who is giving a party that night for her husband, Richard Dalloway, a Conservative member of Parliament.

THE VOYAGE OUT (1915)

• Clarissa is “a tall slight woman, her body wrapped in furs, her face in veils”. Her husband is a conservative politician who is against women’s vote.

Septimus Warren Smith

• In the only introduction Woolf wrote for any of her novels, she says that she originally intended that Clarissa would die in the novel, perhaps by suicide. Then she decided to create another character who would be the one to die. This new character was Septimus Warren Smith, a 30-year-old veteran of the WWI. This character allows Woolf to explore some aspects of madness that she had experienced herself, and also to condemn war and the false patriotism she associates with it.

From Woolf’ s Diary

• “Mrs. Dalloway has branched into a book [she published a short story, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” in 1923]; and I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side--something like that. Septimus Smith? is that a good name?” (October 14, 1922)

Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses

– MD as a response to ULYSSES• "I have read 200 pages [of Ulysses] so far," Virginia

Woolf writes in her diary for 16 August 1922, and reports that she has been "amused, stimulated, charmed, interested ... to the end of the Cemetery scene."

• Later, she is "puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned" "by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." She thinks of Ulysses as an "illiterate, underbred book ... of a self taught working man”.

SIMILIARITIES

• BOTH TAKE PLACE ON A SINGLE DAY (16th JUNE 1904 AND 13th JUNE 1923)

• TECHNIQUE: STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (BUT INTERIOR MONOLOGUE VS FREE INDIRECT SPEECH/STYLE)

DIFFERENCES

• TITLE (No mythical method)

• THEMATIC (absence of real communication)

• SPIRITUALITY VS MATERIALISM (see MF)

Modern Fiction

• Modern fiction is an experiment:• It is for the historian of literature to decide; for

him to say if we are now beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert; and of this perhaps it may be worth while to attempt some account.

Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924)

• In her essay W warns readers that they must get used to “a season of fragments or failures” and adds that they would have to be patient and learn to tolerate “the spasmodic, the obscure”.

• They will be rewarded because she is certain that “we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature”.

Modern Fiction 2

• Polemic against Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy

• If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word we should say that these three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its soul.

Modern Fiction 3

• If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on which is one word materialists, we mean by it that they write of unimportant things; that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.

Modern Fiction

• Let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception.

• The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

• Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being like this. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style (…)

• Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?

• However this may be, the problem before the novelist at present, as we suppose it to have been in the past, is to contrive means of being free to set down what he chooses. He has to have the courage to say that what interests him is no longer “this” but “that”: out of “that” alone must he construct his work. For the moderns “that”, the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology. At once, therefore, the accent falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon something hitherto ignored

Conclusion• (…) there is no limit to the horizon, and that

nothing—no “method”, no experiment, even of the wildest—is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence. “The proper stuff of fiction” does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.

Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

• And they said “Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe…” But I cried “Stop! Stop!”(…) I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs. Brown, that vision to which I cling though I know no way of imparting it to you, would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished for ever.”

Present/Past

• August 30, 1923

“My discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect & each comes to daylight at the present moment”

Also “tunnelling process”

And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling

Moment of Being

• She went on, into the little room where the Prime Minister had gone with Lady Bruton. Perhaps there was somebody there. But there was nobody (…) What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party— the Bradshaws, talked of death. He had killed himself—but how? Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party!

• She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

• But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding his treasure?

• She parted the curtains; she looked. Oh, but how surprising!—in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her! (…) She was going to bed, in the room opposite. It was fascinating to watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the room, coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating, with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that old woman, quite quietly, going to bed. She pulled the blind now. The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light! the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. (…) But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.

• What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?

• It is Clarissa, he said.

• For there she was.