The novel really has no story or plot. It’s about a party. It begins with Clarissa Dalloway going out to buy flowers for the party she’s holding in her house that evening; and ends when the party is breaking up after the VIPs have been standing around and watching each other, exchanging trivia and gossip.
Through all the meandering prose, consisting of long sentences that ramble on ruminating on everything, we hear not the narrator’s voice, but the staccato fits and starts of what’s going on in people’s minds. The longest sentence of 196 words mimics the prolixity of Proust whom Virginia Woolf (VW) greatly admired:
And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, …
Characters like Septimus Smith are introduced who have no connection with the main theme of people attending the party, except that his suicide by impaling himself on iron railings becomes an overheard conversation at the party – and any talk of death disturbs Clarissa. Septimus is like a patient carried around on a stretcher throughout to render a dose of medical barminess to the barmy goings on of the rich and ineffectual people in the novel.
If you consider the number of suicide cases among retuning American soldiers from tours of duty in the Middle East, it seems we are no better now at treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD, then called shell-shock). An analysis in 2016 indicates that an average of 20 American veterans die from suicide per day. The solution obviously lies in ending such wars, and not in spending useless billions on mental health for veterans.
What do we learn about the party-going elite from the upper crust of London society? First, we learn that they cannot hold a conversation on any serious subject. Second, that there seems no sparkle of wit in them (should we blame Virginia Woolf for that deliberate omission?). Third, that persons of average intelligence from the lower classes would have more gumption. And fourth, they are entirely devoted to the trivia of who is going up and who is coming down in their society.
A study of Clarissa, the central character in the novel will find she is a victim of her desire to hold parties that celebrate nothing – getting people together only to announce that she as a hostess has the drawing power to pull in people of substance to a perfectly dull affair. She’s also a nervous wreck who requires much cosseting, and soothing, and has never put her talents to any use. The idle rich, one might call them. In her preoccupation with minutiae, she seems to be losing her marbles as well.
The film Mrs Dalloway, screenplay by Eileen Atkins, is available on Amazon Prime and free on YouTube. It’s a marvellous film with the incomparable Vanessa Redgrave playing Clarissa, unflappable on the surface, as hostesses should be, but teeming with feelings within. Geeta remarked it’s a novel without a story. Please see this film if you can. It’s not only a beautiful rendition of the novel, but the screenwriter has managed all the disparate scenes so that they make the faithful account of a day’s journey. It all comes together to yield something tender and bruised at the end.
There is a lot of description that borders on the poetic with similes often used:
– She read on Lady Bruton's face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life
– as if he had set light to a grey pellet on a plate and there had risen up a lovely tree in the brisk sea-salted air of their intimacy
– the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp
– she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish
An Account of the Virtual Reading on Jan 29, 2021
Virginia Woolf – a fine-boned, strikingly delicate woman
Virginia Woolf’s mother was a famous beauty. She herself was memorably described by Nigel Nicolson, who knew her, as ‘always beautiful but never pretty.’
The date for the next reading for poetry was decided as Friday, Feb 26, 2021.
Virginia Woolf Brief Biography (by Devika)
Adeline Virginia Woolf [née Stephen] was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th century authors, and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. As an essayist, she is regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group (comprising besides herself, John Maynard Keynes the economist, and the writers E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey). Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
Woolf’s haunting language, her prescient insights into wide-ranging historical, political, feminist, and artistic issues, and her revisionist experiments with the novelistic form during a remarkably productive career, altered the course of Modernist and postmodernist letters.
Woolf was born into an affluent household in London, the seventh child in a blended family of eight which included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell, her sister. While the boys in the family received college educations, the girls were home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature. An important influence in Virginia Woolf's early life was the summer home the family used in St Ives, Cornwall, in south-western England by the sea where, in the late 1890s, she first saw the Godrevy Lighthouse, which was to become central to her novel To the Lighthouse (1927).
Woolf's childhood ended abruptly in 1895 with the death of her mother and her first mental breakdown, followed two years later by the death of her half-sister and a mother figure to her, Stella Duckworth. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied classics and history and came into contact with early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement.
Encouraged by her father, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. Her father's death in 1904 caused Woolf to have another mental breakdown. Following his death, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where they adopted a free-spirited lifestyle. It was in Bloomsbury that she and her friends formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group.
In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917 the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work. They rented a home in Sussex and moved there permanently in 1940. Throughout her life, Woolf was troubled by her mental illness. She was institutionalised several times and attempted suicide at least twice. Her illness may have been bipolar disorder, for which there was no effective intervention during her lifetime. In 1941, at age 59, Woolf died by drowning herself, walking into the River Ouse at Lewes with her pockets filled with stones. The reasons for suicide given in the note to her sister, Vanessa said: “I am certain now that I am going mad again. It is just as it was the first time, I am always hearing voices, and I know I shan’t get over it now.” She wrote in a suicide note to Leonard Woolf, her husband: “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”
No writer, perhaps, has been remembered with more numerous and more touching letters of condolence than VW.
“Virginia Woolf’s fundamental gift to women was to give us the courage and happiness to think our own thoughts.” (Oldfield)
“More than any other writer of her generation she grew to be regarded as the apostle of culture, of a learning humanized by the breath of life [and] of a quality of living the more radiant because of its quickening by things of the spirit.” (Wallis)
“The loveliest mind and spirit I ever knew, immortal both to the world and us who loved her… This is not a hard letter to write as you will know something of what I feel and words are unnecessary. For you I feel a really overwhelming sorrow, and for myself a loss which can never diminish.” (Vita Sackville-West)
“Dear Leonard,
I have just seen The Times, feel a bit trembly and unable to think of anyone but myself. I will write again to you. As I daresay you know she had invited me to come and I had suggested doing so later in this month. I am just going to Cambridge; dear Leonard, it will seem empty and strange. I can’t write any more now, only send my deepest love and sadness. Leslie Humphrey came over that very day and we talked a great deal about Virginia, he will be desolated like so many of all generations.” (E.M. Forster)
Dear Leonard,
No words can express our feelings at this dreadful heartrending thing. We are absolutely overcome. … It cannot help you in the least to know how many people must be feeling a desperate sense of loss. I know that we do, here, — but that does not help you in the least. Nothing can ... But all my life I shall remember the feeling of light, and of happiness, that she gave one. As a person, as well as in her art. Everything seemed worthwhile, important, and beautiful.” (Dame Edith Sitwell, poet)
Woolf’s own last words, penned in her famous diary on January 4, 1929, are at once tragic and serene. She writes:
“Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on forever; goes down to the bottom of the world — this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous we human beings, and show the light through. But what is the light?”
That her mental disturbance had to do with her being sexually abused repeatedly by her half-brothers is more than a conjecture. VW states that she first remembers being molested by Gerald Duckworth when she was six years old. This possibly led to a lifetime of sexual fear and resistance to masculine authority. The wiki entry notes the evidence of sexual abuse of the Stephen girls by their older Duckworth stepbrothers, and by their cousin, James Stephen.
Virginia Woolf was bisexual and had a long-term relationship wit Vita Sackville-West, the designer. Fortunately, Sackville-West’s son, Nigel Nicolson, chronicles their relationship sensitively in his 1973 book Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. The women shared an intense love from the day they first met until VW died by suicide.
Vita Sackville-West became intensely infatuated with Virginia Woolf, ten years her senior ;she was the wife of Harold Nicolson, politician and writer
Her works have been translated into more than 50 languages. A large body of literature is dedicated to her life and work, and she has been the subject of plays, novels, and films. Woolf is commemorated today by statues, societies dedicated to her work, and a building at the University of London.
Mrs. Dalloway is a unique novel in that it takes place in a single day — a Wednesday in mid-June 1923. The novel interweaves two seemingly unconnected storylines during this day.
At the beginning, Clarissa Dalloway, fiftyish and recently recovering from an illness, is preparing for a party she will host that evening. She begins her day running an errand to purchase the flowers for the party. Throughout the morning, Clarissa reflects on her past, including her decision to marry Richard Dalloway thirty years earlier, rather than her more impassioned suitor Peter Walsh.
Meanwhile, the second storyline begins with Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked war veteran, out on the street with his wife, Lucrezia. Septimus struggles with the after-effects of the war, hearing voices and feeling that life has little meaning. A car backfiring paralyzes him, and he reflects on his life. Septimus lost his good friend and commanding officer Evans in the war and continues to carry on hallucinatory conversations with this lost friend.
The Bloomsbury group was the name given to a coterie of English writers, philosophers, and artists who frequently met between about 1907 and 1930 at the houses of Clive and Vanessa Bell and of Vanessa’s brother and sister Adrian and Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf) in the Bloomsbury district of London, the area around the British Museum. They discussed aesthetic and philosophical questions in a spirit of agnosticism and were strongly influenced by G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903) and by A.N. Whitehead’s and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica (1910–13), in the light of which they searched for definitions of the good, the true, and the beautiful and questioned accepted ideas with a “comprehensive irreverence” for all kinds of sham.
The Mrs Dalloway summary on www.sparknotes.com gives interesting insights into the characters, quotes, main ideas of themes, symbol, motif and key facts. Here are some references used in this brief biography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf
Mrs Dalloway
The film Mrs Dalloway, screenplay by Eileen Atkins, is available on Amazon Prime – turns out the film is here free on Youtube. It’s a marvellous film with the incomparable Vanessa Redgrave playing Clarissa, unflappable on the exterior, as hostesses should be, but teeming with feelings within. Geeta remarked it’s a novel without a story. See this film if you can. It’s not only a beautiful rendition of the novel, but the screenwriter has managed all the disparate scenes so that they make the faithful account of a day’s journey punctuated by the bells of the churches and Big Ben. It all comes together to yield something tender and bruised at the end.
Another video, an hour-long dramatisation combines Mrs Dalloway played by Susan Tracy, and VW played by Eileen Atkins. It’s absorbing, and the talk by VW to the young women of Cambridge who invited her is absolutely stunning, (starting at 31:00 min to 33:30 min). She skewers a certain bishop and other critics.
KumKum made a ‘Sally Seton flower arrangement’ for the reading, recalling this passage:
There was her way with flowers, for instance. At Bourton they always had stiff little vases all the way down the table. Sally went out, picked hollyhocks, dahlias— all sorts of flowers that had never been seen together—cut their heads off, and made them swim on the top of water in bowls. The effect was extraordinary—coming in to dinner in the sunset. (Of course Aunt Helena thought it wicked to treat flowers like that.)
The Sally Seton flower arrangement
There is a lot of description that borders on the poetic with similes used throughout:
– She read on Lady Bruton's face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life
– as if he had set light to a grey pellet on a plate and there had risen up a lovely tree in the brisk sea-salted air of their intimacy
– the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp
– Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to the solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens lolloping away on the green sea waves, or are dashed in his face like bunches of roses, or rise to the surface like pale faces which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace.
There is no denying the lack of straightforward clarity in VW’s sentences, which can border on the opaque. They give the reader a lot of trouble, and must be gauged by the extent of the compensation for slowing down the pace of reading.
Need one really burden the reader with a 196-word sentence such as this? ––
And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party.
Perhaps it is to give the effect of so many things going on at once in many different places, all familiar to Clarissa, and therefore all present in her mind simultaneously. Prose is linear and cannot quite cope with such an overflow. Occasionally, VW drops an aphorism in the reader’s lap, sharing a happy turn of phrase that has come suddenly to her:
Life is a season between two silences.
If you are waiting for reward it does come from such sentences as this:
Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking ...
Listen to a talk by Elaine Showalter of Princeton University on the British Library website dedicated to the novel Mrs Dalloway (of which the Library holds the original manuscript in her hand). Prof. Showalter describes how VW uses stream of consciousness to enter the minds of her characters and portray cultural and individual change in the period of ferment following WWI. The novel is set on a single day in mid-June just as James Joyce set Ulysses on one day, June 16, 1904, now known as Bloomsday, a celebration that takes place both in Dublin and around the world. Leopold Bloom was one of the central characters in that novel.
The bells of the churches and Big Ben punctuate the hours and half-hours of the novel. In her manuscript VW left a wide white space to denote these divisions in The Hours (the original name of the novel), but they are mostly ignored in modern editions. In the British edition there are twelve spaces in the book to mark the twelve hours of the day.
Here is the opening. page from the manuscript of The Hours stored in the British Library (click to enlarge):
The walks taken by Clarissa, Peter and Septimus map a central part of London close to important parks – the novel begins with Clarissa walking to the flower shop from her house.
Mrs Dalloway in her yellow feathered hat going to get flowers from Mulberry's
At the website of the Mrs Dalloway Mapping Project the paths the main characters take through London over the course of the novel are shown, and linked to the text. Here is an overlapping map of the three characters’ walks (click to enlarge):
Mrs. Dalloway’s path (red), Septimus’s path (green), and Peter’s path (blue)
There are 24 kinds of flowers mentioned in the novel. Here is the annotated version of the Sally Seton cut-off heads flower arrangement that KumKum made for the session (it's a pastiche):
The Sally Seton flower arrangement – annotated (click to enlarge)
The guests at the Party come from various stages of Clarissa’s life, from different parts of London, from different classes, her old nurse, her nanny, and poor relatives. There are boring people and pompous people. It becomes a procession of life. It comes together with human spirit, and joy begins to flow, and all her apprehensions drop away; her efforts as a hostess are crowned. At the end it becomes a symbol of community. Life goes on in the human procession, different generations, classes, ages, all merging together.
Clarissa Dalloway and her husband Richard greet guests at her party
Tim Parks in a New York Review of Books article says this novel presents the suicide of Septimus as a gift of the individual to collective, just as the party of Clarissa was her gift to the community. For, when Septimus throws himself out of the window feeling threatened by the approach Dr. Holmes, he cries out
“I'll give it you!”
as if to say it's Dr.Holmes who wanted it, and Septimus is giving it (there is an elision of ‘to’ in the sentence). The reviewer writes:
“It’s true that Septimus is frightened and angry, but the idea of the gift is essential to the book. Do readers, for the main, take the idea on board? To judge by the way this novel is often seen as a rather flowery manifestation of soft feminism, I suspect not.”
We have noted before VW’s use of stream of consciousness. In her manuscript there is a note in her hand at the top of a page:
“A delicious idea came to me that Will write anything I want to write”
“Mrs Dalloway contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English, and that alone would be reason enough to read it. It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century.”
KumKum
Rather early in the novel we listen to the interior thoughts Clarissa recalling her choice of Richard Dalloway over Peter Walsh. She appreciates that with Richard one got space and a freedom to go about without constantly checking with him:
For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.
Peter had been too possessive, wanting her to share everything with him. It had been overpowering. Hence the fateful choice as she puts it:
when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed,
But she carried the grief stemming from that difficult choice for years, and had been upset beyond measure on learning he had taken up with an Indian woman. The passage continues with her inward reactions to external scenes:
She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
The closing phrase (‘very very dangerous to live even one day’) is striking. It marks her as someone living on the edge. VW is not making Mrs D out to be a deep thinker. She's quite ordinary as to education and occupation; but if we recognise something noteworthy about her it is that VW has endowed her with a simultaneous life of the mind, even as she goes about ordinary activities like buying flowers. Clarissa is alive to the world, and communing with it constantly.
KumKum said that Clarissa should have cast Peter out of her mind, once for all, when she plumped for Richard. Instead she continued to entertain in the recesses of her mind the past romance with Peter. Not that she was unfaithful, or would even have been tempted thereto, but this was a flaw according to KumKum. Fortunately, for us readers, this ‘flaw’ illuminates an aspect of relationships between old lovers, passive and active at the same time, that VW brings out.
Geetha
In the passage Geetha chose, Clarissa is pondering the physical aspect of love while going up to her attic bedroom to rest, as advised by doctor and insisted on by her husband.
So the room was an attic; the bed narrow; and lying there reading, for she slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet.
She sleeps alone in a narrow bed; a separation exists between Richard and her, part of the ‘space’ he’s given her. She recalls some particular early moment in her marriage when she could not respond to intimate contact:
So the room was an attic; the bed narrow; and lying there reading, for she slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet.
And another time when she had fallen short:
when, through some contraction of this cold spirit, she had failed him.
In a self-analytical manner she arrives at what disturbed the natural coming together of the sexes:
something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together.
She acknowledges her bisexuality:
she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman ... she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread ...
And finally she is confirmed in her mind that what had existed between her and the friend of her youth was also love:
Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?
Clarissa kisses Sally Seton at Bourton when young – ‘Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life ...’
You can see in this passage that though it is explicit, it is also delicate in the way she expresses it. VW does not shrink from the reality of women's existence and the problems that often confront them. Modernism is peeping through in VW's writing as well as her feminism, and Victorian morality is being left in the dust.
Clarissa greets Sally Seton, now Lady Rossiter, at her party, meeting her after an interval of decades
Joe
Clarissa is the first person Peter goes to meet upon his return from India. VW orchestrates a dual scene for us conducted partly in direct speech, but to a greater extent as reflections in each other's minds, during intervals between direct speech. The direct speech is ordinary geniality between old friends. The unspoken under-currents are electric, divulging what politeness forbids one to be explicit about, lest it give offence, create complications, or not be understood rightly:
– She's grown older, he thought, sitting down. I shan't tell her anything about it
– She's looking at me, he thought, a sudden embarrassment coming over him
– Exactly the same, thought Clarissa; the same queer look; the same check suit; a little out of the straight his face is, a little thinner, dryer,
– He's very well dressed, thought Clarissa; yet he always criticises me
– here she's been sitting all the time I've been in India; mending her dress; playing about; going to parties; running to the House and back and all that, he thought, growing more and more irritated
– But it was delicious to hear her say that—my dear Peter!
– Now of course, thought Clarissa, he's enchanting! perfectly enchanting! Now I remember how impossible it was ever to make up my mind
– "But he never liked any one who—our friends," said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her
– Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he thought
Clarissa kisses Peter Walsh with affection at her house when he visits –
The solitary Peter Walsh is haunted by his love for Clarissa: ‘She broke my heart. And you can't love like that twice’
It's not revolutionary as a technique, and perhaps this is not what they call ‘stream of consciousness.’
Thommo
The conversation between Peter and Clarissa continues in the same vein with exterior dialogue often undercut by the interior thoughts of the duo. And one can make a catalogue of what is not said, but only thought. Peter is struggling to get off his chest that he's in love with a girl in India. Clarissa is horrified:
“that he at his age should be sucked under in his little bow-tie by that monster! And there's no flesh on his neck; his hands are red; ... He was in love! Not with her. With some younger woman, of course.”
VW implies that this two-layer mode of exchange is quite normal among humans and goes on all the time in the ordinary course of events. It’s just as well, for to say everything that comes to mind would lead to ill-will and quarrels, and words can leave permanent scars. Imagine two rival diplomats at a meeting, and each spouting off unguarded comments!
Devika
Devika chose the scene of the break-up between Clarissa and Peter, when Clarissa chose unequivocally in favour of the upstart Ricard Dalloway over her long-time suitor, Peter Walsh. Peter called it the most important event in his life. It was after a boat-ride on the lake in which Dalloway had come along. Peter had been perfectly happy that summer, yet:
“ ... all the time, he knew perfectly well, Dalloway was falling in love with her; she was falling in love with Dalloway; but it didn't seem to matter.
Sally Seton kept him apprised of Clarissa's moods, being on Peter's side, and she told him it was his demands on Clarissa that made her recoil, and “She would have accepted him still, perhaps, if he had been less absurd.” One afternoon Peter got it into his mind that he must have it out with Clarissa:
“It's got to be finished one way or the other,” he said to himself. He sent a note to her by Sally asking her to meet him by the fountain at three. “Something very important has happened,” he scribbled at the end of it.
Peter badgers her at the fountain asking her to tell him the truth about her affections. She was petrified at his outburst and finally gave her verdict:
“It's no use. It's no use. This is the end"—after he had spoken for hours, it seemed, with the tears running down his cheeks—it was as if she had hit him in the face. She turned, she left him, went away.
She never came back. The affair was over. Peter went away that night and never saw her again.
The question among readers was: did Clarissa make the right choice among the two men? Priya endorsed Clarissa's decision as the right one. The right one or the safe one? – someone asked.
Her choice had certainly resulted in her elevation to the upper class life of London among the politicians, Harley Street doctors and bureaucrats, and a life of relative luxury, with few responsibilities, and no need to think of herself having to accomplish anything with her talents, beyond giving parties. VW is clearly posing the question: should that be all a woman aspires to in the modern age?
Other readers thought Clarissa would have had a more adventurous life with Peter, who was a more lively and interesting man than Dalloway. Clarissa’s objection was that he gave her no space for a separate life and would constantly be making demands on her, unlike Dalloway who understood she needed her afternoon nap, and servants at home to keep house for her, and so on. So, perhaps knowing her limitations she entered into the right life for her; but she did not lose interest in Peter and no doubt continued to have him in her affections.
While Peter thinks of Dalloway as a bore, he also grants that he could never have given Clarissa her upper-class life style in London. But anyone acquainted with the colonials and how they lived in India would wonder if Clarissa knew the life of leisure they led, with servants for this, and servants for that, holidays in hill-stations, dances at the Governor's mansion, and socialising at all-white clubs, and so on.
Pamela
We are treated to Peter's frank assessment of Richard Dalloway as “a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head.” Richard. was much more of a country squire type, suited to a gentleman's life at home among dogs and farm animals, but “without a touch of imagination.”
Peter thought Dalloway’s opinions of culture, Shakespeare, and so on were oafish.
Take Richard’s dictum:
“no decent man ought to read Shakespeare’s sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes (besides the relationship was not one that he approved).”
Was Peter right in dismissing Dalloway as a bumpkin? Such opinions as the one above are obviously second-hand and showed what stuff and nonsense Dalloway retailed; how then could Clarissa “swallow all that stuff about poetry?” To Peter's great chagrin:
“Clarissa sucked it all in; thought it so honest of him; so independent of him; Heaven knows if she didn't think him the most original mind she'd ever met!”
Peter thinks the lesser man had won her heart, to his eternal regret.
All this makes one think: was Clarissa's marriage, though one of convenience, the optimal compromise for her?
Shoba
This passage may be partly a narrator's piece, partly Clarissa's rumination, and very likely a lot of it is Peter speaking his thoughts. Clarissa had a wonderful gift of enjoying – ‘she enjoyed practically everything.’
She needed people to make her happy:
“She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers ...”
And she'd go to any length to have company:
“There she would sit at the head of the table taking infinite pains with some old buffer who might be useful to Dalloway—they knew the most appalling bores in Europe ...”
At first one may think 'buffer' was a mistake, and VW meant 'duffer.' But the OED shows one meaning of buffer among many as Scottish and dialect for ‘A foolish fellow.’ Stet.
Peter describes some of the compensations of growing old:
“... the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light. ... to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.”
And being with all these delicious remembered experiences from olden time, enables Peter to forget his Indian romance with Daisy for days on end.
Zakia
Zakia sent a recording of her passage as she was traveling on the day. Septimus makes his appearance in this piece, as a parallel story. He had joined the army as a volunteer and fought in the war WWI bravely. He and his officer, Evans, became close:
They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other.
But “when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognising that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably.” This lack of feeling was the deceptive calm that preceded the storm.
He got engaged to a young milliner in Italy where he was billeted, and it was well after the armistice date when the war was over he had those fateful intimations of shell-shock:
“he had, especially in the evening, these sudden thunder-claps of fear. He could not feel.”
We know as the Septimus story advances that it will intersect with that of Clarissa. Peter on his way to the climactic party hears the ambulance coming to fetch the body of Septimus after his suicide. Later, his death is mentioned at the party by Dr. Holmes in the hearing of Clarissa and she is disturbed.
The question arose among the readers as to the significance of Septimus in this novel, which is chiefly centred around Clarissa and her friends and the party. Why does VW introduce the Septimus story? It may have been topical since in 1923 when she wrote the novel (published in 1925) WWI was still fresh in memory with its calamitous number of casualties.
Septimus and Clarissa seem to be contrasting personalities. Septimus is hemmed in by his mind which closing in on itself. He has distanced himself from the physical world; in his mind he sees and hears things that others do not. He appreciates the world’s beauty, but at the same time is overawed by it. He is gradually growing psychotic.
Clarissa, on the other hand, is very much in touch with her physical surroundings. She loves the beautiful things nature has to offer, flowers, trees, and so on. Her life is engaged with upper-class English society, and involves throwing parties, inviting and greeting people, making them feel at home.
Unlike Septimus, Clarissa is aware of her surroundings and takes pains to keep her ties with people, no matter how superficial they may be.
Woolf perhaps intended Clarissa to be the voice of reason and Septimus the voice of those going gradually insane. But we know Clarissa too is one edge with her nerves and requires rest to keep herself on an even keel. When Clarissa says earlier “she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day” she is hinting at the possibility of becoming unhinged, is she not? Is that her connection to Septimus?
Priya
In Priya's piece we are made privy to the tender relations between Clarissa and her husband Richard – not a passionate man, not even one who could “bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words,” yet one filled with solicitude for her, who brings her red and white roses.
“In came Richard, holding out flowers. She had failed him, once at Constantinople; and Lady Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her. He was holding out flowers—”
It’s amazing how that clickety-clack brain of Clarissa works. One moment she's thinking how she ‘failed’ Richard in Constantinople (was that on their honeymoon?) and the next she is putting his flowers in vases. But Richard suggests they sit down and he narrates events from the lunch he’s just attended at Lady Bruton’s. Mention of Hugh Whitbread – the one who carried the despatch box stamped with the Royal Arms – brings on a comment about his being “fatter than ever; an intolerable ass.”
Then a fresh reminder of marital nirvana in the Dalloway household:
“He held her hand. Happiness is this, he thought. But he could not tell her he loved her.”
“If she worried about these parties he would not let her give them. Did she wish she had married Peter? But he must go.”
As Richard steps out to let her rest Clarissa muses that “even between husband and wife [there exists] a gulf; and that one must respect, a solitude.” Even in this brief scene between husband and wife, Peter intrudes into Richard's thoughts via a tangential inward thought: “Did she wish she had married Peter? But he must go.” There is no hint of annoyance, just a matter-of-fact thought because he knew her slight weakness, but was assured nothing more could come of it now.
Vibrations in the memory could not unsettle the deep roots of their well-being –– which reminds one of a poet who talked of vibrations and love:
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
Saras
The passage is a clear-eyed reflection by Clarissa on what makes her happy. She resented that Richard and Peter both thought her parties unnecessary and serving no purpose:
“but what had he said? There were his roses. Her parties! That was it! Her parties! Both of them criticised her very unfairly, laughed at her very unjustly, for her parties. That was it! That was it!”
Richard merely thought it “foolish of her to like excitement when she knew it was bad for her heart.” Peter thought she had all these great names over because she “was simply a snob in short.”
“And both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life.”
She could not imagine Peter or Richard taking the trouble to give a party for no reason whatever, she thought. They're an offering to nobody and nothing in particular, “to combine, to create” something out of disparate people. And even though she had no other creative gift, this one gift of hers, to give parties, gave her great happiness. Clarissa’s reflection ends on a sombre note of death:
“it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant…”
Here we note once again that Septimus and Clarissa are not so far apart. In the midst of happiness she thinks of death and how it must all end. Just so Septimus sitting in Regent’s Park and watching the “elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling with all their leaves alight and the colour thinning and thickening from blue to the green of a hollow wave,...”
then sees himself in the next world ...
“lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the sun, for ever unwasted, suffering for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not want it, he moaned, putting from him with a wave of his hand that eternal suffering, that eternal loneliness.”
Geeta
In Geeta's passage Septimus, suffering from shell-shock, feels Dr. Holmes oppressing him, and falls into terrifying visions. Septimus would invent stories about Holmes ... —making himself roar with laughter or rage, for Dr. Holmes seemed to stand for something horrible to him.”
Septimus is clearly going off his rocker (losing his sense of ‘proportion’ as Dr. Holmes would put it) ...
“He was drowned, he used to say, and lying on a cliff with the gulls screaming over him. He would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea.”
Tears would run down Septimus’ cheeks, and it upset Lucrezia to see a man like Septimus, her husband, who had fought bravely in the war and been decorated, crying.
“He would cry that he was falling down, down into the flames! Actually she would look for flames, it was so vivid. But there was nothing.”
Rest in a peaceful rustic surrounding, and isolation from people and events that brought on terrible memories, was the prescription then for treating shell-shock. In the century following nothing much has changed except that they load the patients up with chemicals to calm them ... and yet they keep dying unimaginable numbers. A 2016 analysis indicates an average of 20 veterans die from suicide per day, victims of all the wars America fought abroad. They spend billions in treatment when everyone knows the only way is to avoid it –– is not to fight wars. For killing, or seeing one’s buddies killed in war, and being oneself subject to the brain injuries of explosive blasts, is about the most traumatic experience a human can have, on par with rape and sexual molestation in youth, in terms of its far-reaching mental effects.
It is now recognised also that symptoms that were formerly thought to be psychological—ascribed to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—may instead be direct results of physical damage to the brain from blast shocks and explosions. The experience of shell-shock breaks downs the sharp distinction between the sane and the insane. For, given sufficiently extreme circumstances, anyone could break down.
This is another connection between the Septimus story and Clarissa in the novel.
Arundhaty
Even though at first Clarissa shrugs off the death of Septimus whose suicide she overhears when Dr. Holmes is talking with guests at her party, she is deeply disturbed to the core and her thoughts turn to death.
“there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often if Richard had not been there reading the Times, so that she could crouch like a bird and gradually revive, ... she must have perished. But that young man had killed himself.”
She realises to how great an extent she is dependent on Richard and the calm he exudes. The implication of her awful fear, and the young man killing himself, is precisely that her life too could end as suddenly, and in a similar manner if she lost her equanimity.
“It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness,”
It is death that lurks and she cannot remain indifferent, though seemingly insulated by her mansion and her flowers and her servants and so on. She knows it’s all on account of Richard that she enjoys this quality of life. But will it last?
“It was due to Richard; she had never been so happy. Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure could equal, ...”
“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.”
We are reminded of John Donne’s poem –
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
Clarissa resists involvement in the death of Septimus, but she cannot avoid it. She remembers Shakespere’s song countenancing death in Cymbeline:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
And finally concludes:
“She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away.”
As Donne said she is ineluctably bound up with Septimus. “He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun.”
The Readings
KumKum
Clarissa remembers parting with Peter Walsh was good; marriage to him would have destroyed them. She remarks on her small education.
So she would still find herself arguing in 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 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. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish; and then the horror of the moment when some one told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the boat going to India! Never should she forget all that! Cold, heartless, a prude, he called her. Never could she understand how he cared. But those Indian women did presumably—silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops. And she wasted her pity. For he was quite happy, he assured her—perfectly happy, though he had never done a thing that they talked of; his whole life had been a failure. It made her angry still.
She had reached the Park gates. She stood for a moment, looking at the omnibuses in Piccadilly.
She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fräulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.
Geetha
Clarissa goes up to rest in her attic bedroom and feels virginal. She realises her occasional failure of sexual intimacy with her husband, and looks back on her love for Sally Seton in her youth.
Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went upstairs, paused at the window, came to the bathroom. There was the green linoleum and a tap dripping. There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe. She pierced the pincushion and laid her feathered yellow hat on the bed. The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be. The candle was half burnt down and she had read deep in Baron Marbot's Memoirs. She had read late at night of the retreat from Moscow. For the House sat so long that Richard insisted, after her illness, that she must sleep undisturbed. And really she preferred to read of the retreat from Moscow. He knew it. So the room was an attic; the bed narrow; and lying there reading, for she slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet. Lovely in girlhood, suddenly there came a moment—for example on the river beneath the woods at Clieveden—when, through some contraction of this cold spirit, she had failed him. And then at Constantinople, and again and again. She could see what she lacked. It was not beauty; it was not mind. It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. For that she could dimly perceive. She resented it, had a scruple picked up Heaven knows where, or, as she felt, sent by Nature (who is invariably wise); yet she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly. And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or that she was older, or some accident—like a faint scent, or a violin next door (so strange is the power of sounds at certain moments), she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. 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, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over—the moment. Against such moments (with women too) there contrasted (as she laid her hat down) the bed and Baron Marbot and the candle half-burnt. Lying awake, the floor creaked; the lit house was suddenly darkened, and if she raised her head she could just hear the click of the handle released as gently as possible by Richard, who slipped upstairs in his socks and then, as often as not, dropped his hot-water bottle and swore! How she laughed!
But this question of love (she thought, putting her coat away), this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?
Joe
Peter Walsh returns from India and meets Clarissa Dalloway – reminding him he had once wanted to marry her.
"And how are you?" said Peter Walsh, positively trembling; taking both her hands; kissing both her hands. She's grown older, he thought, sitting down. I shan't tell her anything about it, he thought, for she's grown older. She's looking at me, he thought, a sudden embarrassment coming over him, though he had kissed her hands. Putting his hand into his pocket, he took out a large pocket-knife and half opened the blade.
Exactly the same, thought Clarissa; the same queer look; the same check suit; a little out of the straight his face is, a little thinner, dryer, perhaps, but he looks awfully well, and just the same.
"How heavenly it is to see you again!" she exclaimed. He had his knife out. That's so like him, she thought.
He had only reached town last night, he said; would have to go down into the country at once; and how was everything, how was everybody— Richard? Elizabeth?
"And what's all this?" he said, tilting his pen-knife towards her green dress.
He's very well dressed, thought Clarissa; yet he always criticises me.
Here she is mending her dress; mending her dress as usual, he thought; here she's been sitting all the time I've been in India; mending her dress; playing about; going to parties; running to the House and back and all that, he thought, growing more and more irritated, more and more agitated, for there's nothing in the world so bad for some women as marriage, he thought; and politics; and having a Conservative husband, like the admirable Richard. So it is, so it is, he thought, shutting his knife with a snap.
"Richard's very well. Richard's at a Committee," said Clarissa.
And she opened her scissors, and said, did he mind her just finishing what she was doing to her dress, for they had a party that night?
"Which I shan't ask you to," she said. "My dear Peter!" she said.
But it was delicious to hear her say that—my dear Peter! Indeed, it was all so delicious—the silver, the chairs; all so delicious!
Why wouldn't she ask him to her party? he asked.
Now of course, thought Clarissa, he's enchanting! perfectly enchanting! Now I remember how impossible it was ever to make up my mind—and why did I make up my mind—not to marry him? she wondered, that awful summer?
"But it's so extraordinary that you should have come this morning!" she cried, putting her hands, one on top of another, down on her dress.
"Do you remember," she said, "how the blinds used to flap at Bourton?"
"They did," he said; and he remembered breakfasting alone, very awkwardly, with her father; who had died; and he had not written to Clarissa. But he had never got on well with old Parry, that querulous, weak-kneed old man, Clarissa's father, Justin Parry.
"I often wish I'd got on better with your father," he said.
"But he never liked any one who—our friends," said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her.
Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight.
Thommo
Peter notes that all the charming comforts in Clarissa’s life made him think of himself as a failure it was all boring Richard’s doing. He confesses to her he is in love, a messy affair with a married woman.
She looked at Peter Walsh; her look, passing through all that time and that emotion, reached him doubtfully; settled on him tearfully; and rose and fluttered away, as a bird touches a branch and rises and flutters away. Quite simply she wiped her eyes.
"Yes," said Peter. "Yes, yes, yes," he said, as if she drew up to the surface something which positively hurt him as it rose. Stop! Stop! he wanted to cry. For he was not old; his life was not over; not by any means. He was only just past fifty. Shall I tell her, he thought, or not? He would like to make a clean breast of it all. But she is too cold, he thought; sewing, with her scissors; Daisy would look ordinary beside Clarissa. And she would think me a failure, which I am in their sense, he thought; in the Dalloways' sense. Oh yes, he had no doubt about that; he was a failure, compared with all this—the inlaid table, the mounted paperknife, the dolphin and the candlesticks, the chair-covers and the old valuable English tinted prints—he was a failure! I detest the smugness of the whole affair, he thought; Richard's doing, not Clarissa's; save that she married him. (Here Lucy came into the room, carrying silver, more silver, but charming, slender, graceful she looked, he thought, as she stooped to put it down.) And this has been going on all the time! he thought; week after week; Clarissa's life; while I—he thought; and at once everything seemed to radiate from him; journeys; rides; quarrels; adventures; bridge parties; love affairs; work; work, work! and he took out his knife quite openly—his old horn-handled knife which Clarissa could swear he had had these thirty years—and clenched his fist upon it.
What an extraordinary habit that was, Clarissa thought; always playing with a knife. Always making one feel, too, frivolous; empty-minded; a mere silly chatterbox, as he used. But I too, she thought, and, taking up her needle, summoned, like a Queen whose guards have fallen asleep and left her unprotected (she had been quite taken aback by this visit—it had upset her) so that any one can stroll in and have a look at her where she lies with the brambles curving over her, summoned to her help the things she did; the things she liked; her husband; Elizabeth; her self, in short, which Peter hardly knew now, all to come about her and beat off the enemy.
"Well, and what's happened to you?" she said. So before a battle begins, the horses paw the ground; toss their heads; the light shines on their flanks; their necks curve. So Peter Walsh and Clarissa, sitting side by side on the blue sofa, challenged each other. His powers chafed and tossed in him. He assembled from different quarters all sorts of things; praise; his career at Oxford; his marriage, which she knew nothing whatever about; how he had loved; and altogether done his job.
"Millions of things!" he exclaimed, and, urged by the assembly of powers which were now charging this way and that and giving him the feeling at once frightening and extremely exhilarating of being rushed through the air on the shoulders of people he could no longer see, he raised his hands to his forehead.
Clarissa sat very upright; drew in her breath.
"I am in love," he said, not to her however, but to some one raised up in the dark so that you could not touch her but must lay your garland down on the grass in the dark.
"In love," he repeated, now speaking rather dryly to Clarissa Dalloway; "in love with a girl in India." He had deposited his garland. Clarissa could make what she would of it.
"In love!" she said. That he at his age should be sucked under in his little bow-tie by that monster! And there's no flesh on his neck; his hands are red; and he's six months older than I am! her eye flashed back to her; but in her heart she felt, all the same, he is in love. He has that, she felt; he is in love.
But the indomitable egotism which for ever rides down the hosts opposed to it, the river which says on, on, on; even though, it admits, there may be no goal for us whatever, still on, on; this indomitable egotism charged her cheeks with colour; made her look very young; very pink; very bright-eyed as she sat with her dress upon her knee, and her needle held to the end of green silk, trembling a little. He was in love! Not with her. With some younger woman, of course.
"And who is she?" she asked.
Now this statue must be brought from its height and set down between them.
"A married woman, unfortunately," he said; "the wife of a Major in the Indian Army."
Devika
Peter realises that Clarissa will marry that man, Richard Dalloway. He has it out with her beside the fountain in Bourton, and she says with finality “It's no use. It's no use. This is the end.”
He had never felt so happy in the whole of his life! Without a word they made it up. They walked down to the lake. He had twenty minutes of perfect happiness. Her voice, her laugh, her dress (something floating, white, crimson), her spirit, her adventurousness; she made them all disembark and explore the island; she startled a hen; she laughed; she sang. And all the time, he knew perfectly well, Dalloway was falling in love with her; she was falling in love with Dalloway; but it didn't seem to matter. Nothing mattered. They sat on the ground and talked—he and Clarissa. They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort. And then in a second it was over. He said to himself as they were getting into the boat, "She will marry that man," dully, without any resentment; but it was an obvious thing. Dalloway would marry Clarissa.
Dalloway rowed them in. He said nothing. But somehow as they watched him start, jumping on to his bicycle to ride twenty miles through the woods, wobbling off down the drive, waving his hand and disappearing, he obviously did feel, instinctively, tremendously, strongly, all that; the night; the romance; Clarissa. He deserved to have her.
For himself, he was absurd. His demands upon Clarissa (he could see it now) were absurd. He asked impossible things. He made terrible scenes. She would have accepted him still, perhaps, if he had been less absurd. Sally thought so. She wrote him all that summer long letters; how they had talked of him; how she had praised him, how Clarissa burst into tears! It was an extraordinary summer—all letters, scenes, telegrams— arriving at Bourton early in the morning, hanging about till the servants were up; appalling tête-à-têtes with old Mr. Parry at breakfast; Aunt Helena formidable but kind; Sally sweeping him off for talks in the vegetable garden; Clarissa in bed with headaches.
The final scene, the terrible scene which he believed had mattered more than anything in the whole of his life (it might be an exaggeration— but still so it did seem now) happened at three o'clock in the afternoon of a very hot day. It was a trifle that led up to it—Sally at lunch saying something about Dalloway, and calling him "My name is Dalloway"; whereupon Clarissa suddenly stiffened, coloured, in a way she had, and rapped out sharply, "We've had enough of that feeble joke." That was all; but for him it was precisely as if she had said, "I'm only amusing myself with you; I've an understanding with Richard Dalloway." So he took it. He had not slept for nights. "It's got to be finished one way or the other," he said to himself. He sent a note to her by Sally asking her to meet him by the fountain at three. "Something very important has happened," he scribbled at the end of it.
The fountain was in the middle of a little shrubbery, far from the house, with shrubs and trees all round it. There she came, even before the time, and they stood with the fountain between them, the spout (it was broken) dribbling water incessantly. How sights fix themselves upon the mind! For example, the vivid green moss.
She did not move. "Tell me the truth, tell me the truth," he kept on saying. He felt as if his forehead would burst. She seemed contracted, petrified. She did not move. "Tell me the truth," he repeated, when suddenly that old man Breitkopf popped his head in carrying the Times; stared at them; gaped; and went away. They neither of them moved. "Tell me the truth," he repeated. He felt that he was grinding against something physically hard; she was unyielding. She was like iron, like flint, rigid up the backbone. And when she said, "It's no use. It's no use. This is the end"—after he had spoken for hours, it seemed, with the tears running down his cheeks—it was as if she had hit him in the face. She turned, she left him, went away.
"Clarissa!" he cried. "Clarissa!" But she never came back. It was over. He went away that night. He never saw her again.
Pamela
Peter Walsh’s notion of Richard Dalloway is that of unimaginative chap suitable for life on a farm with scores of absurd prejudices.
He didn't mind what he asked Dalloway. He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a spark of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type. He ought to have been a country gentleman—he was wasted on politics. He was at his best out of doors, with horses and dogs—how good he was, for instance, when that great shaggy dog of Clarissa's got caught in a trap and had its paw half torn off, and Clarissa turned faint and Dalloway did the whole thing; bandaged, made splints; told Clarissa not to be a fool. That was what she liked him for perhaps—that was what she needed. "Now, my dear, don't be a fool. Hold this—fetch that," all the time talking to the dog as if it were a human being.
But how could she swallow all that stuff about poetry? How could she let him hold forth about Shakespeare? Seriously and solemnly Richard Dalloway got on his hind legs and said that no decent man ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes (besides the relationship was not one that he approved). No decent man ought to let his wife visit a deceased wife's sister. Incredible! The only thing to do was to pelt him with sugared almonds—it was at dinner. But Clarissa sucked it all in; thought it so honest of him; so independent of him; Heaven knows if she didn't think him the most original mind she'd ever met!
Shoba
Clarissa reflects how she needed people to bring out her sense of fun and giving parties brought her in touch with useful bores. Richard has matured to the point he can find pleasure in the gardens.
And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy (though goodness only knows, she had her reserves; it was a mere sketch, he often felt, that even he, after all these years, could make of Clarissa). Anyhow there was no bitterness in her; none of that sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically everything. If 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. (Very likely, she would have talked to those lovers, if she had thought them unhappy.) She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, sayings things she didn't mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination. There she would sit at the head of the table taking infinite pains with some old buffer who might be useful to Dalloway—they knew the most appalling bores in Europe—or in came Elizabeth and everything must give way to her. She was at a High School, at the inarticulate stage last time he was over, a round-eyed, pale-faced girl, with nothing of her mother in her, a silent stolid creature, who took it all as a matter of course, let her mother make a fuss of her, and then said "May I go now?" like a child of four; going off, Clarissa explained, with that mixture of amusement and pride which Dalloway himself seemed to rouse in her, to play hockey. And now Elizabeth was "out," presumably; thought him an old fogy, laughed at her mother's friends. Ah well, so be it. The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent's Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.
A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), but now, at the age of fifty-three one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent's Park, was enough. Too much indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning; which both were so much more solid than they used to be, so much less personal. It was impossible that he should ever suffer again as Clarissa had made him suffer. For hours at a time (pray God that one might say these things without being overheard!), for hours and days he never thought of Daisy.
Zakia
Septimus joins the army and has intense battlefield experiences, which later lead to the onset of hallucinations and an inability to feel. He meets Lucrezia, a hat girl, while billeted in Italy and proposes to her.
Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the trenches the change which Mr. Brewer desired when he advised football was produced instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew the attention, indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by name. It was a case of two dogs playing on a hearth-rug; one worrying a paper screw, snarling, snapping, giving a pinch, now and then, at the old dog's ear; the other lying somnolent, blinking at the fire, raising a paw, turning and growling good-temperedly. They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other. But when Evans (Rezia who had only seen him once called him "a quiet man," a sturdy red-haired man, undemonstrative in the company of women), when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognising that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime. He had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive. He was right there. The last shells missed him. He watched them explode with indifference. When peace came he was in Milan, billeted in the house of an innkeeper with a courtyard, flowers in tubs, little tables in the open, daughters making hats, and to Lucrezia, the younger daughter, he became engaged one evening when the panic was on him—that he could not feel.
For now that it was all over, truce signed, and the dead buried, he had, especially in the evening, these sudden thunder-claps of fear. He could not feel. As he opened the door of the room where the Italian girls sat making hats, he could see them; could hear them; they were rubbing wires among coloured beads in saucers; they were turning buckram shapes this way and that; the table was all strewn with feathers, spangles, silks, ribbons; scissors were rapping on the table; but something failed him; he could not feel. Still, scissors rapping, girls laughing, hats being made protected him; he was assured of safety; he had a refuge. But he could not sit there all night. There were moments of waking in the early morning. The bed was falling; he was falling. Oh for the scissors and the lamplight and the buckram shapes! He asked Lucrezia to marry him, the younger of the two, the gay, the frivolous, with those little artist's fingers that she would hold up and say "It is all in them." Silk, feathers, what not were alive to them.
Priya
Richard Dalloway gives flowers to Clarissa and wants to express his love for her, but fails to do so.
And the sound of the bell flooded the room with its melancholy wave; which receded, and gathered itself together to fall once more, when she heard, distractingly, something fumbling, something scratching at the door. Who at this hour? Three, good Heavens! Three already! For with overpowering directness and dignity the clock struck three; and she heard nothing else; but the door handle slipped round and in came Richard! What a surprise! In came Richard, holding out flowers. She had failed him, once at Constantinople; and Lady Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her. He was holding out flowers—roses, red and white roses. (But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.)
But how lovely, she said, taking his flowers. She understood; she understood without his speaking; his Clarissa. She put them in vases on the mantelpiece. How lovely they looked! she said. And was it amusing, she asked? Had Lady Bruton asked after her? Peter Walsh was back. Mrs. Marsham had written. Must she ask Ellie Henderson? That woman Kilman was upstairs.
"But let us sit down for five minutes," said Richard.
It all looked so empty. All the chairs were against the wall. What had they been doing? Oh, it was for the party; no, he had not forgotten, the party. Peter Walsh was back. Oh yes; she had had him. And he was going to get a divorce; and he was in love with some woman out there. And he hadn't changed in the slightest. There she was, mending her dress… .
"Thinking of Bourton," she said.
"Hugh was at lunch," said Richard. She had met him too! Well, he was getting absolutely intolerable. Buying Evelyn necklaces; fatter than ever; an intolerable ass.
"And it came over me 'I might have married you,'" she said, thinking of Peter sitting there in his little bow-tie; with that knife, opening it, shutting it. "Just as he always was, you know."
They were talking about him at lunch, said Richard. (But he could not tell her he loved her. He held her hand. Happiness is this, he thought.) They had been writing a letter to the Times for Millicent Bruton. That was about all Hugh was fit for.
"And our dear Miss Kilman?" he asked. Clarissa thought the roses absolutely lovely; first bunched together; now of their own accord starting apart.
"Kilman arrives just as we've done lunch," she said. "Elizabeth turns pink. They shut themselves up. I suppose they're praying." Lord! He didn't like it; but these things pass over if you let them. "In a mackintosh with an umbrella," said Clarissa.
He had not said "I love you"; but he held her hand. Happiness is this, is this, he thought.
"But why should I ask all the dull women in London to my parties?" said Clarissa. And if Mrs. Marsham gave a party, did she invite her guests?
"Poor Ellie Henderson," said Richard—it was a very odd thing how much Clarissa minded about her parties, he thought. But Richard had no notion of the look of a room. However—what was he going to say?
If she worried about these parties he would not let her give them. Did she wish she had married Peter? But he must go. He must be off, he said, getting up. But he stood for a moment as if he were about to say something; and she wondered what? Why? There were the roses.
"Some Committee?" she asked, as he opened the door.
"Armenians," he said; or perhaps it was "Albanians."
And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought Clarissa, watching him open the door; for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one's husband, without losing one's independence, one's self-respect—something, after all, priceless.
He returned with a pillow and a quilt.
"An hour's complete rest after luncheon," he said. And he went.
Saras
Clarissa Dalloway is mentally defending the perceived criticism of her parties by Richard Dalloway and Peter Walsh
How like him! He would go on saying "An hour's complete rest after luncheon" to the end of time, because a doctor had ordered it once. It was like him to take what doctors said literally; part of his adorable, divine simplicity, which no one had to the same extent; which made him go and do the thing while she and Peter frittered their time away bickering. He was already halfway to the House of Commons, to his Armenians, his Albanians, having settled her on the sofa, looking at his roses. And people would say, "Clarissa Dalloway is spoilt." She cared much more for her roses than for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard say so over and over again)—no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn't that help the Armenians?)—the only flowers she could bear to see cut. But Richard was already at the House of Commons; at his Committee, having settled all her difficulties. But no; alas, that was not true. He did not see the reasons against asking Ellie Henderson. She would do it, of course, as he wished it. Since he had brought the pillows, she would lie down… . But—but—why did she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy? As a person who has dropped some grain of pearl or diamond into the grass and parts the tall blades very carefully, this way and that, and searches here and there vainly, and at last spies it there at the roots, so she went through one thing and another; no, it was not Sally Seton saying that Richard would never be in the Cabinet because he had a second-class brain (it came back to her); no, she did not mind that; nor was it to do with Elizabeth either and Doris Kilman; those were facts. It was a feeling, some unpleasant feeling, earlier in the day perhaps; something that Peter had said, combined with some depression of her own, in her bedroom, taking off her hat; and what Richard had said had added to it, but what had he said? There were his roses. Her parties! That was it! Her parties! Both of them criticised her very unfairly, laughed at her very unjustly, for her parties. That was it! That was it!
Well, how was she going to defend herself? Now that she knew what it was, she felt perfectly happy. They thought, or Peter at any rate thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous people about her; great names; was simply a snob in short. Well, Peter might think so. Richard merely thought it foolish of her to like excitement when she knew it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought. And both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life.
"That's what I do it for," she said, speaking aloud, to life.
Since she was lying on the sofa, cloistered, exempt, the presence of this thing which she felt to be so obvious became physically existent; with robes of sound from the street, sunny, with hot breath, whispering, blowing out the blinds. But suppose Peter said to her, "Yes, yes, but your parties—what's the sense of your parties?" all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They're an offering; which sounded horribly vague. But who was Peter to make out that life was all plain sailing?—Peter always in love, always in love with the wrong woman? What's your love? she might say to him. And she knew his answer; how it is the most important thing in the world and no woman possibly understood it. Very well. But could any man understand what she meant either? about life? She could not imagine Peter or Richard taking the trouble to give a party for no reason whatever.
But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?
An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know. All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!—that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant…
Geeta
Septimus Smith, suffering from shell-shock, feels Dr. Holmes oppressing him, and falls into ghastly visions.
It was a dreadful pity. For that made Septimus cry out about human cruelty—how they tear each other to pieces. The fallen, he said, they tear to pieces. "Holmes is on us," he would say, and he would invent stories about Holmes; Holmes eating porridge; Holmes reading Shakespeare—making himself roar with laughter or rage, for Dr. Holmes seemed to stand for something horrible to him. "Human nature," he called him. Then there were the visions. He was drowned, he used to say, and lying on a cliff with the gulls screaming over him. He would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea. Or he was hearing music. Really it was only a barrel organ or some man crying in the street. But "Lovely!" he used to cry, and the tears would run down his cheeks, which was to her the most dreadful thing of all, to see a man like Septimus, who had fought, who was brave, crying. And he would lie listening until suddenly he would cry that he was falling down, down into the flames! Actually she would look for flames, it was so vivid. But there was nothing. They were alone in the room. It was a dream, she would tell him and so quiet him at last, but sometimes she was frightened too. She sighed as she sat sewing.
Arundhaty
Deeply disturbed by the young man’s death Mrs Dalloway returns to her room and her thoughts on life .
Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one's parents giving it into one's hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often if Richard had not been there reading the Times, so that she could crouch like a bird and gradually revive, send roaring up that immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another, she must have perished. But that young man had killed himself.
Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress. She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success. Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton.
It was due to Richard; she had never been so happy. Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Bourton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; or seen it between people's shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. She walked to the window.
It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this country sky, this sky above Westminster. 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. And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty. But there it was—ashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. The wind must have risen. 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. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.
Wow! How wonderful to read your blog this Sunday morning on KRG's January session with Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. You did a marvelous job, dear Joe.It is so full of essential annotation to this Classic, yet an unconventional novel of all time.
ReplyDeleteI really liked the book reading it, the second time, for KRG's January, 2021 session. I must thank Devika and Saras for selecting the book for this session. And I am pleased that my Sally Seton flower arrangement found an entry in your blog, Joe.
Glad you found it useful ... thanks for the encomium.
ReplyDelete– joe
It was very well compiled as usual. Reading thru it was like attending the session again.
ReplyDeleteOnly thing I wanted to add was the women in the upper echelons of the society in England had nothing to do or to occupy their time. They were expected to make a good marriage, produce an heir and a spare, and spend their time with needlework. I think organising parties as Clarissa did, was something constructive to do.
It was only in the years between the wars that women were able to rebel a bit, but Clarissa was not young enough for that; also she was considered sickly.
WW2 was what really emancipated these women. So I don't hold her wish to have frequent parties against her. I sympathise with her really.
Thank you, Saras. At first I thought your comment should be incorporated in the blog, but it is better as a standalone comment on how it was for women in those post-Victorian times.
ReplyDelete1.
ReplyDeleteVW was experimenting boldly with the new mode of writing – Stream of Consciousness (SoC)
The narrative, the little there is of it, describes the events in a day of the life of Clarissa Dalloway when she chooses to throw a party; it would have made a small and middling story. What gave it distinction and a certain notoriety was the use of SoC throughout.
The life of Septimus and his wife Lucrezia would have been a minor diversion.
VW took the liberty to meld them, (not entirely seamless in the development) via SoC. Thoughts of death trouble Clarissa too.
2.
Britain of the 1920s was very much a society riddled with class consciousness. Peter Walsh, as a colonial is shown to be lower in the pecking order. Is it suggested that the officers who were posted to the colonies lost their class after commingling with the natives?
Peter just did not match up to the class of Richard and Clarissa, and he was quite aware of that. In fact, Clarissa chose the Richard over Peter for that reason, it would appear. Could she have had the Prime Minister to dinner if she had married Peter? – certainly not.
Unless. you came from the nobility or the royals, a stint in the colonies only lowered your status. Viceroys like Lord Mountbatten were different.
3.
Mrs Dalloway as a novel will be valued for its musical language – somewhat meandering, but often evocative in description, and accurate in capturing the upper class culture at that epoch. The hourly striking of Big Ben, a refrain akin to the Greek Chorus, helps to punctuate the narrative. It’s a slick use of a literary device.
4.
The flatness of the story was particularly intriguing; it did not stall, and carried me forward. The rambling narrative is fresh and charming, once the reader gets used to it. I particularly liked the anti-climax of an otherwise dull story.