'Mrs' Dalloway': portrait of the artist as a middle-aged woman
by Jacob Littleton If the nature of the artist is to transmute personal experience and feeling into a public act, Clarissa Dalloway is certainly an artist, and Virginia Woolf's novel a portrait of the artist as a woman in middle age. The fundamental action of Mrs. Dalloway is to elucidate the mechanisms of Clarissa's thoughts and actions and to chart the ways in which her existence profoundly controverts the ideology and power relations of her cultural sphere. Critical appraisals of the novel have recognized Clarissa's identity as an artist, but usually in the context of another interpretation. Suzette Henke, for instance, notes that Clarissa's "gatherings serve as . . . creative acts of social artistry" (127), but centers her analysis on the religious models Woolf uses. David Daiches writes, "There is a suggestion throughout that the experiences of individuals combine to form a single indeterminate whole" (73), a suggestion central to Dalloway's aesthetics. Deborah Guth reveals Clarissa's modes of self-invention, glancing at the importance of her parties to the character's self-definition. Clarissa's artistry is the essential key to understanding her character, and the depiction of that character is the novel's key event. Woolf is concerned, before anything else, with the absolutely private mental world of a woman who, according to the patriarchal ideology of the day as well as her own figure in the world, was not imagined to have any artistic feeling at all. Woolf criticizes conceptions of character bound by the exterior forms of life: the whole complex (job, family, assets) that fixes every person firmly in the world of business and power relationships. Against this system Woolf places a world of private significance whose meaning is wholly irreducible to facts of the external world. By conceiving of personality as a private fact, apparently alienated from "public, political culture" and "its imperialistic and death-dealing ways" (Rosenman 77), Woolf shows Clarissa's "actual" existence to be an unrecognized but fundamental contradiction of traditional assumptions about gender. Maria DiBattista points out "the novel's vague but universal sense of malaise, of spiritual incapacity, of frustrated expectations" (24). This malaise arises from each character's perception of an inadequacy in her or his world view to encompass a world that increasingly seems unexplainable. The Europe of the early twentieth century was characterized by a breakdown of traditional models, as Woolf emphasized throughout her work. Clarissa is "modernist" in outlook, fundamentally a nonbeliever. With her "horror of psychological engulfment" (Henke 139), she rejects society's common props against the void: Walsh's passion, Kilman's religion, Bradshaw's Proportion, the simplistic patriotism of her husband and Lady Bruton. As a result, she must face disordered reality without accepted props and create her own meaning for it. This process is central to Mrs. Dalloway. Perhaps the most fundamental fact of Clarissa's psyche is the pleasure she takes in physical, sensual existence. She bursts onto the street to buy flowers and appreciates everything; "carriages, motorcars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and singing" (Mrs. Dalloway 4). She neither condemns what seems like an altogether noisy and irritating urban scene (her London is not a Waste Land), nor approves it with the air of a connoisseur; her appreciation depends only on experience. In fact, her delight is free of self-interest or discrimination. She does not appreciate the scene for what it is, but simply because it is. Her world view is suffused with the sense of the solemnity and wonder of existence, but most of all by the wonder of living; she takes life very seriously. Being is a self-sufficient value without reference to other values, rational thought, or emotion; indeed, she sees the worth of being as directly opposed, and superior, to those other values. She uses the non-hierarchical joy-in-life to counter her emotions and desires, conceived of as threatening to her dignity and autonomy. After her hatred for Miss Kilman first flares up, she is soothed by the experience of the florist's shop, "as if this beauty, this scent, this colour ... were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up" (13). Because she loves life without judgment, Clarissa neither categorizes or coerces; "Had she ever tried to convert anyone herself? Did she not wish everyone merely to be themselves?" (126). This flight from forms into existence is irreducibly opposed to the Edwardian world view as exemplified by Bradshaw's Proportion and Conversion, whose "inter-personal imperialism dehumanizes and objectifies the Other to block out any disturbing sympathy or sense of likeness which might impede conquest" (Rosenman 78). Whereas Clarissa's nonjudgmental interest and love "subvert the masculine grammar of subject and object, unifying and protecting both in a single field" (Rosenman 78), dominant men of Clarissa's society seek only to inscribe their own characters of all "deviants," however slight in itself the deviation -- a desire that is ultimately and urge for power. While Woolf labels judgment and hierarchy generally as masculine, and love and acceptance as principally feminine, her novel uses them as potential traits for either gender. J. Hillis Miller writes, "the same images of unity, of reconciliation, of communion well up spontaneously from the deep levels of the minds of all the major characters" (13). Lady Bruton after her luncheon, Peter dozing in the park, Richard on his walk home all sense the same wholeness, a contentment in the mere experience of daily life. Clarissa passes the rest of the characters by turning love of existence into an existential starting point. Ellen Rosenman notes that Clarissa's thought is centered on the moment: "The moment is not, strictly speaking, an epiphany, a sudden illumination which takes one out of time. It is, literally, a `movement in time', stretching the boundaries of an hour to achieve more commodious proportions" (80). This "movement" occurs in the mind of one who experiences life at the moment; it is a sudden awareness of/union with the miraculous fact of being itself, a melting away of conscious thought, a reverie. As Lucio Ruotolo writes, "The important consideration about Being is not `what' or `how' it is, but rather `that' it is" (29); Clarissa's moments of being share this outlook, even though she is only half-ware of it: "But every one remembered; what she loved was loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab" (Mrs. Dalloway 9). In the moment, then, the boundaries of conscious selfhood dissolve into awareness of basic physical existence. Clarissa creates a faith based on this unit of heightened awareness of existence. Her belief converts the hour of "more commodious proportions" into an immortal, everlasting existence. Dalloway has a preternaturally vivid awareness and fear of the termination of the existence she loves so much; Peter notes her "horror of death." She is capable of imagining, minutely, her own progression toward death (and is in poor physical health); she links her isolated attic bedroom with her loneliness and death. Her bed, no longer the marriage bed symbolizing fertility, is symbolized by her fertile mind as shrinking into her coffin and burial shroud (31). Against this graphic intimation of death, Clarissa has intimations of immortality. Peter recalls her philosophy as the expressed it in their youth: "Since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death" (153). "The unseen part of us" simply means the memory of a moment which survives in the memories of those who experienced that moment. Although the moment's actual Being ends, it lives in the memory, an existence which Dalloway does not denigrate for its intangibility. The answer to individual death is the immortality of collective experience. This immortality springs from the common sensual world in which people experience each other. The common region is the Existence central to Clarissa Dalloway's understanding. Ruotolo states, "the I can meet the Thou only because There is -- i.e., can meet only within some encompassing region of Being. After all, I have to meet thee somewhere, in relation to something and in some context" (16). Remembrance of shared experience is an underpinning of the novel, the summer at Bourton the most prominent example. That summer is so vivid in Clarissa and Peter's memory that, as Miller notices, Woolf's language obsfuscates the passage from "living" present to "dead" past. The past at Bourton remains so vivid that it remains "present" for Clarissa even though she has changed so much that one of the central emotions of that time -- her love of Sally -- seems dead to her. But the principle lines of force in her life are the rites of memory established at Bourton: her marriage, her love/antagonism for Peter Walsh, her half-awareness of her love of women. Human interaction and communication, then, form a network by which individuals merge into one another through experience, imagination, and memory. Miller explains, "No man or woman is limited to him or herself, but each is joined to the others by means of this tree, diffused like a mist among all the people and places he or she has encountered" (173). Throughout Mrs. Dalloway Woolf shows this network of communication as it is formed. Lady Bruton muses on how Hugh and Richard remain with her after they leave, "as if one's friends were attached to one's body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which ... became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour" (112). On the walk home, Richard feels his link to Lady Bruton attenuate and snap, replaced by the sudden awareness of his bond with Clarissa. Another significant instance is the experimental line established between Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. Clarissa never even glimpses the character whom Woolf called her double, and yet he plays the central role in her day. She hears of his death through Bradshaw; this news strikes a chord that reverberates with her mood at the party, and she withdraws to consider her party's deeper meaning for her. She imaginatively recreates Smith's suicide and clearly understands him, as her thoughts mirror his. But not only does his act catalyze an emotional change in her, her act of remembrance in turn insures that his life will survive in a sympathetic context, and not simply as a figure in Bradshaw's utilitarian world. A meeting is not necessary for their communion; to know what is essential in a person requires only a sort of sympathetic psychic awareness. And the two meet also, more tenuously, when Peter sees Septimus and Rezia; he speculates that Clarissa would have spoken to them had she been there. Peter is infinitesimally changed by seeing them (and carries this change to the party), and something of Clarissa enters into his experience of the couple. The possible conquest of death is the wider significance of the sensory experience of life. Clarissa's self is diffused by the people who experience her, and she spreads the salves of those she experiences. A universal spirit fills the apparently empty space between people, which allows Clarissa and Peter to hold a silent conversation behind the spoken one when he visits her drawing room. It allows Clarissa to feel the physical impact of Smith's plunge. This void-filling force outlasts individual death, as Elizabeth experiences on her ramble through London: It was not conscious. There was no recognition in it of one fortune, or fate, and for that very reason even to those dazed with watching for the last shivers on the faces of the dying, consoling. Forgetfulness in people might wound, their ingratitude corrode, but this voice pouring endlessly, year in year out ... this procession would wrap them all about and carry them on. (138) An anonymity provided by shared experience relieves humans of the loneliness of individual existence. Woolf's characters struggle to find their way to some sort of shared experience, from the unexamined patriotism displayed in the incident of the car on Bond Street (14), even to the anti-social lunacy of Septimus Warren Smith. The value of experiences is not individual but collective; in Clarissa's skeptical mind this collective experience takes the place of "love and religion," and other potential rocks against the void, in which she places no faith. According to Daiches, "The significance of the whole is not the sum of the significance of the different parts, but depends on the shape and disposition of the completed story" (61); this comment on the structure of Woolf's novel also holds true for the world view of her heroine. Clarissa finds an answer to the malaise of existence in this Existence; it is her faith. There is, no doubt, a minimal level of faith at which she no longer is certain, but doubt is a characteristic of all faiths, particularly in a cultural moment of conflicted ideologies and the crumbling of Victorian certitude. This faith explains and orders her world in a way that other outlooks available to her do not. Perhaps most important, it grants her the sense of an urgent call to action. From her world view Clarissa progresses to a mode of existential behavior. For Clarissa's Being is not an invincible antidote to death. This collective Being, so dependent on a common fund of experience, disintegrates in the separation of people, just as memory (by which Being comes into existence) is challenged by forgetfulness. Miller claims, "Nothing could be less like the intermittencies and difficulties of memory in Wordsworth or in Proust than the spontaneity and ease of memory in Mrs. Dalloway" (176). But while in most respects Woolf does show memory as spontaneous, she too deals with intermittencies. There are instances of profound lapses of memory, as when Lady Bruton remembers Hugh's kindness, but not the occasion for it (Mrs. Dalloway 104). Insofar as metaphysical Being exists in human minds and not in the objective world, losing awareness of Being is tantamount to losing Being. For Clarissa, forgetfulness is not simply a prefiguration of death; it is itself a very real death. The procession of time leads to death, and time's passage leads also to the oblivion of forgetfulness. This condition of oblivion is inherent in the fractured, isolated conditions of life, in which people drift toward experiential isolation. Clarissa had a theory, "to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people, not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day, then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory ... how little one knew people" (152). She thinks, "But what was this thing she called life? ... 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" (122). She must act to end that separation. Referring to the above trio, "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" (122). She sees a way for her to act to strengthen collective being through her parties. Her parties are her art. Clarissa creates and controls her event-art in ways similar to, and in certain ways significantly different from, the way art was traditionally understood to be generated. These points of similarity and contrast firmly establish Clarissa Dalloway as a real artist, but one whose modes of creation destabilize not only traditional boundaries of art, but boundaries of personhood fundamental to English culture. In keeping with modernist aesthetics, in the development of which Woolf played a key role, a Dalloway party creates a mode of being seen as fundamentally separate from mundane life. It "creates a scene that wrenches her guests from the dullness of habitual activity and serves as a stage for moments of heightened consciousness" (Henke 142). Like a conventional drama, her party distorts the forms of everyday life to reveal a truth she believes to be more profound and important. Her art is both false and true; it is life, but life transformed. Clarissa muses, "Every time she gave a party she had this feeling ... that everyone was unreal in one way, much more real in another" (Mrs. Dalloway 259). Critics have noted the religious connotations of this celebration of a higher, more profound reality. In light not only of Clarissa's characteristic distrust of religion, but of the decline of religious faith of Woolf's time, I feel it more appropriate to emphasize the urge of creation as the original impulse for this action. For Woolf, as for many artists of her time, the inevitable motion of human consciousness to impose order on a world without apparent meaning was itself the motive force of religion and philosophy. Artists, as knowing manipulators and expressors of consciousness, replaced priests and monarchs as actual creators of order and meaning. DiBattista says, "Woolf's psychology ... necessarily predicates that the form-engendering power of the mind naturally shapes the life of Monday or Tuesday into orders that are not adventitious, but truly expressive of the life apprehended from within" (4). As Peter Walsh muses, "If he can conceive of her, then in some sort she exists" (Mrs. Dalloway 57); the truths created by the mind are not false because they are, in crude terms, "made up." They are made true simply by being felt. Both hostesses and artists must create a world that draws in the reader or guest and takes her or him out of the logic of the mundane. But if Clarissa's intent and effect correspond closely to the vision of art espoused by her creator, her methods are certainly quite different from those employed by writers of fiction. Even performed dramas of the day, followed a set script. Dance and music could be improvisational, even revolutionary in form, but like fiction they maintained a dichotomy between the subject (the viewer) and object (the work of art), or the subject (the transforming work of art) and object (the viewer whose feelings are to be worked upon). The party cannot be characterized this way. The party-goers are actors as well as viewers, including Clarissa herself, and the party's creator neither controls nor thinks of controlling the actions of her subjects/objects, even though her beliefs about life imbue every aspect of her gathering. Most important, the element of intentionality is absent. No one is consciously aware of her or his involvement in a work of art. Clarissa herself seems only imperfectly aware of what she is creating. Nevertheless, it is also possible to overstate the extent to which the party is unreasoned, a product of unknown urges. Without some intentionality and control, Clarissa ceases to be an artist and is a hostess simply. But Clarissa does have control. First, she controls the party's physical aspect: when it is to occur (has she seen people as feeling isolated lately?), who will come (what combination will be successful?), what the scene will look like. Richard's intercession for Ellie Henderson piques Clarissa to make her central defense of her parties as meaningful events; she feels a need for control of the party which indicates how much of her personality is involved in it. Clarissa's control is in the physical scene of the party, from which arise the actions of the guests which constitute the beginnings of the hum of Life which is Clarissa's real goal. If she has judged the moment correctly, laid the scene correctly, she will be rewarded with what she wants from her guests without coercion or persuasion. In the end, this is not very different from the writer or painter, who must also succeed technically for the reader to comprehend his or her message. Clarissa is minutely aware of how her party fares by her aesthetic standards. In the beginning, before the fire of companionship has been lit, she is terrified that her endeavor has failed: "Anything, any explosion, any horror was better than people wandering aimlessly, standing in a bunch at a corner" (168). As the evening progresses, she feels more optimistic; the hum of life, of communication and connection, has begun. At last she judges her party a success when a guest beats back a curtain while continuing to talk (170). Significantly Clarissa interprets physical signs. Not only does she know just what she wants, she also knows just what it looks and sounds like. Her material focus reinforces the sensual, physical locus of her pleasure. All her philosophy and ideas about life return to the primary fact of enjoyment of life. Her interest in the way her party appears also reveals what isn't important to her as a hostess: great names, prominent people, or the social ladder. The butler rattles off names of guests; for this Clarissa has no response. Everyone, Sally and Peter included, see in her only a status-minded hostess for whom the party is, first and last, an attempt at increasing social stature. While Clarissa does love the conventional symbols of her class, the significance they have for her is far from conventional. The complex of values embodied in Clarissa's beloved Lady Bexborough relate to her parties not practically, but obliquely; she creates parties not to advance herself or her husband's career in society, but to express society's values (filtered through Clarissa's consciousness) as part of the whole array of ideas brought to life by the party. Finally, Clarissa senses herself to have a stake in her production that goes beyond that of the ordinary hostess: "She ... couldn't help feeling that she had, anyhow, made this happen, that it marked a stage" (170). This feeling is insubstantial and fleeting, not surprisingly in that she has neither cultural not personal support for it. Yet the feeling cannot be wholly eradicated either. This suspicion of her power is symptomatic of Clarissa's philosophy and art generally; uncertainty enveloping an undeniable but mysterious presence. The artist's role is to create and express the truths that she or he apprehends in the world; the artist is Woolf's high priest of consciousness. This is the role that Clarissa plays in her party. Her parties project the truth she sees onto a ritual physical structure freed in many ways from the forms and concerns of everyday life. This truth is expressed not through the use of power as Bradshaw or Kilman impose their own beliefs, by manipulating the power they have. Rather, the party establishes a zone of influence in which, far from having one's personal beliefs imposed upon or subjugated, one's beliefs are transformed by contact with the other system. Art's effect is not to force or even to persuade, but (once again) to "subvert the masculine grammar of subject and object, unifying and protecting both in a single field" (Rosenman 79). Woolf displays this opening of experience in the conversation of Peter and Sally. Dalloway's old friends have not been in close contact for years, perhaps since Bourton; nevertheless they fall quickly into confidence: Sally says, "Peter was an old friend, a dear friend -- did absence matter? did distance matter?" (Mrs. Dalloway 189). Unconsciously, of course, she sees life on the terms that Clarissa gives it. Her philosophy is born in Sally; Sally will carry away not simply a memory of Peter and one of Clarissa, but also a sense of the significance of these friendships she might not have had, had she seen Peter on a street corner or Clarissa at the florist's. The party marks a place of special awareness of friendship and connection, for it is a celebration of these aspects of humanity in common culture as well as in Clarissa's more developed scheme of life. When Ellie Henderson looks at the Prime Minister and thinks, "He looked so ordinary. You might have stood him behind a counter and bought biscuits -- poor chap, all rigged up in gold lace" (172), she likewise seems to be under the influence of Clarissa's disregard of hierarchies and distinctions, made visible in the party where the minister's status is less important than his physical presence. From all such individual realizations, taken together, arises the Existence that Clarissa wishes to create or make visible. "The interaction of personalities in ritual gesture establishes a lasting, collective relationship crystallised in bonds of joyful affiliation," writes Henke (142). Clarissa's view is congruous with most analyses of the novel, which interpret her parties as an offering -- fundamentally for other people and for the external force, not as acts with a principally private significance. These aspects of the party challenge the notion of art accepted in that time. There is no room in Clarissa for the identity of the artist as master of every aspect of her creation. She does not see herself as part of a tradition, much less a centrally important one; although she has confused intimations of the significance of what she does, the disdain shown by society is more than enough to undercut thoroughly any self-esteem her creations give her. Clarissa's art controverts even what the modernists consciously understood about art. It is possibly more understandable to present-day readers, accustomed to forms of art which attempt to transform traditional dynamics of the relationship between performer and viewer. The endeavors of Woolf's character are so far beyond the art of England in 1923 that their participants, and even their facilitator, went into them with no artistic expectations. Clarissa's existence as an artist, the forms of her art, destabilize tradition far more completely than the most revolutionary form of art-as-art. It exists outside the forms of art while doing what art alone is supposed to be able to do: express life as viewed by a unique individual, and impress that view of life on the art's observers. Clarissa Dalloway, as a woman, is an outsider to the male-dominated realm of official art; therefore the art she does create, which she is compelled to create by her Self, cannot but be revolutionary in form. But although the parties undeniably influence the collective psyche of those present, their primary importance for Clarissa remains personal. Paradoxically, her modes of art, built of collective interaction and unfolding as a communal experience, spring from Dalloway's sense of her own isolation as an individual. If communal experience is the focal point of Clarissa's universe, awareness of individual isolation, even alienation, from others is the key to her awareness of herself. As effective as she proves to be in managing the party, her actual human connections are clumsy and unsatisfying: "Certainly Clarissa's more metaphorical femininity, her `woman's gift' and diffuse consciousness, overshadows her actual motherhood" (Roseman 81). Although Clarissa's party art is fundamentally consistent with her milieu's vision of feminine nature as inherently nurturant of interpersonal connection, the kinship of art to social belief is purely ideological. Her unquestioned faith in the "angel in the house" is undercut by her own inability to function as an effective focal point for her family, at least by ordinary means. She fears her daughter's gravitation to Kilman will vitiate the filial bond, while she broods over having failed Richard at some past point, presumably in the role of politician's spouse (Mrs. Dalloway 31). But as fervidly as Clarissa admires Lady Bexborough and all she embodies, she just as tenaciously remains distanced from this world view, in which a woman is to the world little more than the sum of her relations with others, particularly men. She demands room for private development: "In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house" (8). The less intense alliance with Richard allows Clarissa greater space to fulfill her submerged desires. Peter Walsh might have destroyed this aspect of her, not by mere closeness but by the incessant judgment of her secret beliefs about the world. Others understand that Clarissa did not marry for standard romantic love, but misunderstand her actual motives. When Clarissa disappears from her party, "Sally supposed ... that there were people of importance, politicians, whom neither of them knew unless by sight ... whom Clarissa had to be nice to, had to talk to" (186); in fact, the hostess has withdrawn from everyone to probe her feelings about the death of Septimus Smith. She imagines herself as isolated, alone. In the end Clarissa stands alone in that the truth," what is essential about her life, remains unknown to all even as all partake of the field of that truth which she generates. To the extent that she could have made herself known through love, and Peter understands her more completely than anyone else, albeit still haltingly, Clarissa's expression of herself through art is a free choice. But to the extent that other options, such as a passionate relationship, require subjugation of her artistic urges, Clarissa is a victim of a regime which denied artistically inclined women the chance to express themselves, and she ended with the life she had, not because it best suited her, but because it most closely approached the minimum condition of her happiness: capacity to express herself in art. Her conscious agreement with the principles of her class ought not be slighted; her love of Peter does not stop her criticizing his marginality, passion, and instability. Clarissa is of the solid center. However, the use to which she puts the apparatus of her class profoundly destabilizes the center she ostensibly upholds. Clarissa's complex position comprises external conformity, ideological affinity, and substantive subversion. This difficult spot is the source of Clarissa's world view in which isolation battles with connection. For Woolf does not merely portray the thought and art of her central character, she also paints a complex portrait of the artist's situation in the world. This portrait uncovers the way in which the artist's experience is transformed and recapitulated in art; more, it also reveals and critiques the society that gave rise to the artist. Just as Clarissa's mind imposes a pattern of isolation and connection on existence, so the existence she must lead imposes. a pattern of isolation and connection on Clarissa. But whereas the truth the woman creates for the world moves toward apolitical universality, the truth the novelist reveals in the life is specific and social. For it is the power of the patriarchy that imprisons Clarissa in loneliness, while an individual feminine power fundamentally opposed to the male-dominated social order is the source of her feelings of human affiliation. Clarissa characterizes herself as virginal, in some way inept with people: "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 the surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together"(31). This coldness is the trait she associates with her attic bed and isolation; the reader can also see the source of her deep fear of isolation as the precursor of death. But Clarissa, just after the above reflection, sees in her life 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 arid 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.(32) The source of this extraordinary feeling, described in overtly sexual terms, is pleasure in certain moments with women. This blush of woman love seems to provide Clarissa with a touch of "something central which permeated"; the specificity of these moments seems to correspond to Clarissa's delight in existence, while their social nature (conversation with women) points to the importance to her of human interaction. These moments of awareness, of connection (awakened in her when she met Sally Seton) in her actual life are the wellspring of Clarissa's highly developed beliefs about the nature and significance of existence. Likewise, "the bed and Baron Marbot and the candle half-burnt" (32), the isolation and awareness of death in her own life, generate her abhorrence of isolation and fear of death more generally. Deborah Guth points out that "the private, supposedly `real' inner self that Clarissa explores during the day in fact duplicates rather than denies the artificial, ceremonial quality of her public self " (35). Despite her alienated, isolated position in society, the private world of Clarissa's consciousness is fundamentally determined by her existential position. Clarissa's isolation, the fact of death in her life, is caused by a social order which requires the subjugation of the private self, for Clarissa the real self, to the individual's social position. This imprisonment of the self is symbolized in Woolf's use of names (DiBattista 36). Woolf writes, "She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen . . . this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway" (11). "Mrs. Dalloway" is that part of her fixed in a social position: her femininity, in a patrilineal culture, subsumed by her identity as Richard's wife. The novel begins with the words "Mrs. Dalloway." But the name used by everyone who thinks of her at all personally is her Christian name, the name not of social relationships but of emotional ones. The novel closes with a view of Peter Walsh: "What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? ... What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was" (194). It is significant that Septimus is the other character for whom Woolf brings up this dichotomy (84); Septimus replicates Clarissa's threatened position. They are threatened more than other characters because, more than any others, their private selves diverge from public expectations of them. The social order of Britain in 1923 was resolutely inimical to the reality of actual life cherished by Clarissa and Septimus. It created standards that, far from allowing for free, individual expression, forced individuals into rigid roles with unfulfillable expectations. The regime's ideals are antithetical to life itself. No one measures up to these standards. Peter is a failure, and Richard has not gone as far as expected. The accomplished Lady Bruton, due to her putative nonrationality, feels she cannot write a letter. The Prime Minister would look more in place selling bread. Even Whitbread and Bradshaw, the enthusiastic enforcers of the ideal, are almost universally disliked. The regime works on ideals and ideal symbols relating to the glory of patriarchal society. Peter Walsh encounters a regiment of young soldiers marching past the "exalted statues" in Regent's Park; they tramp "as if one will worked arms and legs uniformly, and life, with all its varieties, its irreticencies, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline" (51). Undisciplined, aimless life must be forced to work for financial or political gain, for the advancement of Britain, for any number of reasons connected not only to "war, patriotism, and nationalistic ardour, but also to the auxiliary vices of force and possessiveness that bolster the dictatorial spirit" (Henke 129). This ideal-machine's agents cannot help desiring to fix things. Richard, presented benevolently by Woolf, still must ponder "the problem of the female vagrant" (I 16). Clarissa, by contrast, thinks, "the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) ... can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life" (4). Not only is desire to change, even if the reasons are benevolent, necessarily linked to the desire to use power, but the ability to effect change is inevitably tied to the possession of power. Sir William Bradshaw seems to demonstrate this. His method of treatment is quite simply to cut off whatever sets his patients apart, makes them unique, living human beings, however idiosyncratic or unhappy, and reduce them to the human Proportion he prefers: "his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw's if they were women" (99). The form of his Proportion is determined by traditional ideology: "family affection; honour; courage; and a brilliant career" (102). He enforces his will through traditional structures: the power of doctor over patient, "sane" over "insane," wealthy over poor. His personal aim is power as well; the end result of his labor is his colleagues' respect, his subordinates' respect, and the gratitude of the relatives of his patients (99). The judgment regimes which discard life as it is lived naturally fail to find worth in that life. Socioeconomic regimes, like Bradshaw's, work principally to change life; thus his misperceptions are actually useful to him. But for "interpersonal imperialists" like Walsh and Kilman, misunderstanding only perpetuates divisive, alienating walls which destroy Existence as Clarissa conceives it. Walsh is described as sharp; he thinks, "The All-Judging, the All-Merciful might excuse -- Peter Walsh had no mercy. Villains there must be" (173). Clarissa is his most frequent target. He continually judges her actions with words such as "annoying," "irritating, "too far." This judgment militates against his understanding her as thoroughly as she understands him. His occasional insights are ruined by complete misunderstandings grounded in his perceptions of what she should be. He understands her enjoyment of life, but blasts her parties: "She frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense . . . losing her discrimination" (78). Clarissa accepts him even when she disapproves, and she understands him completely; at the party she senses the exact moment at which his disdain turns to approval. Like Peter, Kilman uses a critical viewpoint to overcome her fears: "Whenever the hot and painful feelings boiled within her . . . this grudge against the world, she thought of God. . . . Rage was succeeded by calm. A sweet savour filled her veins" (124). Like Bradshaw's Proportion, Doris's religious piety masks a desire for power. She thinks. of Clarissa, "If only she could make her weep; could ruin her; humiliate her; bring her to her knees crying, You are right" (125). Doris is afflicted with a "grudge against life," an inability to accept or appreciate sensual existence. The anti-existence judgment of Bradshaw, Walsh, and Kilman works to attain personal power over individuals. Septimus bemoans the dominance of Bradshaws, "who saw nothing clear, yet ruled, yet inflicted. `Must' they said" (148). Clarissa calls Walsh's love and Kilman's love "the cruelest things in the world . . . clumsy, hot, domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous, infinitely cruel and unscrupulous" (127). Both Walsh and Kilman condemn Clarissa for her social position. Walsh calls her "the perfect hostess" (62), while Kilman puts her in "the most worthless of all classes -- the rich, with a smattering of culture" (123). Such judgments are like death for Clarissa; they are the forces that affix her permanently in isolation. Clarissa's love of mere existence, the importance to her of the means she has to bolster the communal spirit of life, and her refusal to judge or force, alienate her from her milieu. This environment, in which people are separated by social role and position, is the Death she fears so much. She is kept alive by the fugitive communion she senses, particularly by her own ability to bolster communion. These life-giving feelings originate in passion for the presence of other women, a feeling that is ambiguously homosexual, as Emily Jensen notes (173), but is overtly opposed to the rigid and utilitarian social order. Thus Clarissa and Septimus each face threats from social forces to whom their rejection of useful labor (including a tendency to "nonproductive" homosexuality) and joyful embrace of sensual joy in turn pose a threat. Clarissa and Septimus threaten the utilitarian order merely by being passive, half-unconscious alternatives to it. But the differences between Septimus and Clarissa's experience of their own deviation also present a profound analysis of society's expectations about gender. Septimus goes mad while Clarissa hides her difference and remains externally integrated with society because conformity was a practical necessity for women, particularly of Clarissa's class, imprisoned by centuries of male control of all wealth and almost all means to wealth, indeed, of practically every aspect of public life. As a man, Septimus could not avoid subjection to the most extreme dysfunctions of the social order: war and Bradshaw. His response is similarly extreme. The manifestations of his madness are guided by the tradition of male poetry: "Was he not like Keats?" Isabel Pole asks (85). His scraps of paper, laughed at by the maid, are in the tradition of men's poetry judged as insane by contemporaries and cherished by posterity. Most important, he has open access to the public world, even though this access is more curse than blessing to him, because along with comparative freedom of motion came the requirement of productive paid labor. But independent social position allowed men the freedom to throw away virtue, career, and social approbation, and eke out survival on the edges of respectability, as Peter Walsh does. Woolf wrote on the opportunities open to Tolstoy: "There was a young man living freely with this gypsy or that great lady; going to the wars; picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of life that was to serve him so splendidly later when he came to write his books (A Room 71). Merely being a man opened to Septimus vistas of life absolutely closed to an upper-class woman like Clarissa. She is denied experiences that could have profoundly transformed her, but she is also spared the worst extremes of patriarchal dysfunction by her very isolation. Clarissa inherits not the opportunity to rove and write, but the elite woman's inheritance of social communication and parties. Her culture claimed women to be essentially nonrational, and Clarissa does not care about abstract knowledge as understood by England's intellectual apparatus. Defending her parties as an offering, she thinks, "She 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" (122). Clarissa does not externally contradict this self-analysis, which touches on the central points of the gender ideology of the time. But the significance of her actions to her private mental life could not be more at odds with the superficial hostess all assume her to be. While Mrs. Bradshaw is "balancing like a sea-lion on the edge of its tank, barking for invitations, Duchesses" (183), Clarissa worries not about the status-success her party brings, but about its mere physical success in the terms of her world view. Clarissa remains allied to society for two interlocking reasons. Respectability is essential to her first of all because, unlike Peter Walsh, she could not have remained in society with a faint aura of disrepute. As she would have to depend on a man to maintain her, virtue was in fact her greatest asset. But it should not be thought that Clarissa consciously felt trapped by this condition; in fact, she admires her class and culture just as much as Whitbread and the other characters. She loves the activities open to her without considering them secondary to or a substitute for pursuits more overtly intellectual. These activities constitute a separate female inheritance, and there was no Keats or Tolstoy in the female tradition. Woolf compares George Eliot to Tolstoy; she "escaped after much tribulation, but only to a secluded villa in St. John's Wood . . . for was she not living in sin with a married man and might not the sight of her damage the chastity of Mrs. Smith or whoever it was that chanced to call? One must submit to social convention" (A Room 70). Clarissa submits to social convention by subverting it in ways that express herself without destabilizing her own position. To accomplish this she wholeheartedly embraces the very isolation that her personal beliefs suggest is to blame for all unhappiness. So secret is her pleasure that no one understands her. Clarissa embraces the more distanced marriage to Richard over the more passionate option of marrying Peter to maintain an autonomy which the latter man would certainly not have allowed: "There is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect" (120). As one critic put it, "Clarissa's frigidity is a response to that threat and not simply2 character flaw. Clarissa denies her actual sexuality only to participate in it imaginatively" (Rosenman 83). And of course the apparatus of her class is essential to the fulfillment of Clarissa's artistic goals: "Behind it all was that network of visiting, leaving cards, being kind to people; running about with bunches of flowers, little presents" (Mrs. Dalloway 77). Clarissa makes subversive use of this network; although this subversion remains undetected, it subtly affects those who enter its sphere of influence, Clarissa's parties. Woolf's presentation of Clarissa Dalloway is itself subversive on. many levels. By creating a viable heroine with many intellectual attributes ascribed solely to men, Woolf destabilizes gender boundaries Clarissa's talents derive, moreover, from her social femininity, presenting an alternative to male-identified utilitarian ideology. Perhaps most important, Woolf's novel attempts to uncover a female, intellectual inheritance not preserved in rigid. cultural vessels such as libraries and universities. Woolf, in her own, way, is in search of her mother's garden. Just as Clarissa's 'intuitive completion of Septimus's suicide rescues that act from the oblivion to which it might otherwise have been consigned, so Woolf's creation rescues Clarissa, or someone like her, from the same oblivion, at the same time serving to erase the isolation felt by women artists excluded from the male intellectual tradition. WORKS CITED Daithes, David. Virginia Woolf. New York: New Directions, 1963. DiBattista, Maria. Virginia Woolf's Major Novels: The Fables of Anon. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980. Guth, Deborah, "Rituals of Self-Deception: Clarissa Dalloway's Final Moment of Vision." Twentieth Century Literature (1990) 36.1: 34-43. Henke, Suzette. "Mrs. Dalloway: The Communion of Saints." New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jane Marcus. Lincoln: of U Nebraska P. 1981. 125-47. Jensen, Emily. "Clarissa Dalloway's Respectable Suicide." Virginia Wolf: A Feminist Slant. Ed. Jane Marcus. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983. Miller, J. Hillis. "Repetition as Raising the Dead." Virginia Woolf. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1986. Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk. The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother Daughter Relationship. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1986. Ruotolo, Lucio P. Six Existential Heroes: The Politics of Faith. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973. Woolf, Virginia Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, 1925. _____. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt, 1929 |
Publication Information: Article Title: 'Mrs' Dalloway': Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Woman. Contributors: Jacob Littleton - author. Journal Title: Twentieth Century Literature. Volume: 41. Issue: 1. Publication Year: 1995. Page Number: 36+. COPYRIGHT 1995 Hofstra University; COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com