Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, first published as a novel in 1925
Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Mrs. Dalloway is the story of one day. This day is in the 1920s, in London, and we see it as viewed by Clarissa Dalloway, a fifty-something housewife who is preparing to throw a party that evening. She runs errands for the party and takes in the world around her, which we see with a kind of omniscience, diving into the back stories and lives and complications of the people she passes by. Clarissa is married to Richard Dalloway, but she had previous paramours, including one, Peter Walsh, that she thinks of often, and he ends up stopping by to pay a visit and then coming to the party. Clarissa and Peter both spend the day marinating on what might have been, and whether they're happy with the choice they've made not to be together.
Clarissa and Richard have one daughter, Elizabeth, who is a young woman (maybe late teens? I can't recall if we know her age) who is enamored of her governess, Miss Kilman, a rather severe and godly woman. Clarissa despises Miss Kilman (and the feeling is mutual) and there's a kind of battle going on over Elizabeth. Clarissa also spends part of the day reflecting on a time when she fell in love with her best friend, Sally Seton, and then, in another surprise, Sally ends up attending Clarissa's party also. Everyone reconnects and reflects on the ways that their friends and previous loves have changed, and the novel ends with Peter and Clarissa coming together at the party, possibly still in love.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here
Well, blobbists. This was a much shorter read than The Magic Mountain, roughly a tenth of the length, so I am back here writing to you much sooner than before.
I don't know if I can say I enjoyed reading this book, but there were many exquisite moments in it. I think if I were to describe the book in one word, it would be 'precarious'. Clarissa seems to be in a tenuous mental headspace, floating in and out of herself, as do several other characters in the novel, and while that was fascinating to explore, it also made me feel very on edge, as if I was watching an disaster unfold in slow motion. I still very much love To The Lighthouse, of Ms. Woolf's works, and it remains my favorite of hers, though I'm glad I read Mrs. Dalloway and had the chance to experience it. Here are some thoughts!
Big Ben as a character
I've said in other blob entries that I love the way certain writers write about specific things - the way Pasternak writes weather, the way Murasaki Shikibu writes the seasons. I would like to add to the list that I love the way that Virginia Woolf writes about time. Here are two (imo) incredible passages about Big Ben tolling:
- First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
- The sounds of Big Ben striking the half-hour stuck out between them with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that. Isn't incredible that she paints such an image with something so simple as the chiming of a clock?
Daybreak
Another thing I love about Virginia Woolf's writing is the way she paints pictures with her words. I told my mother in describing this book to her that it felt like a painting of a scene where we dove into and out of different images and characters.
One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung.
The flower shop
We follow Clarissa around town as she goes about her errands, and I loved this exchange at the flower shop:
And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing, nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently, as if this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, 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 when - oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!
'Dear, those motor cars', said Miss Pym, going to the window to look, and coming back and smiling apologetically with her hands full of sweet peas, as if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars, were all her fault.
On might maybe mayhap having seen the Queen
Just after the flower shop, everyone in the area is abuzz because they think someone famous has stopped by, possibly the Queen. There was a poetic patriotism to how Woolf described each person's internal dialogue at this prospect:
Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing - poor women waiting to see the Queen go past - poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War - tut-tut- actually had tears in his eyes. It made me think of how there were lines miles long to see the Queen when she passed away recently, and how I don't know if there's anyone in American society who gets so much reverence on a national scale.
Seasons
Murasaki Shikibu can be our main seasons writer, but she can collab with Virginia Woolf. ;)
June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that.
Houses
Oh, also, I LOVE the way Virginia Woolf writes about buildings and their relationship to their inhabitants. In my blob on To the Lighthouse, I share several scenes describing the house getting ready for the family and being brought back to life.
Strange, she thought, pausing on the landing, how a mistress knows the very moment, the very temper of her house! Faint sounds rose in spirals up the well of the stairs; the swish of a mop; tapping; knocking; a loudness when the front door opened; a voice repeating a message in the basement; the chink of silver on a tray; clean silver for the party. All was for the party.
Clarissa
If you read the flower scene quote carefully, you probably picked up on some of the precariousness I mentioned in Clarissa's mental state. Here are some lines that I think paint a vivid picture of Mrs. Dalloway - a bit lost, quite vain, uncertain of how or if she fits in the world.
- 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 more day. As someone who experiences depression and anxiety, I think Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath's writing style resonates very deeply for me, because their articulations of the experience are so resonant. That can make it very difficult for me to read their work, or to want to read their work, as it can throw me into a bit of a mental funk. But I think their voices are such valuable contributions to our understanding of ourselves.
- How much she wanted it - that people should look pleased as she came in.
- She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown.
- Clarissa's husband reflecting on her nature: Possibly she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. I thought this was an apt imagination of her thinking - Clarissa seems to be actively drowning, but she's also making sure that the flower arrangements and the china and the silverware are all JUST right on the sinking ship.
- She had perhaps lost her sense of proportion. God, I love this line. It feels so spot on for how I feel when I spiral into a depressive or OCD headspace, like I can't properly give things the proportion that they should have, and my emotional responses are being reflected through a funhouse mirror that I can't trust.
- But why should she invite all the dull women in London to her parties? LOL.
- Doris Kilman, on Clarissa - Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit. OUCH. Miss Kilman and Clarissa DESPISE each other. They approach life as women in polar opposite ways, and there's a kind of fascination and jealousy, I think, that undergirds their mutual obsessive distaste for each other.
- It was extraordinary how Peter put her into these states just by coming and standing in a corner. He made her see herself; exaggerate. It was idiotic. I loved seeing this side of Clarissa, because it softens her, I think, to the reader, to know that she feels so silly about still being in love with her old boyfriend.
- Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of being something not herself, and that every one was unreal in one way; much more real in another
- What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? Interestingly, some of the guests bring up the death (by suicide) of someone they've interacted with earlier in the day, and Clarissa is horrified that they have the audacity to discuss death at HER party. But it's amusingly hypocritical because she of course has spent the whole day thinking about death herself. Which is evidenced in how she reflects on this moment at the party:
- That young man had killed himself. Somehow it was her disaster - her disgrace.
- She felt somehow very like him - the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. Honestly, I was surprised that the book didn't end with Clarissa killing herself, as it seemed like we were dancing on the edge of a cliff with her for most of the day.
Miss Kilman
Miss Kilman was an interesting side character, who gave us a sense of the 'professional' woman of the time. And yet, like Clarissa, she was, in fact, barely holding it together.
When people are happy, they have a reserve, she had told Elizabeth, upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre (she was fond of such metaphors), jolted by every pebble. This is how I have felt in bouncing back from responding to COVID and its impact on our society. Like I never got the chance to really fill my reserve back up, so I'm just a wheel without a tire being jolted by the smallest thing.
She was about to split asunder, she felt. The agony was so terrific.
Lines I Liked
- I prefer men to cauliflowers. :)
- The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. Like I said, precarious.
- She had a right to his arm, though it was without feeling.
- They spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe. This line is just so beautifully poetic.
- On Clarissa's feelings for her friend, Sally Seton - But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.
- Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets.
- He was alone with the sideboard and the bananas. This was one of my favorite lines.
- Last time they met, Peter remembered, had been among the cauliflowers in the moonlight.
The hall of the house was cool as a vault. Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy's skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to the old devotions. The cook whistled in the kitchen. She heard the click of the typewriter. It was her life, and bending her head over the hall table, she bowed beneath the influence, felt blessed and purified, saying to herself, as she took the pad with the telephone message on it, how moments like this are buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness they are, she thought (as if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only); not for a moment did she believe in God; but all the more, she thought, taking up the pad, must one repay in daily life to servants, yes, to dogs and canaries, above all to Richard her husband, who was the foundation of it - of the gay sounds, of the green lights, of the cook even whistling, for Mrs. Walker was Irish and whistled all day long - one must pay back from this secret deposit of exquisite moments, she thought, lifting the pad, while Lucy stood by her, trying to explain how.
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