“The World had raised
its whip; where will it descend?”
- Mrs Dalloway
Mrs Dalloway is one of those rare books that I abandoned
midway despite really wanting to read it. This was over three years ago when my son had just been
born. Let me share some hard earned
wisdom with you:
Mrs Dalloway is not the best read when you’re wading through
post partum depression. In fact, you may want to avoid Virginia Woolf entirely.
Anyhow, now that I’m not perpetually sleep-deprived and cranky (much) I thought
I’d give
Mrs Dalloway another go. I was surprised at how much darker it had
felt the first time I’d taken it up. Goes to show, doesn’t it, that a book can
mean such different things depending on where you are in your life. Now, I’m
not suggesting that this book is actually all bright and sunshiny, far from it,
but it’s more thought-provoking than depressing.
Clarissa Dalloway is throwing a party that evening and the
book follows her and a few other characters around London during the hours
preceding the party. The narrative
zigzags between the past and the present, thoughts and words, but Woolf does
this with such skill that you are never confused. Since there’s nothing here that can
conventionally be termed a story, I’d like to examine some of the elements of
the book that interested me.
Clarissa Dalloway: Woolf lived with Clarissa Dalloway for a
long time before finally giving her a book of her own. The character first
appears in the novel The Voyage Out and then in the short story Mrs Dalloway in
Bond Street, before evolving into the woman we meet in Mrs Dalloway. Clarissa
is a wonderfully multi-layered character. At first glance she’s just another
charming, but shallow and self centred woman of privilege. But beneath the
serene exterior, she has her own struggles with life, age, mortality and
isolation, although her struggles aren’t dramatic or noisy.
Septimus Smith: Woolf intended Septimus to be another
version of Clarissa. In her notes she refers to Septimus as Clarissa’s twin.
Interestingly the two characters never meet or interact but it’s easy to see
the link between them. Septimus suffers from post-war trauma and hallucinations.
He is also convinced that humanity is innately cruel and therefore not worth
being a part of.
“For the truth is (let
her ignore it) that human beings have neither kindness nor faith, nor charity
beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs.
Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness. They
desert the fallen.”
Clarissa’s loves: Richard Dalloway, the very proper and safe
man she married, loves Clarissa in his own measured way but one is never quite
sure if Clarissa feels anything beyond affection for him. Peter Walsh is the
romance of her girlhood whom she rejected because he unsettled her. Now he’s
back and a lot of her feelings for him are probably because he represents her
youth. However, Clarissa’s most passionate love is for Sally Seton, a radical
and bold girl who visited Clarissa when they were both young.
Dr Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw: Woolf really spews venom
at the medical community of her time through these two characters. They are
perhaps the most caricature-like of all her characters. Dr Holmes, the family
physician, is insufferably patronizing. He seems to think Septimus is just
being a bother and there’s nothing wrong with him that a hobby and some
distraction wouldn’t cure. Dr Bradshaw, the specialist, on the other hand,
pretends to sympathise but his ‘cure’ is really just a way of shutting the
mentally infirm out of society.
“Sir William not only
prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade
childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate
their views, until they too shared his sense of proportion.”
Woolf’s notes suggest that she intended this book to be a
sort of juxtaposition of the sane and insane, the living and the dead, the past
and the present. She succeeds quite spectacularly in this regard. Admittedly,
Mrs Dalloway takes some effort to read despite being a very slim book. But don’t
let this put you off. I know a lot of people who have read and hated it but I
still suggest you give this a chance, possibly even a second chance. I think it’s
worth the effort.
