Book 810: Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

This is the third time I’ve read this. I read it first in high school in my teens and HATED it. #obvi

I then read it in my early twenties in an intro to LGBT Literature course and tolerated it. The discussion was the most fascinating part and had a lot more to do with Woolf and her life than the novel itself, although there are plenty of scribbles I have in my copy about the story.

And now in my mid-30s, I won’t say I love it, but I definitely have a new appreciation for Woolf’s mastery of the craft as I re-read it. Some of the notes I scribbled reading it in undergrad definitely helped draw my attention to things and I picked up on a few more that I missed. And this is noting that my timing to read it was 100% wrong. This is NOT a pool book, I definitely fell asleep and got a slight sunburn because it’s a slow-paced dense book.

I appreciated, so much more this time, the way Woolf moves between the characters of the novel. I’m not sure if it’s stream-of-consciousness or more like literary piggybacking/word association. You’ll be on a bus with Elizabeth, Clarissa’s daughter, and riding along and then all of a sudden you see something or someone and that person or thing is directly connected to Septimus, the poor shell-shocked soldier, and the narrative shifts. Then again to someone else in an effortless shuffle around the city of London starting and ending with the Dalloway’s house.

It’s just so beautifully written and seamlessly done that on a few occasions I missed whatever triggered the narrative shift and had to go back and re-read a passage or two to find out who I had shifted to and that’s saying something.

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 dimply perceive. She resented it, had a scrupled 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 of 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! (31)

This seamlessly shifting between male and female, young and old, I believe helped Woolf to bury the same-sex desires across characters even though she was pretty explicit in some passages like the one above and a couple at the end. Clarissa’s marriage at least on this day, comes across as forced and even Richard, her husband, struggles to say he loves her and can only buy flowers (even though she said she’ll get them herself). There also appears to be some homo-erotic undertones of Septimus’ friend Evan during the war, so it’s constantly under the surface.

The thing I noticed more this time, I’m assuming because I’m older and have had a few immediate family members die since I last read this, is Woolf’s focus on death throughout the novel. Not only does Clarissa focus on it and describe her bed as a coffin on multiple occasions, but the story cocoons the suicide of Septimus and many of the characters acknowledge their getting older and even assume other characters are dead or close to death and talk about it both nonchalantly but also with a reverence that belies/hides their own mortality.

She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the place. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter—even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that 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 . . . perhaps—perhaps. (153)

I also feel that Woolf may have been ahead of her time in talking about mental health. I’m sure other authors and artists were dealing with the fall out of World War II, but to have such a frank representation of a soldier who experienced shell shock and ultimately takes his own life seems groundbreaking to me at least.

Recommendation: Definitely worth a read, or trying to re-read it if you failed the first time. I enjoyed this more than I thought I would and I’m glad to have revisited in a third decade of my life. Each time I re-read it I feel I get more out of it. I can’t believe the 100th publication anniversary is in only a couple of years, it still feels like an incredibly modern novel even if some of the references are dated. I’ll probably revisit it again in my 40s, but who knows.

Opening Line: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

Closing Line: “For there she was.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)

Additional Quotes from Mrs. Dalloway
“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?” (9)

“For it was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had gathered in to itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; had become one of those spectres with which one battles in the night; one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our life-blood, dominators and tyrants; for no doubt with another throw of the dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would have loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No.” (12)

“‘Look,’ she implored him, for Dr. Holmes had told her to make him notice real things, go to a music hall, play cricket—that was the very game, Dr. Holmes said, a nice out-of-door game for her husband.” (25)

“‘Fear no more,’ said Clarissa. Fear no more the heat o’ the sun; for the shock of Lady Bruton asking Richard to lunch without her made the moment in which she had stood shiver, as a plant on the river-bed feels the shock of a passing oar and shivers: so she rocked: so she shivered.” (30)

“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 . . . 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.” (31)

“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?” (32)

“Then came the most exquisite moment or her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it—a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through the revelation, the religious feeling!—when old Joseph and Peter faced them.” (35)

“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, saying things she didn’t mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination.” (78)

“There remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury-lodging house window, the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia’s (for she was with him). But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot.” (149)

“He was rather shriveled-looking, but kinder, she felt, and she had a real affection for him, for he was connected with her youth, and she still had a little Emily Brontë he had given her, and he was to write, surely? In those days he was to write.” (187)