Final Thoughts | Mrs Dalloway, Part 4
And our schedule for Arendt's The Human Condition
Today is our last free post about Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Tomorrow, I’ll send along the recording from last night’s members-only Zoom call where we discussed the book as a whole; that recording is available to anyone paying subscriber of Commonplace Philosophy.
It was a great time, and that conversation helped shape my final thoughts, which I’ll be sharing below.
But first, let’s talk about our next book: The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt. Here’s the schedule.
November 25: Chapter 1: The Human Condition
December 2: Chapter 2: The Public and The Private Realm
December 9: Chapter 3: Labor
December 15: Members-Only Zoom Call
December 16: Chapter 4: Work
December 23: Reading Week
December 30: Reading Week
January 6: Chapter 5: Action (§24-29)
January 13: Chapter 5: Action (§30-34)
January 19: Members-Only Zoom Call
January 20: Chapter 6 The Vita Activa and The Modern Age (§35-40)
January 27: Chapter 6 The Vita Activa and The Modern Age (§41-45)
February 3: Final Thoughts
There are a few things I need to note about this.
First, in November there will be no Zoom call. Let’s use November to get a head-start on Arendt, recharge our mental batteries, and prepare for the marathon holiday season. I might try to stream on Substack, now that they offer that, instead.
Second, in December we will have two weeks that I’ve called Reading Weeks. Between December 23-31, the odds of getting much done is slim, and I expect many people will fall behind. So we’ll briefly pause our read-along and, for those who need it and are able, catch up (read ahead) so we can finish the book well.
Third, for the most part we will read a chapter in a week. However, the final two chapters are more substantial, so I have broken them up by sections.
Fourth, we’ll be reading the edition from the University of Chicago Press. If you have another edition, feel free to read that, but the Chicago edition will serve as our go-to reference.
Fifth, after we finish Arendt in February, we’ll get ready for Le Guin’s The Dispossessed in March.
Now that we have finished Mrs Dalloway, I found it useful to look back at some of my earlier posts. This novel is not an easy read; Woolf is regularly subverting expectations, and so some of our initial assessments may turn out to have been wrong. (And this error might even be intended on Woolf’s part.)
For instance, in my first post, I wrote this about Clarissa Dalloway:
Clarissa Dalloway seems to me to be a character who is an empty vessel. She has no languages, histories, etc.; her schooling wasn’t thorough. She is filled by the others around her. And this means appearances matter — thus, flowers for a party, thinking of a hat in the middle of a conversation, reflecting on her age.
My early assessment of her was that she was vain and uninteresting. I thought she lacked an interior life, and so she focused instead on others’ perceptions of her to form her self-image. She was too focused on things like parties and flowers. But now I think I was wrong.
Clarissa Dalloway may think of herself in these terms. When she says that Sally Seton is the one who had all the ideas, that may actually be her assessment of the matter; that does not necessarily reflect reality. Because we follow the stream of consciousness of the various characters, the world is being colored by their judgments. A reckless reader may forget that; perhaps I did. Clarissa thinks Sally had all of the ideas, but when she arrives at the party she still thinks quite highly of Clarissa. Peter, too, despite his harsh words and his petty scolding. Clarissa still commands their attention. There is more to Clarissa than how she conceives of herself. And her fear that she is being reduced merely to Mrs Dalloway may not be realized. (The last time she is named in the novel, in the penultimate line, she is called Clarissa. She stands on her own, at least in the mind of Peter.)
I failed to understand Clarissa Dalloway, at least at the beginning. This failure reflects a theme of the novel: that gap between persons which prevents us from knowing each other. A young Clarissa mused on this with Peter:
Clarissa had a theory in those days – they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other?
The human subject is perhaps the subject of Mrs Dalloway.
As one participant in yesterday’s Zoom call, R., pointed out, though, the form of Mrs Dalloway suggests that these barriers are not so impenetrable after all. We quickly move from one perspective to another; the stream of consciousness we inhabit is not a single subject’s, but many; the world is formed by all of these points of view. If these barriers are an illusion, how could we not know each other?
All of this is brought painfully to the fore at the Dalloways’ party. Richard talks politics with Lord Bradshaw and Clarissa speaks with his wife. They both learn that Septimus has killed himself — and he did so after filling his wife with such hope. For the Bradshaw’s it is treated almost like trivia. Only Clarissa seems to empathize with Septimus; that empathy may overextend (she thinks positively of Septimus’ choice, a feeling I can’t bring myself to share) but the empathy itself is notable and commendable. Clarissa, that woman I found so uninteresting at the beginning of the novel, is the one person who seems to truly know another by the end of it — and she never met Septimus.
There is much we could discuss: Mrs Kilman, Elizabeth, Peter’s final impressions of Clarissa, the reentry of Sally into London social life, the changes mores of the time (especially with regard to women), Septimus’ final moments. Feel free to start that conversation down below.
I really, really like "Mrs. Dalloway" and Virginia Woolf's style of writing. I intend to continue reading her, especially her diaries. It is amazing that such a small book contains so much for us to enjoy and think about.
A few random thoughts:
Jared's comment that VW's empathy for Septimus's suicide might be overextended points to the sad fact that Woolf took her own life in 1941. While I have no reason to believe that the character of Clarissa Dalloway is autobiographical, I can't help feeling that there is some Virginia in it.
There is one passage about Clarissa early on in the book that haunts me throughout my reading: "She had a perpetual sense . . . 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." But Mrs. Dalloway did succeed in finding enough courage and life force to go on living, one day at a time. That's why I believe she is a "modern heroine." Where could meaning and hope be found after WWI? More importantly for me, where can meaning and hope be found now?
Of all the main characters, I feel that Clarissa is the only one who truly enjoys living, even when she's just taking a walk or preparing for a party. Whenever she appears, I sense from VW's use of language a flowering of life, joy, and energy. I take her to be a symbol of life in the story, paired with Septimus's symbol of death. Sadly, in real life, death won over life for Virginia Woolf.
Jared, thanks for bringing "Mrs. Dalloway" to our attention.
I have arrived a little late to this read-along project of Mrs Dalloway but I found the pieces to be highly constructive and relevant as I had coincidentally been reading (and writing on) Mrs Dalloway during October as well. Had I only known about this project then!
Jared - I was amused to see your reference to Hegel in Part 3 of the series and how you found ideas in his The Phenomenology of Spirit applicable to Woolf's novel. I could not agree more. In fact, I wrote an entire essay on the theme of Phenomenology in Mrs Dalloway. Alas I chose Husserl as my torchbearer for the proverbial flag of Phenomenology, not Hegel - I had initally planned on interweaving Hegel's ideas into the text too but had to drop it for the sake of brevity. I was writing for a literary audience but not necessarily one steeped in obscure philosophical ideas. Due to the similarity in themes, I'm inclined to share parts of my written work here in hope that it spurs further reflections on Woolf's work. It is not a comprehensive assessment of the novel but rather explores one of the many interesting paths one could venture down with this book. I found Mrs Dalloway a very enjoyable read(!) and it has prompted me to explore more modernist works and works by authors deploying a steam-of-consciousness style of writing such as Joyce or Proust.
Essay:
This reflection explores the influence of the phenomenological perspective on consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, particularly the connection of Husserlian subjectivity to Woolf's stream-of-consciousness writing style and how she represents consciousness as a nothingness of an elusive nature.
In the Modernist period (1910-1945), authors were grappling with ideas of consciousness and personal experience, trying to come to grips with how to represent individual subjective experience. Authors sought out many approaches to capture what real life experience looked and felt like, for example by writing in a stream-of-consciousness manner. The questions asked and the explorations pursued in search for an answer were partly inspired by phenomenology, the study of human consciousness through focusing on the immediacy of experience, which developed in tandem and, just prior to, Modernism. Edmund Husserl, considered the father of phenomenology, wrote his seminal work Logical Investigations in 1900, followed by Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy in 1913. As will be explored, Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is steeped in phenomenological ideas, drawing many of her themes and her literary style from principles developed in Husserl’s works.
The most striking influence of phenomenology in Mrs. Dalloway – what practically jumps out of the page – is in Woolf’s use of language and composition to express the subjectivity of experience. This subjectivity is one of the core tenets of phenomenology: Husserl argues how consciousness is fundamentally a subjective experience and always intentional, meaning it is always directed toward something. This intentionality is central to how immediate experience is understood: consciousness does not exist just by itself but has to always strive towards an intentional object; it is engaged with the world. Immediate experience, therefore, is subjective. Woolf’s treatment of language, such as her overly lengthy sentences, her confounding syntax, and her use of dashes and semicolons to interject loosely tethered thoughts that arise from the mind, like how in real life thoughts wander and jump about from place to place, captures the stream-of-consciousness perception permeating a subjective experience. This overwhelming (single) sentence below provides an instructive example of Woolf’s method:
"And everywhere, thought 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 most 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."
Woolf utilizes many other techniques to produce a similar effect. She moves between characters to make it difficult for the reader to locate the source of any given thought or construction of reality, and intentionally repeats words and phrases to invoke in the reader a sense of seeing the world through a character’s perspective, as if living life through them and participating in their inner thoughts. When Woolf weaves in repetition in phrases, such as “it was a silly, silly dream”, it stops having a mere descriptive function and instead throws the reader into the direct and intentional experience of the character. The pattern of the language tries to mirror consciousness and Woolf does so to great effect, and by doing so aligns her portrayal of the world with phenomenological principles.
Phenomenology’s perspective of consciousness is not only seen by Woolf’s dictation but can be perceived in frequent intervals in the discussion and inner thoughts of the novel’s characters. First, in between slumbers in Regent’s Park, Peter Walsh echoes Husserl’s subjectivity of experience when he reflects how “nothing exists outside us except a state of mind”. Here, ‘nothing exists’ expresses a skepticism inherent in phenomenology as, in a subjective world, no object can be assured to be absolute. Secondly, Clarissa dives into the heart of the question of consciousness with her statement “There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room”, which builds on Husserl’s idea of intentionality. The logical extension of consciousness as something that constantly strives towards an intentional object is that consciousness is nothing in and of itself. It is a nothingness relying on other objects to be in the world. Thus, the ‘emptiness’ in the center of life. Thirdly, earlier in the novel, Clarissa again this time, with the statement how “she sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.” perfectly encapsulates the fundamental behavior of consciousness in the phenomenological tradition: its striving towards that encloses everything, constantly wrapping around objects but, at the same time, its frustratingly slippy character, as it cunningly escapes every attempt to be defined.
In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf skillfully interweaves ideas of phenomenology in her writing and literary themes to explore the subjective nature of human consciousness. By utilizing the stream-of-consciousness style of writing to simulate the flow of immediate experience and tapping into Husserl’s ideas on intentionality and subjectivity, Woolf paints a picture of consciousness as something engaged yet still elusive. The dynamic portrayal of the subjective experience in Mrs. Dalloway and its resolution into consciousness invites readers to reconsider the essence of self and experience, just like the philosophical inquiry that the school of phenomenology once posed.