‘Remember my party to-night!’ | Mrs Dalloway, Part 1

Today, we begin our read-along of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I am coming into this as a neophyte with regard to Woolf —I have read A Room of One’s Own, but that’s it. This makes for a very different reading experience than, say, reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

It is also quite different because we are not reading a work of philosophy; this is literature. While literature can be philosophical – and I suspect this work is – the mode of presentation is different. It is not didactic, ideally. It is evocative. This may be especially true for Mrs Dalloway, given Woolf’s prose style. The book is a stream of observations, with plenty of eddies and tangents, so often pinned closely to Clarissa Dalloway’s way of seeing the world.

Or, as we’ll discuss in a moment, how the world sees her.

Before we get to that, let’s turn to some housekeeping.

The following schedule has page numbers taken from the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Mrs Dalloway. That edition has 166 pages. What I’ve done is roughly divide the book into 4 parts; if your edition has a different number of pages, you can make your own rough division, and we should be in a similar place in the text.

• October 7: Discussion of pages 1-42

• October 14: Discussion of pages 42-84

• October 20: Zoom call, 8 PM Eastern

• October 21: Discussion of pages 84-126

• October 28: Discussion of pages 126-166

Note that the call on October 20 is our members-only call; if you want to join that call, become a paying subscriber.

When I want to read fiction more deeply, I try a technique cribbed from the Christian tradition: lectio divina, it is called. As I was taught it, the technique involves reading a small portion of the text, meditating on it, and then returning to the text again. You can repeat this several times. It is an intentionally slow, reflective way of reading. What is striking is how different the text can appear on even the second read.

When I first read these forty pages, I was caught in the flurry of the prose. The beginnings of the story center on the titular Mrs. Dalloway, and Clarissa Dalloway is a woman of many thoughts; her attention flits and fleets about. It is a disorienting, though quite beautiful, read. But on my second read – especially these first few pages – one aspect of Woolf’s story stands out: we learn about Clarissa through others.

This is may not be immediately striking — after all, in fiction we always have our experience slanted by the choice of point of view. Yet, Clarissa Dalloway is our subject; the text reads as if we can hear her thoughts. The choice of the third person, and even the use of the literary past tense, reflects a certain distance, yes, but it is an intimate novel in that we become intimately familiar with Clarissa. So, how we learn about Clarissa reflects how she thinks about herself.

In her interaction with Hugh Whitbread, a childhood friend, she feels ‘skimpy.’ Peter Walsh, the man who occupies so much of her attention, reduced her to tears when he called the perfect hostess — his vision of her, she realized, carried with it certain burdens. But all these years later, he still is on her mind. ‘If he were with me now, what would he say?’ she finds herself wondering. This despite the fact that he is actually quite forgettable. (And yet: ‘Always, when she thought of him she thought of their quarrels for some reason – because she wanted his good opinions so much, perhaps.’)

Despite her recognition that a marriage needs a little license – a little distance – 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.

But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing — nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of the, up Bond Steret, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.

When we reflect on Clarissa’s girlhood with her, we see more of this. Sally Seton, a beautiful young girl with whom Clarissa fell in love, brings something out of her. They become political radicals together, but ‘The ideas were Sally’s, of course.’ Sally’s personality overpowers Clarissa and might overpower many others. She is forceful. She is someone.

When Peter turns on Sally, Clarissa feels it acutely. Sally is unaffected. Contrast that with how Clarissa reacts when Peter returns from India. She is overwhelmed by him. Even the moon seems to obey Peter, from her perspective. He departs and, despite previously saying he would not be invited, she exclaims: ‘Remember my party to-night!’

Septimus Warren Smith is the foil to Clarissa. A man dressed in brown shoes in the city – breaking an old piece of upper-crust fashion etiquette – and a shabby overcoat, he is apparently not concerned with appearances, or at least circumstances have not allowed him to attend to them. While onlookers, Clarissa Dalloway included, stare at a car, Septimus assumes they are looking at him. Immediately Woolf turns to how the world presents itself to him, even in how the car’s blinds appear.

He has earlier made a declaration, which bothers his wife Lucrezia: ‘I will kill myself.’ (Something that I suspect will be relevant later.) Lucrezia, on doctor’s orders, wants to make Septimus take an interest in things outside of himself. But the signals in the sky must be signals to Septimus, he reasons. Birds speak to him. He becomes so fixed on what the world is telling him that he does not notice his wife, who desires to be recognized by him.

It is an artful contrast. Septimus has turned inward, and this leads to suicidal desires; Clarissa is always looking outward, and she feels she is disappearing; Lucrezia is unrecognized by the man to whom she is wed, and she suffers.

Some questions we might discuss down below:

1. Is this your first Virginia Woolf novel? Have you read Mrs Dalloway before?

2. What are you making of it, broadly?

3. What do we think of my reading — that the novel is primarily concerned with social and interpersonal recognition (and its many degenerations)?

4. What themes, images, etc. are standing out to you?

5. What of Woolf’s narrative choices, for instance her choice to bounce between perspectives so freely?