The death of the soul | Mrs Dalloway, Pt. 2

Today we return to our reading of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

First, 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.

Before we go back to Mrs Dalloway, we need to talk about who Woolf was — something we probably should have talked about before we dove into the text itself.

Virginia Woolf was a 20th century writer, born at the tale end of the 19th century and publishing her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. As readers of Mrs Dalloway know already, she frequently employed a stream of consciousness style (she is mentioned with the likes of Proust and Joyce), and even in her nonfiction her writing has a sense of thoughtfulness, moving from subject to subject as necessary, circling around a larger point. (Here I am primarily thinking of A Room of One’s Own.)

She is associated closely with the Bloomsbury Group, whose members included Keynes, Forster, and Virginia’s husband Leonard. (Some dispute just how real this group was, but it does suggest Woolf ran in particular intellectual and cultural circles.)

Woolf’s England was very different from ours — a testament to just how much things can change in a century. She attended the Ladies Department at King’s College London; in contrast, women were unable to graduate from Cambridge until 1948. This was a world that was still struggling to make room for women, and women struggled back.

I imagine that novels provided a way to Woolf to be part of a larger conversation, even when more formal institutions were still closed off to women.

Her most famous novel is To the Lighthouse — though I chose to have us read Mrs Dalloway largely due to length, the recommendations of a few of my better-read friends, and a gut feeling that I just couldn’t escape. I’ve been happy with the choice so far.

Now, let’s return to Mrs Dalloway.

As we begin our second portion of Mrs Dalloway, we find ourselves in the mind of Peter Walsh. At some point, Peter and Clarissa were entangled; however, Clarissa would go on to marry Richard Dalloway. From what we know of Richard so far, he stands in stark contrast to Peter. He is a Tory, while Peter is (or was) a socialist; he is immersed in his government work, while Peter has lived a life of adventure (of some sort) in India. The impression is that Peter is a perhaps failed dreamer, while Richard is a moderate succes who never bothered to dream.

Peter feels he has been refused by Clarissa, and as he walks he entertains many thoughts. Like Septimus earlier, Peter seems to interpret the world as primarily about him; a beautiful young woman must desire him, and so he follows her. I’d wager we have the development of a theme. I argued that Clarissa interprets herself through others (calling her an empty vessel), and I think this is supported by the way that Clarissa sees herself disappearing and becoming merely Mrs. Dalloway. The men whom we have followed, however, interpret all of the world through themselves. This leads to sometimes absurd results — again, see Peter following a young woman and fantasizing, or Septimus imagining everyone in the street must be focusing on him.

Despite his lingering affections, Peter sometimes seems to despise Clarissa. She is what he refused to be, or maybe she is what he could have been; there is immense inner conflict. This has been one of the joys of reading Woolf, in fact. She so elegantly depicts the ways that all of us contradict ourselves, even in an immediate succession of thought.

In a recollection, Peter remembers the day that Richard Dalloway was introduced into their lives. Peter and Clarissa have had a tiff; she said something he didn’t like, and now they were in the making up phase.

He was prey to revelations at that time. This one – that she would marry Dalloway – was blinding – overwhelming at the moment. There was a sort of – how could he put it? – a sort of ease in her manner to him; something maternal; something gentle.

This is Peter observing Richard and Clarissa. Afterward, he call her ‘the perfect hostess’ — something I noted last time. This was a turning point in their relationship, and it caused Clarissa to break things off (though this happens later, in a meeting by the fountain). This week, we’ve learned that it was said by Richard with the intention to pain Clarissa. This leads to Richard and Clarissa marrying; Peter has guaranteed the truth of his revelation.

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Rezia still finds herself attending to Septimus, who flits between serenity and terror. Though even at his most serene, there is a darkness to it all; he will declare that now he and Rezia can kill themselves. The doctor can’t help, saying there’s nothing wrong with him, but Septimus sees the dead, believes he has stumbled on the secrets of life (‘first, that trees are alive; next, there is no crime; next, love, universal love’), and then finds himself on the couch, in tears, desperate to hold Rezia’s hand.

Septimus is experiencing shell-shock, or, as we’d now call it, post-traumatic stress disorder. He has been in The War, which he’d entered in order to save England, and it has changed him. Like Peter, he returns to England to find it changed — fashion and mores are quickly shifting, as Woolf would have seen in her own life. Peter seems taken by it all; for Septimus, there’s a need for more truth, more revelation. He has seen something that no one else has seen, and either he must share it or he must end his life. Perhaps worse, ‘beauty was behind a pane of glass.’ The enjoyment of life has been stripped from him. When Rezia cries over their childlessness, he can observe, but he feels nothing.

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A few takeaways from this week’s reading:

1. Woolf loves to play with contrast. Sometimes this is the contrast of our own thoughts (see Peter’s inconsistencies), but very often it is the contrast between characters.

2. Yet these contrasts often reveal similarities, like the fact that both Peter and Septimus recognize a change in the world, or that Peter and Clarissa saw the end of their relationship.

3. One of the most striking contrasts has been in how the men of the novel tend to think about themselves and how the women tend to put themselves second, sometimes even transforming their identities. The men don’t think of themselves as husbands; they think of themselves as having a wife.