Mrs Dalloway and Woolf in Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel

Daniel R. Schwarz
Reading Woolf depends on discarding notions of the biographical fallacy or notions
of pure textuality, while responding to the poignant, intense, impulsive, caring presence
whose voice speaks and performs the imagined world of the novel. Wool"s aesthetic
program enacts the value of feelings and emotions. While she sought in her work an
escape from personality, what she actually does is redene the concept of personality in
terms which include moments of feeling. In an important 192o diary entry she wrote:
I gure that the approach will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding,
scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour,
everything as bright as re in the mist ... I suppose the danger is the damned
egotistical self: which ruins Joyce and Richardson to my mind: is one pliant
& rich enough to provide a wall for the book from oneself without its becoming,
as in Joyce and Richardson, narrow & restricting? (Diaries, II, January 26, 1920)
For Woolf, realism meant, among other things, sincerity and depth of feeling: Am I
writing The Hours from deep emotion? Of course the mad part tries me so much, makes
my mind squint so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it (Diaries, II,
June 19, 1923). Yet she had a fear that she might misuse language:
One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoevsky. And do I? Or do I
fabricate with words, loving them as I do? No I think not ... I daresay its
true, however, that I haven"t that reality gift. I insubstantise, wilfully to
some extent, distrusting reality -its cheapness. But to get further. Have
I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about
myself? (Diaries, II, June 19, 1923)
Yet, at times, what is most real to Woolf is the language she uses to create an
alternative to the painful reality of the world in which she lives. Put another way, she
wanted to intrude into the space between the tick and the tock of passing time and create
signicant time, to, as she puts it, in the passage I quoted, rescue life from waste,
deadness, superuity by saturat[ing] every atom with the signicance of artistic
understanding...
...language used by an omniscient narrator that makes a novel real? or is it the kinship
between how we plot our own narrative actions: dreaming, scheming, planning? Or is the
true realism -as Sterne implies in Tristam Shandy- the digressions from a narrative line,
from consistent behavior, and from literal language?
The point of departure for Woolf"s reality is Jane Austen"s world of English country
houses, rigid social customs, and understated feelings and attitudes. In ction about
women, Woolf contends in A Room!s of One!s Own, men prior to nineteenth-century ction
always show women in their relaiton to men, and
how small a part of woman"s life is that, and how little can a man know
even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which
sex puts upon his nose? Hence, perhaps, the peculiar nature of woman in
ction; the astonishing extremes of her beauty and horror, her alternations
between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity.
By contrast, when a middle-class woman like Austen or Emily Bront or George
Eliot wrote, they wrote novels because they were trained in the observation of character,
in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the
inuences of the common sitting-room. People"s feelings were impressed on her; personal
relations were always before her eyes.
Woolf"s reality focuses on the individual moments of heightened perceptions,
although she does not neglect the physical details of daily life or the historical or economic
contexts. For her, reality does include a keen awareness of WWI and the permanent
change it wrought in England"s social fabric.
Like Lily in To the Lighthouse, Woolf wishes to isolate events from their temporal
dimension and give them pictorial shape. To be sure, the spatial arrangement of her novels
owes much to Impressionism!s desire to displace the conventional idiom of perception
with a fresh human respresentation of what the eye and mind actually experience, and to
Cubism"s insistence on seeing a gure or object on its spatial plane and from multiple
perspectives. In Mrs Dalloway, to emphasize that there is not one reality, she depicts
London from the perspective of every character in terms of his or her individual interior
space.
Like a Cubist painter using images to dene space, Woolf uses words to give
denition to not only exterior space but the interior space of her characters" minds. To use
terms she uses in a letter to the painter Jacques Raverat, she is one of the writers who
are trying to catch and consolidate and consummate...
...narration inb the English novel. The quest for meaning is antithetical to conclusive
meaning, and, indeed, conclusive meaning is at least partially aligned with Mr Ramsay"s
autocratic positivism. To the extent that Lily"s line carries closure, it, like any vision, has a
trace of the certainty that Woolf both sought immortality and mortality, for its suspension of
time coexists with its awareness of passing time and, as the vision is assigned to past
time, the moment takes us another step toward what the voice of To the Lighthouse calls
that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail (debil[idad)] barks
founder (hundirse) in darkness. If the ecstatic vision, the epiphanic moment, moves to
stability and stasis, it must carry the trace of mortality.
Woolf"s voice reects her sense of herself writing no only as a woman in a man"s
world (including a literary culture dominated by men), but also writing as a Modernist
whose beliefs are tentative formulations. She never puts behind her the Victorian world of
her parents, a world which values certainty. Even as she seeks a center, even as she
strains for a deeper reality and psychology of character than that found in prior ction, she
creates a texture of language that at once seeks and eschews a dialogue with reality.
Fusing the narrator and her character"s impressions of events with the actual events,
Woolf"s novels are correlative to the at surfaces of Cubism that resolve foreground and
background.
II Understanding Clarissa
Mrs Dalloway is a lyrical novel rather than a narrative one: while empathetic with the life of
Clarissa, the voice transcends her individual perspective and places her in an historical
and cultural context of which she is a part. The novel is poised between life and death, war
and peace, lyric and narrative, narrator"s reection and character analysis; that poise, that
balance, is responsible for the novel"s magnicent aesthetic unity. Mrs Dalloway is
autobiographical because it explores the similarities and differences between what we call
madness and what we call sanity. For Woolf, no theme could be more urgent. The novel
enables her to examine attitudes and states of mind that are crucial to her experience.
Woolf chooses a day in Clarissa"s life in which her past returns with a difference
(Peter"s and to a lesser extent Sally"s return to her life). Woolf juxtaposes past and present
through memory and weaves a tautly designed pattern of now and then. As we reread Mrs
Dalloway, does it not pulsate outward in concentric circles from crucial memories rather
than proceed considerable anger and hostility. Moreover although he is engaged to Daisy,
he essentially gives Clarissa another try, as if before marrying he will test the waters of his
xation one more time.
As an imaginative man, half-creating what he sees (recalling Austern"s Emma),
Peter is a kind of artist gure; indeed, as he fantasizes about a girl he follows, he reects
that the better part of life is made up, and uses his imagination as a refuge from this
fever of living. His self-image as an adventurer, reckless,. . . romantic buccaneer
sustains him. Like Septimus and Clarissa, Peter imposes meaning on the sky and
branches. Yet his youthful revelations about the death of Clarissa"s soul and his
prediction that she will marry Richard become self-fullling prophecies that help create the
reality that he now sees. Indeed, we feel that he may have lost Clarissa because,
immersed in his myopic perceptions, he was unable to respond to her needs and the
competition offered by Richard.
Like Stevens and Yeats, Woolf believes that there is a continuity between
artistic activity and imaginative activity that sustains all of us. But Mrs Dalloway"s
belief that she is a refuge and a radiance is an ironic version of this belief. By an act of will
she feels she can draw the parts [of herself] together and become a radiancy no doubt
in some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps. But except for Peter, who
has a nostalgic feeling for his rst love, does this radiance really matter? Isn"t this forced
radiance a substitute for passion and creativity? In her characterization of Clarissa, Woolf
is examining a life which lacks the certainty of religion or authority, but, which unlike her
own, does not have the compensation of art. It is as if she is doing research into the lives
of those who do not have, like herself or Lily Briscoe, the artistic activity of creating worlds
to sustain them.
The novel"s prevailing tone is ironic bathos (paso de los sublime a lo comn), a
sense that life is far less than religious and literary texts have preached. By incongruous
juxtaposition or inated rhetoric, Woolf undermines the notion that human life yields
sublime experience. According to Quentin Bell, she maintained an attitude sometimes
of mild, sometimes of aggressive agnosticism. How, Woolf asks, we create
meaning in this late age of the world!s experience-a time when airplanes deface the
sky with advertisements, and when we poignantly seek to discover an equivalent for the
sacraments and rituals of religion by such futile gestures as entertaining the suspicion that
a politically prominent gure occupies a chauffeured motor car? Note the narrator"s
description of the clouds on which humankind has grotesquely written and advertisement
for toffee: the clouds . . . moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to East on a
mission of the greatest importance which would never be revealed. Isn"t Septimus a
parody of romantic visionaries who read the signature of human things upon nature, who
anthropomorphize nature, who see the...