NUCL and Mrs. Dalloway

One conference down, and two to go.

This Saturday I'll be reading "Feminine Consciousness, Community, and Isolation in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway" (which should actually be "Mrs Richard Dalloway: the Tension of Feminine Consciousness," or something more like a title and less like a list) at the Northwest Undergraduate Conference for Literature in Portland (assuming we find a ride).

And since I know you're all so interested, here it is! =)

This was the first tutorial paper I wrote in Oxford. The style is pretty different than a thesis-driven American essay, so keep that in mind. Also, it's basically a rough draft since I had to do all the research, and all the writing, in less than a week (not something I'd ever attempted before). I'd love to have the time to completely rewrite it, because some of the ideas fascinate me, but I don't feel like they're expressed very well (or fully articulated) in this essay.

Anyway, this version has been tampered with (I had to rearrange a few of my sections), but hopefully it still flows alright.

Feminine Consciousness, Community, and Isolation in Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
© 2008 Karith Amel Magnuson

The world of Mrs. Dalloway is spilt between the forces of isolation and community. It is a book about the individual within society—a book about fragmentation and unity. At the story’s center is Clarissa Dalloway, and Clarissa Dalloway’s party. Clarissa, the society hostess, defines ‘life,’ that essence that she loves and lives for, in terms of bringing people together, solving the supreme mystery that is “simply this: here was one room; there another.” Asking herself what she truly means by this thing called ‘life,’ she expresses a desire “to go deeper…to combine, to create”: “Here was So-and-So in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it.” It is her “offering,” her “gift,” and even Peter Walsh cannot help but come under her influence, despite his contempt for her social obsessions: “She seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed.” Her party, with which the book ends, is the culmination of this desire to assemble (bringing together characters from throughout the book and Clarissa’s past) but it is by no means its only manifestation.

Indeed, Clarissa seems to associate this same idea of ‘life’ with the city itself. For while the book ends with Clarissa’s party, it begins with her pushing open her front door and plunging into the swinging, jingling, trudging uproar that is the city. She is swept along, surrounded by automobiles and rushing, laughing, mourning humans—individuals who are brought together in chance meetings (such as that between Clarissa and Hugh in the park), mutual awe (like the rumor allowed to “accumulate in their veins” ), and puzzlement over flying advertisements. Throughout the book this theme is maintained—the city as a backdrop for union, the meeting of disparate souls. In Laura Marcus’ book, Virginia Woolf, Marcus argues that this use of city as “consciousness in motion” is typical of modernist authors. However, Marcus suggests that Woolf is unique in her exploration of “communication and circulation in the city”—presenting London, not as a wasteland of isolation, so much as a unifying of individual aspects of society and humanity. Indeed, it is within this larger context of the city that the true significance of Clarissa’s party can be seen. It is not simply to bring together her specific guests that Clarissa plays the enchanting hostess, but to become part of the larger unifying force that London symbolizes: “She, too, loving it as she did [life; London; this moment in June] with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it...she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party.”

But against this physical backdrop of London, there is also the internal struggle for unification within Clarissa herself. It is the struggle for identity; the desire to bring together the different aspects of experience and emotion, and create a coherent whole. Upon looking at her face in the mirror, Clarissa purses her lips “to give her face point. That was her self – pointed; dartlike; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together...different...incompatible...into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy.” She must assemble “that diamond shape, that single person” before she can return to the duties of the house. As Marcus explains, “Her identity fragmented, it has to be recollected, assembled, gathered together like the torn dress she intends to wear to her party that evening.”

This tension—this desire to unite disparate elements into a unified whole—is present in Clarissa’s constant memories of the past. Throughout the book, Clarissa is shadowed by her eighteen-year-old self: throwing open the French windows at Bourton, kissing Sally Seton, taking walks with Peter Walsh. The present is constantly filtered through previous experience—through events, relationships, and places. Peter remembers the younger Clarissa remarking, “She felt herself everywhere...she was all that. So that to know her, or anyone, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places.” And as she walks through London, Clarissa ponders the connection she still has with Peter, “she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there...being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best...it spread ever so far, her life, herself.” And this constant spreading, these connections that define and redefine Clarissa’s identity, this ability to simultaneously be eighteen and in her fifties (“she felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged” ), leads Clarissa to the conclusion that a person’s essence cannot be defined or captured: “She would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.”

In The Experimental Self, Judy Little argues that the significance of this fractured identity is found in its role in the formation of a uniquely feminine consciousness. She proposes that women’s place on the outskirts of society has left them unsuccessfully socialized, and therefore capable of a subjective identity. They are forced to learn the language of a male-dominated social sphere, while also possessing their own language—the language of their mothers. This, Little states, allows women to be uniquely adaptable, able to migrate between different visions of reality and points of view. She suggests that this grants women an extreme relational tendency (unlike men who define themselves in opposition to the other), and quotes Patricia Waugh to state that women’s fiction “can be seen...as an attempt...to discover a collective concept of subjectivity which foregrounds the construction of identity in relationships.” Such an identity must, by nature, be extremely volatile, changing (or fragmenting) with the relationships that shape it, and Little goes on to state that, in Woolf’s novels, “self is a discourse...a means that facilitates the celebration of friendship and shared lives.”

However, there is another side to this feminine consciousness, and that, ironically, is self-chosen isolation—isolation used to withstand domination and preserve self, even at the cost of community. The suicide of Septimus Warren Smith, and Clarissa’s interpretation of his death, is perhaps the ultimate example of this practice. For Septimus, though not a woman, is certainly an outsider in society, so made by his traumatic experiences in the Great War and his inability to maintain “a sense of proportion.” Clarissa describes Septimus’ death, not as passive acquiescence (though she later cries out against the darkness), but as a self-chosen defiance—defiance, presumably, against men like Sir William Bradshaw, who “make life intolerable” by “forcing your soul.” This is consistent with Clarissa’s hatred of Miss Kilman, who desires, in Clarissa’s mind at least, to convert her, to destroy “the privacy of the soul.” And even when she speaks of the men she loves, of Peter and Richard, Clarissa seems wary to let them too close, or share too much intimacy: “There was a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought Clarissa, watching [Richard Dalloway] open the door; for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one’s husband, without losing one’s independence, one’s self-respect – something, after all, priceless.” She was right, she states, to not marry Peter, because he demanded that everything be shared, “everything gone into,” and “it was intolerable.”

This unease seems to represent, not a backlash against Clarissa’s original desires to combine and create, but a fear of domination. This is obviously true in the case of Miss Kilman and Sir William Bradshaw, but subtler when applied to Peter and Richard. Despite both men’s love for Clarissa (though Peter may deny being “in love” with her), there is a level at which, being female in a male-dominated society, she is very much in their power. This is especially true of Richard, because he is her husband, and even Peter comments that one of the tragedies of married life is that “with twice [Richard’s] wits, [Clarissa] had to see things through his eyes.” Furthermore, Clarissa, while walking in London, “had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway.” All the different fragments of Clarissa’s identity are swallowed up by that name.

However, there is another level at which isolation is beyond Clarissa’s control—not an attempt to maintain identity and withstand domination, but simply a frustration of her desire to cohere. For although an outsider’s status grants freedom to move between social spheres and perspectives, it ultimately prohibits full acceptance to any single portion of society. Thus, beneath the surface of Mrs. Dalloway flows a consistent current of discontent—of failed realization—as communion is sought, reached for, and lost. The moments of deepest separation seem to follow those of strongest union (or attempted union), for, if we are to believe Little’s account of feminine consciousness, that which drives Clarissa to pursue unity is ultimately what keeps her separate and apart.

Even in the midst of the ‘life’ that is London, Clarissa experiences moments of intense isolation: “She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone.” Directly following the contemplation of her own domestic bliss, Clarissa comes to the conclusion, “There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe.” This last statement, though seemingly peculiar, is particularly significant. In the second to last chapter it is faintly echoed, when, in the midst of her party, Clarissa moves into a side room and finds herself suddenly alone. “There was nobody. The party’s splendour fell to the floor, so strange it was to come in alone in her finery.” Clarissa’s dress, representing her role as hostess and socialite, comes into stark contrast with the sudden emptiness and silence. For though it is her gift to assemble, to bring together, it seems that fragmentation can only be held off, delayed, not prevented. For, eventually, “women must put off their rich apparel,” or even if they do not, the darkness may prevail regardless. For even as Clarissa’s party takes hold, turning “into something now, not nothing,” Clarissa feels dissatisfied, “for though she loved it and felt it tingle and sting, still these semblances, these triumphs...had a hollowness.” And when she hears of Septimus’ death, she interprets it as “her disaster – her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress.”

And so, the struggle against alienation is lost. Septimus is dead, and the splendor of Clarissa’s party has fallen to the floor. “Closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone.” But no. “She must go back. She must assemble.” “They went on living...they would grow old.” Woolf leaves us with no clear answers, only a continuing dance of isolation and community—of drawing together and falling apart. But perhaps that is as it should be. For Woolf sees identity as a dialogue and self as an experiment—they are not to be established, but explored. Through her novels, Woolf is presenting “the courageous view that human beings are ideologically mobile”—are capable of change. Identity, as Woolf presents it, is contradiction warring for coherence, and, Little suggests, being unwilling to explore the fragments, to know more than “the (one) truth or...just one self,” limits a person’s humanity, and the artist’s creative response. Perhaps reaching coherence—creating unity—is not as significant as the process, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.” The process that, according to Mrs. Dalloway, is life.

Bibliography

B. R. Daugherty and E. Barrett, ed., Virginia Woolf: texts and contexts (1996)
J. Little, The experimental self: dialogic subjectivity in Woolf, Pym, and Brooke-Rose (1996)
L. Marcus, Virginia Woolf, 2nd edn (2004)
V. Neverow-Turk and M. Hussey, ed., Virginia Woolf: themes and variations (1993)
V. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1996)