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The Theme of "Mrs. Dalloway"Author(s): Ralph SamuelsonReviewed work(s):Source: Chicago Review, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter, 1958), pp. 57-76Published by: Chicago ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25293400 .

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RALPH SAMUELSON

THE THEME OF MRS. DALLOWAY

D. S. Savage's intense and comprehensive attack, in The

Withered Branch, on nearly the whole canon of Virginia

Woolf's nine novels has been ignored more than it has been an

swered by any of the Virginia Woolf criticism, adulatory or

otherwise, that has appeared since publication of Savage's book.

The fact that virtually all recent criticism on Woolf has con

tinued along an aesthetic approach

to her works, indeed increases

the interest of this situation; for Savage, if he did nothing else in

his essay, demonstrated the inadequacy of the aesthetic approach. This present study does not

object to aesthetic criticism, but it

feels Savage to have a strong point when he insists that a novelist

like Virginia Woolf cannot permanently stand up merely

on the

basis of adulatory criticism which makes a totally aesthetic ap

proach to her novels and which pretends that the problem of

meaning in her novels simply need not be discussed. When

Savage attacks Woolf's themes, when he attacks her content as

insignificant, one hardly answers him by indulging in further structuralist criticism (valuable and filled with new insights as

structuralist criticism often is), which simply begs the question of significant

content.

One does not answer Savage by ignoring his attack, then, but

only by taking issue with him on his own terms?on the question of the value of Woolf's content. For surely it is not

clearly self

evident that Savage is wrong about her works; indeed, the very

sparkle and freshness of Woolf's novelistic techniques render her

content, her meaning, less obvious on a first reading than does

the method of a more "ordinary" novelist. The very fact that

her prose so approaches poetry?a phenomenon on which almost

everyone agrees, without agreeing on what her prose "says"?

should cause us, as readers and critics, to be doubly aware of the

57



difficulty of extracting from its texture the "prose sense," or

what Percy Lubbock calls the "theme," of this kind of novel.

Yet this must be done if Virginia Woolf is to take a permanent

place among the first-rate English novelists. But one does not do

it by calling Mrs. Dalloway a "poem," as Leon Edel does,1 by which he somehow implies that Mrs. Dalloway is exempt from

examination by any method of prose criticism; for if it is a poem, we may still ask if it is good or bad poetry. And neither will we come to terms with Woolf 's content

by proving that one of her

novels has a certain "shape," in the sense that one of Henry

James' novels, we are told, is shaped like an "hour-glass," and

D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow is shaped like an "arch." Is a

novel that is shaped like an hourglass therefore a

good novel? In

the long run too much of this sort of critical approach only

suc

ceeds in damning with faint praise. It fails to do what is most

important: to come to terms with meaning, and in some cases the

approach actually chokes off the possibility of getting at mean

ing. For instance, one critic has said that "time" is the "hero" of

To The Lighthouse. I do not think that time can be the hero of

anything, and in To The Lighthouse, I think that the hero, or

heroine, is Mrs. Ramsay. It is not enough, then, to

explain the methods by which Woolf

transforms her substance into art, unless one goes on to demon

strate the significance and permanence of the substance itself. To

be more specific: it is not

enough to

point to all the devices in

Mrs. Dalloway which Woolf gleaned from her reading of Ulys ses as it appeared in instalments in the Little Review: the time de

vice of action confined to a single day, and a

single day in June at that; the Royal Procession through the streets of London; the

device of "complementary" characters (what does the relation

ship between Clarissa and Septimus Smith mean, finally, in terms

of the novel's theme?). One would think, from this sort of ex

haustive comparison, which somehow remains adulatory, that

*Leon Edel, The Psychological Novel. New York: 1955. See Chapter X

throughout.

58



Virginia Woolf was at once the twin and understudy of Joyce, that she had nothing individual to impart whatsoever, with the

exception of a few interesting technical modifications which

grow out of her novel like tiny shoots from the great trunk

Ulysses. What else is one to conclude when Leon Edel, for in

stance, says of Mrs. Dalloway that "the book's brilliance, as writ

ing and as poetry, lies in the skill with which Mrs. Woolf weaves

from one mind into another"?2

Let us, then, granting the technical innovations, look at Mrs.

Dalloway not as a poem, nor as a clever shifting of the stream of

consciousness from one mind into another, nor as a work which

employs an

interesting, even brilliant, use of time. Let us look at

the novel as a novel; let us, in short, ascertain what Mrs. Dallo

way is about.

My intention, then, is to return to the area of Savage's concern

?to discuss the theme of Mrs. Dalloway, and in so doing to take

issue with Savage on the matter of the significance of Woolf's

content.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Savage finds Woolf indulging in a pitiful compensation for an earlier vision in which she revealed a total

absence of belief in anything. Savage traces his point through Rachel Vinrace of The Voyage Out and Mary Datchet of Night and Day, and finally

to Clarissa Dalloway, the heroine of what

Savage sees as Woolf's most promising novel, but a novel in

which "the specific absence of belief which is shown in the earlier

novels is revealed in its reverse aspect. It takes on the appearance of belief?a positive acceptance and affirmation, not of any par ticular level of reality, but of everything, without discrimination. ... A belief so total that it engulfs the whole of experience, and

which on examination turns out to be a positive inversion of un

belief."3 I cannot accept Savage here, and feel that the novel con

tains a body of belief which is not "a positive inversion of un

2 The Psychological Novel, p. 198. 3 D. S. Savage, The Withered Branch. New York: n.d., p. 81.

59



belief" by any means, but one which accepts a very particular and valuable level of reality indeed.

Savage as well as other critics has for some reason neglected

certain statements Woolf made in her Diary? statements that

lead us directly into the matter of what the novel is about. Be

sides the Diary, the only place where she comments on her work

is in the Introduction to the Random House edition of her novel;

here she tells us that in an original plan of the novel "Septimus,

who later is intended to be her double, had no existence; and that

Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party."4 And in the Diary we get the fol

lowing notes: "But now what do I feel about my writing??this

book, that is, The Hours,5 if that's its name? One must write

from deep feeling, said Dostoievsky. And do I? Or do I fabricate

with words, loving them as I do? No, I think not. In this book I

have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity

and insanity. I want to criticise the social system, and to show it

at work, at its most intense."6 And in a later entry: "I think the

design is more remarkable than in any of my books. I dare say I

shan't be able to carry it out. I am stuffed with ideas for it. I feel

I can use up everything I've ever thought. Certainly, I'm less

coerced than I've yet been. The doubtful point is, I think, the

character of Mrs. Dalloway. It may be too stiff, too glittering and tinselly."7

Contained in these hurried, exciting lines are nearly all the

major issues, the seeds of both the failures and the clear successes

of the novel itself. What is Woolf concerned about as she writes

her novel? For one thing, that there may be "too many ideas" in

it. What is the novel to be about? It is to be about "life and

death," "sanity and insanity," and is to be a criticism of the

"social system" of England. Another worry of the author is "the

4 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Random House, 1928, p. vi.

5 The original tentative title for Mrs. Dalloway. 6 Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf. New York: 1953, p.

56. 7 A Writer's Diary, pp. 59-60.

60



character of Mrs. Dalloway," which is perhaps "too glittering and tinselly."

Not only have the implications of the above Diary statements

been ignored, but Woolf's statement on the fact that Septimus is

Clarissa's "double" has been widely misinterpreted; and the mis

interpretation of the statement must be clarified in order that the

theme of the novel may be clearly discussed. If we grant, as we

must, that Septimus Smith is the "double" of Mrs. Dalloway, and

that Septimus Smith is "insane," then it must follow that Mrs.

Dalloway herself, if not insane, is at least very close to Smith's

own state of mind, and in great sympathy with his view of real

ity. The characters are not "opposites": they do not embrace

contrary values, but very nearly identical ones. And these are the

positive values that the novel sets forth, so that we must take the

word "insanity" not in a

pejorative sense, but finally as a term of

irony, for the true "insanity" in the novel resides, as Woolf

makes us tremendously aware, in the "proportion" of Sir Wil

liam Bradshaw, the psychiatrist, and in the "conversion" of Doris

Kilman, the self-righteous Christian woman who is morbidly attracted to Mrs. Dalloway's daughter, Elizabeth.

It is partly because it has been said so often that the novel is

about "sanity" and "insanity" that critics have jumped to the

conclusion that because Septimus Smith is "insane," Mrs. Dallo

way must somehow represent "sanity." Leon Edel, who first

quotes Woolf's own statement that Septimus is Clarissa's

"double," makes this precise error. He asks: "But how is he the

double?Septimus the insane, Clarissa the sane?"8 And we see the

same mistaken notion in nearly all the criticism which touches

on this point. We may now look into the novel itself in order to demonstrate

the trouble to which Woolf has gone to reveal the proximity of

these two characters who never meet. The clearest point that

emerges is that there is in both characters a tendency toward

8 The Psychological Novel, p. 196.

61



total withdrawal from the society around them. We indeed re

ceive an extremely vivid sense of this tendency in Clarissa Dallo

way before we ever confront Septimus Smith. For one thing,

Clarissa no longer sleeps either in the same bed or the same room

with her husband, Richard. She has been "ill," we learn on the

second page of the novel. And at noon, when she goes up to her

"attic room" to change clothes and prepare for her party, we are

brought up to date on the details of her present isolation from

her husband. "She had read late at night of the retreat from Mos

cow. For the House sat so long that Richard insisted, after her

illness, that she must sleep undisturbed. And really she preferred

to read of the retreat from Moscow. He knew it. So the room

was an attic; the bed narrow; and lying there reading, for she

slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet. Lovely in girlhood, suddenly there came a moment?for example

on the river be

neath the woods at Clieveden?when, through some contraction

of this cold spirit, she had failed him" (page 46). The nature of Clarissa's illness is deliberately left unclear. She has had "influen

za"; there is a chance that her heart has been affected. And look

ing into her mirror, anticipating the return of Peter Walsh from

India, Clarissa notes that "since her illness she had turned almost

white" (page 54). Both literally and symbolically, Mrs. Dallo

way is near death, and in life near Septimus Smith. Fragments of

the lines "Fear no more the heat o' the sun, / Nor the furious

winter's rages," from the funeral song in Cymbeline, occur to

her throughout the novel with surprising frequency. Both Claris

sa and Septimus reveal in a great part of their thought a Hamlet

like, death-brooding bent; and both are in sympathy with the idea of self-destruction as a way of preserving their integrity

against forces in their common social world which threaten to

annihilate them as individuals.

We shall examine the nature of this social world presently, after an examination of the character of Septimus Smith and

some further details concerning Clarissa. But it should be clear at

62



this point that the major issue in the novel is a conflict between

the individual and society. The novel's concept of the individual

is embodied in these two characters, Septimus and Clarissa. And

the major distinction between Septimus and Clarissa is simply that in Septimus this conflict with society has reached truly serious proportions;

some resolution to his conflict is imminent

throughout the novel. His mind, which works like Clarissa's with

a quick flightiness, is the true

representative of the sense of

"flux," for which Mrs. Dalloway's mind has been given the

major credit. Here indeed is another similarity between them,

except that Septimus sees all reality

as Bergsonian flux, while

Clarissa's sense of flux is more casual, and is a state of mind from

which she is still able to withdraw at will. During the scene in

Regent's Park, Rezia, Septimus Smith's Italian wife, must restrain

her husband for fear he may exhibit irrational behavior before

other people. What follows is the nature of daily reality as seen

through Septimus Smith's eyes. One may note here the striking

similarity between the following and Clarissa's own indulgence,

during earlier scenes, in what has been called her "moments of

being": her view of a street scene, for instance, in which it be

comes clear that her mind does not accept arbitrary time divi

sions, but wholly embraces a Bergsonian ?lan vital. Thus Septi

mus:

Happily Rezia put her hand with a tremendous weight on his knee so that he was

weighted down, transfixed, or the excitement of the elm trees rising

and falling, rising and falling with all their leaves alight and the colour

thinning and thickening from blue to the green of a hollow wave, like

plumes on horses' heads, feathers on ladies', so

proudly they rose and fell,

so superbly, would have sent him mad.... But

they beckoned; leaves were

alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of

fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down, (page 32)

Both Clarissa and Septimus are "insane," insofar as the state of

their minds is wholly anti-intellectual and anti-scientific. The

difference between them, again, is one of degree, not of kind.

And in terms of the actual material in the novel, we may say that

63



if Sir William Bradshaw were to have "examined" Clarissa Dallo

way as well as Septimus Smith, whom he does actually examine,

he would without question have had to pronounce her case to be

nearly as serious as Smith's, even

though Mrs. Dalloway, unlike

Smith, is still capable of "rational" behavior in dealing with the

small surface problems of daily living. Indeed, with respect to

Bradshaw's great worry?Smith's public threat of suicide, which

makes the "protection" of Smith from himself a matter of "law"

?the only difference between Smith and Clarissa Dalloway is

that her own continuous thoughts on suicide have remained

private. But what is the nature of that difference in degree between

them?of Septimus Smith's extreme behavior? His behavior is ab

normal, to be sure; but Bradshaw, though he realizes this, does

not understand Smith's problem to the slightest degree. We are

given snatches of Smith's past throughout the novel, until it be

comes clear that the cause of Smith's present state of mind is

somehow grounded in the death of one Lieutenant Evans, who

was Smith's best friend in the War. His death has made a tremen

dous impression on Smith, although we do not know why until

later in the novel. In an early section, Smith has a vision of

Evans' return from death:

"It is time," said Rezia. The word "time" split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, with out his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach

themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time. He

sang. Evans answered from behind the tree. The dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the orchids. There they waited till the War was over,

and now the dead, Evans himself?"For God's sake don't come!" Septimus cried out. For he could not look upon the dead, (page 105)

Later, in what is the direct voice of the author, we are told that

Smith's concern for Evans is something quite different from any

normal, temporary sorrow at the loss of a friend.

But, when Evans (Rezia, who had only seen him once, called him "a guiet man," a

sturdy red-haired man, undemonstrative in the company of

women), when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Sep timus, far from showing any emotion or

recognizing that here was the end

of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very

64



reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime. He had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had won promotion,

was still under thirty and was bound to survive. He was right there. The last shells missed him. He watched them explode with indifference. When

peace came he was in Milan, billeted in the house of an innkeeper with a

courtyard, flowers in tubs, little tables in the open, daughters making hats, and to Lucrezia, the younger daughter, he became engaged one evening

when the panic was upon him?that he could not feel. (pp. 130-131)

It is the notion that he is incapable of feeling, that terrorizes

Smith through every section of the novel in which he appears.

During the War, he had deliberately choked off feeling (or

thought that he had, for it was finally an impossible task) : thus he found himself, upon Evans' death, "feeling very little and

very reasonably." He had learned too well, in fact, Bradshaw's

"sense of proportion" before he had ever encountered Bradshaw.

It had been acquired by Smith from the outside, and was hardly a

thing inherent with him, as it is inherent, apparently, with

Bradshaw. "The War had taught" Smith. And now, after Evans'

death, and because his feelings could not be simply put away in a

drawer, Smith feels with enormous guilt that he had failed upon

Evans' death to keep faith with the precious quality of friend

ship that existed between himself and Evans?had failed to show, at that time, any signs of sorrow for the loss of a friend. His

guilt overshadows and colors nearly every moment of his exist

ence. He feels that some mysterious Justice has condemned him

permanently, that he can never be let off for "his crime." And, more

seriously, he senses that the rest of society?the society that

has "taught" him not to show any emotion upon the death of a

friend?must be as incapable of feeling

as he himself, except that

somehow the rest of society has managed with impunity to stifle

its feelings without any accompanying sense of guilt. It is Smith

alone who has become the conscience of the world, who feels

responsible for all war dead, as society must, if Donne's well

known fragment from his Meditations still has meaning, and as

society, from Smith's point of view, does not. That he has been

erroneously instructed to put away all feeling occurs to Smith at

least once:

65



He looked at people outside; happy they seemed, collecting in the middle of the street, shouting, laughing, squabbling over nothing. But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the tea-shop among the tables and the chat

tering waiters the appalling fear came over him?he could not feel. He

could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily ("Septimus, do put down your book," said Rezia, gendy shutting the Inferno), he

could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then?that he could not feel....

It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the

train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the world

itself is without meaning, (pp. 132-133 )

Smith senses indeed that the rest of society hides its indiffer

ence to the war dead in fine phrases which have only the appear ance of any actual feeling: "At the office they advanced him to

a post of considerable responsibility. They were

proud of him;

he had won crosses. 'You have done your duty; it is up to us?'

began Mr. Brewer; and could not finish, so pleasurable

was his

emotion" (page 133). This kind of satire on the author's part

surely reveals the point of the outstanding irony in Smith's con

tinuous self-condemnation of himself for his inability to feel. For

it is precisely because he can feel that he is in such difficulty, and

at such odds with society. And the same is true of Clarissa Dallo

way, even though she is fortunate in having escaped the intense

guilt that Smith has been saddled with because he had once fol

lowed society in stifling his emotions ("the War had taught

him"), and then found that such a course was for him impos sible. Thus Clarissa and Smith are the two

really decent people in the novel; and the majority of the characters?namely, that

group of upper middle class individuals in Clarissa Dalloway's

world, by whom she is continually surrounded?seldom exhibit

qualities by which they may be seen as having any permanent or

significant values of their own.

The great enemy of Septimus and Clarissa is, of course, Sir

William Bradshaw, the psychiatrist. He is finally the enemy of

any tolerance which would allow the full expression of individ

ual personality, and is thus the enemy of life itself. Here is

66



clearly a character whom Woolf does not

"accept"; and it is cer

tainly curious that in the light of such a character, Savage can

state that the novel betrays an indiscriminate acceptance of

"everything." In making Sir William a psychiatrist and attempt

ing to reveal him as

"typical" of his profession, Woolf unfairly

condemns, I feel, both psychiatry and science, especially when

she so tightly associates all science with Sir William's particular

brand of it, which contains a cold blooded, impersonal quality from which all feelings have been drained. But on the other hand

Sir William himself as a personality is completely convincing.

Woolf makes clear that Sir William is not interested in curing

Smith, but only in killing him?perhaps only spiritually?but kill

ing him nevertheless.

Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on

you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They

scour the desert. They fly scream

ing into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Hu

man nature is remorseless.

"Impulses came upon him sometimes? "

Sir William asked, with his pen cil on a

pink card.

That was his own affair, said Septimus.

"Nobody lives for himself alone," said Sir William, glancing at the pho tograph of his wife in Court dress.

"And you have a brilliant career before you," said Sir William. There was Mr. Brewer's letter on the table. "An

exceptionally brilliant career."

But if he confessed? If he communicated? Would they let him off then, his torturers?

"I?I?" he stammered.

But what was his crime? He could not remember it.

"Yes?" Sir William encouraged him. (But it was growing late.) (page 148)

And Bradshaw's "sense of proportion" is seen finally

as merely

that mean, cramped quality in his own personality which, be

cause of his official position as a

respected doctor, he is able to

impose upon others.

"Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William's goddess, was ac

quired by Sir William walking hospitals, catching salmon, be

getting one son in Harley Street by Lady Bradshaw, who caught salmon herself and took photographs scarcely to be distinguished

67



from the work of professionals. Worshipping proportion, Sir

William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair, made

it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they,

too, shared his sense of proportion . . ." (page 150). And that Sir

William is simply an efficient dictator who under the names of

"love, duty, self-sacrifice" has stamped his will on all those

weaker than himself, is revealed in what has happened to

Lady

Bradshaw, his wife. "Fifteen years ago she had gone under. It

was nothing you could put your finger on; there had been no

scene, no snap; only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will

into his. Sweet was her smile, swift her submission; dinner in

Harley Street, numbering eight or nine courses, feeding

ten or

fifteen guests of the professional classes, was smooth and urbane"

(page 152). Bradshaw, then, spiritually kills all those who allow themselves

to come into close contact with him. And the helpless Septimus, unlike Bradshaw's other victims, is at least able to take his life out

of Bradshaw's hands when he brings about his own death. His

death is tragic because it is an enormous waste of Smith as a

potentially valuable human being. His death is also, as Mrs.

Dalloway says later in the novel, a form of defiance?a tragic act

but the only course left open to him.

As to Clarissa's social world: we may see the figures who make

up this world as milder copies of Bradshaw himself. All of them

live by the sense of proportion which Bradshaw advises. In gen

eral, they are all incapable of any form of the real sympathy for

their fellow man which we have seen revealed in Smith. In one

sense, this statement may seem extreme; surely Mrs. Dallo way's

daughter Elizabeth is a sympathetic figure, seen as she is during her process of self-discovery. But at best Mrs. Dalloway's friends

are merely "nice" people, mildly neutral in all their enterprises.

We would not want to depend upon them in a crisis. Clarissa's

husband Richard, even when he brings roses to his wife, strikes

68



us as weakly and pathetically affectionate in his failure to tell his

wife he loves her, as he had promised himself to do. And as a

Member of Parliament, he strikes us as simply

a political figure

head; Woolf implies that his office is virtually a sinecure. The

hard-headed Peter Walsh, himself at odds with this cluster of

Mrs. Dalloway's friends, remarks that one can discover Richard's

opinions for a given day simply by reading that morning's Times.

And Clarissa notes that her husband possesses the dubious gift of

being capable of showing sympathy only for people remote from

his own environment?for "the Albanians"?but never for people too

uncomfortably close to him. The same is true of Doris Kil

man. Lady Bruton's main distinction as a character is that she

organizes luncheons to which Mrs. Dalloway is often not invited,

but to which Mr. Dalloway is; her other preoccupation is "that

project for emigrating young people of both sexes born of re

spectable parents and setting them up with a fair prospect of

doing well in Canada" (page 164). There is Millicent Brush, the

obsequious and jealous lackey of Lady Bruton and her projects. And the author leaves little doubt what we are to think of Hugh

Whitbread, who helps Lady Bruton write her emigration-project letters to the Times:

He did not go deeply. He brushed surfaces; the dead languages, the living, life in Constantinople, Paris, Rome; riding, shooting, tennis it had been once. The malicious asserted that he now

kept guard at

Buckingham

Palace, dressed in silk stockings and knee-breeches, over what nobody knew. But he did it extremely efficiently. He had been afloat on the cream of English society for fifty-five years. He had known Prime Ministers. His affections were understood to be deep. And if it were true that he had not taken part in any of the great movements of the time or held

important

office, one or two humble reforms stood to his credit; an improvement

in

public shelters was one; the protection of owls in Norfolk another; servant

girls had reason to be grateful to him; and his name at the end of letters to

the Times, asking for funds, appealing

to the public to

protect, to preserve,

to clear up litter, to abate smoke, and stamp out

immorality in parks,

com

manded respect, (pp. 155-156)

Virginia Woolf has seldom been given credit for this brand of

light but deadly satire, and yet it makes up a good part of her

69



novel. All of this group is set against both Clarissa and Septimus;

it is a part of the army, headed by Sir William Bradshaw, which has kept faith with his "sense of proportion," though all of them lack Bradshaw's will and strength of personality. In clear opposi tion to these characters emerges the "insanity" of Clarissa and

Septimus, which comes into contact with Bradshaw's "sense of

proportion" in such a way that both terms emerge as clearly

reversed; and, through the central intelligence of the novel, which consists of Mrs. Dalloway and a separate but similar

"author voice," one sees without question that it is society and its

"proportion" which is condemned, and the "insanity" of Septi mus and Clarissa which is finally celebrated.

D. S. Savage has indeed recognized this very opposition in the

novel, and given credit for it, though he must finally condemn

the novel on the basis of his own beliefs, which cannot tolerate

Woolf's questioning of the ideals of "proportion" and "conver

sion." "And yet, despite its at times cloying sentimentality, Mrs.

Dalloway is perhaps Virginia Woolf's most satisfactory novel,

for it has an organic

structure which derives from the successful

dramatic presentation of a view of life. It is in fact the only novel

of Virginia Woolf's in which tension is achieved through the

opposition of characters embodying contrary principles of con

duct."9 Though this is not the issue here, one can hardly agree

with Savage's point that Mrs. Dalloway is the only novel of

Woolf's embodying such an opposition. Indeed, it seems to me

that an "opposition of characters" is even more intense in her

later novels. But when Savage in the above passage speaks of the

"cloying sentimentality" of occasional sections of the novel, he

is getting nearer to the novel's principal fault: defects in the

character of Mrs. Dalloway herself.

One may remember Virginia Woolf's early fear about the

novel as she expressed it in her Diary: "The doubtful point is, I

think, the character of Mrs. Dalloway. It may be too stiff, too

glittering and tinselly." And it is, indeed, precisely because Vir

The Withered Branch, p. 87.

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ginia Woolf did not completely succeed in cutting out all of the

"glittering and tinselly" part of Mrs. Dalloway that we are often

not certain just how to take her. It is when she clearly allies

herself with the point of view of Septimus Smith that she takes

on the flesh and blood of a living character. But when she rhap

sodizes about "life" in general she slips from us as a living person,

and indeed makes us wonder whether we should not simply lump

her with the rest of that superficial group which in other sections

of the novel she so clearly condemns and to which her own per

son offers so clear a contrast. After the strong statements that

have been made about Hugh Whitbread, for instance, we do not

understand this other side of Mrs. Dalloway when she speaks,

quite sincerely, of "the admirable Hugh." Savage has seen this

quality in Mrs. Dalloway and one may note, in his angry and in

tense comment, how closely he comes to seeing the same "tin

selly" quality in the character that Woolf herself was fearful

might be present. Here is a part of Savage's own

quotation from

Mrs. Dalloway, followed by his own comment:

All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thurs

day, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the

sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came

Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death

was!?that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how

she had loved it all; how every instant. ..

The loquacious, breathlessly chattering style [Savage says of the above] is a

perfect medium for the expression of the reflections of this empty

headed, middle-aged bourgeoise matron, so ostentatiously and

rhapsodical

ly thrilled by the mere continuous fact of existence (though it is a leisured, idle, comfortable enough existence to be sure).10

And there is more to it than merely this superficial rhapsodiz

ing. Part of the difficulty was, I think, that Virginia Woolf was so

greatly concerned with reflecting a view of reality as a kind

of Bergsonian flux that she often made Mrs. Dalloway into a

kind of life principle in the novel, a living embodiment of flux, a character who had to

continually "flow" in and out of the life

10 The Withered Branch, p. 82.

71



around her. This is indeed connected to Woolf's other fear for

the novel expressed in the Diary: that there may be "too many ideas" in it.

This may seem indeed a singular criticism to make about a

novelist whose "ideas" have actually hardly been discussed at all

by her critics, but I feel it is true nevertheless. Most of the sub

stance in the concluding section of the novel is not assimilated

into the novel's major conflict: the opposition between the Septi mus Smith-Clarissa Dalloway values, and the values of Sir Wil

liam Bradshaw, embodied to varying degrees in Lady Bruton,

Richard Dalloway, Millicent Brush, Doris Kilman, and Hugh Whitbread. Two characters finally

seem irrelevant to this major conflict, and form actually

a good part of the material of retro

spect in which the "tinselly" aspect of Mrs. Dalloway makes

itself most felt. This study does not wish to group everybody in the novel into two hostile camps, but in Clarissa Dalloway's

nos

talgic rhapsodizing over her early love affair with Peter Walsh

and in her childhood memories, which are so filled with the char

acter of Sally Seton, material is being built up which ought per haps to have gone into another novel altogether. One can of

course argue that Mrs. Dalloway's highly retrospective mind

naturally reminisces about all of her past, and that what Virginia Woolf calls in her Diary her "tunneling" process, helps build up

and round out the character of Mrs. Dalloway. This is certainly true; but it leaves us

wondering about the relevance of this

particular part of Mrs. Dalloway's past to the chief issues in the

novel: the "proportion" and "insanity" oppositions which allow

Woolf so effectively

to criticise the "society" which forms the

novel's background. Perhaps Woolf intended us to see Peter

Walsh and Sally Seton in a relationship to Clarissa which is

analogous to Smith's relation to Evans. If this is so, perhaps

more

of a case could be made for Peter and Sally's function in the

novel than I have made here.

At any rate, it is in the "party" section at the end of the novel

that Peter and Sally become most obvious, and it is this section

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which seems to me to suffer most from the entrance of alien

material into the novel's main theme. First of all, Woolf is obvi

ously interested in tracing for us Mrs. Dalloway's reactions to

the return of her two old friends Peter and Sally, with both of whom she was

previously so intimate, and both of whom have

been absent from her life for some time. They both appear at her

party, to which nearly everyone in the novel has been invited ex

cept, of course, Septimus, whom Mrs. Dalloway has never known

in the first place and who has by now taken his own life in an

act of defiance against Sir William Bradshaw's "proportion." One aspect of the party scene is, of course, relevant to the

novel's theme. As has been pointed out by many commentators,

it is at the party that Mrs. Dalloway receives news of the death

of Septimus, and where she clearly opposes the values of Sir

William Bradshaw; indeed, Septimus' death forces Mrs. Dallo

way to articulate her own values more consciously than she has

yet done in the novel. She sees Sir William Bradshaw as a threat to everyone who believes, as she does so

highly, in the necessity of spiritual and intellectual privacy, in the dignity and necessary inviolability of human personality.

But what of the party itself? What does it stand for? And it is clear that Woolf intended the party scene to be of some con siderable importance. Mrs. Dalloway herself has tried to

analyze for us her own motives for her parties, which she

apparently gives at

regular intervals: she has been thinking here of some im

plied criticism of her act of party giving, by both Peter Walsh and her husband.

Her parties! That was it! Her parties! Both of them criticised her very un fairly, laughed at her very unjustly, for her parties.... Well, how was she going to defend herself? . . .

They thought, or Peter at any rate thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous people about her; great names; was

simply a snob in short. . . . And both were

quite wrong. What she liked was simply life.... But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgments, how

superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was

So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody

73



else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their exis

tence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if

only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?

An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift, (pp. 183-185)

And surely, as Mrs. Dalloway's "offering"

to life in accordance

with her role as hostess, the party may be justified to some ex

tent. But a difficulty emerges nevertheless when one tries defini

tively to relate the major portion of the party scene at the novel's

end to the main conflict within the novel.

James Hafley's interesting study11 has made a valiant attempt to do just this. He has tried to distinguish between two sides of

Clarissa: what he calls her "self" and her "non-self"; and finds

Clarissa's party a vaguely healthful compensation for her other

wise too introverted character. He feels that in the progress of

the novel she moves from her introverted self, from her private

bedroom, to the party, which Hafley calls "the large room of

reality itself." This is very interesting, but yet as one reads the

party scene one does not feel Mrs. Dalloway moving into a more

significant kind of reality than that which she has been in all

along. Indeed, one gets chiefly a

sharp sense of the confusion that

always results in a large gathering of people who have suddenly

been thrown together. And one feels too an irony (very likely

not intended) in the fact that no real communication whatsoever

takes place between these people at the party?only that super

ficial kind of chatter that one expects at a large gathering of

people who lack basic similarities of temperament and interests.

Indeed, one feels during the party scene all over again the utter

isolation of the individual that one has felt throughout the novel, so that nothing, actually, is "resolved" at the party at all, except

that, as mentioned before, Clarissa clearly sets herself in opposi

tion to Sir William Bradshaw. What is finally important about the party, then, is that Mrs.

n James Hafley, The Glass Roof. Berkeley: 1954.

74



Dalloway lives on in what we are made to feel will be a continu

ous defiance of the world of living death which Dr. Bradshaw

and Doris Kilman?the name here is surely significant?have built

up around themselves. Septimus Smith has been destroyed, but

Mrs. Dalloway in her defiant protection of her individualism will

continue to face up to threats to her own liberty from these

sources. She will continue, we feel, to do what she has done all

along in the novel, and what any individual must do whose own

temperament is generally alien to the temperament of the society to which he is native: she will cooperate with that society, but

always with certain reservations, so that her own values will not

be bent to fit into the dangerous ones of Sir William Bradshaw

and his followers.

And it is a great credit to her that Mrs. Dalloway feels person

ally responsible for Septimus' death. She brings into the open

and indulges in the very feelings for Smith, that Smith himself

had tried unsuccessfully to stifle about his own friend Evans'

death. "Somehow it was 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" (page 282). And thus the novel has come round

full circle. The above quotation indeed suggests the whole party to be a horrible travesty; it calls to mind, for instance, the theme

of Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party, and makes it diffi

cult to find any real "significance" in the party itself.

Though he does not specifically attack the suicide scene in

Mrs. Dalloway, Savage makes it clear that any ethical justifica tion of such an act would be as alien to him as are Woolf's at

tacks against the ideals of "proportion" and "conversion." Sui

cide, insanity, proportion: these are all terms which the novel

forces us to use as we discuss it. But the very use to which the

novel itself puts these terms, the ways in which the novel "tests"

them, as it were, should make us realize the impossibility of ab

stracting the terms and asking direct ethical questions about

75



them: Is "suicide" good? Is "insanity" bad? Is "proportion" de

sirable? Such questions obviously lead nowhere, and for the

absolute moralist, Mrs. Dalloway will remain a novel one might

safely discuss only as an

interesting display of technical virtu

osity. Clearly Virginia Woolf insists that we ask: "Suicide in what circumstances?" "Whose insanity?" "What kind of pro

portion, dictated by whom?"

As for insanity, Sir William Bradshaw considers anyone "in

sane" who lacks a "sense of proportion." But for Clarissa and

Septimus, a "sense of proportion" is the equivalent of spiritual

death. "Insanity" is the label which a society peopled with Sir William Bradshaws will give

to anyone appearing to be too

"individual." And Mrs. Dalloway has for its theme the need for

the individual to withstand the conforming pressures of society? the need, in effect, for some form of "insanity" within an atmos

phere of Bradshaws.

And as for Smith's suicide, it is Bradshaw who really kills him: Smith's only choice is the method of death, and from this point of view, his suicide is the last expression of his individuality. His death is not an

"escape from responsibilities" (the usual stigma associated with suicide), for there is no

longer any question of

Smith's having responsibilities. Bradshaw would have seen to that

as soon as he had locked Smith up. His suicide is a final "stand"

against Bradshaw, of the kind that soldiers make when they use

lessly fight to the last man instead of surrendering. This too is

"suicide," although in such a context we usually

see it?and right

ly?as heroic.

Savage sees the concept of "conversion"?the term associated

with Doris Kilman, and closely identified with "proportion"?as the one "definite view of life" the novel contains, but which Vir

ginia Woolf unfortunately derides. Savage naturally deplores this; and in doing

so fails to see that other very definite view of

life which the novel celebrates: the worth of individual personal

ity and the need for its expression, the affirmation of diversity itself.

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