{"id":1120,"date":"2025-02-25T13:14:32","date_gmt":"2025-02-25T13:14:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/?p=1120"},"modified":"2025-02-26T17:24:00","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T17:24:00","slug":"seize-the-day-virginia-woolfs-mrs-dalloway-at-100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/seize-the-day-virginia-woolfs-mrs-dalloway-at-100\/","title":{"rendered":"Seize the day \u2013 Virginia Woolf\u2019s Mrs Dalloway at 100"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m at the park with my daughter, who is jumping in and out of puddles, splashing, shrieking at me (Mum! Look what I can do!<\/em>), as I read frantically, taking one-handed notes on my phone (Mum! Look at this!<\/em>). Part of me wishes I could enjoy with her this moment of pleasure in movement. The other, more insistent part is thinking about this essay: where to start, what to say, how to sum up the extraordinary legacy of the book I\u2019m re-reading, Virginia Woolf\u2019s Mrs Dalloway, which this year marks 100 years since its first publication in 1925. How am I supposed to write about this book?<\/p>\n

If you were to read a synopsis, it might seem like a book purely for an academic specialist (which, admittedly, I am). One day in London in June 1923, an ageing rich woman, Clarissa Dalloway, prepares to give a party. Across town, a shell-shocked Great War veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, loses his grip on sanity. Between them oscillate other characters: Clarissa\u2019s former lover Peter Walsh, Clarissa\u2019s husband Richard and daughter Elizabeth, Elizabeth\u2019s tutor Doris Kilman, Septimus\u2019s wife Rezia, and his doctors Holmes and Bradshaw.<\/p>\n

Like that other modernist monument, James Joyce\u2019s\u00a0Ulysses<\/a>\u00a0(1922), Mrs Dalloway is explicitly quotidian. It follows ordinary people through ordinary activities on an ordinary day \u2013 shopping, walking in the park, riding the bus, going to appointments, mending a dress. As Woolf\u2019s characters go about their day, scenes and impressions are filtered through their individual consciousnesses, threaded together with language, images and memories.<\/p>\n

The novel opens with the famous line \u201cMrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself\u201d, a sentence remarkable for its banality, as well as for its commitment to the\u00a0in medias res<\/em>\u00a0plunge into life that Woolf was so keen on. The iconic status of the line is demonstrated by the number of online parodies it inspires, perhaps only surpassed by William Carlos Williams\u2019s poem\u00a0This Is Just To Say<\/a>, which has become\u00a0a verified meme<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A new seam<\/h2>\n

On Good Friday 1924, Woolf wrote on a page of the manuscript she was drafting \u2013 then called \u201cThe Hours\u201d \u2013 that \u201cI will write whatever I want to write.\u201d She could write whatever she wanted to write because she owned her own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The actual press was in the basement of her suburban Richmond home.<\/p>\n

Mrs Dalloway was the second of Woolf\u2019s novels to be self-published in this way. Being a small-press publisher allowed her to experiment formally in ways that would have been impossible if she was working with a mainstream publisher. In\u00a0A Writer\u2019s Diary<\/a>, she describes her process as both exploratory and technical. On August 30, 1923, she wrote: \u201cI dig out beautiful caves behind my characters\u201d. Later, in October 1924: \u201cI practise writing; do my scales\u201d.<\/p>\n

I recently co-hosted a conference here in Hobart, which included a panel on contemporary Tasmanian experimental writing. The writers who spoke that day talked of the struggle to place work that pushed the boundaries of form and genre. A hundred years after Woolf\u2019s efforts to unearth what she called a new \u201cseam\u201d, commercial imperatives continue to constrain writers and their work.<\/p>\n

Despite Woolf\u2019s refusal to compromise with mainstream tastes, Mrs Dalloway was well received. Her contemporaries recognised the novel\u2019s importance immediately. \u201cAn intellectual triumph\u201d, proclaimed P.C. Kennedy in the New Statesman; \u201ca cathedral\u201d, pronounced E.M. Forster in the New Criterion.<\/p>\n

It sold moderately well: 1,500 copies within about a month of its publication on May 14 \u2013 more than her prior novel,\u00a0Jacob\u2019s Room<\/a>, had sold in a year. Her biographer Hermione Lee\u00a0records<\/a>\u00a0that in 1926 income from writing allowed Woolf and her husband Leonard to install a hot water range and toilet at their country home.<\/p>\n

Woolf\u2019s novel was revolutionary for its depiction of same-sex attraction and mental illness, as well as for its challenge to the novel form and representation of time. Clarissa remembers the jolt of desire she felt as an 18-year-old for her friend Sally Seton, who kisses her on the terrace of her house at Bourton:<\/p>\n

\n

“the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it \u2013 a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Clarissa, made \u201cvirginal\u201d in middle age by illness and marital boredom, is surprised by this irrupting memory. She connects it to her sense of joy in life itself: \u201cthe moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings [\u2026] collecting the whole of her at one point\u201d.<\/p>\n

Clarissa and Septimus Smith \u2013 though they never meet \u2013 are shadow versions of each other. Both have beaky noses, thin pale birdlike bodies, and histories of illness.<\/p>\n

Septimus, so capable as a soldier in the Great War, buries the trauma of seeing his commanding officer Evans killed, only to have it resurface in visual and aural hallucinations, of Evans behind the trees, and birds singing in Greek. He perceives, as Clarissa does, the burden of the past upon the present, and he suffers as a result of the coercion of the social system \u2013 what Woolf\u2019s narrator ironises as the sister goddesses Conversion and Proportion.<\/p>\n

\u201cWorshipping proportion [\u2026] made England prosper\u201d, because proportion forbids despair, illness, and emotional extremes. Conversion, the strong arm of Empire, \u201coffers help, but desires power; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient, the dissatisfied\u201d. Conversion \u201cloves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will\u201d. Together, they suck the life from those who cannot or will not comply with them.<\/p>\n

For Septimus, who has witnessed the dreadful disproportion of the war, ordinary social life becomes a torturous pressure cooker, a \u201cgradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames\u201d. A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement emphasised this aspect of its experimentalism:<\/p>\n

\n

“Watching Mrs Woolf\u2019s experiment, certainly one of the hardest and very subtly planned, one reckons up its cost. To get the whole value of the present you must enhance it, perhaps, with the past.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Watching my daughter lark about is shadowed by the two surgeries she had in early childhood to correct her developmental hip dysplasia. I hear her screech with joy in the park, rocketing about freely; I hear her scream in pain in the hospital, encased in plaster from the midsection down. As Woolf knew, the past and the present are experienced within us simultaneously.<\/p>\n

Doubled experience<\/h2>\n

\u201cIn this book I have almost too many ideas,\u201d Woolf wrote in her diary on June 19, 1923. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Woolf\u2019s ideas have inspired scores of interpretations, focusing on time, space, reality, psychology, domesticity, history, sexual relations, politics, fashion, the environment, health and illness. She is now probably the most written-about 20th century English author. I can remember vividly first reading this novel as an undergraduate, after which I devoured Woolf\u2019s revolutionary 1929 essay\u00a0A Room of One\u2019s Own<\/a>, which criticised the educational, economic and social constraints that prevented women, in many instances, from writing anything at all.<\/p>\n

Woolf, of course, could and did write. This was a function, as she knew, of her financial and class privilege. Feminist politics has progressed beyond Woolf, but she laid one of the foundation stones. In her fiction, she modelled a method of writing that critiques patriarchal thinking. She focuses our attention on overlooked individuals and their inner lives, and she splendidly undoes the Victorian conception of plot.<\/p>\n

The same year Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, she also published her important collection of essays,\u00a0The Common Reader<\/a>. The first piece in that book, on the medieval letters of the Paston family, describes the illumination cast by these ordinary, non-literary pieces of writing:<\/p>\n

\n

“Like all collections of letters, they seem to hint that we need not care overmuch for the fortunes of individuals. The family will go on, whether Sir John lives or dies. It is their method to heap up in mounds of insignificant and often dismal dust the innumerable trivialities of daily life, as it grinds itself out, year after year. And then suddenly they blaze up; the day shines out, complete, alive, before our eyes.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Mrs Dalloway encompasses this doubled experience of insignificance and blazing life. Woolf writes of the past emerging into the present day and the present\u2019s capacity to reshape the past. In her diary, she called this her \u201ctunnelling process, by which I tell the past in instalments, as I have need of it\u201d.<\/p>\n

In tunnelling through narrative, digging out caves behind her characters, Woolf flung out a lot of what seems to be dust \u2013 buying flowers, ogling girls, table manners and weight gain, advertising, letter writing, doctor\u2019s appointments, eating eclairs in a department store cafe. The novel reminds us of these moments\u2019 triviality, and their significance, through repeated reference to the bells and clocks of London striking the hour.<\/p>\n

This is why the opening line \u2013 and the novel as a whole \u2013 is so remarkable. It catches drops of shimmering reality from moments that can so easily go unremarked. This, Woolf knew, was what writing needed to do: to stop time. As she wrote of the Pastons\u2019 letters: \u201cThere is the ancient day, spread out before us, hour by hour.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her metaphor shows that Woolf\u2019s thinking about time also had a spatial dimension. These two dimensions of space and time structure Mrs Dalloway\u2019s theme and method, As David Daiches explained in his 1939 book\u00a0The Novel and the Modern World<\/a>, Woolf first links a series of different perspectives through a single shared moment in time \u2013 marked by the sound of the bells \u2013 then switches to an individual perspective, anchored in space, and moves through that individual\u2019s memories.<\/p>\n

Woolf wrote in her diary that \u201cthe caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment.\u201d Daiches diagrammed these relations in time and space as a series of connected trees, arguing that they illustrated the novel\u2019s concern with \u201cthe importance of contact and at the same time the necessity of keeping the self inviolable, of the extremes of isolation and domination\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m at the park with my daughter, who is jumping in and out of puddles, splashing, shrieking at me (Mum! Look what I can do!), as I read frantically, taking one-handed notes on my phone (Mum! Look at this!). Part of me wishes I could enjoy with her this moment of pleasure in movement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1121,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,57],"tags":[67],"class_list":["post-1120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-ultimate-reading-lists","tag-recommended"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1122,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions\/1122"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}