StillILearn
New Member
I do know that I read The Hours by Michael Cunningham (and watched the movie), but I don't actually remember reading Mrs. Dalloway.
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Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is one of Woolf’s two most loved and most written-about novels, the other being To the Lighthouse (1925). Set on a single June day in 1923, the novel (MD for short) tracks the parallel lives of two very different Londoners, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. Clarissa is a 51-year old socialite who is giving a party that night for her husband, Richard Dalloway, a Conservative member of Parliament. She moves in the upper reaches of British society (the prime minister will attend her party), but she is not a titled aristocrat, and she is thrilled about the prime minister’s actually showing up at the party. Woolf knew lots of people like Clarissa, though they were not among her best friends. Most people say Woolf modeled Clarissa on Kitty Maxse (1867-1922), who had been a close friend of Woolf’s two older sisters, Stella and Vanessa (see Mark Hussey’s entry on Katherine Maxse in Virginia Woolf: A-Z).
Mrs. Dalloway’s London
Woolf had begun writing Mrs. Dalloway as early as 1922, two years before she returned to Bloomsbury in May 1924, and she finished it that summer at her country home, Monk’s House, in Rodmell, Sussex. So she did only the final editing while actually living in central London. Yet it is her most London novel, the one in which she most vividly brings the city to life by recreating a day in June 1923 in various parts of central London, especially Westminster, where Clarissa Dalloway lives, and Regent’s Park, where several of Septimus Warren Smith’s scenes are laid.
Woolf gives us so much detail about the various characters walks through London that we can easily trace their steps, as we will do. But what is the point of this detail? Woolf is hardly writing a travel guide. One answer to that is that the geographic details, together with the striking of Big Ben, ground the novel in material reality, giving it a shape that allows readers to follow the characters’ thoughts very far from that material reality. On a symbolic level, Woolf invests various geographic detail with heavy significance. Some of this symbolic significance rests in the things themselves, notably Big Ben, the enormous bell in a clock tower, which is universally a symbol for London and for British Government, standing as it does at the houses of Parliament (the Palace of Westminster; see more about Big Ben at www.bigben.freeservers.com/)
Jean Moorcroft Wilson points out how Woolf uses external scenes in London to reflect the characters’ internal reality (see pp 125-126 re MD). She illustrates with quotations about Clarissa on Bond Street (see p 11, beginning with “Bond Street fascinated her”) and Septimus in Regent’s Park (see p 69, beginning with “He had only to open his eyes”). Wilson also comments on how Woolf uses objects in external reality as a narrative technique to switch from one character’s mind to another (see Wilson pp 131-133), as when she shifts from Septimus and Rezia viewing the mysterious motorcar that backfired in Bond Street, to the mind of Clarissa, thinking “it is probably the Queen” (see p 16). This is one of the narrative techniques that the film The Hours imitates very beautifully with photography.
Wilson also comments on how London has mystical significance for Woolf. Seeing the city as somehow the center of life, it’s also a source of creative energy and access to that illusive thing (the “fin in a waste of water”) that Woolf sought. Wilson quotes a passage from Woolf’s diary for 1915, about how being is London is “being on the highest crest of the biggest wave—right in the centre & swim of things” (qtd Wilson 136, from Diary, vol. 1, p 10). Clarissa Dalloway has a similar vision of London scenes providing a sense of immortality. Here is how she thinks of the London streets she is walking:
what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. (MD 9)
London streets, trees, ordinary houses—these are a part of herself and of all the people who have passed through them, and in so doing live on. In Mrs. Dalloway, those London street scenes—and the characters’ meditations on them—are key to the theme of relatedness and connection, to the meaning of life (and death), and the reason why it is worthwhile to just go on living.
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