This is another step in my journey to fill in major gaps in my reading. The name Virginia Woolf is probably known as much for the Edward Albee play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” as for her own works. Browsing my favorite bookstore, The Ivy, I came across a section of her books and picked up this one, only later realizing that it was the inspiration for the movie, “The Hours.” The movie does not follow the plot of Mrs. Dalloway, but features two women who had read and were deeply affected by the book, along with Mrs. Woolf herself. I figured this out about two thirds of the way through the book. I kept trying to place events in the book into what I could remember of the movie, which I had seen fifteen years back. Nothing fit. Finally I googled the movie, read the summary, and then understood why I wasn’t seeing any connections.
Mrs. Dalloway is not easy reading. It isn’t long, at just under two hundred pages, and there were not many words I needed to look up. Tokay, for instance turns out to be a wine from a region of Hungary and Slovakia known as Tokaj. The expression “come up to the scratch”, apparently common to the time and place of the novel, means to “be good enough” for whatever is called for. There were other expressions not familiar to me but context generally provided sufficient clues for me to grasp the meaning.
Set in post-WWI London, the story traces one day in the life of an upper crust wife, Clarissa Dalloway, along with numerous other characters who brush up against her life in ways that range from insignificant to profound. It opens with her purchasing flowers for the party she was having that night, and ends that evening as the party is winding down.
Much of what the reader gets from the narrative is implied rather than stated. For instance, the opening sentence reads, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” From this and what follows one infers that she is wealthy and would ordinarily have one of her employees get the flowers but for some reason she had chosen to do it herself. The reader may wonder why. Is it because there is so much to do to prepare for the party and her servants are busy with other tasks? Is there something special about this party with respect to the flowers chosen? Maybe a particular guest with whom she shares a memory about flowers? Maybe she just wants to get out of the house into the world for a while.
This speculation I’ve just done is a tiny glimpse at the way Woolf tells the story. It’s at least ninety percent interior, that is, interior to the mind as opposed to actual events. Think about how the mind works when uninterrupted. It flits from one thought to another, maybe settles on one train for a while, catches on a memory that leads elsewhere, then another, then wonders how it got to this point and tries to backtrack, retrace the links to the first thought, and then, “what shall I have for lunch?” Woolf tells the story through these interior monologues which I found difficult to follow and often required me to re-read to get the meaning. Her punctuation is complicated too, with lots of commas and semicolons, and absences where it seems some punctuation is called for. But then how would you punctuate your rambling thoughts? Even more confusing are moments when two women are together and ‘she’ and ‘her’ appear in numerous thoughts, and it becomes unclear which person is which. I’m sure that if I re-read the book now in its entirety much would become more clear to me.
So with all this confusion and difficulty, why bother? Is there redeeming value that makes it worth the trouble? My answer is yes. For one thing there is much beauty in the writing itself. For example, when Big Ben strikes she writes, “First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.” For me that conjures the image of a pebble tossed into a still pond, or a drop of water falling from the tip of my oar onto the glassy surface of the river, making a perfect circle that expands ever outward from the center growing fainter until it vanishes. Her choice of the words “warning”, “irrevocable”, and “leaden” color the thought with a darkness, a sadness, again leading the reader to wonder why.
Beyond its stylistic merits, the story reveals important insights, such as about the resentment between the wealthy and the poor, obscured beneath the polite surface. For poor, ugly Miss Kilman her hatred is like a pressure cooker, a plain metal pot on the outside but superheated with rage on the inside. Clarissa feels hatred toward Miss Kilman too but maintains the appearance of serenity.
Septimus Warren Smith is a war veteran who survived physically intact but is shell-shocked, a condition we would now call PTSD. As his madness grows, his thoughts become more disordered, he sees apparitions, hears noises, a woman morphs into a bird, paranoia sets in, his interior monologue grows increasingly remote from anything in the real world. It’s a sympathetic treatment of the condition which is needless to say a major concern for returning veterans today, and is still only imperfectly understood. The nature of the interior monologue of the deranged and struggling Mr. Smith has special credibility because Virginia Woolf herself descended into madness in her later years and at age fifty-nine, committed suicide, as does Septimus Warren Smith.
The main story line (okay it took me a while to get to it) is the love between Mrs. Dalloway and Peter Walsh. Long ago they had fallen in love, exciting, turbulent. They talked, they argued, they fought, but it was when together that they felt most alive. Clarissa had rejected Peter’s proposal. Why? Did she want to hurt him? Did she allow her head to overrule her heart? Now, decades later, they have lived separate lives, both married, both pretending their lives have been good and satisfying, though it is clear they regret not having been together. The love still burns but is smothered by the thought, as Paul Simon put it in “Slip-Sliding Away,” “She said a bad day is when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been.” Regret. It’s an emotion we’ve all felt at some time or another, maybe about some little thing that we soon forget, or maybe about the biggest decision of our lives. I think Virginia Woolf has something to say to us all.
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