Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway also, should be included in the talk I’m working on.
People who have read the novel will no doubt remember the basic duality the
author sets up between Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway. One
protagonist privileged, a person of means; the other, an ex-soldier who
survives World War I, is unemployed. Poet and society matron. Male and female.
Simplifying in this way may give us leads into understanding the ideas running
through the book. A close reading reveals pretty quickly how carefully it is
planned and written. Two other binary opposites, sane/insane, are of use here,
especially as Woolf herself made use of them as she planned to write the book.
In Virginia Woolf ‘The Hours’: The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway.
(Pace U P, 1996), Helen M. Wussow tells us that in planning notes dated October
16, 1922 Woolf wrote: 'Suppose it to be connected in this way: Sanity &
insanity. Mrs D. seeing the truth. S.S. seeing the insane truth' (Wussow, 412).
Shakespeare and others had of course dealt with similar ideas. In any event,
during the noonday visit Septimus Smith makes to one of his doctors, Dr
Bradshaw, Septimus is depicted as thinking himself privy to what he assumes is
the fact that, in literature (and perhaps in culture generally) '[t]he secret
signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing,
hatred, despair’ (75).*
The novel thus navigates around truth versus
insane truth… Doubt—the region of beauty, as Woolf terms it in the essay
‘Reading’—is created about the acuteness of Septimus Smith’s psychological
trauma. Obviously the insanity of war is part of her societal indictment. One
of the things I personally find fascinating is the use Virginia Woolf makes of
suggestion through a series of key words or ideas as she sets up the viewpoints
of her characters in her ‘novel of consciousness’. Finally, reading these texts
today in some of the terms she establishes provides a lot of information on
metafictional strategies and the craft of creating ‘a good story’…
*Mrs Dalloway. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford
World’s Classics, 2000.