Reading Mrs Dalloway

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.