Mrs. Dalloway is not a novel that chronicles the years of the life of Clarissa Dalloway. In fact, Mrs. Dalloway is not a conventionally narrated novel at all. It is a collage, a mosaic portrait; it pieces together bits of Mrs. Dalloway’s past and bits of Mrs. Dalloway’s present on a single day—a Wednesday in mid-June, 1923. As far as plot is concerned, Mrs. Dalloway on this particular day in June prepares for and gives a party. That is all that happens. Our job is to look beyond the plot and realize who Mrs. Dalloway has been and what she has become. We must try to see the diversity beneath the surface of this English lady and try to get a sense of her personality. This is not an easy task because appearances deceive.
When Mrs. Dalloway was a young girl, her beau, Peter Walsh, prophesied that someday Clarissa would be The Perfect Hostess. Peter said this impulsively, out of jealous anger, yet when we finish Mrs. Dalloway. we are left with a literal image of Clarissa Dalloway as The Perfect Hostess. Peter Walsh’s chance and angry remark seems to have been most accurate. Clarissa’s destiny does indeed seem to have been that of a well-bred wife who would give successful parties for her husband. This would seem to be the only value of her life.
In a sense, Clarissa Dalloway does develop into a perfect hostess; and, in a sense, Mrs. Dalloway is about a party Clarissa gives. But these ideas are only on the surface. A woman is never just a wife, or a mother, or a hostess; human beings cannot be defined in one word. It is only when we are ignorant, or lazy, or angry (as Peter Walsh was) that we label one another. But we make these generalized, easy assessments of people every day while knowing that we—individually—are certainly too complex to be summed up so easily. We would never dream of simplifying ourselves so narrowly because we know how very little of our “real selves” is displayed to the world. There are depths of feeling—hatred, despair, joy, sensitivity—which are rarely revealed. And, in the same way that much of our emotions remain submerged, our minds also pile up ideas, dreams, conversations, and multitudes of words and thoughts that are never uttered. The acts we actually perform are only pale outlines of another multithought and—feeling individual. It is this individual which is Virginia Woolf’s concern in Mrs. Dalloway.
Who is Mrs. Dalloway?
Probably it is best to start with what Clarissa Dalloway looks like so that we have a frame for our discoveries about her. And in determining Mrs. Dalloway’s physical features we should note how we learn such details; Virginia Woolf’s art of narration is just as important as the content of her novels.
We learn that Mrs. Dalloway prefers to buy the flowers herself This seems like an innocuous statement, yet this single sentence is the entire first paragraph; it is a curious way of beginning a novel. What lies behind the first sentence is this: Virginia Woolf is getting Mrs. Dalloway out of the house so that she can be seen by strangers, by an old friend, and by a neighbor. Also, Mrs. Dalloway can react to a London she has not seen for some time. We are going to learn about Mrs. Dalloway from various points of view; we will not be told outright the facts about Mrs. Dalloway because such collections of facts reveal too little. We must learn by observation.
Mrs. Dalloway’s excursion is not routine. Usually Mrs. Dalloway has things done for her; she is not used to doing errands. Today, however, seems special to her because it is fresh and brisk. The fact that the maid is busy supervising the removal of the winter doors is an excellent opportunity for Mrs. Dalloway to go out shopping. This is a day when Mrs. Dalloway is going to do something she enjoys but which, because of illness, she has not been able to do for some time: to go strolling on an errand through London’s noisy, bustling traffic. The return of the summer season, the return of Mrs. Dalloway’s health, and her return to a busy London scene parallel one another.
As Clarissa heads for the flower shop, we leave her thoughts and enter the mind of Scrope Purvis. Purvis has been Clarissa’s neighbor for many years so his observation is valuable. He thinks of Mrs. Dalloway as bird-like—perched, as it were, on the curb. She seems bird-like despite being fiftyish and still bearing the pallor of her recent illness. She is wearing a feathered yellow hat (we learn this after she returns home) and possibly this spot of plumage influences Scrope’s comparison. But, no, Clarissa also thinks of herself as bird-like—too bird-like, she would say. We learn this when she reflects on Lady Bexborough.
By comparing herself with Lady Bexborough, Clarissa (not Virginia Woolf) tells us about herself. We learn about Clarissa’s physical appearance and we learn her thoughts as she compares herself with a woman whom she considers ideal. Clarissa would, for instance, gladly exchange her own pale and smooth complexion for Lady Bexborough’s dark and crumpled one. She would like to have a face with more visible character. She would like to move more slowly and stately, not lightly; she feels that she is too flighty, too pointy-featured, and too insincere. Clarissa, it would seem, would like to be less feminine; more masculine, perhaps. At least she would like to have a more serious mien and be interested in, say, politics. She does not find her pallor or smooth skin attractive—or even natural. She talks of her body as being a “nothing” that she “wears.” The only features that she approves of are her hands and feet. Otherwise, she is not happy with her outward appearance—the thin, white, bony sack that contains Mrs. Dalloway.
Perhaps these seem like unusual, contradictory thoughts—this despair at aging, and at aging unattractively, while Clarissa is very obviously enjoying being in the hurry and noise of the London morning. Without a doubt, Clarissa is thrilled to be in this colorful London stream; our first view of her is filled with her excited responses to being a part of the city’s thoroughfare again. Her moods do alternate however; in one paragraph she is troubled and worried, in the next she is sparkling. Yet Virginia Woolf did not insert these changes of mood merely to be whimsical or lyrical.
Consider this: Clarissa’s flashes of worry about aging are not at all unnatural; she has already said that she wishes she were not so delicate and brooding. Also, Clarissa has been ill, has become even more delicate, and has had too much time to think. No doubt her doctor and husband and friends commented on her looks and Clarissa would probably have consulted, first of all, her mirror as she searched for signs of illness in her over-fiftyish face. In addition, one must remember in assessing Mrs. Dalloway’s fluctuations of moods that if Clarissa was confined to bed during her illness she would, like most people past fifty and confined to bed, have reflected on life. She would have recalled and pondered. Recovered now, and back in the stream of London traffic, her sick-bed seriousness would not have been immediately flushed away. There would be this natural residue of seriousness in the midst of all the wonder of this morning.
Virginia Woolf is not manipulating, for sheer effect or merely Mrs. Dalloway 14
for exposition, Clarissa’s present-to-past-to-present changes of mood and thought. There is valid motivation for Clarissa’s ebb and flow of mood and time. The transitions are indeed swift, but our own minds can be every bit as mercurial. Human beings seem geared to clock time as it continuously moves forward, but in fact they are not. Within themselves, their minds ignore clock time and obey a different sense of time. Virginia Woolf has used Clarissa to imaginatively approximate a mind’s natural course.
We discern that Mrs. Dalloway has been ill, has been resurrected, and is again enjoying the smells and sights of this busy London morning. Sharp-featured, angular-jointed, she is almost intoxicated by the noisy goings-on and, at turns, lost in thought about decisions she has made during her lifetime and about her physical shortcomings. She has been ill but has returned to the life of London and has plunged into its traffic. Now, as she makes her way up the streets, we make our own way—into Mrs. Dalloway. We have learned what she looks like from Scrope Purvis’ image; then we were given Clarissa’s verification. Listening to her negative comments about herself, we learned certain of Clarissa’s quirks—plus one very important clue to her character. From Clarissa’s minor dissatisfactions with her looks and personality grows one of the novel’s major concerns: is Mrs. Dalloway satisfied being “Mrs. Dalloway”? Piecemeal, we are to learn the circumstances and the results of Clarissa’s decision to become Mrs. Dalloway—this decision on a husband, the most important decision in a woman’s life.
Returning to Peter Walsh, it is important to consider that we hear of him long before we hear about Richard Dalloway. This is a novel about Richard Dalloway’s wife, yet it is not Richard that we learn about first; it is Peter. We discover that Clarissa, very rationally, chose to break off her relationship with Peter Walsh and, very rationally, to become Mrs. Richard Dalloway. The title of this novel and its first words are one and the same: Mrs. Dalloway. Our first impression is a double-barreled emphasis on Clarissa’s married state. But already on the first page we see that Clarissa is concerned not with her husband, but with remembering a wry comment Peter Walsh, her former beau, made long ago as he caught Clarissa gazing into space.
The first thing we hear Peter say, as he chides Clarissa for appearing so deep in revery, is that he prefers men to cauliflowers. Peter is saying, in effect, that he prefers the company of men—of human beings—to the non-human. It is a trivial joke that Peter tossed to Clarissa, yet Clarissa’s memory has preserved it all these years; and, since Virginia Woolf places it before us as Peter’s first speech in the novel, it is important—a key to why Clarissa rejected Peter, why she denied herself Peter, and why still today she argues with herself that she was right not to marry Peter.
