Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Read Free Book Online

‘Woolf gives us a picture of a class impervious to change in a society that desperately needs or demands it, a class that worships tradition and settled order, but cannot accommodate the new and disturbing.’ 58
    In this context, Septimus is a scapegoat, whose visionary emotional turbulence and lack of psychic defences has to be seen in contrast to the fatuousness, insensitivity, impassivity, and self-protective caution of the dominant codes. Septimus feels so much because others feel so little.He has wished to be a poet and an artist, not a clerk; and his disordered perceptions are also creative and powerful. In the forms of ballet, film, modernist poetry, and surrealist art, they were also to shape the new post-war culture whose greatness Woolf had predicted.
    In life, Septimus would never be invited to the Dalloway party which his death symbolically interrupts. ‘All must converge upon the party at the end’, Woolf wrote in her notes. Indeed all that is snobbish and artificial about London society converges at the party. Here are gathered the pompous, the frivolous, the narrow-minded and the moribund. People arrive to be announced by the hired butler like ghosts of the past. The Prime Minister in his gold lace is an emblem of the hollowness of the occasion. As Zwerdling observes, ‘The party at the end of the novel, for all its brilliance, is a kind of wake. It reveals the form of power without its substance.’ 59 Clarissa’s anxieties about the success or failure of this occasion seem trivial in view of what lies beyond the fairy-lights of her garden, and a reading which celebrates her as a great artist whose medium is parties does not seem justified.
    Yet the party also is a communal event, and a comic pageant in which life itself is the cause of celebration. As Woolf takes us into the minds of the various guests, we see that their façades of festivity and good breeding conceal a terror of ageing and death. Coming together is a way for them to affirm continuity. For Sally and Peter it is an opportunity to remind themselves that they are still people of passion, that they feel deeply despite appearances. For old Mrs. Hilbery, the laughter is simply a way for her to forget that ‘it is certain we must die’.
    This society will not undergo radical change. Elizabeth, who has vague dreams of a life different from hermother’s, will probably repeat it. She too adores her dog more than her suitors, and is already being watched by admirers like Willie Titcomb. Yet although Richard Dalloway is too shy to tell his wife that he loves her, he does tell his daughter that she is lovely. For Clarissa, the thought of Septimus’s death is a reminder of the intensity and joy of a life, even if beyond the triumphs of youth. If her identification with Septimus is perhaps sentimental, nonetheless it is part of her realization of her own limits and possibilities. ‘For there she was,’ the novel ends, insisting that as readers too we must take Clarissa on her own terms. Despite its fascination with death,
Mrs. Dalloway
ends, as it begins, with a tribute to endurance, survival, and joy.
    Elaine Showalter
Princeton University, 1991
NOTES
    1. There are now several studies of
Mrs. Dalloway
alone. See Harold Bloom, ed.,
Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’
(Chelsea House, 1988); David Dowling,
Mrs. Dalloway: Mapping Streams of Consciousness
(Twayne, 1991); and Jeremy Hawthorn,
Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’: A Study in Alienation
(Sussex University Press, 1975).
    2. Margaret Drabble, ‘Introduction,’
Pride and Prejudice
(Virago, 1989, p. xiii).
    3.
Diary
, II, 15 October 1923, p. 272.
    4. Jacqueline Rose,
The Haunting of Sylvia Plath
(Virago, 1991, p. 112).
    5. Paul Bailey, ‘Into the waves,’
Times Literary Supplement
, 13 May 1973.
    6. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century
,