Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated) by Virginia Woolf Read Free Book Online Page B

248). In the same diary entry, she admits, “The design is so queer & so masterful. I’m always having to wrench my substance to fit it. The design certainly original, & interests me hugely” (
Diary
2: 249). One of the things we might consider is whether it is the approach to character, rather than the characters themselves, that is more memorable in
Mrs. Dalloway
.
    Â 
    Contending with Ulysses and Qualifying for Modernism
    Â 
    W OOLF’S SUCCESS , on the verge of
Mrs. Dalloway
, had not come easily, and would not go unchallenged. As she would acknowledge a few years later in
A Room of One’s Own
, she did have literary foremothers. Some, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, and Jane Austen, were quite well known. But with the exception of Austen, she finds that they had all struggled with literary forms and critical criteria that strained against their talents and inclinations. There had been many bestselling women novelists in the late nineteenth century whose names were largely forgotten by the twentieth because they had not been taken seriously by those who determined what would be canonized—what qualified as high culture, deserving of further study. In her frequently cited literary essay “Modern Fiction,” Woolf gravitated toward defining and practicing what was “modern.” She distinguished her method from that of “materialist” Edwardian writers, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy. Her own generation placed its accent differently—on random atoms of experience as recorded in the mind (155), or “in the dark places of psychology” (156). Despite advocating a new kind of writing, she was not universally welcomed by key makers of high, avant-garde modernism.
    Wyndham Lewis is representative of early gatekeepers of modernism who thought of their project in terms of a masculine reclaiming, of culture from decadence and feminization. To him,
Mrs. Dalloway
presented “puerile copies” of the “realistic vigor” offered by James Joyce’s 1922 novel
Ulysses
(
Men Without Art
138–39). Woolf could certainly have been influenced by
Ulysses
. She had read parts of the novel as early as 1918, when they were serialized in the
Little Review
magazine. That same year the Woolfs were offered the manuscript for publication at the Hogarth Press. They turned it down, ostensibly because of its length, but probably also because of their distaste for it. In “Modern Fiction,” Woolf takes Joyce as a primary example of her own generation of writers. She credits him with revealing “the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain” (155). Her notebooks, “Modern Novels (Joyce),” kept in preparing the earlier version of this essay, have even more positive observations. But in “Modern Fiction,” she does criticize
Ulysses
, for being “centered in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself.” Woolf also resists “the emphasis laid, perhaps didactically, upon indecency”—a quibble that may register class as well as gender difference between Joyce and Woolf. By the time
Ulysses
was published in full in 1922, Woolf finds it increasingly “unimportant” and doesn’t “even trouble conscientiously to make out its meanings” (
Diary
2: 196). It is a “misfire. Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred.” She imagines a schoolboy “full of wits & powers, but so self-conscious & egotistical that he loses his head” (
Diary
2: 199). As was true with her thoughts about Katherine Mansfield, Woolf sees that envy may explain her reaction to Joyce. She concedes, “I was over stimulated by Tom’s [T. S. Eliot’s] praises” of Ulysses (
Diary
2: 200).
    Eliot’s