Chapter 1
The Intersection of the Spirit of the Time and the Aesthetic
−Woolf’s Narrative Strategy in Mrs. Dalloway
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As I mentioned in the Introduction, Virginia Woolf’s works have attracted much attention from both critics and readers. I also explained that, though feminism and modernism have been conspicuous among these critical perspectives, critics have begun to examine and analyse Woolf’s writing in terms of the apparatus, structure or movement proper to modern society. If Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s “breakthrough novel,”
as Elizabeth Abel puts it (xvi), and its narrative mode establishes a definite type elaborated by Woolf throughout her fiction, it is little wonder that the novel has been the subject of attention for recent critical trends. In fact, Mrs. Dalloway is reviewed not only in terms of homosexuality resurrected in the Hollywood film The Hours, but also in terms of the metropolitan urban. According to Laura Marcus, even a feminist critic like Rachel Bowlby – who shares “Elizabeth Abel’s interest in the relationship between Freud’s and Woolf’s fictions of femininity and female development” – has “resisted the pull of the past and the elegiac dimensions of Woolf’s writing.” Marcus continues to describe:
Bowlby . . . has represented Woolf as a writer of ‘modernity’ as well as
‘modernism’, opening up the place in her work of the city . . . new forms of travel and transport and their relationship to modern subjectivities, consumerism and the fashioning of sexual identities, and exploring
“Woolf’s ceaseless fascination with the surprising connections and clashes
amid the discontinuous movements of modern life.” (238-39)
Focusing on this characterisation of Woolf as a writer who is fascinated with and confronts the “surprising connections and clashes amid the discontinuous movement” in the modern era, I want to shed light in this chapter on how Woolf reacts to and incorporates the spirit of modern times into her narrative – particularly in Mrs.
Dalloway, through Clarissa Dalloway’s enjoyable meandering in London and her party at home, and through Septimus’ agony and the interactive responses of people and things. After all, Woolf discloses in her narrative strategy the process through which human life is entangled with the personal or collective past; that is, its historical inheritance.
The chapter is structured around three main points: first, I will show how her elaborate tunnelling process１ delineates a kind of loose unity – a collective discursive continuum, in which people, objects, and their environment are brought into a precarious and coincidental relation, being entangled with their personal memory or their collective history at the same time. Secondly, I examine the way in which the stigma of the Great War is inscribed in human mind and life – particularly in the mental breakdown of Septimus, a young veteran, thereby suggesting the repeated resurrection of history, as it is inscribed in the human mind. Lastly, I focus on how the palimpsest of the text reveals the drastic transformation of human perception that modern technology imposes and how, at the same time, it facilitates for Woolf the disruption of linear time based on patriarchal discourse. On the whole Woolf unsettles, by her tunnelling process, the seemingly established framework of modern social reality where the here-and-now is always interwoven with history or people’s memory of the past; the reality which she thinks can be no longer contained in the conventional form of the novel.
In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf creates a peculiar world. For one thing, she blurs the boundary of time – between past and present – by adopting her tunnelling process. As in Jacob’s Room or To the Lighthouse, she develops – by plunging into her characters’
minds – a transient world, where past and present intertwine with each other. In addition, Woolf also blurs spatial boundaries – between the individual and the collective and between the individual and the object – through the technique of providing multiple points of view, shifting focalisations from one person to another. As a result of these temporal and spatial blurrings, there unfolds in Mrs. Dalloway a phantasmagoric landscape; a loose unity that includes not only people, nature and objects, but also the past and present existence belonging to each – suggesting a vast bird’s-eye view in which history intertwines with the current reality.
I would like to explore how the narrative of Mrs. Dalloway is effectively constructed to create an undercurrent impression of this loose unity, or discursive continuum, and how this narrative strategy is linked to the spirit of the time she lived in.
Regarding the narrative strategy of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf writes in her diary:
. . . how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each come to daylight at the present moment. (30 August 1923) (Diary
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263)She also states that: “It took me a year’s groping to discover what I call my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by installments, as I have need of it” (15 October 1923).
Thus by “digging out beautiful caves” behind the characters, that is to say by
“tunnelling,” she tries to make each character’s mind “come to daylight at the present
moment.” Woolf sets “installments” in this process, perhaps because she acknowledges that the past is inherent in one’s present moment. Moreover, when these beautiful caves
“connect,” each given past accumulates into the collective history, otherwise submerged imperceptibly in everyday life.
At the very beginning of Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa – leaving her house to buy herself flowers – recollects her days as an 18 year-old girl at Bourton:
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. (3)
Setting off as a middle-age woman into a June morning in London, Clarissa plunges simultaneously into the open air at Bourton as a teenage girl. Her recollection continues into Peter’s remarks at the time and then reflects forwards to his current situation:
He must have said it at the breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace – Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished – how strange it was! – a few sayings like this about cabbages. (3)２
The refreshing morning in June makes Clarissa not only remember the morning when she had opened the French windows as a girl, but also associates it with the words Peter had said at the breakfast that morning. Then her recollection goes back and forth, from Peter’s present condition to his past remarks. When she is walking down to the flower shop in Bond Street, she remembers intermittently Sally from her past, as well as Peter both in the past and in the present. Consequently her mind wanders about, to and fro,
between the past and the present, even as – in the present time – she is also impressed by many other people, objects, and the various events she comes across.
The same intermittent recollection is also a feature of Peter’s mind. Having seen Clarissa after five years’ absence, he reflects thus on his way to the hotel:
The way she said ‘Here is my Elizabeth!’ – that annoyed him. Why not
‘Here’s Elizabeth’ simply? It was sincere. . . There was always something cold in Clarrisa, he thought. She had always, even as a girl, a sort of timidity, which in middle age becomes conventionality . . . . It is Clarissa herself, he thought, with a deep emotion, and an extraordinarily clear, yet puzzling, recollection of her, as if this bell had come into the room years ago . . . (42)
He remembers the “present Clarissa,” whom he met a little while before, and then that recollection is immediately superseded by his image of the “past Clarissa.” Whether in the past or in the present, however, the Clarissa in his mind could never be the same as the one in her own mind nor in any other person’s mind. The Clarissa that crosses his mind is a kind of product he creates with his imagination; and likewise, the Peter that occurs to Clarissa’s mind is a kind of product she creates. The same could be said of any character – for example, Sally. The Sally remembered by Clarissa could by no means be the same Sally that Peter remembers. As is the case with the past image of the characters, the present one varies among the characters upon whose perception we rely. When Peter is talking to Clarissa, Peter’s image of Clarissa is quite different from her own image and vice versa. Furthermore, even Peter’s own image of Clarissa can vary, depending on his state of mind.
Therefore, it could be said that when the past and the present intersect each other
discontinuously and repeatedly in Mrs. Dalloway it is definitely never a single, static and – as it were – ordered process, but a multiple, transient and subjective one. Either the past or the present is a product reconstructed by characters, something in “beautiful caves behind characters,” which you could find through the narrator who is “digging out.”
On the other hand, it is not only their past or the people they know but also many other people, objects, and random events they happen to come across, that impact upon Woolf’s characters. For example, when Clarissa is walking down to Bond Street, she sees various things that trigger her emotions or her imagination in one way or other:
. . . the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs . . . . And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lord’s, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns. . . (4)
Thus even things such as “the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans,” or sounds such as “a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats” constitute the urban landscape that impresses itself upon Clarissa. This is the case with other characters in the novel besides Clarissa: Peter, Septimus, Lucrezia, Richard, Lady Bruton, Hugh, and even people Clarissa does not know – for example, Mrs. Bletchley, Mrs. Coates, and Mr.
Bouley. When all of them see other people or objects, the processes in which they feel and think about them, are mingled with their own recollections or their private concerns.
The thoughts of various characters are expressed by virtue of multiple focalisations. What makes the novel unique is the way in which these multiple
focalisations shift from one character to another seamlessly. These frequent shifts are always triggered by means of some object or event: when Clarissa is surprised, in the flower shop, at the pistol shot of the motor car outside, there is Septimus standing in the crowd, who is watching the same car accident. The description focalised on Clarissa moves seamlessly to that focalised on Septimus, by way of the description of the car accident.
The aeroplane is also used as the mediator for repeated shifting focalisations.
When Clarissa passes along the Mall and before the statue of Queen Victoria, Mrs.
Coates – who is in the small crowd – notices the aeroplane making letters in the sky.
After making a little stir in the crowd, the aeroplane attracts Rezia’s attention. Rezia – told by the doctor to urge her husband Septimus to take an interest in things outside himself – cries, “Look, look, Septimus!”(18). Then Septimus looks up and thinks about it in his own context, which leads him to contemplate nature’s sacredness or harmony with the universe. The perspective then shifts to Maisie Johnson – a nineteen year-old girl from Edinburgh who thinks Septimus odd – and then moves toward Mrs. Dempster, who observes Maisie and also looks up at the aeroplane. The aeroplane disappears, at last, when Clarissa comes back home and says, “What are they looking at?”(25). Aside from the car accident and aeroplane numerous other mediators exist – such as the bird, the bench, or the ambulance. At times, perspectives shift from one character to another just when they happen to pass each other.
In this manner one character’s mind is replaced immediately by another’s when they share coincidentally, however briefly, the same location or object of attention. So frequently and so seamlessly do these descriptions move from one character to another, it seems as if all of the characters create continuity without any division or joint other
than the abrupt shifts of scenes – Woolf’s “interrupted moments,” a staple feature of her writing.
It is not only the shift between people or things, however, which creates the impression of seamless continuity. Septimus, when sitting on the bench in Regent’s Park, feels himself connected to nature in the following manner:
. . . leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made the statement. The sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of the pattern;
the white and blue, barred with black branches. Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds. A child cried. Rightly far away a horn sounded. All taken together meant the birth of a new religion . . . (19)
When he feels that leaves and his own body are connected with each other, sparrows are also part of the pattern. Sounds – including a child’s cry and the distant sound of a horn, and even vacant spaces – harmonise as well, with the result that there emerges “a new religion.” This “new religion” connotes the whole “pattern” consisting of people, nature, animals, objects, space, and even time. Possibly Septimus, who cannot “feel,” discovers a paradoxical sensitivity – finding out the subtle and invisible relationship between the world and himself.
Clarissa also feels the connection between herself and the world in another way.
After hearing the sound of the ambulance, Peter reflects on Clarissa’s words:
But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’; and she tapped the back of the
seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue.
She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter – even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death.
Perhaps – perhaps. (129-30)
In contrast to Septimus, Clarissa feels the connection not so much between herself and nature as between herself and other people. Nevertheless, the “odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to” could be considered parallel to Septimus’ sense that not only leaves and birds but also sounds and space are part of some religion. In the same way that – as might be inferred from the words “even trees, or barns” and “certain places” – Clarissa never limits her sense of affinity to merely people, so Septimus includes in his schema a crying child or someone blowing a horn. Both are suggestive of a whole pattern where everything – including people, nature, sound, cries, place, and space – are connected with each other within the accidental, loose and fluid continuity of which we are part; what we are in the visible world represents only a transient “part of us” and “the unseen part of us” permeates everywhere. The recognition that we are never independent but part of something greater – connected to other people, nature, and things – is also an undercurrent theme of the narrative in Between the Acts, as I will
argue in Chapter 2; it is, furthermore, an underlying thought driving Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, as I will explain in Chapter 3.
The following words confirm again Clarissa’s sense of the continuity that surrounds and inhabits her:
. . . did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her . . . here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. (8)
In this free indirect discourse we can find Clarissa’s sense of herself as a part of some invisible whole. Because she is positive that she is “part of the trees at home,” “of the house there” and “part of people she had never met,” she could “survive” by living “in each other” even after she ceases completely, “being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best.” To illustrate this point, when Clarissa recollects Sally, the latter can live in Clarissa’s mind – “laid out like a mist” – and vice versa. Therefore, it does not matter if she ceases completely or not, nor if she knows someone of whom she is part. She – like everything else – is just a temporal and accidental entity, whose brief existence is made manifest and preserved in the hearts and minds of others, occupying a corner of history and reserving her own particular place as a part of a huge ambiguous continuum.
One of Woolf’s other works, where this huge loose unity is similarly depicted by repeated shift of focalisations, is To the Lighthouse. In part one and part three of To the
Lighthouse, almost all of the characters – more or less – are disposed to verbalise their own thoughts: Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe, Charles Tansley, William Bankes, James and Cam all reflect this trend. Similar to the case of Mrs. Dalloway, the description moves back and forth, from one character’s narration to another, seamlessly and at random, giving the impression of a whole pattern. When Lily recollects, in part three, the memory of Mrs. Ramsay – her bearing, her words, and her countenance – the late Mrs. Ramsay appears to be “laid out like a mist between the people she knew best,”
and it seems as if Lily “lifted” Mrs. Ramsay “on [her] branches” and the mist “spread ever so far”:
It was strange how clearly she saw her, stepping with her usual quickness across fields among whose folds, purplish and soft, among whose flowers hyacinths or lilies, she vanished. It was some trick of the painter’s eye. For days after she had heard of her death she had seen her thus, putting her wreath to her forehead and going unquestioningly with her companion . . . . Wherever she happened to be, painting, here, in the country, or in London, the vision would come to her, and her eyes, half closing, sought something to base her vision on. (132)
In this way, even when Mrs. Ramsay is not actually with Lily, Lily “clearly saw her with her usual quickness,” and even after Mrs. Ramsay’s death she can still see her as clearly as before – clearly enough to envisage her expression in detail, as if Mrs.
Ramsay is standing next to her. This feeling could be considered parallel to Clarissa’s own ambiguous sensations. That Lily embraces the image of Mrs. Ramsay after her death would imply that, as Clarissa puts it, the death of an individual does not equal complete nothingness; or rather, the dead live on in the people who know them.
We could also find another version of this loose unity in Woolf’s essay, “Street Haunting.” Here Woolf discusses – in terms which suggest Clarissa’s experience – the pleasure of wandering around the streets in London one evening:
We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room . . . . The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken . . . (155) While shedding “the self our friends know us by” might connote a blurring of the boundary between self and others, “that vast republican army of anonymous trampers”
could be a metaphor for the loose unity that I have described. For, as she roams through the streets in Holborn, in Soho, and in Mayfair, she sees a lot of objects and a lot of people she does not know, all of which appear to accumulate into some unity that she becomes part of. She sees houses, offices, windows, lamps and bridges as well as the old man who squats, a bearded Jew and an old woman with a cloak and she assimilates all of these disparate elements to herself. When she drops in the second-hand bookshop she sympathises even with the dead:
Thus glancing round the bookshop, we make other such sudden capricious friendships with the unknown and the vanished whose only record is, for example, this little book of poems, so fairly printed, so finely engraved, too, with a portrait of the author. (162)
Here again the narrator, like Clarissa, knows “friendship with the unknown and the vanished.” For her, whether she knows one and whether one is dead does not matter
since she is part of them; both corporeal and temporal boundaries have not much significance. In the end her sympathy with the outside world expands to the extent that she declares definitely thepossibility of nullifying the boundary between people:
Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality . . . (165)
Presumably this illusion – to put on the bodies and minds of others – is not simply a never-fulfilled desire. In light of the interconnectedness of people that I have discussed so far, the illusion seems a metaphorised version of a kind of coalescence between people, which translates into the aforesaid continuum where one could become an anonymous “other” – a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer, etc. This sense of continuum and of interchangeability that extends throughout Mrs. Dalloway is also a feature of Between the Acts as I will observe in Chapter 2; it is found again in Anna Wulf’s thought in The Golden Notebook, as Chapter 3 will detail. As I will return to these points in the relevant chapters, here I will point out only that interconnectedness or interchangeability is considered a path to pleasure in the narratives of both writers;
indeed transgressing “the straight lines of personality” produces “greater delight and wonder.”
This idea of a loose unity, however, should not be taken to indicate a simply philanthropical and optimistic admiration of human life. It is true that Clarissa herself loves, and craves for, life; from the outset of Mrs. Dalloway exclamatory phrases such
as “What a lark! What a plunge!” betray her exhilaration. She loves the morning in June, cheerful comings and goings of people on the streets and the vigorous city of London itself. Her “odd affinity with people she doesn’t know” is an expression of her love for not particular individual acquaintances but people in general, who walk, eat, laugh and cry in everyday life. It is this sense of her appetite for ordinary life that Peter has recognised from their youth. After meeting with her, Peter thinks of this aspect of her temperament:
And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy . . . . And how there was no bitterness in her, none of that sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically everything. . . . she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn’t mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination. (66-67) Thus she loves “everything,” particularly “people,” and so, she willingly spares time for quotidian and trivial things like “lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers,” and even “talking nonsense, saying things she didn’t mean.” She loves literally everything in daily lives, including what seems to be merely trivial.３
On the other hand, in spite of the fact that Clarissa enjoys “practically everything,” a number of suggestions can be found throughout the novel that her aspiration for life is always overshadowed with a notion of death. When she contemplates, as earlier described, “did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely” and the idea of being “laid out like a mist between the people,” her love for life seems inextricably associated with the idea of death – an inevitable, mysterious and
often harrowing event for human beings to confront. That her uplifting sensation, her craving for life, is – more often than not – encroached by the morbid shadow of fear is overt in the descriptions following the exuberant, exclamatory phrases at the beginning.
Immediately after them appears abruptly the ominous expression: “. . . standing there at the open window . . . something awful was about to happen.” This sense of “something awful” Clarissa holds on to until near the end of the novel. Hearing about the death of Septimus, whom she doesn’t know at all, she meditates alone in the small room in the midst of her party:
Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. (157)
In the midst of her party, which is the very emblem of her yearning for life’s enjoyment and gathering people together, she has in mind “the terror” and “an awful fear,”
precipitated by the death of someone she has never known. Clarissa’s sense of love for life is so susceptible to “something awful” – or the idea of death – that it seems as if life and death are, for her, two sides of the same coin.
Above all it is when Clarissa encounters Septimus by way of the conversation with the Bradshaws that the inseparability of life and death within herself is revealed most explicitly. As Clarissa holds the concept of life and death as an undercurrent deep down in her mind, whether consciously or unconsciously, her response to the news of the death is immediate and intense:
Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought. . . What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young man killed himself . . . but how? Always her body went
through it, when she was told, first, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. . . There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. (156) Thus, Clarissa resonates with her whole mind and body to the news of Septimus’ death.
The metaphorical expression that “her body went through it,” “her dress flamed” and
“her body burnt” equates her reaction to an assimilation of his death. Moreover, with only sparse facts – that he has suffered the deferred effects of shell-shock and that Sir William Bradshaw has examined him – Clarissa gains a precise insight into what drives him into a corner:
Or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had that passion, and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor, yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrage – forcing your soul, that was it – if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said (indeed she felt now), Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that? (157)
Supposedly on the point that Sir William “forc[es] your soul” and then “life is made intolerable,” Clarissa sympathises with Septimus – for, she admits in the earlier part of the novel that one could not protect his or her soul without keeping “the privacy of soul.” “[F]orcing your soul” means invading or violating this privacy, without which you could not fully live your life.４ Therefore, no sooner does she hear of his suicide than she senses intuitively the truth of the tragedy.
Some critics have pursued an argument based on the relationship between Clarissa and Septimus. Maria DeBattista – in “Mrs. Dalloway: Virginia Woolf’s
Memento Mori” – views death in the novel as not a termination but an attenuation of life, offering a mystical conception of life as “something central which permeated”
people’s existence (46-47). Mrs. Dalloway is, she states, a novel about the impossibility of reaching that centre; an impossibility compensated for by the fact that death seems to complete life, rather than disrupt it. It is natural, therefore, for Clarissa – whose love of life is so vital – that death should constitute an essential part of her self. DeBattista goes on to argue that “Septimus’ fatal plunge is echoed and transfigured by Clarissa’s plunge into the dark sea,” but it is worth noting that Clarissa can also rise to the surface. It is this ability of hers to dart to the surface that distinguishes her from Septimus and that keeps her alive to the end of the novel (61).
On the other hand, Hermione Lee – in her essay, “Mrs. Dalloway” – interprets Septimus’s suicide and Clarissa’s reaction from another point of view. According to her, there are three levels within the self: the external level, the deeper one, and an even deeper and more remote one. The first is the social aspect of the self, which, though being in reality a mockery of the inner self, is also an irremovable part of self. Therefore,
“All the judgment made about Clarissa, whether satirical or sympathetic, has a certain kind of truth in it” (22).
Below this external level of self, she goes on to argue, is the deeper self, “made up partly of her feeling about experience . . . and partly of her present emotions” (23).
Furthermore, there is a deeper and more remote level of existence, furthest removed from her external and social self, where Clarissa feels “the possibility of going beyond the exigencies of time and place” (24). On this plane, Lee emphasises, Clarissa feels a sense of identity with Septimus, because “this elusive, intangible self awaits death as a release, a way into communication with the general life of things” (24). His death
redeems the hollowness, the “corruption, lies, chatter” of her life.
J. Hillis Miller’s argument in “Mrs. Dalloway: Repetition as the Raising of the Dead” is very similar, but much clearer compared to that of DeBattista. According to Miller, the omniscient narrator in Mrs. Dalloway is “a general consciousness or social mind which rises into existence out of the collective mental experience of the individual human beings in the story” (83). This general mind and the individual mind become one in their deepest part, where “deep below the surface, in some dark and remote cave of the spirit, each person’s mind connects with all other minds, in a vast cavern where all the tunnels end” (85). It is in this place of “true communion” (96) that death lies:
Life becomes death within the impersonal mind of the narrator and within her language, which is the place of communion in death. There the fragmentary is made whole. There all is assembled into one unit. All the connections between one part of the novel and another are known only to the agile and ubiquitous mind of the narrator. (99)
Septimus is, in this sense, Clarissa’s surrogate in death. For, Clarissa “recognises how factitious all her attempt to assemble and to connect has been,” and she tries, in the midst of her party, to keep untouched “the privacy of soul, that still point from which one can recognise the hollowness of the social world and feel the attraction of the death everyone carries within him as his deepest reality” (96). When death is the place of true communion, and when Clarissa tries to achieve true communion by protecting “the privacy of soul,” what she can do ultimately is to die. Miller points out that it is because Woolf wishes her heroine to survive that she has to have two protagonists in the novel;
Septimus dies, and Clarissa, having died vicariously, returns to life.
Whether or not death means completion of life and Clarissa survives due to
Septimus’ surrogate death, the loose continuum adumbrated in the novel certainly plays a critical role with respect to not only Septimus’ death but also Clarissa’s sympathy with it and her survival. If there lurks “the privacy of soul” or “a thing that matters” in the deepest layer of the individual’s “cave” – where each individual is connected to each other and life and death, past and present are fused together – then it is exactly this deepest layer of the individual’s cave that spreads throughout the novel, with the employment of a narrative mode which effectively reflects this loose continuity. What I want to accentuate here is that, when the individuals’ caves contain death and past events or thoughts, and when these individuals combine to form a conglomeration, their caves inescapably intuit the collective past represented by history. Woolf writes, in her Diary, that the novel is about life and death (248) and she attempts such a novel by obscuring the temporal boundaries between past and present as well as the spatial boundaries between individuals. As the narrator in Mrs. Dalloway attempts the impossible task of bringing the values of death and past life into daylight existence by burrowing amongst the individuals’ beautiful caves, her narration leads to the foregrounding of the process within the individual by which one’s past is always intertwining with one’s present;５ the process through which they become a part of the collective and a part of history.
Ⅱ
The concepts of life and death delineated here mean, in one sense, what is experienced by each human being at any historical time. On the other hand they could not be considered without the social and political background at the time – which, in the case of Mrs. Dalloway, means particularly the impact of the Great War. In contrast to
the shifting focalisation which traverses toward every direction throughout the novel, the chimes of Big Ben tell the clock-time strictly, and the time when Clarissa’s party is held – June in 1923, four years after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 – is stated specifically. Furthermore, as might be inferred from the fact that she called the Great War “the bloody war” in her diary in 1920 – two years after the War was over – and lamented that “[o]ur generation is daily scourged by the bloody war” (Diary 51), Woolf was profoundly sensible of the trauma or the stigma left by it. It was on account of such factors as the sheer scale of casualties, the far-reaching nature of its effects, combined with the unprecedented use of technology and modern methods of warfare that the First World War – which broke out in 1914 and ended in 1918 – received the epithet the Great War; a name which, because it was the first of its kind, stuck even after the Second World War, where more soldiers and citizens were killed than in the first one.
The Great War compelled, for the first time, people in almost the whole of Europe to get involved on some level – to kill and to be killed, to be deprived of their families.
It was in this war that they used for the first time such technological armoury as tanks, fighters, and machine-guns, with which one could kill a great number of people at one time, without actually seeing whom one was killing. These weapons made it possible for a person to kill a large number of his fellow human beings from a safe distance – to ignore their humanity, that is, the various pleasures and emotions of their life, with the result that casualties were reduced to mere statistics.
As a consequence, the War changed not only people’s way of life through its social and economic destruction, but also had a drastic and inescapable impact on people’s minds. For one thing, as one of the most prominent results of the bloodshed, the innocent belief in civilisation and in the progress of humanity could not survive.
Also, precipitated by the conceptual destabilisation of masculinity as an ideal of the Victorian and Edwardian age and the destabilisation of the patriarchal system in England as well, femininity – its counterpart – was forced to undergo a critical transformation. As a whole people could no longer look at the society they belonged to, or their daily lives, in the same way as they had in the pre-war period, having witnessed so many deaths, so many losses, so much destruction and such terrible chaos.６
Although the narrator of Mrs. Dalloway hardly discusses the War in any direct or obtrusive manner, short and fragmentary descriptions scattered throughout the novel convey its memory. A few paragraphs after the beginning, and just after the description of Clarissa’s admiration of life, the first reference to the War appears:
For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven – over. It was June. (4)
The refrain of “[t]he war was over” or “it was over” offer phrases that paradoxically emphasise that such an event was not over actually but deeply etched in people’s minds.
When Clarissa reads the book of Shakespeare displayed in Hatchard’s shop window, the narrator refers to Lady Bexborough again and admits that “[t]his late age of world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears” (8). Miss Helena Parry, who appears at Clarissa’s party, is described as an “indomitable English woman,”
who – though not losing her son – is “fretful if disturbed by the war, say, which dropped a bomb at her very door” (151). Miss Kilman, whose brother was killed in the War, is
herself persecuted for her German origins. She observes people shuffling “past the tomb of the Unknown Warrior” (113) with ambivalent feeling, presumably brooding over both her brother’s subservience for England and over her own plight during the War.
Moreover, apart from the individuals’ mourning for their family members, people in London seem to be nervous of whatever can be associated with the War. As the aeroplane flying in the sky seems to them “ominous” (17), reminding them of an air raid, so does the “violent explosion” of the motor car which sounds like “a pistol shot” (12) to passers-by on Bond Street.
Thus Woolf shows in diverse ways people’s irredeemable scars caused by the War.
It is in Septimus, however, that what the War has inscribed in people’s minds manifests itself more clearly than in any of the other characters. Volunteering “to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare and Miss Isabel Pole” (73) – that is, to save the humanity Shakespeare delineates and the human happiness his lover, Isabel, embodies – Septimus, the only combatant in the novel, has tried to improve himself in the trenches in compliance with what Mr. Brewer, his ex-employer desired;
consequently “he [Septimus] developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew the attention, indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by name” (73). As a result of this improvement, however, he at last found himself impervious when his officer died:
. . . when Evans was killed . . . Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognizing that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War taught him. It was sublime. He had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive . . . . The last shells missed him. He watched them explode with indifference.
(73)
Satisfied at first with his “feeling very little and very reasonably,” because being too emotional is an obstacle to his “manliness,” this imperviousness eventually induces panic in Septimus’ mind; when he becomes engaged to Rezia, he regrets his inability to feel. This lack of feeling he senses as “the sin for which human nature had condemned him to death” (77), though it is the War that “taught him” that imperviousness. Human nature, he feels, is “on him” – and so are Dr. Holmes and Dr. Bradshaw, the representatives of human nature.
Karen L. Levenback – in Virginia Woolf and the Great War – regards Septimus’
inability to feel as the effect of his experience in the trenches, which is “a place that dissolved the clear distinction between life and death” resulting in a “transgression of categories” (49). Moreover, she argues, Septimus “lacks conscious memory of the war, that is, memory of the war as something past” (50) because, as the combatant loses his sense of the future except for the rest of the war, “time has no significance at all, and
‘the rest’ of the war has not yet occurred” (50) for him. Consequently the war does not remain in his memory; it has become his actuality, which makes him feel that “the postwar world has duplicated the war in the trenches – but without the trenches” (51). In the world after the Great War, however, returning veterans were regarded as “less manly than their service records” (56) and “sympathy and assistance afforded to veterans had all but ceased by 1921” (58). Referring to the government’s Report of the War Office Committee of Inquiry into “Shell-Shock,” Levenback states:
. . . a shell-shock was deemed personally culpable . . . and no hero. By dying, a combatant was grist for the mill of hero makers, the propagandists of the Great War in progress and those who saw to it that survivors and
their experience was forgotten afterward. A dead hero provided a cheap reality capable . . . of perpetuating the myth of war. If a combatant did not die, a financial allotment from the ministry in a small way legitimized his service and in a large way kept him off the street. (60)
On the battlefield a combatant is demanded to be manly and brave, and to fight valiantly, defying his possible death as well as others’; i.e., ignoring the categories of life and death, to become a hero. Once injured, however, he departs from the path of a hero – since only a fighting combatant, never an injured one, represents a hero. The way, therefore, to become a hero is confined to the two alternatives: to adapt himself to the post-war society, concealing his imperviousness nurtured on the battlefield, or else to die in the war as a hero – for a hero is completely finished only by death, which allows him to be “grist for the mill of hero makers,” providing “cheap reality capable of perpetuating the myth of war.” If a combatant survives, like Septimus, he is reduced to a dropout, only a reminder of the disastrous war at whose memory the citizens in the post-war world recoil.
Therefore, Levenback attributes Septimus’ suicide to “the experience of the war in combination with the experience of the post-war world” (70), where “he was deserted” and “[t]he whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sake” (Mrs. Dalloway 78) – concluding that “Septimus was killed in the battle between his self and the post-war world” (77). In other words, he is disintegrated by the insurmountable gap between the sense of values on the battlefield and that in civil society, where people pay no attention to that incongruous gulf.７ That gap became intensified in the Great War, where one could slaughter so easily with highly developed weapons and kill without seeing the casualties.
Thus, it is as a result of Septimus’ diversion from the path to being a hero and his strenuous ambition to become one that he is driven to kill himself. We might ask ourselves the question, then, what constitutes a hero and what form does the masculinity it is based on take? Obviously, for a hero manliness or masculinity is one of the most significant factors, which, as stated before, underwent a critical transformation – or rather, suffered serious damage – during the War. Nevertheless, it not only survived the War but also continued to be a key concept in the perpetuation of patriarchy, nationalism and heroism. It is this masculinity Woolf calls into question, especially in Three Guineas – published thirteen years after Mrs. Dalloway appeared. Before examining Three Guineas, however, it might be better to examine the situation concerning masculinity or sexuality in general during the War.
Ironically, in the War – when manliness or masculinity was admired and encouraged to the greatest degree – it was also profoundly destabilised. Mary Bordon, who worked as a nurse in France and in Belgium in the War, took care of a number of injured soldiers every day, and maintains in “The Forbidden Zone: Blind” that the brave, dependable and heroic image of Victorian masculinity is totally undermined:
There are no men here, so why should I be a woman? There are heads and knees and mangled testicles . . . . There are these things, but no men; so how could I be a woman here and not die of it? Sometimes, suddenly, all in an instant, a man looks up at me from the shambles, a man’s eyes signal or a voice calls “Sister! Sister!” . . . . It is impossible to be a woman here. (95) She contrasts “a man” who possesses a perfect body to one with “heads and knees and mangled testicles,” metaphorising the latter as an emblem of divided and fragmented masculinity. The disintegration of masculinity inflicted that of its counterpart –
femininity – making it impossible “to be a woman.” Ellen N. La Motte, who also worked as a nurse in the War, witnessed the unconquerable gap between the ideal soldiers and the egotistic, rude and indecent behaviour of the injured soldiers:
One had no ideals. The others had ideals, and fought for them. Yet had they? Poor selfish Alexandre, poor vain Felix, poor gluttonous Alphonse, poor filthy Hippolyte – was it possible that each cherished ideals, hidden beneath? Courageous dreams of freedom and patriotism? Yet if so, how could such beliefs fail to influence their daily lives? Could one cherish standards so noble, yet be himself so ignoble, so petty, so commonplace?
(9)
La Motte points out the contradiction between the nature attributed to men and the bearings of the actual injured soldiers. This doubt about the masculinity that a man is supposed to have innately was not exclusive to the experience of nurses at the front. At home also, mothers, daughters, and sisters could not help changing their views about masculinity when they saw their men coming back from the war, hurt, depressed and baffled. If a male body is, from a Freudian point of view, conceptualised as a whole in contradistinction to a female body, which is conceptualised as what is essentially lacked – or castrated – an injured man, whether in body or in mind, represents an incomplete or feminised body. Thus the destabilised concept of masculinity joined that of femininity, no longer standing in opposition to it – so disturbing the traditional polarity of masculinity-femininity.
The collapse of masculinity happened across almost the whole of Europe, transforming people’s sense of gender. Nicola Humble argues that,
For the generation that fought it, and for those who came after, the Great
War changed everything . . . . The effect of gender roles was decisive: the traditional masculine values of honour, martial prowess, and emotional restraint were severely compromised by the futility of the mass-slaughter and the trauma that followed . . . . The result was the formation, in the years immediately following the war, of new codes of masculinity, and a concomitant shift in the qualities associated with the feminine. (195) Septimus has pursued in the trenches “the traditional masculine values of honour, martial prowess, and emotional restraint,” which have made him “feel little and reasonably” when Evans was killed. Paradoxically, after the successful pursuit of being a masculine hero, he has in the end become the least heroic man, disintegrating from within his mind. In this respect, Septimus – a castrated man – might be considered to have joined the ranks of the feminine.
Even if “the traditional masculine values . . . were severely compromised” and there appeared a “new code of masculinity,” people in the post-war world, especially amongst London’s dominant classes, tried to suppress – even hated – this undermining of their masculinity. Levenback makes clear the predominance of this conservative tendency familiar to Woolf:
She[Woolf] particularly calls attention to those in the upper (or upper-middle) quadrant of the social system who maintain a prewar sense of the continuity of time, what Fussell sees as the prewar mind-set, which never questioned historical continuity and saw the Great War “taking place within a seamless, purposeful ‘history’ involving a coherent stream of time running from past through present to future” (Great War, 21) . . . . The “new independence” experienced by women, a holdover from the war, is
observed but not considered in the context of the war. (53-54)
Traditional masculinity is naturally embedded in the linear and continuous model of history where time’s passage is static and coherent, and which supports a patriarchal and hierarchal system. While Septimus can no longer maintain the traditional, historical ideal of masculinity, he has to live in post-war London in which people still cherish “a seamless, purposeful ‘history’ involving a coherent stream of time running from past through present to future,” adhering to the model of masculinity associated with it. This chasm between the loss of and the adherence to masculinity is one of the significant triggers of his collapse. The connection between masculinity and the status of “war hero” is therefore one of the main undercurrents in Mrs. Dalloway.
Little wonder, then, that Woolf – when writing Mrs. Dalloway – not only looked backwards at the Great War, but also dealt with the ongoing rise of fascism and the possibility of a fascist regime becoming successfully established in the future. When Mussolini took over the Facta Government in October 1922, Woolf admitted in her diary that she had conceived a plan for the novel that would become Mrs. Dalloway (Diary 209). Her critique of fascism is present in embryonic form in Mrs. Dalloway and she develops it more fully in Three Guineas, a piece of aesthetic writing where she associates it with masculinity.
The speaker in Three Guineas responds, in the form of a fictitious letter, to a gentleman who asks her to support him against fascism and war. Reiterating the phrase,
“how . . . are we to prevent war?” (3), the speaker points out three strategically important institutions: a women’s college set up to endow women with higher education, an organisation for women to enter professional life, and the gentleman’s anti-fascist organisation. The speaker has no intention, however, of joining this gentleman’s
organisation, since she knows it will never repudiate the traditional gender relations which she believes ultimately underlie the desire for war. Instead she recommends founding the Outsider’s Society for women to neutralise the gender system, standing on the very threshold between the public and the private.
The speaker suggests how men monopolise public and professional life by relegating women to the private sphere, and in so doing they utilise the power of visual imagery in an effective way. She calls attention to men’s professional uniform, which they wear “to emphasise their superiority over other people, either in birth or intellect, by dressing differently, or by adding titles before, or names after” (21). Through this visible token of men’s superiority, women are lured into investing them with desire – provided, in return, “with maid; with carriage; with fine clothes; with fine parties” (37).
Marie-Luise Gättens points out, in “Three Guineas, Fascism, and the Construction of Gender,” the correspondence of the fixed nature of women’s position – i.e., the carrot and stick policy described in Three Guineas – to those ideals espoused by the Nazis. For a definite and outspoken advocate of the rigid gender policy based on biological difference, the Nazis clearly made a distinction between men’s sphere, the public, and that of women, the private. Even in the Nazi organisation, the women’s sphere was confined to the Women’s Bureau. It is worth noting, however, that Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the chief of the Women’s Bureau, was not only deeply satisfied with the work but never doubted her autonomy. Gättens indicates the Nazis’ elaborate and shrewd configuration of women:
While Hitler reduces women to their biology and thus leaves no doubt about their subordinate status in the National Socialist state, he simultaneously flatters all those who are allowed to think of themselves as
‘German’ women by conferring superior status on them over all other non-German beings. The combination of requiring subordination and simultaneously granting elevation fundamentally characterized Nazi ideology. (26)
Thus strengthening the myth of the unity of the “German” race, and at the same time creating the inferior “other non-German beings” to confer German women “superior status,” the Nazis manipulatively captured the minds of German women. Moreover, as Hitler “explicitly link[ed] motherhood to the Nazis’ national and racial project of the Nation” – as if the nation were an extended family – women could feel their work as mother within the family valuable but “non-political” (26). It was this non-political sense of women, Gätten argues, that made the Women’s Bureau work so successfully.
As a matter of fact, “[t]he myth of the non-political status of women within their sphere of family and home was skillfully employed, in fact, in order to thoroughly politicise and control this sphere” (27).８ Woolf detected that this deceptive seclusion of women into the private sphere was similar to that in England, leaving the public sphere as a space for men to pursue war, and ultimately, fascist tendencies.
Woolf demonstrates this link between the public or professional and war or fascism, by juxtaposing two photographs: one is that of a procession of military men in uniform, and the other ruined houses and dead bodies. Within the military, the most emblematic profession of the Empire, the most sublime treasure is masculinity – as it was for Septimus during the War – requiring values, such as fixity, rigidity and self-abstinence, which the Nazis employed in order to consolidate their fascist regime.
Between Three Guineas and Mrs. Dalloway a certain thematic coherence seems to lie. For one thing, Clarissa is positioned far from the military-fascist attitude both in
character and in her way of thinking. Wandering around here and there in her mind, she never thinks linearly, but capriciously and amorphously – cherishing “the privacy of soul” or “private beauty” which the speaker in Three Guineas persuades the reader to respect. In contradistinction to Clarissa appears Sir William, who, observing modern science and “Proportion and Conversion,” tries to invade Septimus’ inner mind in the name of the professional and public. Also, the military procession that Peter in Mrs.
Dalloway witnesses has every trait that the speaker in Three Guineas indicates in the procession featured therein: “[b]oys in uniform . . . marched with their eyes ahead of them,” and with their expression “praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England,”
“on they marched . . . in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life . . . had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths” (Mrs.
Dalloway 43). The uniformity and rigidity of the boys’ procession anticipates that craved for fascism.９
In addition to this, if Septimus can be regarded as failing to keep hold of his masculinity and to acquire a valid position in the public through having diverted from the path to being a hero, it is presumably because of his diversion from the public sphere or because of his joining femininity that his death resonates so much with Clarissa. Appropriately enough, she does penetrate the nature of his agony caused by the encroachment of Sir William – who embodies the public, patriarchy, or masculinity. She can sympathise with Septimus, who dies shaking off masculinity – the grounds for the traditional historical continuity represented by “a coherent stream of time.” Septimus, then, embodies the difficulty that a man without masculinity suffers in a masculine-oriented society; so that finally he is offered the possibility of moving into the world of Clarissa, who embodies original “castrated” femininity, always wandering
about in her mind and thereby nullifying linear time.
In addition to the deployment of the characters’ and Clarissa’s way of thinking, the narrative mode of Mrs. Dalloway itself shows the diversion from “a coherent stream of time.” All of its aspects are incompatible with linearity or uniformity; the frequent shift of perspective, the rejection of rigid grammar and the ambiguous fusion of the past and the present. The effect of these narrative strategies results in the expansion of a kind of loose continuity, where there is no clear and strict boundaries either temporarily or spatially; ironically, this continuity emerges most clearly when contrasted with the assignment of an exact date, or the time-telling chimes of Big Ben – that is, the metonym of linear historical time.
Ⅲ
This method of Woolf’s implicates not only the critical conception of the War as an event conforming to the category of historical linear time, but also as a response to the time which produces the War. The discursive continuum and the narrative strategy that enables it are never the outcome of a purely technical development in literature but reflect the perceptual innovations of modernity, which require the formation of a new style. In the early twentieth century when Woolf wrote her works a mood of comprehensive change, which took many forms, was prevalent. The further industrialisation progressed, the more drastically the modern world underwent an inevitable transformation in every aspect – in social, economic, technological and philosophical dimensions.
It is the word, modernism, that indicates this vast and radical transformation which broke out around the turn of the century throughout the West – although, as
Randall Stevenson points out, modernism is:
. . . a critical construct, a recognition, some years after writers completed the works involved, of substantial similarities, even a collective identity, in the initiatives they took and the styles and concerns which they made a priority. (8)
Certainly, modernism is named “some years after writers completed the works involved” as “a critical construct” or “a collective identity,” and yet it also has another aspect of motivation. As Pamela L. Caughie insists, in the introduction in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, modernism is not only “simply critical inductions convenient for describing certain family resemblances,” but a “testing of the limits of aesthetic construction” with the “strong thrust toward the verges of the aesthetic experience.” That is because, “after the nineteenth century had established a remarkably safe, intimate centre where the artist and the audience could dwell, the twentieth century reaches out to the freakish circumferences of art” (viii-ix).
Whatever “the freakish circumferences of art” may be, modernism or modernity, to which it is linked etymologically, is inescapably and intricately involved with technology which, offering “the control of nature and the rationalisation of production and social process,” is “central to the modern worldview and to modern capitalist society, as are versions of the self and body” (Armstrong 158). Doubtless, human nature could not avoid the effect of this profound and far-reaching undulation of society, as Woolf declares in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”:
All human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and
literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.
(320)
Although Woolf does not specify it as a tangible trait of the shift or the change, newly introduced technology – especially those utilised in everyday life, such as photography, motor cars and film – induced altogether a tremendous effect on human perception, and consequently, human relations: Kodak, the first camera that was easy to use for non-experts, was launched in 1888; “the mass production of motor cars by assembly-line methods, which started in 1921, both responded to and created a booming mass market and brought a continuous fall in price” (Minow-Pinkney 161); the cinema already attracted huge crowds in the 1920s.
Woolf showed not a little interest in these new technologies. As for the camera, Maggie Humm declares, in “Virginia Woolf’s Photography and the Monk’s House Albums,” that “[f]rom the age of fifteen, photographs framed Virginia Woolf’s world”
and that “[p]hotography was a continuous part of the Woolfs’ lives” (219) – despite
“Bloomsbury’s denigration of photography” (223) – resulting in seven albums in Monk’s House, many of the photographs in which were taken by Woolf herself (231).
Humm also states that, like contemporaries such as James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and H.D., “the Woolfs and the Bells were cinemagoers fully aware of film’s stylistic devices, such as montage” (229).
“[E]xploring the relationship between Woolf’s art and the new technological conditions of the age” (160), Makiko Minow-Pinkney – in “Virginia Woolf and the Age of Motor Car” – focuses on the motor car as one of the most predominant technological innovations of the time. The Woolfs bought a second-hand motor car, Singer, on 15 July 1927 and during that summer “they could ‘talk of nothing but cars’ and ‘all images
are . . . tinged with driving a motor’” (160). Complaining of noise and contamination by motor cars as Woolf was at first, the Woolfs soon became “intrepid motorists” (162).
Woolf delineates, as Minow-Pinkney suggests, the radically change to the landscape caused by the speed of driving a motor car in Orlando. Arriving in the twentieth century and driving a motor car, Orlando senses people reduced to “bees” which “buzzed and hummed round the plate-glass window” until she regains her perspective and realised that “they are bodies” (285). Yet Woolf, caught between two contradictory sensations – that is, freedom versus confinement – found that the movement of the motor car provided “a liberatory trope for non-linear thought and narrative form” (Diary 75). It is not, however, just a matter of a trope, Minow-Pinkney argues, but that of the new human perception and aesthetic it requires:
. . . motoring, together with other experiences distinctive to the modern age of technology, affects the human sensory organization itself, which, dissolving its linear cohesion, necessitates new modes of thought and aesthetic representation adjusted to it. (163)
As motoring “affects human sensory organisation itself,” so does film as one of the
“other experiences distinctive to the modern age of technology.” The techniques of film like cut, record, close-up, reserve, replay, all incur the disruption and fragmentation of coherent perception. It is this “shock experience” which, Minow-Pinkney argues, connects Walter Benjamin to Woolf since, she confesses in Moments of Being, “shock experience” is an indispensable motivation for her writing.
As industrialisation and the concomitant concentration of capital developed in the nineteenth century, the corpulence and crowdedness of the city was intensified along with the development of the traffic network. If modernity can never be separated from
these conditions, together with the aforementioned disruptive experience that it entails, then neither can modern man be extricated from the sea of people that characterises the metropolitan or urban experience. Already in the middle of the nineteenth century William Wordsworth – in “Residence in London” from The Prelude – refers to the metropolitan experience of being immersed in people or objects endlessly and constantly as “the endless stream of men, and moving things” (198), or “the moving pageant” (208). In this respect, Pinkney quotes Raymond William’s remarks regarding
“a quintessentially modern ‘set of physical and sense relationships’; the poet feels a crisis of the dissolution of self-identity,” and maintains that “Williams claims this is the first expression of what has since become a dominant experience of the city” (164).
Benjaman confers the name “shock experience” (Benjamin 158) on this phenomenon. He defines “shock experience” as both critical to our consideration of modernity and central to the urban experience of Baudelaire, who Benjamin defines as both the first modernist and last lyrical poet. Baudelaire articulates, in The Painter of Modern Life, his famous definition of modernity, and provides many sketches of fragments of modern life – offering the word flâneur to describe a new type of idler in the metropolitan city. He seems to enjoy his life “incognito wherever he goes,” as “[t]he lover of life makes the whole world into his family.” Baudelaire extends his idea as follows:
So the lover of life of the universe enters into the masses as into a huge reservoir of electrical energy. He may also be compared to a mirror as huge as the masses themselves; to a kaleidoscope endowed with awareness, which at each of its movements reproduces the multiplicity of life and the restless grace of all life’s elements. (29)
Another “lover of life” along these lines is the narrator of Woolf’s “Street Haunting,”
who “shed[s] the self” and “become[s] part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable,” sharing with Baudelaire a kind of euphoria in urban circumstance. The narrator, like Baudelaire, wanders about the sea of people and objects, enjoying their movement, finding joy in the encounter with people, each of whom lives his or her own life respectively. Clarissa submits to a similar experience, encountering a lot of people and objects in London, and responding to and enjoying them whether she knows them or not. Either the narrator in “Street Haunting” or Clarissa, therefore, is a flâneur or flâneuse in London which is – owing to such innovations as the aeroplane or the car – much more dense and fast-paced than seventy years before.
Baudelaire’s image of “a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness,” which
“presents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity, and the flowing grace of all the elements” in the crowd like “an enormous reservoir of electricity” is remarkably similar to Woolf’s own ideas. What a writer should be, she states in “The Modern Fiction,” is precisely this “kaleidoscope”:
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday . . . (106)
It is this state of mind that Woolf attempts to express when writing Mrs. Dalloway. As
“a kaleidoscope endowed with awareness,” Clarissa and other characters in the novel articulate the “myriad impressions” and “an incessant shower of innumerable atoms”
which come “from all sides” through “shock experience”; in other words, they
“reproduce the multiplicity of life.” As a result, together with the people or objects surrounding them, they seem to converge into an entirely new world. In relation to the interpenetrative relationship between external impressions and inner consciousness that is so central to modern experience, Baudelaire defines modernity as “ephemeral, fugitive, contingent upon the occasion,” and advocates it by saying “[t]his ephemeral and fugitive element, subject to so frequent metamorphoses, is not to be despised or ignored” (32).
However, even if a modern “lover of life” enjoys his or her anonymity, receiving
“shock experience,” he or she could not be immune to the crisis of human perception that arises when “shock experience” becomes normal; he or she can no longer seize the cohesive or coherent view, immersed in constant and fragmentary excitation. That might be why Woolf elaborated her tunnelling process, which achieves its purpose by
“plunging” into individual minds one after another and creates a loose unity as a way of confronting the fragmented human perception and identity. Stevenson appears finally to also support this point:
But many contemporary authors, the modernists in particular, viewed the new technologies, speeds and stresses of modern life a good deal more sceptically than enthusiastically, especially after the First World War. . . Unlike Futurism, modernism neither welcomed nor accepted the death of space and time. Instead – like much contemporary philosophy – it attempted a kind of surgery to keep these dimensions alive and open in human terms; reshaped in ways which could continue to allow an integral, significant existence to be construed as the natural condition of individual
