by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's homage to the delicate web of past, present, neighbors and strangers, that affects us every day whether we acknowledge it or not.
Reviewed by: A.F. Morrow
About A.F. Morrow
What a lark! What a plunge! The war is over, the roses are blooming, and brides-to-be are selecting underlinens shot through with white ribbon across the way. What, really, has more flawless promise that a sunny June day?
Mrs Dalloway is about beginnings and what inevitably happens when we set out from them. Choices are made: the consequences of which reside in us, sometimes quietly, sometimes welling up more noisily as they do on this day. If a choice proves wrong, oh, it's hard to bear. Better to focus on the beginnings: June air: summer stretching out ahead, morning's promise. The day is not yet determined; no time's been wasted, or worse, misspent.
"What the heck is the big deal about Mrs Dalloway?" a friend asked me, "the plot is practically Seinfeldian in its lack of action and it's full of fussing about meaningless social details". Exactly. Remember William Carlos Williams' poem about the image of a passing fire truck that inspired Demeuth's painting "I Saw the Figure Five in Gold"? It's just an image, in word or paint, of clanging bells, a big red fast truck full of capable men, and the momentary disruption of a wet city street. The image carries different nuance and meaning for each viewer, as it should, and in the best Modernist sense, conveys a moment that we can all understand.
"Mrs. Dalloway" is an image. An image of a day. A beautiful June day that starts out like a young person, scrubbed clean, brimming with promised, unmarred by any of the life choices yet to be made. What a lark! What a plunge! Mrs. Dalloway thinks as she steps out into the sunny June morning on her famous flower-buying errand. Yet, it is not this morning that she is reacting to. The image Woolf is giving us is one we've all had. The moment when one steps out to work or errands and realizes that the day is glorious, that we should be on the beach, tanned and windblown. We are transported back to a moment, perhaps trading shells with a young friend whose name we can't remember but who loved the way the sun caught in our brown hair and danced. Is that image the story of today, a fine June morning, or of the long-gone June when Clarissa Dalloway opened the french doors to the sea air and thought "What a lark! What a plunge!" And young Peter said to her "communing among the cabbages?" It is both simultaneously. She can hear him now, and see the tilt of his head as he admired her among the gardens: an image clear though stored for decades, to bubble up in this same crisp June air.
As Clarissa proceeds on her errands, we are drawn through her stream of consciousness. The lack of action and the minutiae that well up into her thoughts are as overwhelming as they are familiar, for this is human experience. Walking through London and buying yellow roses, Clarissa thinks of that June morning as a young woman with Peter, and our understanding of her errand and her day is filtered through all of that, through what was (a friendship) and what might have been (a romance? Another kind of life altogether?). As all experience is filtered through the set of values and presupposed factors, readers of "Mrs Dalloway" are drawn through a sifting mixture of perceptions and details, to which Woolf adds yet another layer of experience, the consciousness of those passing by, and this is where the novel departs into it's own somewhat unique territory.
As Clarissa maneuvers through London streets to buy her flowers, she ruminates on those who'll attend her party. A neighbor admires her fine 'birdlike' countenance. Septimus Warren Smith sits on a bench struggling with the madness that will overtake him by evening; his wife Lucrezia sits next to him, her ramrod straight spine and steely gaze belying her powerlessness. A Scottish girl passes, terrified at the bustle of the city, a matron sizes her up knowingly and silently warns her off the men who'll prey on her youth. Which of these characters are pivotal, which inconsequential, which of these passing folks will change Mrs Dalloway's life in some way? Which indeed, Woolf seems to be saying, which of these hugely diverse characters could you do without? And are you qualified to choose?
Pressed up against fellow city-dwellers, jostling elbows with strangers, London is an organism, a unified whole that takes its place as a character in the novel and adds a gritty reality to Mrs Dalloway's evening. Her party may glitter with the social success that she has burnished for years but to her credit she doesn't deny the ugliness within her community, and that it affects her. She and Septimus may only share an acquaintance, a slender thread of common experience, but Clarissa Dalloway feels a keen connection to his plight. It is this slim connection to Septimus that most affects her as she considers her long day, and I find it is the paradox of this connection that brings me back to "Mrs. Dalloway" time and again.
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Copyright © by A.F. Morrow, 2003
Reviewed by A.F. Morrow:
-- Fall on Your Knees - by Ann-Marie Macdonald
-- October Sky, originally published as Rocket Boys - by Homer H. Hickam, Jr.
-- I Know This Much Is True - by Wally Lamb
-- Mrs. Dalloway - by Virginia Woolf
-- My Dream of You - by Nuala O'Faolain
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