Mrs Dalloway

-Virginia Woolf

(This is the original cover of Mrs Dalloway, designed by Vanessa Bell, the Modernist painter and
Virginia Woolf’s sister)

The Plot

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about one day in the lives of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith. The
novel unfolds through the stream of consciousness technique which explores the thoughts,
emotions and memories of the characters. Mrs. Dalloway was going to host a party in the evening
and she spends her day making arrangements for the party while reflecting on her life so far. She
thinks about her youth and her friends, then about her marriage to Richard Dalloway and about her
daughter Elizabeth. We get a glimpse of the fractures in her apparently perfect life. Her marriage
lacks the kind of passion she would have liked. She does not understand her daughter’s hopes and
wishes. She herself is growing old and life is hardly what it seems. Septimus Smith, was a war
veteran who returned to England after the WW I. He was suffering from post-traumatic stress
disorder. He and his young wife Lucrezia were trying to find the best treatment for him. He however
was paranoid and absolutely depressed. The world seemed strange to him and he was unable to
make sense of the anything. Death seemed the only way out for him. His suicidal tendencies
however deeply troubled his young wife. She desperately tried to make life easier for him. At
Clarissa’s party in the evening, it is revealed that Septimus jumped to his death and the news upsets
her. Septimus acts as a foil to Clarissa, whose survival becomes possible because of the death of
Septimus.

Major Characters:

 Clarissa Dalloway – The protagonist of the novel, through whose consciousness the novel
mostly unfolds.
 Septimus Warren Smith - A World War I veteran suffering from shell shock.
  Peter Walsh - A close friend of Clarissa’s, who was once desperately in love with her and had
proposed marriage to her, when she was eighteen. When she rejected him, he left for India
where he stayed for five years and had only just returned to London.
 Sally Seton - A close friend of Clarissa and Peter in their youth. Sally was a wild and beautiful
girl who smoked cigars and had no regard for social convention. She and Clarissa were
sexually attracted to one another as teenagers. Sally later married, had five boys and lived in
Manchester. Her married name is Lady Rosseter.
 Richard Dalloway - Clarissa’s husband. A member of Parliament in the Conservative
government.
 Lucrezia Smith (Rezia) - Septimus’s Italian wife. Rezia loves Septimus but is forced to bear the
burden of his mental illness alone.
 Elizabeth Dalloway - Clarissa and Richard’s only child. She was seventeen year old. Disliked
parties and jewellery and clothes. Liked being in the country with her father and dogs. She
spent a great deal of time praying with her history teacher, the religious Miss Kilman, and
wanted to have a career unlike her mother.
 Evans - Septimus’s wartime officer and close friend. Evans died in Italy just before the
armistice, but Septimus, in his deluded state, continues to see and hear him behind trees
and sitting room screens. During the war, Evans and Septimus were inseparable. Evans was a
shy Englishman with red hair.

Minor Characters:
 Hugh Whitbread - Clarissa’s old friend, married to Evelyn Whitbread. An impeccable
Englishman and upholder of English tradition.
 Evelyn Whitbread- Clarissa’s friend. Hugh Whitbread’s wife. Evelyn suffers from an
unspecified internal ailment and spends much of her time in nursing homes.
 Dr. Holmes - Septimus’s general practitioner to whom Lucrezia had initially taken Septimus
but who recommended that they should go to consult Sir William Bradshaw.
 Sir William Bradshaw - A renowned London psychiatrist. Lucrezia and Septimus goes to him
for consultation about his psychological problems. Sir William believes that all psychological
problems are the result of a “lack of proportion.” He determines that Septimus has suffered
a complete nervous breakdown and recommends that Septimus spend time in the country,
apart from Lucrezia.
 Lady (Millicent) Bruton - A member of high society and a friend of the Dalloways.
 Miss Helena Parry (Aunt Helena) - Clarissa’s aunt. She is eighty years old and a formidable
lady. She represents the conservative English society Clarissa finds confining.
 Daisy Simmons - Peter Walsh’s lover in India, married to a major in the Indian army. Daisy is
twenty-four years old and has two small children. Peter is in London to arrange her divorce.

What is the novel about?

  Modernist Text:
a) Narrative devices - Stream of Consciousness
b) Time and Memory
 Anti-War Text: Septimus Warren Smith

Virginia Woolf was writing during the Modernist period (end of 19 th century to beginning of 20th
century). Modernism was characterized by a break away from traditions and traditional views and
beliefs. Malcolm Bradbury and McFarlane describe Modernism as “An art of rapidly modernizing
world, a world of rabid industrial development, advanced technology, urbanization, secularization
and mass forms of social life” but also “the art of a world from which many traditional certainties
had departed”. The Modernist writers were trying their best to represent a fragmented reality and
life. (Refer to your class-notes, when we discussed about the numerous short-lived movements in
visual arts- Impressionism, Expressionism, Symbolism, Pointillism, Dadaism, Cubism, Futurism,
Surrealism, among others. The artists were all trying to find the most apt way of representing a
fragmented reality. Therefore, they were all experimenting with numerous and diverse techniques.)
Similarly, in literature as well, the writers were trying to break free of the earlier rigid techniques of
form and structure and trying to experiment with techniques. (Refer to Woolf’s “Modern Fiction”
and “Mr. Brown and Mrs. Bennett”, where she is exploring new techniques of representation that
focus more on the psychological reality of the characters rather than their external reality.) James
Joyce in A Portrait of An Artist as a young man, had already used the stream of consciousness as a
narrative tool to depict the psychological reality of his characters. Also, think about, Ezra Pound, who
was advocating experimentation through his slogan “Make it New”.

Virginia Woolf demonstrates the power of the modernist literary form to delve into the psyche of
the characters. The external reality is not as important as the psychological reality of the individuals.
Woolf's stream-of-consciousness narrative form corresponds to the trauma survivor's perception of
time. For a trauma survivor, the traumatic event is ever-present. It dominates his psyche and
intermingles with his non-traumatic memories, to create a fragmented perception of reality. Time
for such individuals is warped and fragmented. It runs on a continuous unending loop and the
traumatic even runs on in his or her mind. The linear chronology or sequence is lost. The only way of
expression available to humans - language also fails to express this experience that even the mind
cannot comprehend. Woolf’s narrative is also woven in a similar fashion. The narrative mingles the
past and the present through flashbacks. The Stream of Consciousness is a narrative technique that
has been used by many authors of the twentieth century to depict the thoughts and feelings of
characters. The term was coined by the psychologist William James in Principles of Psychology,
published in 1890, in which he defines it as “nothing joined; it flows. A river and a stream are the
metaphors by which it is most naturally described”. The Stream of Consciousness can be defined as
the continuous flow of thoughts, images, feelings, memories and emotions in the character’s mind,
or as a device that gives the reader a direct and deep access to human’s mind and psyche. It can also
be defined as “A literary technique or a device that aims to depict the multitudinous flow of
thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind”.

The novel Mrs Dalloway, unfolds through the inner thoughts of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus
Smith. The plot becomes secondary to the memories and the stream of thoughts and emotions of
these two characters. The novel describes one day (24 hrs) in the lives of the two main characters, in
1923 – an upper-class housewife Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith – a veteran of the First World
War suffering from shell shock. During its writing, Woolf conceived of her method as a ‘tunnelling
process’ whereby she ‘dig[s] out beautiful caves behind my characters’ with the idea that ‘the caves
shall connect, & each comes today light at the present moment’. Therefore, what Woolf attempted
to do was to delve deep into the psyche of her characters.

The complex interweaving of time and memory is responsible for making the readers aware that
while the clock may make the passage of time, the mind has its own measure of time that does not
follow the clock. Therefore, there is a clear distinction between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ worlds. In
Time and Free Will (1888), Henri Bergson distinguishes between the ‘historical’ time, which is
external and linear, and in the novel marked by the booming of the Big Ben and the ‘psychological’
time, which is subjective and non-linear. Woolf believed that any external event was significant only
in terms of the response it garners in one’s inner life. An incident which was only a brief flash in
chronological time could have a far greater impact on an individual’s consciousness while even a
historically momentous event could leave on imprint on an individual’s mind.

The narrative constantly shifts between the past and the present. The novel begins with Clarissa
Dalloway planning to buy flowers for a party she was going to host in the evening. Through her
memories we are then taken back in time, when she was a young girl and had to choose between
Peter Walsh and Richard Dalloway. She also fondly remembered the moment of passion between
herself and Sally Seton, now also married. Mrs Dalloway remembers the kiss between her and Sally
Seaton as a Sapphic island in a sea of patriarchy. Clarissa enjoys the sights of London and then drifts
into her memories. The emphasis is on the thoughts and feelings of the characters rather than on
their actions. Virginia Woolf convinces us that time has meaning only in terms of human experience.

The narrative shifts not only between the past and the present but also between the different
characters. We see how the sound of a car backfiring, a sky-writing plane, the song of a flower-seller
and the striking of Big Ben are among the novel’s points of transition between different
consciousnesses. We see a transition from the inner thoughts of Clarissa to Septimus’s when Mrs
Dalloway is in Miss Pym’s flower shop and the car comes to a screeching halt. Mrs Pym calls out
while ‘‘going to the window to look, and coming back and smiling apologetically with her hands full
of sweet peas, as if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars, were all her fault’’. The narrative
shifts to the glimpses caught by ‘passers-by’ of the car itself. Then a certain Edgar J. Watkiss is heard
to proclaim ‘‘The Proime Minister’s kyar.’’ Attention now turns to Septimus Warren Smith ‘‘who
himself unable to pass, heard him’’. Then the narrative then plunges into the consciousness of
Septimus Smith.

Septimus had fought in the First World War and when he returned from the war, he had changed
immensely. The harsh realities of the war had traumatised him and he had become incapable of
leading a normal life. While strolling in the Regent Park with his wife, Lucrezia, he felt
uncomfortable. The other strollers in the park also find his behaviour unusual. Even the environment
seemed to make him paranoid. He shut his eyes to prevent himself from going mad but “They
beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. Sparrows, everything rising and falling in a pattern, full
of meaning.” Through Septimus, Woolf has been successful in depicting the horrors of the war.
Septimus’s psychological breakdown happened after his officer Evans is killed in the war. He began
to have the symptoms that are likely to follow dreadful events and are now so familiar to us as Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder. At night he had panic attacks and awful dreams. He had completely lost
his interest in life. Eventually he “gives way,” “surrenders,” to depression, doesn’t move or react. Dr
Holmes who was treating him did not understand his condition and believed that Septimus should
be ashamed of talking to his wife about killing himself. The next doctor they went to consult was Sir
William Bradshaw. Bradshaw correctly diagnosed that Septimus was suffering from “delayed shell-
shock,” the nervous breakdown due to war trauma. However, he was unable to prescribe the correct
form of treatment for him.

Modernist literature is a literature of trauma. The modernist narrative form of Woolf's novel
brilliantly mirrors the mind of a trauma survivor like Septimus. In fact, the modernist literary works
written in the decade after World War I constitute a literature of trauma: their forms often replicate
the damaged psyche of a trauma survivor and their contents often portray his characteristic
disorientation and despair. Trauma inevitably damages the victim's faith in the assumptions he has
held in the past about himself and the world and leaves him struggling to find new, more reliable
ideologies to give order and meaning to his post-traumatic life. Like trauma survivors, the modernist
writers suffered a similar loss of faith in the ideologies of the past and particularly in the literary
forms that emerged from those ideologies. Their works depict in both form and content a modern
age severed from the traditions and values of the past first by new discoveries in such fields as
psychology, anthropology, physics, and biology, and later by the First World War's unprecedented
destruction.

On this June day, though, he was on the verge of absolute breakdown. His hallucination represented
“the return of the repressed.” Septimus was disabled by fearful trauma. As part of the intricate
tapestry of the day in June his death became inevitable. None of the ideas about treatment were to
be of any use. He was the necessary death in life for Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway vividly shows how
British society had to struggle to pretend that nothing unusual had resulted from the war and that
any casualties were heroic. A psychologically disturbed ex-soldier was unthinkable. Septimus's war
trauma, however, is perpetuated and its psychological damage aggravated by a culturally prescribed
process of postwar reintegration that silences and marginalizes war veterans. Even Clarissa becomes
quite upset when someone at her party mentions Septimus’ suicide. She wonders “what business
had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself. And they talked of
it at her party – the Bradshaws, talked of death.” Throughout the novel the two never meet each
other, yet Septimus emerges as the alter-ego/ spiritual double of Clarissa where her death-wish is
fulfilled when Septimus leaps from the window (to commit suicide).