Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf - Book Report/Review Example

"Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too"(14). This is our lingering impression of Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway, on the other hand, is the life-loving Clarissa: "In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jungle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June" (4). Besides the beak nose and the love for Shakespeare, what exactly is common between Woolf's charming and vivacious high society lady and the troubled war-veteran in Mrs. Dalloway Their individual conflicts and the respective resolutions show them to be quite similar yet very different as characters. Mrs. Dalloway, written in a stream-of-consciousness style, shows us more of the inner workings of the minds of various characters, rather than external dialog. Woolf has described her method of characterization in these words: "I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humor, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment" [ Woolf 's Diary, August 20, 1923]. In the case of Clarissa and Septimus, Woolf's tunneling of caves behind her characters has resulted in an extraordinary chiaroscuro: here the lights and shades in both Clarissa and Septimus seem to merge and unite and yet remain distinct. Though they never meet each other in person, and Septimus remains totally unaware of Clarissa's existence, he seems to be Clarissa's alter-ego, a personified version of what she has suppressed and changed in herself for all her life. The character of each balances the other out in the universe of Mrs. Dalloway: each is conflicted, but while Septimus chooses death to validate his life and ultimately resolve his conflicts, his death helps Clarissa resolve her own conflicts in a moment of clarity, and she goes on with life, and Woolf makes us the witness of these two processes by taking us into their minds. One of the things that Woolf makes immediately apparent in Clarissa is her ability to live fully in the moment and live the moment fully and love it: "What she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab.'' (p.9). Not only is she in love with the moment, she is able to immerse herself completely in beautiful moments, moments when she can get to the very core meaning of life, moments instinctively realized in such breathtaking beauty that, "If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy,"(p.35). When Woolf takes us into Clarissa's mind, we are able to glimpse this near-religious experience, when all her senses unite to make her feel life with an almost painful intensity. Some moments bring her to the point where no experience remains but death. But she combats this fear of the intensity of life with her passion for living, despite the reminder and the warning :"Fear no more the heat o' the sun / Nor the furious winter's rages,''(p.9). Her love of life, "What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her...", (p.1) brings with it moments not only of regret and second thoughts when she wonders what life would have been like with Peter who she had rejected, or wonders about Sally who she had loved, but also of pure, unadulterated fear: Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one's parents giving it into one's 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. Even now, quite often if Richard had not been there reading the Times, so that she could crouch like a bird and gradually revive, send roaring up that immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another, she must have perished. (p. 204 ) She has decided not to give in to the fear and the genuine reality of life, and evades it by living her life on the surface, by throwing parties, by bringing people together even if it is temporary and superficial. She engages in socially acceptable behavior, keeps up a constant stream of convivial chatter and tries to please the people around her. This means that her depths are not understood by her husband Richard, or her daughter Elizabeth, or even by the Sally she had once loved: she is in reality as isolated as Septimus. Her dilemma lies in how to be at one with the world and its underlying truth ( which no one understood) and break down the barriers around her: "[H] ere was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love" ( p. 193). Her conflict arose from a need to break down the barriers of her own fears and those imposed by society, without destroying herself in the process. Her solution was to project her self out, to seek sustenance in her surroundings by making them part of her, and put parts of herself into them, and Woolf shows this expertly through the images in Clarissa's mind. "[H] ere, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; . . . 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.(p. 12) . She wanted to keep the intensities of life and death at bay, but Septimus brought them home to her, even amid her attempt at an affirmation of life, her party: "Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here's death, she thought" (p.183). Death becomes for her the only way for true communication, a communication she vicariously experiences through Septimus's act of ending his life: it is not the facile and superficial communication that occurs at her parties, which are part of public consciousness. "A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death". (p. 280-281) Clarissa finally accepted that her life, and her love for it would remain only if she went back "to assemble", and cover the truth in "chatter". Not so with Septimus. He was willing to die for his truth, to preserve his sense of his own sense of privacy, yet break down all barriers. Woolf shows us a Septimus who was not always a scarred war-veteran: "Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square".(p.30). We meet him on the last day of his life, but by using the stream-of-consciousness technique Woolf takes us back and forth in his life, and shows us how the horrors of war have changed him forever, killing off all his earlier feelings and replacing them with a painful sensitivity to his surroundings. He sees "beauty, exquisite beauty...languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in...inexhaustible charity and intention to provide him...with beauty, more beauty!" (p. 31) and comes to the belief that it is up to him to share the knowledge of this beauty with everyone else. While his perception of beauty is similar to Clarissa's, only more sensitized, he cannot hold on to a social sanity like her because his previous experiences have been too traumatic: Septimus Warren Smith, whose experience in the war has led him to a state of mind in which he cannot respond at all to the reality of the existence of other people, is driven mad by this meaningless isolation of the self, and his madness is exacerbated into suicide by the hearty doctors who insist that all he has to do is to imitate the public gestures of society (eat porridge for breakfast and play golf) and he will become an integrated character again. ( ) While Clarissa's moments of vision can be called faintly religious, Septimus, in his own mind, becomes a messiah with a job to interpret the beauty and the harmony he sees for the benefit of all mankind, and Woolf shows us the imbalanced mind through its twilight, dreamlike translucence, using her skill in delving into her character's mind . Just as Clarissa sees the barriers of fear and alienation, Septimus sees them too, and these are represented by the screens he keeps seeing, the screen he has to tear through to reach at the truth. But while Clarissa has a sense of comedy, of carrying on with life, Septimus has a sense of the tragic, he is willing to live on the edge and to push himself over it. As one critic sums it up: Not only is Septimus a prescient historical figure and force, but also, in Mrs. Dalloway, a powerful presence that refuses to disappear, either in suicide or in death. To be sure, Clarissa Dalloway is the substantive character and center of Woolf's novel, but Septimus Warren Smith is its fictive coadjutor (or "double") without whom neither the role of Clarissa nor the full significance of the novel can be completely grasped. (Panichas, 2004) Bloom, H. (ed). Clarissa Dalloway. New York: Chelsea House, 1990. p. 35. Panichas, A, G. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: "a well of tears", Modern Age, Summer, 2004. Woolf, V. Mrs. Dalloway. London : Hogarth Press.1925. Read More