Reading the famous Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, equally famous herself, reminds me of those very detailed pictures with a lot of people doing a lot of things at the same time in different places. When I close my eyes, I feel I can take it all in – the ticking clocks, the leaves of Regent’s Park, the clink of teacups behind Mrs Dalloway’s drawing room window. Everyone and everything is there, happening at once, each thread leading somewhere dark, or quiet or bursting with life. And if you’ve ever walked the streets of London, really walked them, you’ll notice how much more alive the book becomes. Knowing the sounds of Piccadilly and the cobbled street of Westminster you share something very personal with Clarissa, with Septimus, with Virginia Woolf herself. Their day in London becomes your own.
a summary of mrs dalloway by virginia woolf
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinger; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
Mrs Dalloway starts with probably the most well-known sentences of English literature: Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. And she does so, indeed. The novel starts with her walking from her Westminster house to Bond Street to sort her flower order for the party she is planning in the evening. But that’s only one thread of this intricate novel. Another thread follows Septimus Smith and his wife Rezia, as they walk from Bond Street to Regent’s Park and then back to Marylebone, in Harley Street, to visit a psychiatrist. Septimus needs to treat his mind, left broken by the Great War. The third thread follows Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s youth-time suitor, who is just back from India and visits her in the morning. He then walks to Regent’s Park and takes a taxi back to his hotel close to the British Museum. There is a fourth thread, a fifth thread, an nth thread as well, as the novel expands and expands to incorporate the London day of Richard, Clarissa’s husband, Elizabeth, her daughter, and many, many other characters who, some way or other, are part of Clarissa’s life.
There’s really not much happening, per se. These people (because they are more than characters) walk through London on a sunny June day and think of that which troubles them – a guest list, loneliness, life in India, the memory of the past. The mundane is entangled with the personal and triviality with big questions of life. Their thoughts unconsciously bounce off one another and are engulfed back into the impersonality and beauty of the city of London. To reflect all this Woolf uses the stream of consciousness, a popular term which is less fancily also known as free indirect discourse. The voice of the narrator fades into the background and we hear the flutter of the characters’ voices, as if they would tell us their story themselves, the thoughts in the background and the interruptions in the characters’ main line of thought. The narration switches from one character to another, sometimes mid-paragraph, and that gives the book a layered, moving rhythm, like a city street filled with overlapping conversations, happening all at once.
For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? Over twenty – one feels even in the midst of traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her hear, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes.
past & present
Exactly the same, thought Clarissa; the same queer look; the same check suit; a little out of the straight his face is, a little thinner, dryer, perhaps, but he looks awfully well, and just the same.
One of my favourite scenes of the book is Peter visiting Clarissa. This is where we first meet Peter, but Clarissa is already back from her odyssey to Bond Street and back, where she ordered the flowers for her party, but she also revisited the past. For in Mrs Dalloway (and generally, in Virginia Woolf’s fiction) time doesn’t unfold in a straight line, in folds back unto itself. The present moment opens a stage into the past and then closes back up, leaving us stranded in the present.
The scene with the two of them reminded me of a similar scene, in To the Lighthouse, where Mr and Mrs Ramsay retire to their bedroom after dinner and briefly discuss the events of the day. Both scenes are so heavy with character personality and with the memories and thoughts of the past which define their present selves, but none of this transpire in the simple words they address to each other. Clarissa and Peter are happy to see each other, but each of them retires back into their own personal world of thought not accessible to the other. While talking to Peter, Clarissa mends a dress which she remembers she wore at Buckingham Palace. Watching her mend the dress, Peter’s thought drifts to matters of marriage and politics, which lead to Richard, Clarissa’s husband. In the background of their conversation, the distinction between then and now blurs as past events negotiate their presence amid the routine of everyday life, a reminder that the past can never truly stay behind.
together, alone
Slightly waved by tears the broad path, the nurse, the man in grey, the perambulator, rose and fell before her eyes. To be rocked by this malignant torturer was her lot. But why?
Living and walking in London makes the coexistence of past and present even more visible. The characters live within their own version of reality, while walking the same London streets, sometimes without being aware of each other. One of my favourite examples is the almost-meeting between Peter and the couple formed of Septimus and Rezia in Regent’s Park. After his morning visit to Clarissa, Peter walks to Regent Park and falls asleep on a bench. Before their appointment in Harley Street, Septimus and Rezia walk from Bond Street (where Clarissa also was) to Regent’s Park. The scene is masterfully weaved. Peter just wakes up from his sleep with memories of Clarissa in his mind and watches a girl running to her nurse. Rezia is unhappy and ponders on how much Septimus changed, while looking at the girl, too. Each paragraph switches between the two points of view while making it clear that Rezia and Peter’s path can never cross outside a coincidental brush in the Park. London links all the characters together, a container for all the lives which cross in the city’s shared rhythm.
Interweaving time & space, people talking to each other in their thoughts, the bustle of life in one of the world’s biggest cities, a fragment of life which gives the feeling of whole. That’s what Mrs Dalloway and Virginia Woolf offer, and maybe that’s why we still read the novel 100 years after its publication. It makes us realize how memory, fear, love, and regret move with us through parks, shops, and casual conversations. There’s something comforting in the way Woolf lets thought drift and overlap, how she captures the perfect chaos of being human. We still read it because it doesn’t try to explain life. It just lets us live it.
your thoughts?