The Interplay of Love, Life and Letters in Mrs Dalloway - Essay Example

To Nurture or Numb the Soul: The Interplay of Love, Life and Letters in Mrs Dalloway Love of literature and of the literary life are perhaps among the most significant themes of Virginia Woolf's path breaking novel Mrs Dalloway, published just three years after James Joyce's Ulysses. Like Ulysses, Woolf's novel tells the events of a day in the flow of consciousness of a few characters, chief among them the eponymous Mrs Dalloway. Indeed Clarissa Dalloway physically brings together in a dinner party at her house almost all the main characters alluded to in the novel, if not in the flesh at least in living memory, at the end of the novel. It is possible to note the dichotomy between the characters who share a love of letters and those who do not, and to observe that an antipathy or indifference to literature seems to point to corrosion or corruption of the soul. Love, literature and life are shown to be inextricably linked together in this novel written by a woman who was born in a literary family, whose house was a haven for the artistically inclined, and who married a man of letters. In Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith, Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh and Sally Seton are, despite all their tribulations, amply rewarded by their love of letters. Although Richard Dalloway is no reader, his patent love for his wife and his concern for her onetime suitor, emphasizes his humanity and redeems his soul. Characters like Sir William Bradshaw, Lady Bruton and Hugh Whitbread, for all their material prosperity are seen to lack spiritual grace because they, at best, do no more than try to manipulate language for their own ends. At the opening of the novel, Clarissa Dalloway takes upon herself the task of buying flowers for the party at her house because the servants would have plenty on their hands. It is a beautiful June morning-" fresh as if issued to children on a beach"(5) and Clarissa's thoughts flow back to the time when she was eighteen and perhaps in love with Peter Walsh who was in love with her: "Musing among the vegetables"--was that it--"I prefer men to cauliflowers"--was that it He must have said it at 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. (5-6) It had been assumed at the time that Peter would 'write'-that he would go on to be a writer-but he cheerfully reveals to Sally Seton at the end of the novel that he had written "Not a word!" (207). However, he had always been a good and judicious reader, and a good and judicious critic of life and letters and men and women, as well as an excellent conversationalist. It was his private grief that, because Clarissa had rejected him, he had fallen for all the wrong women and made a mess of his life, but even so, at the end of the novel, the very sight of Clarissa from afar "fills" him "with extraordinary excitement" (215). One character who seems to live more in the rarefied world of letters than in the real world of life is the relatively young Septimus Warren Smith whose noble mind has been broken by the death of a beloved friend at his side in the war. The world fills him with apprehension, and empathetically we feel, rightly so: 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. The world has raised its whip; where will it descend (17) Septimus lives in a world of his own populated by his own anxieties and fears and by the voices and sounds that speak to him and to him only, and which he feels compelled to record: Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He waited. He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death. (28) When he is jerked back into the hell of other people, he is provoked to say that he would kill himself. His perplexed Milanese wife Lucrezia is alarmed enough to seek the advice of Doctor Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw, who both manage to rub Septimus up the wrong way. Sir William Bradshaw's philistine nature is seen through even by Lucrezia: "But Rezia Warren Smith cried, walking down Harley Street, that she did not like that man" (113). Sir William does not get his hands on Septimus, but "human nature" (102) in the form of Doctor Holmes, breaks through the feeble barrier of Rezia's arms blocking his way, and impels Septimus to undertake " the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out" (165) to his death. The life of the mind and the life of letters are especially active in Clarissa Dalloway, but she herself would be the first to disavow any such pretensions. She would never think that she had the answer to life's problems, "She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that"(10). She is middle-aged, but "felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged" (10). Her mind, however, is razor sharp, "She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on" (10-11). She is always aware of how, so often and for so many, life seemed to hang on a thread-"she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day" (11). This observation, coming as it does from the depths of reason and common sense betokens an exceptionally shrewd mind, but Clarissa is not vainglorious enough to think herself "clever, or much out of the ordinary"(11). Indeed, this humility that reminds one of Socrates' famous observation, is one of the marks of the truly cultured mind, the mind that is aware of the boundless ocean of knowledge in front of it: How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Frulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that. (11) It would be deceptively easy to accept this picture of herself to be true unless one pays attention to the fact that she regularly reads memoirs in bed, and opens one's eyes to the fact that it is not where one reads and when, but what and how often that is important. After this introspective revelation from her stream of consciousness, Clarissa's very next thought is that "Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct" (11)-no mean achievement, especially when one considers that she is perhaps the only person to accomplish an accurate reading of Septimus Warren Smith and the circumstances of his death, as well as its actual perpetrators. Woolf masterfully traces Clarissa's thoughts from the moment the news of the death is rather crudely presented to her consciousness: 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. He had killed himself--but how Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party! (203) She sees the physical facts of the death in her mind's eye, and proceeds to deduce from the bare facts the concatenation of circumstances that must have led the young man to make so final a gesture. In other words, Clarissa Dalloway is able to think this conundrum through, and solve it, on her own. She comes to see the crux of it in a flash: "Death was defiance" (204). Further, she realizes that "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" (204). Above all, she realizes that "there was an embrace in death" (204). Literature intervenes and makes her wonder, "But this young man who had killed himself--had he plunged holding his treasure "If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy," she had said to herself once, coming down in white" (204). In an intuitive epiphany Clarissa Dalloway sees that the young man too must have been of a literary bent, one whose natural element was the world of letters: 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 it now), Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that (204) How appropriate her earlier observation that "she sliced like a knife through everything" (10-11)-she has quite obviously penetrated into the heart of the matter. Moreover, she is able to empathize with the young man, to understand him through and through: She felt somehow very like him--the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room. (206) It is this extraordinary prescience-and surprising presence of mind-that earns for Clarissa Dalloway the right to be the central consciousness of this stream of consciousness novel. Clarissa Dalloway can see into the hearts of things and people in a way that other characters in the novel plainly cannot-not even characters who share her love of the literary life. Peter Walsh and Sally Seton, talking to each other at the end of the novel cannot understand what made Clarissa marry Richard Dalloway. Peter could recognize the fact that that Richard is a "good fellow" (212)-"Of them all, Richard seemed to him the best, he said - the most disinterested" (213). Still, Sally is puzzled: 'But what has he done' Sally asked. Public work, she supposed. And were they happy together Sally asked (she herself was extremely happy); for, she admitted, she knew nothing about them, only jumped to conclusions, as one does, for what can one know even of the people one lives with every day She asked. Are we not all prisoners She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life - one scratched on the wall. (213) So, whereas Sally Seton feels that she herself had but scratched the surface of life, and Peter Walsh, "fidgeting with his knife" muses aloud that "he had not found life simple" (212), Clarissa Dalloway sees clear into the very heart of her own soul and into the inscrutable souls of men like Septimus Warren Smith. Clarissa Dalloway thus fulfills a clarifying function in the novel. She clarifies to herself and to the reader, and to others in the novel what she has gleaned of life and love and letters from her experience of life and love and letters. Those who share her love of life, love and letters will, undeniably, profit from the opportunity, while those with more philistine tendencies may prefer pleasures more corporeal. Ultimately, however, when the flesh rots, the spirit soars, as the clairvoyant know. Works Cited Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Read More