Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: "a well of tears"

Modern Age, Summer, 2004 by George A. Panichas

A humane literary genius is actively at work in a novelist like Woolf as a moral realist who communicates her version of "the fate of man in the modern world," unto "the end of our time," what the Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev in the thirties spoke of as "the internal apocalypse of history." Contemporary critics, furiously "at war with the word," generally choose to play down or to reject outrightly intricate connections and interconnections that render issues and concerns that are the stuff of the imagination and of that shaping spirit of modern fiction, in form, in composition, in values, identified and interpreted in this essay. (5) Readers are today prone to assuming and accepting the death of great literature as it has been dictated by postmodern literary theorists and deconstructors. The theme of disenchantment, the text chosen to illustrate it, and the moral interpretation of both theme and text in the ensuing discussion, revolve around what one young critic, Mark C. Henrie, writes in an admirable essay entitled "The Refreshment of the Humanities": "The best defense of the humanities is the activity itself .... The way for humanists to recover their cultural authority [and patrimony] is by doing what they do best: reading and explaining and criticizing the old books." (6)

II

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway portrays the acute physical and psychic effects, and the sundry ramifications of disenchantment in the post-1918 years. It shows in the most vivid and heartbreaking of ways how the experience and suffering of the battlefields of the European War wreaked havoc; how the combatants who survived the holocaust then struggled wearily to understand their civilian surroundings; how, in short, they "coped," or failed to cope, with the realities and the demands of civic society. Even if the late War and the Armistice were now simply a memory, painful memories of the war resonated among those survivors seeking to go about the business of human existence in peacetime.

Woolf's novel has as one of its primary reference points the life and fate of a psychologically maimed soldier who has returned from the Western Front. Years after the cessation of the war, he is seen struggling frantically to come to terms with and then to overcome his experience of war and death, and then of disenchantment and madness. His name is Septimus Warren Smith, whom we see in the final day of his life on a Wednesday in June 1923; he is drawn in direct and tangential relation to the other central and secondary figures in the novel, as well as to the chain of events transpiring on a "hot June day, with the bees going round and about and the yellow butterflies." Indeed, his character is dominant both in the overall consciousness of the novel's fictive world and in the personal histories of the figures who appear in the events of the novel, as these are enacted in the city of London, in the district of Westminster, in which Big Ben (and Saint Margaret's) tolls with precision and regularity: "There! Out it booms. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable." (7)