'Mrs' Dalloway': portrait of the artist as a middle-aged woman - novel by Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1995 by Jacob Littleton

If the nature of the artist is to transmute personal experience and feeling into a public act, Clarissa Dalloway is certainly an artist, and Virginia Woolf's novel a portrait of the artist as a woman in middle age. The fundamental action of Mrs. Dalloway is to elucidate the mechanisms of Clarissa's thoughts and actions and to chart the ways in which her existence profoundly controverts the ideology and power relations of her cultural sphere.

Critical appraisals of the novel have recognized Clarissa's identity as an artist, but usually in the context of another interpretation. Suzette Henke, for instance, notes that Clarissa's "gatherings serve as . . . creative acts of social artistry" (127), but centers her analysis on the religious models Woolf uses. David Daiches writes, "There is a suggestion throughout that the experiences of individuals combine to form a single indeterminate whole" (73), a suggestion central to Dalloway's aesthetics. Deborah Guth reveals Clarissa's modes of self-invention, glancing at the importance of her parties to the character's self-definition.

Clarissa's artistry is the essential key to understanding her character, and the depiction of that character is the novel's key event. Woolf is concerned, before anything else, with the absolutely private mental world of a woman who, according to the patriarchal ideology of the day as well as her own figure in the world, was not imagined to have any artistic feeling at all. Woolf criticizes conceptions of character bound by the exterior forms of life: the whole complex (job, family, assets) that fixes every person firmly in the world of business and power relationships. Against this system Woolf places a world of private significance whose meaning is wholly irreducible to facts of the external world. By conceiving of personality as a private fact, apparently alienated from "public, political culture" and "its imperialistic and death-dealing ways" (Rosenman 77), Woolf shows Clarissa's "actual" existence to be an unrecognized but fundamental contradiction of traditional assumptions about gender.

Maria DiBattista points out "the novel's vague but universal sense of malaise, of spiritual incapacity, of frustrated expectations" (24). This malaise arises from each character's perception of an inadequacy in her or his world view to encompass a world that increasingly seems unexplainable. The Europe of the early twentieth century was characterized by a breakdown of traditional models, as Woolf emphasized throughout her work. Clarissa is "modernist" in outlook, fundamentally a nonbeliever. With her "horror of psychological engulfment" (Henke 139), she rejects society's common props against the void: Walsh's passion, Kilman's religion, Bradshaw's Proportion, the simplistic patriotism of her husband and Lady Bruton. As a result, she must face disordered reality without accepted props and create her own meaning for it. This process is central to Mrs. Dalloway.

Perhaps the most fundamental fact of Clarissa's psyche is the pleasure she takes in physical, sensual existence. She bursts onto the street to buy flowers and appreciates everything; "carriages, motorcars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and singing" (Mrs. Dalloway 4). She neither condemns what seems like an altogether noisy and irritating urban scene (her London is not a Waste Land), nor approves it with the air of a connoisseur; her appreciation depends only on experience. In fact, her delight is free of self-interest or discrimination. She does not appreciate the scene for what it is, but simply because it is. Her world view is suffused with the sense of the solemnity and wonder of existence, but most of all by the wonder of living; she takes life very seriously. Being is a self-sufficient value without reference to other values, rational thought, or emotion; indeed, she sees the worth of being as directly opposed, and superior, to those other values. She uses the non-hierarchical joy-in-life to counter her emotions and desires, conceived of as threatening to her dignity and autonomy. After her hatred for Miss Kilman first flares up, she is soothed by the experience of the florist's shop, "as if this beauty, this scent, this colour ... were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up" (13). Because she loves life without judgment, Clarissa neither categorizes or coerces; "Had she ever tried to convert anyone herself? Did she not wish everyone merely to be themselves?" (126). This flight from forms into existence is irreducibly opposed to the Edwardian world view as exemplified by Bradshaw's Proportion and Conversion, whose "inter-personal imperialism dehumanizes and objectifies the Other to block out any disturbing sympathy or sense of likeness which might impede conquest" (Rosenman 78). Whereas Clarissa's nonjudgmental interest and love "subvert the masculine grammar of subject and object, unifying and protecting both in a single field" (Rosenman 78), dominant men of Clarissa's society seek only to inscribe their own characters of all "deviants," however slight in itself the deviation -- a desire that is ultimately and urge for power. While Woolf labels judgment and hierarchy generally as masculine, and love and acceptance as principally feminine, her novel uses them as potential traits for either gender. J. Hillis Miller writes, "the same images of unity, of reconciliation, of communion well up spontaneously from the deep levels of the minds of all the major characters" (13). Lady Bruton after her luncheon, Peter dozing in the park, Richard on his walk home all sense the same wholeness, a contentment in the mere experience of daily life.