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

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1995 by Jacob Littleton

Clarissa's isolation, the fact of death in her life, is caused by a social order which requires the subjugation of the private self, for Clarissa the real self, to the individual's social position. This imprisonment of the self is symbolized in Woolf's use of names (DiBattista 36). Woolf writes, "She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen . . . this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway" (11). "Mrs. Dalloway" is that part of her fixed in a social position: her femininity, in a patrilineal culture, subsumed by her identity as Richard's wife. The novel begins with the words "Mrs. Dalloway." But the name used by everyone who thinks of her at all personally is her Christian name, the name not of social relationships but of emotional ones. The novel closes with a view of Peter Walsh: "What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? ... What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was" (194). It is significant that Septimus is the other character for whom Woolf brings up this dichotomy (84); Septimus replicates Clarissa's threatened position. They are threatened more than other characters because, more than any others, their private selves diverge from public expectations of them.

The social order of Britain in 1923 was resolutely inimical to the reality of actual life cherished by Clarissa and Septimus. It created standards that, far from allowing for free, individual expression, forced individuals into rigid roles with unfulfillable expectations. The regime's ideals are antithetical to life itself. No one measures up to these standards. Peter is a failure, and Richard has not gone as far as expected. The accomplished Lady Bruton, due to her putative nonrationality, feels she cannot write a letter. The Prime Minister would look more in place selling bread. Even Whitbread and Bradshaw, the enthusiastic enforcers of the ideal, are almost universally disliked. The regime works on ideals and ideal symbols relating to the glory of patriarchal society. Peter Walsh encounters a regiment of young soldiers marching past the "exalted statues" in Regent's Park; they tramp "as if one will worked arms and legs uniformly, and life, with all its varieties, its irreticencies, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline" (51). Undisciplined, aimless life must be forced to work for financial or political gain, for the advancement of Britain, for any number of reasons connected not only to "war, patriotism, and nationalistic ardour, but also to the auxiliary vices of force and possessiveness that bolster the dictatorial spirit" (Henke 129). This ideal-machine's agents cannot help desiring to fix things. Richard, presented benevolently by Woolf, still must ponder "the problem of the female vagrant" (I 16). Clarissa, by contrast, thinks, "the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) ... can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life" (4). Not only is desire to change, even if the reasons are benevolent, necessarily linked to the desire to use power, but the ability to effect change is inevitably tied to the possession of power. Sir William Bradshaw seems to demonstrate this. His method of treatment is quite simply to cut off whatever sets his patients apart, makes them unique, living human beings, however idiosyncratic or unhappy, and reduce them to the human Proportion he prefers: "his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw's if they were women" (99). The form of his Proportion is determined by traditional ideology: "family affection; honour; courage; and a brilliant career" (102). He enforces his will through traditional structures: the power of doctor over patient, "sane" over "insane," wealthy over poor. His personal aim is power as well; the end result of his labor is his colleagues' respect, his subordinates' respect, and the gratitude of the relatives of his patients (99).