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

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1995 by Jacob Littleton

The value of experiences is not individual but collective; in Clarissa's skeptical mind this collective experience takes the place of "love and religion," and other potential rocks against the void, in which she places no faith. According to Daiches, "The significance of the whole is not the sum of the significance of the different parts, but depends on the shape and disposition of the completed story" (61); this comment on the structure of Woolf's novel also holds true for the world view of her heroine. Clarissa finds an answer to the malaise of existence in this Existence; it is her faith. There is, no doubt, a minimal level of faith at which she no longer is certain, but doubt is a characteristic of all faiths, particularly in a cultural moment of conflicted ideologies and the crumbling of Victorian certitude. This faith explains and orders her world in a way that other outlooks available to her do not.

Perhaps most important, it grants her the sense of an urgent call to action. From her world view Clarissa progresses to a mode of existential behavior. For Clarissa's Being is not an invincible antidote to death. This collective Being, so dependent on a common fund of experience, disintegrates in the separation of people, just as memory (by which Being comes into existence) is challenged by forgetfulness. Miller claims, "Nothing could be less like the intermittencies and difficulties of memory in Wordsworth or in Proust than the spontaneity and ease of memory in Mrs. Dalloway" (176). But while in most respects Woolf does show memory as spontaneous, she too deals with intermittencies. There are instances of profound lapses of memory, as when Lady Bruton remembers Hugh's kindness, but not the occasion for it (Mrs. Dalloway 104). Insofar as metaphysical Being exists in human minds and not in the objective world, losing awareness of Being is tantamount to losing Being. For Clarissa, forgetfulness is not simply a prefiguration of death; it is itself a very real death. The procession of time leads to death, and time's passage leads also to the oblivion of forgetfulness. This condition of oblivion is inherent in the fractured, isolated conditions of life, in which people drift toward experiential isolation. Clarissa had a theory, "to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people, not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day, then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory ... how little one knew people" (152). She thinks, "But what was this thing she called life? ... Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste, and she felt what a pity" (122). She must act to end that separation. Referring to the above trio, "She felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom? An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps" (122). She sees a way for her to act to strengthen collective being through her parties. Her parties are her art.