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

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1995 by Jacob Littleton

But although the parties undeniably influence the collective psyche of those present, their primary importance for Clarissa remains personal. Paradoxically, her modes of art, built of collective interaction and unfolding as a communal experience, spring from Dalloway's sense of her own isolation as an individual. If communal experience is the focal point of Clarissa's universe, awareness of individual isolation, even alienation, from others is the key to her awareness of herself. As effective as she proves to be in managing the party, her actual human connections are clumsy and unsatisfying: "Certainly Clarissa's more metaphorical femininity, her `woman's gift' and diffuse consciousness, overshadows her actual motherhood" (Roseman 81). Although Clarissa's party art is fundamentally consistent with her milieu's vision of feminine nature as inherently nurturant of interpersonal connection, the kinship of art to social belief is purely ideological. Her unquestioned faith in the "angel in the house" is undercut by her own inability to function as an effective focal point for her family, at least by ordinary means. She fears her daughter's gravitation to Kilman will vitiate the filial bond, while she broods over having failed Richard at some past point, presumably in the role of politician's spouse (Mrs. Dalloway 31). But as fervidly as Clarissa admires Lady Bexborough and all she embodies, she just as tenaciously remains distanced from this world view, in which a woman is to the world little more than the sum of her relations with others, particularly men. She demands room for private development: "In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house" (8). The less intense alliance with Richard allows Clarissa greater space to fulfill her submerged desires. Peter Walsh might have destroyed this aspect of her, not by mere closeness but by the incessant judgment of her secret beliefs about the world.

Others understand that Clarissa did not marry for standard romantic love, but misunderstand her actual motives. When Clarissa disappears from her party, "Sally supposed ... that there were people of importance, politicians, whom neither of them knew unless by sight ... whom Clarissa had to be nice to, had to talk to" (186); in fact, the hostess has withdrawn from everyone to probe her feelings about the death of Septimus Smith. She imagines herself as isolated, alone. In the end Clarissa stands alone in that the truth," what is essential about her life, remains unknown to all even as all partake of the field of that truth which she generates. To the extent that she could have made herself known through love, and Peter understands her more completely than anyone else, albeit still haltingly, Clarissa's expression of herself through art is a free choice. But to the extent that other options, such as a passionate relationship, require subjugation of her artistic urges, Clarissa is a victim of a regime which denied artistically inclined women the chance to express themselves, and she ended with the life she had, not because it best suited her, but because it most closely approached the minimum condition of her happiness: capacity to express herself in art. Her conscious agreement with the principles of her class ought not be slighted; her love of Peter does not stop her criticizing his marginality, passion, and instability. Clarissa is of the solid center. However, the use to which she puts the apparatus of her class profoundly destabilizes the center she ostensibly upholds.