'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 complex position comprises external conformity, ideological affinity, and substantive subversion. This difficult spot is the source of Clarissa's world view in which isolation battles with connection. For Woolf does not merely portray the thought and art of her central character, she also paints a complex portrait of the artist's situation in the world. This portrait uncovers the way in which the artist's experience is transformed and recapitulated in art; more, it also reveals and critiques the society that gave rise to the artist.

Just as Clarissa's mind imposes a pattern of isolation and connection on existence, so the existence she must lead imposes. a pattern of isolation and connection on Clarissa. But whereas the truth the woman creates for the world moves toward apolitical universality, the truth the novelist reveals in the life is specific and social. For it is the power of the patriarchy that imprisons Clarissa in loneliness, while an individual feminine power fundamentally opposed to the male-dominated social order is the source of her feelings of human affiliation.

Clarissa characterizes herself as virginal, in some way inept with people: "She could see what she lacked. It was not beauty; it was not mind. It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up the surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together"(31). This coldness is the trait she associates with her attic bed and isolation; the reader can also see the source of her deep fear of isolation as the precursor of death. But Clarissa, just after the above reflection, sees in her life

a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check

and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to

the farthest verge and there quivered arid felt the world come

closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure

of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with

an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for

that moment, she had seen an illumination, a match burning in a

crocus, an inner meaning almost expressed.(32)

The source of this extraordinary feeling, described in overtly sexual terms, is pleasure in certain moments with women. This blush of woman love seems to provide Clarissa with a touch of "something central which permeated"; the specificity of these moments seems to correspond to Clarissa's delight in existence, while their social nature (conversation with women) points to the importance to her of human interaction. These moments of awareness, of connection (awakened in her when she met Sally Seton) in her actual life are the wellspring of Clarissa's highly developed beliefs about the nature and significance of existence. Likewise, "the bed and Baron Marbot and the candle half-burnt" (32), the isolation and awareness of death in her own life, generate her abhorrence of isolation and fear of death more generally. Deborah Guth points out that "the private, supposedly `real' inner self that Clarissa explores during the day in fact duplicates rather than denies the artificial, ceremonial quality of her public self " (35). Despite her alienated, isolated position in society, the private world of Clarissa's consciousness is fundamentally determined by her existential position.