Mrs Dalloway (Collins Classroom Classics)

This Collins Classroom Classics edition includes an introduction and glossary to support students, written by an experienced teacher.

Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf

…in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

ISBN 978-0-00-837184-5

£3.00

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Mrs Dalloway 9 780008 371845

Virginia Woolf 22/11/2019 09:53

Introduction There is a short paragraph in Virginia Woolf’s fifth novel, To The Lighthouse (1927), which begins and ends with the same sentence: ‘Never did anybody look so sad.’1 It’s a description of one of the novel’s main characters, Mrs Ramsay, who has just measured a stocking she has knitted for the lighthouse keeper’s son and found it to be too short. This paragraph may seem quite trivial in passing, but it has taken on great significance in the reception of Woolf’s work. Why? It was picked out by the German literary historian Erich Auerbach in Mimesis (1946), a book that sought to trace the different ways in which poets and writers have tried to represent reality in their work, beginning with Homer’s Odyssey and running through to what was then more or less the present day. Auerbach comments: Who is speaking in this paragraph? Who is looking at Mrs Ramsay here, who concludes that never did anybody look so sad? Who is expressing these doubtful, obscure suppositions? […] The person speaking here, whoever it is, acts the part of one who has only an impression of Mrs Ramsay, who looks at her face and renders the impression received, but is doubtful of its proper interpretation.2 These kinds of question also arise when we try to understand Mrs Dalloway, a novel that explores character and relationships by moving in and out of different people’s minds, sometimes within the same scene. It calls for care on the part of the reader to recognise these shifts of perspective, which are often marked only by a change in the texture of language iv

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Introduction

or a thought pattern that surely must be attached to a different person. As a result, doubt and contradiction are part of the novel’s fabric. The implication, we’ll discover, is that too much self-certainty has the potential to cause profound damage.

Auerbach’s choice of Woolf for the final chapter in his book, placing her at the end of a lineage that began with the Greek epics and the Bible, helped to secure and enhance her reputation as a major 20th-century writer – and, specifically, a writer who was doing something distinctive or new in the way she tried to represent people and the world. It’s because of these developments in Woolf’s style that she is understood to be a key figure in literary modernism. But it didn’t necessarily take a German philologist to recognise this: Woolf herself was already thinking along similar lines in the 1920s, aware of an insufficiency in the way that writers were creating their characters and fictional worlds. She explores this problem explicitly in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924), an essay she wrote in response to the then-eminent novelist Arnold Bennett, who had reviewed Woolf’s last novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), and criticised her presentation of character. In her essay, Woolf critiques the Edwardian novelists for valuing pedantic description while completely failing to represent the complexity of actual people. She begins her argument with two claims: first, that ‘it would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practised character-reading and had some skill in the art’; second, that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’.3 Woolf’s second assertion has become famous: it is provocative, controversial, a little bit tongue-in-cheek, and too specific to be taken entirely seriously, but a convenient date for students and literary critics to orbit v

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around. In the essay, she refers to the relation between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children, helping to contextualise the changing social dynamics among which modernism developed.

The essay also gives context to the experimentation with perspective and form that Woolf advanced in Mrs Dalloway. If human character has changed, Woolf argues, the novel will have to change as well. The novelist, she writes, chases character as though it were a ‘will-o’-the-wisp’.4 She names this generic character ‘Mrs Brown’, and encourages her audience to ‘insist that writers shall come down off their plinths and pedestals, and describe beautifully if possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs Brown’.5 Beauty comes second, truth first, and this means that the uncertainties and difficulties of a personality have to be accommodated. So, Woolf concludes, ‘do not expect just at present a complete and satisfactory presentment of her. Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure’.6 This is, perhaps, a helpful attitude to take towards reading Mrs Dalloway: it sums up the difficulties and rewards of the novel, whereby incompleteness and dissatisfaction, failure and tolerance all take on an aesthetic and, arguably, ethical importance.

Contexts War, prosperity and class Mrs Dalloway takes place over the course of a single day in 1923, following its characters and their minds around certain parts of the city of London – the bustling, eclectic, prosperous, changing but still, in places, highly conservative and hidebound streets of Bloomsbury and the areas around Westminster. In vi

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M

rs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her.

The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, ‘Musing among the vegetables?’ – was that it? – ‘I prefer men to cauliflowers’ – was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace – Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she 1

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forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished – how strange it was! – a few sayings like this about cabbages.

She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.

For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? over twenty, – one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

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For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven – over. It was June. The King and Queen were at the Palace. And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party. But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence; the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy ducks; the pouched birds waddling; and who should be coming along with his back against the Government buildings, most ­appropriately, carrying a despatch box stamped with 3

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Glossary 1 Rumpelmayer’s men: Anton Rumpelmayer was a famous confectioner, originally from Austria, with branches across Europe. He operated a catering service in London.

1 Bourton: This is Clarissa’s family home. Woolf never specifies whether Bourton is a real or fictional setting, but we later learn that it overlooks the River Severn in the west of England.

1 back from India: India was a colony of Britain from 1858 to 1947. The association with the British Empire is implied.

2 Durtnall’s van: This is most likely a reference to a removal company operating in London at that time. There is a whole array of business names mentioned in Mrs Dalloway, not all of which are essential to following the novel; instead, they help to build a sense of the novel’s geography. These notes include references that seem particularly significant to what is taking place at a particular moment.

2 in Westminster: borough of Central London close to Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament 2

i nfluenza: This probably implies the highly destructive global pandemic that immediately followed the First World War, sometimes known as Spanish flu. There are many different estimates about how many people died from this influenza, but it is almost certainly in the tens of millions.

2 Big Ben: name commonly given to the bell, clock and clock tower of the Palace of Westminster, where the Houses of Parliament meet 2 Acts of Parliament: the way that the British government enacts laws and policies 2 barrel organs: a type of portable music apparatus operated by turning a cylinder (the barrel) on which particular tunes are encoded 3 Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh: Lords is a famous cricket ground in Central London; Ascot is a horse racing course in Berkshire to the west of London; Ranelagh probably alludes to a polo club in south London, the Hurlingham Club in Ranelagh Gardens.

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Glossary

3 the time of the Georges: George V was king when Mrs Dalloway is set, but this alludes to the first four King Georges, who reigned consecutively from 1714 to 1830.

3 a despatch box: box used by ministers of the British government to carry documents relating to parliamentary business 4 little job at Court: refers to the Royal Court – the advisors and immediate employees of the British monarch, implying some involvement in the business of government 5 barber’s block: originally, a wooden model of a head on which wigs could be displayed; by implication, someone dimwitted (and possibly more interested in outward display) 5 Bath: a town in the west of England known for its thermal spas, and a fashionable destination for wealthy visitors since the 18th century 5

Pimlico: area of Westminster

5 from the Fleet to the Admiralty: general terms for the British Navy (Fleet) and its commanding officers (Admiralty), but also specifically to the Admiralty building in Central London, which communicated by means of a radio tower 5 Piccadilly: a road in Central London that runs between Hyde Park Corner and Piccadilly Circus 5 the Park: Arlington Street and Piccadilly border Green Park, which runs to the north of Buckingham Palace.

5 Wagner, Pope’s poetry: Richard Wagner (1813–83) was a German composer known especially for his operas and their spectacular scale; Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was an English poet known for writing satire and mock epics. There is no immediate connection between the two, just Peter Walsh’s interest, though it picks up the theme of Anglo– German post-war relations.

6 those Indian women: referring to Anglo–Indians: people with a British background living in colonial India 7 the Serpentine: a lake in Hyde Park, Central London 8 Hatchards’: a bookshop on Piccadilly 8 Fear no more the heat: These are the first lines of a song from Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline. Clarissa repeats the 211

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words later (pp.29, 200) and they are echoed in Septimus’s thoughts (p.149).

8 Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities … Soapy Sponge …

Mrs Asquith’s Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria: This series of titles is meant to suggest non-literary interests, comic triviality and popular genres. Clarissa used to read widely, we learn, but now only reads memoirs from time to time.

10 Communion: Christian ceremony commemorating the death and resurrection of Christ, held each Sunday in the Church of England tradition 10 causes: implying ‘good causes’: a general term for charitable or political endeavours 10 green mackintosh coat: a type of waterproof jacket; not fashionable or elegant, and something that Clarissa fixes on in her disapproval of Miss Kilman 13 Prince of Wales’s… Queen’s… Prime Minister’s: Prince of Wales is the title traditionally bestowed on the British monarch’s eldest child; in 1923 it was Edward (1894–1972), who would later become king and then abdicate. Queen refers to Mary of Teck (1867–1953), the wife of George V. The British Prime Minister in 1923 was Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947).

13 Proime Minister’s kyar: This probably attempts to represent a working-class Londoner mimicking a ‘posh’ way of speaking.

14 the Embankment: specific section of the north bank of the River Thames, between Westminster Bridge and Blackfriars 16 Hurlingham: a polo club in Ranelagh Gardens, south London (see also entry for p.3) 16 Bond Street: a major street in Central London, particularly known for fashionable and expensive shops 17 capable of transmitting shocks in China: implies a seismograph (measuring earthquakes) and probably refers to China simply to exaggerate the sensitivity of the instrument 17

thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire: This presumably refers to the dead of the First World War, the Union Jack, and the British Empire. Whether the different 212

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