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Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
I've never read a whole book by Virginia Woolf before. I've read a fair few excerpts from a number of her books, in a variety of contexts (she seems to be a popular choice for 'unseen extract' questions in literature exams...), to the extent that I feel actually quite familiar with her tone and style of writing, but this is the first time I've sat down and read one of her novels in its entirety from cover to cover. I can't honestly say that I loved it, but I did find it interesting. And on this blog, I try to value books that interested me just as much as books that I really enjoyed. So here are my thoughts.
'Mrs Dalloway' is set in London in the early 20th Century, and is centred around the titular character Clarissa Dalloway, a society hostess preparing for a house party. As well as following Clarissa, we see another narrative running parallel - that of Septimus Smith, a war veteran who is still haunted by his experiences (today we understand that he is suffering from PTSD; it's clear from the way he's treated that people in his era had no idea).
There seems to be a poignant link between the two characters, in that they are in such different societal positions, and the way they are viewed by everyone around them is almost diametrically opposed, but in themselves and in the way they feel they are actually strikingly similar. Septimus is utterly alone, abandoned even by the medics who prescribe 'bed rest' to cure his schizophrenia (and his poor wife Rezia doesn't know how to support him, though she tries); Clarissa meanwhile is a social butterfly drawing wealthy guests to her house party like a magnet. Yet they are both, in a way, lonely, and both their positions seem to be somewhat precarious.
Woolf has said she was aiming to portray 'the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side', and I think the way in which Clarissa and Septimus are presented somehow as both opposing halves and corresponding doubles raises an interesting debate about whether their perspectives really can be seen as 'the sane and the insane'. Is not Septimus's torment perfectly understandable, and Clarissa's slavish pursuit of the party life futile (she pours so much energy into these 'friends', but there's trouble un-dealt-with in her close relationships; she seems to have married the wrong man, and it's even suggested that she might be gay.)? Maybe there's a bit more nuance to which one of the two is really 'sane' or 'insane', and maybe there's a bit of a social comment going on here... Just a thought.
Woolf has an intriguing writing style often referred to as 'stream of consciousness' - rather than being a conventional narrative, there is much more of an emphasis on the thoughts and internal monologues of the characters. As such, the timespan of the book is actually less than a day in total, and instead of action, it almost entirely consists of the thought-wanderings of the characters, always coming back to Clarissa and Septimus.
This is one of the things that interested me about 'Mrs Dalloway', as opposed to something I liked! It's not my favourite style of writing, but Woolf has an undeniable knack for it. She has absolutely mastered the way people's thoughts work - the way little things you spot in the present suddenly take you right back to a very specific memory, the personal asides we add in our heads when something miffs us, the way our minds can wander indefinitely on tangent after tangent... I found a quote from Woolf herself in the introduction to this edition, and I think (unsurprisingly) it captures perfectly the effect of her style:
'I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth.'
So true. The characters are so round and complex and real, and Woolf's 'beautiful caves' is a great metaphor for that sense of getting inside the characters' heads and tunnelling and spiralling deeper and deeper inside their thoughts.
Overall, this book contained some quite thought-provoking characters, it was an interesting concept, and the stream-of-consciousness style was used with utter mastery. But there wasn't much of a story - because it just isn't that kind of a book - which I think was why it didn't quite hit the mark for me.
THE WORD WOLF
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