"Academic Series" #2 - Mrs. Dalloway "Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman"

In this piece, I explore Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in a traditionally modernist way, stemming from Woof's manifesto that much of the things in life are small and fleeting. People think that Mrs Dalloway is a bore - the characters in the novel think the woman is a bore, and people in real life think the book is. It's all about the quiet art of life, of making a moment in your mind with a creative frame.




Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman

In her essay Modern Fiction (1919), Virginia Woolf asserts that anything in the world is potentially the subject of art and fiction. Stating that “'[t]he proper stuff of fiction' does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon” she is directly opposing herself to the literary paradigms preceding her. She rejects previous notions of narrative, with its rigidity and certainty. She writes, “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” 

Likewise, she lauds her contemporaries, who share the view that the workings of the world contain untold variables the mind cannot account for when trying to accurately represent reality. The Modernists tell us that so much is uncertain, that each individual's perception of the world is vastly shaped by the inner, subjective world. Mrs Dalloway illustrates the subjective experience, and shows us that Clarissa Dalloway is an artist whose tools are her memory, imagination and life itself. We will explore this by first analyzing the practice of looking, and the effect of the gaze. Memory is one of the most personal things there is, and its connection to external stimuli is also worth looking into. Finally, we see how Clarissa practices her art – how her imagination is inspired while combining the gaze with her memory, how she mixes up different kinds of people in an effort to create something new, and how the very act of living itself can be “the stuff of fiction”.

All of this happens through the practice of looking. Woolf observes that the “mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.” She is more interested in a person's reaction to an event rather than the event itself. The realists failed in their objective of representing the world, since “so much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception.” By trying to represent the world as truth, they forget that is not the way people experience life, and that gulf between what occurred and how it affects someone is worth exploring. Woolf states“[f]or the moderns 'that', the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology” and that these “moment[s] of importance came not here but there.” The stuff of import can be found in the most inner places, tied to the most trivial of events.

The “narration” of the story itself, the way one event flows into the other, is very precise. Here, in the structure of the novel itself, we get the first instance of gaze. Even the act of framing events makes conscious omissions. The art in photography is capturing life within set physical restrictions, in addition to the temporal ones. We do this too in our lives, focusing on certain objects, blocking others out and framing our perspective. Mrs Dalloway's narrative seeks to replicate this. This practice is essential to Clarissa's personality. She feels like “[s]he sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxicabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone” (7). Her sense of being an observer makes her an absorber of the minutia of life. People are specifically subjects she likes to watch, as she finds them so full of life. Instead of remembering, she wants to absorb life around her. “What she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab” (8) and “[w]hat she liked was simply life” (103). She delights in the world around her, acting as a connoisseur or critic.

When mixed with memory, her practice of gazing can also turn her into a poet. For instance, take her one-sentence description of flowers she sees while on errands:

“And then, opening her eyes, how fresh, like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays, the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale-as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer's day, with its almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies, was over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower – roses, carnations, irises, lilac – glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!” (11)

Indeed, the sheer size of this tangent (and this sentence, and this quotation) allows us to see just how much poetic detail and enthusiasm she can muster. She inventories the various sensual qualities like a painter, looking at the beauty of both the individual flowers and how they work in harmony. Her own interpretation is ornate, detailed, and focused. Her exacting gaze certainly has an artfulness to it, yet it is rendered even more meaningful later in the text. When we are given details of Sally Seton, we can quickly see a connection. Clarissa remembers that “Sally's power was amazing, her gift, her personality. There was her way with flowers, for instance” (29) followed by another description of flowers. Elsewhere the memory of Clarissa walking with Sally one day, when “Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips” (30). Flora provide a clear emotional connection to Clarissa, and remind her of the myriad of complicated feelings she had for Sally. Beyond this, flowers seem to be connected to life – something that Clarissa always seeks to be close to. They also remind her of Sally – whom she admired for her liveliness. Sally's brashness, unorthodoxy and energy are all the qualities Clarissa is drawn to, and it is the absence of these things that disappoints Clarissa when she sees Sally at the party, years later, after “[t]he lustre had left her “ (145). If these disparate connections are put into words, we call this simile and metaphor, and call the writer an artist. As they are merely thought, Clarissa is still seen as a silly old woman.

Small moments, such as recalling half a memory, are the most important in the novel to Clarissa. In Modern Fiction Woolf wrote, “Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.” With this in mind, when we look at the few 'big' moments in the plot (particularly the 'royal' car, the skywriting and the Prime Minister's entrance) we see that they are all marked with vagueness: nobody knows who drives the car that everyone looks at, nobody knows what the letters that everyone looks up at actually read, and everybody who sees the Prime Minister notes how plain he is, and pretend he is not there. The most important element of these scenes is once again the element of the gaze. Woolf is showing the reader that what is interesting in these scenes is the effect on the people who see it – there is no actual consequence to who is inside the car, or what the air plane actually wrote. With early events like these shifting the usual focus inwards, we are provided a setting where Clarissa's skills make her stand out.

Clarissa's personality is reflexive and reactive – she craves external stimuli. Peter remarks that Clarissa “had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out” (67). As stated earlier, she loves life in itself, and people to her are the source of it. This is where some of her craft comes in. While she has a constant feeling of being alone, she has an acute sense for connections. She realizes that “to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman on the street, some man behind the counter” (129). With this in mind, she thinks about all of the people connected to her, and thinks about how they are not connected to each other “and she felt what a waste...if only they could be brought together; so she did it” (103) by throwing her parties. Her parties are an act of creative synthesis; she does her work in the way an artist who works with collage or pastiche.

Clarissa loves life, and throws these parties as a sort of celebration for it. This may be why, upon the news of Septimus' death, she lamented: “Oh!...in the middle of my party, here's death” (156). She seemed particularly upset about death for the only time in the book, and it's only on the grounds of how it affects the party's atmosphere. But again, it all makes sense if atmosphere is her art form.

At her party, Clarissa Dalloway takes a moment to look out the window. She sees an old woman, alone, across the street. “There! The old lady had put out her light! The whole house was dark now with this [the party] going on” (158). This seems to be Clarissa's fear, of being the old, alone woman who is missing out on life and people and gossip. A fear of missing any excitement the world has to offer.