Solitariness in the City in Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway

In Mrs Dalloway psychological perspective is intricately linked to the experience of a characters

immediate surroundings. The city of London acts as a matrix onto which the emotions of the
protagonists can be mapped as they pass through it, a space that stands in stark contrast to the organic
experience of Bourton and its country setting. The characters interactions and their emotional
responses to them are carefully framed by the time and space that they occupy and each characters
integrity of feeling is circumscribed by the social strictures imposed on them by the urban
environment and the societal expectations it fosters. This essay will explore how the urban
environment engenders a feeling of artifice and emotional alienation within the protagonists of Mrs
Dalloway arguing that never is a sense of solitariness more imminent than in the city where one is
surrounded by a throng of people with which one has little or no personal contact.

I believe a sense of solitariness in Mrs Dalloway arises primarily in the dichotomy between the public
and the private self, particularly when these two forms of identity act in opposition to each other to
create a conflict. I believe this disjuncture between the public and private self is strongest within an
urban environment and occurs as a result of the social systems that the city facilitates. As Jeremy
Hawthorn argues in his book Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway: A Study in Alienation: It is not so much
that the city causes alienation but rather that a particular form of social structure encouraged the
development of a set of social relationships in the city, which then offered themselves as a perfect
symbol of that basic structure. The individual in our society, like the individual in the city, is
surrounded by people with whom he has to relate, to whom he must communicate, but who are
essentially private, separate from him. 1 It is on the pretext of communicating with these private
beings, these individuals who make up a body of people who can be defined no more specifically than
as other to us that we create our public self. The city facilitates a dualistic model of communication.
1 Jeremy Hawthorn, Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway: A Study in Alienation, A.
Kettle & A. K. Thorlby, (London: Sussex University Press, 1975), p.68

Firstly the public self; who communicates impersonally with members of the public on a practical
basis, dealing with the everyday interactions that make up the functional part of life; buying flowers
from Mrs Pyms shop and ordering Rumpelmayers men to take the doors off the hinges for the party.
And secondly the private self, the self that is maintained apart from our formal interaction, the
element of the self that communicates with the integral identity of the soul, which surrenders itself
only in matters of conjugal and familial love.
The alienation that arises in Mrs Dalloway occurs in the inadvertent transplantation of this former
model of communication upon the private sphere. Clarissas public self exhibits itself most in her
ambitions as a hostess in the throwing of parties in which she communicates with the guests on a
purely formal basis, parties that offer little or no emotional fulfilment to her inner private self. The
impersonality of this hostess/guest relationship is demonstrated most aptly by the distanced formality
between Clarissa and Lady Bruton. Woolf tells us how Lady Brutons inquiry, Hows Clarissa? was
known by women infallibly, to be a signal from a well-wisher, from an almost silent companion,
whose utterances (half a dozen perhaps in the course of a lifetime) signified recognition of some
feminine comradeship which [...] united Lady Bruton and Mrs. Dalloway, who seldom met, and
appeared when they did meet indifferent and even hostile, in a singular bond. 2 This dichotomy
between feminine comradeship a intimate understanding between women and the indifferent and
even hostile exterior with which they meet each other at parties, is demonstrative of the kind of
alienation which occurs throughout and is encouraged by an urban atmosphere where the personal is
kept detached from the public self as a matter of respectability.
This artifice of detached respectability frustrates Peter Walsh who in quite the opposite fashion to
Clarissa is prone to a sense of solitariness that arises in his liability to alienate people within the
formal strictures of London society with overt expressions of his private feelings. For Clarissa, Peters
emotional profuseness is the product of a self-centeredness, a wish to impose upon the private sphere
of the other: think of Peter in love she muses after his first visit with her after his time in India

2 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 107

he came to see her after all these years, and what did he talk about? Himself. Horrible passion! she
thought. Degrading passion!3
For Clarissa Peters emotional impulsiveness, his marrying on the ship out to India and more recently
his entanglement with an Indian officers wife, his eagerness to engage with the private self is
horrible and degrading and the women he love[s] vulgar, trivial, commonplace. 4 For Clarissa
marriage is a practical contract to give oneself a position within society, a way of formalising ones
personal relationship with a partner, which takes its precedent from the public model interactions that
the city engenders. For Clarissa marriage is an attic room, the bed narrow and an inability to
dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which cl[i]ng[s] to her like a sheet. 5 Clarissa is unable
to reconcile her public self with her emotional and sexual self, preferring a detached formality in
marriage, which will give her security in her public independence.
Peter derides this sense of emotional detachment in Clarissa saying there was always something cold
in Clarissa [...]. She had always, even as a girl, a sort of timidity, which in middle age becomes
conventionality, and then its all up, its all up,6 for Peter theres nothing in the world so bad for
some women as marriage[...]; and politics; and having a Conservative husband, like the admirable
Richard.7 During their time at Bourton Peter had teased Clarissa that She would marry a Prime
Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess, [...] she had the makings of the perfect
hostess.8 Peters emotional integrity lies in this detestation of the formalisation of emotional
relationships which finds its perfect form in the hostess figure. Peter may fail in his marriages,
3 MD, p.128
4 MD, p.128
5 MD, p.30
6 MD, p.48
7 MD, pp.39-40
8 MD, p. 5

presumably because of the heated and impulsive nature of his passions. And despite being overcome
with shame suddenly at having been a fool; wept; been emotional; told [Clarissa] everything, as
usual, in their first encounter after India, Peter is at least able to give voice to his emotions in a way
that Clarissa never achieves. This inability to voice her private self is what inevitably leads to the
alienation of her private self and her sense of solitariness among the formal strictures of the city.

Jeremy Hawthorn further explores how the public and private selves interact proposing that Woolf
seems fascinated by the fact that a human beings distinctness only reveals itself through contact with
other people, and can only be fully perceived by another person. We exist simultaneously in terms of
but distinct from other people.9 A major disjunction that defines the relationship between Peter Walsh
and Clarissa is Peters inability to understand Clarissas need to maintain this public self even in
marriage. With Clarissa a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living
together day in day out in the same house; which Richard g[ives] her, and she him, whereas with Peter
everything ha[s] to be shared; everything gone into which proves intolerable for Clarissa. 10 Clarissa
is unable to make deep emotional connections with men on a private level, which is exacerbated by
her sexual frigidity. Clarissa cannot reconcile her public and her private selves and so chooses a
relationship with Richard who will not interrogate her on deeper emotional issues and who himself
has issues with expressing intimate emotion as when he fails to tell Clarissa he loves her after buying
her roses.
But simultaneously Clarissa needs to company of people to complete her as Peter relates she had a
sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out and
for him the inevitable result of this is that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these
incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, sayings things she didnt mean, blunting the edge of her
mind, losing her discrimination. The fact that peter sees the importance of discrimination as a key
9A Study in Alienation, p.12
10 MD, p. 5

part of maintaining ones integrity shows a hypocrisy in his criticism of Clarissas detached
demeanour. For Clarissa remaining emotionally detached is her way of maintaining the integrity of
her private self and her emotional fulfilment is satisfied in being the centre of a reputable social circle
that is incredibly discriminating. For Clarissa her parties allow her to see herself reflected in her social
circle without wishing to subdue or absorb the other persons identity as Peter is so apt to do. Her
parties are a meeting point for a social exchange, which form as a microcosm of the urban
environment where people may interact formally without having to engage on a deep emotional level.
But in a way Clarissa still fails to reconcile her composed public self with her private self and is left
feeling just anybody, standing there [...]a stake driven in at the top of her stairs. [...]of ha[ving] this
feeling of being something not herself, and that every one [is] unreal in one way.11 She has fulfilled
Peters scornful prediction at Bourton of her being married to a politician (if not a Prime minister) and
being the perfect hostess stood at the top of the stairs. This feeling of being something not herself
reflects the alienating artifice of her social situation in relation to her private self that wishes to to go
deeper, beneath what people said beyond these superficial and fragmentary judgements people
make.12
Clarissa perhaps then finds cohesion between her public and private self, finding a balance between
her emotional compass, personal freedom and the need for a set of formalities, which underpin
communication in wandering the streets of London. Woolf explores this juncture between the public
and the private in her essay Street Haunting saying: The evening hour, gives us the irresponsibility
which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house
on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of
that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of
ones own room.13 This extract demonstrates Woolf belief not only in the alienating qualities of city
life, but also in a comforting sense of anonymity that the city can afford one that allows us freedom
11 MD, p. 173
12 MD, p.68

from the strictures of social interaction which occurs with the shedding of the self our friends know
us by. For Clarissa this freedom exists in peoples 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 [...] what she loved; life; London.14
In conclusion the effect of the city upon feelings of solitariness and alienation is a double-edged one.
The social structures of the city can act a means of confirming ones own identity reflected in and
admired by another, and it can rebuke a sense of alienation by taking one out of ones self by fostering
an appreciation of the distinctness of another person. But it can also have its negative side, where the
social structures of the city and the interactions of people within them resemble a form of imposition
upon the private self, an attempt at a conversion to someone elses outlook on life or where it involves
a desire to subdue or assimilate another persons identity.

Word Count: 1979

Bibliography
Hawthorn, Jeremy, Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway: A Study in Alienation, A. Kettle & A. K. Thorlby,
(London: Sussex University Press, 1975),
Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway, (London: Penguin, 1996)
Woolf, Virginia, 'Street Haunting', in Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942) available at:
<http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/chapter5.html> [01/05/2014]

13Virginia Woolf, 'Street Haunting', in Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)
available at: <http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/chapter5.html > [01/05/2014]
(para. 2)
14 MD, p.2