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MISREADING MRS.

DALLOWAY
VEREEN M. BELL OR example: Daniel Mendelsohns assertion in the New York Review of Books that in Mrs. Dalloway "it is the men surrounding the women who keep falling apart" and that it is "the women who are strong, who choose life, who survive." (This seems especially ungracious toward Septimus, comparable to Dr. Bradshaws blurting out "Coward!" when Septimus leaps to his death. It isflatlywrong about Richard.) Or Patricia Meyer Spacks's claim that under the circumstances Clarissas role as "'perfect hostess' . . . is in fact an act of transcendence." (The term transcendence recurs frequently in Virginia Woolf criticism without ever being fully explained.) Or Bernard Blackstone's declaration that when Clarissas instincts are concerned, given her limited ratiocinative capacity, she is "magnificently right!" Or Jane Marcus's statement that capitalism has destroyed the lives of both Septimus and Clarissa by causing them to be "consumed by guilt at their repressed homosexuality." Or we should recall even, in an otherwise perceptive essay, Christopher Herbert's representing Clarissa as empathizing with the tragedy of the Armenians (or Albanians)"hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice"^whereas these are not Clarissa's thoughts in origin but are Richard's, whom she is all but dismissively paraphrasing. Or consider this in an issue of USA Today: "It is a day marred by a suicide, and yet what emerges triumphant is Clarissa's love of life." (The term life also recurs frequently in Virginia Woolf criticism without ever being fully explained.) Or Avrom Fleishman's claim that Clarissa "chooses hfe" even after her "prolonged transaction with death" as opposed to J. Hillis Miller's that Clarissa's "moment of greatest insight" comes at the end, when, reflecting upon Septimus's suicide, she realizes that "death is the place of true communion." Or Alice Van Buren Kelley's observation that Clarissa determines "never to bow to the laws of limitation set up in society"; that she perceives instead "a force that unites the entire world beneath the splintered factual

2006 by VereenM. Bell

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surface," which she draws upon "on a more universal plane to bring all of life together in her parties." I have selected these observations more or less at random and from a range of sources to show how after all these years the issue of Clarissa Dalloway s character rernains ambiguous and how, as she enters the public domain, owing to Michael Cunninghams idealized reinvention of her, she is in the process of becoming a public utihty. She also seems to have been caught up in what the president of the International Virginia Woolf Society imprudently described (regarding thefilmversion oiThe Hours) as a battle over "who claims to speak for the true Virginia Woolfwho owns her?" Own Clarissa Dalloway and you own Virginia Woolf, perhaps, but neither Woolf nor her creation is easily subjugated, and Clarissa Dallowayas she exists (before mediation) in the text itselfis far too complex a moral and intellectual being to be the obvious choice for an ideological model. More so than any of Woolf s other novels, Mrs. Dalloway is disconcertingly polycentric. There is so much reported thinking going on in the heads of so many characterswith virtually no guidance from the impartial narrator as to what we should be thinkingthat Clarissa Dalloway hardly seems to be a protagonist but instead is a unifying device around which other characters' thoughts cohere (insofar as they do). This means that any conclusive reading of the novel, like some of those above, must necessarily be achieved by a calculated selection of evidence that excludes salient contradictory evidence put there in plain view by Woolf herself. This is especially the case when attempts are made to represent Clarissa as the model of some human virtuestrength of character, intuitive genius, affirmation of life, transcendence of patriarchal social arrangements, empathy with the dead, unifier of society. Such efforts always involve, in one way or the other, making the kinds of excuses for Clarissa that the novel itself does not permit. The only way to achieve a clear interpretative reading of Mrs. Dalloway, in other words, would seem to present a simplistically partial and therefore false one. The miracle of Mrs. Dalloway, with all of its dazzling facets in place and accounted for, is that as soon as we appropriate it and determine what it is about, and what it is that Clarissa stands for, it always returns (as The Waste Land does) to being its unappropriatable self.

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All of this must seem self-evident to the innocent, or common, reader who comes to the novel for the first time without a paradigm in tow (and there must be many such readers today, now that Mrs. Dalloway has been a best seller). What is offered here is a version of such an innocent reading in order to illustrate the truism that careful close reading requires obedience to all of the text, not just to appropriated parts of it, and that wath a text that is as radically modernist by design as this one is, resolution is resisted by the nature of the text itself. (This is a main argument of Christopher Herbert's essay mentioned above.) Many critics have called attention to Clarissa Dalloway's limitations. What I wish to do is restore a perspective to the continuing discussion of Clarissa's story and character that has become distorted either by ideological claims upon her or by her transfiguration in the recent reinventions of her in fiction and filmnot just in The Hours and its film version but in the film version of Mrs. Dalloway directed by Marleen Corris in 1997. Virginia Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway is engaging and complex because she is presented with unsparing honesty by the narrator and regarded with varying degrees of skepticism by the novel's other characters whose main job it is to reflect upon her. She is, moreover, embedded morally and intellectually in her historical moment in a way thatbeing embeddedshe is incapable of understanding. That is what makes her so appealing, in spite of herself, and her story so sad. Whatever else may be said about Mrs. Dalloway, it is clearly intended as criticism of English society in the year 1923, as Virginia Woolf herself has said. Except for that one startling moment when the otherwise recessive narrator steps forward to tell us about the twin goddesses of Proportion and Conversion, this critique is achieved through the nuances of free indirect discourse and emerges at random intervals from the thoughts of many different characters, no one of which has greater standing than any otlier. The social critique is presented in bits and pieces, woven in rather than painted on, and the aggregate effect of this strategy is one of a subtle ironic aporia, since the otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned observers are frequentlyhke Richard Dalloway and Peter Walsh or even Sally Setonnot only representatives but agents of the social order that they observe. Clarissa is no exception. In her one moment of true moral

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insight, she empathizes abstractly with Septimus and his suicide and what she interprets as his gesture of defiance and his attempt to communicate, and she sees such people as Sir WilUam Bradshaw as truly evil people who "force the soul" and make life intolerable. Yet Sir William and his wife are guests, of course, at Clarissas party, and she would not dream of their not being there. And Septimus and his foreign bride would not have been invited under any circumstances. In her thoughts Clarissa repudiates Sir William and all that he stands for, but in her actions she collaborates in his social authority. By extension she reinforces what she thinks of as his "obscurely evil" power over the lives of the uninvited. This discontinuity between thought and deed makes historical change^what Ceorg Lukacs called "concrete potentiality"seem hopeless. Lukacs may have been partly right to include Virginia Woolf among the ideological modernists for whom potentiality is wholly abstract and subjective and not grounded in real social conditions. Virginia Woolf, however, was subtler than Lukacs himself on the subject of how and why potentiality, among the privileged and educated classes, remains abstract. The social critiques presented at random intervals in Mrs. Dalloway through the thoughts of Richard or Peter or Sally Seton or Ellie Henderson at the party are all accurate, often biting and satiric, but fleeting. Virginia Woolf has contextualized them in such a way as to add another level of pohtical critique. She shows that privilege, or even mere association with privilege, is too seductive not to ensure that subversive thoughts remain unspoken and unacted upon. "With all this luxury going on," Doris Kilman thinks, "what hope was there for a better state of things?" The novel could be named Mrs. Dalloway not because Clarissa offers a traditional heroine's alternative social vision but because she epitomizes the best and the worst of the one that prevails. Her idea of having her life over againof an alternative lifeis to have had a different body, a larger more imposing one like Lady Bexboroughs, a darker complexion, an interest in politics (as if this, too, were simply something one were bom with), and a country house. It is Lady Bexborough whom she admires for having bravely opened a bazaar while holding in her hand the telegram bringing news of her favorite son's death. English society at its best. Clarissa herself is reserved, averse to intimacy or displays of

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emotionlike Peter showever animated her own inner life may be. She likes to picture herself at social gatherings at the head of the stairs, as opposed to mingling. What political attitudes she has are unreflectively Tory. She assumes a pose of "extreme dignity" when she imagines that she is in the presence of the Queen ("the enduring symbol of the state") in the mysterious car on Bond Street. The British middle classes"sitting sideways on the tops of omnibuses with parcels and umbrellas"she considers "ridiculous, more unlike anything there has ever been than one could conceive." She admires Hugh Whitbread for having been able to stay "afloat on the cream of Enghsh society forfifty-fiveyears." Sally Seton and Peter Walsh think of Clarissa, affectionately, as a snob, and she is a snob. She is coerced by Richards appeal to her conscience to invite to her party her dowdy cousin, Ellie Henderson, who has only three hundred a year and therefore cannot dress well (Sally Seton by comparison has ten thousand), but she snubs Ellie at the party. Only Richard takes pity on Ellie and attempts to make conversation with her. Ellie Henderson s discomfort and loneliness at the party make Clarissas indifference to her and lack of empathy seem all the more cruel. When Clarissa thinks of her loathing for Doris Kilman, it is the unsightliness of Miss Kilman s mackintosh that always comes to mind. (Clarissa herself adores gloves: "a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves.") Sally, now Lady Rosseter, surmises that Clarissa has not come to visit her and her husband and her five enormous boys out in the vwlds in Manchester because she believes Sally has married beneath hera miners son, who is in manufacturing. This remains a surmise but it seems right. Even in her youthful socialist period at Bourton, Clarissa had enjoyed mocking the housemaid who had married one of the neighboring squires and who didn't know how to dress properly. She vows never to speak to the woman again when she learns that the housemaid had a baby before she was married. Peter marks this occasion, as he remembers it, as the beginning of the death of her soul. Peter and Sally agree that Clarissa has the rare quality of being extraordinarily generous to her friends, but she is also insincerely attentive to people of status whom she dislikes (and should dislike) and yet wishes to cultivate. She frets constantly over what people in society must think of her, and this anxiety underlies her

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concern over the success of her party. Clarissa thinks of her parties as what she calls "an offering," an expression of her love of life, bringing people together; but the people who attend the parties are, for the most part, tediously self-important bores: the unctuous Hugh Whitbred with his beautiful socks; Sir William Bradshaw and his wife; Lady Bruton, the woman warrior of the Empire, who detests illness in the wives of politicians; Aunt Helena, not dead yet, still promoting her book on the orchids of Burma and reminiscing about being "carried on the backs of coolies in the 'sixties over solitary peaks"; Sir Harry, who is rich from painting cattle "standing absorbing moisture in sunset pools" and who forms lewd thoughts about Clarissa; the aloof and priggish Professor Brierly, who lectures on Milton; the prime minister in his gold lace; Lord and Lady Lexham, bantering about her wearing furs to garden parties. The disconnection between what the parties are in Clarissa's mind and what they are actually likeand the odious people they are given foris profoundly saddening. This party is not a "transcendence" in any sense; it is rather the reverse. Sally Seton tries to put into words for Peter her sense that Clarissa lacks something. She has "extraordinary charm" and yet is very hard on people like Ellie Henderson who are poor and not her friends (or her servants); and there is, she says, "all this," waving her hands around at the house, at the party, and the people there. Peter himself has been reflecting during the day on the triviality of Clarissa's concernsfor all her enjoyment of lifeand upon what has appeared to him to be the death of her soulfrittering "her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn't mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination." What Clarissa lacks is a meaningful connection to the real world. In this respect she is not only an expression of her class, but she exceeds the norm. Her upbringing at Bourton had been Victorian and sheltered in the extreme, under Aunt Helena's watchful eye ("Aunt Helena never liked discussion of anything") and except for the bizarre and meaningless tragedy of her sister's death, her life seems to have been sufficiently idyllic to give convention and its restraints an aura of attractive innocence. Even Sally Seton's kiss and the lovely infatuation that follows seem to have participated in this prelapsarian Bourton aura. The radical political thoughts

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Clarissa and Sally share, reading Shelley and William Morris, are described as Utopian, as indeed they must have been, given Clarissa's and Sally's sheltered youth and the privileged setting in which the thoughts are formed. In substance Sally's and Clarissa's socialism cannot have risen to the level even of Oscar Wilde's. Clarissa's having chosen to marry Richard, who offers her status and protectiveness and respect, instead of the garrulous Peter, whose love was too intense and invasive (too real, less formal) has enabled her to remain isolated from the pressure of other people's lives and from the outer world generally (as she imagines the old lady across the way to be). For someone who has read Shelley and William Morris in her youth, and, we are surprised to learn, Tyndall and Huxley later, (Clarissa has reached the point in her middle age at which she scarcely seems conscious of the world outside Westminster and Mayfair. Her famous meditation upon the plight ofthe Armenians is excoriating evidence of this: She cared much more for her roses than for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard say over and over again)no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn't that help the Armenians?)the only flowers she could bear to see cut, , . . An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps [her parties]. Anyhow it was her gift. Nothing else had she ofthe slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans . of nonsense; and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know. If Clarissa cared what the equator was she could look it up, or ask Richard, To say the least she should not confuse the Armenians and the Turksthe victims with the victimizerseight years into only the most recent phase of that evolving genocidethe first of the century. In 1945 terms it is roughly the equivalent of confusing Nazis and the European Jews, The newest pogrom begun in Turkey was continuing even into 1923 under the celebrated constitutional

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regime of Mustafa Kemal (eventually, Kemal Ataturk), whose will had prevailed against the allies eight years before at Callipoli. This intemationai crisis is what Richard is returning to the House of Commons to help contend with after delivering his roses. ("Some Committee?" Clarissa has asked, expressing as much interest as she can muster.) The Armenian Christian genocide was widely reported in the Western press. It was denounced in both Houses of Parliament and condemned by the Anglican church, and its original perpetrators were condemned to death in absentia by a postwar tribunal. Clarissas obliviousness seems willful under the circumstances. It cannot be intended as a joke or as evidence of endearing eccentricity. Adolf Hitler knew more about this aspect of human nature than most people. "Who still remembers today the annihilation of the Armenians?" he is reported to have said to anxious aides when pressing forward with his own Final Solution. Historical memory should matter, especially to the class of people who control history's levers. The worst of it in Clarissas case blithely conflating the equator and genocide in her thoughtsis that she seems not to care. The thought that loving her roses somehow helps the Armenians is either ludicrous or insane. Clarissas harshest critic is, of course, her archenemy, Doris Kilman, who is one of this novel's Mrs. Browns. (Mrs. Dempster is the other.) Among the persons who know Clarissa and form opinions of her. Miss Kilman is wholly unmoved by the prevailing social ethos, and her analysis of Clarissa therefore has a sharper political edge. She dislikes and fears Clarissa not only for who she is (and for being the competitor for Elizabeth's allegiance) but for the attitudes of the class she represents. She is Clarissa's true antitype in the novel: unattractive, sullen, ungifted socially, dowdy, poor, passionate, un-English, politically radical, and religious. Ironically, given everything else she has going against her, Doris Kilman is the one character Woolf has situated in the novel who embodies and enunciates feminist principles. Doris Kilman is not often taken seriously by Clarissa's partisans among literary critics, but the mere fact that she is unattractive and also the heroine's antithesis does not mean she is also wrong about Clarissa. On the contrary she can be clearheaded about Clarissa because she is not under her spell. She has come into Clarissa's life because Richard has employed her to tutor their daughter in historynot in the

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arts or pianoand under the circumstances (perhaps after due consideration on Richard's part) this does not seem a bad idea. It is also interesting that Richard has chosen a Cerman woman for this role, someone who is not likely to espouse the unquestioned party line of the other members of the Dalloways' elite circle. The fact that Miss Kilman is in love with and possessive toward Elizabeth, and jealous of Clarissa on these grounds alone, does not, in tum, mean that she is wrong to fear that Elizabeth is in danger of repeating her mother's life and to wish something more meaningful for her. She seems genuinely (as well as self-interestedly) concemed that Elizabeth attempt to grasp the concept of how other kinds of people live and thinkan extension of the logic of her interest in history: "And she talked too about the war. After all, there were people who did not think the English invariably right. There were books. There were meetings. There were other points of view. Would Elizabeth hke to come with her to hsten to So-and-so (a most extraordinary looking old man)? Then Miss Kilman took her to some church in Kensington and they had tea with a clergyman. She had lent her books. Law, medicine, politics, all professions are open to women of your generation, said Miss Kilman." ("Elizabeth had never thought about the poor. . . . [She] hked old women because they were Duchesses, and being descended from some Lord.") When Miss Kilman says to Ehzabeth that "she must not let parties absorb her" we are reminded that Clarissa thinks of parties as her only "gift" and that she thinks that love and religion are "detestable" and serve only to destroy "the privacy of the soul." Clarissa is not altogether wrong about this, psychologically speaking, but after one discards politics and history in the first place, and then love and religion as well, one does not have much left but parties to fall back on. It is immediately after Clarissa's reflections on love and religion that the small harrowing episode begins in which Ehzabeth goes with Miss Kilman to the Stores. This sequencing cannot be accidental. Briefly Clarissa's and Miss Kilman's circles of consciousness overlap (though they remain opaque to each other) as if to compete for and compHcate our moral understanding. Just as Elizabeth and Miss Kilman are about to depart, Clarissa laughs at Miss Kilman. This may not be altogether for the reason that Miss Kilman later thinks, but it is thoughtless and cmel nevertheless.

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We are not permitted the privilege of laughing at Miss Kilman nor of thinking of her as Clarissa does, in her jealousy, as a caricature. Phyllis Rose schematically classifies Miss Kilman, as other critics have in different ways, as among those "fanatics and ideologues" who share in the masculine "crime of 'forcing' the soul, where forcing has the meanings of forcible entry into a locked house, of rape." But this is to take Miss Kilman at Clarissas evaluation, and Clarissas "magnificent" instincts are not always right. Part of the point of the shifting points of view of this novel is to give everyone's inner life respectful standing and, in the process, to show how inaccurate everyone in it is about everyone else. It is clearly, and significantly, EUzabeth taking Miss Kilman to the Army and Navy Stores, since she knows her way around such uppercrust estabUshments, rather than, as Clarissa has oddly surmised, the reverse. What we leam about Miss Kilman in the narrative sequence that continues into this episode is almost more than it is possible to bear: that she has struggled to educate and make something of herself, beginning in meager immigrant circumstances in the lower range of what Clarissa thinks of as the "ridiculous" middle classes; that she has been largely thwarted in this otherwise (one would think) commendable ambition for a woman because of being Cerman at the worst possible historical moment ("she had never been able to tell lies. Miss Dolby [at the school] thought she would be happier with people who shared her views about the Germans"); that her brother has been killed in the war; that she resents her own poverty and exclusion; that she is overweight and homely and despises her own body and yet derives her only pleasure in hfe from eating sweets; that she has become a Christian because a sympathetic minister has taken pity upon her and enabled her to take some comfort in identifying with the suffering of Christ; that she is socially graceless and incapable of small talk; that her commitment to her beliefs consists largely in her attempt to renounce worldly things and thus to transcend the pain inflicted upon her own tortured ego ("It is the flesh," she repeats desperately to herself when humiliated by Clarissa and others); and, worst of allin her un-English waythat she is passionately, recklessly, and hopelessly in love with the beautiful young Ehzabeth. The roughly twelve pages depicting Doris Kilman's emotional

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disintegration and its aftermath are among the most wrenching and poignant in all of Virginia Woolf s writing. Certainly they are in Mrs. Dalloway, for no one else in its attenuated emotional environment has anything like Doris Kilman's capacity for raw feeling. Doris Kilman, ill-at-ease to begin with and bewildered by the Stores, makes the disastrous error, having finished her eclair, of trying to share her feelings, of attempting intimacy, with a Dalloway woman. "I never go to parties, " said Miss Kilman, just to keep Elizabeth from going. "People don't ask me to go to parties"and she knew as she said it that it was this egotism that was her undoing . . . but she could not help it. She had suffered so horribly. "Why should they ask me?" she said. "I'm plain, I'm unhappy." She knew it was idiotic. . . . Like some dumb creature who has been brought up to a gate for an unknown purpose, and stands there longing to gallop away, Elizabeth Dalloway sat silent. Was Miss Kilman going to say anything more? "Don't quite forget me," said Doris Kilman; her voice quivered. Right away to the end of the Held the dumb creature galloped in terror. The great hand opened and shut. Elizabeth turned her head. The waitress came. One had to pay at the desk, Elizabeth said, and went off, drawing out, so Miss Kilman felt, the very entrails in her body, stretching them as she crossed the room, and then, with a final twist, bowing her head very politely, she went. She had gone. Miss Kilman sat at the marble table among the eclairs, stricken once, twice, thrice by shocks of suffering. She had gone. Beauty had gone, youth had gone. It cannot be that we are meant to ignore the depth of Miss Kilman's suffering. It is too starkly described: "One had to pay at the desk, Elizabeth said, and went off, drawing out, so Miss Kilman felt, the very entrails in her body, stretching them as she

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crossed the room." Her religionfar from forcing the souls of othersis intended to be a refuge from such suffering. All that Clarissa knows about Doris Kilman is that she is religious, possessive, and degradingly poor. What we as readers know after these pages is how powerful and unjust her suffering is and how little release from it she finds in her Lord. Whatever rapport there previously existed between EHzabeth and Miss Kilman is forever broken. Miss Kilman takes refuge in prayer nearby in the darkness and silence of Westminster Abbey. Here she is impartially observed by a Mr. Eletcher, who is among the lucky for whom the path to Cod has been smooth. He cannot "help being a Uttle distressed by the poor lady's disorder; her hair dovm; her parcel on the floor. . . . But, as he stood gazing about him, at the white marbles, grey window panes, and accumulated treasures (for he was extremely proud of the Abbey), her largeness, robustness, and power as she sat there shifting her knees from time to time (it was so rough the approach to her Codso tough her desires) impressed him." We leam here, for the first time, that these qualities have also impressed Mrs. Dalloway, who "had been unable to get the thought of her out of her mind that afternoon." Ehzabeth, meanwhile, enjoys her release into solitude among the masses on the omnibus. Inspired by the purposeful urban bustle of the Strand and Fleet Street, she begins imagining a future for herself (sounding for all the world like the earnest young seekers after happiness at the end of Rasselas): "She liked people who were ill. And every profession is open to the women of your generation, said Miss Kilman. So she might be a doctor. She might be a farmer. Animals were often ill. She might own a thousand acres and have people under her. She would go and see them in their cottages." The adventure "has made her quite determined, whatever her mother might say, to become either a farmer or a doctor. But she was, of course, rather lazy." Her dreams begin to seem even to her rather silly. They are Hke something "slumbrous" lying on "the mind's sandy floor" which breaks the surface from time to time, leaves an impression, and then goes "dov^Ti again . . . to the sandy floor." And, anyway, "She must go home. She must dress for dinner." A page earlier, the narrator has interposed: "And did Elizabeth give one thought to poor Miss Kilman who loved her without jealousy, to whom she had been a fawn in the open, a

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moon in a glade? She was delighted to be free." Ehzabeth in these moments, the last we see of her in sharp focus, clearly exhibits traits derived both from her father and her mother (her adventure echoes her mother's, earher, going to fetch the flowers), but the signs of her mother in her do not seem like those one would want a daughter to emulate. It is perhaps a good sign that she identifies herself more with her father than with her mother, but she is still seen as in danger of "going under"as her mother is and as Mrs. Bradshaw has before them. We do not leam anything about Clarissa and her social world from Miss Kilman that we should not already know. At one point in this episode, however, Woolf has Miss Kilman encapsulate it, so that we won't miss the point: "When people are happy, they have a reserve . . . upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre . . . jolted by every pebble." This is a harsh truth that Woolf broods upon in Mrs. Dalloway incessantly. The juxtaposition between Doris Kilman's life and Clarissa Dalloway's incarnates it. The problem then becomes. What are we to make of it? (Lukacs would have an answer for this.) The novel gives us no answers. Certainly it is not that life must be affirmed if Clarissa is to be the paragon of that view, for Clarissa hardly knows what life is and seems not to care to know more of it than she does. Her horizons do not seem to her to need vwdening. Empathy does not come naturally to her. She makes symbols of peoplelike the lady across the way, or Doris Kilman, or Septimusso that they can be accommodated to the narrative of her own life. She is shielded from the harshness of the world by her wealth and beauty and by her lyrical sensibility. What she thinks of as life is the excitement of going for the flowers herself rather than sending servants for them or the hustle and bustle of the city streets on her way there or being good to and being adored by her servants or giving parties. But the novel shows us that Doris Kilman is life, also. The effects ofthe war upon both Septimus and his pathetically trapped wife are life. The grotesqueness and carnage of the Creat War that no one speaks of are life. The massacred Armenians are life. Colonial exploitation, from which everyone here prospers, is life. On this perfectly ordinary, fine summer morning in Regent's Park, Maisie Johnson is overwhelmed by the strangeness of things

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within the normal in this disorienting city and is seized with terror: "'Horror! horror!' she wanted to cry. (She had left her people; they had warned her what would happen) 'Why hadn't she stayed at home?' she cried, twisting the knob of the iron railing." This is life as it irrupts in the heart of a frightened girl from Edinburgh on a June day in 1923. Observing (and misreading) her, Mrs. Dempster, resting on a park bench, meditates on yet another aspect of life which for Clarissa would be wholly other: That girl, thought Mrs. Dempster . . . don't know a thing yet; and really it seemed to her better to be a little stout, a little slack, a little moderate in one's expectations. Percy drank. Well, better to have a son, thought Mrs. Dempster. She had had a hard time of it, and couldn't help smiling at a girl like that. You'll get married, for you're pretty enough, thought Mrs. Dempster. Get married, she thought, and then you'll know. Oh, the cooks, and so on. Every man has his ways. But whether I'd have chosen quite like that if I could have known, thought Mrs. Dempster, and could not help wishing to whisper a word to Maisie Johnson; to feel on the creased pouch of her worn old face the kiss of pity. For it's been a hard life, thought Mrs. Dempster. What hadn't she given to it? Roses; figure; her feet too. (She drew the knobbed lumps beneath her skirt.) Roses, she thought sardonically. All trash, m'dear. For really, what with eating, drinking, and mating, the bad days and good, life had been no mere matter of roses, and what was more, let me tell you, Carrie Dempster had no wish to change her lot with any woman's in Kentish Town! But, she implored, pity. Pity for the loss of roses. Pity she asked of Maisie Johnson, standing by the hyacinth beds. Even roughly one hundred pages later when Clarissa is thinking about Richard's Armenians and how much more she herself cares about her roses, this passage should resonate for us. Mrs. Dempster's weariness and her gnarled feet are life, too. Virginia Woolf supphes us with these random mosaic pieces, these loose

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ends that are outside the frame of Clarissas narrative, but she does not comment on their relevance. We either get it or we don't, Peter Walsh is in love with Clarissa, in his way, and, like others who know less about her, he is still under the spell of her practiced cordiality. But he is not wrong about her having been interpellated. He would not be able to put it this way, of course, but when he thinks abruptly, "the death ofthe soul" and then, remembering the night at Bourton when Clarissa had derided the housemaid who had married the squire, "the death of her soul," it is clearly interpellation he is thinking of. Clarissa has chosen the life she leads when she married Richard instead of Peter, and she does not repudiate that life. She seems to herself to depend upon Richard for her very survival. The interpellation process has followed inexorably. She is joining the ranks of other womenEmma Bovary, Edna Pontelher, Lily Bart among them^who have been trapped in history both by the choices they make and by the poverty of options in their historical moment that forces these choices upon them in the first place. What is worse, their respective cultures have denied them an intellectual idiom in which to think their way past what has become of them. Interpellation works insidiously, and it works most cruelly on those upon whom it works imperfectly, who have not gone completely under, who can still see what has happened to themselves but also see that there is no realistic way to change it. Psychologically Clarissa would be better off being Lady Bradshaw. Clarissas not being Lady Bradshawexpressed in the inchoate sorrow just below the surface of her public identityone of her "laminations" as ZwerdUng describes itis what redeems her for us. On the night of the party this sorrow rouses and sends forth into her thoughts its intimations of loss. This occurs unexpectedly at a moment of greatest intoxication with her party's triumph: for, though she had loved this intoxication, she thinks, "and felt it tingle and sting, still these semblances, these triumphs (dear old Peter, for example, thinking her so brilliant), had a hoUowness; at arm's length they were, not in the heart, and it might be that she was growing old but they satisfied her no longer as they used." (Earlier she has thought, "Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of being something not herself, and that every one was unreal in one way; much more real in another.") She

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suddenly thinks of Doris Kilman again. She has momentarily seen herself through Doris Kilman's eyes, and she knows that though she hates Miss Kilman she loves her also. However sycophantic Clarissa may be in her public life, she is brave enoughat this moment, at leastto concede that "It is enemies one wanted, not friends"that, in effect, Doris Kilman embodies what is left of Clarissa's uninterpellated self. By the time death comes to Clarissa's party, in other words, Doris Kilman is already there in her mind, and Clarissa therefore cannot avoid thinking of Septimus's suicide as somehow a comment upon her own life. The thoughts that follow seem to flow one into the other, but they are really disconnected and do not coalesce into a single meaning. At first she is offended that the Bradshaws have spoken of death at her party. Then, in one of her remarkable rushes of empathy, she relives Septimus's plunge onto the railings. Then she thinks that Septimus in flinging his life away had preserved some unnameable thing "that mattered" which "has been obscured in her owoi life" and that she and her friends, on the other hand, will simply grow old, letting the thing that matters "drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter." She then buffers the harsh truth of this insight by complicating it: "Death was a defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death." This is a paratactic jumble of not very logical thoughtsdefiance, communication, embrace, the fading of rapture, aloneness^which cohere only around Clarissa's inchoate sadness and sense of loss and her unwelcome, if transitory, realization that not only is her own life a structure of artifice and evasiondriven by what Edith Wharton named the "force of negation"but that access to some redemptive mystical center is closed off as well. Perhaps, this implies, the mystical center itself is an illusion, not a presence but an absence, a mirage at the inverted horizon of despair. In the irregular flow of these thoughts Clarissa is suddenly led to one clear and concise judgment upon herself and the life she has chosen: "Somehow it was her disasterher disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress."

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But, although Clarissa can be brave, she is too much a creature of her culture to be this brave and this self-aware for long. She moves on. Her mood begins to lift. She thinks of her happiness with Richard, ofthe pleasures of having done with the triumphs of youth while intermittently having access to her youthful happiness come upon her "with a shock of deUght, as the sun rose, as the day sank." Mentally preparing to return to her party, Clarissa opportunistically revaluates the meaning of Septimus's death. "The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; . . . she did not pity him, with all this going on. . . . She felt somehow very like himthe young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. . . . He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun." In any other context this last sequence of thoughts about Septimusthe horrors of whose hfe we, of course, know in a way that Clarissa cannot^would seem crudely narcissistic. ("He made her feel the beauty. He made her feel the fun.") Perhaps it is only crudely narcissistic, related to Clarissa's bhtheness about the Armenians and her roses. On the other hand Clarissa is having to work herself past the oppressive ambience of death in order to reassume her identity as a hostess, and this role cannot be performed effectively under the influence of despair or of ironic self-scrutiny. "She must assemble," she thinks (a nice ambiguity here). "She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room" (a nice ambiguity here, as well). Before Clarissa fully returns from her sohtude, however, we are returned to Sally and Peter and Elizabeth and Richard and the rejected Ellie Henderson, all of whom we have gotten to know far better than they, as Sally has pointed out, can ever hope to know one another. From this beautiful and affecting narrative strategy we discover that within the social critiqueeven at its most scathing at the party^what Mrs. Dalloway has been showing us in different ways all along is also the poignancy of human isolation and regretthat these two currents in the narration, of judgment on the one hand, and of empathy on the otherof brain and hearthave been flowing together from the beginning in the oddly aristocratic and egalitarian motions of Virginia Woolf's style. There is no victory of one person, or of one gender, over the other in Mrs. Dalloway, no summation, no transcendence, only an attentive, satiric, and generous representation of fallible,

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intelligent people doing their best to make sense of, and get on with, what they have made of their lives. Even the snobbish Sally seems abruptly overcome, as if she has been reading the novel that she is in. She and Peter agree that they have been surprised to discover that, having grown older, they feel more rather than less. Observing Richard and Elizabeth together, Sally agrees with Peter that Richard has "improved" (rather than admitting that she had been wrong about him before), and she rises to go to him and to affirm their friendship, to affirm what is meaningful. "What does the brain matter," she says, "compared with the heart?"perhaps thinking as much ofher own brainy self as of Richard. When Peter then abruptly senses the terror and the ecstasy of Clarissas presence, it is surely irony that the novel s last thought, formed in free indirect discourse, is, "For there she was." Who can know by this point who Clarissa is? Least of all the infatuated romantic Peter. Least of all Clarissa herself. And yet their dependence upon each other is as intricate and as necessary as it is incomplete. The selves they keep alive in each other in memory both have and have not in fact flowed away into the past. Identity in the stream-of-consciousness novel is never a stable construct, as Virginia Woolf tirelessly pointed out in her prose and illustrated in her fiction. It is more like a lava lamp than a structure (which is why Alex ZwerdUng's otherwise accurate description of Clarissas personality as "laminated" seems slightly imprecise). This may account for the strange sadness, the sense of loss or of absence that pervades all of her work. Her characters are never wholly alive to themselves because they can never be complete in the way they had expected to be. The same transience and mutabihty that rule in the outer world rule in the inner world as well, from one hour, from one day, to the next. This is why neither Clarissa nor anyone else in Mrs. Dalloway can be converted into a version of ourselves or of our own ideologies. Sally Seton, Lady Rosseter, has it right for this context: it is our feelings, not a structure of ideas, that keep us at one with the flow of our humanness in process. Perhaps the Virginia Woolf who excoriates the twin goddesses of Proportion and Conversion would also want to argue that our ideologies are only artifacts of denial that help us hold this intimidating truth of our lives at bay. There are all sorts of ways of

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forcing the soul. By intention the stream-of-consciousness method denies us closure and resolution, especially when, as in Mrs. Dalloway, there are so many smaller streams flowing into the larger one. The currents of inner and outer lives simplyflowon, carrying memories with them, which, in tum, are mediated by prevailing cultural texts. A novel that is true to this understanding of life will simply stop, as this one does, leaving those whorls and currents of thought and feeling set loose in its pages to flow on beyond themand flow eventually into the blank space into which our own livesas we try to make sense of and get on with themflow as well.

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