Virginia Woolf (16 page)

“For it was the middle of June. The War was over … 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 … ”
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The thoughts run on like a gossippy woman; the long full sentence is less a structural feat than a psychologic one, giving the hurrying, hustling tokens of the hurrying, bustling observations and ideas. It is such writing which makes “Mrs. Dalloway” the unquestionable product of a woman. In it Virginia Woolf has found free scope to explore the consciousness of her sex. Mrs. Dalloway is representative of the emotional, quasi-poetic woman whose thoughts are largely memories. She is “the perfect hostess”, the social analogy of the great Mother, “with that extraordinary gift, that woman’s gift of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be.”
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Her irrelevancies are traces, depicting the mysterious leaps in the mind of a woman from vanity to the most profound experiences in life and back again to the question of dresses and personal beauty.

“That was her self—”, she thinks, looking in the mirror, “pointed; dartlike; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together.” (Orlando too as a woman, draws her parts together, the innumerable phases and potentialities which make her “true self … compact of all the selves we have it in us to be; commanded and locked up by the Captain self, the Key self, which amalgamates and controls them all”). So with the same mosaic quality of a woman’s personality, Mrs. Dalloway “drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy no doubt in some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps; she had helped young people, who were grateful to her; had tried to be the same always, never showing a sign of all the other sides of her—faults, jealousies, vanities, suspicions, like this of Lady Bruton not asking her to lunch; which, she thought (combing her hair finally), is utterly base! Now, where was her dress?”
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Streams of consciousness are explored in all the characters. The present is a kind of maypole from which each character flees with his own streamer back into the past. The characters reminisce; their lives are recounted with a constant moving backward in time. Nothing is active and vital; the figures are forever contemplating, always regretting, or longing sentimentally) for
times past. “There was Regent’s Park—odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps coining back to me—the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women live much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places; and their fathers—a woman’s always proud of her father.”
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All feminine irrelevancies are unified in this stream of consciousness; associations, as of Clarissa’s father, stimulate in Virginia Woolf, aphorisms which mark her life as one rich in observations and experience. Peter’s reflection that women live deeply in the past is a justification of the whole book, a justification of Clarissa’s constant reminiscences and, more important, of Virginia Woolf’s own mentality, inducing her to create in such scant action and vast, poetic memories, as:

“Still remembering how once in some primeval May she had walked with her lover, this rusty pump, this battered old woman with one hand exposed for coppers, the other clutching her side, would still be there in ten million years, remembering how once she had walked in May, where the sea flows now, with whom it did not matter—he was a man, oh yes, a man who had loved her. But the passage of ages had blurred the clarity of that ancient May day; the bright petalled flowers were hoar and silver frosted; and she no longer saw, when she implored him (as she did now quite clearly) ‘look in my eyes with thy sweet eyes intently,’ she no longer saw brown eyes, black whiskers or sunburnt face, but only a looming shape, a shadow shape … ”
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Where in “Jacob’s Room” the method is contrapuntal, in “Mrs. Dalloway” it is a constant retracing of past themes. The sharp outlines of the present are blurred; here is a dreaming of the past, of associations which have lost their temporal significance. There is little of the active movement of the first two novels; the characters contemplate a move and then regard its completion. The action itself is rarely mentioned; its reality lies in its suggestiveness that space and time have been traversed. A character thinks of holding something; no action occurs, but the object is obtained and held. “But he wanted to come in holding something. Flowers? Yes, flowers, since he did not trust his taste in gold; any number of flowers, roses, orchids, to celebrate what was, reckoning things as you will, an event; this feeling about her when they spoke of Peter Walsh at luncheon; and they never spoke of it; not for years had they spoken of it; which, he thought, grasping his red and white roses together (a vast bunch in tissue paper), is the greatest mistake in the world.”
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Where in her earlier novels, she had returned to Sir Thomas Browne and the dead philosophers for inspiration, she stands now in the air of her time. It is Bergson’s problem and solutions which modulate her thinking and with it her style. The poetic concept of reality, peculiar to the French philosopher, is the kernel of her writing. She is too innately creative, too inherently Bergsonian to be called Bergson’s imitator. It is conceivable that she would have found the way without him; yet living in the Bergsonian atmosphere, she draws even unconsciously from the truths he had established. Life is to be understood, he had proclaimed, not through the brain or mechanical reason, but through poetic intuition. A manifesto for Virginia Woolf to whom as poet and woman, intuition is core and kernel. Like Bergson, she denounces science in its attempt to explain mechanically the processes of the mind and the human consciousness. She objectifies her distaste for science in the doctors she creates. Portraying Science in one man, Dr. Bradshaw, she ridicules its complacent external logic, and its utter failure to understand the deeper psychic experiences in man. Only intuition, sympathetic and creative, can grasp these inner phenomena. Mrs. Dalloway, in her Bergsonian irrationalism, can comprehend the torments which drive Septimus Warren Smith to insanity; Dr. Bradshaw can only diagnose with “his infallible instinct, this is madness, this sense.”
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He can codify insanities; he cannot comprehend them. To all his patients he gives the same rational cure, regardless of what has caused their psychosis or how fitting to each of them his cure may be. With driving irony, Virginia Woolf portrays this man of reason, his logical orderly classifications and his role of fatal critic to the Bergsonian creative poet. “To his patients he gave three-quarters of an hour; and if in this exacting science which has to do with what, after all, we know nothing about—the nervous system, the human brain—a doctor loses his sense of proportion, as a doctor he fails. Health we must have; and health is proportion; so that when a man comes into your room and says he is Christ (a common delusion), and has a message, as they mostly have, and threatens, as they often do, to kill himself, you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages; six month’s rest; until a man who went in weighing seven slone six comes out weighing twelve.”
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The scientist, in his mechanical ratiocination, has missed the central difficulty; he can cure the body, but for psychic diseases, his masculine brain alone is impotent. It is the
unscientific Clarissa who penetrates with peculiar femininity, why, after Septimus has visited Dr. Bradshaw, he commits suicide … “there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had that passion, and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor, yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrage—forcing your soul, that was it—if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said (indeed she felt it now), Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that?”
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Or, she philosophizes: “A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

“But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding his treasure?”
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The change in Virginia Woolf’s philosophic influences is obvious in her style. Her nature descriptions do not change, but her analysis of the consciousness, her psychic interest in life, seeks a fitting expression. From the poetic rhythms of Browne and Lamb and De Quincey, whose cadences, in their harmonic purity, seem to follow laws of aural rhetoric, she now assumes the Bergsonian rhythms which convey the rise and fall of thoughts themselves. Her old search for the Flaubert
mot juste
, seems suppressed. Single words are not ostentatiously sounded but are blended to depict the sensitive workings of the mind. She is following carefully Bergson’s definition of style. «En réalité, l’art de l’écrivain consiste surtout ànous faire oublier qu’il emploie des mots … Le rhythme de la parole n’a done d’autre objet que de reproduire le rhythme de la pensée.»
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Bergson’s vitalism, his creative Élan Vital, and his definition of style mark their influence upon Virginia Woolf. His differentiation between measured time and the creative time-concept of the consciousness stimulate in her a deep train of thought. “Time … though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a
hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.”
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Bergson’s durée, parallel to the inner stream of consciousness, is for Virginia Woolf, the irrational dynamic reality in life. Consciousness, Bergson contended, is comprehended largely in temporal impressions. The man of action, observes Virginia Woolf, is different from the sedentary thinker in his apprehension of passing time: “time when he is thinking becomes inordinately long; time when he is doing becomes inordinately short … his whole past, which seemed to him of extreme length and variety, rushed into the falling second, swelled it a dozen times its natural size, coloured it a thousand tints, and filled it with all the odds and ends in the universe.”
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It is in this psychic creative memory, where the measured laws of time and space are shattered, that Virginia Woolf approximates Bergson’s Élan Vital. She builds the characters in “Mrs. Dalloway” through their own recreation of time past, a Bergsonian influence upon Proust and Joyce and through them upon contemporary literature.

Following the technique of “Ulysses”, “Mrs. Dalloway” revives the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action. The single ordinary day depicted in both novels is the middle of June where the characters may bathe, like Stephen, in the morning, or sleep on benches at noon, like Peter Walsh. London in “Mrs. Dalloway” supersedes Joyce’s Dublin with the same place-consciousness. Westminster, Bond Street, Regent’s Park, are vital, conscious settings as suggestive of defined space as Davy Byrne’s bar, or Eccles Street, or the Lying-in-Hospital in Dublin. The characters are held together in “Mrs. Dalloway” with more obvious, more conscious unity and rigour than in “Ulysses”. Where Joyce’s characters drift and fall apart as in the course of an ordinary day, and Bloom and Stephen are driven together only by the subconscious Odyssean search of a father for a son, Virginia Woolf’s characters are gravitated through external motivations. Clarissa’s party is the great cohesive goal towards which they all converge. Through secondary streams, the whole world seems connected; shopkeepers, florists, department stores, omnibuses, everything touched by the characters becomes centripetal. “It was her street, this, Clarissa’s; cabs were rushing round the corner,
like water round the piers of a bridge, drawn together, it seemed to him because they bore people going to her party, Clarissa’s party.”
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Septimus, a vital character for Virginia Woolf, a poet shocked by the war, whose wild fanciful illusions have grown unrestrained with the loss of his stability, seems unrelated to the others, neither going to the party nor known to Clarissa. Until the end, he seems to have been inserted only for the potentialities he has, excusable in a deranged man, for poetic flight. But at the party itself, the thread which relates him to the others becomes apparent. It is through his doctor, the successful Harley Street specialist, who attends the party, that Septimus is a necessary tributary stream.