Mrs. Dalloway—Virginia Woolf

Party for Party's Sake

The party artist. AI-generated image

Virginia Woolf published Mrs. Dalloway in 1925, a few years after the First World War (1914-1918). The toll taken on England by both the war and the Great Influenza epidemic (1918-1920) left its mark throughout the novel.

The story unfolds over a single day. During this day, the main character, Clarissa Dalloway, prepares for an evening party that she hosts. The novel concludes after most of the guests have departed. Throughout, Big Ben chimes the passing hours and half-hours, marking the relentless progression of time while also uniting the characters within the same geographic space. The party itself also brings all the characters together in one way or another, either through their presence or through their mention.

Critics often describe the narrative style of this work as stream-of-consciousness, but that term, to me, suggests a continuous flow of a unified mind or perhaps an interior monologue. Woolf’s style defies that description. The narrator in Mrs. Dalloway swoops and swerves through London, like a mind-reading drone, gathering snatches of thoughts while passing by people, following them into shops or omnibuses, lingering over one person or another, often darting into their pasts or futures, and at times jumping to another part of London, with Big Ben's chimes binding it all together. The narrative doesn’t resemble a patchwork of scattered thoughts and flashbacks that the reader must piece together, but rather an open microphone capturing the flow of conversations, thoughts, and time itself. The resulting experience mirrors some of the famous long takes in cinema, such as the opening scene of The Player (1992), Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), most of Birdman (2014), or the entirety of Russian Ark (2002). But movies don’t provide interiority. In a film, you deduce characters' thoughts from their actions, whereas in Mrs. Dalloway, you sometimes deduce their actions from their thoughts. Woolf packs so much detail into so few pages, and she does it in a manner so controlled, so lyrical, so elegant, and so very, very British, that it left me in awe.

One of her boldest explorations of a character’s mind involves Septimus Warren Smith, a young veteran from the recent war, profoundly disturbed by the death of a friend in battle. Woolf unlocks Septimus's troubled mind and reveals his rich but tormented inner life, offering the kind of insight and empathy we wish those around him had shown. Consider this brief exchange between the suspicious Septimus and his clueless, distracted doctor, Sir William Bradshaw. Septimus’s wife has brought him for a consultation, worried by his talk of suicide.

Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is upon you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrews are applied. Human nature is remorseless.

“Impulses come upon him sometimes?” Sir Williams asked, with his pencil on a pink card.

That was his own affair said Septimus.

“Nobody lives for himself alone,” said Sir William, glancing at the photograph of his wife in Court dress.

“And you have a brilliant career before you,” said Sir William. There was Mr. Brewer’s letter on the table. “An exceptionally brilliant career.”

But if he confessed? If he communicated? Would they let him off then, his torturers?

“I—I—“ he stammered.

But what was his crime? He could not remember it.

“Yes?” Sir William encouraged him. (But it was growing late.)

Love, trees, there is no crime—what was his message?

He could not remember it.

“I—I—“ Septimus stammered.

“Try to think as little about yourself as possible,” said Sir Williams kindly. Really, he was not fit to be about.

I intensely dislike parties when I know hardly anyone there. However, for this particular party I had spent the entire day eavesdropping on everyone’s innermost thoughts, so the experience Woolf gave me at Clarissa’s felt as benign as possible—for a party, that is. For once, I actually felt like I belonged. Before the first guests even arrived, I already knew all the juicy tidbits I would normally only hear about afterwards on the way home, having spent the whole evening in a quiet corner, glaring at the chattering strangers.

As a veteran party-hater, I approached the novel with a strong bias. This whole story, I thought, just describes a rich socialite throwing a party? I could imagine nothing more frivolous. But I trusted Virginia to show me a good time. I half expected her to lecture me on how the patriarchy limits women’s possibilities, forcing them to flit around shops and busy themselves with domestic concerns. I expected Clarissa, like Jo March in Little Women, to fight back against a society that had closed off all meaningful paths for women. And when I realized Clarissa had accepted the role given to her, I saw it as a defeat. But in the following passage, my experience of her world took me in a different direction. Clarissa rests alone and argues in her head with her former suitor, Peter.

[…] But suppose Peter said to her, “Yes, yes, but your parties—what’s the sense of your parties?” all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They’re an offering; which sounded horribly vague. But who was Peter to make out that life was all plain sailing?—Peter always in love, always in love with the wrong woman? What’s you’re love? she might say to him. And she knew his answer; how it is the most important thing in the world and no woman possibly understood it. Very well. But could any man understand what she meant either? about life? She could not imagine Peter or Richard taking the trouble to give a party for no reason whatever.

But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how superficial and fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and someone else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?

An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; talked oceans of nonsense; and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.

All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!—that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant …

Clarissa’s phrase, “an offering for the sake of offering,” echoes “art for the sake of art,” a view defended in the 19th century by Walter Pater, whose thought strongly influenced Virginia Woolf. Clarissa’s plaintive and somewhat forlorn defense of the one beautiful thing she feels capable of creating gently dismisses the notion that everything must serve a purpose beyond itself or have a point. Some things hold value simply because of their beauty. Clarissa loves life; life’s worth stems from whatever aesthetic experiences it holds. By creating her parties, she weaves together many lives from the scattered strands of people, thus producing a beautiful, if momentary, happening. But further, her parties truly belong to her, as she doesn’t delegate their entire preparation to the servants while she reads the newspaper. The novel’s first line strikes the opening chord of this theme of creative ownership: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” and toward the novel’s end, she greets her arriving guests with the mixed anxiety and satisfaction of an artist.

So, I finished Mrs. Dalloway with a changed attitude. Not that I will ever start seeking out parties to attend, but I now understand how anyone’s conscious life can blossom with moments of beauty. Woolf demonstrates this not just through Clarissa’s reflections but through the luminous moments of noticing and memory that make up the conscious lives of all the novel’s major and minor characters—moments the narrator spins into a single narrative thread.

Clarissa has mastered the art of gathering disparate lives together briefly, somewhat like a social florist. But Woolf’s art mirrors this act. The mind-reading drone not only follows close contacts, jumping across the table from one mind to another at a luncheon, for example, but also skips happily between faces in a public space watching a skywriter, stuck in traffic, or enjoying a stroll through the park. Shared experiences bring solipsistic lives, even without intersecting, into parallel, and thus into communion.

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I have a lot of real-life distractions lined up for next two weeks, so I plan to stick with fairly short works again. In pursuit of more banned books, I’ll offer some thoughts about John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

Thank you for reading the Decade Project. I know that some of these works have more sex appeal than others, but every one of them has played an important role in the history of literature. If some of these reflections have inspired you or have reminded you of how a book once made you feel, I would love to hear from you. If you have not already subscribed, please consider doing so.

Works mentioned in this post

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck

The Player (1992), directed by Robert Altman

Rope (1948), directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Russian Ark (2002) directed by Aleksandr Sokurov

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu