Religious Belief in a Secular Age: Literary Modernism and Virginia Woolf's Mrs

Religious belief in a secular age: Literary modernism and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway Author(s): Emily Griesinger Source: Christianity and Literature , Vol. 64, No. 4 (September 2015), pp. 438-464 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26194858

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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:02 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Article Christianity & Literature 2015, Vol. 64(4) 438–464 Religious belief in a ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/ secular age: Literary journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0148333115585279 modernism and Virginia cal.sagepub.com Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Emily Griesinger Azusa Pacific University, USA

Abstract This article explores Virginia Woolf’s conflicted relationship with Christianity, namely, her avowed atheism and hostility to religious dogma, yet her openness to mystical experience and her use of the language of Christian mysticism in her writing. In particular, Woolf’s critique of secularism in her novel Mrs. Dalloway remains open at some level to Christian beliefs and values. Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique reveals the soul as a ‘‘sacred’’ space or ‘‘sanctuary,’’ and her allusions to Christ in the character of Septimus Smith, and less obviously Clarissa Dalloway, suggest yearning for answers to human suffering in a ‘‘godless’’ world. In the end, however, the modernist effort to ‘‘sacralize’’ human goodness does not resolve deeper theological issues at stake in the novel, which Christianity locates in the doctrine of the fall and God’s redemptive work in Christ.

Keywords Christianity, literary modernism, religious belief, secular enchantment, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s hostility to Christianity is well known. The most convincing evidence is a letter to her sister, Vanessa Bell, in which she famously responds to the conversion of T. S. Eliot:

I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the ﬁre and believing in God. (Letters III: 457–58)1

Corresponding author: Emily Griesinger, Azusa Pacific University, 901 E Alosta Ave Azusa, CA 91702, USA. Email: [email protected]

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As Jane de Gay and other scholars have recognized, Woolf’s relationship to Christianity was complicated. Not only were her Victorian grandparents leading members of the Evangelical Clapham Sect, which included such luminaries as William Wilberforce and Henry Venn, but both parents, Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth Stephen, were outspoken agnostics who challenged the Evangelical faith of their parents and raised their daughter to do the same. She later married a Jewish atheist, Leonard Woolf, and surrounded herself with artists and intellectuals, the Bloomsbury Circle, many of whom traced a similar lineage to the Clapham Sect and were eager to distance themselves from that heritage, which they found repressive.2 Her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell, conﬁrms that his aunt’s views on religion are not easily pinned down:

Using the word in a very wide sense we may ﬁnd a ‘‘religious’’ element in her novels; she tended to be, as she herself put it, ‘‘mystical’’; but she entertained no comfortable beliefs. That the Universe is a very mysterious place she would certainly have allowed, but not that this mysteriousness allows us to suppose the existence of a moral deity or of a future life. (Q. Bell II:136)

We are not obliged to accept Quentin Bell’s opinion, of course, but it is a helpful starting point for the conversation I wish to engage in this essay, which examines religious themes in Woolf’s first successful stream-of-consciousness novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925).3 For our purposes applying the term ‘‘religious’’ to Virginia Woolf means at least the following: (1) she is conscious of unseen realities beneath or within the ordinary world; (2) she experiments with narrative technique in an effort to express or convey the inner world where the spirit or soul resides; (3) she employs religious imagery as part of this effort, drawing on Christian as well as pagan allusions, myth, and symbol. My concern here is to suggest how Woolf’s literary sensitivity to the unseen or spiritual reflects an imaginative response to secularization. This is not an entirely new thesis. Pericles Lewis and Amy Hungerford have recently studied literary responses to secularism, Lewis taking on modern novelists Henry James, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf in Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (2010); and Hungerford focusing on J.D. Salinger, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson in Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (2010). My argument differs from theirs in drawing on insights from Christian theology to illuminate Woolf’s response to secularism in Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, during the peak of literary modernism. In her article on Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, Gabrielle McIntire argues that Woolf’s experimental method employs religious language and symbol to ‘‘repudiate’’ and ‘‘renegotiate’’ the divine in ways that allow her characters to reject God, while remaining ‘‘astonishing[ly]’’ open to ‘‘immanence, transcendence, redemption, and illumination’’ (1). My interest is in how such ‘‘negotiations’’ occur in Mrs. Dalloway. Through close reading of the main characters, Clarissa Dalloway and her ‘‘dark double,’’ the war veteran,

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Septimus Smith, who commits suicide at the end of the novel, I will identify some of the ways ‘‘secular’’ and ‘‘sacred’’ collide in the text, and will consider the theological implications of several moments of illumination, what literary critics following James Joyce call ‘‘epiphanies,’’4 in which characters seek transcendent or ultimate meaning in this world without reference to an external deity. While expressing the secular unbelief associated with literary modernism, Mrs. Dalloway critiques secularism in ways that remain open at some level to Christian beliefs and values. In the end, however, the eﬀort to ‘‘sacralize’’ human goodness does not resolve deeper theological issues at stake in the novel, which Christianity locates in the doctrine of the fall and the need for redemptive grace in a ‘‘godless’’ secular world.

Virginia Woolf and Christianity The argument that Mrs. Dalloway is open in some measure to Christianity bears careful scrutiny given Woolf’s expressed hostility to institutional religion and all forms of Christian doctrine and dogma. Born in 1882 to Leslie and Julia Stephen, both committed agnostics, Virginia Woolf appears to have believed Christianity had something of value to offer in terms of ethics and morality. She was intention- ally (and perhaps maddeningly) vague about what that was, but whatever it was, it did not depend on what most Christians find essential to their faith, things like the Incarnation, the miracles recorded in the Old and New Testaments, the Resurrection, the immortality of the soul, and any sort of personal relationship with Christ. Such subversive views were common in the intellectual environs of Bloomsbury where she and her sister Vanessa moved when their father, Sir Leslie Stephen, died in 1904, opening their home at 46 Gordon Square to their brother Thoby’s Cambridge friends, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and others, who together with Virginia, Vanessa, and Thoby formed the Bloomsbury Circle.5 According to Charles Taylor, literary Bloomsbury was itself a secular subversion of Christianity that can be traced indirectly to the moral earnestness of the ‘‘Bloomsbury’’ parents and grandparents, the latter of whom two generations back were founding members of the Clapham Sect. Absent a personal faith in Christ, the earnestness of the Claphamites degenerated in the next generation (i.e. that of Leslie Stephen) into a repressive moralism that alie- nated their children, the Bloomsberries (Taylor 395–407).6 Vincent Pecora traces Woolf’s critical appropriation of her Evangelical heritage in her first novel The Voyage Out in which the protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, loses her faith during an Anglican church service while visiting a British outpost in South America. Observing the ‘‘shallow and smug’’ worshipers who have ‘‘no splendid conception of God within,’’ Rachel is disturbed by what Christianity has become, both for these people and for herself, and thus ‘‘reject[s] all that she had before implicitly believed’’ (Voyage Out 227–29). The ‘‘voyage out’’ represents ‘‘de-conversion,’’ among other things, but the heroine nevertheless makes a dis- tinction between the ‘‘beautiful idea’’ of the Gospel and the failure of the church to

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convey that idea authentically in its liturgy, music, sermons, and other rituals. ‘‘All around her were people pretending to feel what they did not feel, while some- where above her floated the idea which they could none of them grasp, which they pretended to grasp, always escaping out of reach, a beautiful idea, an idea like a butterfly’’ (Voyage Out 228). Pecora sees in this passage an effort to secularize religion by reducing it to aesthetic symbol (181), not unlike what happened in the Bloomsbury credo ‘‘art for art’s sake,’’ which Taylor says replaced Christian morality and ethics. Pecora further suggests that the Bloomsbury ideal of friendship and communion, a recurring theme in Mrs. Dalloway, ‘‘reenacts’’ the fellowship of kindred minds that was a hallmark of Clapham Evangelical spirituality (193). Neither the fellowship nor the human sympathy on which it depends, whether in fiction or in real life, were enough ‘‘to assuage the doubt and despair that troubled most of Woolf’s protagonists and finally destroyed Woolf herself’’ (193). Pecora here alludes to the tragedy of Woolf’s struggle with mental illness that ended in suicide in 1941 when she was 59 years old.7 Whether or not her illness, which biographers attribute to multiple factors including childhood issues of loss, separation, abandonment, as well as sexual abuse, had anything to do with Woolf’s complicated response to Christianity, or for that matter, her response to agnosticism and atheism, is a topic we cannot fully address here. Mental illness, Christianity, and atheism intermingle in the novel, for example, in Clarissa’s anxiety about death and the meaning of life, which connects through stream-of- consciousness doubling with the mental deterioration of Septimus Smith, who commits suicide. Further connections emerge in Clarissa’s professed atheism and her pathological hatred of her daughter’s German tutor, Miss Kilman, who is a recent Christian convert. Doris Kilman appears to be based on Woolf’s cousin, Dorothea Stephen (1871–1965), the daughter of her father’s brother James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–94), who made ‘‘perpetual attempts’’ to convert her as a girl in Hyde Park, as she complains years later in a letter to her friend Dame Ethel Smyth: ‘‘I never pass through Hyde Park without cursing separately every God inventor there. . . . And even now, when no one tries, I still draw in and shiver at the suspicion—he’s got a finger in my mind’’ (Letters IV:333).8 According to one biographer, the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, any perceived threat to Woolf’s privacy brought similar reactions:

[Her sister] Vanessa’s teasing and tormenting her, when they were children; pious relatives’ haranguing her about religion, when she was an adolescent; men’s expecting to have sexual relations with her, when she became an adult and after she married; physicians’, especially psychiatrists’, ordering her about, during much of her life; and, ﬁnally, the threat of Nazi invasion of England, when she killed herself. (92)

Given this background of childhood and adolescent trauma in which Christianity was implicated, if not directly then indirectly, it is no surprise that Woolf would reject forms of Christianity that emphasize conversion and a

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personal Savior. What is surprising, and perhaps less well known, is her apparent openness in some of her writing to the ‘‘sad and beautiful figure of Christ’’ (227) in the New Testament, a phrase taken from The Voyage Out (1915), a novel I have already mentioned. Further evidence that Woolf was not entirely opposed to Christianity can be found in her book Three Guineas, a much later work, published in 1938. In her study of Virginia Woolf and the Clergy, Jane de Gay examines those sections of Three Guineas that might have a ‘‘particular sting’’ for Christians (5), such as Woolf’s spoofing of religious symbols like the cross and the communion table. Yet, De Gay also observes how courageously Woolf takes on the Anglican clergy of the 1930s for refusing to admit women to the priesthood. Woolf’s argument is one with which many Christian feminists would agree. Woolf rejected the Church of England as ‘‘irremediably flawed’’ and ‘‘deeply misogynistic,’’ says De Gay, urging women to create their own ‘‘Society of Outsiders’’ (Virginia Woolf and the Clergy 10). According to Woolf, women in this ‘‘Society’’ will read the New Testament for themselves, attend church services, and critically analyze the sermons.

By criticizing religion they would attempt to free the religious spirit from its present servitude and would help, if need be, to create a new religion based, it might well be, upon the New Testament, but, it might well be, very diﬀerent from the religion now erected upon that basis. (Three Guineas 112–13)

In addition to T. S. Eliot, whose conversion she scorned in 1928, Woolf did know and admire at least one devout Christian whose ‘‘voice’’ must also be taken into account when we read her fiction. I refer to her father’s only sister, the Quaker theologian Caroline Emelia Stephen (1834–1909). Affectionately nicknamed ‘‘the Nun,’’ Aunt Caroline was a mystic who believed in the supernatural and experienced voices and visions.9 In her seminal essay, ‘‘The Niece of a Nun: Virginia Woolf, Caroline Stephen, and the Cloistered Imagination,’’ which appeared in 1983, Jane Marcus argues convincingly that Caroline’s mystical theology embraced non-rational ways of knowing God, affirming women’s intuitive gifts and spiritual authority, and through its emphasis on silence and solitude, secured their right to independent thought and privacy of soul. According to Marcus, Caroline’s ‘‘method of spiritual exercises’’ provided a way to clear the ‘‘inner chamber (a room of one’s own in the soul)’’ in order ‘‘to prepare the way for visionary experiences in which daily life was lit up to incandescence. It was a method of spiritual self-reliance in which no exterior aids were invoked except the need to wait receptively in silence’’ (18). Caroline Stephen left her niece a legacy of 2,500 pounds. When added to the monies received upon the sale of the family home at 22 Hyde Park Gate upon Leslie Stephen’s death, this legacy provided Woolf with 500 pounds annual income, the amount needed for a woman to achieve independence and become a writer, as she says in A Room of One’s Own (lii, 4, 37). If Woolf was searching for a model of Christian experience that could accommodate Bloomsbury rejection of religious

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authority, she might understandably be drawn to her aunt’s non-creedal, non- doctrinal form of Christianity which refused to make the religious experience of one community normative for everyone. While she valued spiritual independence and the freedom to approach God in her own way, Caroline’s theology is clearly orthodox, attesting to the existence of God the Creator, to the fall of man, and to eternal life, healing, and redemption in Christ:

[T]o know that for our sakes the Son of God did lay down His life, becoming obedient unto death, even the death upon the cross, that we, through Him, might have life—to know in our own hearts what it is to be brought under the humbling, redeem- ing, purifying power of the cross of Christ—all this is enough and more than enough to ﬁll our lips with praise and our hearts with thanksgiving, and to set us free for ever from the desire for explanations of the unspeakable. (Quaker Strongholds, ‘‘Preface’’ 8)

Virginia retained both of her aunt’s books Quaker Strongholds (marked in the margins) and Light Arising in her private library after her father’s death.10 Whether she agreed with her aunt’s theology or not, one wonders how important Caroline Stephen’s beliefs were to Woolf as she tried to fashion her own religious views amid the agnosticism of her parents and the fierce atheism of her husband and Bloomsbury friends. Woolf’s hesitating but nonetheless real interest in the ‘‘beautiful’’ idea of Christianity and the person of Jesus in the New Testament, and her openness to mystical experience, indeed her use of the language of Christian mysticism in her writing, suggest that critics and scholars might profitably read her fiction ‘‘against the secular grain.’’ Generalizations about her childhood encounters with Christian zealots in Hyde Park or her ridicule of Tom Eliot’s conversion, or even the oft- quoted pronouncement that ‘‘emphatically there is no God’’ (72) from her memoir ‘‘A Sketch of the Past,’’11 must be placed beside her respect and genuine curiosity about Christian beliefs, truths, and values, such as we find in A Voyage Out and Three Guineas. Building on the work of comparative literature scholar Gauri Viswanathan, Gabrielle McIntire argues that where literary modernism is concerned even ‘‘ostensibly secular’’ works by authors like Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner, for example, retain ‘‘vestiges of effaced religious impulses’’ (1), making it worthwhile to investigate such texts from a perspective that is not hostile to faith but willing to take religious belief and its modern permutations seriously. Citing W. H. Auden’s observation that ‘‘great changes in artistic style always reflect some alteration in the frontier between the sacred and profane in the imagination of a society,’’ Pericles Lewis contends that literary modernists, including Virginia Woolf, inhabited such a frontier, collapsing sacred and profane into a ‘‘secular sacred,’’ which he defines as ‘‘a form of transcendence or ultimate meaning to be discovered in this world without reference to the supernatural’’ (21). Regina Mara Schwartz traces a similar pattern beginning with the ‘‘stripping of the altars,’’ which was essentially the rejection of Catholic sacramental theology that occurred

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during the Reformation. In her book Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism (2008), Schwartz claims that from then until now God or the gods have continually ‘‘left the world’’ only to return ‘‘hidden’’ beneath or within secular art and culture: ‘‘In their impulse to hold fast to the sacred even while the modern sciences challenged its presuppositions, early moderns [e.g., John Donne and George Herbert] forged innovative responses to the looming threats of a godless world’’ (13).12 I submit that Virginia Woolf does something similar in the 1920s and 1930s, the peak of literary modernism, ‘‘repudiating the divine,’’ as McIntire says, while ‘‘renegotiating’’ partial and fragmented ‘‘sacralities’’ through the use of Christian archetypes, imagery, and symbols. Such maneuvers may account for the confusion readers feel on being told by some critics, for example Rene Fortin and Suzette Henke, that Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged lady professing atheism, is also a substitute for Christ as ‘‘perfect hostess’’ or Divine Host at a cocktail party.13 Similar problems arise from identifying Christ symbolically in the character of Septimus Smith, a wounded soldier suffering from PTSD who commits suicide. Does the novel approve or disparage modern understandings of God and/or Jesus in these characters, both of whom may (or may not) be Christ or Christ-figures? Those who teach Mrs. Dalloway year after year—the complete text is featured in both the Norton Anthology (2012) and the Longman Anthology (2010)—are no doubt wary of attempts to characterize this work (or modernist literature in gen- eral) as less ‘‘secular’’ than it actually is. I for one would welcome the discovery of ‘‘sacral’’ impulses at work in a seminal modernist text. But I am also wary of readings that fail to discriminate ‘‘wheat’’ from ‘‘weeds.’’ Woolf’s attitude towards secularism is ambiguous at best. Her task as a writer was to discover the unseen depths of the human consciousness, a task fully in tune with modernity after Freud, whose work incidentally she published in English beginning in 1924, around the time she was writing Mrs. Dalloway. She did not, however, submit to being psychoanalyzed herself, and was unwilling to reduce the unseen to the compass of modern science, including the psychoanalytic theories of Freud.14 Nor could she accept the authority of institutional religion, which she found manipulative and invasive. What she offers instead is the possibility of a private religion with no theological strings attached, a religion based on fleeting ‘‘moments of being,’’ as she called them in her memoir (‘‘A Sketch of the Past’’ 70), during which her characters (and the reader) gain access to a visionary realm beyond or within the material world. In the next few sections I want to examine several such ‘‘moments’’ in Mrs. Dalloway in which Woolf ‘‘renegotiates’’ the divine in ways that reenchant a ‘‘godless’’ secular world.

Resisting the secular: Clarissa’s ‘‘atheist religion’’ Virginia Woolf belongs to a cadre of novelists stretching from the late Victorian period through the end of WWII who sought ‘‘replacements for religion in the

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wake of a God whose announced withdrawal from this world never seemed to be quite complete’’ (P. Lewis 1). Clarissa Dalloway is resigned to God’s absence but unwilling to live her life on completely secular terms. The novel reconstructs her search for an alternative to traditional faith during the course of a single day in June, 1923, five years after the war, as she prepares to give a party. Walking across town to ‘‘buy the flowers herself’’ (MD 3), Clarissa recalls her friendship with Sally Seton and her love affair with Peter Walsh. Should she have married Peter after all instead of Richard Dalloway? After purchasing the flowers, she withdraws to her attic room to mend the green dress she will wear to the party. Peter Walsh arrives unexpectedly from India, where he has lived for several years as a civil servant. They talk, she invites him to the party, and he leaves for his hotel, passing a shell- shocked soldier, Septimus Smith, and his wife, Lucrezia, in St. James Park. In a state of hallucinatory madness, Septimus thinks Peter is his dead friend Evans, thus proving his prophetic message to the world: ‘‘there is no death’’ (MD 137). Richard Dalloway, Clarissa’s husband, brings her a dozen roses, and insists that she rest before the party. At the same time Septimus and Lucrezia meet with Dr. Holmes and Dr. Bradshaw, neither of whom can help Septimus, who fears they will shut him up in an asylum. To avoid that catastrophe he commits suicide by throwing himself out a window. Clarissa learns of his death from the Bradshaws at her party and considers her complicity in his death, and possibly in the war itself, which has left hundreds like him roaming the streets of London. She ponders her life, what really matters, what it all means. Although not entirely happy with her choices, and while admiring Septimus for his defiance of meddling doctors to the point of death, she will not ‘‘throw it away’’ (MD 182) as he has done. Instead, she determines to rejoin the party, where Richard, Peter, and Sally are waiting, and the novel ends. With the exception of the family’s German tutor, Doris Kilman, about whom I will have more to say in a moment, none of these characters believes in God. Yet, like other modernists, Woolf seeks to ‘‘mask and yet disclose sacred experience’’ while ‘‘alternately displacing and yet embracing the theological imagination’’ (McIntire 6). It is possible to trace ‘‘partial’’ and ‘‘fragmented sacralities’’ (McIntire 1) which suggest preoccupation with the divine even as characters pro- claim disbelief in God. Thus, after buying the flowers, Clarissa withdraws ‘‘like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions. The cook whistled in the kitchen. She heard the click of the typewriter. It was her life, and, bending her head over the hall table, she bowed beneath the influence, felt blessed and purified’’ (MD 28). Such moments are ‘‘buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness they are, she thought (as if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only)’’ (MD 28). The imagery points subtly to the cross and the beatific vision of Christ as the loveliest Rose, the central radiance in Dante’s heaven, for example. Even tucked in parentheses, however, the allusion triggers such alarm that Clarissa has to assert firmly ‘‘not for a moment did she believe in God’’ (MD 28).

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Are these the words of a devout atheist or a woman whose soul in unguarded moments longs for God? Peter Walsh has his own explanation:

[P]ossibly she said to herself, . . . as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners . . . decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all their own way,—her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady. (MD 76)

When her sister Sylvia is killed ‘‘on the verge of life’’ by a falling tree, Clarissa turned bitter, Peter remembers. After that ‘‘she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness’’ (MD 76). Clarissa disbelieves in God but determines nevertheless to live ‘‘as if’’ it matters to something or someone beyond herself that she ‘‘behave like a lady,’’ which means caring for neighbors in need, bringing them books or cushions or flowers. Her ‘‘crisis of faith,’’ if we may call it that, follows a familiar pattern. Doubt in the character of God hardens into unbelief in the existence of God. A similar logic might apply to literary modernists who lost faith in a benevolent, personal God in the aftermath of a war that killed an entire generation of young men and left thousands blind or maimed or mentally unhinged. Biographical par- allels are also worth noting. Prior to the war, over a ten-year period between age 13 and 23, Virginia Woolf lost her mother, Julia Stephen, her half-sister and surrogate mother, Stella Duckworth, her talented brother, Thoby, and her brilliant but demanding father, Sir Leslie Stephen. In the midst of these disasters, Woolf describes herself as a ‘‘tremulous’’ butterfly on the verge of flight (‘‘A Sketch of the Past’’ 124). The language echoes the above passage from Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa Dalloway’s sister Sylvia is ‘‘on the verge of life’’ (MD 76) when she is killed by a falling tree, implying that death couldn’t have come at a worse moment. So we might imagine the impact of Woolf’s sister, Stella Duckworth’s sudden death on the adolescent Virginia. Recalling this period from a distance of 35 years, she writes in her memoir, ‘‘[T]he second blow of death [i.e. the death of Stella coming two years after the death of her mother] struck on me; tremulous, filmy eyed as I was, with my wings still creased, sitting there on the edge of my broken chrysalis’’ (‘‘A Sketch of the Past’’ 124). The butterfly is a common symbol for the beauty and fragility of the soul. A half-formed butterfly with wet wings suggests arrested spiritual development and the incredible vulnerability that went with it, apparently, for Virginia Woolf. Given this scenario, it is amazing that Woolf ever became a writer in the first place, much less a world famous author whose literary output by the time of her death in 1941 included hundreds of published essays and reviews, 6 volumes of

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letters, 5 volumes of diaries, several collections of short stories and memoirs, 1 biography, and 10 novels, 3 of which were (and still are) bestsellers. To say she was ‘‘driven’’ would be an understatement. Writing was the key to Woolf’s sanity, a way to keep pain and suffering at bay. Literary accomplishments represented her best effort to ‘‘do good for the sake of goodness’’ (MD 76). Secularism takes many forms, one of which is the effort to demystify or demythologize sacred texts like the Bible and the historic creeds. Another is the effort to divorce Christian ethics and morality from their theological roots. Clarissa’s ‘‘atheist religion’’ falls into this category. A subtle yet theologically evocative allusion to Bloomsbury aesthetics of ‘‘art for art’s sake,’’ Clarissa’s ‘‘goodness for the sake of goodness’’ suggests a secular variant of ‘‘works righteousness,’’ sometimes referred to as a ‘‘gospel of works,’’ in which believers must earn the love of God, pay for their own sins, and essentially ‘‘save’’ themselves. By embedding this whole discussion in the interior monologue of Peter Walsh, a character who loves but is also critical of Clarissa, Woolf leaves open the question of whether or not, and to what extent, religious atheism is a sufficient explanation of Clarissa’s experience of God, while casting doubt as well on the ability of Peter or anyone else to understand the mysteries of the soul.

Secular enchantment: reflections on beauty The Bloomsbury translation of ethics into an aesthetic category emphasizing beauty, friendship, and love finds imaginative expression in the novel in the recurring image of flowers, either in their symbolic value as gifts or in their capacity to evoke transcendence. For our purposes, the flower motif has theological resonance as well, especially given the role of flowers and flower giving in Peter’s explanation of Clarissa’s ‘‘atheist religion.’’ The emphasis on flowers and flower imagery announced in the opening sentence, ‘‘Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself’’ (MD 3) and continuing in multiple streams of consciousness, allows for multiple perspectives on beauty as a substitute for orthodox faith. Variations of the word ‘‘flower’’ occur at least 40 times, while references to specific flowers, for instance, hydrangeas, lilies, hyacinths, sweet peas, and most prominently roses, occur over 100 times in a novel of less than 200 pages. Not just Clarissa but all the major and minor characters can be observed to carry, touch, smell, grow, notice, admire, or simply enjoy flowers. Sally Seton picks ‘‘hollyhocks, dahlias—all sorts of flowers that had never been seen together—cut[s] their heads off, and [makes] them swim on the top of water in bowls’’ to ‘‘extraordinary’’ effect (MD 33); Richard gives Clarissa a ‘‘vast bunch’’ of ‘‘red and white roses’’ to express unspoken love (MD 112); and Septimus Smith’s wife, Lucrezia, ‘‘pin[s] a rose to one side of [a] hat’’ in the moments leading up to his suicide (MD 140). The image of a middle-aged woman shopping for flowers, breathing in the smell of flowers, carrying flowers across London to display their beauty on the mantle at her party is a subtle demonstration of ‘‘sacramental poetics,’’ as Schwartz says, the effort to infuse a sense of the sacred into a ‘‘godless’’ world. But why does Clarissa

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need to touch and smell all these flowers, as we see her doing, for example, in Miss Pym’s flower shop? We know she doubts herself and the choices she has made—‘‘Oh if she could have had her life over again!’’ (MD 10). Barely 52 years old, suffering the effects of influenza, which has weakened her heart, Clarissa is or soon will be a wilted ‘‘flower.’’ Even the lines from Shakespeare, ‘‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun / Nor the furious winter’s rages’’ (MD 9), which she sees in a bookshop window, and recites to herself as a mantra throughout the day, cannot stop the passage of time, as we are reminded by the chiming of Big Ben every few pages. Flower imagery conveys the beauty and fragility of life. More important, Clarissa’s meditation on beauty in the flower shop resonates with Christian views of goodness and evil, the existence of enemy forces without and within, and the need to protect and/or purify the soul. The problem is Clarissa’s hatred of her daughter Elizabeth’s German tutor, Miss Kilman. Not the woman herself but the ‘‘idea of her’’ destroys Clarissa’s compos- ure: ‘‘It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf- encumbered forest, the soul’’ (MD 12). Whereas Christianity promises victory over such ‘‘monsters’’ through spiritual disciplines like prayer and the sacraments, the remedy for Clarissa is to suffuse her senses with beauty as she does in her walk across London, and now in the flower shop ‘‘nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness’’ (MD 13). Passing from flower to flower, Clarissa transcends her abhor- rence of Miss Kilman:

[N]onsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently, as if this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, were a wave which she let ﬂow over her and surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up when—oh! a pistol shot in the street outside! (MD 13)

The pistol shot in the street, which turns out to be a car back-firing, disrupts Clarissa’s meditation on beauty in a way that foreshadows a similar incident at the end of the novel when in the midst of her party, Clarissa hears about a young man (Septimus) who has killed himself. ‘‘Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought. ...What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party?’’ (MD 179). Both scenes can be interpreted theologically as reminders that human nature is fallen and hence our best efforts to be good and do ‘‘good for the sake of goodness’’ are subject to sinful disruption, as implied by the invasion of Clarissa’s soul by the ‘‘brutal monster’’ Miss Kilman, and by Septimus’s fear of Dr. Holmes, the ‘‘brute with the red nostrils ...snuffing into every secret place!’’ (MD 144). Woolf is not naı¨ve about human nature, a point underscored by the juxtaposition of Clarissa smelling roses to exorcize the ‘‘brutal monster’’ Miss Kilman, and Miss Kilman a hundred pages later kneeling in Westminster Abbey trying to rid her soul of envy and bitterness toward Clarissa Dalloway. Both passages point toward the need for transcendence, the capacity to

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rise above or get beyond self-interest and ego, in Clarissa’s case through aesthetics, the beauty of roses; in Miss Kilman’s case through spiritual disciplines of confes- sion and prayer. One must conquer vanity and self-love, the Reverend Whittaker tells Miss Kilman. But she is unlovable and unloved, and ‘‘no one knew the agony!’’ He responds by ‘‘pointing to the crucifix.’’ Her own salvation, too, must come ‘‘through suffering’’ (MD 126). Pericles Lewis and Vereen Bell are two critics who read Miss Kilman sympa- thetically. For Lewis she may not be ‘‘the religious bigot of Clarissa Dalloway’s imagination (and most critical discussions) but a woman with a complex, if demanding, spiritual life’’ (17). Bell argues that the ‘‘radically modernist’’ design of the novel prevents our drawing firm conclusions about Miss Kilman, or any other character for that matter, and this makes it impossible to say for sure whether the novel as a whole rejects the Christianity represented by her character. The purpose of the shifting points of view is ‘‘to give everyone’s inner life respectful standing and, in the process, to show how inaccurate everyone in it is about everyone else’’ (‘‘Misreading’’ 95, 102). Clarissa believes religion in the form practiced (in her mind) by Miss Kilman is manipulative and invasive. But so is love, which is why she chooses not to marry Peter Walsh, with whom ‘‘everything had to be shared’’ (MD 7), preferring instead the independence allowed by Richard Dalloway, even though it means they sleep in separate bedrooms. Moreover, Miss Kilman is a feminist whom modern women, including Virginia Woolf, should surely admire. ‘‘[T]hat she has struggled to educate and make something of herself, . . . that she has been largely thwarted in this otherwise (one would think) commendable ambition for a woman because of being German at the worst possible historical moment’’ (‘‘Misreading’’ 102) makes her less ridiculous if not heroic. ‘‘[T]hat she is overweight and homely and despises her own body and yet derives her only pleasure from eating sweets’’ and ‘‘worst of all—in her un-English way—that she is passionately, recklessly, and hopelessly in love with the beautiful young Elizabeth’’ is reason for pity (‘‘Misreading’’ 102). Indeed Miss Kilman 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’’ (‘‘Misreading’’ 102). The pages describing Miss Kilman’s melt-down in the Army Navy Store with Elizabeth are among ‘‘the most wrenching and poignant in all of Virginia Woolf’s writing,’’ Bell concludes. ‘‘It cannot be that we are to ignore the depth of Miss Kilman’s suffering. It is too starkly described’’ (‘‘Misreading’’ 103). There is evidence in Woolf’s letters that this character is based on her proselytiz- ing cousin Dorothea Stephen, who she tells her sister Vanessa ate ‘‘like a poor woman at a charity tea, fast, stealthily, every crumb, thanking me with insincere sweetness’’ (Letters II:492), not unlike Miss Kilman at the Army Navy Store in the novel: ‘‘Elizabeth rather wondered whether Miss Kilman could be hungry. It was her way of eating, eating with intensity, then looking, again and again, at a plate of sugared cakes on the table next to them’’ (MD 127). The scene ends with Miss Kilman ‘‘fingering the last two inches of a chocolate ećlair’’ (MD 128), an action

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that recalls Dorothea Stephen’s ‘‘stealthy’’ obsession with crumbs. Given these similarities and Woolf’s aversion to her cousin, it is remarkable that Miss Kilman, at least in the Westminster Abbey scene, is treated with respect and sympathy. Clarissa’s meditation on beauty interrupted by hateful thoughts of Miss Kilman calls attention to ﬂaws in her character, while allowing for a more nuanced presentation of Christianity in the struggle of Miss Kilman in later scenes to ﬁnd forgiveness and peace with God. It is not clear, then, that the novel champions Bloomsbury aesthetics over Christianity. Perhaps Miss Kilman’s role is at least partly to force readers to reexamine traditional faith. Safely distanced in a character readers can easily des- pise, this woman’s urgent quest for God implies recognition of Christianity as a viable alternative to modern secularism. One wonders, too, if Septimus’s over- reaction to beauty in the passage following Clarissa’s earlier meditation isn’t a caricatured exaggeration of Bloomsbury aesthetics. An airplane writes ‘‘TOFFEE’’ in the sky and Septimus reads it as a message from the gods:

Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears ﬁlled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words ...one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks. (MD 21)

For Septimus, beauty is not a route to goodness but leads to crazy behavior, delusions and madness.

‘‘Broken Jesus’’: reflections on suicide Adding further complexity to the treatment of Christianity in the novel is the doubling of Clarissa with the delusional Septimus Smith. It has been suggested that both characters resemble Christ or Christ-figures. What motivates Clarissa, according to Rene Fortin, is her need ‘‘to find an adequate substitute for Christianity, and, specifically, for the sacramental sense of reality which it fostered’’ (24). The cocktail party at the end is a type of the Mass in which Clarissa offers herself, ‘‘like Christ, as priest and victim to restore the integrity of man’’ (Fortin 29). Suzette Henke offers a similar reading in her essay ‘‘Mrs. Dalloway: The Communion of Saints’’ (1981). Fusing Greek myth with images and symbols drawn from the Eucharist, Clarissa’s party denotes both the ‘‘ritual sacrifice’’ of Septimus, alluding to the Theban King Pentheus devoured by the Bacchae in the play by Euripides, and the crucifixion of Christ (126, 140). This combination is meant to satirize ‘‘contemporary rites of tragic suffering—rituals of war and coer- cion that victimize the young, the helpless, the visionary and the deviant’’ (126). Neither of these readings takes into account the central Christian understanding of the atonement as a victory over death, however, or the way Christ’s resurrection is celebrated in the Eucharist.15

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It may seem odd to look for Christ-figures in a novel by an avowed atheist; yet, as we have said, Woolf had a religious sensibility. She owned several Bibles and a Book of Common Prayer.16 It is not unreasonable to suppose she might borrow Christian imagery in her writing, appropriating aspects of the Christ-story to convey her own sense of the human condition. Still, one has to wonder if she intended either Clarissa or Septimus as Christ-figures, and if so in what sense. Douglas Howard’s ‘‘Mrs. Dalloway: Virginia Woolf’s Redemptive Cycle’’ (1998) and more recently Arthur Bethea’s ‘‘Septimus Smith, the War-Shattered Christ Substitute in Mrs. Dalloway’’ (2010) at least frame the argument within the context of the biblical narrative. In both of these readings Christianity is deemed a failure in the novel because it cannot save a soldier from going mad (Bethea 250) or cannot ‘‘repair the damage’’ of the fall (Howard 155). Septimus is so ‘‘damaged’’ by the war that he is unable to love or feel anything. ‘‘Too broken, Woolf’s Jesus cannot save himself’’ (Bethea 251) much less anyone else. The problem is not just the ravages of war, but guilt over his homoerotic attraction to Evans, a fellow soldier who died in the war. According to Howard, the ‘‘crucifixion’’ of Septimus allows for the purgation of his guilt, at the same time freeing Clarissa ‘‘to purge her own guilt’’ over loving Sally Seton when they were girls. Thus Howard concludes that Woolf has ‘‘re-negotiated’’ the biblical account in ways ‘‘the authors of the original text would have most certainly considered blasphemous’’ (156). The search for ‘‘Christ-figures’’ in literature has a long history which will not concern us here except to note how easily that search can go awry.17 Does the novel as a whole support the blasphemous or heretical views Howard imagines? I don’t think so. Still, there are serious problems with reading Septimus as Christ. On the one hand, if ‘‘crazy’’ Septimus is Christ, it could be argued that Christianity is dangerous to one’s mental health, hence inadequate to address the problems raised in the novel. On the other hand, Woolf’s ‘‘broken Jesus’’ could be viewed as a judgment, however oblique, on the inadequacy of modern secularism, humanism, agnosticism, and atheism, none of which heals the ‘‘brokenness’’ of the war veteran, nor the fragmentation of postwar London, which Clarissa tries to remedy by her parties, and which Woolf conveys so powerfully in her art. The suicide of Septimus may suggest the potency of the Christ image rather than its ineffectual failure. At least Clarissa recognizes the impact of the war on those outside her elite circle. ‘‘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’’ (MD 181). Vereen Bell argues that the suicide is salvific in evoking a sense of guilt in Clarissa for her pride and indifference to the war. ‘‘A creature of fragments until now, [Clarissa] has become whole, momentarily, for however long it lasts, by facing the truth. In naming what is wrong with her self, she has also named what is wrong with her culture and has therefore stood apart from it’’ (‘‘Death’’ 57). Bell’s interpretation differs from that of Howard and Bethea in viewing Septimus as a bearer of truth whose suicide is tragic but for that very reason effec- tual. In biblical terms it ‘‘convicts’’ or ‘‘convinces’’ Clarissa of sin. Even without the

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Christian gloss, we can agree that the suicide beneﬁts Clarissa by channeling her own thoughts of suicide throughout the day.

She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dis- solved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. (MD 182)

In her journal entry for October 14, 1922, Woolf states her intention to ‘‘double’’ the character of Clarissa and Septimus in order to convey the close proximity in human experience between the sane and the insane (Diary II:207).18 This allows for the possibility that Clarissa and Septimus together represent conflicting sides of Woolf’s troubled psyche. The suicide which Clarissa finds ‘‘beautiful’’ and ‘‘fun’’ was a real temptation for Woolf, which she puts to rest at least temporarily by transferring or projecting it, and metaphorically ‘‘killing it off’’ in the character of Septimus. It makes sense psychologically if not theologically. Clarissa benefits from Septimus’s death primarily by recognizing how fortunate she is to have married Richard Dalloway, who provides her a ‘‘room of her own’’ and stands between her and ‘‘monstrous’’ invaders like Dr. Holmes and Dr. Bradshaw. At the same time, she has a ‘‘transcendental theory’’ (MD 149) that allows her to imagine web-like connections between all people, hence, her ability to identify with Septimus: ‘‘He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it’’ (MD 179). Still, it is difficult to accept Clarissa’s statement—‘‘He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun’’ (MD 182)—as the novel’s final word on the suicide. Unless we are prepared to view suicide as a viable option for people facing difficult circumstances such as illness, grief, poverty, loneliness, sadness, or depression, most readers will have serious reservations about this statement and may also find Clarissa as a Christ-figure unconvincing, despite the Eucharistic imagery associated with her parties.19 Suicide is attractive to Clarissa as a way to communicate the sanctity of the human soul. If that sanctity is sufficiently threatened, death becomes a courageous or heroic act, an assertion of freedom against tyrants, a victory of goodness over evil. That Septimus dies such a violent death as she imagines—smashing his brains on the sidewalk—is less important than the question of whether he is able to protect what matters most to Clarissa were she in his position. ‘‘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’’ (MD 180). The ‘‘treasure’’ she thinks Septimus has preserved is his true ‘‘self’’ or soul. While this omits or ignores theological questions about the afterlife, salvation or damna- tion, heaven, purgatory, or hell, eternal suffering or annihilation, it nevertheless affirms the Christian belief that human beings have souls, that we are not just a conglomeration of atoms that decay at death and that is all.

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Though skeptical of God’s existence and/or character, these reflections suggest that Clarissa Dalloway, like Virginia Woolf and other modernists, is eager to avoid sheer materialism as an explanation of life’s ultimate meaning. Indeed, if Septimus gives voice to what is hidden or repressed in Clarissa, then his epiphany—‘‘There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs of envelopes)’’ (MD 24)—may suggest a ‘‘vestige of effaced religion’’ (McIntire 1) even in the soul of an avowed atheist. By making the witness for God’s existence a wounded soldier suffering from PTSD, Woolf comes in ‘‘under the radar’’ of the secular modern in two ways, first because this God is a mad jumble of pantheism and Bloomsbury aesthetics, and second because whatever allusions there may be to Christianity, in the end this God does not save Septimus from perceiving ‘‘Holmes and Bradshaw were on him! The brute with the red nostrils was snuffing into every secret place!’’ (MD 144), and this perception (or misperception) causes him to kill himself.

‘‘Privacy of soul’’: interpreting the ‘‘old woman’’ Clarissa’s reaction to Miss Kilman, who represents in her mind a perversion of Christianity, and Septimus’s reaction to Dr. Holmes and Dr. Bradshaw, combine Woolf’s aversion to religious and psychiatric meddling, both of which Clarissa escapes by marrying Richard Dalloway, who allows her to live independently in a ‘‘room of her own.’’ From this vantage point she observes an old woman in the house next door preparing for bed. Perhaps it is not the ‘‘cruciﬁxion’’ of the Christ- substitute Septimus Smith that ‘‘rejuvenates’’ Clarissa after ‘‘scapegoating’’ her suicidal thoughts. Maybe it is her meditation on this woman. Like other sacral images, the old woman is ambiguous, suggesting both the beneﬁts of solitude and privacy, and the dangers of narcissism and isolation.

Let her climb upstairs if she wanted to; let her stop; then let her, as Clarissa had often seen her, gain her bedroom, part her curtains, and disappear again into the background. Somehow one respected that—that old woman looking out of the window, quite unconscious that she was being watched. There was something solemn in it—but love and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul. (MD 123–24)

Though they have been neighbors for many years, Clarissa appears to know nothing about this woman, not even her name. Yet something profound passes between them, especially in the second scene where Clarissa, in the midst of con- templating the suicide, sees the old woman again. ‘‘Oh, but how surprising!—in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her!’’ (MD 181). What does this mean? It could mean Clarissa has found a soul mate, someone who understands the side of her personality that needs solitude. Or, more disturbing, it could be an aﬃrmation of Clarissa’s suicidal thoughts throughout the day. To be alone, to

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choose darkness, to close the curtains, and turn out one’s light. Such images con- note intentional and self-inflicted death. Christianity has taught for centuries that suicide is wrong, a crime against the sanctity of life. If the old lady warns against suicide, it could be argued that at least in this regard the novel confirms a Christian perspective opposing suicide. For this reason the image of the ‘‘old woman’’ may resonate more with some readers than the image of Septimus as ‘‘broken Jesus,’’ throwing himself out the window and smashing his brains with a ‘‘thud, thud, thud’’ on the pavement (MD 179). I read the old woman as another ‘‘double’’ or ‘‘doppelga¨nger’’ for Clarissa Dalloway. The old woman lives her life independently the way Clarissa longs to do, untroubled by the responsibilities of love and marriage, unconcerned by outside meddlers like Dr. Holmes and Dr. Bradshaw and Miss Kilman. Woolf’s essay ‘‘On Being Ill,’’ written about the same time as Mrs. Dalloway, offers a further gloss on the ‘‘old woman.’’ In this essay Woolf describes the human need for privacy especially during illness. ‘‘About sympathy for example—we can do without it. ...Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so’’ (‘‘On Being Ill’’ 11–12). The ‘‘old woman’’ sends a mixed message to Clarissa in this regard. At one level, she appears to ‘‘go alone’’ and ‘‘like it better so.’’ At the same time, her solitude makes her unavailable for the kinds of connections Clarissa hopes to achieve by her parties. ‘‘There! The old lady had put out her light!’’ (MD 181). The gesture is fascinating to Clarissa, suggesting the nature of human freedom. We get to choose when to share our ‘‘treasure’’ and with whom. The ‘‘old woman’’ will choose when to reveal her soul, as it were, and when to ‘‘close the curtain’’ and ‘‘put out the light.’’ Whatever insight Clarissa gains from the ‘‘old woman,’’ it appears to offset her attraction to suicide. ‘‘He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room’’ (MD 182). Peter waits in ‘‘ecstasy’’ for Clarissa to return, and the novel ends. If Clarissa and the ‘‘old woman’’ are alter egos for the author, a common interpretation, then we might conclude that at the time she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf was wrestling with physical or emotional illness and thoughts of ‘‘throwing it away’’ like Septimus does in the novel. When her ability to think and write was severely threatened due to mental illness and her fears of Nazi invasion in March 1941, she put stones in her pockets and drowned herself in the River Ouse near her home in Rodmell. For some, the lines from her novel The Waves chosen by Leonard for her memorial, attest to the courage of the modern artist, unwilling to forfeit freedom and autonomy even if it meant death. ‘‘Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’’ (297). For others these lines are a tragic reminder that modern forms of ‘‘secular sacred’’ cannot heal the ‘‘brokenness’’ that is a pervasive theme of modern literature, nor could they save the life of a gifted literary modernist, one of the greatest women writers of the 20th century.

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Christianity and literary modernism Given Virginia Woolf’s acclaimed hostility toward Christianity as evidenced by her dismay over T. S. Eliot’s adult conversion, it is instructive to reflect on her use of Christian archetypes, imagery, and symbol in her fiction, in particular, as I have argued here, to critique secular ways of thinking, knowing, and imagining the world. Speaking directly to a Christian audience, in his essay on ‘‘Religion and Literature,’’ published in 1935, Eliot insists that all of modern literature is ‘‘cor- rupted’’ by ‘‘Secularism’’; therefore, ‘‘it is simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life’’ (206). Only by acknowledging the ‘‘gulf’’ fixed between secularism so defined and ‘‘real belief in a supernatural order’’ such as Eliot presumably found in Christianity are we in a position to ‘‘extract from [modern literature] what good it has to offer us’’ (207). That Eliot capitalizes the word ‘‘Secularism’’ indicates his concern that less orthodox forms of spirituality, as we find in the psychical research of William and Henry James, for example, or the interest in mystical auras, transmigration of souls, theosophy, and the occult, all of which were popular in the 1920s and 1930s, not least of all among literary elites like W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf; all of these were attempts to spiritualize secularism or to revive old heresies by other names. If World War I was easily blamed on ‘‘bad religion,’’ faith in the British Empire and the traditional institutions that supported it, including the Church of England, World War II disclosed the horrors of secularism itself, the amoral and immoral belief systems of tyrants and dictators leading to genocide and the gas chambers. Literary modernists who rejected the ‘‘bad religion’’ of Christianity during World War I had to find another ‘‘script,’’ as Wallace Stevens says in his poem ‘‘On Modern Poetry,’’ something that would make sense of the mess. Where were the moral resources to combat such evil on such a scale? I have set forth in this paper some of the reasons why Virginia Woolf did not entertain firm distinctions between ‘‘secular’’ and ‘‘sacred’’ in the sense T. S. Eliot has in mind. While she states in her memoirs ‘‘A Sketch of the Past’’ that ‘‘emphatically there is no God’’ (72), she nevertheless makes intelligent and imaginative use of Christian imagery and symbol to challenge secularism and does so in ways that align to some degree with Christian values and truths. Although Woolf was an avowed atheist, careful attention to the inner worlds of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway, as we have seen, suggests at least hesitating admiration of Christ and the Christ-story, and her respectful treatment of an otherwise unsympathetic Christian character, Doris Kilman, makes it difficult to judge the position of the novel as a whole with regard to orthodox faith. Indeed the alternatives represented in Clarissa’s ‘‘atheist religion’’ of ‘‘doing good for the sake of goodness,’’ a form of secular humanism, and her worship of beauty, a play on Bloomsbury aesthetics and ‘‘art for art’s sake,’’ are ineffectual remedies for the darkness that plagues the soul of her alter ego, Septimus Smith. Insofar as the religious sensibility of literary modernism rejected Christian orthodoxy, substituting instead various forms of humanism, it was condemned by T. S. Eliot as utterly secular. On the other

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hand, having been baptized and having joined the Church of England, Tom Eliot was in Woolf’s opinion less ‘‘credible’’ than a ‘‘corpse’’ drinking tea by the fire (Letters III:457–58). Certainly he was not alone. Along with the decline of Christian belief, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed renewed interest among intellectuals, some of whom aban- doned atheism and returned to orthodoxy, finding in Christ and the biblical narrative a reason to hope even in the midst of two devastating world wars. One such convert was C. S. Lewis, who with other Christian writers like J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, formed ‘‘The Inklings’’ in 1929, a group that continued to meet in Oxford until 1945. Lewis claims to have been influenced as well by G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), whose book on Orthodoxy appeared in 1908, followed by another book on the same subject, The Everlasting Man, published in 1925, the same year as Mrs. Dalloway. One of their colleagues (though not a member), Dorothy L. Sayers, who lived in Bloomsbury between 1918 and 1921, wrote numer- ous pamphlets, essays, and reviews defending orthodox faith.20 In her essay ‘‘Creed or Chaos?’’ delivered as a speech in May 1940, Sayers argues that the righteousness, justice, and peace England was fighting for could not be sustained without the moral underpinnings of orthodox faith. Left to itself, human nature simply does not have the resources to bring about the good to which it aspires. The perfect- ibility of humanity will never come about through scientific knowledge, techno- logical progress, or acts of Parliament alone. ‘‘[I]t is not true at all that ‘truly to know the good is to do the good’’’ Sayers urges. It is better to admit with the Apostle Paul ‘‘the evil that I would not, that I do’’ and to look for spiritual resources in Christ (38–39). Spiritual resources in Christ would include the ‘‘Divine Radiance’’ and ‘‘Light Within’’ that featured so prominently in Caroline Stephen’s Evangelical Quaker theology. The ‘‘Inner Light’’ of Christ ‘‘has led and is leading me onwards and upwards out of the abyss,’’ she writes, ‘‘nearer and nearer to its own eternal Source; and I know that, in so far as I am obedient to it, I am safe’’ (Quaker Strongholds 34). Caroline Stephen, it should be remembered, belonged to the Church of England for 20 years, leaving to join the Society of Friends, around the time Virginia Woolf was born. She was preceded in death by her brother, Virginia’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, in 1904, and died herself in 1909, several years after Virginia moved to Bloomsbury, but before she married Leonard Woolf in 1912 and published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. What Caroline absorbed from the Quakers, and what drew her to them in the first place, was their willingness to accept the mystery of unseen and eternal things without forcing commitment to ‘‘man-made’’ rituals, doctrines, or creeds, which in her view were too often enforced by the abusive authority of a male clergy. An approach to God based on silence, she writes, ‘‘pledged me to nothing, and left me altogether undisturbed to seek for help in my own way (Quaker Strongholds 54). All of this would have been attractive to the feminist side of her niece, and indeed we can see Woolf’s development of similar ideas in Three Guineas. While she could not endorse a less rigid, non-doctrinal, non-creedal version of orthodox

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faith such as her aunt found among the Society of Friends, she does encourage women to found their own religious order of ‘‘Outsiders’’ who can do a better job interpreting Christ’s egalitarian teachings so that women might feel welcome and not excluded from the ‘‘good news’’ of the Gospel. What was unacceptable was her aunt’s view of God as the source of truth and eternal life mediated to human beings through the ‘‘Inner Christ.’’ In Quaker Strongholds, Caroline writes of the soul: ‘‘It is here, in this holy of holies, that ‘deep calleth unto deep’; here that the imper- ishable, unfathomable, unchanging elements of humanity meet and are one with the Divine Fountain of life from whence they flow; here that the well of living waters springeth up unto eternal life’’ (36–37). How different is this view from ‘‘privacy of soul’’ in the novel. Clarissa Dalloway retreats to an upper chamber to be alone with her thoughts or to avoid waking her husband. ‘‘There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. ...The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be’’ (MD 30). The imagery suggests barrenness and death. Further on we get the doppelga¨ngers, Septimus Smith, Doris Kilman, the ‘‘old woman,’’ and even the perverted ‘‘soul doctors’’ Dr. Holmes and Dr. Bradshaw, characters who suggest a darkness in the soul that threatens ‘‘all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved’’ (MD 12). By contrast, Caroline’s mystical theology attests to ‘‘Divine Radiance’’ and ‘‘the stillness of a life firmly rooted in the Divine life, ever radiating, ever fruitful, without disturbance or disorder—a stillness full of Divine harmonies, and satisfying every faculty of mind and soul and spirit—the peace of God which passeth all understanding’’ (Light Arising 71–72). Since she states toward the end of her life ‘‘emphatically there is no God,’’ we might well conclude that where Woolf is concerned the case for Christianity is closed. In this essay I have sought to challenge that conclusion by suggesting that certain aspects of her writing align with Christian values and beliefs. For example, Woolf’s stream-of-conscious technique reveals the soul as a ‘‘sacred’’ space or ‘‘sanctuary,’’ her allusions to the crucified Christ suggest latent yearning for divine grace as the answer to human suffering, and her sense that ordinary life is a mystery, suffused with beauty, radiance, and truth point toward Christian affirm- ation of the glory of God in creation. Woolf was keenly aware of the darkness in the human soul. If nothing else, her fiction demonstrates the effort to overcome such darkness through the beauty and wholeness of language, for example through metaphors of illumination, epiphany, and transcendence. She challenges secularism by making readers aware of ‘‘sacral impulses’’ within and beneath the material world, by showing the dangers of excessive rationalism, the hubris of modern science and medicine when it seeks to manipulate or coerce the soul, and by drawing attention to our need for human sympathy and love. Perhaps the only conclusion that makes sense when talking about Virginia Woolf and Christianity is to acknowledge that while her use of biblical image and symbol—Septimus and/or Clarissa as Christ-figures, the party as Eucharist—bespeaks a ‘‘sacral impulse’’ in her writing, that usage does not finally

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embrace a Christian understanding of the soul as inhabited and protected by God, or as Caroline Stephen says, illuminated from within by the ‘‘Radiancy Divine,’’ the ‘‘light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ’’ (Quaker Strongholds, ‘‘Preface’’ 8). Nevertheless, as evidenced in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf cre- ated in her ﬁction a ‘‘thing that mattered’’ (MD 180), a joyful celebration of life, an artistic, coherent whole. As the psalmist reminds us, our lives are ‘‘as a mere breath’’ in light of eternity (Psalm 39, NRSV). This truth is beautifully expressed by Clarissa Dalloway, a woman in mid-life facing down her own mortality by enjoying daily miracles, small things, the cook whistling in the kitchen, the ‘‘swing, tramp, and trudge’’ (MD 4) of London streets, the rhythm of needle and thread sewing, stitching, mending what is torn and damaged. We are all subject to the ‘‘heat o’ the sun’’ and the ‘‘furious winter’s rages.’’ Every moment therefore is a miracle to which the appropriate response is gratitude. Resisting secularism through innovative narrative techniques and the power of the imagination, Virginia Woolf conveys through her art the miracle and mystery of life. This was and still is her gift to the world.

Notes 1. The letter to Vanessa Bell is dated Feb. 11, 1928. The ‘‘distressing interview’’ appears to have taken place earlier in the week, as Virginia mentions a two-hour conversation with T. S. Eliot ‘‘about God’’ in a letter to Vanessa’s husband, Clive Bell, dated Feb. 7, 1928. T. S. Eliot was baptized into the Church of England on June 29, 1927, and confirmed the next day, on June 30, 1927 (Eliot ‘‘Biographical Commentary,’’ Letters III:xxii–xxiii). There is no mention of the conversation with Virginia Woolf in the Letters IV:1928–29. 2. De Gay traces this history in a recent article (‘‘Challenging’’) and in her book (Virginia Woolf). See also Gaipa; Knight; and a special issue of Virginia Woolf Miscellany devoted to ‘‘Virginia Woolf and Spirituality’’ (2011). For a useful family tree depicting Woolf’s heritage in the Clapham Sect, see Lee xx–xxi. 3. All references to the novel (MD) are cited from the edition in the bibliography and appear in the text within parentheses. 4. Woolf uses the term ‘‘moments of being’’ to distinguish incidents of illumination from the ‘‘cotton wool’’ of everyday life. The ‘‘shock-receiving capacity’’ that allows her to pene- trate behind the ‘‘cotton wool’’ and put into words what she finds there is what makes her a writer. She explains the process at length in ‘‘A Sketch of the Past’’ (70–75). 5. For more on literary Bloomsbury see Rose 31–47; M. Rosenthal; Lee 258–73; McNeillie; and Goldman 32–33. 6. The reaction of the Bloomsbury generation to Clapham’s moralism and duty ‘‘helped to open new spaces for unbelief, all in different ways drawing on the post-Romantic understanding of the aesthetic as an ethical category’’ (Taylor 406). Vincent Pecora traces the appropriation of Woolf’s Evangelical heritage as aesthetic symbol (Pecora 157–93). 7. While Leonard Woolf and Quentin Bell agree that Virginia suffered from manic depression or schizophrenia, what today we would call bi-polar disorder, in their book Virginia Woolf and Trauma: Embodied Texts (2007), Suzette Henke and David Eberly draw on a 1978 study by Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf, to argue that Woolf’s mental crises can also be understood as a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In PTSD the patient experiences physiological, neurological, and psychological changes that

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undermine, sometimes permanently, his or her personal identity (Henke and Eberly 7). According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, symptoms of PTSD include ‘‘recurrent and intrusive recollections of the [traumatic] event,’’ ‘‘psychic numbing’’ or ‘‘emotional anesthesia,’’ ‘‘self-destruc- tive and impulsive behavior,’’ ‘‘feelings of ineffectiveness, shame, despair, or hopeless- ness’’ (DSM-IV: 425 qtd. in Henke and Eberly 7–8). Virginia Woolf experienced all of these symptoms to varying degrees for most of her life. Based on Woolf’s comment in a letter in January 1922 to E. M. Forster, Henke and Eberly suggest that Woolf also ascribed visionary and possibly religious meaning to her illness, which was never accur- ately diagnosed in her lifetime (8). ‘‘Not that I haven’t picked up something from my insanities and all the rest. Indeed, I suspect they’ve done instead of religion. But this is a difficult point’’ (Letters II:499). 8. According to Nicolson and Trautmann, editors of the Letters, the cousins referred to in this letter are Katherine (1856–1924) and Dorothea (1871–1965). Their sister, Rosamond (1868–1951), was equally disliked for similar reasons. See Woolf’s letter of April 1899 to Emma Vaughan in which she refers to the ‘‘divine Rosamond’’ who ‘‘attacked us . . . on our religious faith! It was amusing: then the day after she came at 10:30 and took us out on to the beach and discussed a future life at great length’’ (Letters I:23). Literally, a ‘‘rasp’’ is a metal or woodworking tool with sharp, projecting teeth used to scrape a rough surface and make it smooth (OED). Here it means to grate upon or irritate the nerves. Woolf is irritated by people who proselytize or evangelize and seek to impose their views on others. The word ‘‘rasped’’ appears in Mrs. Dalloway with reference to Clarissa’s hatred of Miss Kilman: ‘‘It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster!’’ (MD 12). 9. I do not mean to suggest that all mystics are Christian or for that matter that all Quaker mystics would agree with Caroline Stephen’s views of Christ as outlined in her theological writings. 10. Copies of Quaker Strongholds and Light Arising were in Woolf’s private library at the time of her death in 1941: ‘‘So much of the old forms and the family ties of her past life were jettisoned when she and her siblings recreated themselves in Bloomsbury that it seems unlikely that she would have retained these books for purely sentimental reasons. They must have been meaningful to her on some deeper level’’ (A. Lewis 1). Two copies of Quaker Strongholds are included in the Virginia Woolf Library archived at Washington State University, Pullman, WA. One copy belonged to Leslie Stephen and the other belonged to Virginia Woolf. According to Kathy Heininge, the annotations in his copy end about halfway through and the remaining pages are uncut. The annotations in her copy end at approximately the same place, suggesting that they read at least half of the text together (20). 11. I refer to the ‘‘cotton wool’’ passage in which Woolf appears to reject the idea of God as Creator and asserts the total autonomy of the artist and/or the work of art. ‘‘[B]ehind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself’’ (‘‘A Sketch of the Past’’ 72). 12. Writers may be said to employ ‘‘sacramental poetics’’ when they use literary devices to evoke a sense of mystery previously attached to the sacraments. The argument that

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Protestantism contained within itself the seeds of secularization is the central thesis of Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967). According to Berger, a medieval Catholic lived in ‘‘a world in which the sacred [was] mediated to him through a variety of channels—the sacraments of the church, the intercession of the saints, the recurring eruption of the ‘supernatural’ in miracles—a vast continuity of being between the seen and the unseen. Protestantism abolished most of these mediations. It broke the continuity, cut the umbilical cord between heaven and earth, and thereby threw man back upon himself in a historically unprecedented manner’’ (Berger 112). In this way Protestantism unintentionally wiped out the ‘‘sacred canopy’’ and thus contributed as much as science to what Max Weber, writing earlier in the century, called the ‘‘disenchantment of the world’’ (Weber 155). 13. See Henke, and Fortin. Both articles are discussed in the section of this article ‘‘‘Broken Jesus’: reflections on suicide.’’ 14. For more on Woolf’s reactions to Freud, see Abel. 15. For Gualtieri-Reed, ‘‘The mundane Clarissa (like the mundane bread and wine in a Catholic mass) has been consecrated (by her revelation through Septimus’s death) and has become sacred. ...She becomes the perfect hostess—the female Host or Christ—through the domestic art of throwing a party’’ (Gualtieri-Reed 218, 220). The idea of the ‘‘scapegoat’’ in pagan fertility rituals and Greek tragedy blends with Catholic ritual in Henke’s reading: ‘‘As celebrant of a pagan Mass, Clarissa reminds us of the sacred words of transubstantiation: ‘Take thou and eat: for this is my body.’ She offers to her dinner guests not only physical sustenance but the spiritual nourishment of a communion sanctified by the death of Septimus. She is high priestess and empathic victim—a worshipper of life whose spring ‘fertility rite’ is blessed by the scapegoat who ‘revitalises the community that destroys him’’’ (Henke 126). 16. Woolf owned two copies of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer; the second, published in 1936, included information on the ordination of priests, which she used in building her case against the church’s refusal to ordain women in Three Guineas (De Gay 9). The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf archived at Washington State University includes a Bible inscribed to Virginia Woolf by her Quaker friend Violet Dickinson, another Bible inscribed to her by Leonard, and two Greek New Testaments, one anno- tated by Virginia. In total, the combined libraries of Leonard and Virginia housed in this collection include six Bibles, one in Latin, one in Tamil, and six New Testaments, two in Greek, one in Hebrew, and four Old Testaments. See Diane Gillespie’s online ‘‘Introduction’’ to the WSU collection, ‘‘Virginia Woolf and Libraries’’ (paragraph 11). Gillespie argues that Woolf did not actually read the Bible in any systematic way until her research for Three Guineas in 1935 (‘‘‘Woolfs’ in Sheep’s Clothing’’ 77). 17. Recent studies of ‘‘Christ-figures’’ in literature include P. Rosenthal; Keuss; Sherry; Melnyk; and Kozlovic. 18. ‘‘Mrs. Dalloway has branched into a book; & I adumbrate here a study of insanity & suicide: the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side—something, like that’’ (Diary II:207). In her 1928 ‘‘Introduction’’ to the Modern Library edition of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf comments, ‘‘[I]n the first version Septimus, who later is intended to be [Clarissa’s] double, had no existence’’ and that ‘‘Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party’’ (Prose 11). 19. The passage ‘‘he made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun’’ appears in the American edition, which is used here, but was deleted by Woolf in the British edition.

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Both editions appeared on the same day, May 14, 1925. It is not clear why she deleted ‘‘he made her feel the beauty; he made her feel the fun’’ (MD 182). Perhaps it trivializes the suicide and/or Clarissa’s response to have her think of a young man’s death as ‘‘fun.’’ Whatever the reason, the retention of this passage in the American edition is problematic, especially since subsequent printings by Harcourt are based on the American edition, as are the printings of the entire novel that appear in the Norton Anthology of British Literature, 9th ed. and the Longman Anthology of British Literature, 4th ed. The passage suggests Clarissa’s attraction to suicide, which undermines her role as a legitimate Christ-figure. For more detailed analysis of such revisions, see Shields; Wright; and Bishop. 20. For details on the Inklings, problems of dating the meetings, who was involved, and the relations between the Inklings and Dorothy L. Sayers, see Glyer 10–11; 23 n. 21.

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Author biography Emily Griesinger is Professor of English at Azusa Paciﬁc University in Azusa, California, where she teaches courses in literature and theology, British literature, women and literature, children’s literature, and spiritual autobiography and memoir. She co-edited with Mark Eaton a collection of critical essays, The Gift of Story: Narrating Hope in a Postmodern World (Baylor University Press, 2006), and has published articles in Christianity and Literature, Christian Scholars Review, Books and Culture, and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

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