London As a Principle of Structure in "Mrs

Home , Mrs Dalloway, The London Scene

LONDON AS A PRINCIPLE OF STRUCTURE IN "MRS. DALLOWAY" Author(s): Miroslav Beker Source: Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3, VIRGINIA WOOLF NUMBER (Autumn 1972), pp. 375-385 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26279214 Accessed: 28-10-2019 13:26 UTC

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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms LONDON AS A PRINCIPLE OF STRUCTURE IN MRS. DALLO WAY

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Miroslav Beker

It has been noted by several critics that the city or locale in general is often of outstanding importance in modern fiction. In Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature we read that "the great city (Paris, London, New York) is the most real of the characters in many a modern novel."1 And writing about Madame Bovary Percy Lubbock says that "the town [Yonville] with its life is not behind the heroine, subdued in tone to make a background: it is with her, no less fully to the front; its value in the picture is as strong as her own."2 Referring to the locale in modern fiction, Hans Meyerhoff in his study on time in literature stresses that "the identity of the city has the same face as the identity of persons in the city. Fragments of lives in each are gathered together by a unitary symbolic frame of reference, which also constitutes the unit of the narrative itself."3 But the spatial character of modern fiction is probably given the most thorough-going treatment in Joseph Frank's study "Spatial Form in Modern Litera

* Weilek and Warren, Theory of Literatur* (New York: Viking Pro«, 1956), p. 821. •Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New Yolk: Viking Pros, 1957), p. 85. •Ham Mey erhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley: Unlvenity of California Preu, 1955), pp. 39-40.

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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ture."4 Frank's general claim is that "modern literature is moving in the direction of spatial form," which means that the reader is intended to apprehend these works spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence. This claim calls into question what was traditionally taken for granted: that fiction as a narrative mode is expressed in time and that essentially it has a sequential character. According to Frank, Flaubert was among the first modern writers to practice the technique of simultaneity, but this was only a point of departure which in Joyce's Ulysses became the principle of spatial cross-references and symbolic allusions. Without too much effort we could think of other modern works supplying further evidence for Frank's thesis. We remember the central part of Lawrence's Rainbow (the Will and Anna section) and the novels by Lawrence Durrell and Robbe-Grillet.

It has been observed that in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway the city—London—plays a greater part than the settings in her other novels. J. K. Johnstone is, therefore, right when he says that we shall enjoy the novel more fully if we know London: "The novel has an added savour, and its spatial relations are clearer, if the reader knows the West End; but it exists, nevertheless, as a self-contained work of art which is independent of outside knowledge."5' This is quite true, but the same claim could be made about many novels in which fa miliarity with the setting enhances understanding and enjoyment of the work: Dorothy Brewster says in the preface to her Virginia Woolf's London that the "roar of traffic in the Strand or Kingsway falls dif ferently on different ears in different circumstances,"6 and this is what really matters. But while Dorothy Brewster mostly describes Virginia Woolf's success in the presentation of London and its atmos phere, the present paper should try to answer how far the city in Mrs. Dalloway defines and tests the characters, how it reveals them and prompts the action of the novel.

At the outset we could take the Dalloways and their place within the London scene. The beginning of the novel makes it clear that for Clarissa Dalloway the city (and Westminster in particular) has a profound meaning, a fascination that is not fully explicable in ra tional terms, amounting to a mystical communion with the locale. Thus we read about Clarissa in the first pages:

'The study was first published In three installments In The Sewanee Review in 1945 and later re-printed in J. W. Aldridge's collection of critical essays, Critiques and Essays on Modern Fiction, 1920-1951 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952). 5 J. K. Johnstone, The Bloomsbury Group (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1954), p. 338. •Dorothy Brewster, Virginia Woolf s London (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960), p. 9. 376 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over twenty—one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a parti cular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting in doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason; they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane over-head was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.T

The importance of London could hardly have been more suggestively introduced than in these remarks on the first pages of the novel. London has a somewhat similar effect on Clarissa Dalloway that nature had on Wordsworth; even amidst all the commotion of the metropolis she feels "a particular hush, a solemnity, an indescribable pause; a suspense . . . before Big Ben strikes." The experience is not unlike the ecstatic stasis in Wordsworth's poem when . . the breath of this corporeal frame/ And even the motion of our human blood" are "almost suspended" and an extraordinary vision follows. On the other hand, Clarissa Dalloway's walk through London streets on a fine June morning probably defines and reveals her social character more suggestively than a detailed description would do. Clarissa's associations and reminiscences during the walk place her among the English upper classes; she muses on "Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh, and all the rest of it" (p. 6). She is on her way to a flower shop in Bond Street, London's most expensive shopping district. It is through Bond Street which "fascinated her" that she goes towards the shop "where they kept flowers for her." Clarissa notices that in this elegant part of the city there is not a single straw to be seen on the pavement. In the flower shop itself she is surrounded by a variety of flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilacs, carnations, roses, and irises.

We know, however, that this social quality is only one facet of Clarissa's personality, that there is also another, darker side of her which is eroded by boredom and a feeling of futility and which even flirts with thoughts of suicide. This side of Clarissa's personality comes fully to the fore at her party when Sir William Bradshaw

'Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Inc., 1925), pp. 4-5. Subsequent references are to this edition.

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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms breaks the news of Septimus' suicide—the death of the man who could not find his place in the vast multitudes of London and who ended his life by jumping out of the window of his Bloomsbury apartment. Clarissa remembers that once she had thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, "never anything else" (p. 280). But the other man was persistent and resolute in his pursuit because, after all, as Clarissa thought,

Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; . . . one was alone. There was an embrace in death, (pp. 280-281)

Preoccupied with these thoughts she walks to the window, and in a moment of stasis, "with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room," she thinks that even in the sky she could see some thing of her own, in "this sky above Westminster" (pp. 282-283). Watching an old lady quietly switching out the light in her room across the street and listening to Big Ben striking the hour, Clarissa 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 dissolved in the air. . .(pp. 283-284)

But to return to Clarissa's family. Her husband's response to London is completely different; his attitude to the city is colored by his desire for reform, coupled with a rather conventional respect for tradition and continuity. On his way from lunch with Lady Bruton, Mr. Dalloway sees young children crossing the busy Picadilly by them selves and this makes his blood boil. He blames the police because, as he thinks, "the police ought to have stopped the traffic at once" (p. 175). But then he had no illusions about London police—actually he was collecting evidence on their malpractices. When he sees prostitutes in the streets his reaction is again that of a public man who is trying to come to the roots of evil for, as it seems to him, "the fault was not in these women, nor in the young men either, but in our detesta ble social system . . (p. 175). But the impression of Mr. Dalloway as a radical reformer would be wrong, for he is also a traditionalist and a conventional figure who, at the sight of Buckingham Palace, is struck by the thought that "you can't deny it a certain dignity . . . nor despise what does, after all, stand to millions of people ... for a symbol, absurd though it is . . ." (p. 177). And he, himself, liked con tinuity "and the sense of handing on the traditions of the past" (p. 177).

Elizabeth, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the Dalloways, ex periences London in her own way. After shopping together with Miss

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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Kilman at the drab Army and Navy stores, the thought strikes her that "perhaps she need not go home just yet" (p. 204). Boarding a bus, and after taking a seat on top, Elizabeth "was delighted to be free. The fresh air was so delicious" (p. 205). After riding on the bus for some time she is tempted to go even further in the direction in which the Dalloways hardly ever went: "Oh, she would like to go a little further. Another penny was to the Strand? Here was another penny then. She would go up the Strand" (p. 206). Elizabeth fully enjoyed her fling through the unknown parts of London. She finds buildings splendid and serious, and the people extremely busy. Here in the business part of the city people were not eternally occupied with trivial chatterings, but with thoughts of ships, business, law, administration, while the atmosphere was at the same time so stately, gay, and pious. In this unknown part of London Elizabeth feels the thrill of a pioneer, the excitement of someone on tiptoe exploring a strange house by night with a candle, "on edge lest the owner should suddenly fling wide his bedroom door and ask her business, nor did she dare wander off into queer alleys, tempting by-streets, any more than in a strange house open doors which might be the bedroom doors, or sitting-room doors, or lead straight into the larder" (p. 206). And with it comes the indifferent but attractive bustle and commotion of London streets. Elizabeth "liked the geniality, sisterhood, motherhood, brotherhood of this uproar" (p. 209). She knows that her mother would not like her to walk by herself in strange parts of London, but then, at this moment, her mother seemed to Elizabeth "extremely immature, like a child still, attached to dolls, to old slippers" (pp. 208-209).

Elizabeth's London adventure has been a radical step towards her maturity, or, as Dorothy Brewster put it, Elizabeth "had her epiphany" so that the effect of the adventure paves the way for one of the most hopeful and tender scenes in the novel when Elizabeth appears at her mother's party in the evening so much changed that everybody is struck by her appearance and even her father does not recognize her at first. But then the genial man—as we have seen him in his response to London—"recognized her, she looked so lovely in her pink frock." She went to talk to her father and the two of them were rather glad [that the party] was over, but Richard was proud of his daughter. And he had not meant to tell her, but he could not help telling her. He had looked at her, he said, and had wondered, Who is that lovely girl? and it was his daughter) That did make her happy. But her poor dog was howling, (p. 296)

So far we have been dealing with figures that are firmly integrated in the social structure of London; there are, however, several char acters in the novel who are in one sense or another outsiders from

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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms London society. Of these Peter Walsh is the most important one as he is able to see through the other characters and can sum them up. It is by no means an accident that he has been in India for twenty years and has now arrived in London after a lapse of five years. His long absence has intensified his general "susceptibility to impressions." (p. 107). He is fully aware that his absence has made him more sensi tively aware of London and its life:

The amusing thing about coming back to England, after five years, was the way it made, anyhow the first days, things stand out as if one had never seen them before; lovers squabbling under a tree; the domestic family life of the parks. Never had he seen London look so enchanting—the softness of the distances; the richness, the greenness, the civilisation, after India, he thought, strolling across the grass, (p. 107)

Peter Walsh's response to London and English civilization is ac tually unthinkable without his prolonged stay in a country so dif ferent from England and Europe in general. His reactions are identical with those of Fielding, E. M. Forster's ex-patriot in A Passage to India. What fascinates Fielding on his return to the Mediterranean and Europe is "the harmony between the works of man and the earth that upholds them, the civilization that has escaped muddle, the spirit in a reasonable form, with flesh and blood subsisting."8

For some obscure reason it seems to Peter Walsh that the five years of his absence have been of special importance. People look different, and there is a new sense of freedom and tolerance not typical of Lon don before the war. He feels that now, after India, he could fall in love with every woman in London. He notices some peculiar freshness about them; he has no doubt that now even the poorest are better dressed than five years ago; he appreciates the new slim look and the elegance. He finds "design, art, everywhere."

But the general well-being and euphoria of post-war London make Peter Walsh even more poignantly aware that he is a failure; at the age of fifty-three he has come back to London to look for a job in a secretary's office, to find some usher's job, or to teach little boys Latin, "at the beck and call of some mandarin in the office." And during his visit to the Dalloways in their Westminster home, the awareness of his failure is driven home to Peter Walsh with doubtless force: "Oh yes, he had no doubt about that; he was a failure, compared with all this—the inlaid table, the mounted paper-knife, . . . the old valuable English tinted prints—he was a failurel" (p. 64). But if socially and in

»E. M. Förster, A Passage to India (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929), p. 882. 380 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms terms of career Peter Walsh was a failure, his power of seeing through the shallowness and snobbery of London upper class society has only been increased by the fact that his impressions were now fresh, not dulled and blunted as it often happens with people who have lived in one place for a long time. As Peter Walsh put it, concerning the Dalloway home: "I detest the smugness of the whole affair; Richard's doing, not Clarissa's . . (p. 65). By and large, it is his more varied career and cosmopolitan background that enables Peter Walsh to sum up his friends and acquaintances in London when revisiting them after a long absence. Thus he can easily and with condescension qualify Richard Dalloway's abilities: "He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a spark of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type" (pp.112-113). It is Peter Walsh who can place Clarissa within London society; "she was wordly; cared too much for rank and society and getting on in the world" (p. 115). He admits though, that she had a sense of comedy, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn't mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination, (p. 118)

Peter Walsh formulates here what the reader has already seen in the responses of the Dalloways to London: Clarissa's social absorption and Richard's reformist tendencies coupled with his conventional respect for tradition and continuity. But Peter Walsh's power of observation is not limited only to the Dalloways. Viewing the guests at Clarissa's party, which was attended by the cream of London society, including the Prime Minister, he is thinking, while standing as an outsider in a corner: "Lord, Lord, the snobbery of the Englishl . . . How they loved dressing up in gold lace and doing homagel There! That must be . . . Hugh Whitbread, snuffing round the precincts of the great" (p. 262).

While it is generally true that Peter Walsh's return to London made his observation more articulate and incisive, this does not apply to the whole of his London experience. After calling on Clarissa in the morning, he goes to Regent's Park where he falls asleep on a bench. When he wakes up he remembers in a long reverie the unhappy days when he was hopelessly in love with Clarissa and when he was callously rejected. Such a prolonged evocation of the past is possible only if there is no strong external stimulus which would divert attention. And this is exactly true of Peter Walsh in Regent's Park because, after

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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms his reverie, "he thought, yawning and beginning to take notice— Regent's Park had changed very little since he was a boy, except for the squirrels" (p. 97).

And yet Regent's Park serves even here as a cohesive force because, while Peter Walsh is reliving his past, Septimus Warren Smith and his wife Rezia are sitting in the same park on a bench close by. The same device of spatial coincidence as link between two episodes is applied in other parts of the novel as well, for example, when an explosion apparently coming from an elegant car attracts everybody's attention, including that of Septimus Warren Smith. Later on, after Elizabeth's London adventure, the bridge that connects the scene with Septimus is the lights and noises of London streets penetrating Septimus' room in Bloomsbury. There is something arbitrary in these links and coincidences, and one could apply to this aspect of Mrs. Dalloway Henry James's complaint about his The Wings of the Dove to the effect that the seams have not been properly concealed. In the context of this paper, it is relevant to note that it is London that brings about the link deriving from these coincidences. In one of the last instances, when Septimus is brought to the attention of the other characters, London again provides the merger.

We have noted that on his return from India Peter Walsh finds London enchanting; the rhythm and élan of the city make him "feel so young"; every now and then he admires the triumph of civilization in London; or, to follow his own thoughts, "a splendid achievement in its own way, after all, London; the season; civilisation" (p. 82). With this in mind we find it quite natural that, when Septimus is rushed to the hospital, Peter Walsh notices the ambulance and is im pressed by the efficiency of civilized life:

One of the triumphs of civilisation ... It is one of the triumphs of civilisation, as the light high bell of the ambulance sounded. Swiftly, cleanly the ambulance sped to the hospital, having picked up instantly, humanely, some poor devil; . . . That was civilisation. It struck him coming back from the East—the effi ciency, the organisation, the communal spirit of London, (p. 229)

Ironically enough, while Peter Walsh admires the communal spirit of London, Septimus, who is taken to the hospital in the ambulance —i.e., the beneficiary of the communal spirit—was a thoroughly alienated and lonely individual. Suffering from shellshock, Septimus is obsessed by thoughts of death and suicide. His Italian wife, Rezia, following the doctor's advice, is constantly trying to interest Septimus in his surroundings, and London is ideal in this respect with its endless variety of diversions. She draws Septimus' attention to the

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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms plane sky-writing a commercial, and later they move to Regent's Park because, as Septimus thinks, they must get away from people . . . right away over there, where there were chairs beneath a tree and the long slope of the park dipped like a length of green stuff with a ceiling cloth of blue and pink smoke high above, and there was a rampart of far irregular houses hazed in smoke, the traffic hummed in a circle, and on the right, dun-coloured animals stretched long necks over the Zoo palings, barking, howling, (p. 36)

In Regent's Park Septimus is struck by the checkered beauty of trees and leaves which is changing its pattern but retaining the charm of play of light and shade: "Long streamers of sunlight fawned at his feet. The trees waved, brandished" (p. 104). Septimus finds it exquisite joy to watch a leaf quivering in the air, and up in the sky the swallows swooping and swerving with perfect control, while the sun was dazzling leaves "with soft gold in pure good temper" (p. 105). Yet, apart from the soothing impact of London parks, the overriding effect of the city on Septimus is that of a megalopolis which could not care less about the face of one individual; this is the paradox of a huge multitude of people where one feels as lonely as an outcast on an island. We read in the novel: "London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them" (p. 127). Quite naturally, Septimus' Italian wife, Rezia, feels even more alienated in a huge strange city with a mentally deranged husband. Her London suffers from the comparison with her native Italy where in the evening the streets are crowded with people talking and laughing "not half alive like people here [in London] huddled up in Bath chairs, looking at a few ugly flowers stuck in pots" (p. 34). And confronted with the ordinary everyday life in London, Rezia is tormenting herself with the questions as to why she should be singled out for loneliness, suffering, and bullying by "this malignant torturer," her demented husband. There are moments when she can hardly find a valid reason that made her "come to live here, in this awful city" (p. 99). No wonder that another newcomer to London, the young Maisie from Edinburgh, would find this couple strange: In London for the first time, come to take up a post at her uncle's in Leadenhall Street, and now walking through Regent's Park in the morning, this couple on the chairs gave her quite a turn; the young woman seeming foreign, the man looking queer; so that should she be very old she would still remember and make it jangle again among her memories how she walked through Regent's Park on a fine summer's morning fifty years ago. (p. 38) Finally, we might mention Mrs. Dempster—an elderly Cockney—as she sees Maisie Johnson walking through the park. Weary of her hard

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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms and bleak life, Mrs. Dempster is imagining Maisie married and the inevitable old story of drabness starting again. But to sum up: Regent's Park is never described, its place in the structure of the novel is never adjectival, subsidiary, a frame round a character, but rather it is verbal, fully functional in revealing the characters of those who are found there. Septimus' hypersensitive and unbalanced character responds to the vibrant delicate beauty of the park—and in the presentation of checkered beauty of trees, leaves, and sunshine Virginia Woolf is at her very best—Maisie Johnson is struck by the strange appearance of the couple in the park, whereas Mrs. Dempster is too dull and earthly to think of anything but the waste and drabness of life.

Mrs. Dalloway is obviously another case in support of the claim on spatialization of modern fiction, but this does not mean that the thesis should be taken absolutely. Virginia Woolf can be cited both in support of and against the thesis on spatialization: she was certainly interested in the exploration of the spatial possibilities of the novel, and she entertained ideas on "pure time" as a spatial moment includ ing both the past and the present, but there is no doubt that she was also intrigued by the flow of time, by what we might call its horizontal aspect. The flow of time and its pulse is best described in her essay "Life Itself" in which she implies, while writing about an English country parson from the eighteenth century, that individual lives and historical events are trivial and that what matters is the recurrent changes, the flow and flux of time, as it were the rhythm of the universe.

For an analysis of alteration between the horizontal and vertical approach to time, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is most ap propriate. After a largely "vertical" first part (in the sense of dis section of a moment or very limited time span), the "horizontal" aspect becomes the subject of the second section. We see here the effect of time on man and his environment. So far does Virginia Woolf go in this direction that she turns the conventional plot upside down: the main characters (Mrs. Ramsay and the others) have become subsidiary, their fates are recorded only in brackets, while time has become the central and undisputed force. To the Lighthouse is almost the antithesis of Mrs. Dalloway: whereas in Mrs. Dalloway the city defines the characters, in To the Lighthouse the characters are stripped of spatial dimensions. Because they are not immersed in their locale, the author is free to focus her attention on the dynamics of personal relations and on the effects of the flow of time on man's life. But it is not the aim of this paper

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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms to discuss To the Lighthouse, only to make the quality of Mrs. Dalloway more distinct by juxtaposing it with Virginia Woolf's next novel. We also wanted to show that, although spatialization has be come an important feature of the modern novel, it is by no means superior to temporal considerations—as one might gather from Frank's study. We would finally agree with Wayne Booth's remarks on Frank's essay that it is a "highly influential, intelligent account of the decline of interest in temporal sequence in modern fiction; mis leading, I think, in its suggestion that temporal interests are somehow inferior aesthetically to 'spatial' or 'architectural' interests."9 Virginia Woolf's works supply evidence for both parts of Booth's antithetical statement.

•Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 401.

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