Virginia Woolf's "Cotton Wool of Daily Life" Author(S): Liesl M

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Virginia Woolf's "Cotton Wool of Daily Life" Author(s): Liesl M. Olson Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2, Virginia Woolf and Others (Winter, 2003), pp. 42-65 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3831894 Accessed: 28-10-2019 13:29 UTC

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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:29:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Virginia Woolf's ** "cotton wool of daily life

Liesl M. Olson Columbia University

[Poetry] has never been used for the common purpose of life. Prose has taken all the dirty work on to her own shoulders; has answered letters, paid bills, written articles, made speeches, served the needs of business- men, shopkeepers, lawyers, soldiers, peasants. ? Virginia Woolf, "The Narrow Bridge of Art"1

[T]he everyday is what we are first of all, and most often: at work, at lei? sure, awake, asleep, in the street, in private existence. The everyday, then, is ourselves, ordinarily. ? Maurice Blanchot, "Everyday Speech"2

v? irginia Woolf's prose has frequently been called poetic, a description that alludes to the rhythm and sound of her sentences, the lyric plotlessness of her novels, and the self-conscious interiority of her characters. Woolf's friend, E.M. Forster, once claimed that Woolf's "problem" was that she should have been a poet, not a novelist.3 But poetic is a term that invites question, largely because it suggests that Woolf does not tackle the pedestrian world of ordinary life, or that her novels disdain prosaic subjects. While Woolf sought to remove the heavy furniture of the realist and naturalist novel in order to render the inner workings of the mind ? the "atoms as they fall upon the mind

1. Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, Vol. 2 (Hogarth Press, 1966), p. 223. 2. Maurice Blanchot, "Everyday Speech" in Yale French Studies 73 (1987), p.12. 3. "So that is her problem. She is a poet, who wants to write something as near to a novel as possible," Forster writes in his somewhat hesitant tribute to Woolf after her death. See Forster's Virginia Woolf (Harcourt Brace, 1942), p.23.

Liesl M. Olson, "Virginia Woolf's 'cottonwool of daily life,'" Journal of Modern Literature, 26.2 (Winter 2002-2003), pp. 42-65. ?Indiana University Press, 2003.

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in the order in which they fall" ? she knew that the modern novel could not flee from the external world of everyday things, from "the common objects of daily prose, the bicycle and the omnibus," as she writes in "A Letter to a Young Poet" (1932).4 Her characters will not dwell solely in their heads; they will dwell, for instance, in a physical world of London streets and public parks, where vagrants sing for money and airplanes advertise overhead. Woolf's finest writing calls attention to ordinary experiences in a world full of ordinary things. Celebrators and critics of modernism have typically focused on Woolf's interest in the mind, or the "moment of being," but have left the ordinary largely overlooked, a tendency evident in our critical fascination with modernism's fantastic revelations: Joyce's "epiphany," Pound's "magic moment," Eliot's "still point of the turning world," or Proust's explosion of memory, triggered by such events as the taste ofthe madeleine.5 The modernist preoccupation with self-consciousness, located most strikingly in such moments as these, has been both praised and criticized, but it has rarely been questioned.6 Yet, as I will show, Woolf's modernism is not purely concerned with recording the subjective mind or heightened experience, but is deeply invested, stylistically and ideologically, in representing the ordinary.7 Certainly, those who argue that Woolf shares with other modernists an emphasis on subjec? tive interiority, above all else, find much support in Woolf's writing. In "Modern Fiction," Woolf herself states that "For the moderns 'that,' the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology," and many critics have taken this statement (among similar ones) as a point of departure.8 Elizabeth Abel, in Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (1989), examines the way Woolf's works "echo and rewrite the developmental fictions of psychoanalysis."9 Most of the introductions to Woolf's major works also pick up on what Abel describes as Woolf's interest in internal states, "the points of origin marked by mother and father," or other "[p]rivate power? ful sources."10 Beginning readers of Woolf's work will learn that "the external event is significant primarily for the way it triggers and releases the inner life" and that "there is a roominess about so many ofVirginia Woolf's characters, a sense of mystery and ofthe inexplicable; they are rarely

4. Virginia Woolf, "Modern Fiction" in The Common Reader, 1st series (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 150, Vir? ginia Woolf, "A Letter to a Young Poet," in The Death ofthe Moth and Other Essays (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), p. 214. 5. As Alex Zwerdling has recently pointed out, "moments of being" is a phrase that Jeanne Schulkind chooses as the title to her collection of Woolf's memoirs, but Woolf herself does not give the phrase such primacy. See Zwerdling's "Mas- tering the Memoir: Woolf and the Family Legacy" in Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2003), pp. 165-88. 6. "The most influential formal impulses of canonical modernism," Frederic Jameson writes, "have been strategies of inwardness, which set out to reappropriate an alienated universe by transforming it into personal styles and private languages." See Jameson's Fables of Aggression (University of California Press, 1979), p. 2. The Marxist critique of modernism has always claimed that modernism represents a withdrawal to privacy, a denial of history, and a privileging of subjectivity. In this vein, Georg Lukacs disparages the turn from the "objective reality" of the nineteenth-century novel to the "decadent" subjective experience of modernism, arguing that "specific individuality cannot be separated from the context in which they were created." See Lukacs' Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle (Harper and Row, 1971), p. 19. Lukacs fails to understand that modernists were profoundly skeptical ofthe "objective reality" in which he believed.

7. My exploration of Woolf's work is part of a larger project that examines literary modernism's preoccupation with the habitual, pragmatic actions of everyday life. I also look at the work of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens, focusing on how these writers emphasize the non-transformative power of the ordinary as its most compelling attribute: literary modernists depict ordinary experience as a satisfaction with the material rather than the spiritual, the local rather than the exotic, the constant rather than the unknown, and the democratic rather than the privileged. 8. Virginia Woolf, "Modern Fiction," p. 152. 9. Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. xvi. 10. Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, p. 3.

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enclosed in precise outlines."11 Woolf also has been called "a novelist usually considered the most inward of all British writers," an appraisal that is misleading, and which she would certainly dislike.12 A general sense, in both popular and scholarly estimations of Woolf, is that her work explores a fluid state of consciousness, always heightened, never settling on an outline. My argu? ment is not that these claims about Woolf's writing are baseless; rather, I believe that they funda- mentally miss something crucial about her commitment to ordinary experience, about experiences that are not heightened. When Woolf, in "Modern Fiction," asks us to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day," she demands two things, seemingly incompatible. She wants her subject to be both "ordinary," and of the "mind," though by her own suggestions in her essays of this time, the subjective mind is a shifting, wildly complex thing, receiving "a myriad impressions ? trivial, fan? tastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel."13 To render the ordinary is to describe experiences with which every reader is familiar, but the mind is a strange, unique entity. How might modern fiction represent both psychological interiority and realism rooted in the things that are shared among us? Woolf bridges this divide by replicating the ways in which individu? als do the things that they always do ? repeated acts and habits ? because these actions are the fabric of what she calls "character." Woolf identifies the ordinary in several of her key non-fiction writings. She continues to emphasize a distinction between poetry and prose ? a distinction less tenable, in retrospect, than revealing of Woolf's belief in the capabilities of the prosaic. Mrs. Dal? loway, in particular, is a novel obsessed with the ordinary as a source of knowledge about another person. The ordinary in Mrs. Dalloway lies at the heart of Woolf's representation of "character," functioning as a powerful force of life, prevailing over the traumatic. Woolf's representation ofthe ordinary, however, is not limited to Mrs. Dalloway, but becomes an enduring fixation, dominating her experimentation in subsequent novels. The main quality of the ordinary is that it eludes representation, or that no representation of it (no matter how experimental) can be totally satisfac- tory. Woolf's concern with how best to represent the ordinary drives her ambivalent use of facts in fiction, as she herself implies in her long essay "Phases of Fiction" (1929). A survey of novel? ists who capture the ordinary particularly well, "Phases" also establishes a tradition from which Woolf positions herself. Partly because Woolf was such a voracious and imaginative reader her? self, "Phases of Fiction" reveals Woolf's strong attachment to novelists who describe the world as it is, who satisfy our need to believe in a fictitious world, derived from what we know already. Her determined disassociation from the Edwardians, whose work is entrenched in materialist facts, should be considered in context of her admiration for many other older novelists whose use of facts she emulates as a means of achieving the ordinary. In "A Letter to a Young Poet," a long piece written in response to the young English poets of the 1930s (her nephew Julian Bell, John Lehmann, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and W. H. Auden), Woolf criticizes poets who are self-obsessed, who describe only "a self that sits alone in the room at night with the blinds drawn."14 The poetry that emerges from such a strategy suffers

11. See Elaine Showalter's Introduction to the Penguin edition of Mrs. Dalloway (1992), p. xx, and Jeanne Schulkind's Introduction to Moments of Being (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), p. 14. 12. See Michael North's Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene ofthe Modern (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 81. Prevailing notions about Woolf's work, as I show, are similar. 13. Woolf, "Modern Fiction," p. 150. 14. Virginia Woolf, "A Letter to a Young Poet," p. 218. "A Letter to a Young Poet" was published as one of The Hogarth

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from abstraction and impenetrability; even a discerning reader like Woolf is baffled by it. But Woolf also questions poetry that is too crass in its attempt to include "the actual, the colloquial."15 She quotes verse from Lehmann, Spender and Day-Lewis (although she does not cite their names), and notes the abrupt shift from romantic images to common vernacular.16 The tension she poses between the private language of the mind and colloquial language of the public, also put forth in essays like "The Narrow Bridge of Art" (1927) and "The Leaning Tower" (1940), underlines Woolf's central concern with how the novel should capture the ordinary without making it overly poetic or utterly crass. Woolf's attitude in "A Letter to a Young Poet" echoes her famous response to Joyce's Ulysses, a novel that she ultimately felt was too adolescent in its representation of ordinary experience, criticizing Joyce's experimentations as merely "conscious and calculated indecency."17 Finding fault with similar moments in the work of younger poets, Woolf emphasizes lines like "ease the bowels" and "buggers are after," and then explains: "The poet is trying to include Mrs. Gape. He is honestly of opinion that she can be brought into poetry and will do very well there. Poetry, he feels, will be improved by the actual, the colloquial. But though I honour him for the attempt, I doubt that it is wholly successful. I feel a jar. I feel a shock. I feel as if I had stubbed my toe on the corner of the wardrobe."18 Ironically, the poet's motives, as Woolf describes them, resemble Woolf's own.19 While the name "Mrs. Gape" suggests a woman who draws a reader's attention, or astonishes, she may not be so different from Woolf's own charwoman "Mrs. Brown." Both are ill-served by poetry, according to Woolf. She argues compellingly in "Mr. Bennettt and Mrs. Brown" (1924) that such women should not be overlooked. A modern writer must throw away the superfluous, tiresome tools of Edwardian description and represent ordinary "character" clearly and completely. Of course, Woolf's feminist aims also underscore her concern with character: Mrs. Brown represents the type of woman (older, unsupported, burdened by her duties) who is often overlooked, in literature and in life.20 Thus Woolf quarrels with the younger generation of poets not so much because of their motives (with which she is explicitly sympathetic), but because of their disappointing method. Only the novel, "the prose of the world," in Hegel's phrase, can

Letters series, a project planned by John Lehmann, who was then working for the Hogarth Press (and who would eventually buy Virginia Woolf's share in it.) The "Letter" was specifically addressed to Lehmann, who brought it to Auden, Spender and Day-Lewis. 15. Woolf, "A Letter to a Young Poet," p. 215. 16. The examples Woolf chooses are not the poets' best. She noticeably ignores Auden in "Letter," no doubt the finest poet in the group. 17. Woolf writes: "Mr. Joyce's indecency in Ulysses seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows. At moments, when the window is broken, he is magnifi- cent. But what a waste of energy! And, after all, how dull indecency is, when it is not the overflowing of a superabundant energy or savagery, but the determined and public-spirited act of a man who needs fresh air!" See "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" in The Captain s Death Bed and Other Essays (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p.116. Privately in her diary, Woolf described Joyce: "A queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." See The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol.II, Eds. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984), pp. 188-89. 18. Woolf, "A Letter to a Young Poet," p. 215. 19. When John Lehmann criticized the "Letter," Woolf maintained that "the young poet is rather crudely jerked between realism and beauty . .. he doesnt [sic] reach the unconscious automated state ? hence the spasmodic, jerky, self conscious effect of his realistic language. But I may be transferring to him some of the ill effects of my own struggles the other way round ? writes poetry in prose." See The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V, p. 83. 20. Woolf's discomfort with the younger generation of poets also seems to stem from her suspicion that they cannot adequately represent a woman like "Mrs. Gape," even though Woolf claims that this is what they are trying to do. Woolf viewed the 30s poets ? privileged, male and mostly homosexuai ? with some skepticism, particularly regarding their views on gender. See Hermione Lee's chapter "Young Poets" in Virginia Woolf (Chatto & Windus, 1996), pp. 608-25.

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capture a person's complexity.21 The form of the novel, "so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive," Woolf writes in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," is well designed to express character.22

In her critical essays on the novel, Woolf insists on the danger ? for the artist ? in retreating to the purely subjective, to the entirely interior, to what she defined as overly poetic. The not always stable associations she makes among subjectivity, interiority, and poetry are influenced by the artistic experiments of her time; she recognizes one of the most pressing issues posed by literary modernism and the artistic developments that followed: To what extent should writers depict the facts of an external world, "to disenchant and disintoxicate," as W.H. Auden wrote, and to what extent should they represent psychological depth or inner vision? Which is the more authentic reality? Woolf's engagement, late in her career, with the poets of the 1930s highlights her persistently mixed feelings about literature's responsibility to a real or external world outside the world that modernist experimentation, according to many, was trying to represent. The word "real," of course, is bandied about by Woolf to mean almost anything, partly because she sought to redefine it. Woolf sympathizes with the younger generation's desire to supplant the imagination with a more politically-minded realism, particularly in response to the inexplicable violence of the first war, and England's political and economic difficulties during the summer of 1931, when the letter was composed.23 But her own artistic struggle is slightly different. Her work is not split between representations of inner versus outer or personal versus political.24 Rather, her representation of ordinary experience works to reconcile two sides of a dichotomy that we usually understand as dominating literary modernism. At the start of her unfinished memoir, "A Sketch of the Past" (1940), Woolf distinguishes between "moments of being" and "moments of non-being." She describes her childhood as one long period of ecstasy, a "moment of being" marked by the sound of waves crashing outside her nursery room window at St. Ives. And yet, Woolf acknowledges, her childhood certainly consisted of more than just this one morning lying in bed: "If I could remember one whole day I should be able to describe, superficially at least, what life was like as a child. Unfortunately, one only remem? bers what is exceptional. And there seems to be no reason why one thing is exceptional and another not."25 Parts of the day that are not lived consciously, and thus not remembered, comprise what she calls "non-being," of which her adult life seems to be full. As an example, Woolf gives the events of the day before: "ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbind- ing."26 While Woolf seems somewhat wearied by all of these events (if we can call them events),

21. Laurie Langbauer essentially modifies Woolf's assessment by arguing that the Victorian series novel is the special province of the everyday precisely because of the expansiveness, repetitiveness, and complicated closure that constitutes an extended series. See Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850-1930 (Cornell University Press, 1999). Langbauer considers Mrs. Dalloway as it breaks from and incorporates the series tradition, though I would argue that Woolf's novel calls into question Langbauer's very model. The novel of one day seems especially suited to capturing the experience of the everyday (particularly the everyday's temporality). 22. Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," p. 102. 23. Ramsay Macdonald's Labour Government collapsed in August, on the heels ofthe General Strike in England and the stock market crash in America. Rapid inflation threatened to follow. The summer was marked by "violent political argu? ment," Woolf noted in a letter. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. IV, p. 373. 24. Contrast Harvena Richter's study of Woolf's subjectivity, Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage (Princeton University Press, 1970), with Susan Squier's analysis of London's exteriority, Virginia Woolf and London: Sexual Politics ofthe City (University of North Carolina Press, 1985). Also see Alex Zwerdling's Virginia Woolf and the Real World (University of California Press, 1986), an analysis of Woolf's fiction which pivots on these binaries. 25. Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," in Moments of Being, pp. 69-70. 26. Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," p. 70.

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she places particular importance on their role in revealing character ? in this instance, these events reveal something about who she is, as she struggles to describe herself in her memoir. The importance of "non-being" in Virginia Woolf's work has received considerably less atten? tion than the "ecstasy" or "shock" that Woolf also describes. In "Sketch of the Past," she explains: "Often when I have been writing one of my so-called novels I have been baffled by this same problem; that is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand ? "non-being."27 The ordi? nary, forgettable events of the day, Woolf suggests, must exist in her novels ? but how? In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf of course creates "one whole day," not of her childhood, as she wishes she could do when writing her memoirs, but of Clarissa Dalloway's adult life: Clarissa buys flowers, mends a dress, meets an old friend, takes a nap, throws a party.28 The ordinariness of these events enables the focus to be Clarissa's character ? and character is Woolf's chief novelistic concern. Indeed, Woolf even suggests that a writer must be more attuned to ordinary experience than other artists. In a 1911 letter to her sister Vanessa Bell, she writes: "As a painter, I believe you are much less conscious of the drone of daily life than I am, as a writer. You are a painter. I think a good deal about you, for purposes of my own, and this seems to me clear. This explains your simplicity."29 A writer, composing the stuff that establishes character, must be attentive to the dull "drone" of daily life, the non-being that constitutes a realistic novel. Woolf's distinction between moments of being and non-being, like her distinction between poetry and prose, demonstrates her awareness that the modern novel cannot represent only height? ened moments of self-consciousness, but must be made up of more mundane moments that occupy our lives. Woolf's ambivalence about how the novel should respond to the subjective, to the interior, reveals a red thread running through literary modernism: despite the desire to get at psychological depth, many modernists sought to retain and amplify a world of ordinary experience and every? day things. On a large scale, we might acknowledge many modernist classics as grappling with this representation of an ordinary human, existing ? as Maurice Blanchot writes ? "ordinarily" (Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, The Man Without Qualities, Beckett's Trilogy, to name a few). If mod? ernism rejected or subverted conventional literary devices (plot, closure), many modernist works still preserve and even privilege the coherence of character. To represent ordinary experience becomes the means by which characters are best revealed, an idea at the heart of a modernist artistic credo like Woolf's "Mr. Bennettt and Mrs. Brown" (1924) or Gertrude Stein's "Portraits and Repetitions" (1934). While Woolf argues that the character of an ordinary charwoman like Mrs. Brown should not be overlooked in fiction, Stein similarly, defends the innovative style of her portraits by explaining that her use of repetition is an attempt to get at "the rhythm of anybody's personality."30 Rejecting a beginning, middle and end, Stein's portraits do not tell a story, but recreate the "existence," as she calls it, of an individual. Routine and habit, enacted by repetition, become more important than heightened or significantly ordered events.

27. Woolf, "A Sketch ofthe Past," p. 70. 28. Certainly it could be argued that that party which ends Mrs. Dalloway is not an ordinary event, marked as it is by the presence of the Prime Minister as well as the most significant people from Clarissa's past. However, we might see this temporary reprieve from the ordinary as a defining feature of the ordinary's repetition. As Henri Lefebvre has argued, anomalies often serve as a confirmation of the ordinary. Certain types of pleasure, if they happen repeatedly (as Clarissa's parties do) give the ordinary its emphasis, its cycle of suspension and re-instatement. See "Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside," the penultimate chapter in Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1 (Verso, 1991), pp. 201-27. 29. Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I, p. 475. 30. Gertrude Stein, "Portraits and Repetition," in Lectures in America (Beacon Press, 1935), p. 174.

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The modern novel treats the everyday with a new centrality, but the everyday (as Woolf notices disapprovingly) is not limited to the form of the novel.31 An essay like "A Letter to a Young Poet" reveals the slippery boundaries between poetry and prose and Woolf's somewhat unconvincing attempt to separate their provinces, as if poetry should be saved for the lofty and only the novel should treat the everyday. But as the genres of the novel and the lyric become less distinct, a dominant strain of modernist poetry also foregrounds the pleasure of the everyday in opposition to a romantic idealism and poetic language of the past. Stein's series of object lessons, Tender Buttons, a playful study of ordinary things in the sensory world, certainly serves as an example of this development; moreover, the poetry that Woolf admires and mentions in "A Letter to a Young Poet" (and which influences the 1930s poets) ? the work of Eliot and late Yeats ? unmistakably captures what she calls "the actual, the colloquial." Woolf's objection to 1930s poetry ultimately hinges on her opinion of its quality, since she actually admires much ofthe poetry that was becom? ing more prose-like at the time. "[W]e are going in the direction of prose," Woolf claims in "The Narrow Bridge of Art" (1927), an essay in which she looks to poetry for "beauty, purity, transcendence," but ultimately rejects it in favor of a new kind of novel, one largely characterized by the ordinary work of prose, with just "something of the exaltation of poetry."32 But as much as Woolf pushes for a new form of the novel, the actual fiction she produces is rooted in what will render the ordinary, which is sometimes stylistically less radical than her essays on the modern novel would have us believe. Despite her distaste for Edwardian materialism, so passionately stated in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" and "Modern Fiction," Woolf does not actually reject the representation of what she calls "the fabric of things."33 She transforms, but does not reject, materialist or realist techniques. Her most successful works render ordinary experience, and do in fact depend upon facts and fabric.

All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park . . . it was enough.34 ? Mrs. Dalloway

If Mrs. Dalloway explores how people respond to change ? the shift from war to peace, the pressures within the class system, and the realizations wrought by a family's growing older ? then

31. The desire to replicate ordinary experience, it should be acknowledged, is not solely a modern one. The nineteenth- century novel, as many critics of the novel have sustained, is the exemplary chronicler of ordinary life, rooted in the realism of the domestic and the natural. Franco Moretti's work certainly builds from the premise that the everyday is the special province ofthe novel. See Moretti's "The Moment of Truth" in Signs Taken for Wonders, revised ed. (Verso 1988), pp. 249-61 for a discussion of the novel's reification of the everyday in contrast to modern tragedy's capacity to disrupt the everyday. My examination of Woolf's work assumes that there is something in the modernist experience itself that makes Woolf rethink the modalities of the everyday, but that her work is more directly linked to earlier novelistic modes of rep? resentation than she would have us believe. 32. Woolf, "The Narrow Bridge of Art," p. 224. 33. Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," p. 112. 34. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Penguin, 1992), p.134. All subsequent citations from Mrs. Dalloway will be paren? thetical within the text.

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we might understand Woolf's focus on ordinary events as showing how her characters normalize these changes. In a novel where nothing happens twice, but much that happens presumably has happened before (Clarissa's walk through London, Lady Bruton's luncheon, Elizabeth's omnibus ride), Woolf suggests that no event is the same event, even if it appears everyday. In a Bergsonian sense, no action is the same because each action is affected by time. "If everything is in time, everything changes inwardly, and the same concrete reality never recurs," Bergson writes; "Rep? etition is therefore possible only in the abstract: what is repeated is some aspect that our senses, and especially our intellect, have singled out from reality, just because our action, upon which all the effort of our intellect is directed, can move only among repetitions."35 Change pervades every moment of our existence, essentially making repetition of any event impossible. Mrs. Dalloway pivots on this experience of the ordinary as something strange, in that the ordinary always exists in a new moment of time. Yet as Woolf explains in "Sketch of the Past," repetition of everyday actions is what we use to orient and control our lives, relying on the sameness of what has gone before. Though we might not be aware of it, Woolf writes, we are protected by change, comfort- ably covered in the "cotton wool of daily life."36 In his study of Proust, Samuel Beckett describes the way in which temporality dominates our day-to-day existence: "There is no escape from the hours and the days. Neither from tomorrow nor from yesterday. There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us."37 Woolf's novel foresees Beckett's theory: "daily life" in Mrs. Dalloway func? tions as something her characters crave, as a natural reaction against the deformations of time. As Peter Walsh notes, walking around Regent's Park: "Those five years ? 1918 to 1923 ? had been, he suspected, somehow very important. People looked different. Newspapers seemed different" (p. 78). London pedestrians, going about their daily business, seem new and strange. But change, as it affects a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, is not illustrated by sudden acts of self-awareness, but in the desire ? felt by so many characters ? to preserve the ordinary flow of events, the moment passing. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Woolf's novel opens with an ordinary task, suited by a simple sentence ? iambic, like natural speech, and set apart as a single paragraph. Yet move quickly down the page and the task is tinged with a sense that "something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees" (p. 3). Clarissa's death anxieties, foreshad- owing and echoing Septimus Smith's, complicate the early morning freshness of her day. The first page of Mrs. Dalloway immediately establishes a dichotomy between an ordinary task and a heightened event, running an errand and plunging towards death. Similarly, Clarissa is both an ordinary woman and a woman who feels extraordinary emotions: "she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary" (p. 9). This back-and-forth style characterizes the novel ("She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that" [p. 8]); Clarissa's simple actions, her walk through London and her party preparations, as well as the movements of other characters throughout this June day, make up the substance of the novel's action; they dominate ? even hold in check ? moments of anxiety or self-realization.

35. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, Trans. Arthur Mitchell (Dover Publications, Inc, 1998), p. 46. 36. Woolf, "A Sketch ofthe Past," p. 72. 37. Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit (John Calder Publishers, 1999), p. 13.

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Experience in this novel certainly can be heightened, as Septimus Smith illustrates, but even Septimus is best revealed when he is doing ordinary, habitual things, and when he brierly reverts back to his habits before the war. Unselfconscious routines reveal who these people are: when Cla? rissa thinks about Peter Walsh, at the novel's opening, she cannot remember what he is doing now, but remembers things about him that are constant. Much of what is seemingly important gets for? gotten, leaving a person composed in memory by what seems trivial: "He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished ? how strange it was! ? a few sayings like this about cabbages" (p. 3). Clarissa knows Peter based on little things ? not his interior thoughts, but his eyes, his sayings, his habit of fiddling with a pocketknife. Of course, Clarissa's remembering these things about Peter endows them with significance; she paradoxically removes them from their ordinariness. And so Peter's pocketknife resonates with importance ? a symbol of his sexual energy, the fear Clarissa felt about marrying him, and his sadly tamed danger and masculinity. There are many moments, like this one, in which simple habits not only reveal character, but can also be read symbolically. For instance, Clarissa sits on her sofa sewing her green dress when Peter, just returned from India, surprises her. While Peter wonders how she could be doing what she's always been doing (has she changed at all?), Clarissa's sewing is more than just her routine. The episode distinctly echoes Penelope's weaving and waiting for Odysseus to return; it acquires mythic importance.38 But by no means are all of the ordinary actions of this novel so heavily loaded. In fact, most of them are not. Habits, by nature, are not symbolic; they are not exceptional moments. To transform habits wholly into something beyond a representation of character would undermine the realist project that Mrs. Dalloway undertakes. Woolf wants to depict the way habits function, the way habits compose a life. In his study of Proust, Beckett is compelled and repelled by habits: they remind us of our physical obligations, and tie us to our animal selves. But habits are also the lifeblood of a play like Waiting for Godot, as they are for the characters in Woolf's novel. Habit, Beckett believes, is the substance of "life": "Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolabil- ity, the lightning-conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit."39 Woolf, certainly inspired by Proust, is also a novelist obsessed with memory, as "the laws of memory are subject to the more general laws of habit.'H0 But Woolf's

38. Allusions to Odysseus's journey also draw attention to Woolf's response to Joyce's Ulysses, which she read in 1918 and then re-read in 1922. See Harvena Richter's "The Ulysses Connection: Clarissa Dalloway's Bloomsday," in Studies in the Novel, 21.3 (1989), pp. 305-19. While Richter usefully connects Woolf's composing of Mrs. Dalloway with her reading notes and reaction to Ulysses, I find some of Richter's parallels between the two novels tenuous. Perhaps the most question- able suggestion is that Woolf was essentially driven to write Mrs. Dalloway by her "feelings of failure" and desire to match or trump Ulysses, a novel that her friends (most importantly T.S. Eliot) highly praised. 39. Beckett, Proust, pp. 18-19. 40. Beckett, Proust, p. 18. Woolf read and reread Proust from 1922 onwards. She wrote to Roger Fry: "Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh, if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures ? theres [sic] something sexual in it ? that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can't write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession." See The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II, p. 525. J. Hillis Miller notes how the functioning of past and present in Mrs. Dalloway parallels Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu: "Just as Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, a book much admired by Woolf, ends with a party in which Marcel encounters figures from his past turned now into aged specters of themselves, so the 'story' of Mrs. Dalloway ... is something which

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ideas about habit differ from Beckett's in that she sees habit as something that reveals rather than degrades character. The routine needs of the body, while sometimes bothersome, are part of who a person is. For instance, Woolf describes Peter eating his dinner alone at a restaurant ? reinforcing the simple fact that people must eat, including this Englishman, who orders Bartlett pears for dessert (p. 176). Peter's solitary dinner, narrated to emphasize its necessity, is a far cry from Krapp's obsession with bananas. Other events in Woolf's novel ? "between the individual and his environment" ? are simply mentioned and dropped; they happen and conceivably happen frequently. Clarissa has bought flowers before and she will most likely buy flowers again, from the same florist, Miss Pym. Repetition of such actions allows characters to negotiate the changes between the present and the past, so that events from long ago become part of the immediate moment, as J. Hillis Miller has noted in his celebrated essay on repetition in Mrs. Dalloway.41 Woolf takes the ordinary as her central subject ? an ordinary that is not always symbolic of something else. "Ordinary" (like "character") is a catchword for Woolf; in many of her essays, such as "Phases of Fiction," she draws attention to writers who capture it particularly well. The fiction of Turgenev, Austen, and her friend Forster (among others) locates and fixes on ordinary experiences and ordinary things, often through an attention to facts. Woolf's comment on these writers mixes praise with a desire to translate their aesthetic into something more like her own. In her essay on Jane Austen, for instance, she praises Austen's ability to take the "trivial" and make it profoundly revealing of character. In Austen's novels (as in Woolf's), "[t]here is no tragedy and no heroism," Woolf writes, just commonplace moments of living.42 These moments capture the repetitions and habits of any day ? for instance, a man and woman talking on the stairs before dinner ? but these moments can also spark a character's self-revelation: "But, from triviality, from commonplace, their words become suddenly full of meaning, and the moment for both one of the most memorable in their lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep, trembling, serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this drop, in which all the happiness of life has collected, gently subsides again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence."43 Woolf's praise for Austen is striking because it so aptly describes her own fiction ? especially the "housemaid" passing, for nearly all Woolf's novels include servants, characters who embody and control domestic routines, whereas Austen's novels rarely mention servants at all. While it would be easy to read this passage as a description of a modernist epiphany, it is equally impor? tant to highlight the ordinariness of what Woolf describes, and implicitly her indebtedness to Austen's materialism. Woolf locates a moment, not solely in an Austen novel, but characteristic of her own ? perhaps the charged, unspoken intimacy between the Ramsays at the end of "The Window" or Isa's quickly stifled attraction to Haines in the opening scene of Between the Acts.

happened long before the single day in the novel's present" See Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 188. Hermione Lee also draws a parallel between Woolfian and Proustian memories of child? hood: "Virginia Woolf's earliest memories 'come back' to her rather like Marcel's 'vast structure of recollection' ignited by the taste ofthe madeleine. Like Virginia Woolf, Marcel remembers himself as the child half-asleep looking at the indistinct shapes ofthe furniture in the bedroom, or hearing the sound ofthe bell tinkling on the garden door to announce the arrival of M. Swann." See Virginia Woolf p. 30. 41. Repetition in Mrs. Dalloway, according to J. Hillis Miller, is the recurrence of past events in the minds of Woolf's characters. Miller focuses on narrative strategies ofthe novel (rather than actual actions that are repeated), particularly the way in which a ubiquitous, all-knowing narrator invades characters' minds, displacing the present with past events. See "Mrs. Dalloway: Repetition as the Raising ofthe Dead" in Fiction and Repetition. 42. Virginia Woolf, "Jane Austen," in The Common Reader, 1st series (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p.138. 43. Woolf, "Jane Austen," p. 142.

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These moments are not themselves epiphanic, but "drop[s]," collected as part of our ordinary course of life. The "housemaid passing" interrupts the glow and shine of human connection, much as "Mrs. Gape" is a jarring "shock" to poetic reverie. But Woolf, as she makes clear in "A Letter to a Young Poet," actually wants to represent these interruptions, these deflations, the way that the everyday is a mixture and ongoing flow of events. Woolf's interpretation of Austen (like most liter? ary criticism) reveals as much about Woolf's ethos and era as it does about Austen's. The ordinary is a point of fascination for Woolf, alluring because it is so hard to pin down; its natural "ebb and flow" denies a stable moment of recognition. But how can the ordinary be represented, in fiction, when by virtue of its representation it becomes more than just ordinary? The Marxist theoretician Henri Lefebvre explores this question in his description of what he calls the "everyday" ("la vie quotidienne"). In Everyday Life and the Modern World (1968), Lefebvre argues that the category ofthe everyday cannot be defined or located; everyday life eludes metaphor, "evades the grip of forms," it is what is "practically untel- lable."44 Lefebvre writes: "It is not possible to construct a theoretical and practical system such that the details of everyday life will become meaningful in and by this system."45 The ordinary is not supposed to function in any important way ? it cannot be part of a "meaningful" system. As many other theorists of everyday life have insisted, the ordinary exists in a slippery state between elusiveness and apprehension; "It escapes," writes Maurice Blanchot.46 The ordinary event, because it is definitively uneventful, is the absence of event, so that to transcribe the ordinary risks transforming it. This artistic paradox becomes part of Woolf's text itself, addressed and played out by the major characters, as well as many minor ones. For instance, Woolf peoples the streets of London with a collection of insignificant pedestrians, some of whom see the city with bright-eyed attention. Maisie Johnson, "in London for the first time," sees "the stone basins, the prim flowers, the old men and women, invalids most of them in Bath chairs ? all seemed, after Edinburgh, so queer" (p. 28). She is a girl much like Joyce's Eveline ? used to old ways, repetitions, familiar objects ? but Maisie now stands terrified in a big city, "twisting the knob ofthe iron railing," much as Eveline does, paralyzed at the Dublin port. All ofthe day-to-day events ofthe city seem strange; Maisie (who is never mentioned again) demonstrates how what is ordinary can be entirely de-con- textualized when put into such fresh focus, as Woolf does in describing it. That is, Woolf enacts the activity of the city ? listing so many things all at once ? well aware that the act of writing may deepen the importance of these events. While she includes many things (a technique amplified in Joyce), these things nevertheless are given significance by the act of literary representation. As Woolf worked on this scene in Regent's Park, she found that the only way to go forward was "by clinging as tight to fact as I can."47 Facts, here, are the names, affiliations, and occupa- tions of pedestrians ? described with brevity, but nonetheless comparable to the materialist style

44. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life and the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (The Penguin Press, 1971), p. 82,24. Lefebvre's work, somewhat obscure, has influenced more well-known writers such as Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau and Georges Perec. Critique of Everyday Life, published in 1947 (two more volumes would follow in subsequent decades) has received new attention recently in the field of Cultural Studies, where interest in the everyday has been renewed. See Yale French Studies 73 (1987), a special issue devoted to "Everyday Life," edited by Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross, including essays, among others, by Lefebvre, Blanchot and Baudrillard. Also see New Literary History 33.4 (2002), also dedicated to "the everyday," drawing on a range of interdisciplinary approaches. 45. Lefebvre, Everyday Life and the Modern World, p. 98. 46. Blanchot, "Everyday Speech," p. 14. 47. The Diary ofVirginia Woolf, Vol. II, p. 272.

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of Woolf's Edwardian predecessors. For instance, a reader finds a similar collection of facts when turning to the opening pages of Arnold Bennettt's Riceyman Steps (1923), in which a man walks through the industrial streets of London's Clerkenwell in the autumn of 1919. His physical appear? ance (stout, with a slight limp), manner of dress (hatless, neatly suited), and occupation (book- seller) are emphasized in the novel's first paragraphs, along with many other details that Woolf presumably would have criticized for being "outside," lacking depth, as she writes in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown."48 Bennett's style, according to Woolf, overlooks the essential "character" of the individual, perhaps evident in his depiction of the charwoman Elsie, who is seen almost solely from the outside, as a man might see her.49 And yet, even as Bennett overlooks something crucial to the constitution of character, his materialist style serves a particular purpose, stabilizing and rooting the reader in a world of ordinary action and physical objects. Woolf's work similarly relies on facts, but Woolf also uses facts to foreground the elusiveness of the ordinary and the paradox of its representation. Maisie has many counterparts (as part of a list of people who fill the opening scene ofthe novel), who are not so pointedly aware of their surroundings: Scrope Purvis, who sees Clarissa on the curb (p. 4); Edgar J. Watkiss, who carries lead piping (p. 15); Sarah Bletchley, with the baby (p. 21); Mr. Bowley, with rooms at the Albany (p. 21); Mrs. Coates, who looks up at the airplane (p. 21); and Mrs. Dempster, who saves crusts for squirrels (p. 29). These characters popu- late Regent's Park and the streets surrounding it, as they would any other day ofthe week.50 Woolf brierly attends to each, but they are never mentioned again. Like actions that will certainly be repeated, these minor characters are noted as if they are regular, recurring aspects of London; Cla? rissa must inevitably pass these people. Woolf thus captures the ordinariness of walking through London, and also acknowledges (here, through Maisie) that representing its ordinariness has the power to make it seem strange. Like this pageant of pedestrians on the London streets, resuming their lives after the war, Woolf's deliberate "doubling" of Septimus and Clarissa threads together the experience of shell- shock with the experience of ordinary existence, continuing.51 The relationship between these two characters, rather than posing a dichotomy of experience (front lines versus home front), empha? sizes Clarissa's own sense of vulnerability after the war (and specifically after her illness) as well as Septimus's struggle to connect to a world that Clarissa represents. Clarissa's renewed vitality and love of what she calls "the ebb and flow of things" (p. 9) hinges on her theory of human connectedness, of finding meaning from the people and events around her rather than from within herself. Whereas alone, taking her prescribed afternoon rest, Clarissa acknowledges what she

48. Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," p. 105. 49. Elsie is introduced early in a long paragraph, beginning: "Elsie was a strongly-built wench, plump, fairly tail, with the striking free, powerful carriage of one bred to various and hard manual labour. Her arms and bust were superb. She had blue-black hair and dark blue eyes, and a pretty curve of the lips. The face was square but soft." See Riceyman Steps (Collins, 1956), p. 29. While Bennett's novel indeed takes Elsie's plight as a central subject, the narrator typically assumes that he knows more about her, objectively, than she knows about herself. 50. Gillian Beer suggests that these characters are representative of the English classes and their rituals. The aeroplane and the ear that attract the attention of every person in the novel's opening scene become "the specular centre for the comedy of social class." See Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 160. 51. In her introduction to the Modern Library edition of Mrs. Dalloway (1928), Woolf writes: ". . . in the first version Septimus, who later is intended to be her double, had no existence; and that Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party" (p.vi). Certainly, if Clarissa had killed herself, her day would not have been ordinary at all, but the fact that Woolf changes her original plan suggests that Clarissa's everyday living triumphs over death.

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"lack[s]" ("something central which permeated"), she feels wholly alive when walking through the streets of London (p. 34). Every pedestrian that she passes reinforces her own sense of promise: "what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab" (p. 9). Clarissa's daugh? ter Elizabeth inherits this attraction to the everyday flow of events: the "procession" of people, as she calls it sitting atop an omnibus, constitutes the stuff of life. While different from Clarissa in many ways, Elizabeth also hopes that what humans forget, what does not get remembered in the grand flow of each day (what Woolf calls "non-being") might be apprehended by some force larger than we. Elizabeth thinks: "Forgetfulness in people might wound, their ingratitude corrode, but this voice, pouring endlessly, year in year out, would take whatever it might be; this vow; this van; this life; this procession, would wrap them all about and carry them on, as in the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on" (p. 152). Somehow "life" must be preserved ? not in amber, but in ice, frozen in time, and moving into a vast ocean where all melts and joins. But who can remember every fragment of life, every process of the day, the flow of all the hours? The idea that all of these fragments ? the little things, the ordinary tasks ? are what constitute "life" is the central assertion of the novel, voiced most persistently by Clarissa. She believes that the movement and flow of each day, in its ordinariness, is more important than grand action, even if she cannot recall these things specifically: "being part of it" (p. 5), "that divine vitality" (p. 7). The deictic language of Clarissa's embrace ("this, here, now") emphasizes her longing after something that, by its very nature, escapes defining. Yet Clarissa's satisfaction with the ordinariness of events and their transitory quality is her hallmark characteristic. As the epigraph to this section suggests, each day ofthe week follows in accordance with what has come before, but for Clarissa, this is "enough." The word "procession" also summons a distinct event in the context of the post-World I period in England: the procession to bury the unknown warrior in November 1920, an event that drew thousands of mourners to Westminster Abbey, and stirred the imagination of the country. Woolf's use of the word "procession" in Mrs. Dalloway re-imagines the event. While the procession of the unknown warrior offered a form of mourning for the unprecedented casualties of the First World War ? an outcome difficult for England to comprehend in its magnitude ? Woolf's procession commemorates life, embodied by small, organic things. The images ? "a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees" ? suggest the tangible and the natural, though the piecemeal nature of these things also evokes the fragility of living. Woolf's procession reaffirms the way in which Clarissa (as well as the Regent's Park pedestrians) seeks out a protective "cotton wool," to "wrap them all about and carry them on"; vulnerable, she nonetheless desires participation in an urban exterior world, filled with people and with everyday routines. Alternatively, Septimus has turned inward after his mental breakdown, denying the external world of people and things. Septimus cannot handle the stuff of life that he calls "real things," for "real things were too exciting" (p. 155). Septimus vacillates back and forth between recognizing these "things" and seeing them metamorphose into a vision of war; he has lost the identity that rou? tines and habits establish; now, everything is heightened experience. Septimus's interior thoughts, as Suzette Henke suggests, are rendered in prose that "is at once the language of the poet and the madman."52 His visions ? modeled largely after Woolf's own ? render a mind deranged by

52. Suzette Henke, "Virginia Woolf's Septimus Smith: An Analysis of 'Paraphrenic' and Schizophrenic Use of Lan? guage." Literature and Psychology 31.4 (1981), p. 17.

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inexplicable pain and devastating loss.53 For instance, sitting on a park bench with his wife Rezia, Septimus transforms a man in a gray business suit walking through the park into a uniformed soldier, arisen from the dead (p. 76). Septimus cannot see the man as Clarissa sees the fat lady in the cab ? as an ordinary stranger going about his daily business ? but envisions a macabre scene of war instead.

Yet hope remains that Septimus might recover; in one scene, he seems to recuperate his char? acter before the war, or before his breakdown, and we learn something about his previous per? sonality. This scene, late afternoon as Rezia sews hats and Septimus lies on the sofa, centers on Septimus's relationship to the ordinary. For a brief moment, Septimus addresses the materiality of things around him and he seems able to function without fear. Surrounded by domestic objects that threaten to metamorphose into something else, he has difficulty opening his eyes, but "gathering courage, he looked at the sideboard; the plate of bananas; the engraving of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort; at the mantelpiece, with the jar of roses. None of these things moved. All were still; all were real" (p. 156). Septimus's comfort with the ordinary objects of a living room seems a temporary stay against confusion. He chooses the ribbons for the hat that Rezia is making; "so real, it was so substantial, Mrs. Peters' hat" (p. 158). And instantly Rezia thinks: "He had become himself then, he had laughed then" (p. 158). Similar to Clarissa's sewing, Rezia's hat-making might be understood as representing the satisfaction of ordinary routines, to which Septimus, for one instant, returns. Moreover, sewing suggests an assembling of things together, a creation of something whole from individual parts, like Clarissa's final party. To "assemble" is what Clarissa must do when, in the middle of her party, she hears of Septimus's suicide, his final disassembling, a turning way from what ? in this afternoon scene ? he briefly embraces. Karen DeMeester maintains that Woolf's description of Septimus's experience is a mark of the novel's modernist style, in that modern fiction is particularly well-suited to depict heightened expe? rience, especially trauma. "Modernist literature is a literature of trauma," she states; "in the 1920s, it gave form and representation to a psychological condition that psychiatrists would not under? stand for another fifty years."54 Taking Mrs. Dalloway as a representative text, DeMeester argues that Septimus suffers not from schizophrenia ? as other critics have suggested ? but from delayed stress response to trauma, which the novel's repetitions, non-chronological form, and stream-of- consciousness style "preserve" rather than "reorder." Moreover, DeMeester claims that modernist forms are ineffective at depicting recovery; Septimus's insanity, not stability, conforms better to modernist modes of representation. DeMeester illuminates Septimus's experience of trauma in the context of recent discoveries in the field of trauma psychology, but her assumption about what makes Mrs. Dalloway modernist

53. In Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), Leonard Woolf describes how Virginia Woolf (like Septimus) heard sparrows speaking Greek during one of her illnesses. While biographical readings are usually a tricky endeavor (yet are frequently undertaken with Woolf's work), Virginia Woolf's personal experience of "madness" might help to explain why she represents the ordinary as a means of keeping change in check. Ordinary actions and domestic things had a particular allure for Woolf, as they represented health and stability in her own life, in contrast to the terrifying bouts of madness that threatened to take over her ability to write and function. (See Hermione Lee's chapter entitled "Madness" in Virginia Woolf for a balanced and insightful examination of the nature of Woolf's illness.) Once she had recovered, however, Woolf drew upon her madness as material for her writing; thus, in some ways the stability of habit and routine also took on connotations of artistic dullness, or prose over poetry (See Woolf's essay, "On Being 111" in The Moment and Other Essays [Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948]). Thus, Septimus' madness, while terrifying to him, is also "thrilling." 54. Karen DeMeester, "Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway" in Modern Fiction Studies 44, number 3 (Fall 1998), p. 649.

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does not account for the essential role of the ordinary.55 First, representations of trauma are not unique to modernism, as Septimus himself comprehends, when rereading the literature that he went to war to save: "How Shakespeare loathed humanity. . . . This was now revealed to Septi? mus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus (translated) the same" (p. 97). Septimus, having seen the horrors of humanity during the war, now sees the horrors of humanity depicted in the literature that ? ironically ? convinced him to fight for England in the first place; he sees himself reflected back.56 A reader need look only to Lear on the heath or Ugolino in Hell to experience the way in which madness, terror, or trauma is enacted.57 Syntacti- cal disruptions, repetition, and non-chronological form have been used to represent trauma long before the arrival of literary modernism.58 Moreover, in the case of Woolf's novel, the narrative drive of Mrs. Dalloway ? that is, the way it ends ? represents an affirmation of the ordinary, not the traumatic. When Clarissa hears of Septimus's suicide, in the middle of her party, she feels at first deeply startled, largely because she recognizes her own proclivity to "plunge" towards death. Her physical reaction to Septimus's death ("her dress flamed, her body burnt" [p. 201]), suggests that she could herself be engulfed or consumed by suicide; his death causes her to imagine her own. Yet Clarissa recovers a sense of happiness that Septimus's death threatens to obliterate. Leaving her party for a moment and retreating to a back room, she arrives at a sense of joy; while she admires and even envies Sep? timus's courage, she wants to go on living: "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" (p. 202). Septimus's suicide "preserves," paradoxically, the same flow of

55. DeMeester draws upon recent work in the field of trauma studies by Kali Tal, Judith Herman, Elaine Scarry and Cathy Caruth. As it relates to Woolf's work, trauma has been a very topical issue. DeMeester's argument is echoed in many other readings of Mrs. Dalloway, see, for instance, Jane Lilienfeld's "Accident, Incident and Meaning: Traces of Trauma in Virginia Woolf's Narrativity" in Virginia Woolf: Turning the Centuries (Pace University Press, 2000) and Marlene Briggs' "Veterans and Civilians: Traumatic Knowledge and Cultural Appropriation in Mrs. Dalloway" in Virginia Woolf and Communities (Pace University Press, 1999). Lilienfeld argues that the "narrativity of accident" espoused in Woolf's essay "Modern Fiction" is the narrative of trauma enacted in Mrs. Dalloway ? that Woolf's statement "examine an ordi? nary mind on an ordinary day" is actually "intrusive traumatic imagery" (p. 154). Briggs, like DeMeester, explores how Septimus's "traumatic knowledge exceeds narrative representation" (p. 44). 56. The "irony" of WWI is best documented by Paul Fussell in his seminal work The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, 1975). Fussell writes: "Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.... But the Great War was more ironic than any before or since. It was a hideous embarrassment to the prevailing Meliorist myth which had dominated the public consciousness for a century. It reversed the idea of Progress" (pp. 7-8). 57. In Wars I Have Seen (Random House, 1945), Gertrude Stein also notes the parallel between Shakespeare's tragedies and her experience in occupied France during World War II. Stein writes: "We spend our Friday afternoons with friends reading Shakespeare, we have read Julius Caesar, and Macbeth and now Richard the Third and what is so terrifying is that it is all just like what is happening now" (p. 105). 58. Moreover, the assumption that traumatic experience demands a different kind of narration ? or that trauma itself cannot be narrated ? seems almost contrary to how Woolf describes the difference between "non-being" and a highly mem? orable (or traumatic) event. In a 1924 diary entry that foresees this distinction in "A Sketch ofthe Past," Woolf notes how time easily passes in her new home (to which she and Leonard have just moved); she cannot pin down exactly what marks each day: "Indeed most of life escapes, now I come to think of it: the texture of the ordinary day" (298). Woolf proceeds to tell of a traumatic scare ? her niece Angelica Bell was hit by a motor ear ? and the details she remembers are vivid: a telephone call, waiting in the hospital, the evasive nurse, the anguished look on her sister's face. The traumatic, it seems, is etched in her memory so as to be printed on the page, unlike the time Woolf spends in her new home: "It takes a long time to form a habit," she continues, " ? the habit of living at 52 Tavistock Sqre is not quite formed, but doing well_Soon I shall be making a habit of life in this room." See The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II, p. 299. Woolf identifies trauma as material about which she naturally writes, in contrast to habitual experiences that are much harder ? but necessary ? to remember and record.

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events that Elizabeth watches from atop the omnibus, "this vow; this van; this life," like the ice of a glacier preserving a splinter of bone. Septimus's death somehow keeps intact a human desire for purity or unadulterated experience that, for Clarissa, the "chatter" and "corruption" of life some? times obscure, Unable to see life after the war as simple or pure, Septimus cannot maintain his connection to ordinary things, and yet his suicide propels Clarissa to re-connect with "life": "this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely" (p. 203). While Clarissa's happiness ? her conclusion that "she felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living" (p. 204) ? might seem perverse, it is essentially an assertion of life ("this, here, now,") over inwardness, trauma, or death. Woolf asserts the force of Clarissa's everyday living. The power of the everyday to trump trauma is a possibility that Woolf's other works also put forth. Woolfs use of the word "procession" to signify the flow of ordinary events ? events that paradoxically resist representation ? also occurs earlier in Jacob's Room (1922), a novel that aspires to capture the elusive character of Jacob Flanders. As his loaded last name suggests, Jacob will soon become a victim of the same war that drove Septimus to suicide; and the "procession" of events that make up Jacob's life are nothing but "shadows," in Woolf's opinion, as if Jacob's character disseminates into the unknown, along with the First World War's warriors.59 In a rare instance of authorial intrusion (which her subsequent novels generally avoid), an omniscient Wool- fian narrator presents a theory that is worth quoting at length, as it exemplifies the connections Woolf makes between an ordinary moment and individual character:

It seems then that men and women are equally at fault. It seems that a profound, impar- tial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shad? ows. And why, if this and much more is true, why are we yet surprised in the window

corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us ? why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him. Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.60

This passage illuminates many Woolfian themes: the difficulty of "knowing" another person, the transience of meaningful moments, the shiftiness of perspective, and the desire to pin down char? acter. Woolf here also attempts to collapse the inner versus outer dichotomy that motivates her engagement with the 1930s poets; she does not want to say that individuals are defined solely by subjectivity. Moreover, Woolf's young man foresees Mrs. Brown, the "old lady in the corner opposite," whom Woolf hopes the modern novelist, departing from more traditional representa? tions of character, will not ignore. The interior image ? of a person by a window, suddenly recog? nizable ? also makes its way into To the Lighthouse, whose first chapter (very much about Mrs. Ramsay's inscrutability) is entitled "The Window." Lily Briscoe's abstract representation of Mrs.

59. Woolf s language of course echoes Macbeth's ("Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage"), although the "petty pace" of Macbeth's "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow" is more akin to Beckett's notion of daily routine than to Woolf's. 60. Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room (Penguin, 1992), p. 60.

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Ramsay attempts to solidify, to stabilize, an emotion she cannot pin down, one similarly associ? ated with death's contribution to a "procession of shadows." Most significantly, the above passage identifies the moment when an ephemeral procession becomes something "the most real, the most solid." Essentially, "shadows" become "real" when they are rooted in an ordinary moment, a young man sitting in a chair, doing nothing so different from what he would normally do. While the tone of the passage is markedly melancholy, the situation cannot be called traumatic. Rather, the move? ment from "shadow" to "real" enacts the aim of Woolf's fiction: characters come alive when they are rooted in ordinary moments, or in "moments of non-being." Woolf suggests that these kinds of moments most define the "manner" and "conditions" of our lives ? a sentiment that characterizes the turn away from the heightened in favor of the ordinary in Mrs. Dalloway. Cloaked in cotton wool or preserved in a procession, ordinary moments embody the substance of Woolf's characters and constitute the prosaic fabric of her fiction.

It is precisely the random moment which is comparatively independent of the controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair; it passes unaffected by them, as daily life. The more it is exploited, the more the elementary things which our lives have in common come to light. ? Eric Auerbach, Mimesis61

While Clarissa's celebration of "life" depends upon her theory that "everyone was connected," class distinctions identify the everyday as an experience fashioned by a particular ideology. The first page of Mrs. Dalloway reveals that Clarissa's everyday consists of servants, country houses, and a familiarity with those in positions of imperial power. Class determines just what sort of ordinary tasks mark one's life; certainly, women who work out of necessity have a much different experience each day than women who take walks and throw parties.62 Characters in Woolf's fiction like Lucy, or Mrs. McNab from To the Lighthouse, do the cleaning and cooking, while Clarissa Dalloway and the Ramsays do not. To what extent, then, is Clarissa's day a privilege of the upper class? How does the everyday in Woolf's novel account for characters who are not agents of their own habits (who cannot decide to buy the flowers themselves) but whose habits are imposed upon them?

While every individual's life necessarily entails certain routines of self-maintenance, the ordi? nary also has an economic, cultural, and gendered specificity that defies simple totalizing, a point

61. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Trans. Willard Trask (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), p. 488. 62. In The Waves (1931), Woolf wanted to represent the "life of anybody," but realized that she could replicate only the upper-class voices with which she was familiar. In her drafts, she included the voices of the working-class, but omitted them in the published text for fear of being condescending. See Virginia Woolf The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts, transcribed and edited by J.W. Graham (University of Toronto Press, 1976). For a thorough and even-handed examination of Woolf's attitude towards working-class women, see Mary M. Childers' "Virginia Woolf on the Outside Looking Down: Reflections on the Class of Women" in Modern Fiction Studies 38, No. 1 (Spring 1992), pp. 61-79. Childers writes: "Woolf's writing ranges nervously from pointed, responsible commentary on middle-class women ? commentaries for which she is especially famous ? to unwarranted generalizations about gender, to expressions of discomfort amounting to distaste for women whose lives are so restricted by material circumstances that they do not inspire elegant prose" (p. 62).

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that many theorists who valorize the everyday's revolutionary potential often overlook.63 "The most certain chances of liberation are born in what is most familiar," writes Raoul Vaneigem, celebrating everyday life as a powerful agent in opposing a capitalist system.64 While Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway certainly critiques systems of power on the level of everyday event, the notion of everyday life as potentially defiant or rebellious assumes that individuals have control over the everyday, or that most people are dissatisfied with their own ordinary habits. Rezia Warren Smith, for instance, is instinctively repulsed by Sir William Bradshaw's "proportion" and "conversion," and wants to protect Septimus from the doctor's authoritative orders. Before Septimus's suicide, as they wait for the doctors to arrive, she finishes sewing her hat and wraps up Septimus's papers, as if protecting the two of them from what the doctors might impose. But Rezia, of course, can do noth? ing in the face of Bradshaw's swashbuckling. Her everyday is overlooked, lacking any real power. As Eric Auerbach argues at the end ofMimesis (1946), the everyday is constituted by moments that are in fact indiscernible to a dominant order. Literature's ability to unearth these privately concealed moments, according to Auerbach, illuminates something "elementary" and "common" among all individuals, though the everyday manifests itself differently for each person. Whether or not this revelation of shared humanity ("being part of it") has any real political power (as Auerbach believes it does) is a question that Woolf's novels after Mrs. Dalloway continue to explore. Exam- ining Mrs. Dalloway's commitment to the ordinary within the context of these later novels reveals the ways in which Woolf experimented with how to incorporate the facts of material existence, among both the upper and lower classes. Woolf's representation of everyday moments no doubt tends to favor the perspectives of the upper class. Even Woolf's depiction of servants ? often quite sympathetic ? is nonetheless limited to how servants are related to the people for whom they work. Similarly, Woolf's stinging portrait of Miss Kilman singles out Miss Kilman's bitterness towards the upper class as the most defin? ing feature of her identity. But Woolf's novels ? which always mark the disparities between the upper and lower classes and especially between men and women ? seem to acknowledge rather than overlook the radical differences in how the everyday is experienced. "Often nothing tangible remains of a woman's day," Woolf writes in "Women and Fiction" (the essay that served as a basis for A Room of One's Own), understanding that the everyday may hold a special valence for women, whose lives go unrecorded.65 Woolf's Mrs. Brown, of course, traveling from Richmond to Waterloo, is a vital example of a woman whose life journey has never constituted a literary epic. The everyday ? the experience of "non-being" ? seems particularly prevalent in the lives of underprivileged women. While Woolf's depictions of characters akin to Mrs. Brown (like Miss Kilman or Ellie Henderson), in the end, may not satisfy a reader's need for class complexity, Woolf's novelistic aim is to suggest that a representation of the everyday cannot be reduced to one authentic experience. Woolf's depiction of the everyday emerges as both diverse and ultimately collective. No matter how famous an individual or how remarkable a day may be, there is an ordinariness about every-

63. Lefebvre, De Certeau, and Situationists like Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord locate the everyday in a subjective critique of the capitalist system, but only by taking their own subjectivity for everyone else's. Moreover, an individual's response to the system becomes more important than the cause(s) of societal problems. See Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (The Situationist International Text Library, 1967) for a radical, subjective and utopian vision of everyday life as the "truth" ? the only "real" source of revolution. 64. Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, p. 3. 65. Virginia Woolf, "Women and Fiction" in Collected Essays, Vol. II (Hogarth Press, 1966), p. 146.

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one, and every day, that cannot be escaped. The intersecting points-of-view in Mrs. Dalloway contribute to the "procession" of everyday life that all of the characters, regardless of class, expe? rience. Rita Felski explains: "Everyone, from the most famous to the most humble, eats, sleeps, yawns, defecates; no one escapes the reach ofthe quotidian. Everyday life, in other words, does not only describe the lives of ordinary people, but recognizes that every life contains an element ofthe ordinary. We are all ultimately anchored in the mundane."66 The sky-writing airplane, the Prime Minister's motorcar, and the chiming of Big Ben, for instance, thread through each pedestrian's personal narrative, even as each person's day is individually quite different. As Auerbach argues, modernity's emphasis on the "random moment in the lives of different people" sharpens the pro? found relationship between the individual and a larger sense of shared humanity.67 In exploring the ordinary, we see "nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice."68 Writing in exile, Auerbach challenges the face of fascism, finding his example in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, where he sees Woolf's rep? resentation of the overlooked as an enduring sign of what is shared across countries at war. The two women in the "Time Passes" section of To the Lighthouse best demonstrate the bal? ance between the universality and individuality of the everyday. Here, the solidity of ordinary moments reappears with force. "Time Passes" interrupts the narrative of the Ramsay family's summer holiday and enacts the disruptions of World War I. The famous brackets in "Time Passes" have the effect of purposely subordinating the traumatic events that irrevocably change the Ramsay family. The brackets also give "the sense of reading the two things at the same time," as Woolf explained in her diary, again recognizing (like the doubling of Septimus and Clarissa) that expe? rience is never just one thing.69 "Time Passes" ? even more than Mrs. Dalloway ? dramatically deflects the traumatic and centralizes what is ordinary. Mrs. Ramsay's death, Prue's marriage and death in childbirth, and Andrew's death in battle are all bracketed here, placed within the context of Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast cleaning the Ramsay house: dusting bedrooms, wiping windows, sweeping floors, and pausing in the study to sip tea together. These tasks are the only actions with the power to normalize the passing of time during the upheavals of war.70 The ordinary ? located in the housework of two lower-class women ? serves as an arresting reminder of what remains in war's wake ? the basic and essential routines of human endurance. The women thus embody the struggle of Europe, but also ? on a literal level ? remind us that their work differs from the leisure described in the novel's first section.71

66. See Rita Felski's "The Invention of Everyday Life" in Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodem Culture (New York University Press, 2000), p. 79. 67. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 488. 68. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 488. 69. Woolf, The Diary ofVirginia Woolf, Vol. III, p. 106. 70. "Time Passes" enacts radical cultural and artistic changes wrought by war, a point that Michael Tratner emphasizes in Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf Eliot, Yeats (Stanford University Press, 1995). Arguing that modernist literary forms attempted to include the "idiom of the crowd mind," Tratner suggests that the shifts occurring during "Time Passes" accord with Woolf's famous line in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" that "on or about December, 1910, human character changed" (p. 2). Taking "Time Passes" and Joyce's "Circe" as exemplary texts, Tratner states: "In both To the Lighthouse and Ulysses, a change of psychology, a change of literary form, and a change of historical era are all invoked by the emergence into the text of working-class women of marginal ethnicity" (p. 52). Tratner assumes that Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast are at the forefront (rather than in the background) in "Time Passes," a point that draws attention to the ordinari? ness of characters and events in this section. While Tratner views the servants as representations of change, they might also be understood as characters who serve to normalize and even diminish change. 71. Lefebvre considers leisure a defining feature of la vie quotidian. Events like the vacation or the birthday party, if they happen repeatedly, yearly, constitute a continuation as well as a critique of work. In Everyday and the Modern World, Lefebvre

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Servants, the only denizens of the Ramsay house in "Time Passes," also emphasize the over? looked or unremembered nature of ordinary experience: their routines usually go unnoticed. Here and elsewhere, Woolf shifts point-of-view in order to focus on the forgotten, the banal. The objects of the Ramsay house and the labor of Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast deflect away from the terrible events of war. Pain and loss are not addressed head on, but through the efforts of cleaning and continuing. Woolf describes the sheer effort and physical exertion demanded in cleaning the Ramsay house: "The books and things were mouldy, for, what with the war and help being hard to get, the house had not been cleaned as she would have wished. It was beyond one person's strength to get it straight now. She was too old. Her legs pained her."72 To "get it straight" requires an enormous effort; Mrs. McNab's attempt to reestablish a sense of continuity and security in the Ramsay home generates a new relationship to the ordinary. Domestic objects and routines of cleaning become more powerful than they once were; objects seem to endure longer than humans do. Stability is found in ordinary things, in "a jug and basin ... the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers" (p. 137). Objects retain beauty in their solidity, withstanding human questioning: '"Will you fade? Will you perish?' ... they should answer: we remain" (p. 137). Like the sideboard and bananas that connect Septimus to an external world, the objects in "Time Passes" represent firm elements of habitual, ordinary life, which a world war cannot stamp out. Alex Zwerdling argues that the "discontinuous structure [of "Time Passes"] is largely deter? mined by [Woolf's] wish to highlight historical and ideological shifts."73 This view generally dominates critical thinking about "Time Passes" ? a view with which I largely agree. While it is undoubtedly true that the brackets in this section may indeed highlight, rather than deflect, the shocking events described within, I am suggesting that "Time Passes" gives as much (if not more) attention to what is described outside ofthe brackets: the mundane housework of two women. Read? ers may feel jarred by the brackets, but they remind us (through their grammatical function) that what's inside is subordinate to what's outside.74 While violence makes its way into "Time Passes," it is not Woolf's primary focus; it is purposefully indirect. In fact, Woolf specifically cut many of her earlier references to World War I in this section. War violence, particularly male destructive- ness, is more explicit in the drafts for "Time Passes" and in a separate version published a year ear? lier than the finished novel in Commerce, a Paris periodical.75 In the final published version, Woolf chooses to de-emphasize, even eliminate, overt references to war. War is acknowledged first and foremost as a cause of domestic neglect, so that it seems possible to recover, through housework, ordinary life before the war. In this way "Time Passes" privileges the routines of cleaning over the shock of war, even as cleaning takes on a dramatically new meaning in conjunction with the losses that shake the Ramsay family and the world outside of their house. The ordinary becomes a

writes: "Everyday life is made of recurrences: gestures of labour and leisure, mechanical movements both human and prop? erly mechanic, hours, days, weeks, months, years, linear and cyclical repetitions, natural and rational time" (p. 18). 72. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Penguin, 1992), p. 147. All subsequent citations from To the Lighthouse will be parenthetical within the text. 73. Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World, p. 193. 74. Allyson Booth, for instance, explains her shocked reaction to the brackets in "Time Passes": "Yet despite Woolf's positioning of [war] at an extraordinarily complicated remove from both narrator and reader, the first time I read To the Lighthouse, Andrew's death made me gasp." See Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space Between Modernism and the First World War (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 3. Booth uses "Time Passes" as a model for how architectural spaces supplied many modernist writers with a vocabulary for articulating loss. 75. See James M. Haule's "7b the Lighthouse and the Great War: The Evidence of Virginia Woolf's Revisions of 'Time Passes'" in Virginia Woolf and War, ed. Mark Hussey (Syracuse University Press, 1991), pp. 164-79.

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means by which the unprecedented magnitude of the war can be managed. Moldy books are minor in comparison to the destroyed libraries of Europe, but they are objects that can be mourned over, cleaned, and repaired. The powerful, bracketed moments in "Time Passes," emphasizing the dev- astations of war, transform the ordinary into something other than the unimportant; the ordinary becomes a vital assertion of life, continuing. In Mrs. Dalloway, sl similar re-focusing occurs towards the end of the novel, when Clarissa's servants prepare for her party. When the first guests arrive, we see the scene through Lucy's eyes. She frets over the Prime Minister, while Mrs. Walker frets over the soup and salmon; Woolf emphasizes the work in the kitchen, while Clarissa's party is in full swing. Other servants ? Jenny, Mrs. Parkinson, old Ellen Barnet, and Mr. Wilkins ? are all named, like Regent's Park pedestrians, drawing attention to the indispensable facts of Clarissa's party, not solely to the heightened sense of human connectedness that Clarissa later feels. Furthermore, the material things of the party are as important as the Prime Minister's arrival: ". . . the plates, saucepans, cullenders, frying-pans, chicken in aspic, ice-cream freezers, pared crusts of bread, lemons, soup tureens, and pudding basins which, however hard they washed up in the scullery, seemed to be all on top of [Mrs. Walker], on the kitchen table, on chairs, while the fire blared and roared, the electric lights glared, and still supper had to be laid."76 The ordinary machinery of the party is neither left out nor subordinated; it is an equal part of the novel's final event.77 Like the literary still life of "Time Passes," this accumulation of cooking objects calls attention to the actual labor behind the final event of the novel.

In Woolf's last three novels, however, she becomes troubled by this method of including "acts and things." If we look at what animates Woolf's continued stylistic experiments, it becomes clear that representing ordinary experience by means of a materialist style emerges as a major uncer? tainty in her later work. Woolf both spurns and embraces the inclusion of the prosaic, afraid that it often complicates or covers up what is real about a character. In her long essay "Phases of Fiction," Woolf seems to be of two minds regarding the use of facts in fiction, classifying a collection of writers as "the truth-tellers" ? including Defoe, Swift, Trollope, Borrow, WE. Norris, and Mau- passant ? because they gratify our sense of "belief." Woolf admires the chief truth teller, Defoe, because "emphasis is laid upon the very facts that most reassure us of stability in real life, upon money, furniture, food, until we seem wedged among solid objects in a solid universe."78 Robinson Crusoe's catalogs and timetables ? an early form of Joycean lists ? and the repetitious nature of Defoe's narrative are qualities that Woolf ostensibly celebrates. And yet her own ambivalence about facts softens her praise; "truth-tellers" are liable to fall into the same trap as the Edwardians: "Truth-telling is liable to degenerate into perfunctory fact-recording, the repetition of the state? ment that it was on Wednesday that the Vicar held his mother's meeting which was often attended by Mrs. Brown and Miss Dobson in their pony carriage, a statement which, as the reader is quick to perceive, has nothing of truth in it but the respectable outside."79 Woolf acknowledges that listing things can never comprehensively represent experience; a writer must convey the "inside" as well

76. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, p. 181. 77. As Peter Schwenger has recently argued, Woolf's conception of things hinges on how they generate narrative, not how they deny human subjects or stories. See "Still Life: A User's Manual" in Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2 (May 2002), pp. 140-55. Schwenger is primarily concerned with the work of George Perec, though he also questions the common des- ignation of Woolf's novels as "lyric," precisely because she is so fascinated with "things." 78. Virginia Woolf, "Phases of Fiction" in Granite and Rainbow (Harcourt Brace, 1958), p. 95. 79. Woolf, "Phases of Fiction," p. 103.

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as the "outside"; again, "Mrs. Brown" reminds us that the inner life of women, in particular, often gets overlooked by novelistic facts. The use of facts in fiction, for Woolf, seems both necessary and essentially insufficient. Though a dramatic departure from her previous novels, The Waves (1931) marks Woolf's ongoing struggle with facts. Woolf represents the ordinary as entirely stripped from the external world that facts establish, testing the limits of a non-material world. Woolf's novel most frequently described as "poetic," The Waves privileges a lyrical "I": six voices speaking in the emphatic present tense, interrupted by intervals that describe the sun's course over the earth and sea. Rarely can the reader locate specific places, visualize appearances, or contextualize characters in a world outside of sensory experience. Facts exist, but are blunted by sensation. When writing The Waves, Woolf was involved in her discussions with John Lehmann about the distinction between poetry and prose. She wrote to him: "I wanted to eliminate all detail; all fact; and analysis; and my self; and yet not be frigid and rhetorical; and not monotonous (which I am) and to keep the swiftness of prose and yet strike one or two sparks, and not write poetical, but purebred prose, and keep the ele? ments of character; and yet that there should be many characters, and only one; and also an infinity, a background behind."80 The "purebred prose" of The Waves radically differs from conventional prose styles; even more than in Woolf's other novels, in Barthes's terms, it draws attention to its "writerly" rather than "readerly" nature. The voices in The Waves do not replicate the way that people actually talk; rarely are the sensations of the body spoken aloud in real life. But the experi? ences described in this work happen to us all: birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, and death. Six voices represent the voices of everyone, or anyone. The language of The Waves is prose, it seems, because it describes ordinary experiences, not unique events. Present-tense utter- ances are equalized among the others (except, perhaps, for Bernard's final soliloquy, spoken in the past tense), so that the novel does not demarcate individual "moments of being," but represents an are of being, not identifiable by any specific time. The ordinary is universal or shared experience, of which actual facts seem to play little part. By contrast, Woolf records exact dates, particular locations, technological developments, family genealogy, and historical moments in The Years (1937) ? a fundamental departure from The Waves. The Years systematically (and somewhat pedantically) traces life in the Pargiter family from 1880 to what Woolf calls the "Present Day." In her earlier version of this novel, Woolf alter- nates between non-fiction essays and chapters of fiction, essentially commenting on her story as it develops, and emphasizing institutional and social facts that controlled women's sexual lives, such as not being able to go outside alone, or being permitted only restricted exercise. In the first essay, Woolf explains that the work "is not a novel of vision, but a novel of fact."81 Similar to the copious footnotes in Three Guineas, the facts included in these essays are meant to give credence to the creative work of the text. Facts, for instance, might be the detailed finances of the Pargiter household (found in the second essay) that make clear why the Pargiter daughters never ask to go to college or art school. But in the end, Woolf abandoned this form of fact giving, and fused the two

80. Woolf, The Letters ofVirginia Woolf, Vol. IV, p. 381. 81. Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 9. Perhaps more than any of Woolf's other novels, The Years details the way English life looked, particularly domestic interiors. Moreover, a reader can trace various solid objects ? the spotted walrus with a brush on its back or the "great crimson chair with gilt claws" ? as they reappear from one era to the next, emphasizing experience rooted in a material world. Of course, this technique most strikingly distinguishes Joyce's Ulysses, as a reader follows the journey of certain objects (lemon soap, a potato) through successive chapters.

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sections ofthe novel together. She expressed disappointment with the final result of her conception (although it was her only novel to reach the New York Times bestseller list). Her last novel, Between the Acts (1941), maintains an altered commitment to fact. Set quite specifically on a mid-June afternoon in 1939, just six weeks before the start of the war, the novel pivots on the domestic functions of English country life, and explores how these functions are tied to an historical English past.82 Facts, in this novel, are newspaper stories (of a London rape, of present and imminent war) as well as history texts (an "Outline of History," Mrs. Swithin's favorite book). Woolf wants to connect what gets written down ? recorded history ? with the unselfconscious rituals and routines that grow out of this past. She suggests that everyday actions sometimes have the power to resist or subvert the history that preceded them, albeit in very small ways. Miss La Trobe, the outsider who directs the pageant of English history, attempts to show her audience how their origins have shaped them, thus suggesting that they might act differently through the pageant's implicit questioning of how their culture has progressed. The whole novel hangs heavy with indications of war ? a future towards which Miss La Trobe's history seems to be headed, and which the relationship between Isa and Giles portends. But Woolf's characters are only minor agents of change, assuming what Michel de Certeau describes as small "tactics" of everyday life that resist social and economic systems. These tactics, such as Isa's resistance to Giles, slow down or shift relations, but as De Certeau acknowledges, they rarely change the overall organization of power: Miss La Trobe believes her pageant to be a "failure," as the individuals of the audience return home to dinner once the final scene has ended.83 Facts of the past in Between the Acts ? what Miss La Trobe's pageant enacts ? weigh upon the English present in a way that makes it quite difficult for the Swithins and Olivers to act differently from the way that their ances- tors acted. They cannot change their habits; history operates as the agent of the everyday. The facts of history dramatically dictate the way the English behave in their ordinary lives. Woolf's method of including facts and things ties her work to the writers that she regularly disparages, and to other realist writers (like Austen and Defoe) that she admires; her modern real? ism is not in stark contrast to the realist novels that preceded hers. A novel like Between the Acts depends on facts, foregrounding their intransigence and power, just as Mrs. Dalloway foregrounds the elusiveness of the ordinary that facts embody. Woolf's experimentation with facts throughout her later fiction continues to renovate earlier literary styles, in the sense that her work self-consciously engages with the ideological reasons for deploying facts; she accepts facts as a means of conveying something real in the novel while simultaneously questioning the stability of this repre? sentation. In "Phases of Fiction," Woolf explains: "The novel is the only form of art which seeks to make us believe that it is giving a full and truthful record of the life of a real person. And in order to give that full record of life, not the climax and the crisis but the growth and development of feel? ings, which is the novelist's aim, he copies the order ofthe day, observes the sequence of ordinary things even if such fidelity entails chapters of description and hours of research."84 Here, Woolf

82. Most obviously, Miss La Trobe's country pageant dramatizes (and satirizes) the English past ? from Chaucer's pil- grims to the Victorian tea room ? and questions how for the audience, the "present time" is tied to this past. 83. Resistance in De Certeau, as Ben Highmore has observed, is closer to the use of the term in electronics and psycho? analysis: resistance is what hinders and dissipates the energy flow of domination. For example, a worker might disguise his work for the employer: a secretary writing a love note on company time or a cabinetmaker borrowing leftover wood to make a piece of furniture for his living room, or a factory worker slowing down or speeding up, simply reacting to the monotony. See Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (Routledge, 2002), pp. 152-53. 84. Woolf, "Phases of Fiction," p. 141.

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describes the novels of the past as well as the novels of the future ? the novels she will write. But Woolf acknowledges that in some writers, a concern with factual truth telling produces empty fic? tion: "The surface is all; there is nothing beyond."85 The "fidelity" of facts, in Woolf's fiction, must go beyond the "surface," recording overlooked habits and routines, the minute stuff that comprises character. Woolf's battle with facts and truth fueled her own works of fiction, and thus she cannot help but see this struggle in so many other novelists whose realism she inherits. Woolf's representation of the ordinary emerges as the most defining feature of her fiction, but her ambivalence about describing facts and things draws attention to her shifting, often inconsistent views about how this representation should work. In his Rambler essay "On Fiction," Samuel John? son argues that a good story emerges from a writer's "general converse and accurate observation of the living world," a line of thinking that Woolf also embraces along with Johnson's notion of the "common reader."86 A writer should not employ the "machinery" of fiction, according to Johnson, but attempt to replicate life. Of course, for Johnson, fiction has unambiguous moral aims ("Vice... should always disgust").87 But Johnson assumes, like Woolf, that all lives are worth describing, not just the lives of the privileged or ? as Leslie Stephen recorded in his dictionary ? the lives of famous British men. "I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful," Johnson writes in his Rambler essay on "Biography," "for the incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition."88 Woolf's "non-being" is precisely the material that escapes memory and upon which literary traditions cannot be built. While her novels experiment stylistically with how to represent these "evanescent" incidents, it is possible to understand her entire oeuvre as committed to the representation of the ordinary. It is worth calling attention to the fact that this dominating feature of Woolf's fiction has deep biographical roots as well, a connection which has been only partially explored here. The "cotton wool of daily life" that Woolf describes in "A Sketch of the Past," fills up her diaries and letters, often described with great relish, often described with fatigue. Moreover, the sheer magnitude of this writing (on average, Woolf wrote six letters a day and kept a diary for forty-four years) has allowed critics to understand the texture of how Woolf lived, with minute and detailed informa? tion about how her days were constituted. In a 1925 diary entry, Woolf realizes that the dailiness of work and marriage often adds up to an unseen and private happiness: "The immense success of our life, is I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it. That is, if one enjoys a bus ride to Richmond, sitting on the green smoking, taking the letters out ofthe box, airing the marmots, combing Grizzle, making an ice, opening a letter, sitting down after dinner, side by side, & saying Are you in your stall, brother?' ? well, what can trouble this happiness? And every day is necessarily full of it."89 The ordinary is the cause of personal triumph, embedded in "common things" and therefore untouchable. Woolf's work suggests that satisfaction can come not only from the more obvious achievement s in life, but from what we do in the next day, or hour.

85. Woolf, Phases of Fiction," p. 98. 86. Samuel Johnson, "On Fiction," in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors, 7th ed. (W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 1243. 87. Johnson, "On Fiction," p. 1244. 88. Samuel Johnson, "Biography," in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors, 7th ed. (W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), pp. 1247-1248. 89. Woolf, The Diary ofVirginia Woolf, Vol. III, p. 30.

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