"I AM THIS, I AM THAT": SHIFTING DISTANCE and MOVEMENT in "MRS. DALLOWAY" Author(S): FRANCIS GILLEN Source: Studies in the Novel, Vol

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"I AM THIS, I AM THAT": SHIFTING DISTANCE AND MOVEMENT IN "MRS. DALLOWAY" Author(s): FRANCIS GILLEN Source: Studies in the Novel, Vol. 4, No. 3 (fall 1972), pp. 484-493 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29531540 Accessed: 28-10-2019 13:20 UTC

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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:20:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms "I AM THIS, I AM THAT": SHIFTING DISTANCE AND MOVEMENT IN MRS, DALLOWAY

FRANCIS GILLEN

Two trends have been observable in most criticism dealing with the novels of Virginia Woolf. The first has been the identification of Mrs. Woolf with those characters in her fiction who totally and uncritically accept the impressions of the moment. Bernard Blackstone may be taken as typical of this trend when he remarks that for Mrs. Woolf "Things are what they are, and we have moved out of the moral, discriminating world of Dickens and Thackeray. We might call this absence of judgment a note of modernity and indeed of maturity."1 Most recently Jean Guiguet summed up the conclusion of a long study "in a single word, of which the whole of her work is the explanation, the definition, re examined constantly and ever more searchingly: 'Being.' Being as opposed to seeming, believing, thinking, wanting, doing."2 Nor have there been lacking critics who have reproached Mrs. Woolf for such ap? parent lack of discrimination. W. H. Meilers sounded this note quite clearly when he remarked in The Kenyon Review: "Sensuous impres? sions, though they are immensely important and perhaps the only means whereby a poet can make his apprehensions and his attitudes concrete and comprehensible, are not an end in themselves. . . . Mrs. Woolf was of course adult and an intelligent woman; but . .. her intellectual capacity is oddly disproportionate to, and immature compared with, her sensi? tiveness."3 Lord David Cecil's caustic judgment is typical of the critics who have followed Meilers: "How cleansing it is to be transported, if only for an hour, to a region where it is more important to be clever than to be good, and more important to be beautiful than to be either."4 A second trend is observable in a recent number of critics who have noticed Mrs. Woolf s ironic treatment of some of her feminine charac? ters. A. D. Moody, for instance, identifies Mrs. Dalloway and the de? spicable Sir William Bradshaw as being "at one in their exaltation of the symbols and appearances of honour, achievement, civilization; and in their panic hatred of the life that does not subdue itself to these sym

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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:20:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MRS. DALLOWAY / 485 bols and conventions."5 Glenn Pederson writes of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse as "the negative force which usurps the lighthouse and thus prevents the integration of the family while she lives."6 Neither trend, I think, does justice to the subtlety of Mrs. Woolfs accomplishments. Mrs. Woolf is constantly moving the reader of her novels back and forth between an affirmative and a critical judgment of her major characters, and it is precisely the need for such movement that I see as the major import of her novels. In his excellent study, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth suggests that we badly need a study of shifting distance of response in the modern novel.7 What I propose in this essay is to take Mrs. Dalloway as an example and to demonstrate how Mrs. Woolf shifts the response between approval and rejection of Mrs. Dalloway. From the opening of the novel the reader is presented with Mrs. Dalloway's vibrant sense of the flux of impressions:

Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parlia? ment for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuff? ling and swinging; brass bands; barrell organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.8

This passage provides an excellent example of how deliberately Mrs. Woolfs style supports her meaning. The passage from "For Heaven only knows" consists of but three sentences. The first sentence contains twelve verbs or verb forms, giving a sense of almost continual movement, of man's most intense activities?"loves," "sees," "making," "building," "creating." The accumulation of visual details in a single sentence sug? gests the breadth of Mrs. Dalloway's sensibility. For simply factual com? munication, for instance, the word "vehicles" would have been sufficient, but here many types are enumerated?"carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging"?providing almost a breath? less sense of overflowing richness. Notice the way in which in the par? ticular liquidity and flow of her prose, image melts into image, combining, not separating. Now contrast this with the short, jerky rhy? thms of Peter Walsh's thoughts, as he too proceeds up Whitehall: "As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind.

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Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame" p. 55). In the case of Mrs. Dalloway the very rhythm suggests union and fusion; in the case of Peter, disruption and separateness. Through these means, then, Mrs. Woolf helps create a generally favorable response to Mrs. Dalloway. Let us now go back over some of these same scenes and see how Mrs. Woolf has simultaneously made the reader aware of the dangers inherent in Mrs. Dalloway's point of view. As Clarissa continues her reverie while walking up Bond Street, aspects are introduced which alert the reader to less favorable implica? tions of Mrs. Dalloway's characteristic attitude. The phrase "she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that" (p. 11) can be taken in a favor? able sense to indicate Clarissa's openness, but it can also indicate Claris? sa's lack of a sense of personal identity. And this second pejorative mean? ing is given increasing stress as Clarissa continues her walk. The undiffer entiated acceptance of fluctuating moods and impressions amounts to the loss of inner control and therefore to the feeling that "this body with all its capacities, seemed nothing?nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway" (p. 13). Here the phrase "not even Clarissa" denotes the loss of interiority and the extremely formal "Mrs. Richard Dalloway" suggests that Clarissa is simply being carried along "with the rest of them" by the surface im? pressions of life. Here, too, the style supports the meaning; the two sen? tences contain an accumulation of eight negatives or negative forms? "nothing," "nothing at all," "wvisible," "w/iseen," "unknown," "no more marrying," "no more having," culminating in "not even Clarissa" [italics mine]. Then Mrs. Woolf immediately juxtaposes a paragraph quite similar to Mrs. Dalloway's earlier hymning of Bond Street. But the details on which Mrs. Dalloway now fixes her rapt attention?"one roll of tweed," "a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock"?seem now oddly in? congruous, especially the fish. We recall Mrs. Dalloway's earlier ecstatic identification with "life; London; this moment of June" (p. 13). The devices of the car and the aeroplane have been praised as means of bringing together the various consciousnesses and have been compared with a similar technique in the "Wandering Rocks" episode of Joyce's Ulysses.9 Concern with the novelty has perhaps blunted a sense of the obvious. The two sections constitute at times an evident parody of Mrs. Dalloway's slightly strained and lyrical attention to the single and most ordinary detail, as the following selection should amply demonstrate:

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There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing some? thing! making letters in the sky! . . . But what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? "Blaxo," said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awe-stricken voice, gazing straight up, and her baby, lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up. "Kreemo," murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a sleep-walker. With his hat held out perfectly still in his hand, Mr. Bowley gazed straight up. All down the Mall people were standing and looking up into the sky. As they looked the whole world be? came perfectly silent, and a flight of gulls crossed the sky, first one gull leading, then another, and in this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor, in this purity, bells struck eleven times, the sound fading up there among the gulls (pp. 23-24).

The obviously humorous " 'Blaxo,' said Mrs. Coates in a strained awe stricken voice" differs only in degree of incongruity from Mrs. Dallo? way's strained awe-stricken rhapsody for "salmon on an iceblock." And the patently overdone lyrical picture of the gulls which follows Mrs. Bletchley's "Kreemo" exposes what is excessive in Mrs. Dalloway's lyricism. Notice too how the ability to see alphabetic letter after letter without being able to make out a meaningful word parallels and parodies Mrs. Dalloway's ability to encounter impression after impression without being able to discover a unified meaning. The most definitive evaluation of the section occurs, however, when a reaction similar to Mrs. Dalloway's excessive dependence on external stimulation and her cultivation of the moment's beauty is now seen to occur in the mind of the crazed Septimus. Looking at the skywriting, he sees the individual letters spelling "Blaxo" as "bestowing upon him, in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness, one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks" (p. 25). By definition, almost, madness con? sists of being unable to attain perspective?thus placing the victim at the mercy of the moment's stimulation. It is at the opposite pole from self identification. And this madness of Septimus, Mrs. Woolf suggests, is the potential danger beneath what at first appeared so attractive in Mrs. Dalloway. For Septimus there is no crime, only a universal benignity, and hence no value: "The supreme secret must be told to the Cabinet; first, that trees are alive; next, there is no crime; next, love, universal love, he muttered, gasping, trembling, painfully drawing out these pro? found truths which needed, so deep were they, so difficult, an immense effort to speak out, but the world was entirely changed by them for ever" (p. 75). Notice how in the above passage Mrs. Woolf has used obvious exaggeration in Septimus's thought to emphasize the impossible idealism

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of his mind: "supreme secret," "no crime," "universal love," "entirely changed," "for ever" [italics mine]. The impressions which flood in upon his mind, as dogs become men and trees live, impressions which are often in themselves of as great a beauty and intensity as those of Mrs. Dallo? way, heighten the epistemological theme of the need of relating one's impressions to reality. He is indeed, like the child, vividly, too imagi? natively aware; but Mrs. Woolf describes this condition as a madness, not life. If Septimus represents, then, the major analogical warning against the indiscriminate acceptance of the moment, the characters Miss Kil man and Doctors Holmes and Bradshaw heighten the reader's awareness of the failure involved in the opposite extreme, the lack of sensitivity. Miss Kilman's name is self-explanatory. She represents that religious ecstacy which "made people callous (so did causes): dulled their feelings, for Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensitive was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat" (p. 14). Sir William Bradshaw also represents abstractionism at its worst. In itself, his advice is not completely incorrect. His warning to Septi? mus?"Nobody lives for himself alone"?is one of the antithetical themes of the book (p. 108). What is wrong is the way in which he applies this advice, based to such a great extent on his personal experience alone, without any real sense that his patients are people, not abstractions in a book about psychology or potential projections of his own confined and self-satisfied vision of life. He represents "that Goddess whose lust is to override opposition, to stamp indelibly in the sanctuaries of others the image of herself. Naked, defenceless, the exhausted, the friendless re? ceived the impress of Sir William's will. He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up" (p. 113).10 In separately discussing the antithetical themes of the dangers and the necessity of a private sensibility, we have perhaps made the opposi? tion of the two appear more schematic than they would seem to the reader who is first encountering the book. Actually the reader is constantly be? ing moved back and forth between these alternating positions. The reader himself is immersed in the characters' own sense of flux. He is involved in the novel because his search for pattern in the book parallels Mrs. Dalloway's search for a meaningful pattern in the flux of her impressions. Whatever is to be taken as a solution, then, must avoid the extremes both of the mere aesthetic or undiscriminating acceptance of the moment and of the exclusion of the present reality for the sake of an abstract pattern or cause. The solution offered is presented in terms of two symbols?marriage and party. Clarissa married Richard rather than Peter Walsh in order

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to preserve from violation the privacy of her soul: "For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. . . . But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into" (p. 10). The references to the marriage of Clarissa and Richard help to define one basic condition of any unifying act: that it preserve the uniqueness and individuality of each person. In a sense, the symbol of a party summarizes Mrs. Dalloway's en? tire life. On the one hand a party can be a superficial bringing together of bodies for the utterance of unimportant trivia. On this level it sug? gests only the kind of external union that was accomplished by the motor car or the aeroplane or the intense awareness which Clarissa had demon? strated during her walk up Bond Street. As such, the party, as Clarissa's life, becomes a series of momentary but unrelated recognitions?"six or seven words with each, and they went on." On a deeper level, however, the party is at least potentially the symbol of a ritual which brings people together and yet allows them to retain their individuality; in fact, a party depends for its success on the contribution each individual makes to the group. As such it is the external expression of the synthesis for which Clarissa has been throughout the day, and throughout her life, subcon? sciously searching, for "here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. . . . And she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it" (pp. 134-35). The party then represents an antithetical force, a call to life, an invitation to emerge from the limitations of a subjective point of view and to com? municate as Septimus cannot or will not communicate. It represents a necessary testing of the subjective viewpoint which prevents it from be? coming wholly solipsistic and degenerating into hallucination. "Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of being something not her? self, and that every one was unreal in one way; much more real in anoth? er" (pp. 187-88). In the climactic scene of the novel both of these aspects are recog? nized and a synthesis is effected. The climax of the novel consists of a double recognition on Clarissa's part. The double recognition cor? responds to the need which Mrs. Woolf has clearly created, for affirming the value inherent in Mrs. Dalloway's attitude and at the same time purging its faults and its dangers. Clarissa identifies herself both with Septimus and with the old lady whom she sees preparing for bed in a room across from her. She identifies with Septimus insofar as she in? terprets his death as a defiance of excessive dependence on society. Her admission: "Somehow it was her disaster?her disgrace" (p. 203) shows that she recognizes her own failure in being too dependent on the praise or beauty of the moment, too reliant on the surface of life.

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Clarissa's identification with Septimus represents her rejection of her absolute dependence on society and on external stimulation, and is a measure of her achievement of selfhood. On the other hand Septimus's rejection of society is also an absolute extreme?a movement toward total inclusion impossible to man, which, on anything but a symbolic level, achieves the opposite of the effect intended, that is, madness and the destruction of the human life. Mrs. Dalloway's identification with the old woman signifies her acceptance of her own limited humanity, of the realization that man does not reach the spiritual in a single romantic leap, but that whatever is accomplished is accomplished through the in? fusion of spirit into matter. Independence does not imply the rejection of one's humanity, but, conversely, demands the return to society. In con? trast to her earlier romantic longing, which had been much like that of Septimus: "But often now this body she wore . . . this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing?nothing at all," (p. 204). Neither de? pendence nor rejection?that is the final synthesis of Mrs. Dalloway. The full significance of Mrs. Dalloway's return to the party and of her relation with Septimus is heightened and controlled by an elaborate allegory placed in a central position in the novel. It is necessary that the reader comprehend this theme clearly, yet such a comprehensive view is beyond the consciousness of any single character and too central to the theme to be left to chance recognition. So Mrs. Woolf invents a purely allegorical figure?a solitary traveller who encounters on his way "one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches." She poses the central theme in these allegorical terms: "By conviction an atheist perhaps, he [the solitary traveller] is taken by surprise with moments of extraordinary exaltation. Nothing exists outside us except a state of mind, he thinks; a desire for solace, for re? lief, for something outside these miserable pygmies, these feeble, these ugly, these craven men and women" (pp. 63-64). And then the narrator comments: "Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of the actual thing; often overpowering the soli? tary traveller and taking away from him the sense of the earth, the wish to return, and giving him for substitute a general peace, as if (so he thinks as he advances down the forest ride) all this fever of living were simplicity itself; and myriads of things merged in one thing" (p. 64, italics mine). Notice how clearly this explicit comment defines the drive toward indiscriminate inclusion as a beguiling but false illusion which must be distinguished from "the actual thing," and also how it thus evaluates Septimus's death wish which is couched in such a desire for general peace and a rejection of human beings: "Life was good. The sun hot. Only hu? man beings?" (p. 164). As the comment continues, it defines as a temp? tation the desire not to return to the antithesis implied in human inter

This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:20:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MRS. DALLOWAY / 491 course. And so it draws the important distinction between Clarissa and Septimus, her decision reached after her almost complete identification with that unfortunate young man, to return to the party: "So, he thinks, may I never go back to the lamplight; to the sitting-room; never finish my book; never knock out my pipe; never ring for Mrs. Turner to clear away; rather let me walk straight on to this great figure, who will, with a toss of her head, mount me on her streamers and let me blow to nothing? ness with the rest" (p. 64). This view is, I think, given further support by Leonard Woolfs de? scription of Mrs. Woolfs own illness in his recent autobiographical mem? oir, Beginning Again. Mrs. Woolf, during her illnesses, experienced mo? ments of extremely heightened perception similar to those she ex? perienced when she wrote. But what distinguished the creative states from the ill states was her ability in the former to relate these heightened per? ceptions to real life, and the inability, in the latter state, to do so. Leonard Woolf wrote that: "On the one side of this line was a kind of mental bal? ance, a psychological coherence between intellect and emotion, an aware? ness and acceptance of the outside world and a rational reaction to it; on the other side were violent emotional instability and oscillation."12 We come then to the final question to which our essay leads. Have the controls been sufficient to overcome the sense of mere undifferentiat ed flux of sensibility? The answer to such a question must remain, of course, largely a matter of judgment. The criticisms of pure sensibility are there?as we have shown?the ironic dichotomy between Mrs. Dallo? way's ecstacy and objects such as a dead fish, the parody of Mrs. Dallo? way's style, the analogical character of Septimus to define her tendency towards madness, the allegory of the solitary traveller. And these are side by side with the criticisms of pure abstractionism as represented by Kil man and Bradshaw. Thus it is difficult to see how the reader can fail to come to the conclusion that it is in the movement between the two views? neither acceptable in itself?that the meaning of the novel lies. And it is with Clarissa's acceptance of such movement and the self criticism it im? plies that the novel ends. Perhaps the final answer though must come in terms of what Mrs. Woolf was trying to accomplish in her novels. In a judgment of D.H. Lawrence, she wrote in her diary:

But it's the preaching that rasps me. Like a person de? livering a judgment when only half the facts are there: and cling? ing to the rails and beating the cushion. Come out and see what's up here I want to say. I mean it's so barren: so easy: giv? ing advice on a system. The moral is, never systematise?not till you're 70: and have been supple and sympathetic and creative

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and tried out all your nerves and scopes. . . . Why not some system that includes the good? What a discovery that would be?a system that does not shut out.13

Note that in this discussion of Lawrence, Mrs. Woolf does not deny the possibility of meaning in the novel or in life; she demands only that mean? ing evolve from the sense of life. The "supple and sympathetic and crea? tive" apprehension of life must precede the attempt to impose order. For Virginia Woolf the life had to be there?all there?before the criticism of life in a novel could be valid. The fuller the sense of life, the more valid the meaning. And it is this feeling of the fullness of the life portrayed that the sense of flux in her novels accomplishes. It is from this sense of life that pattern and meaning emerge. Meanings emerge; they are not imposed. That is what I find makes a novel by Virginia Woolf so deeply satisfying; it corresponds so closely to our own tenuous discovery of meaning through the experience of life itself. So that, to return to our question: could the controls be more explicit and obvious? Yes, they could be, but only at the expense of destroying the sense of life that it is the primary responsibility of the novelist to create. To this extent her novels are mimetic insofar as they not only contain meaning but imitate what was for Virginia Woolf the only viable way of apprehending that meaning without destroying growth, "a system that did not shut out." Meaning is tenuous in her novels because meaning is tenuous in life. Yet meaning is there. The final vision of life presented in Mrs. Dalloway, then, represents neither the uncritical acceptance of the moment's sensation, nor the com? plete rejection of Mrs. Dalloway. Rather it represents life as a movement between sensibility and pattern, intuition and criticism. And by moving the reader back and forth between these two poles, Mrs. Woolf, as we have attempted to demonstrate, has not only presented such a vision, but has actively involved the reader in a struggle for meaning which parallels and enhances Mrs. Dalloway's own search.

UNIVERSITY OF TAMPA

NOTES

1 Bernard Blackstone, Virginia Woolf (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1952), p. 10.

2 Jean Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her Works (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), p. 462.

3 W. H. Meilers, "Virginia Woolf: The Last Phase," Kenyon Review, 4 (Autumn 1942), 381.

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4 Lord David Cecil, Poets and Story-Tellers (London: Constable, 1949), p. 180.

5 A. D. Moody, Virginia Woolf (New York: Grove Press, 1963), pp. 25-26.

6 Glenn Pederson, "Vision in To the Lighthouse" PMLA, 73 (Dec. 1958), 585.

7 Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 157.

8 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 10th impression (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), p. 6. Subsequent quotations from the novel will be given in parentheses in the text.

9 Cf. esp. Leon Edel, The Psychological Novel: 1900-1950 (New York and Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1955), pp. 195-201.

10 The original of Bradshaw may have been Mrs. Woolfs own doctor, Sir George Savage. Leonard Woolf records his impression of Savage as one he viewed "much more as a man of the world than as a doctor." When he consulted Savage about his wife's ability to bear children, Sir George's bumptious optimism again reminds one of Bradshaw: "I went and consulted Sir George Savage; he brushed my doubts aside. But now my doubts about Sir George Savage were added to my doubts about Virginia's health. There seemed to be more of the man of the world (lDo her a world of good, my dear fellow; do her a world of good!') in his opinion than of the mental specialist." Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918 (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 82.

11 In her diary, Mrs. Woolf wrote of a similar personal experience and a similar acceptance of one's own limited humanity: "Two resolute, sunburnt, dusty girls in jerseys and short skirts, with packs on their backs, city clerks, or secretaries, tramping along the road in the hot sunshine at Ripe. My instinct at once throws up a screen, which condemns them: I think them in every way angular, awkward and self-assertive. But all this is a great mistake. These screens shut me out. Have no screens, for screens are made out of our own integument; and get at the thing itself, which has nothing whatever in common with a screen. The screen-making habit, though, is so universal that probably it preserves our sanity. If we had not this device for shutting people off from our sympathies we might perhaps dissolve utterly; separateness would be impossible. But the screens are in the excess; not the sympathy." Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1953), p. 96.

12 Leonard Woolf, p. 78.

13 Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, pp. 182-83.

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