The Ulysses Connection: Clarissa Dalloway's Bloomsday

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THE "ULYSSES" CONNECTION: CLARISSA DALLOWAY'S BLOOMSDAY Author(s): HARVENA RICHTER Source: Studies in the Novel, Vol. 21, No. 3 (fall 1989), pp. 305-319 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29532654 Accessed: 28-10-2019 13:25 UTC

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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:25:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE ULYSSES CONNECTION: CLARISSA DALLOWAY'S BLOOMSDAY

HARVENA RICHTER

When Virginia Woolf began writing Mrs. Dalloway in the autumn of 1922, she was faced with a difficult problem: how to connect two unrelated story lines which she wished to expand into a novel. A study of Woolf's perception of the problem, and her imaginative realization of how James Joyce solved a similar difficulty in Ulysses, not only comments on the transformative function of the creative mind?which, as Woolf admitted, is prone to cannibalize other works of art1?but offers new insights into the intricate and carefully balanced structure of Mrs. Dalloway itself. And finally, it discloses a far closer relationship between the two novels than has hitherto been suspected. Woolf's seeming hostility toward Joyce's Ulysses in both her diaries and letters has blinded most critics to the connection between the two works. "A queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples," she commented in her diary.2 "Never did I read such tosh," she wrote to Lytton Strachey. To Roger Fry she complained that she was bound to Ulysses "like a martyr to a stake, and have thank God, now finished?my martyrdom is over."3 One must go back to the reading notes which Virginia Woolf made on Ulysses, contained in a small unsigned and undated notebook, for a different view of the impact which Ulysses made on her. The notes were probably written in April of 1918 when Harriet Weaver brought Joyce ' s manuscript to the Woolf s ' Hogarth Press for consideration, and were done in preparation for an essay "Modern Novels" published in TLS the following April.4 Woolf's immediate response was that Ulysses was revolutionary ("For all I know, every great book has been an act of revolution"), and the notes carefully analyze what Joyce had accomplished:

It is an attempt to get thinking into literature?hence the jumble the inf?rant is that this is psychology. Possibly like a cinema that shows you very slowly, how a horse does jump Here is thought made phonetic?taken to bits

305

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The inner thought, & then the little scatter of life on top to keep you in touch with reality the repetition of words like wormwood and ashes

Psychology, patterns of thought, a contrast of inner and outer reality, scrambled data, repetition?these were modes of subjectivity Woolf would use in the novels from Mrs. Dalloway to The Waves. Although the plot structures of her first two novels were traditional, Woolf had already shown herself aware of inner reality, especially in The Voyage Out. The novel not yet started in 1918, the year of her first encounter with Ulysses, was Jacob's Room, a revolutionary experiment on quite another track. It would take a second reading of Ulysses in 1922 to change Woolf s direction once more and prompt her to use some of the lessons learned from the first reading. The appearance of Ulysses from a French publisher came at a propitious time. The fact that Woolf paid ?4 for a copy, then a substantial sum, indicates her interest in the novel and perhaps the depth of dissatisfaction she felt with her own work. Several times her diary records an acute sense of failure. Although her second novel, Night and Day, had received a great deal of praise, E. M. Forster had not liked it as well as The Voyage Out, and upon rereading the latter, Woolf was inclined to agree with him. Jacob's Room, except for its warm reception by her friends, had been a critical disaster.5 Woolf s feelings of failure were compounded by T. S. Eliot's admiration for Ulysses, for she mentions Joyce twice in letters to Roger Fry, first saying that Eliot thought Joyce was "a great genius," then later admitting that Eliot felt Ulysses was "the greatest work of the age."6 Even Gerald Brenan, to whom Woolf wrote very flippantly about the novel, appeared to agree with Eliot.7 As sensitive as Woolf s diary shows her to be regarding her standing in comparison to other writers, such praise of a novel she herself claimed to despise must have rankled deeply. And there were other, perhaps unconscious, irritations which Woolf may have felt with Ulysses. Stephen, whom Woolf first encountered in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was Virginia's maiden name. Leopold Bloom, like Woolf s husband, is Jewish; the names Leopold Bloom and Leonard Woolf are similar (Woolf is almost Bloom spelled backward). And the London district of Bloomsbury was becoming associated with Virginia and her family, not a fashionable precinct, but certainly more than a cut above, socially and intellectually, the habitat of the Blooms. One might ask whether the name resemblances are purely coincidental. But it is no coincidence that in early manuscript versions of Woolf s novel, Septimus Smith is Stephen Smith8 and Sally Seton is called Molly,9 that name appearing both before and after the use of Sally, a perhaps unconscious slip of the pen. This sometime use by Woolf of two out of three of the main characters' names in Ulysses points to a long series of parallels in Woolf s and Joyce's

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novels. The more obvious have been frequently discussed: the unities of time and place, interior monologue, psychology. Some accusations of imitation were leveled at Woolf. But as late as 1974 the relationship between Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway was termed a "false problem."10 The real parallels went unobserved:

the dual plot structure: two story lines involving two unrelated groups of characters which converge at the novel's end, the connection occurring in both books in the very early morning.

three main characters: two men and one woman in each novel, from whose consciousness the action unfolds.

a contrast of two types of consciousness: ordinary and intellectual.

emphasis on flow er s I blooms.

the date itself: June 16 and "the middle of June."

relation of a symbolic number to the formlstructure: in Ulysses (as noted by Woolf in her diary)1 l the sequence is divided into 16 incidents (to correspond with the date June 16). In Mrs. Dalloway, the character Septimus (= seven) has seven scenes allotted to him, as well as seven to Clarissa and seven to Peter.12

man as microcosm: for Joyce, emphasis on the organs of the body; for Woolf, emphasis on the faculties of mind and feeling: head, heart, brain, soul.

motif of heat: the character of Blazes Boy Ian in Ulysses, the heat wave in Mrs. Dalloway.

sexual humor: overt in Ulysses, covert in Mrs. Dalloway.

satire, irony: an abundance of puns; use of leitmotif.

themes of impotence, love, jealousy: impotence/frigidity in Bloom and Septimus, and Clarissa, vs. the sexually healthy Blazes Boy Ian and Peter Walsh.

the earth-mother figures of Molly Bloom, Sally Seton, and the beggar woman, all connected with flowers; both Molly and the beggar have their "swamp and ice ages."13

"What is the connection between Bloom and Dedalus?" Woolf asked in her Ulysses notes. "Connect, only connect," Septimus says in Mrs. Dalloway. And

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in an early manuscript version, "They are always talking about making the connection, but they never do."14 It would appear that Woolf's puzzlement over the separate stories of Bloom and Dedalus would spur her to design a series of connecting links between her own characters that would make her feel she had out-distanced Joyce?a private rebuttal for reasons of personal satisfaction. Before the connections are examined in their variety of complexity, it is helpful to review the following chronology of composition. When Woolf began re-reading Ulysses in April of 1922, she was at work on the short story "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,"15 with no intimation of the novel to come. When she finally finished reading Joyce's novel in the beginning of October, she was doing a sequel to the Dalloway story called "The Prime Minister." It is at this point that the idea came to turn the two stories into chapters of a novel titled, tentatively, "At Home: or The Party." But the overall scheme was nebulous. A contrast between a society woman and amad assassin (Septimus is plotting to kill the Prime Minister)16 would hardly be sufficient. Ways must be found to connect Clarissa and Septimus which not only link them, such as the motor car and aeroplane scenes, but contribute to the book's structure. (Later, the theme of connection would be primary to the novel, as connections between the past and present of the characters are made.) On October 16, Woolf essayed:

Suppose it to be connected in this way: Sanity & insanity. Mrs. D. seeing the truth, S. S. seeing the insane truth.

the contrast must be arranged.

And on November 9:

All inner feelings to be lit up. The two minds Mrs. D. & Septimus

This is to be psychology.17

For Joyce, Woolf must have realized, one of the ways of connecting Bloom and Dedalus was by contrasting their minds and patterns of thought. For Woolf, then, the difference between the sane and insane mind would be enhanced by a similar contrast. Clarissa's mind is the chatty, memory-nibbling consciousness of an ordinary upper-class woman, what Woolf might have described as "an ordinary mind on an ordinary day" as she did indirectly of Leopold Bloom's in

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her essay "Modern Fiction." The mind of Septimus, concerned with abstract truths rather than mundane facts, can be said to resemble that of Stephen Dedalus on the intellectual level. There are many parallels between Septimus Smith, originally named Stephen, and Joyce's Irish student. Both are fond of Shakespeare, write poetry, and share the first four letters of their Christian names (s-t-e-p; s-e-p-t) as well as a foreign cadence to Dedalus/Septimus. They are introverted, alienated; Septimus means "the seventh," a numerical emblem of loneliness. Both characters are connected with the images of hawk and sun.18 As the Greek artificer, the mythic Dedalus created the labyrinth; Septimus' full last name is Warren-Smith, "warren" suggesting an underground burrow or labyrinth, perhaps the unconscious. The Dedalian labyrinth houses the minotaur, symbolizing unnatural passion; Septimus fears the "brute with the blood-red nostrils" (see footnote 24). Still further, St. Stephen was a Christian martyr; Septimus, calling himself a "scapegoat" as well as identifying with Christ, martyrs himself (pp. 37, 147). Neither character can relate closely to women. Both revolt or turn away from their mothers. Both are pursued by ghosts?Stephen by dreams of his dead mother in her graveclothes, Septimus by hallucinations of his dead friend Evans.

Ill

Once Woolf chose to combine the two separate stories, with the loss of unity this would imply, she must dramatize the split in structure and make a virtue out of it. The contrast between the minds of Clarissa and Septimus is but one way; another is the split within the characters themselves. Septimus is a schizophrenic, in the common (although not the medical) view, a split personality; and he alternates between normal and abnormal behavior. Clarissa is divided in another way; she is born under Gemini, the sign of the twins, indicated by Woolf s mention that she had "just broken into her fifty-second year" (p. 54). With this Gemini or twin motif, Woolf was able to accomplish several things: achieve a balance between the two characters and story lines?which fall into place as twin stories?and use the motif as a basis for a complicated network of echoing images and symbols, leitmotifs, and rhythms. This appears to have been the answer to her need, expressed in the Dalloway notebook, for an "extremely complicated" design.19 Woolf ' s use of an astrological symbol, so casually made that it has hitherto remained unnoticed, has a long history of literary precedence.20 Here it functions not only to show Clarissa's character but point to the connection between her and Septimus. Clarissa is a typical woman Gemini: light and airy, "the perfect hostess" (p. 93), artistic ("a magician," Sally Seton calls her at the party), and composed of easily discerned twin selves: the outgoing social self, oriented toward life, and the inner emotional self, concerned with failure and death. When

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Septimus is seen as Clarissa's twin, the two figures exhibit many of the dual aspects of the astrological sign: the divine and mortal, the creator and destroyer, the two sides of the androgynous being. In its dynamic aspect, the Gemini is a symbol of Inversion and connected to death and resurrection. Its general symbolism embraces "paradise and inferno, love and hate, peace and war."21 Twins abound in creation myths and are frequently male and female. The Gemini figures of Clarissa and Septimus express these positive/ negative aspects. Clarissa has the aura of the divine about her, that "divine vitality" (p. 9) reflected in her creativity and the images of Paradise which occur in the scene of the party. The opposite of Clarissa's creative power is the destroyer whom Septimus embodies, not only self-destruction but annihilation of love and marriage, of the principle of fertility itself.22 Septimus' wife, Rezia, to whom he denies a child, compares him to "that hawk or crow ... a great destroyer of crops" (p. 225). Opposed to the Paradisal images (pp. 256,258) are the motifs of the Inferno. Septimus is actually reading Dante's Inferno (p. 133); earlier he imagines himself falling into flames. The hatred with which Septimus views humanity is opposed by Clarissa's spontaneous feeling for people. Septimus, lately returned from war, cannot envision peace; Clarissa achieves peace within herself. Consonant with the up-and-down movements in the novel is the theme of death and resurrection, implicit in the fertility myths and explicit in Clarissa's resurrection from the "death of the soul," achieved through her identification with Septimus whose suicide she learns of during her party. Alone in the quiet of a "little room," Clarissa absorbs what in Jungian terms would be the "shadow" part of herself and returns to her guests a psychic whole. Much has been made of Septimus as Clarissa's double, or doppe I ganger.23 Woolf was reading the Russians at the time of writing Mrs. Dalloway, and Dostoevsky's use of alternate selves (such as Svidrigailov representing the shadow self of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment) undoubtedly crept into her sense of the relationship between Septimus and Clarissa. Yet the twin idea must have presented a more symbolic connection, one which Woolf could exploit in a far more literary manner. If Joyce would use the Uly sses/Telemachus symbolism for Bloom and Dedalus, Woolf would join her two characters in an even closer bond. This bond is dramatized throughout the novel with twinned imagery, whose complexity is matched only by the constant movement and transformation of symbol from character to character in The Waves. In Mrs. Dalloway, the images function on a less abstract level. Sometimes they illustrate individual emotions and attitudes; at other times they are thematic, pointing to the novel's dual nature. Most obvious are the leitmotifs "fear no more" and "the death of the soul" which apply to both Clarissa and Septimus. For example, Peter Walsh thinks of "the death of the soul" in connection with Clarissa; Septimus prefers the death of his body to a forcing of?or death of?his soul, which the psychiatrist Dr. Holmes

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would inflict. More pervasive is the double image of brute-Bruton. Acting almost as leitmotif for Septimus, the "brute, with the blood-red nostrils" embodies his fear of Dr. Holmes and perhaps, on a less conscious level, his fear of "human nature" with its sexual impulses.24 For Clarissa, there is not only her own "brutal monster" which roams the labyrinth of her being as she savors her hatred of Doris Kilman (p. 17) but the figure of Lady Bruton, who is lunching with Clarissa's husband, Richard, and who calls forth in Clarissa terrors of social rejection and old age (p. 44). In each case, the fears embodied in the brute/Bruton images have their basis in conflicts within the societal realm, fears grounded in an obscure terror of a violation of the self or of someone close by.25 Other images which Clarissa and Septimus share are those of fire, bird, martyr, soul, sun, feelings "that something... was about to happen." Each image is adapted to the particular twin. For example, Septimus' fears of fire revolve around his hallucinations of falling into flames (pp. 100, 213); Clarissa's fire image is a positive one, that of creating a social warmth (p. 6), of "kindling" (p. 261), or "rubbing stick to stick" (p. 282). Clarissa has "a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green" (p. 4) whereas Septimus sits hunched like a "young hawk" (p. 222).26 Other twin images are less overt. Septimus sees an old man come down the staircase and stop and stare at him (p. 226); Clarissa watches the old lady opposite climbing upstairs (p. 191). Septimus imagines his dead friend Evans among the orchids (p. 272); Clarissa's aunt has written a book on orchids (p. 105). Septimus' boss is a Mr. Brewer; Hugh Whitbread, Clarissa's friend, bears the name of a well-known British brewer. Clarissa hears "a tap dripping" as she goes upstairs (p. 45); Septimus hears Rezia talking "drip, drip, drip, like a contented tap left running" (p. 218). Clarissa's sister Sylvia is killed by "a falling tree" (p. 117); Septimus has the revelation that "men must not cut down trees" (p. 35). Clarissa thinks "I am alone forever" (p. 70); Septimus moans about "that eternal loneliness" (p. 37). The twinned images join not only Clarissa and Septimus but serve to connect other characters, furthering that theme of connection in the novel and functioning somewhat like the threads that Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse runs between "this mass on the right" and "that on the left" of her painting. In this sense, Rezia and Septimus echo one another; they are twins in suffering. Each experiences falling sensations (pp. 35, 100, 131), a feeling of being "exposed" (p. 99), or "the victim exposed on the heights" (p. 146). Like Septimus, Rezia feels solitary (p. 33) and says "I am alone" (p. 35). Twinned images link other characters with both Septimus and Clarissa. Peter Walsh is covered by "the plumes and feathers of sleep" (p. 85); Septimus sees elm trees like "plumes on horses' heads, feathers on ladies'" (p. 32); Peter follows a girl who seems "black, but enchanting" (p. 79); Septimus, through his eyelashes, sees Rezia's "little

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black body" (p. 214). Peter is "in Hell" (p. 93); Septimus descends "into the pit" (p. 136). In Peter's vision in Regent's Park, sirens are "lolloping away on the green sea waves" (p. 86); Clarissa at her party becomes a mermaid "lolloping on the waves" (p. 264); Clarissa used to have a "woodenness" about her (p. 264); Peter remembers standing "by Miss Parry's chair as though he had been cut out of wood" (p. 93). Septimus' desire to kill himself (p. 22) is echoed in the name of Miss Kilman. The extent of ideas and images thus doubled or redoubled is too vast to enumerate.27 Their resonance fills the novel like the bells of St. Margaret's which echo the chimes of Big Ben, the latter described as "a young man . . . swinging dumb-bells this way and that" (p. 71), a metaphor of balance not only in the design of the dumb-bells themselves but in the act of swinging one in each hand. Moreover, the masculine image of Big Ben has its female counterpart in the church of St. Margaret's, a suggestion of masculine and feminine time. Rhythm serves as the final connecting device in Mrs. Dalloway, with the positive/negative movements of rising and falling which are signaled on the first page. "What a lark! what a plunge!" Clarissa thinks, opposing the upward motion of joy and the high-flying lark with a "plunge" into "the open air," one which will be echoed when Septimus plunges to his death on the area railing. At first the up/ down movements, or rhythms, seem to belong only to Clarissa and her mood changes. But the duality in rising and falling motions pertains to both, an alternation of euphoria and despair which each character experiences. With Clarissa, the rising motion is accentuated, begun in her remarkable vision of London awakening in the opening pages and intensified with her final three stage journey up the staircase of her house. With Septimus, the negative or falling aspect is marked, a progressive descent "into the pit" which has its occasional moments of manic exhilaration. These counterpoised rhythms are part of the Paradise/Inferno duality which, in psychological terms, can be seen as the twin cycles of the schizophrenic personality, an alternation of overwrought manic and depressive periods. Woolf was herself schizophrenic; she admitted patterning much of the Septimus material after her own experience.28 What better way to dramatize the twin aspects of her psychological being than to make Clarissa and Septimus her alter egos, showing the "androgyny" of her illness with its female (manic) and male (depressive) aspects.29

Woolf's "classical sense of balance" in her novel forms a silent criticism, as A.R. Reade has suggested, of the shapelessness of Ulysses.30 But the criticism takes other guises as well: irony, satire, or a humor which, as Peter Walsh puts it, is "a cool, waiting wit, a darting wit; not noisy" (p. 80). A light satiric thrust

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is at the name of Bloom and Bloom's alias, Henry Flower, for Mrs. Dalloway overflows with flowers from the very first sentence. The seminal short story "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street" opens with "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the gloves herself." The novel substitutes the word flowers for gloves, directing attention to the emphasis placed on them throughout the novel. Eleven pages later, the scene in Mulberry's the florists offers delphiniums, sweet peas, lilacs, carnations, roses, iris, arum lilies, cherry pie, and evening primroses. Roses strew the novel: the bunch of red and white roses Richard brings Clarissa, the nearly dead roses Rezia buys, roses on Septimus' wallpaper. Indeed, the word rose is used as a flower thirty-seven times. Sally Seton has married a man named Rossiter, suggestive of roses, and has "miles of conservatories." Appearing also are the blue hydrangeas that remind Sally of Peter Walsh (all the characters except Doris Kilman are connected with flowers),31 plus twenty-four other varieties of flowers if one includes the name of Daisy, Peter's rather ordinary girl. In addition, generic flowers, blossoms, or petals (but not blooms) are mentioned seventeen times; the word flower alone is used as a verb as well as a noun. A more obvious cue to Woolf ' s borrowing certain aspects of Ulysses is her use of the date of Clarissa's party as "the middle of June" (p. 5). A look at a calendar for 1923 would place the middle of June as Friday the 15th or Saturday the 16th (the date of Bloomsday). But twice in Mrs. Dalloway the day is given as a Wednesday, which would fall that year on June 13th. Why Woolf would deliberately choose a traditionally unlucky date for a party make little sense until one realizes that the thirteenth will indeed be unlucky for Septimus, as it would have been for Clarissa, who was to have committed suicide in the original plan for the novel.32 Moreover, Wednesday, named after Wotan/Odin, god of war and death (the after-effects of the war have brought on Septimus' madness and subsequent death), compounds a feeling of doom,33 magnified by a symbolic connection of heat with disaster. One is tempted to see a reference to the Biblical doomsday, when "the elements shall melt with fervent heat" (II Peter 3:10) in Septimus' reaction to the Prime Minister's car: "The sun became extraordinarily hot... this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames" (pp. 20-21). The doomsday motif occurs elsewhere. It was "three o'clock in the afternoon of a very hot day" when Clarissa rejected Peter, the memory of which, years later, causes Peter to cry, "it was awful... awful, awful!" (pp. 96-97). On the novel ' s first page, Clarissa remembers feeling "that something awful was about to happen," which prefigured her break with Peter Walsh. Around six p.m. of "a very hot night"?just the time that Septimus kills himself?"the paper boys went by with placards proclaiming in huge red letters that there was a heat wave" (p. 244).34

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To further emphasize the split structure of the novel, Woolf repeatedly uses the term middle (the point at which a split usually occurs). The day on which Clarissa's party takes place falls in "the middle of June." "The interview with specialist must be in the middle," Virginia Woolf wrote in her working notes, and so Septimus' visit to Dr. Bradshaw, running from page 142 through 149, is in the novel's exact center.35 This interview further splits Septimus from any medical aid, as well as furnishing the central image of the clash between individual and authority. Clarissa's break with Peter Walsh comes, as earlier noted, at "three o'clock," the middle of the afternoon. Richard brings Clarissa roses just as the clock strikes three, failing to tell Clarissa he loves her, reminding her without words how she had failed him "once at Constantinople" (p. 178). Septimus kills himself at six p.m. when the clock ' s hands are at the center or middle of the dial. Clarissa hears about Septimus' death "in the middle of my party" (p. 279) and thinks about it as the clock strikes three a.m. (p. 283). At other times, the word middle, or a visual image of it, functions as leitmotif. The French windows, which Clarissa "burst open" on the first page, open in the middle. Clarissa takes a cushion from "the middle of the sofa" (p. 57). Her Uncle William died "in the middle of the War" (p. 15). She reads Baron Marbot at "about three o'clock in the morning" (p. 205), the same hour that, in another context, Septimus finishes "a masterpiece" (p. 129). Peter passes Rezia and Septimus in Regent's Park "in the middle of the morning" although the clock has just struck "quarter to twelve" (p. 106). There are references to the British middle classes as well as to Armenians and Turks who come, geographically, from the Middle East and whom Clarissa, in one of the novel's frequent puns, "muddled" in her mind. Clarissa's own need to achieve a mean or "middle way" is unrecognized by her, for "ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know" (p. 185). Yet however ignorant Clarissa may be of her need to establish a middle way, she pauses instinctively at the center of things (pp. 4,25). The middle of June is a time of weddings (girls are shopping for their trousseaux, p. 26), a joining of two halves to be accomplished when Clarissa ritually identifies with Septimus upon hearing of his death. The middle of June is also close to the summer solstice, a stopping point in the ellipsis of the sun. Images of pausing, stopping, stillness, and stasis run throughout the novel as a balance or contrast to the manic rush of the hours toward the party's climax. One of the meanings of "solstice" is a turning point or point of culmination, which can apply to the story lines of both Septimus and Clarissa. The party and suicide occur on the day of a heat wave when, paradoxically, each can "fear no more the heat o' the sun" even though the sun would be at its northernmost point of the year. A symbolic end to one season and the beginning of another, solstice forms yet another connecting link between the twin stories.

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"There should be some fun," Virginia Woolf jotted down when the novel was still "At Home; or The Party" (6 Oct.). "Also humor," she added ten days later. No hint exists as to just what she had in mind. But the word June, on a line by itself in the small Dalloway notebook, dated 9 Nov., is placed in parentheses and underlined three times. The humor in Mrs. Dalloway has somehow escaped detection. There are puns ("'One of Holmes's homes?' sneered Septimus"); names with double or symbolic meanings, such as Doris Kilman, Peter, Dr. Holmes, Sylvia, Justin Parry; word-play such as that around the figure of Millicent Bruton,36 certainly a comic character. The comedy is enhanced when, after having had lunch with Millicent Bruton, Hugh Whitbread and Richard Dalloway hesitate "at the corner of Conduit Street" which is directly across from the intersection of both Bruton Street and Bruton Place with Bond?a synchronous placement which Woolf s London readers would instantly recognize.37 And there are sly jibes at Joyce, as when Peter Walsh, mimicking Molly Bloom's famous affirmative, says "Oh yes, she will see me ... Yes, yes, yes"; and five pages later, "yes ... Yes, yes, yes" (pp. 59, 64). Peter Walsh appears to be the vehicle for some of Woolf s most daring sexual imagery?daring, because up to the time of the publishing of Ulysses such impruderies would have been impossible for Woolf. Peter makes mention of the growing literary permissiveness in the years between the first appearance of Ulysses and the writing of Mrs. Dalloway. "Those five years?1918 to 1923? had been . . . somehow very important. . . Now for instance there was a man writing quite openly in one of the respectable weeklies about water-closets. That you couldn 't have done ten years ago" (p. 108). One has only to compare Leopold Bloom reading in the backyard privy and thinking to himself, "Print anything now," to see Peter's thought confirmed. Peter Walsh, with his suggestive first name and phallic pocketknife, is Woolf 's most erotic male character. He is continually "in trouble with women." There is a veiled allusion to sex in the two staircase scenes: the first when Peter climbs the stairs to find Clarissa mending her dress; the second focussed on Clarissa in the three-stage ascent to her party when she feels like "a stake driven in at the top of her stairs" (p. 259), a sexual image duplicated when Septimus plunges to his death on the spikes of the area railing. Peter's final words in the novel are "I will come" as he is filled with terror, ecstasy, and "extraordinary excitement," bringing together by symbolic means the two failed lovers. Freud's dream symbolism may be responsible for much of the sexual imagery in Mrs. Dalloway. The Woolf s ' Hogarth Press began to publish the collected works of Freud in 1924. Volume 4, which included The Interpretation of Dreams, appeared the same year as Mrs. Dalloway, in 1925, which would have given Woolf ample time to have seen the translation before publication (Leonard

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Woolf, however, read Freud as early as 1914).38 In The Interpretation of Dreams, climbing stairs is equated with sexual intercourse. Phallic symbolism in Woolf's novel includes not only the knife, pocketknife, and paper knife, needle, parasol, hats, tower, pistol shot, fountain pens, but stake, dart, pinnacle, pole (i.e., Isobel Pole who in her green dress is related to the maypole of early fertility dances). References to "rubbing and scraping" belong in part to Clarissa, as well as the more feminine emblems of flowers (Freud emphasized their genital significance), scissors, umbrella stand, dolphin, and silver casket.39 From the Ulysses notes: "It may be said that the subconscious mind dwells on indecency."

Woolf's final debt to Joyce is implicit in two other extracts from the Ulysses notes:

Yet it seems quite possible that the big things are the big things; love, death, jealousy and so on; but must be seen again; felt again; always, perpetually

We mean only that reality, or life, or interest, has come for us to lie rather in the emotions of people. We believe that we can say more about peoples mind & feelings. Well then it becomes less necessary to dwell upon their bodies. All sorts of new situations become possible.

Woolf's concentration on "the big things: love, death, jealousy," Ulyssean themes which she offers with many variations, is the substance of Mrs. Dalloway and needs no analysis. The vow to dwell on people's mind and feelings (perhaps partly in revolt against Joyce ' s emphasis on the physical?"Why not in fact leave out bodies!" she jotted in the margin of the second passage) became from 1923 onward her main concern as a novelist. The higher faculties of thinking/ feeling?brain, mind, heart, and soul?are symbolized throughout Mrs. Dalloway even in minor figures such as old Joseph Breitkopf (bright-head). The conjugation of the Italian verb sapere, "to know," appears in another section of the Ulysses notebook; and the images of brain, mind, heart, and soul appear linked in Mrs. Dalloway with modes of knowing, from Septimus' unfeeling intellection to Sally Seton's forthright warmth ("What does the brain matter... compared with the heart?"); from intuition and prophetic truth to Harley Street's false science. Yet however transparent the Ulysses borrowings and parallels may seem, it should be emphasized that they cannot be called imitation. Rather, it is a question of transformation, of Woolf taking ideas from Joyce and adapting them to the particular needs of her novel. In so doing, she comments in an ironic

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manner on certain shortcomings of Ulysses and produces, at the same time, an original and indeed revolutionary work, its form related, as in all of Woolf s fiction, to the important symbolic themes.

UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

NOTES

1 "The Narrow Bridge of Art," Granite and Rainbow (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), p. 18.

2 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, Vol. 2 (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 16 August 1922, pp. 188-89.

3 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, Vol. 2 (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 551, 566.

4 Holograph notebook catalogued by the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, as Modern Novels, bearing the notation "Virginia Woolf s Notebook on Ulysses." My thanks go to Dr. Lola Szladits for drawing my attention to it and granting me permission to quote from it.

5 Diary 2, 29 Oct. 1922, p. 209

6 Letters 2, pp. 296, 485.

7 Ibid., p. 598

8 "Stephen Smith was different," typescript of "The Prime Minister" in the Berg Collection, p. 143.

9 The Hours (Mrs. Dalloway manuscript, Vol. 1 ), Library of the British Museum, London, pp. 34-36, dated Aug. 1923.

10 See James Hafley, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (Berkely: Univ. of California Press, 1954), and his disposal of those who would think Mrs. Dalloway an "inspired imitation ofUlysses" pp. 72-73; Avrom Fleishman observed that "the extent of the resemblance has not been appreciated," noting the June 16/ "middle of June" coincidence but attaching no significance to it, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 69-70; "a false problem," Jean Guiguet, "Virginia Woolf et James Joyce, un probl?me de dates et du temp?raments," Ulysses, Cinquante Ans Apr?s, ed. Louis Bonnerot, Didier (?tudes Anglaises 53), Paris, 1974, p. 30.

11 Diary 2, 20 Sept. 1920, p. 68.

12 See my "The Canonical Hours in Mrs. Dalloway" in Modern Fiction Studies 28 ( 1982): 236 40.

13 Mrs. Dalloway, pp. 122-23 (the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition is used for all quotations). Re Molly Bloom, see Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's Ulysses (New York: Vintage Books, 1957) and Molly's "glacial epoch and its strange mastodons?how once she was 'in a swamp,'" p. 400.

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14 Typescript of "The Prime Minister."

15 Letters 2, pp. 521-22. By 18 August Woolf had read "200 out of 700 pages," p. 548.

16 Typescript of The Prime Minister.

17 Entry of 16 Oct., 1922, Dalloway Notebook 1, bound ms. in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library; entry of 9 November 1922, in small maroon leather book with working notes, also in Berg Collection.

18 In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus is associated with "A hawklike man flying sunward"; Septimus reminds Rezia "with his way of sitting a little hunched ... of a young hawk," p. 222. My Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970,1978) notes Septimus as "an Icarus figure," n.41, p. 217; the sun is also the central symbol in Mrs. Dalloway.

19 Dalloway Notebook 1.

20 For example, Chaucer's Wife of Bath, born under Taurus; Shakespeare's Juliet, a Leo.

21 J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962), pp. 111-12.

22 Clarissa is imaged as "some field or English harvest," p. 233, and is considered a Demeter figure, though perhaps a Demeter manquee.

23 For example, "A Dangerous Day: Mrs. Dalloway Discovers Her Double" in Modern Fiction Studies 7 (1961): 115-24. The Inward Voyage discusses Clarissa and Septimus as doubles; I had not then made the Gemini connection.

24 Pp. 139,141, 148, 213, 223. Is there a connection of "brute, with the blood-red nostrils" with the image of the minotaur? Certainly the mythological figure of the bull is one of masculine phallic power and so would be feared by Septimus; the "displacement" of this fear by a less threatening image, "human nature," has its Freudian sanction.

25 I.e., Clarissa's fear of her daughter Elizabeth being "violated" by Doris Kilman.

26 Septimus as "hunched" occurs also on p. 33; in contrast, Clarissa is "very upright," p. 4.

27 A loose counterpoint of places and ideas between Bloom and Dedalus in Ulysses is noted by Richard Ellmann (James Joyce, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, [1959], p. 369).

28 Small Dalloway notebook, 9 November 1922. See my discussion of the syndrome of Septimus' illness in The Inward Voyage, pp. 88-89. Today, psychologists note a slight difference between schizophrenia of the manic-depressive type and a manic-depressive psychosis. Woolf's illness is said to conform to the latter.

29 Nancy Topping Bazin, in Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision (New Jersey: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1973), equates mania with the maternal, depression with the paternal, p. 6. Mrs. Dalloway is the first of Woolf's novels to experiment with the symbolic depiction of the androgynous being.

30 Main Currents in Modern Literature (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1935), p. 173.

31 In the Demeter-Persephone myth, which Woolf employs, Kilman represents the figure of Pluto who, in Clarissa's mind, is the "seducer" of Elizabeth/Persephone; in the Greek myth, Persephone is ravished to Hades while picking flowers.

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32 From Woolf s introduction to the Modem Library edition of Mrs. Dalloway, p. vi.

33 Septimus refers to "doom" on p. 220.

34 The symbolic importance of the heat wave in Mrs. Dalloway contrasts with the humorous anxiety of Leopold Bloom during the Sirens episode as he thinks how Blazes Boylan, his wife's lover, will soon be at their house; the elements of heat and disaster combine here as well.

35 Small Dalloway notebook, 9 November 1922. Also in The Waves, the death of Percival, central to the novel, occurs on the page at the exact center.

36 For example, Doris (gift of God) contrasts with Kilman; Dr. Holmes (a play on Sherlock Holmes?) fumbles the role of medical "detective" re Septimus' illness; Bruton might represent a debased version of Briton, brutalized (Woolf, anti-war, would not treat the daughter of a military General kindly); Milly Brush's name is as "erect" as her employer (p. 168).

37 Another "in" joke is her patterning of Hugh Whitbread (whose last name, as earlier noted, is that of a British brewer) after Philip Morell, whose money came from the brewing business.

38 See The Inward Voyage, pp. 63-64. Joyce was also influenced by Freud, but in the area of verbal associations, slips of the tongue, etc. In a footnote, Ellman claims Joyce's interest in dreams was "pre-Freudian in that it looks for revelation, not scientific explanation," Joyce, p. 89.

39 The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, Modern Library ed. (New York: Random House, 1938), pp. 371-75, 383.

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