Modern Language Society ARCHETYPAL FIGURES IN "MRS DALLOWAY" Author(s): Jacqueline E. M. Latham Source: Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, Vol. 71, No. 3 (1970), pp. 480-488 Published by: Modern Language Society Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43342569 Accessed: 28-10-2019 13:19 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Modern Language Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Neuphilologische Mitteilungen This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:19:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 480 ARCHETYPAL FIGURES IN MRS D ALLOW AY Although Septimus Smith's recurring visions in Mrs Dalloway are clearly significant, no one has identified the elements of which they are composed. Two important image clusters frequently reappear; the first is centred on the figure of a man isolated and suffering: "His body was macerated until only the nerve fibres were left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock. He lay very high, on the back of the world."1 The second image has as its centre a drowned sailor and suggests that pain has given way to peace. In the following passage the suffering man becomes the sailor, so that the two figures are identified: "But he himself remained high on his rock, like a drowned sailor on a rock. I leant over the edge of the boat and fell down, he thought. I went under the sea. I have been dead, and yet am now alive" (77). The key to the first of these images is found in A Writer's Diary where the entry for 18 August 1921 reads: Here I am chained to my rock; forced to do nothing; doomed to let every worry, spite, irritation and obsession scratch and claw and come again. [. .] Still if one is Prometheus, if the rock is hard and the gadflies pungent, gratitude, affection, none of the nobler feelings have sway. Virginia Woolf, on one of those days when her health confined her indoors, unable to walk or work, sees herself as Prometheus, captive victim of Zeus, and her suffering is conveyed by the physical images of "scratch and claw" which suggest the eagle sent to tear Prometheus' liver. The gadfly is as- sociated with Prometheus in her mind perhaps because of Io' s punishment by Zeus in iEschylus' Prometheus Bound.2, 1 V. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway y London, 1963, p. 76. All references to Virginia Woolf 's works will be to the uniform edition and page references will be inserted in parentheses. 2 As a girl Virginia Woolf had learnt Greek, and though as her Common Reader essay "On not Knowing Greek" suggests she never mastered the language, she was deeply in- fluenced by Greek literature. In her review of Volume 2 of the Loeb edition of The Greek Anthology in The Times Literary Supplement of 25 May 1917 she writes: "there is a beauty in * the Greek language which is unlike and beyond any that we have met elsewhere" and "even to an amateur, Greek literature is not so much literature as the type of litera ture, the supreme example of what can be done with words." Moreover, Janet Case, her teacher, in 1905 published an edition of Prometheus Bound with introduction, Greek text, prose translation and notes. This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:19:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Archetypal Figures in ' Mrs Dallowaý 481 In 1922 Virginia Woolf began to write her fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway , which was published in 1925. From her notes on the novel, now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, we know that she faced the challenge of basing Septimus's madness on her own experience and gave him at least one of her own delusions, that the sparrows talked Greek. This is not, however, the only connection between Mrs Dalloway and Greek literature or between Septimus and Virginia Woolf herself; far more significant is the content of Septimus's recurrent vision of lying back on a rocky mountain side, suffering, an outcast on the edge of the world. Thus in his madness Septimus sees himself as a Prometheus figure. He is the "scapegoat" (29), the "criminal" (107), the "eternal sufferer" (29), the "outcast" (103, 157), the victim (107), alone (29, 103, 157, 160), "straying on the edge of the world" (103), and as he lies back, his body is "spread like a veil upon a rock" (76) and "macerated" (76) high upon the "back of the world" (76), "exposed on the heights" (107) or "exposed on this bleak eminence" (160). These words and phrases clearly recall the situation of Prometheus and are in particular reminiscent of the opening of iEschy- lus' play where, in Janet Case's translation, Kratos begins, "We are come to a plain of Earth, her uttermost, to Skythia's track, an untrodden wilder- ness" and then commands Hephaistos to chain Prometheus, guilty of sin, to the crag. Septimus, as a shell-shocked ex-soldier, is the victim of society's aggres- sion. At the death of his friend Evans, he first "congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably" (96), thus conforming to society's demand for emotional restraint, but "when the panic was on him - that he could not feel" (96) he married Rezia without love. Now he is overcome by a sense of guilt, and as his hold upon sanity becomes weaker Holmes and Bradshaw callously offer him their nostrums of breezy patronage and Proportion. Septimus, like Prometheus, is alone, the victim exposed to suff- ering; he will not give in. The figure of Prometheus not only appears in Virginia Woolf 's Diary and in Mrs Dalloway but is implied by images in other novels and stories. "An Unwritten Novel", first published in 1921, has the sentence, "Tethered to the shores of the world, none of the crimes, sorrows, rhapsodies, or insanities for poor Minnie Marsh" (A Haunted House , 20). And in Jacob's Room she writes, "there you sit on the verge of the marsh drinking rum-punch, an outcast from civilisation, for you have committed a crime" (95). And more 10 This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:19:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 482 JACQUELINE E. M. LATHAM shadowy still are two phrases from later novels: "chained to the rock" ( The Waves , 112) and "manacled to a rock" {Between the Acts , 74). The defiant rebellion of Prometheus against Zeus has become an arche- type of man's struggle against oppression, although ^Eschylus' trilogy con- cluded with a reconciliation between the Titan and Zeus; hence though to us the figure of Prometheus symbolises suffering rebellion, this should be seen as limited and transitional, as in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound . In the same way Mrs Dalloway looks forward to a resolution of the conflict be- tween Septimus and society and to the attainment of the same kind of harmony and renewal with which the ^Eschylean trilogy concluded. Prometheus is not the only classical archetype suggested in Mrs Dalloway , for as if to emphasize the positive aspect of this myth, Virginia Woolf has linked it with the figure of Adonis. But whereas Prometheus is explicitly referred to in A Writers Diary Adonis makes no appearance there though aspects of the myth are unmistakably present in many of the stories and novels. This suggests that certain patterns of thought or feeling persisted in Virginia Woolf's imagination, sometimes perhaps to be expressed un- consciously and sometimes to be drawn upon, as in Mrs Dalloway , to def- ine and to universalise the themes of her novel. In Mrs Dalloway , Septimus's vision of himself as an outcast, exposed on a rock and suffering, is sometimes transformed into that of a drowned sailor (77, 103, 107) on a rock (77) or on the shore of the world (103) who has "leant over the edge of the boat" (77) and gone under the sea (77) or who "would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea" (155) and has been dead and yet is "now alive" (77). At the same time he is described as "the Lord who had come to renew society" (29), the "lord of men" (75) and "the Lord who had gone from life to death" (107). Furthermore, Septimus lies like a "coverlet" (29), and later, having experienced the agony of falling through the sea, has a sense, "as he watched Rezia trimming the straw hat for Mrs Peters, of a coverlet of flowers" (157). He also feels "Red flowers grew through his flesh" (76). (Though this might seem a quite fortuitous image of release from pain, it occurs also in Virginia Woolf's Diary in the entry for 18 August 1921 in which the Prometheus image is used. She is contrasting the Promethean pain of the present with the normal day when she can enjoy a long walk, "and some bout of poetry after dinner, half read, half lived, as if the flesh were dissolved and through it the flowers burst red and white." These flowers bring with them the association of Adonis, the dying god, from whose blood roses sprang.