Eating lunch with a friend yesterday I mentioned that Virginia Woolf’s writing offers me one of those essential reminders of why I’m pursuing a PhD in Literature. In some ways, a terrifying thought as my choice to specialize in 19th century American literature excludes her from my field of study in two ways! Still, she is a source of pleasure that feels more genuine than my sometimes concerted efforts to appreciate literature that’s both “relevant” and not already taken, like Melville’s Pierre.
The pleasure of Mrs. Dalloway, in particular, comes from the ability of her sentences and words to change the cadence of my thoughts, to lengthen their rhythm. I picked up Friday Night Lights today, having enjoyed the first season of the TV show, looking to be enthralled by more of the high stakes high school drama. And yet, I found myself skimming. The opening stage work Bissinger crafts of the town’s historical context left me wanting to skip ahead, to jump into the relationships, conflicts, renegotiations of how each character will fit into the lives and minds of the others. Woolf, meanwhile, holds my attention—my mind—by opening with these relationships, by making them central throughout the novel. But more than that, she makes the internal reflections on these relations a narrative, one that does not feel the smaller for being about reflection and reaction. She slows my thoughts to linger in the twists and turns of others minds.
Of Rezia, watching her husband withdraw into his own mind full of crazy-seeming platitudes and discoveries and images of WWI comabat: “To love makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus now, and looking back, she saw him sitting in his shabby overcoat alone, on the seat, hunched up, staring. And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus now” (23). In Woolf’s hands Septimus’s narrative is compelling, his loathing for the doctors who approach him to contain him, contagious. But she also gives us Rezia, isolated by Septimus’s disappearance into him mind and by her own foreignness. She gives us both his impulse to die and the sorrow its expression creates. Here is the power of another’s words to alter the world, of another’s perspective to shake and isolate.
Thus, Woolf consistently shows the power, the import of the characters’ changing and repeating words to one another. Offhand remarks, insults, complaints, proclamations become talismans, repeated and re-imbued with meaning. Richard Dalloway declares, “My name is Dalloway,” only to have his words repeated by Peter and Sally, and finally defended (or at least cordoned off from mockery) by Clarissa. They move from an offhand remark, meant to establish his relationship with Clarissa more properly, to a way of defining the difference between the proper Richard and Clarissa’s more daring/demanding friends, and finally to a way of asserting Clarissa’s alliance with him.
By extension, the reactions to the words that are spoken and repeated also become weighty. Again, we have both Septimus’s declaration of suicide and Rezia’s subsequent sense of isolation. Alongside Clarissa’s protective gesture, we see Peter’s subsequent knowledge that she would marry not him, but Richard. The conclusion to this novel is not an event, not even Mrs. Dalloway’s long anticipated party, but one character’s surge of feeling for another. That such an ending, a fleeting thought in just one of the many minds that the novel explores, is beautiful and satisfying here, suggests Woolf created a novel which make such thoughts, as well as the words and images to which they respond, of incredible value.
