Mrs Dalloway (Penguin Popular Classics) - Virginia Woolf

...Two instances - when Mrs Dalloway is considering her own sexuality, and the workings of the mind of someone in the grip of depression - are especially powerful, largely I think because they come from personal experience and are written with the heart. Quite a lot of the rest of it is written with the head.

But as a technique of character description it is very effective. The reader starts with a blank canvas with only a name, a title, ...
...I had the measure of Mrs Dalloway and the rest of the cast, with one exception. Woolf allows herself a dramatic device to kick-start the action, or rather the reflections, of the day. Mrs Dalloway has a visit from an old flame, Peter Walsh, whom she hasn't seen for years. I really didn't know what to make of him at all; I didn't understand his reactions or his emotions (note the semi-colon there, it's catching). In the end, I simply found him a bit ... more

I am. This is one scary woman. Consider. She was the founder and lynch-pin of the Bloomsbury Group, a group of writers, artists, and poets which is now a by-word for intellectual élitism. She was married to a poet (Leonard) and her sister and brother-in-law (the Bells) were artists. She herself was an experimental novelist, essayist and critic. She is so highbrow her hairline is invisible. Nor was she easy on the personal front. Depression accompanied her throughout her life (she drowned herself in 1941) and she was bisexual- she had a relationship with Vita Sackville-West of Sissinghurst fame. Fancy being sat next to her on a long-haul flight. What would your opening conversational gambit be? "Do you fly often?" To which she would probably reply: "Only on the gossamer wings of my fancy, to soar, but never attain …" Or something.

Anyway, it was about time to see what all the fuss was about and the opportunity presented itself when browsing in a bookshop and coming across the Penguin Popular Classics at £2 each. Of course I was full of preconceived notions of what to expect. And largely they were proved correct, although there were one or two surprises.

If you know one thing about Virginia Woolf, it's that nothing happens in her novels. So I'm giving nothing away - there is nothing to give away - if I tell you that the book is about Clarissa Dalloway preparing for a party one June day in 1923. It starts in the morning as she goes to buy flowers and ends in the evening after the party. In between we are treated to a series of thoughts, day-dreaming and associations going through the mind of Clarissa, and the minds of characters whose paths she crosses, and characters whose paths cross the paths of … and so on. She sits at the centre of a web of inter-relationships, with some characters very close to her and others connected to her by only very tenuous links.

The internal action that goes on in the heads of the characters is presented in a "stream of consciousness", a technique of which she was a fore-runner. Experimental for its time, it unpicks the psychology of the individual as if they were on a psychiatrist's couch, revealing their innermost selves by what they think. By the end of the novel we should understand everything about them.

Does it work? Yes and no. The internal action is described by means of a series of observations, often with a simile or metaphor, some of which are quite elaborately and lengthily constructed. Each little observation, or part of the image, is separated by that much neglected piece of punctuation, the semi-colon. In fact there are more semi-colons on the page than is frankly healthy in a confined space. The result is that some sentences can run to half a page and the reader is left rather breathless as image is piled on image. Here is an example:

"… as if all this fever of living were simplicity itself; and myriads of things merged in one thing; and this figure, made of sky and branches as it is, had risen from the troubled sea as a shape might be sucked up out of the waves to shower down from her magnificent hands, compassion, comprehension, absolution …"

Not all will find a sympathetic response with every reader, and that particular group didn't work for me. When it does, though, it can be striking, distinctive and original. Two instances - when Mrs Dalloway is considering her own sexuality, and the workings of the mind of someone in the grip of depression - are especially powerful, largely I think because they come from personal experience and are written with the heart. Quite a lot of the rest of it is written with the head.

But as a technique of character description it is very effective. The reader starts with a blank canvas with only a name, a title, a relationship, and gradually layers of colour are added, a nuance here, an illumination there. Characters' own self-revelations are highlighted or contrasted by the observations of them by others. By the end of the novel I felt I had the measure of Mrs Dalloway and the rest of the cast, with one exception. Woolf allows herself a dramatic device to kick-start the action, or rather the reflections, of the day. Mrs Dalloway has a visit from an old flame, Peter Walsh, whom she hasn't seen for years. I really didn't know what to make of him at all; I didn't understand his reactions or his emotions (note the semi-colon there, it's catching). In the end, I simply found him a bit wet, but as a conduit to Mrs Dalloway's past he had a useful function.

Indeed quite a lot of the introspective musings refers to the past. We are reminded of time passing as the day progresses, marked by a clock striking, often Big Ben ("… the sound glides into the recesses of the heart and buries itself in ring after ring of sound, like something alive which wants to confide itself, to disperse itself, to be, with a tremor of delight, at rest …". Oh dear, that one didn't quite work, did it?). If there is a theme in the novel, other than its experimental format, it is the weight of the past bearing on, and defining, the present. Just the sort of thing to bring on a depression.

And still looking beyond the stylistic novelties, it would be wrong to say that nothing at all happens. There is an event in the middle of the book which in its sharply physical unexpectedness jolts the reader out of the image-filled cocoon the author has woven. Likewise when Woolf temporarily abandons the long, semi-colon-rich sentences for terse ones the contrast and change of pace is startling. For that matter, there is a great deal of dialogue, meetings, to-ings and fro-ings. The characters certainly don't address each other in fanciful imagery and the dialogue can be crisp, if a little oblique.

At two points where this external, as opposed to internal, activity is going on - the event already alluded to, and the party at the end - Woolf's technique of observational phrases exactly prefigures a cinematic treatment. The scenes unfold before you like a film, illuminated from different points of view, now an intimate tête-à-tête, now a wide-angle view of the whole scene, little snatches of conversation, episodes involving all the characters. At the party scene the addition of the thoughts of the domestic staff give a quite different dimension and their "contribution" helps to create a sense of bustle and atmosphere.

Overall, a praise-worthy novel, with some good stuff in it, but not a book to curl up with for an afternoon. Reading too much at once is like over-indulging in chocolate; the imagery is just too rich and, in the end, frankly tiring. It was said of Wagner that he had "lovely moments, but awful quarters of an hour" and that could equally apply here. But one can admire it for its many virtues, and for the fact that Mrs Dalloway's perambulations run parallel to those of Dedalus and Bloom wandering through Dublin. So one for the literature students, and those of us who need to lay a few fears to rest!

Note: from the synopsis above Ciao seems to think this is Frankenstein. I'll leave the psychology of that well alone. 

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