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Mrs Dallowayand Woolf in Reading the Modern British and Irish NovelDaniel R. Schwarz

Reading Woolf depends on discarding notions of the biographical fallacy or notionsof pure textuality, while responding to the poignant, intense, impulsive, caring presencewhose voice speaks and performs the imagined world of the novel. Wool "s aesthetic

program enacts the value of feelings and emotions. While she sought in her work anescape from personality, what she actually does is redefine the concept of personality interms which include moments of feeling. In an important 192o diary entry she wrote:

I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding,scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour,

everything as bright as fire in the mist ... I suppose the danger is the damned

egotistical self: which ruins Joyce and Richardson to my mind: is one pliant

& rich enough to provide a wall for the book from oneself without its becoming,

as in Joyce and Richardson, narrow & restricting? (Diaries,II, January 26, 1920)

For Woolf, realism meant, among other things, sincerity and depth of feeling: Am Iwriting The Hoursfrom deep emotion? Of course the mad part tries me so much, makesmy mind squint so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it (Diaries, II,June 19, 1923). Yet she had a fear that she might misuse language:

One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoevsky. And do I? Or do Ifabricate with words, loving them as I do? No I think not ... I daresay itstrue, however, that I haven"t that reality gift. I insubstantise, wilfully tosome extent, distrusting reality -its cheapness. But to get further. Have

I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays aboutmyself? (Diaries,II, June 19, 1923)

Yet, at times, what is most real to Woolf is the language she uses to create analternative to the painful reality of the world in which she lives. Put another way, shewanted to intrude into the space between the tick and the tock of passing time and createsignificant time, to, as she puts it, in the passage I quoted, rescue life from waste,deadness, superfluity by saturat[ing] every atom with the significance of artisticunderstanding......language used by an omniscient narrator that makes a novel real? or is it the kinshipbetween how we plot our own narrative actions: dreaming, scheming, planning? Or is thetrue realism -as Sterne implies in Tristam Shandy- the digressions from a narrative line,from consistent behavior, and from literal language? The point of departure for Woolf"s reality is Jane Austen"s world of English countryhouses, rigid social customs, and understated feelings and attitudes. In fiction aboutwomen, Woolf contends in A Room!s of One!s Own, men prior to nineteenth-century fictionalways show women in their relaiton to men, and

how small a part of woman"s life is that, and how little can a man know

even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which

sex puts upon his nose? Hence, perhaps, the peculiar nature of woman infiction; the astonishing extremes of her beauty and horror, her alternations

between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity.

By contrast, when a middle-class woman like Austen or Emily Bront or GeorgeEliot wrote, they wrote novels because they were trained in the observation of character,in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the

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influences of the common sitting-room. People"s feelings were impressed on her; personalrelations were always before her eyes.

Woolf"s reality focuses on the individual moments of heightened perceptions,although she does not neglect the physical details of daily life or the historical or economiccontexts. For her, reality does include a keen awareness of WWI and the permanentchange it wrought in England"s social fabric. Like Lily in To the Lighthouse, Woolf wishes to isolate events from their temporaldimension and give them pictorial shape. To be sure, the spatial arrangement of her novelsowes much to Impressionism!s desireto displace the conventional idiom of perceptionwith a fresh human respresentation of what the eye and mind actually experience, and toCubism"s insistence on seeing a figure or object on its spatial plane and from multipleperspectives. In Mrs Dalloway, to emphasize that there is not one reality, she depictsLondon from the perspective of every character in terms of his or her individual interiorspace. Like a Cubist painter using images to define space, Woolf uses words to givedefinition to not only exterior space but the interior space of her characters "minds. To useterms she uses in a letter to the painter Jacques Raverat, she is one of the writers whoare trying to catch and consolidate and consummate......narration inb the English novel. The quest for meaning is antithetical to conclusivemeaning, and, indeed, conclusive meaning is at least partially aligned with Mr Ramsay"sautocratic positivism. To the extent that Lily"s line carries closure, it, like any vision, has atrace of the certainty that Woolf both sought immortality and mortality, for its suspension oftime coexists with its awareness of passing time and, as the vision is assigned to pasttime, the moment takes us another step toward what the voice of To the Lighthousecallsthat fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail (debil[idad)] barksfounder (hundirse) in darkness. If the ecstatic vision, the epiphanic moment, moves tostability and stasis, it must carry the trace of mortality.

Woolf"s voice reflects her sense of herself writing no only as a woman in a man

"sworld (including a literary culture dominated by men), but also writing as a Modernist

whose beliefs are tentative formulations. She never puts behind her the Victorian world ofher parents, a world which values certainty. Even as she seeks a center, even as shestrains for a deeper reality and psychology of character than that found in prior fiction, shecreates a texture of language that at once seeks and eschews a dialogue with reality.Fusing the narrator and her character"s impressions of events with the actual events,Woolf"s novels are correlative to the flat surfaces of Cubism that resolve foreground andbackground.

II Understanding Clarissa

Mrs Dallowayis a lyrical novel rather than a narrative one: while empathetic with the life ofClarissa, the voice transcends her individual perspective and places her in an historicaland cultural context of which she is a part. The novel is poised between life and death, warand peace, lyric and narrative, narrator"s reflection and character analysis; that poise, thatbalance, is responsible for the novel"s magnificent aesthetic unity. Mrs Dalloway isautobiographical because it explores the similarities and differences between what we callmadness and what we call sanity. For Woolf, no theme could be more urgent. The novelenables her to examine attitudes and states of mind that are crucial to her experience.

Woolf chooses a day in Clarissa"s life in which her past returns with a difference(Peter"s and to a lesser extent Sally"s return to her life). Woolf juxtaposes past and presentthrough memory and weaves a tautly designed pattern of now and then. As we reread MrsDalloway, does it not pulsate outward in concentric circles from crucial memories ratherthan proceed considerable anger and hostility. Moreover although he is engaged to Daisy,

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he essentially gives Clarissa another try, as if before marrying he will test the waters of hisfixation one more time.

As an imaginative man, half-creating what he sees (recalling Austern"s Emma),Peter is a kind of artist figure; indeed, as he fantasizes about a girl he follows, he reflectsthat the better part of life is made up, and uses his imagination as a refuge from thisfever of living. His self-image as an adventurer, reckless,. . . romantic buccaneer

sustains him. Like Septimus and Clarissa, Peter imposes meaning on the sky andbranches. Yet his youthful revelations about the death of Clarissa"s soul and hisprediction that she will marry Richard become self-fulfilling prophecies that help create thereality that he now sees. Indeed, we feel that he may have lost Clarissa because,immersed in his myopic perceptions, he was unable to respond to her needs and thecompetition offered by Richard. Like Stevens and Yeats, Woolf believes that there is a continuity betweenartistic activity and imaginative activity that sustains all of us. But Mrs Dalloway"sbelief that she is a refuge and a radiance is an ironic version of this belief. By an act of willshe feels she can draw the parts [of herself] together and become a radiancy no doubtin some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps. But except for Peter, whohas a nostalgic feeling for his first love, does this radiance really matter? Isn"t this forcedradiance a substitute for passion and creativity? In her characterization of Clarissa, Woolfis examining a life which lacks the certainty of religion or authority, but, which unlike herown, does not have the compensation of art. It is as if she is doing research into the livesof those who do not have, like herself or Lily Briscoe, the artistic activity of creating worldsto sustain them. The novel"s prevailing tone is ironic bathos (paso de los sublime a lo comn), asense that life is far less than religious and literary texts have preached. By incongruousjuxtaposition or inflated rhetoric, Woolf undermines the notion that human life yieldssublime experience. According to Quentin Bell, she maintained an attitude sometimes

of mild, sometimes of aggressive agnosticism. How, Woolf asks, we createmeaning in this late age of the world!s experience-a time when airplanes deface thesky with advertisements, and when we poignantly seek to discover an equivalent for thesacraments and rituals of religion by such futile gestures as entertaining the suspicion thata politically prominent figure occupies a chauffeured motor car? Note the narrator"sdescription of the clouds on which humankind has grotesquely written and advertisementfor toffee: the clouds . . . moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to East on amission of the greatest importance which would never be revealed. Isn"t Septimus aparody of romantic visionaries who read the signature of human things upon nature, whoanthropomorphize nature, who see the...