Mrs Dalloway (3 page)

These metaphors of a lost Atlantis echoed images of the war she had used in
Mrs. Dalloway
. Woolf was also struck by the narrative possibilities the camera offered in adaptations of novels. ‘The past,' she observed, ‘could be unrolled, distances annihilated, and the gulfs which dislocate novels (when, for instance, Tolstoy has to pass from Levin to Anna and in doing so jars his story and wrenches and arrests our sympathies) could by the sameness of the background, by the repetition of some scene, be smoothed away.'
¹⁷
Yet the cinema had not yet, in her opinion, begun to make the most of its ‘picture-making power,' its potential for symbolization and ‘visual emotion.'

The historically meaningful and symbolically apt transitional devices of
Mrs. Dalloway
show how effectively Woolf used the lessons she had learned from the cinematic medium. Urban life, she believed, was made for cinematic representation: ‘We get intimations only in the chaos of the streets, perhaps, when some momentary assembly of colour, sound, movement suggests that here is a scene waiting a new art to be transfixed.'
¹⁸
In the
opening pages of the novel, an elegant closed motor car going up Bond Street provides a visual object upon which many people project their fantasies, allowing Woolf to pan from mind to mind with great economy and directness, and to capture the chaos in an image.

One of the most cinematic linking devices in
Mrs. Dalloway
is the sky-writing plane which is seen by the crowd around Buckingham Palace, and also by Septimus and Rezia in Regent's Park. Clarissa hears its ‘strange high singing' right after she leaves her house when she crosses Victoria Street, but never sees it; when she returns home, she asks the maid what people are looking at.

The sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something! making letters in the sky! Every one looked up (pp. 21–2).

The plane is advertising something mysterious and modern, Glaxo or Kreemo, or possibly toffee. To Septimus, however, the ‘smoke words languishing and melting in the sky' (p. 23) are signs to him from the gods, apocalyptic messages that call on him to be the messiah. In its final arc, the plane is compared to Shelley's skylark, ‘curving up and up, straight up, like something mounting in ecstasy, in pure delight,' while ‘out from behind poured white smoke looping, writing a T, an O, an F.'

Gillian Beer has wittily described this passage as an erotic and playful one in which ‘toffs and toffee are lexically indistinguishable, farts in the wake of lark, of sexual rapture.'
¹⁹
Virtually as soon as the aeroplane was invented it entered people's dreams as a symbol of sexual
excitement, according to Freud. Moreover, skywriting was a brand-new phenomenon when Woolf was composing her novel. Invented by a British aviator, Major Jack Savage, ‘aerial sign-writing' made its debut in London in August 1922. On 18 August, the London
Times
headlined:

Sky Writing by Aircraft
Wide Scope in War and Peace
Simple Means of News Broadcasting

‘If not in every part of the country,'
The Times
reported, ‘at least for a hundred miles around London the writing of advertisements in the sky by aircraft has been seen by millions of people.' In New York that November, crowds watched in awe as the ‘flying smoke writer,' Captain Cyril Turner, demonstrated the new invention by writing ‘Hello, USA!' in the sky over Manhattan. By 1923, sky-writing was an important advertising device for the
Daily Mail
, and in the evenings city workers could see its name written in the sky ‘in giant letters of orange and silver.'
²⁰

Planes, cars and movies are among the most conspicuous signs of modernity, and such references, along with Woolf's explicit repudiation of her Edwardian predecessors encouraged many critics to read
Mrs. Dalloway
as a textbook of modernism, ‘a work conceived in response to the state of the novel, a consciously “modern” novel.'
²¹
In an introduction to an American edition of
Mrs. Dalloway
in 1928, Woolf herself noted the way it had been seen as an illustration of her theories of fiction: ‘The author, it was said, was dissatisfied with the form of fiction then in vogue, was determined to beg, borrow, steal, or even create another of her own.'
²²

But great novels are not written from theoretical blueprints. Woolf herself firmly denied that the book had its genesis in a theory of literature, or that it was ‘the deliberate offspring of a method.' Instead, she explained,

. . . the idea started as the oyster starts or the snail to secrete a house for itself. And this it did without any conscious direction. The little note book in which an attempt was made to forecast a plan was soon abandoned, and the book grew day by day, week by week, without any plan at all; except that which was dictated each morning in the act of writing . . . it was necessary to write the book first and to invent a theory afterwards.
²³

We know a great deal about the beginnings and the gradual textual evolution of
Mrs. Dalloway
. Woolf's working notes are preserved at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, and her draft in the British Museum.
²⁴
There is also a typescript of a discarded chapter, ‘The Prime Minister', and the seven short stories published as
Mrs. Dalloway's Party
.
²⁵
Moreover, Woolf commented extensively on the progress of her novel in her journal, and discussed it in letters to friends. By reconstructing her writing process, we can see her hard slow labour to find a language and form for her vision.

Clarissa Dalloway and her husband Richard are characters who originally appeared in Woolf's first novel,
The Voyage Out
(1915). There they are slightly comic figures. Clarissa is ‘a tall slight woman, her body wrapped in furs, her face in veils', with artistic tastes and inclinations, but no brain whatsoever.
²⁶
Richard
Dalloway is a Conservative MP with the most conventional opinions on women's rights, literature, and politics. He vows at one point that he will be in his grave before a woman is ever allowed to vote in England.

In August 1922, Woolf wrote the short story ‘Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,' with the idea that it might serve as the first chapter of a novel. By the end of the month, she was considering a sequel: ‘Shall I write the next chapter of Mrs. D. – if she is to have a next chapter; & shall it be The Prime Minister?'
²⁷
In a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose country house, Garsington, had been a literary salon during the war, Woolf joked about the book as her ‘Garsington novel' of society high life.
²⁸

In this early phase, the novel emphasized the ironic social and political contrasts between Clarissa Dalloway, the society hostess in her ‘prime', and the Prime Minister, who is driving through London, and will be a guest at the party. Each is empowered by an institution, whether the House or the Home; each has found an identity through a ‘party'. The novel was to play with the public and the private, the feminine and the masculine, in broad, almost allegorical terms. A Mrs. Dalloway, buying gloves in Bond Street, is the epitome of the leisured lady of the ruling-class for whom the Empire exists. The Prime Minister is the target of all the feelings of resentment and hopelessness felt by the excluded and deprived man in the street.

Woolf first imagined the book as a series of vignettes. At the beginning of October 1922, her working title was ‘At Home' or ‘The Party,' and she envisioned ‘a short book consisting of six or seven chapters each complete separately.'
²⁹
Woolf actually blocked out in her notebook the outline for eight chapters: ‘1. Mrs.
Dalloway in Bond Street/ 2. The Prime Minister/ 3. Ancestors/ 4. A dialogue/ 5. The old ladies/ 6. Country House?/ 7. Cut flowers/ 8. The Party.'
³⁰
Yet, as she could see, the separate stories needed to be connected, perhaps by a climactic event: ‘There must be some sort of fusion. And all must converge upon the party at the end.'
³¹

Gradually, throughout the month of October 1922, Woolf became dissatisfied with this plan; the idea of tightly contained chapters seemed to be the opposite of her vision of a web or organism of relations. As she wrote to T. S. Eliot, the novel became ‘too interwoven for a chapter broken off to be intelligible.'
³²
By 14 October Woolf realized that ‘Mrs Dalloway has branched into a book; & I adumbrate here a study of insanity & suicide: the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side – something like that. Septimus Smith? – is that a good name?'
³³
Over the next few days, Woolf played with the idea of Clarissa and Septimus as doubles. On 16 October, she writes in her notebook:

Suppose it to be connected in this way: Sanity and insanity. Mrs. D. seeing the truth, SS seeing the insane truth. The pace to be given by the gradual increase of S's insanity on the one side; by the approach of the party on the other.
³⁴

The novel took shape very slowly, with Woolf making discoveries about its technique a step at a time. By 7 November, she had hit on the idea of the aeroplane as a linking device. ‘I shall try to sketch out Mrs. D. & consult L. & write the aeroplane chapter now'.
³⁵
Perspective was a continual problem, and we can trace her discoveries about it through steady entries over time. On 9 November, 1922, she writes:

Septimus (?) must be seen by someone. His wife? She to be bounded in S? Simple, instinctive, childless . . . She is to be a
real
character. He only real in so far as she sees him. Otherwise to exist in his view of things: which is always to be contrasting with Mrs. Dalloway.
³⁶

In May she took on the problem of representing Clarissa's personality. At first she had planned that ‘Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway should be entirely dependent on each other.'
³⁷
But as the book developed, Woolf realized that she could not simply present Clarissa and Septimus in stark contrast to each other, or even in a triangular relation to the allegorical Prime Minister. Clarissa too ‘must be seen by other people,' she writes on 26 February, 1923.
³⁸
Rather, she needed to fill out and deepen their lives. Thus in May she came up with the idea of including an old suitor for Clarissa, Peter Walsh:

There shd. now be a long talk between Mrs. D & some old buck. Hurry over. His view of her. Her substratums of feeling about dead youth the past: with her anxiety about Dick threading it together. Story to be provided by Elizabeth. Must all be kept in upstir; in extreme of feeling.
³⁹

The main problem Woolf faced in the novel was that of making her characters four-dimensional: getting the element of time into the book through the characters' memories. This preoccupied her through the summer of 1923, as she wrote about the period in which the novel itself is set. ‘Too thin and unreal somehow,' she writes on 18 June.
⁴⁰
After much struggle, a breakthrough came at the end of August:

My discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity,
humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment.
⁴¹

Yet the insight did not translate automatically into structure and language. In October, about one hundred pages into the novel, Woolf consoled herself for the slowness of the process – perhaps fifty words a morning – by recalling that it had taken ‘a year's groping to discover what I call my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it.'
⁴²

Nonetheless, there were to be many more false starts and dead ends. Her notebooks show that she was trying to work towards the scene of the party, and its contrast with the death of Septimus: ‘All must bear finally upon the party at the end; which expresses life in every variety & full of antic[ipa]tion; while S. dies.' The ways in which this movement was to be given shape and structure evaded her, and she had in mind the models of the Greek dramatists, whose plays she was reading. Should she eliminate chapters and have an ‘observer in the street' acting as a connecting Chorus? Should she divide the text, ‘like acts of a play into five, say, or six scenes'?
⁴³

Through the spring and summer of 1924, as the book reached its final pages, Woolf was still testing out various approaches and ideas, realizing that she had underestimated the amount of time and delicacy involved in writing certain linking scenes, such as Peter Walsh eating dinner. Even as she came to the ‘last lap,' with the party, she sketched out various possibilities, and noted ‘I don't want to tie myself down to that yet.'
⁴⁴
Finally, the whole novel had to be pulled together with
images and allusions. Cubist paintings, strange as they looked to the uninitiated eye, had a unity on the canvas that came from the use of colour, and from the boundary of the frame. In
Mrs. Dalloway
, the striking of Big Ben acts as a temporal grid to organize the narrative.

Woolf's working title during most of the time she was writing had been ‘The Hours,' and the insistent chiming of clocks keeps us aware of the passage of time and the measuring out of human lives and seasons. A major motif of the book is the analogy between the hours and the female life cycle, what we would now call the biological clock. Woolf gives us a full range of portraits spanning the seven ages of woman. Elizabeth Dalloway is almost eighteen, just beginning her adult life. Rezia Smith is in her twenties. Milly Brush and Doris Kilman are past forty. Clarissa and Sally Seton are in their fifties. Millicent Bruton is sixty-two, but dreams of being a little girl in Devon, playing with her brothers in the clover. Miss Helena Parry, past eighty, lives in her memories of India, and the glorious triumph of her book about the orchids of Burma. Finally, there is the nameless old woman Clarissa sees from her window, alone, putting out her light, and going to bed.