So. I can't say that I'm in love with this book. Virginia Woolf certainly is eloquent, but I found it very difficult to get into the book. She writes well--incredibly well--but I just wasn't feeling it, even if I could relate to the characters and all of that. That's just the way it goes sometimes.
The book itself is about, unsurprisingly, Mrs Clarissa Dalloway. It starts out on the morning of a day she is holding a party. On that day her former suitor comes by from India, where he has met a woman he loves. Seeing Clarissa kind of throws him, and he goes back over the signs that their love couldn't last or hadn't existed at all, and all of that. (There's no dramatic reuniting scene or any of that, just for the record.) The story is also told through Septimus, a war hero who suffers from shell shock and who only appears in the main plot a few times, his wife, and Clarissa's daughter's history teacher. Because it only takes place on one day, it's compared to Ulysses often--a comparison I wouldn't make. There's a world of differences between them. It just doesn't seem right to compare the two...
The first note is mainly just a quote from Clarissa--she's reflecting on her relationship with Peter. "For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say?--some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did" (9). The main reason why I've bothered to quote this section is because it's just a speculation on the mind and memory, an entirely accurate speculation, and that's the sort of thing that interests me. The secondary reason is that I find the "reward of having cared for people" bit quite interesting. The section could mean imagining that he has come back (thus her mind has brought him back) and he is no longer bitter about choosing Dalloway over himself. It could also mean that she is thinking about him without having any bitterness recalled in herself--thus, her affection for him overcame all of that.
"She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day" (11). Fun fact: this quote was the whole reason why I decided to read this book. It popped up on my Tumblr dash.
"The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?" (20). This sentence comes forth in introducing the reader to Septimus. He had a look in his eyes as though he were eternally apprehensive, so strong it made others feel the same, and thus...
"To love makes one solitary, she thought" (33). Septimus's wife fears her husband's supposed mental illness, and half drowns him under various doctors and psychologists, who never let him speak and just put forth their judgment. Rezia, the wife, isn't terribly smart and makes things more difficult for her husband and never listens to him, just swallows everything the doctors say without thinking. Eventually--spoiler alert--this causes him to kill himself, because he overhears a doctor recommending to Rezia that he should be placed in an institution. This makes me wonder about Woolf's feelings about Septimus and their similarities--Woolf eventually killed herself.
"It's been a hard life, thought Mrs Dempster. What hadn't she given to it? Roses; figure, her feet too... Roses, she thought sardonically. All trash, m'dear. For really, what with eating, drinking, and mating, the bad days and good, life had been no mere matter of roses, and what was more, let me tell you, Carrie Dempster had no wish to change her lot with any woman's in Kentish Town! But, she implored, pity. Pity, for the loss of roses. Pity she asked of Maisie Johnson, standing by the hyacinth beds" (40). This just reminded me of V for Vendetta... When Evey is reading Valerie's life story and she talks about how she grew roses with her lover in the window box, and then the war came, and after that there were no more roses at all--and she begins the conclusion to her letter with "It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and apologized to no one".
This is from when Peter first calls upon Clarissa after having been gone for so long: "Peter Walsh had got up and crossed to the window and stood with his back to her... Mastery and dry and desolate he looked, his thin shoulder-blades lifting his coat slightly; blowing his nose violently. Take me with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he were starting directly on some great voyage; and then, next moment, it was as if the five acts of a play that had been very exciting and moving were now over and she had lived a lifetime and had run away, had lived with Peter, and it was now over" (71).
"But to whom does the solitary traveller make reply?" (88). Peter, of course.
When Clarissa is first introduced to Richard Dalloway, she mishears his name and thinks that he is WickhamWickham is the name of the snake-in-the-grass in Pride and Prejudice... Not that Richard shows any outward signs of villainy, just that he stole Clarissa's heart, and that really matters most to Peter. At the end of the day, they don't, like I said, have a dramatic reconciliation--the book ends with Peter looking upon her. Nothing big and dramatic, and I kind of liked that. Maybe Wickham isn't the one Clarissa should have married, and that is why he received that nickname, but he does not seem particularly cold or conniving like Jane Austen's Wickham (though he is a politician). More likely than not, though, it just happens to be a name that I just happened to recognize that just happened to be the same. Though you never know, of course...
"The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought... was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained--at last!--the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,--the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light" (119). / "'They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience--and that's supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?' 'What kind of experience?' 'Well--places you've been to, people you've met. Situations you've been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that's supposed to make you wise, in your later years.' '...For other people, I can't speak--but personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me'... 'Then experience is no use at all? You're saying it might just as well not have happened?' 'No. I'm not saying that. I only mean, you can't use it. But if you don't try to--if you just realize it's there and you've got it--then it can be kind of marvelous'"--Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (page one hundred sixty).
"But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged--in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own--is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her name and she feeds on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace... She stands preaching; shrouds herself in white and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories and parliaments; offers help, but desires powers; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient or dissatisfied; bestows her blessing on those who, looking upward, catch submissively from her eyes the light of their own" (151). Like I said, the lady can write. There's absolutely no question of that.
"The difference between one man and another does not amount to much" (157). This is one of those things that can either crack you up--Lady Bruton, a fan of Mr Dalloway, thinks this. She likes him because he was nice to her on one occasion, but she can't remember which exactly, because it was the kindness that counted. It could have been any man or woman or anyone. Anyways, it either cracks you up or depresses you--because it applies to you as well.
Oh, and Richard gets excited by the fact that Peter is in the area and impulsively buys a great bunch of roses to give to his wife to remind her that he loves her.
"How unbelievable death was!--that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant..." (185). Mrs Dalloway, thinking about life day by day--until, of course, the inevitable.
I believe I have mentioned Miss Kilman already--Elizabeth's history teacher. Miss Kilman hates Mrs Dalloway. She thinks she doesn't work hard enough (she believes that instead of lounging around the house and throwing parties and such, she should be working in the factory) and really sees Dalloway as a worm. "Observing [Clarissa Dalloway's] small pink face, her delicate body, her air of freshness and fashion, Miss Kilman felt, Fool! Simpleton! You who have known neither sorrow nor pleasure; who have trifled your life away! And there rose in her an overmastering desire to overcome her; to unmask her... If only she could make her weep; could ruin her; humiliate her; bring her to her knees crying, You are right! But this was God's will, not Miss Kilman's. It was to be a religious victory. So she glared; so she glowered" (189). So Miss Kilman is a little, how you say, high-strung... Why I bothered to point it out is because Mrs Dalloway feels basically exactly the way about Miss Kilman--that she is foolish and is frittering herself (at least her mind) away--though she does not necessarily want to humiliate her or anything. "Clarissa was really shocked. This a Christian--this woman! This woman had taken her daughter from her! She in touch with invisible presences! Heavy, ugly, commonplace, without kindness or grace, she know the meaning of life!" (189-190). It's just sort of ironic that they'd both see each other in essentially the same exact light--you know? Neither of them believes at all that the other knows what's going on, or isn't a heathen. Kilman appears to be a straight backed, puritanical Christian (I'm thinking of the guy in The Scarlet Letter who had a house with shards of glass in the walls or whatever it was exactly), and Dalloway appears to be more relaxed and calm--like she thinks to herself later, she'd rather just let people be what they are. Of course that's not quite true, but still, I'd rather be in Mrs Dalloway's company than Kilman's. Miss Kilman is a tad too intense for me.
My next note is on the page Septimus kills himself. It's some more irony--like I mentioned earlier, Septimus overhears his doctor suggesting an institution, and it's for that reason and because he can't bear to be poked and prodded and made frustrated again that he kills himself. He says that he doesn't want to die, but it's his act of rebellion. The doctor, of course, cannot figure out why Septimus would want to kill himself.
Anyways--flip to many, many pages later--Elizabeth is, of course, at her mother's party. The book does not mention whether she has entered society yet, but Clarissa's cousin mentions it relation to Elizabeth, at the party. I've only marked this because she complains that nowadays girls wore "straight" and "perfectly tight" frocks (I'm going to say that probably means "form-fitting" and "skirts well above the ankles" (257). Ankles! Curved chest pieces! Open-top carriages! What disgraces could possibly be next!?
A woman named Sally was at the party as well (this woman Clarissa had romantic feelings for, very strong ones--to just think that they were under the same roof sent Mrs Dalloway--before she was a Mrs of course--all a-quiver). She thinks about how everyone loved her even though she was quite clumsy and could be absent-minded. She notes several mistakes of hers, smoking in her bedroom, stealing food from the larder for midnight snacks, and once she left a valuable book "in the punt" (276). I had to look this up... It's either a small boat, a Catalan newspaper, or the indented bottom of a wine bottle.
Anyways, the party. It goes well--for a tad bit Mrs Dalloway thinks it's going poorly, but it all turns out well. It ends at the party's close, with Peter: "'I shall say good night. What does the brain matter,' said Lady Rosseter, getting up, 'compared with the heart?' 'I will come,' said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was" (296).
MLA citation information: Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Harcourt, Brace and Company: New York, 1925.
It wasn't half-bad. I don't think Virginia Woolf is my new favourite, but I wouldn't turn her down, yeah? I quite liked Clarissa--I've been reading a great myriad of books and--you know what, I liked Septimus, and Peter too. There were a lot of characters I could relate to. That's actually odd, I've been reading a lot of books with characters I can relate to, which may or may not be a bad thing (the next book up is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). Hmm... I don't have a lot of commentary of this. Not half-bad, not awe-inspiring, but likable, and if I saw it at a used book store I'd pick it up. That sounds cruel, but I'm cheap. Sorry I didn't describe the plot more, but it is really just a day in the life. There's not a whole lot to say... Well. Yeah.
I guess I don't have anything more to say. Sorry... Um... I guess I'll see you with Hunter S Thompson next!
EDIT: On page 192, Clarissa complains that when Peter visited her that afternoon, he only talked about himself and said that it was a "degrading passion"--this is of course a reference to the book of Leviticus, where it refers to sexual relations between two men (the implication is that all-women relations would be the same, but it is not specified) as such. He loves himself; he is a man loving a man.
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