Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

      I first read Mrs. Dalloway as a scrambling-to-finish college sophomore. The books struck me like so much that I read back then, as something that might make a great impression on me if I were able to allow myself to linger in its world a little more. It was for me back then a very different style of writing and one that I’ve come to appreciate more and more in the years since. I remember writing in college that stream of consciousness was difficult because I had my own thoughts that I had to keep pushing aside (“like a windshield wiper” I joked) in order to follow along. Since college, I’ve grown more fascinated with the style. It’s something that you can really only get from a book—something a movie can’t do (although, I’ll admit, I wasn’t completely turned off by the voiceover-heavy Mrs. Dalloway film adaptation I saw that same year in college for extra credit).

      I think the appeal of stream-of-consciousness is that spooky resonance—that realization that other people are conscious and have minds that move and turn much like our own. It is, I daresay, one of the greatest feats of empathy, to write an entire novel in which the thoughts of a variety of characters—men and women, different ages, from different backgrounds—are so vividly imagined. It would be impressive enough if the novel were content to dwell only in the mind of its worldly, titular hostess. Instead, Woolf also delves into the minds of a hallucinating and trembling veteran, an untroubled teenager, and, among even more others, a miserable history tutor who detests our protagonist. The petty clash between Mrs. Dalloway and Miss Kilman is especially rich in that each one’s thorough hatred of the other is so richly illustrated (and, of course, explained in logical terms that make the reader sympathetic, for a moment at least, with whomever the spotlight happens to be on).

     I’m still grappling with what the book seems to say about death and suicide. Dr. Bradshaw, who means to cure Septimus, might rightly be considered the book’s only true villain.  Septimus’s jump out the window is depicted both as something the doctor gave him no alternative but to do, but also as a sort a subversive victory. When Dr. Bradshaw’s patients speak of a right to die (“In short, this living or not living is an affair of our own?”), he counters with what he sees as the cure: the re-balancing of “proportions” (whatever that means). At its core, this is a book that means to illustrate how isolated a person can feel within her mind. Septimus Warren Smith in hurtling himself out the window seems to act upon some impulse lurking just below the waters of Mrs. Dalloway’s mind too, even as she busies herself with superficial details. She feels alarmed (guilty?) at the thought of a stranger’s death (“Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress.”), and she identifies with him (“She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it.”). Chilling words in light of Woolf’s own death. If we see Bradshaw as the book’s true villain, and we recognize as valid the frenzied nature of each character’s mind (not Septimus’s only), perhaps we can understand this to be a book about the impossibility, the futility, of ever attaining, as Dr. Bradshaw would say, a sense “of proportion.” That Mrs. Dalloway, this fastidious and capable and mature woman at the head of the party—that even she should be troubled and should have misgivings, this is our solace.