Mrs Dalloway
The Intense and Sumptuous Life of Banality
Mrs Dalloway recounts a normal day in the London life of Clarissa Dalloway, a dull upper-middle-class lady married to a Conservative MP, and the mother of an adolescent daughter. The story begins one sunny morning in June 1923, as Clarissa is walking through the centre of the city and ends that same evening when the guests at a party given at the Dalloways’ house are beginning to leave. Although during the day one tragic event occurs — the suicide of a young man who had returned from the war with his mind unbalanced — what is significant about the story is not this episode, or the myriad small events and memories that make up the story as a whole, but the fact that all this is narrated from inside the mind of one of the characters, that subtle and impalpable reality where life becomes impression, enjoyment, suffering, memory. The novel appeared in 1925 and was the first of the three great novels — the others are To the Lighthouse and The Waves — in which Virginia Woolf would revolutionise the narrative art of her time, creating a language capable of persuasively imitating human subjectivity, the meanderings and elusive rhythms of consciousness. Her achievement is no less than that of Proust and Joyce: she complements and enriches their work through her particular feminine sensibility. I know how debatable it is to apply the adjective feminine to a work of literature, and I accept that in innumerable cases the use of such a term is somewhat arbitrary. But for books like La Princesse de Clèves or for authors like Colette or Virginia Woolf, it seems absolutely appropriate. In Mrs Dalloway, reality has been reinvented from a perspective that mainly, but not completely, expresses the point of view and condition of a woman. And for that reason, it is the feminine experiences of the story that are most vivid in the reader’s memory, that seem to us essentially true, like the example of the formidable old woman, Clarissa’s aunt Miss Helen Parry, who at eightysomething years old, in the hubbub of the party, only remembers the wild and splendid orchids of her youth in Burma, which she picked and reproduced in watercolours.
On some occasions, in masterpieces that mark a new development in narrative form, the form overshadows the characters and the plot to such an extent that life seems to become frozen and disappear from the novel, consumed by the technique, by the words and order or disorder of the narration. This is what occurs, at times, in Joyce’s Ulysses, and what takes Finnegans Wake to the bounds of illegibility. None of this happens in Mrs Dalloway (although in To the Lighthouse and, above all, The Waves it is on the brink of happening). The balance between the form and content of the tale is perfect, and readers never feel that they are witnessing what this book is as well, a daring experiment; only that they are witnessing the delicate and uncertain network of events that happen to a handful of human beings on a hot summer’s day in the streets, parks and houses of central London. Life is always there, on each line, in each syllable of the book, brimming with grace and refinement, prodigious and incommensurable, rich and diverse in all its aspects. ‘Beauty was everywhere’ is a sentence that springs to the befuddled mind of Septimus Warren Smith, who was to be driven by fear and grief to kill himself. And it is true; in Mrs Dalloway the real world has been remade and perfected to such a degree by the deicidal genius of its creator, that everything in it is beautiful, including what in our unstable objective reality we hold to be dirty and ugly.
To reach this sovereign state, a novel must free itself from real reality, convince the reader that it is a different reality, with its own laws, time, myths and other characteristics that are proper to it and to it alone. What gives a novel its originality — marks its difference from the real world — is the added element that the fantasy and art of the writer provide when he or she transforms objective and historical experience into fiction. The added element is never just a plot, a style, a temporal order, a point of view; it is always a complex combination of factors that affects the form and content and the characters of a story, and which gives it its autonomous existence. Only failed fictions reproduce reality: successful fictions abolish and transfigure reality.
The miraculous originality of Mrs Dalloway lies in the ways in which life is embellished, the secret beauty of every object and every circumstance being thrown into relief. Just as old Miss Parry has abolished from her memory everything except the orchids and some images of gorges and coolies, so the world of fiction has segregated from the real world sex, misery and ugliness and has metamorphosed everything that is in any way a reminder of them into conventional feelings, unimportant allusions or aesthetic pleasure. At the same time it has intensified the presence of ordinary, banal or intangible things, arraying them in unexpected sumptuousness and imbuing them with a hitherto unheard-of prominence, life and dignity. This ‘poetic’ transformation of the world — for once this epithet is justified — is radical and yet is not immediately perceptible, for, if it were so, it would give the impression of being a fake book, a forced distortion of real life, and Mrs Dalloway, by contrast, as with all persuasive fictions — these lies so well made that they pass as truths — seems to submerge us fully in the most authentic of human experience. But it is clear that the fraudulent reconstruction of reality in the novel, reducing it to the most refined, pure aesthetic sensibility, could not be more radical or complete. Why is this sleight of hand not immediately apparent? Because of the rigorous coherence with which the unreality of the novel is described — or, rather, invented — that world in which all the characters without exception have a marvellous ability to detect what is extraordinary in the mundane, what is eternal in the ephemeral and what is glorious in mediocrity, the way Virginia Woolf herself could do. For the characters of this fiction — of every fiction — have been fashioned in the image and likeness of their creator.
But is it the characters of the novel that have these exceptional attributes, or rather just the character who narrates and dictates them, and often speaks through their mouths? I am referring to the narrator — and here we should talk about a female narrator — of the story. The narrator is always the central character in a fiction. Invisible or present, singular or multiple, embodied in the first or second or third person, omniscient god or implied witness in the novel, the narrator is the first and most important character that a novelist must invent in order to make the tale convincing. This elusive, ubiquitous narrator of Mrs Dalloway is Virginia Woolf’s great achievement in this book, the reason for the story’s magic and irresistible power of persuasion.
The narrator of the novel is always located in the private world of the characters, never in the outside world. What is narrated to us comes through filters, diluted and refined by the sensibility of those people. The fluid consciousnesses of Mrs Dalloway, Richard, her husband, Peter Walsh, Elizabeth, Doris Kilman, the tormented Septimus and Rezia, his Italian wife, offer the perspectives from which that hot summer’s morning is constructed, in the streets of London, with the din of horns and engines, and its green and scented parks. The objective world dissolves into these consciousnesses before it reaches the reader and is deformed and reformed according to the state of mind of each character; memories and impressions are added, which become blended with dreams and fantasies. In this way, the reader of Mrs Dalloway is never provided with an objective reality, but only with the different subjective versions that the characters weave out of this reality. This immaterial substance, as slippery as quicksilver, and yet, essentially human — life transformed into memory, feeling, sensation, desire, impulse — is the prism through which the narrator of Mrs Dalloway reveals the world and tells the story. This is what creates, from the opening lines, the extraordinary atmosphere of the noveclass="underline" that of a suspended, subtle reality, suffused with the same evasive quality as light, scents and the tender and furtive images of memory.