PROSE
Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway
“She had the 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.“
Why this book?
Virginia Woolf was one of the most illustrious and influential female writers of the twentieth century. Writing in the aftermath of the First World War, at a time of seismic social and cultural change, her work reflects many of the preoccupations of modernism: the importance of subjective reality; the relationship of art to psychology, psychoanalysis and the subconscious; the breaking down of barriers between art and life.
The writing in Mrs Dalloway is challenging but rewarding to read on one’s own, rich in images, references and details that deliver a powerful emotional and intellectual impact. It provides the opportunity to explore and try to understand Woolf’s incisive study of human personality. Along the way we can look to some of her contemporaries – Freud, Henri Bergson, Roger Fry – to help make sense of this new writing she creates.
The story
To quote Julia Briggs from her biographical study of Woolf through her works:
“Mrs. Dalloway is the story of a day in the lives of a man and woman who never meet — a society hostess who gives a party, and a shell-shocked soldier . . . What they have in common or why their stories are told in parallel, the reader must decide, for this is a modernist text, an open text, with no neat climax or final explanation, and what happens seems to shift as we read and reread. Woolf intended her experiment to bring the reader closer to everyday life, in all its confusion, mystery and uncertainly, rejecting the artificial structures and categories of Victorian fiction.”
The writing
With its use of stream of consciousness, Virginia Woolf’s writing hits emotion first: ‘what happens’ takes second place to ‘what is felt’. The language is packed with subtlety, nuance and evocative images as Woolf probes the depths of intimate relationships. With her we explore a warm June day in London and, in the process, consider experiences of madness, aesthetics, the nature of love and intimacy, war, relationships across and between genders, imperialism, all of which are prodded in this delicate and lyric work.
A few points of focus that you might let stew as you read this seminal novel:
- In Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf is trying to do something altogether new: using the form of the novel, she seeks to evoke the moments that create life. These are not the expected moments of birth/marriage/death, but the small moments of clanging awareness that occur as one buys flowers, or hears Big Ben tolling as one greets a friend in the street and suddenly your lives together radiate out from that moment.
- This is a risky proposal. One reason is that to take these moments (Woolf calls them elsewhere ‘Moments of Being’) and hold them up to the light is to sanctify them and perhaps to make a moment carry more weight than it might otherwise bear, rarefying simply by thrusting it into the limelight. At the same time, creating a character through the prism of these moments means showing a person from all angles – and, to be honest in the portrayal, angles that are sometimes unflattering and inconsistent. This may be a reflection of our lived experience, but in writing – in fiction – we require (or had required up until the Modernist Era) consistency in literary characters, and heroic acts as a means to define them.
- Another challenge to Woolf’s technique is that she is writing in the shadow of World War I, which had revealed how brief and seemingly inconsequential the breath of life can be. To some, it may seem the worst kind of dilettantism to offer the movements of Clarissa Dalloway around London on a hot June day as meaningful, and irresponsible to contrast her to the soldier Septimus Smith in his shell-shocked hallucinations. Can Woolf use the variety of characters she offers (different social classes, political outlooks, ages, varying levels of awareness) to realise what David Bradshaw, in his introduction to the Oxford Classics edition, describes as “how the trauma of a moment can check the progress of a life”?
As you read, notice (and question!) how Woolf is scratching at the interior life – trying to bring our submerged voice to the surface, revealing at times the clash between interior and exterior perceptions. Does Mrs Dalloway offer insights into the way our minds work and the distance traversed between the world in our minds and the surfaces that we move through? Does the book offer new insights into human relationships? Does the writing break the tensile surface of the observed world? How does it do this?
The reading
I urge you to read actively and to converse with the book as you go (see here for more suggestions). Do mark your book: question marks where Woolf’s purpose is still murky for you, highlight passages that capture your interior eye or strike you with the beauty of the writing. Enjoy the language, even if its meaning isn’t always clear, at moments this book reads like a modernist poem.
Remember that our typical Western education trains us to fight, struggle and clench when we do not understand something. Try to release yourself from the overwhelming need to have total comprehension, recognize what is clear but do not agonize about what is not. Welcome mystery, there will be an opportunity to discuss this in our next LitSalon Challenge online forum.
Recommended edition: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Oxford World’s Classics, ISBN-13: 978-0199536009.
Content courtesy of Toby Brothers.
POETRY
Elizabeth Bishop – Sandpiper
“Since we do float on an unknown sea, I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way carefully; who knows what might depend on it”
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop is a poet of details and absences. She explores the world around her, always looking for truth even in the most ordinary observation, with poems that are both controlled and expansive. Sandpiper, written on a return visit to Bishop’s childhood home in Nova Scotia, effortlessly evokes a moment watching a bird searching for food on the shoreline. At the same time, she makes the bird a personification of herself, endlessly searching for something, something, something.
Sandpiper can tell us much about Bishop’s vision of our relationship to nature, uncertainty and art. Repeated readings – ideally out loud, even better with a poetry reading ‘buddy’ – will help you towards a greater understanding of this exquisitely constructed poem.
To begin, listen for the central image in the poem. What is the bird doing? What is the bird’s point of view? Then listen to the way the landscape is described: be aware of sound, colour, movement.
Consider the relationship between the bird and the speaker? What does the bird mean to the speaker? What is distinctive about the poet’s voice? Are there ways in which birds are similar to, or different from, poems?
Sandpiper by Elizabeth Bishop can be read online here.
WILLIAM BLAKE
At the end of line four, Bishop calls the bird “a student of Blake”, an allusion to William Blake, the visionary Romantic poet, who wrote in the opening lines of his poem Auguries of Innocence that the poet wanted:
“To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.“
Here’s a link to the full poem (it’s very long!).
POETS AND BIRDS
Sandpiper is one of many famous poems about birds. Descriptions of birds have been a common theme for as long as poetry has existed. To spark some thought about why this is so, here is a quote from How To Be a Bad Birdwatcher by Simon Barnes:
“Birds are the most studied organisms on the planet. They are the best observed, the most fanatically recorded, the most lovingly written about. Birds have more good observers than any other kind of animal, and untold millions more bad ones. Why? . . . They can fly. Have you thought for a second how amazing that is?“
Elizabeth Bishop’s Life
“All my life I have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper just running down the edges of different countries and continents, looking for something.”
Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, to an American father and a Canadian mother. Her father died when she was eight months old and her mother returned with her to Nova Scotia. When she was five, her mother became mentally ill and was institutionalised, remaining in the asylum until her death in 1934. Elizabeth went to live with her maternal grandparents on a farm in Great Village, Nova Scotia. In her later childhood her paternal grandparents gained custody and she went to live with them in Massachusetts, a move which made her unhappy and she missed her life in Nova Scotia, a place she returned to throughout her life and in her poetry. As an adult, she inherited enough money from her father to travel and live independently, living in France, Key West and Santos, Brazil, all places that figure in her work.
Although she was friends with the confessional poets of her era, including Robert Lowell (with whom she exchanged many letters discussing poetry), Bishop avoided this confessional style and details about her history and relationships are often disguised. She was not in any sense a “public poet” and is much more highly regarded now than in her lifetime. Many critics consider her one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century; she is revered for her skill with form, the accuracy of her observations and the restrained beauty of her language.
Content courtesy of Caroline Hammond.
