Dalloway

Because I'm reading the modernists again

Preface: Last week,

jeanette winterson

wrote an essay commemorating a 100 years of Mrs. Dalloway, hoping we pick it up again this week. Now if Jeanette asks you to read, you simply read.

I was seventeen when I first read Virginia Woolf. The pandemic loomed in the horizon but in India, we were still in disbelief, in denial that it would spread to our homes. It is too hot here for the virus to survive. The next summer the skies would turn black with smoke from electric crematoriums. I was instead asked to concentrate on my 12th grade exams. In between going over trigonometry sums and revising organic chemistry, I decided to read A Room of One’s Own. It was possibly my first real brush with feminism, beyond “Girls Just want to have some Fun-damental Rights” coffee mug and girl-boss quotes of Instagram. I was left with this slightly alcoholic buzz in my blood after I finished reading it, the kind of buzz that you can only sit in after reading a great piece of writing but not quite describe to others.

I grew obsessed with Woolf. I read her Wikipedia over and over again, watched documentaries on the Bloomsbury group, read shreds of her prose, jotted down her quotes in notebooks. But most of all, I think I was attracted to the image of her morbidity. I lost count of the times I read her letter to Leonard before she died. Before I read Woolf, the women writers I consumed were almost exclusively Enid Blyton, Jane Austen and Agatha Christie. The world they built (quite different from their own personal lives, it must be pointed out) consisted of giggling girls in common rooms or young women who had their happy endings or Belgian detectives with funny moustaches. Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Kamala Das had not come into my life yet. My own neuroticism would emerge in full-throttle much later. In Woolf’s text, for the first time, I encountered the visceral woman that to me, was almost inseparable from the writer herself. The inseparability was there in her long face and side profiles that reminded me of my mother and eyes that in all her portraits seemed to carry some kind of worry. If Shakespeare’s sister “killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle,” Woolf lined her pockets with stones before going into the river.

And you read Mrs Dalloway and you recognise something in the sentences that run off into each other, the manner in which the consciousness of one character leaks into the other, the light in which the strange nothingness in some of its passages give way to intense revelations. This is a woman writing while tethered at the edge of madness.

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The sane and the insane work like oil and water in the novel, tangled so close together but still distinct. The “mad” Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked Great War veteran is accompanied by his wife around London, as she frantically searches for a “cure.” For the briefest period, the respectable, supposedly sane Clarissa Dalloway chances upon the younger couple as she runs errands for a party, a routine chore she must perform as the wife of politician. We meet too Peter Walsh, the man who hoped to marry Clarissa, now returned unexpectedly from an Indian adventure on a hot June day in London.

The easier analysis perhaps is to view the novel against the set problems given to us in the social sciences. Smith’s madness is caused by patriarchal glorification of war, Clarissa’s by the claustrophobic patriarchy that marked Victorians living in the Edwardian age. Those are simple explanations, explanations that try to attribute the genius of Woolf’s entirely to the generational trauma of the Great War. The novel strikes, truly strikes, when it has in fact, nothing to do with these elements.

Consider the last scene. Clarissa’s party is a success. But in the middle of it, she hears of Septimus’ death.

What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party—the Bradshaws, talked of death. He had killed himself—but how? Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party!

She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding his treasure? "If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy," she had said to herself once, coming down in white.

At first glance, there is a deep middle-class disgust at madness as Clarissa hears of the news, a disgust that manifests itself even when it touches us in seemingly in the most superficial manner. But Clarissa recognises the madness in Septimus, she sees it as her own. It is not produced in meadows of war or contained in the institutions where the insane are condemned to go.

Madness sits with us in our drawing rooms, as we sip our teas, as we run our errands, and order our house-helps to hurry up. If Septimus’ madness ends in violence — thud, thud, thud in his brain — yours and mine and Clarissa’s is present in the intensity of our being, in how sometimes, I do think it is such a very, very dangerous to live even one day. It is there in how like Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s jilted suitor who never recovered, turns his pen-knife again and again, as he visits and revisits the rejection, in Clarissa’s living room almost thirty years later. Veils are lifted to see the present and all that we find are the past in its various distortions.

And so we find ourselves, like Woolf, seated at the edge of madness.

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