by Ruth Gruber
“So on a summer’s day waves collect, over-balance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying ‘that is all’ more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.”11
Waves and heavings of the consciousness are, however fitting, not the only themes she now adapts to her lyric, feminine prose. Speeches are sung, characters speak in musical cadences. Not a dramatic monologue or a poetic play, but like an operetta, one word, one phrase, one rhythm is repeated: “ ‘But, thank you, Lucy, oh, thank you,’ said Mrs. Dalloway, and thank you, thank you, she went on saying (sitting down on the sofa with her dress over her knees, her scissors, her silks), thank you, thank you, she went on saying in gratitude … ”12 The lyrical fluidity suggests the sweep and graceful movement of the operatic stage.
Dialogue, however, is not abundant; realism, the sharp selectivity, demanded by a dramatist, is lacking. Virginia Woolf is lyrical, singing and receiving vague irrational impressions. “ ‘She was like a lily, Sally said, a lily by the side of a pool’ ”,13 Or “She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a hyacinth, Willie Titcomb was thinking.”14 It is like the richly colored, dreamy conversation of “Salome”, a soliloquy of the consciousness, thought more than spoken. In silence, Peter Walsh remembers how he had wanted to marry Clarissa Dalloway, and in silence, she understands his thoughts.
“Of course I did, thought Peter;” in his desire to marry Clarissa; “it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I’ve ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall.”15
The poetic swelling of emotions, the rhythmic surging of associations in the human mind, is artfully suggested by the style. With unusual structure, prose flows into poetry and long waves of thoughts and illusions are set into graceful motion. “A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound, a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour, beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human meaning into
ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo—
the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent’s Park Tube Station, from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up and down its branches singing
ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo,
and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze.”16
In turning to the world of the sub-conscious, Virginia Woolf finds fitting cause for hallucinations. The associative conceits of nature, loved by the romanticists and condemned by their critics, are permissible in the consciousness, and Mrs. Dalloway, feeling that another woman is crushing her, believes she can “hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul.”17 The darkness of this underworld allows a vagueness of images which sunlight repels. Where earlier writers fell back upon dreams to absolve many impossible illusions, Virginia Woolf, like the psycho-analytic novelists, seeks out this dream world consciously. There “are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing.”18 She still perceives the duality between fact and fancy, but in the dream-world, illusions become reality, justifying a haziness and extravagance otherwise absurd. “Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to the solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens lolloping away on the green sea waves, or are dashed in his face like bunches of roses, or rise to the surface like pale faces which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace.”19 Heaped together, unobjectified, the very conceits satirized in “Orlando” are now allowed because they make no pretence at reality. They exist in trauma and there they are absolute. It is the indelible mark of her character, that, needing expression for such poetic fancies, Virginia Woolf seeks a form in which they are acceptable. Dreams are a refuge, a precaution. At all costs, poetry must find outlet.
The tradition that women think emotionally is embodied in Clarissa Dalloway. Her thoughts are a firework of ejaculations; of poetic visions and feminine ecstasy. “ ‘What a lark!’ ‘What a
plunge!’ ” she cries typically in the first page, her introduction: “How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, ‘Musing among the vegetables?’—was that it?—‘I prefer men to cauliflowers’—was that it?”20
The logical procession of ideas, attributed to men, is foreign to Clarissa. She has flashes of intuition, of reminiscences, whose strong emotional appeal compels cadences and imagery. Lest she lose the common touch with prose, Virginia Woolf intercepts the phrases that threaten to grow metrical, with parenthetic prosaic remarks. Yet the rhythmic, bubbling talk is as typical of Virginia Woolf as it is of Mrs. Dalloway. She is a compound writer rather than a complex one; her thoughts are ordered in ands and buts. Her sentences are clever windings and turnings of gushing irrelevancies. The long lists observed in “Orlando” and reverberating here would prove the adage that women cannot select; all their observations must be aired.
“For it was the middle of June. The War was over … The King and Queen were at the Palace. And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket-bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party. But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence; the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy ducks; the pouched birds waddling … ”21
The thoughts run on like a gossippy woman; the long full sentence is less a structural feat than a psychologic one, giving the hurrying, hustling tokens of the hurrying, bustling observations and ideas. It is such writing which makes “Mrs. Dalloway” the unquestionable product of a woman. In it Virginia Woolf has found free scope to explore the consciousness of her sex. Mrs. Dalloway is representative of the emotional, quasi-poetic woman whose thoughts are largely memories. She is “the perfect hostess”, the social analogy of the great Mother, “with that extraordinary gift, that woman’s gift of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be.”22 Her irrelevancies are traces, depicting the mysterious leaps in the mind of a woman from vanity to the most profound experiences in life and back again to the question of dresses and personal beauty.
“That was her sel
f—”, she thinks, looking in the mirror, “pointed; dartlike; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together.” (Orlando too as a woman, draws her parts together, the innumerable phases and potentialities which make her “true self … compact of all the selves we have it in us to be; commanded and locked up by the Captain self, the Key self, which amalgamates and controls them all”). So with the same mosaic quality of a woman’s personality, Mrs. Dalloway “drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy no doubt in some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps; she had helped young people, who were grateful to her; had tried to be the same always, never showing a sign of all the other sides of her—faults, jealousies, vanities, suspicions, like this of Lady Bruton not asking her to lunch; which, she thought (combing her hair finally), is utterly base! Now, where was her dress?”23
Streams of consciousness are explored in all the characters. The present is a kind of maypole from which each character flees with his own streamer back into the past. The characters reminisce; their lives are recounted with a constant moving backward in time. Nothing is active and vital; the figures are forever contemplating, always regretting, or longing sentimentally) for times past. “There was Regent’s Park—odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps coining back to me—the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women live much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places; and their fathers—a woman’s always proud of her father.”24
All feminine irrelevancies are unified in this stream of consciousness; associations, as of Clarissa’s father, stimulate in Virginia Woolf, aphorisms which mark her life as one rich in observations and experience. Peter’s reflection that women live deeply in the past is a justification of the whole book, a justification of Clarissa’s constant reminiscences and, more important, of Virginia Woolf’s own mentality, inducing her to create in such scant action and vast, poetic memories, as:
“Still remembering how once in some primeval May she had walked with her lover, this rusty pump, this battered old woman with one hand exposed for coppers, the other clutching her side, would still be there in ten million years, remembering how once she had walked in May, where the sea flows now, with whom it did not matter—he was a man, oh yes, a man who had loved her. But the passage of ages had blurred the clarity of that ancient May day; the bright petalled flowers were hoar and silver frosted; and she no longer saw, when she implored him (as she did now quite clearly) ‘look in my eyes with thy sweet eyes intently,’ she no longer saw brown eyes, black whiskers or sunburnt face, but only a looming shape, a shadow shape … ”25
Where in “Jacob’s Room” the method is contrapuntal, in “Mrs. Dalloway” it is a constant retracing of past themes. The sharp outlines of the present are blurred; here is a dreaming of the past, of associations which have lost their temporal significance. There is little of the active movement of the first two novels; the characters contemplate a move and then regard its completion. The action itself is rarely mentioned; its reality lies in its suggestiveness that space and time have been traversed. A character thinks of holding something; no action occurs, but the object is obtained and held. “But he wanted to come in holding something. Flowers? Yes, flowers, since he did not trust his taste in gold; any number of flowers, roses, orchids, to celebrate what was, reckoning things as you will, an event; this feeling about her when they spoke of Peter Walsh at luncheon; and they never spoke of it; not for years had they spoken of it; which, he thought, grasping his red and white roses together (a vast bunch in tissue paper), is the greatest mistake in the world.”26
Where in her earlier novels, she had returned to Sir Thomas Browne and the dead philosophers for inspiration, she stands now in the air of her time. It is Bergson’s problem and solutions which modulate her thinking and with it her style. The poetic concept of reality, peculiar to the French philosopher, is the kernel of her writing. She is too innately creative, too inherently Bergsonian to be called Bergson’s imitator. It is conceivable that she would have found the way without him; yet living in the Bergsonian atmosphere, she draws even unconsciously from the truths he had established. Life is to be understood, he had proclaimed, not through the brain or mechanical reason, but through poetic intuition. A manifesto for Virginia Woolf to whom as poet and woman, intuition is core and kernel. Like Bergson, she denounces science in its attempt to explain mechanically the processes of the mind and the human consciousness. She objectifies her distaste for science in the doctors she creates. Portraying Science in one man, Dr. Bradshaw, she ridicules its complacent external logic, and its utter failure to understand the deeper psychic experiences in man. Only intuition, sympathetic and creative, can grasp these inner phenomena. Mrs. Dalloway, in her Bergsonian irrationalism, can comprehend the torments which drive Septimus Warren Smith to insanity; Dr. Bradshaw can only diagnose with “his infallible instinct, this is madness, this sense.”27 He can codify insanities; he cannot comprehend them. To all his patients he gives the same rational cure, regardless of what has caused their psychosis or how fitting to each of them his cure may be. With driving irony, Virginia Woolf portrays this man of reason, his logical orderly classifications and his role of fatal critic to the Bergsonian creative poet. “To his patients he gave three-quarters of an hour; and if in this exacting science which has to do with what, after all, we know nothing about—the nervous system, the human brain—a doctor loses his sense of proportion, as a doctor he fails. Health we must have; and health is proportion; so that when a man comes into your room and says he is Christ (a common delusion), and has a message, as they mostly have, and threatens, as they often do, to kill himself, you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages; six month’s rest; until a man who went in weighing seven slone six comes out weighing twelve.”28
The scientist, in his mechanical ratiocination, has missed the central difficulty; he can cure the body, but for psychic diseases, his masculine brain alone is impotent. It is the unscientific Clarissa who penetrates with peculiar femininity, why, after Septimus has visited Dr. Bradshaw, he commits suicide … “there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had that passion, and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor, yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrage—forcing your soul, that was it—if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said (indeed she felt it now), Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that?”29 Or, she philosophizes: “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 center 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?”30
The change in Virginia Woolf’s philosophic influences is obvious in her style. Her nature descriptions do not change, but her analysis of the consciousness, her psychic interest in life, seeks a fitting expression. From the poetic rhythms of Browne and Lamb and De Quincey, whose cadences, in their harmonic purity, seem to follow laws of aural rhetoric, she now assumes the Bergsonian rhythms which convey the rise and fall of thoughts themselves. Her old search for the Flaubert mot juste, seems suppressed. Single words are not ostentatiously sounded but are blended to depict the sensitive workings of the mind. She is following carefully Bergson’s definition of style. «En réalité, l’art de l’écrivain consiste surtout ànous faire oublier qu’il emploie des mots … Le rhythme de la paro
le n’a done d’autre objet que de reproduire le rhythme de la pensée.»31
Bergson’s vitalism, his creative Élan Vital, and his definition of style mark their influence upon Virginia Woolf. His differentiation between measured time and the creative time-concept of the consciousness stimulate in her a deep train of thought. “Time … though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.”32
Bergson’s durée, parallel to the inner stream of consciousness, is for Virginia Woolf, the irrational dynamic reality in life. Consciousness, Bergson contended, is comprehended largely in temporal impressions. The man of action, observes Virginia Woolf, is different from the sedentary thinker in his apprehension of passing time: “time when he is thinking becomes inordinately long; time when he is doing becomes inordinately short … his whole past, which seemed to him of extreme length and variety, rushed into the falling second, swelled it a dozen times its natural size, coloured it a thousand tints, and filled it with all the odds and ends in the universe.”33
It is in this psychic creative memory, where the measured laws of time and space are shattered, that Virginia Woolf approximates Bergson’s Élan Vital. She builds the characters in “Mrs. Dalloway” through their own recreation of time past, a Bergsonian influence upon Proust and Joyce and through them upon contemporary literature.