Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction
Favorite line!! From what we've read so far, this sentence is the very essence of Mrs. Dalloway. This novel focuses on "what is commonly thought small" (1) through following a typical day in the life of London's citizenry. Note the word citizenry as opposed to the word citizen, because Woolf focuses on a medley of Londoners, all of different backgrounds, various beliefs, and hotpots of emotion (& often these emotions are the strongest link between the characters). And what really allows Woolf to bring post-war London ("what is commonly thought big") to life is her characters ("what is commonly thought small"). I love, love Woolf's way of depicting character.
From the get-go we are dropped into a mind; Mrs. Dalloway is the owner, we find out (from the first word). And what is it like? What a lark! What a plunge! We go with her, to buy the flowers herself, and see Scrope Purvis across the street, interrupting images of Peter Walsh and fresh air, hear a bell, Big Ben, that barely distracts us from the beauty that is June. We are swept away on currents of thought from parties to war to Hugh Whitman to Peter to the deeply disliked Miss Kilman. It takes a few seconds to realize that as we take all of this in, sort emotions into "worry," "nostalgia," "love??," "distaste!," "misc.," we are just walking down the street with Mrs. Dalloway, prim and proper as ever. A flurry of feelings inside, an upright and dignified posture outside. We read inside out, and in Woolf's writing that way, she brings out different aspects of everyone's character.
As we progress through the novel, we read all of the characters inside out, getting a glimpse of their thoughts and emotions, creating a sense of intimacy when we learn things about the character that no one else knows (Sally Seton, Evans, even some things about Daisy), and then suddenly we see them from the "outside" in another character's point of view. And it can be disorienting, because sometimes the character we see from the outside isn't what we expected to see when we first met the person on the inside, and vice versa.
Our first interaction with Clarissa introduces us to a cheerful woman, in love with the June air, reminiscing fondly on her days of being eighteen. Then the fourth paragraph of the novel introduces us to Clarissa from the perspective of Scrope Purvis, who is standing across the street from her, and we get an impression of Clarissa from a neighbor in Westminister (a lady of equal social standing to Clarissa, as implied by her address). From this angle Clarissa is poised, collected, "upright." We climb back into her mind, walk with her, and listen (with surprise) to her intense, hateful emotions with regard to Miss Kilman (coming from the same woman who was so happily stirred by the June weather to think lovingly of Bruton just steps earlier!). And quite a few pages later, we briefly see another version of her through the eyes of her housemaid Lucy in which we see Clarissa as "a Goddess," a gentle, elegant, and kind lady of the house. So the question arises, which of these descriptions is right? Which is the real Clarissa?
You could say all of these descriptions are right, you could say none of them are, you could say only Clarissa knows her real self, you could be me and say that the question is entirely subjective. Clarissa knows things about herself that no one else does so she sees herself differently and puts her actions/feelings into a different context than another character would. Lucy only knows Clarissa in the context of the home, so to her, Clarissa is an elegant woman of the house and not the disillusioned and rude high society woman that Miss Kilman sees her to be. All the different versions of Clarissa that exist in the minds of other characters are reflections of the ideals and personalities of the characters themselves -- a lot like the "royal" motor car!
As we finish the novel, we see that all of the characters are judged by each other in this same way (and Septimus, I think, is another prime example), and this motor-car mentality is one of the things that makes Woolf's world so believable and real.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) in a way this focus on "what is commonly thought small" connects back to The Mezzanine, where Baker, like Woolf, paints a picture that we've all seen before (an office building, a bustling city) and brings it to life. A corporate office is full of brontosaural staplers, integral signs connecting floors, the most obscure and yet familiar characteristics that turn one office building into a trove of the 1980s lifestyle. Post-war London, in the same way, is familiarized to us by the small group of people we meet there, and the large ever-changing city of London becomes something that we had been familiar with all along. We find that "what is commonly thought small" are the things that everyone can relate to (emotions, straws, doorknobs).
No comments:
Post a Comment