Thursday
Last year (April 26, 2020) I reported on a fascinating Evan Kindley New Yorker article that links Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) to the great 1918-20 flu epidemic. Now Literary Hub has published another account of someone making the link. The difference between the two readings is the difference between how we were experiencing Covid 18 months ago and how we are experiencing it now.
In making his case, Kindley acknowledges that the novel barely mentions the illness, which had struck seven years before. But he points out that Woolf’s mother died of the flu in 1895 and that she herself had dangerous run-ins with it throughout her life, which means that it may operate as a kind of absent presence in the work. Kindley says that the joy Clarissa Dalloway takes in shopping is an assertion of life in the face of death.
His own longing to go out in public during the Covid lockdowns helped him see this. Thus, a line like “she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day” takes on a whole new meaning. So does Clarissa’s announcement, appearing in the famous opening line, that she (rather than her maid) will go out and buy the flowers for her party. Kindley describes the novel as “the most ecstatic representation of running errands in the Western canon,” and one sees her exhilaration at going out in the following passage. As you read it, think back to how you yourself felt the first time you were able to go to a restaurant or other public venue following quarantine:
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; and who should be coming along with his back against the Government buildings, most appropriately, carrying a despatch box stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh Whitbread; her old friend Hugh–the admirable Hugh!
Literary Hub’s Colin Dickey, writing a year and a half later, has a related but slightly different take on the novel. It’s caused by the fact that, while the pandemic is not over, an ending appears in sight. From that point of view, Mrs. Dalloway is a post-apocalyptic novel:
For all our love of post-apocalyptic fiction, what Mrs Dalloway offers is a glimpse of a true “dystopian” reality, for Woolf understood that a dystopian future would not look like The Hunger Games or The Road so much as it would the everyday, banal world of Before, shot through now with the dead and their ghosts—where everything is the same but all is changed, changed utterly.
Dickey writes that few books “capture this moment” as well as Mrs. Dalloway, which he describes as “a novel obsessed with the question of how moving on can be possible”:
How can anyone have a party in the wake of the flood? It is a question the novel takes both rhetorically—how dare anyone have a party in such a time—and literally: how might it be possible to do such a thing? It is a novel about a broken, hobbled England, unable to face the wreckage of war and influenza and the death throes of its own empire, where nonetheless the work of the living persists, where, as the character Peter Walsh observes, “life had a way of adding day to day.”
In other words, after something as cataclysmic as a pandemic, we have to look backward and forward at the same time. The novel helps Dickey frame our own contradictory times:
The pandemic is now over—except for those for whom it is not. Healthcare workers, stunned and traumatized by what they’ve seen, and still processing late breaking waves and public indifference. Restaurant workers who saw their colleagues decimated and now face entitled patrons who tip poorly. Those who lost jobs, lost homes, fell behind, fell out. Parents with kids under five. Those with compromised immune systems, for whom the vaccines don’t take. Longhaulers. People whose loved ones have died. People who have died. The pandemic is now over except for those who’ve lost something, which is every one of us.
And yet, the work of living goes on—doggedly, at times obscenely. We have not yet even begun to face the task of what we owe the dead, and we are nonetheless still faced with the question of what we owe the still living. There are birthday parties to plan, quarterly reports due, new books to read, new friends to make. Our faces are still turned toward the past, fixedly contemplating the single catastrophe of the past two years, wreckage upon wreckage, still wanting to wake the dead and make whole what’s been smashed, even as the storm called Progress propels us into the future.
And further on:
We’ve been through so much, seen too much, suffered too much, are still too raw and wounded. The temptation is to stay too long down there, in the wounds and in the depths, but we are not just our wounds, not just our trauma. We are also our longing and aspirations and our regrets, and we assume the shapes we do because we hope in whatever meager way to hold the future and realize it. In each and every exchange, each and every seemingly superficial interaction, lies the potential for the whole of the world, the whole of a life.
Mrs. Dalloway captures these contradictory emotions, which makes Clarissa’s flower shopping seem at once trivial and life-affirming. Likewise, her response to her friend Septimus Smith’s suicide seems at once callous and compassionate, with critics unable to decide which is uppermost:
The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur is among those who see in her response empathy and vindication: “Septimus’s death, understood and in some way shared, gives to the instinctive love that Clarissa holds for life a tone of defiance and of resolution”; Woolf scholar Julia Briggs instead sees callous indifference: Clarissa accepts, she argues, “his death as the sacrifice that enables the party to go on—as if the millions of war deaths have served only to guarantee the continuance of her way of life.”
Dickey vacillates between the two:
Myself, having read Mrs Dalloway some dozen times, each at a different moment in my life, I’ve found room for both readings; times when I only see Clarissa as the superficial society lady, and times when I see a Clarissa whose belief in the vitality of life redeems Septimus Smith’s death.
When I was younger, perhaps, it was easy enough to decide on a single reading. Now, I’m less sure. What I find now, in this world newly and utterly changed, is that when Woolf asks the question, How does one throw a party after the end of the world?, she asks it neither literally nor rhetorically, but with both inflections at once. It is impossible to do such things without seeming callous and indifferent—and yet, we must find a way to do them anyway. To exist after a tragedy is to bear survivor’s guilt and to be unable to shake the ghosts of those we’ve lost and also to nonetheless dream of—and demand—some kind of future for ourselves.
Dickey concludes,
One reads Mrs Dalloway because it asks questions it cannot fully answer, questions that are all the more urgent because they will never have simple or easy answers. That—and also to be reminded that even in the bright and banal surfaces of the world—the bustle of the city, a stand of flowers, a society party—there are clues to the secret pulse of the world, thrumming beneath us and all around us, drawing us ever forward to whatever may come next.
Dickey says that “one does not read Woolf’s novel as a guide on how to live,” but I think he has shown just the opposite. Woolf has shown just how difficult it is to live in the face of trauma and, by her complex response, given us a framework within which to consider our options. We can neither ignore the past (which is still ongoing) nor let it keep us from moving forward. Some days we may lean one way, some days the other. Woolf lets us that this very uncertainty is life.