Mrs. Dalloway & Her Descendents

With the publication of "Mrs. Dalloway" in 1925, Virginia Woolf offered one of her greatest novels (some say the greatest) to the literary world. James Joyce's "Ulysses" had just been published in 1922. And, like "Ulysses," Woolf's novel followed the life of an ordinary person on an ordinary day.

"Mrs. Dalloway" follows Clarissa Dalloway (a 52-year-old woman living in London) through her day, as she prepares for her party that evening. Woolf first introduced Clarissa and her husband, Richard, in "The Voyage Out" (1915), and developed her further in "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street" (1923) and other short stories.

As the novel develops, we come to see that it is "a study of insanity and suicide," as Woolf once wrote. But, more than that, Woolf presents the subjective truths of a world as both sane and insane people see them. With this book, Woolf wrote that she wanted "to give life and death, sanity and insanity." Truths are subjective and changeable, as the plot streams back and forth in space and time.

Woolf's goal is to move steadily away from traditional forms of fiction, to come "closer to life," to capture the moments of life, even though those times make life both terribly wonderful and completely unbearable.

In "Mrs. Dalloway," Woolf writes: "She felt very young, at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything, at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a 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."

Life suddenly seems meaningless to both Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway. They are alone; the people who love them are alone. They exist in a place apart, though really the same, as the rest of the people of London. They are outsiders.

What makes them this way? Who can say? Mrs. Dalloway thinks about her existence, her body, herself: "this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing--nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them..."

If Mrs. Dalloway is haunted by her invisibility, Septimus is haunted by ghosts of a different sort. Drawing from her own bouts of insanity, Woolf paints Septimus. He is a troubled war hero, who has returned from war only to discover that he can't forget, that the voices of his dead comrades continue to haunt him, and that "the world itself is without meaning."

Then, what is the difference between Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus? They are both lonely; they both feel disconnected. Why does one commit suicide, while the other survives to plan another party?