495. Mrs Dalloway Re-visited

As a young student in college I was besotted by the “Stream of Consciousness” technique.
To me that was the paramount in the art of writing, the most congenial way for an author’s expression, an experience to undertake fully.

So, I embarked on “Mrs Dalloway” which left me tasteless. That’s because at seventeen, no matter how much fire and passion you have for an art form, if you haven’t the patience to plough through endless details; pointless and aimless, you soon tire enough of such a book: because that’s what “Mrs Dalloway” is all about – an inordinate attention to details – trivial, superfluous and leading nowhere: just like the characters of that same book.

None of the characters have a vocation, none have a meaningful life. None of them care about anyone else except perhaps for Peter or Lucrezia; a foreign girl who worries about her husband, Septimus, who doesn’t deserve her concern because he is too involved with his own self-centeredness to care anything about life anymore. Whilst the former, Peter, a reckless piece of work, is a man who returns from India for Clarissa Dalloway’s party since he is infatuated with her; but also seeking a divorce in order to marry an Officer’s wife with two children. Yes, one can say Peter is a man of strong emotions which seem to spring however, from a desire to satisfy his own ego and self-indulgence.

Yet, in this giving importance to meaningless details, Virginia Woolf’s writing is beautiful. She describes all this hopelessness, all this triviality and nothingness with melodic, poetical sounds that make even total emptiness seem precious.

It is in this incarnation with preciousness of meaningless details that Virginia Woolf’s world is made up of. It is in this wealthy, early 20^th Century English society whose motivation for existence was to justify their pedestrian, superficial life style, that through her pen Virginia Woolf paints with an accurate eye the futility in absolute of such existence.

Feelings are flat, emotions never reach a peak, the majority do what is expected of them without any kind of deviation permitted and this is reflected in the character of Clarissa Dalloway, perfectly.

By marrying Richard, she marries stability, certainty – barring joy, excitement, extasy that she would have experienced with Peter. But then Clarissa could never possibly handle joy, excitement, extasy but above all, uncertainty.

No! Better a life whose whole reason for being is the outcome of a party – the consequences of which lead to self-destruction - as Virginia Woolf’s own life confirms: committing suicide at the age of fifty-nine.