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"Mrs. Dalloway," "What's the Sense of Your Parties?"Author(s): Morris PhilipsonSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Sep., 1974), pp. 123-148Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342923Accessed: 01/09/2008 16:35

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Mrs. Dalloway, "What's the Sense of Your Parties?"

Morris Philipson

Throughout recorded folklore as well as in literature there reappears, in endless variety, the tale of the achiever who is brought to a halt by the

uncertainty of what all his effort and accomplishment are for, what they are worth, their purpose, their end. Whether he is the ancient heroic

prince who finds his way to the hermit guru, the worldly gallant who seeks out the cloistered saint, or the successful American businesswoman who brings herself to the psychoanalyst, the question is the same: "What will ever be enough?" The purpose was clear when he was in need: one desires food or clothing or shelter; one desires money or fame, power or

glory; one desires the hand of the princess in marriage, the satisfactions of the harem, adoration. But all "failure of success" stories start after such desires have been fulfilled, when the winner recognizes that each of his achievements represents his command of means to an end but that no experience is an end in itself, and the sequence of these successes

appears to promise an endless treadmill. Weeping over there being "no more worlds to conquer" is confession that the conquest of any "world" has not brought peace. The variations on the answer to that question direct the seeker away from particular or partial needs and desires to consider his life as a whole. "What is the end or goal or purpose of life?"-in the face of death. What vision of life could bring one to a moment of fulfillment so as to believe that to die now would be to die

happy? If the questioner, who has come to a halt, is turned to see some revelation-be it sacred or secular-of the wholeness of life, through encounter with the wise man, the legends have it, he can set off anew, then, possessing knowledge of what makes life worth living. Such a redirection is conversion.

123

124 Morris Philipson Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is, in a peculiar sense, a conversion fable. It was

Virginia Woolf's fourth novel. The first two had been written in the conventional naturalistic or realistic mode. But in the twenty years dur-

ing which those two books emerged she was simultaneously developing her more individual impressionistic style, as in a sketch book, through short stories. At last, inJacob's Room, at forty, she attempted to speak in her own "voice," to merge her special genius with the freedom of the form, the novel.

Jacob's Room turns out to be a book all around Jacob Flanders, locating itself almost exclusively in the experiences of others whose lives sur- rounded his; and the image of a room is uppermost, for the novel results in a series of impressions of the psychological space he fills in the world-more than through what occurs in that space or what he makes of his life. The image is static. I suggest that Virginia Woolf longed to

express the relationship between the separateness of individuality and

participation in the lives of others; she had not fully satisfied that desire

through Jacob's Room, because the hero she portrays remains amor-

phous, and the metaphor of a room remains too ambiguous. However, in Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf found the effective fulcrum for present- ing the balance that will adequately express her speculations on con- scious life, and she found the metaphor that unifies all of the parts of the work of fiction imagistically.

The continuing conscious psychological operation of reorganization and reinterpretation, in order to assimilate the New into the Familiar, is an activity ideally symbolized by the action, the event, the achievement, of a party. If Virginia Woolf had wanted to name the novel with the

all-important metaphor (comparable to naming her earlier work Jacob's Room) and thereby explicitly signal the reader's attention to the single unifying image infusing the work as a whole, she would have called it Mrs. Dalloway's Party. Instead, she has left it to the reader to enjoy the

pleasure of discovering for himself how an occasion in social life be- comes the most effective metaphor for an understanding of personal or

private life.

A graphic image for the effect of the work as a whole would be to say its form is that of an arabesque: a design of intertwined, interwoven elements which, starting from any one point of a geometrical or floral

Morris Philipson is the author of Outline of a Jungian Aesthetics, a satirical novel, Bourgeois Anonymous, and a biography of Tolstoy, The Count Who Wished He Were a Peasant, winner of the Clara Ingram Judson award. He has also edited a number of books including Aesthetics Today and Aldous Huxley on Art and Artists.

September 1974 125

pattern, separate only in order to conjoin at another point, making for unification of a pattern that, once completed, shows how each separable element is an indispensable part of the whole. The parts of an Arabian tile or enamel or illuminated miniature arabesque are visible simulta-

neously. As a spatial whole, they are perceivable instantaneously. The novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is an arabesque executed through time and can be

experienced as a whole only when one has come to see the design brought to completion in time. It is more like an arabesque executed in a ballet than like an Arabian graphic image. The aesthetic effectiveness of an arabesque is created by the sense of necessity for the contribution of each of the separable but symmetrical parts to the establishment of its

repeatable patterned completeness. In this regard, it is interesting to look at the pages of David Daiches's The Novel and the Modern World (1960) and see the schematization (reproduced on p. 126) he draws of what he takes to be "the general movement" ofMrs. Dalloway. It is like the outline of a spider plant dropping appendages from appendages down the length of the page; it gives no graphic impression of completeness of form whatsoever. In fact, the experience of the novel as totally inte-

grated depends upon a relationship between two lines of narrative pro- gression: one revealing Mrs. Dalloway's personal relations experienced in the course of a day-the subtle but entwined movements of the lives of those directly related to her; the other, along an opposite course, re-

vealing the movements of lives entwined with Septimus Warren Smith-

including that of the psychiatrist, Sir William Bradshaw. It is the doctor's

presence at Mrs. Dalloway's party that evening which joins the two dominant but separated curves of the arabesque. The knot that ties them is Mrs. Dalloway's reflections on Smith's death and the speculations that enable her to transcend those thoughts in order to return to

participation in her party.

James Hafley's criticism (1963) of the failure of Jacob's Room for "an unresolved disparity in point of view" does not apply here in the least. The literary concept of "point of view" is a metaphor which assumes the

objective reality of what is "there" to be seen but admits that what is

actually perceived by any one pair of eyes will depend on the location (as an image for the mind and the heart) from which it is looked at. But the difference between a "point of view" and a "vision" is that the objective reality of what may be seen by a visionary is not taken for granted. The

reports of seers may be confirmed or refuted only to the degree that

they coordinate or do not harmonize with what one's own heart or mind

grasps. This is the difference between recognition and revelation.

1. Daiches's writings on Virginia Woolf may be spoken of as "old hat," but the idea that his sort of criticism is not worth arguing with follows from the misconception that, because one disagrees with him, his arguments actually have been confuted-which is not the case.

Critical Inquiry

126 Morris Philipson Mrs. Dalloway

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As Hafley has said, after writing Jacob's Room Virginia Woolf no longer tried to employ the assumption of an absolute impossibility for one person to understand another. She functions as omniscient nar- rator, not so much shifting "point of view" when she transfers our atten- tion from the consciousness of one element in the arabesque to another as applying in the same manner to each of the characters involved that vision of what is most true in individual psychology and most valuable in social relations.

An individual senses himself to be somehow centrally inviolable; or, rather, the essence of the morality of the thought is grounded in the principle that one's personality ought to be respected as inviolable. On the other hand, the appearance of one's individuality-as one's "human atmosphere"-surrounding the personality is the arena in which human intercourse takes place, for it is into that "territory" that personality

Critical Inquiry September 1974 127

projects evaluations, hopes, expectations, fears, and dreads; and it is in that area of experience shared by people that one person comes to

impinge upon another. Only in the most intimate of human relation-

ships do the essences which support appearance strike through such

atmospheres and affect personality itself. These effects may be sup- portive, or destructive, or enhancing. Peter Walsh's effect upon Clarissa

Dalloway is enhancing but not supportive; much of the effect of Richard

Dalloway on his wife through the course of their marriage has been

supportive if not enhancing; Sir William Bradshaw's effect upon Sep- timus Warren Smith is destructive. The psychological drawback to plac- ing primary moral emphasis upon the inviolability of personality is the

consequent sense of loneliness, and it is represented throughout the novel by the repeated observation of the physical separateness of others-such as the elderly woman behind her window across the street seen by Mrs. Dalloway from behind a window in one of her rooms. But no character in the novel is satisfied to live in solitary confinement, reaffirming only his personality at the expense of feeling truly interre- lated with others. Even Hugh Whitbread (whose "human atmosphere" seems desiccated by his having invested nearly all of it in playing a role determined by others, nevertheless) goes through the motions of trying to keep "the doors of perception" open enough so that a little of the human atmosphere of others might bring him revivifying oxygen.

Between protecting yourself from being violated (by those who would "force" another's soul) and opening yourself up to life-enhancing experi- ence is created the tension of conflict between being yourself and becom-

ing your best self. The former is retrospective; the latter is prospective. It is through understanding this tension that one comes to see the func- tion of memory and time in individual psychology. One is not only the

impressions he forms at a given moment but rather the dynamic interre-

lationship of the reserves out of all of his past selectively brought to bear on the observations and sensations of each present moment, anticipating the future, in order to evaluate them and integrate them; the past one identifies as constituting the "self " one wishes to protect and preserve as well as the "best self" one hopes to become, which it implicitly contains. Between Being and Becoming: the danger to personality is that some

present experience will destroy whatever degree of integration the per- sonality already has achieved. Even with the extreme self-isolation of a mystic in the desert there exists no possibility for personality to be inte-

grated to such a degree of stability that no new impression whatsoever can threaten it.

One recognizes discontinuities in himself. We feel that we are "differ- ent people" at different times or in response to different situations, or in relations with different people. We are aware of disparities between

128 Morris Philipson

what we take in our secret lives to be our "real nature" (personality) and what we experience of ourselves as we "appear" in our relations with others and what we imagine are the impressions we make on others.

Therefore, the instinctual drive for integration, while it is constantly in process, results only occasionally in moments of conscious fulfillment-the moments when we feel that we are "all put together." The excellence of Virginia Woolf's artistry rests in her ability to show that such moments do not depend upon ourselves alone. They are ap- preciated by us in subjective isolation; but they are contingent upon our

arriving at a balance between belief in what our best self is at the moment and belief in the accuracy of interpretation of everything outside of ourselves that we depend upon. This is precisely why reciprocal relations are the necessary condition for shared experience. Although the momentary consciousness of integration is perceived by each one in himself, the soundness of the objective reality on which it is based is continually subject to being confirmed or confuted by others. This is what I mean by the social nature of personal reality.

One of such moments of integration is experienced by Mrs. Dalloway on returning home in the middle of the morning:

The hall of the house was cool as a vault. Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, as she heard the swish of Lucy's skirts, she felt like a nun who had left the world and feels fold around her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions. The cook whistled in the kitchen. She heard the click of the typewriter. It was her life, and, bending her head over the hall table, she bowed beneath the influence, she felt blessed and purified, saying to herself, as she took the pad with the telephone message on it, how moments like this are buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness they are, she thought (as if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only); not for a moment did she believe in God; but all the more, she thought, taking up the pad must one repay in daily life to servants, yes, to dogs and canaries, above all to Richard her husband, who was the foundation of it-of the gay sounds, of the green lights, of the cook even whistling, for Mrs. Walker was Irish and whistled all day long-one must pay back from this secret deposit of exquisite moments, she thought, lifting the pad, while Lucy stood by her trying to explain how-

What the maid explains is that Richard Dalloway has been invited to lunch with Lady Bruton by himself and that he has accepted.

"Fear no more," said Clarissa. Fear no more the heat o' the sun; for the shock of Lady Bruton asking Richard to lunch without her made the moment in which she had stood shiver, as a plant on the

Mrs. Dalloway

September 1974 129

river-bed feels the shock of a passing oar and shivers; so she rocked; so she shivered. [Pp. 42-43]

The moment of integration is as brief as that; and it is disordered by a new impression formed as quickly as that. Mrs. Dalloway experiences a sense of harmonious integration and appreciative well-being-in herself and with the rest of her world-but the information that her husband has been invited to lunch without her, and that he means to go, loosens "the foundation" of her sense of fulfillment, and she must shore it up by bringing to it, from memory and the reinterpretation of past experi- ences, those associations that will contribute to reaffirming the founda- tion. This necessity for the continual effort to achieve such reintegration is the consequence of the unending sequence of new impressions. What gives any semblance of stability to an individual is the powers of that personality to reformulate and reorder the elements constitutive of self- hood.

The process of self reintegration is not continuous in the sense of

constantly taking place-for awareness of it is not always present to consciousness-but it is unending insofar as it must be repeated each time a new event "shocks" or "rocks" it.

In the portrait of disintegration of Septimus Warren Smith, the reader is shown what happens when a personality does not have the resources to survive the shocks, when the only alternative to the unbear- able suffering of being overwhelmed by new events of so fragmenting a nature is to choose to throw away the chance to get it "all together" (on one's own terms, let alone under the conditions stipulated by a psychia- trist) and to be free of the terror of disintegration at the price of being unburdened of life itself. Septimus Warren Smith is overwhelmingly fractured by forces he cannot control; to be overwhelmed is to suffer impressions without having the counterbalancing powers of a personal- ity able to absorb them. That would be a functional description of the psychotic breakdown of which he is a victim. It is invaluable for the structure of this novel that the arabesque consists of the contrast made by the sequences in which Septimus is unable to integrate his experience while Clarissa Dalloway is shown to be able to do so. By virtue of the contrast (Virginia Woolf refers to him as Clarissa's "double"), the reader recognizes just how powerful the dark forces are which threaten her.

There is a difference between feeling with others orfor others and feeling with or for oneself. Sir William Bradshaw is able to feel very little for another and nothing at all with another, though in his own arrogant and self-righteous way he feels a great deal for himself. He is self-satisfied at a lower level of integrity. Septimus Warren Smith has lost

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130 Morris Philipson Mrs. Dalloway

the capacity to feel with himself, but to the extent that he feels for himself he cannot endure the disintegration of his personality any further. Clarissa Dalloway's happiness-to the extent that she con-

sciously affirms her pleasure in life as it is-consists in feeling with and for others while knowing that to do so, and still maintain her selfhood, is to function in some rhythmic way between withdrawing into the self in order to shore it up from inside and participating by investing the self

through the sympathy (the caring for others) that interweaves her with them. She is one of a couple, the member of a family, a friend to some, and ultimately a hostess to many: one who desires to bring together a number of different people. The rhythm of participating and withdraw-

ing makes possible the continual re-creation of her integration (in her

private or inner life) as well as balance in shared experience (in her

public or social life).

In this sense, the self is a group and the image for individuation is a success-

ful party. The self is a party of one. The subjective group consists of the functional disparities within a self: the anarchist and the conformist; the

irresponsible, willful adolescent and the repetitively plodding adminis- trative adult; the hedonist and the puritan; the devoted wife and the woman who knows how it feels to love a woman; the grateful and the unsatisfiable; the one who sings her appreciation for the pleasures of life, the one who could let it drop into death out of fear of not being able to bring it "all together."

The word "party" has an honorable and ancient history. It is a collo-

quialism for a person, as in "an old party." It may be used to refer to a

person involved in an action such as a lawsuit, for example: as a party to the affair. Or it is a group of people working to promote a political platform or a social cause; a group acting together to accomplish any task, as a search party. Or a group assembled for social entertainment, and, finally, it is the entertainment itself. Throughout the novel, Mrs.

Dalloway, one is constantly confronted by conditions making shared ex-

perience possible. There are the common facts of nature, such as a beautiful day in June 1923. There are the parks and the streets and the

shops of man-made London. There is the public information of man- made time through the common experience of the hourly sound of bells. There is the passage of the automobile of a Very Important Person. And, in the end, there is the evening's gathering together of Mrs.

Dalloway's party.

As a social entertainment, the party serves a purpose for Mrs. Dallo-

way analogous only to the most significant religious ritual for one who is a believer. Her friends and she are not believers. There are no religious rituals in their lives. But they are believers in the maintenance of the

Critical Inquiry September 1974 131

values of the etiquette that regulates relationships within their social class; they are believers in the legality which regulates the impersonal relationships within their nation; and they are believers in the humanis- tic morality which relates them to the idea of mankind-including those no longer alive but who have created their civilization, and those not yet born who will inherit their civilization. They are, thus, carriers of life, just as one might be a carrier of a disease even if he does not suffer the disease himself; they are carriers of life regardless of the degree of

intensity to which they may live life themselves, so that they are each host bodies "entertaining" a degree of historical and contemporary and, therefore, future-oriented life.

In their public lives as members of the nation, they may be enhanced

through their sense of participation in the institutions which make the nation great as exemplified by what makes the governance of the nation

possible, its leadership. The passage of the automobile of the exalted personage-is it a member of the royal family? or the prime minister?-touches them with that sense of augustness for what is awe- full, what fills one with awe, exalts one through the sense of participation in what is powerful and purposeful in unifying the nation. When the car had gone past

something had happened. Something so trifling in single instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibrations; yet in its fullness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in all the hat shops and tailors' shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. ... For the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very pro- found.... Greatness was passing, and the pale light of the immor- tal presence fell upon them as it had fallen upon Clarissa Dalloway. At once they stood even straighter . . and seemed ready to attend their Sovereign, if need be, to the cannon's mouth, as their ances- tors had done before them. [P. 21]

Patriotism is one substitute for religion and helps to regulate all of the public expectations of behavior in respect to those who participate in maintaining the same nation. There are national ceremonies which function as substitutes for religious rituals, offering metaphors for in- tegration and balance, and firming up resolve for facing future neces- sities. They are all contributions to the public good, to the commonweal, though they do not necessarily contribute to the need for individuation.

A private party does that. Any party-a tea party or a cocktail party or a dinner party or a large "bash" or a ball-is successful when a majority of the participants can each feel that, there, they are at their best. On a

132 Morris Philipson

June evening of 1923, in the London of King George V, in the home of Richard Dalloway, member of Parliament, the party for which Clarissa

Dalloway (who did "not for a moment... believe in God") is the hostess is a party (a search party, a surveying party, a party to the affair) func-

tioning as the secular ritual for self-fulfillment for those who participate in it. Mrs. Dalloway's party offers the symbolic ritual for integration to those for whom the mythology of a religion cannot supply symbols for transformation and integration, to those for whom there are extremely few images through which to see themselves whole. Rituals are symbols in action.

National life, which is structured by legality, retributive and punitive justice in action, is based on the emotion of tribal brotherhood that

appeals to the virtues of accommodating to necessities. But social life which requires the acceptance of minimal conditions in the etiquette of a class offers the self-fulfillment possible only in freedom and so aspires to a morality in behavior transcending the limitations of necessity. In a sense, the legalistic presuppositions of patriotism ask for what each one must do at least, whereas the ethical implications of social life ask for what each one might be at most. The difference between the value of

participation in political life, as demonstrated through the awe-inspiring and publicly enhancing effect of the appearance of the Very Important Person driving through the streets of London in the morning, and the

private, self-enhancing nature of social life, as demonstrated through Mrs. Dalloway's party that evening, is made dramatically effective by the actual appearance of the prime minister at the party.

One couldn't laugh at him. He looked so ordinary. You might have stood him behind a counter and bought biscuits-poor chap, all rigged up in gold lace. And to be fair, as he went his rounds, first with Clarissa then with Richard escorting him, he did it very well. He tried to look somebody. It was amusing to watch. Nobody looked at him. They just went on talking, yet it was perfectly plain that they all knew, felt in the marrow of their bones, this majesty passing; this symbol of what they all stood for, English society. [P. 189]

For those who cannot take communion in the body of a church or

incorporate themselves into a university or any esoteric "cause" or pro- fessional society, and for those in whom the awe of the institutions of national governance is cut down to size by which the prime minister himself may be seen as one who might have stood "behind the counter," there is no ritual comparable to that of a party. To lose oneself in some-

thing larger than oneself among people one respects is to experience social fulfillment. Throughout the novels of Virginia Woolf, parties of various sorts are presented-such as the gathering together of Jacob

Mrs. Dalloway

September 1974 133

Flanders and his fellow alumni from Cambridge, luncheons, dinner par- ties, and teas; or the elaborate evening meal at the summer home of the Ramseys in To the Lighthouse-but none compares in literary significance to that of Mrs. Dalloway's party-when all the silver has been polished, the flowers are choice, the best caterer has supplied the food and drink, the most appropriate dress has been repaired-for here the gathering together of friends and relatives, of associates and people "to make use of," mirrors, captures, and reflects in the dynamic of the event itself (will it be successful?) the author's essential concern for the comprehension and expression of the nature of human life.

The two different things taking place simultaneously follow from the same presuppositions: what makes for the integration of the novel -giving the literary work its effective unity-is what makes for the integration of the individual characters in the novel, out of the need to come to rest in the fulfillment of consummatory pleasure.

At this point it might be worth mentioning that it is a matter of no consequence whether one "likes" Mrs. Dalloway-that is, whether one would enjoy such a person if she were encountered in actual life. A reader's judgment of her self-conscious fragility, her passivity, her soci- ety worldliness may actually be negative, and one's associations with her name might suggest a Callow-way or Shallow-way. But the aesthetic value of her character, independent of degrees of "liking," arises out of a sense of potential significance in her struggle, which is to participate in life without being overwhelmed by it. Virginia Woolf knew women who, in certain respects, show superficial similarities to Clarissa Dalloway. Lady Ottoline Morrell particularly comes to mind. Her husband was a member of Parliament, and she was famous for giving very grand par- ties both at her Bedford Square home and her Garsington estate in Oxfordshire-which prime ministers did, indeed, attend. But Clarissa Dalloway is no eccentrically flamboyant descendant of the dukes of Port- land, who numbers among her house guests Bertrand Russell, W. B. Yeats, Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, and a hundred other prima donnas and peacocks. Of the sources for Mrs. Dalloway, Quentin Bell (1972) writes:

"To some extent she may be identified with Kitty Maxse, and Kitty's sudden death in October 1922-she fell from the top of a flight of stairs and Virginia believed that she had committed suicide-almost certainly helped to ... give that book its final character." In June of 1928, three years after publication, Virginia Woolf stated in her introduction for the Modern Library edition that "in the first version [of the novel] Septimus, who later is intended to be her double, had no existence; and that Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the

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134 Morris Philipson

end of the party." In any event, the "material" of biography is trans- formed into a fiction.2 The sense in which Virginia Woolf herself is Clarissa Dalloway is exactly the same as the sense in which Flaubert is Madame Bovary; but no more so than that.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1968) has written:

When we read a poem, what we respond to is not primarily the static spatial array of marks on a page, but the very process of our own performance. [A performance which he executes according to his interpretation of the directions given to him by the printed text.] It is the experience of this process which is organized by the structure of the poem, and it is that experience which is concluded at the end of it.... The reader's experience is not only continuous over a period of time, but continuously changes in response to succeeding events. As we read, structural principles, both formal and schematic, are gradually deployed and perceived; and as these principles make themselves known, we are engaged in a steady process of readjustment and retrospective patterning. [P. 10]

The retrospective patterning which affects us upon concluding a read-

ing of Mrs. Dalloway enables one to read backward from the experience of the party into each of the main characters who has been presented in order to see that a gathering together of separate individuals about a hostess through participation in a social entertainment is, in its turn, a reflection of each personality's attempt (or in Septimus Warren Smith's instance, failure of the attempt), "gradually deployed and perceived" to

gather the disparate elements within each self into states of integration of relative stability and self-enjoyment. Thus, through the form of the novel itself, we are led to see not only that the self is a group but, complementarily, the group is a self.

Even David Daiches (1960) recognizes that "it is not impressionism for its own sake that Mrs. Woolf is giving us, but an exploration of the

possibilities of certain types of impressionistic approach-their pos- sibilities for novel writing, for helping to create the feel of life as she understood it." He then goes on to make a remarkably negative evalua- tion of that achievement. "Her reaction to crumbling norms is not agnos- ticism but sophistication. It might be argued that a meditative refinement of experience, of the kind that Mrs. Woolf gives us ... [becomes] the ultimate point of refinement when we refine out of exis- tence." And again (Daiches 1963): "The question for the critic is whether the process of rarefaction which goes on throughout the novel does not

2. For Virginia Woolf's own comments on Lady Ottoline and Mrs. Maxse, while work-

ing on Mrs. Dalloway, see A Writer's Diary (1953), pp. 55-56, and 79.

Mrs. Dalloway

Critical Inquiry September 1974 135

end by denuding it of a certain necessary vitality. ... Is there not, one asks, a certain over-refinement here, has not reality been whittled down to almost nothing?" Daiches's ultimate condescending judgment of Mrs.

Dalloway is that while it "reminds one more of a lyric poem than of

anything else" . . . what the author has undertaken to do is consider "a

group of characters in upper-middle class London society and wring some rarefied meaning out of their states of mind." The critic does not

attempt to name that rarefied meaning. It is impressive to see how pe- jorative the word refinement becomes in the statements of an unsym- pathetic critic.

It is not that an "over-refinement" of thought has taken place-unless one, recognizing the standard to be the limited range of commonplace, ordinary, minimal "thinking" in the assumptions of everyday life, would therefore quite neutrally apply the same concept to any elaborated body of intellection. By the same yardstick, one would have to call the

physicist's interpretation of the movement of human bodies through the

space of the city of London during one day in June 1923 an over- refinement of thought, or the chemist's, or the biologist's. Each of them would have "refined" thought based on a coordinated system of princi- ples and a given body of methods; they would express conclusions in that set of terms that is called "technical." But to call such a mode of

interpretation an "over-refinement" is only to say that "I don't like it."

What Virginia Woolf is refining (the word means to make free of

impurities) is the conscious experience of life through individual but interrelated centers of consciousness evaluating and interpreting-in an unending process of both retrospective and prospective patterning. One can name a great many things she does not concern herself with: for example, one learns nothing of the money-earning or -spending per- formance, the sexual or political performance of any of the characters in the novel. And unlike the refinement of a scientific body of thought, given her primary concerns and her methods both of exploration and

expression, what the author yields here is a poetic prose fiction in which the completely overarching symbol is that of a hostess-primarily as an image for the continuing process of individual self-integration and sec- ondarily as an image for the nature of human life transcending indi- viduality.

At the height of her party, Clarissa Dalloway is perceived by Peter Walsh who feels that, as she "escorted her prime minister down the room ... she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed." This makes for an interesting comment on Peter Walsh's negative judgment earlier in the day when he took objection to Mrs. Dalloway's reference to her daughter as "my

136 Morris Philipson

Elizabeth." For here he himself is saying "her prime minister"; thus instead of negatively implying a possessiveness or exclusiveness (cutting him out) he affirms her function as one who brings disparate elements

together. The connective term is "escorted."

Clarissa Dalloway herself, in a weak moment, unnerved about the soundness of her relationships with others, "could see what she lacked. ... It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. For that she could dimly perceive." But in a strong moment, fulfilling her role as hostess, that "something central which

permeated" is precisely what she is shown to possess in an exemplary way.

There are three occasions in the novel in which explicit statements are made regarding the significance of being a hostess.

1. The sounds of the striking of the clock at St. Margaret's Church are

compared with

a hostess who comes into her drawing-room on the very stroke of the hour and finds her guests there already. I am not late. No, it is precisely half-past eleven, she says. Yet though she is perfectly right, her voice being the voice of the hostess, is reluctant to inflict its individuality. Some grief for the past holds it back; some con- cern for the present.. .. The sound of St. Margaret's glides into the recesses of the heart and buries itself in ring after ring of sound, like something alive which wants to confide itself, to disperse itself, to be, with a tremor of delight, at rest-like Clarissa herself, thought Peter Walsh. [Pp. 74, 75]

2. Again, alone in Regents Park, trying to explain Clarissa to himself, Peter Walsh's soliloquy proceeds in the following way:

She made her drawing-room a sort of meeting-place; she had a genius for it. Over and over again he had seen her take some raw youth, twist him, turn him, wake him up; set him going. Infinite numbers of dull people conglomerated round her of course. But odd unexpected people turned up; an artist sometimes; sometimes a writer; queer fish in that atmosphere ....

Oddly enough, she was one of the most thoroughgoing sceptics he had ever met ... her notion being that the gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting, and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady.

And finally:

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She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these inces- sant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn't mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination. [Pp. 114-19]

3. In Clarissa's own mind, the only interpretation set on her behavior as hostess occurs after her husband has brought her roses and found that, while he was unable to say he loved her, she was able to understand what he felt and to appreciate with him how much of a "miracle" was their life together.

But suppose [she reflects] Peter said to her, "Yes, yes but your parties-what's the sense of your parties?" All she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They're an offer- ing; which sounded horribly vague. But who was Peter to make out that life was all plain sailing?-Peter always in love, always in love with the wrong woman? What's your love? she might say to him. And she knew his answer; how it is the most important thing in the world and no woman could possibly understand it. Very well. But could any man understand what she meant either? About life? She could not imagine Peter or Richard taking the trouble to give a party for no reason whatever.

But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judg- ments, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her mind now what did it mean to her this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-So in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and someone else, say, in Mayfair. She felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?

An offering for the sake of offering perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance....

All the same, that one day should follow another ... that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all. [P. 185]

The significance of a party then "for no reason whatever" is that of a ritual not only celebrating but symbolizing individual integration arising out of the social engagement in which it achieves fulfillment and, there- fore, peace. As in the sounding of St. Margaret's bells "like something alive which wants to confide itself, to disperse itself, to be, with a tremor of delight at rest." An end in itself.

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Fulfillment through being a successful hostess, as fulfillment through "how she had loved it all" may share with dying the feeling of coming to rest by confiding and dispersing oneself among others. In this respect, one's selfhood, one's loving, and one's death are indefinable and incom-

prehensible other than through a vision of shared experience. The ex-

clamatory "How unbelievable death was!-that it must end; no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all" is poignant simply for the reason that Peter Walsh understands, that Clarissa Dalloway "needed people, always people, to bring it out." One needs others in order to find where one's own limits are. And, in doing so, one recog- nizes that the "territory between shapes" is common ground or shared

property: the relationship being comparable to landscapes and the at-

mospheres of landscapes. By oneself one is only a fragment of oneself.

If, through the poetic representation of the events and consciousness of the major characters in the novel through the course of one day, Virginia Woolf exemplifies the ways in which individuals feel themselves to be alone as well as the ways in which they feel themselves to be

inextricably in participation with others, then one comprehends the ab-

surdity of the attempt to understand, interpret, or define an individual as a separate, unique, isolated entity. A person is not, like an inanimate

object, an isolable entity; a person is an event, a performance, an on-

going activity effectuating that existence through a rhythmic pattern of participation with and withdrawal from others. Now, if this is true for

any person in the course of one day, such that he shades backward

through his own past experience, through personal memories which arise in consciousness in order to respond to immediate impressions and there is no clear-cut isolated individuality, then it may be that, given such awareness, the end of his life does not mean a clear-cut death. Just as through the living of his life-as a carrier of life-each one continues to realize in himself and to employ in action all that he has inherited from both a personal and an impersonal past, so through his living he

bequeaths to others not only the continuity of that world he has carried forward but the originality, the uniqueness of what he or she has created

through it.

Early on the day of her party, after Clarissa Dalloway had walked

through part of London aware of her enormous delight in life, after the

intensity of a moment of heightened appreciation of her life, after the shiver of uncertainty that rocks the foundation of that moment of inte-

gration, and after the regrouping of her forces through the resources of her self-evaluation and reinterpretation which enable her to regain her

equilibrium:

Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing

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the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green, green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, 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, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. [Pp. 44-45]

Her anxieties over her own life, her apprehensions for the lives of those around her are calmed through images of participation in life in general ("committing its burden to some sea"), not with the cynicism of the cliche that "life goes on" after the death of any one person but with the conviction that one's own life goes on after its death, through the

ways in which it continues to be shared by the life of mankind.

There are two instances when Virginia Woolf as novelist allows herself to make such speculations explicit. The first is part of Mrs. Dalloway's meditation which reads as follows:

Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, ram- bling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. [P. 11]

The second instance is twice removed from her current life. Peter Walsh remembers that many years before she had expressed the idea that

to know her, or anyone, one must seek out the people who com- pleted them; even the places. ... It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her skepticism), that since our appari- tions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this per- son or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps-perhaps. [P. 168]

When one is limited in the experience of being withdrawn from

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140 Morris Philipson

others, concentrating on the privacy of one's own consciousness and the isolation this results in, the intensity of the "horror of death" is ex-

pressed in the cry: "How unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know."

But as the rhythm of life moves from the nadir to the crest of the wave, out of withdrawal to participation, and emphasizes the sense in which "one must seek out the people who completed them; even the

places," then the significance that shared experience brings is not the vision of horror of the "end" that comes with anyone's death but miti-

gation of the pain of death by belief in dispersal through the lives of others.

Thus, in the culminating scene of the novel, when Clarissa

Dalloway-who had seen her sister killed before her eyes-who had, in

response to various threats and dangers throughout the day, repeated the Shakespearean lines "If it were now to die / 'Twere now to be most

happy"-learns of the suicide of Septimus Warren Smith she reflects

upon the meaning of it for herself as one not in the least incapable of

considering her own suicide:

Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body hurt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it? ... [P. 280]

She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never any- thing more, but he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming).... 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 feel- ing 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 if death is an attempt to communicate, a defiance of being con- demned to be alone, then the embrace is through that desire "to confide itself, to disperse itself, to be with a tremor of delight, at rest."

Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one's parents giving it into one's hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depth of her heart an awful fear. .. . Somehow it was her disaster-her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and dis-

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appear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress. ... She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success. ... It was due to Richard; she had never been so happy. Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Bourton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; or seen it between people's shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. ... It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this country sky, this sky above Westminster ... The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him.... She felt somehow very like him.... She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away.... He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. [P. 281]

Suicide makes one conscious, on the one hand, that some may choose to end their lives because they will have reached the highest intensity of participation and appreciation that they consider possible and wish never to experience again a lesser degree of such fulfillment. On the other hand, one can choose to end his own life at the ebb of withdrawal, if the forces that make life intolerable for him cannot be matched by resources enough to overcome disintegration. Contemplating either possibility for a Clarissa Dalloway, involved as she had been all day thinking of her youth, of her relationships with people like Peter and Sally, makes her feel that she herself and "they would grow old." While they may suffer the fears of being incapable of making something of their lives "to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely," the fears are overcome by the happiness that involves other people, other things. Each awareness of loss of life intensifies the sharpness of the pleasure one takes in life. So the information regarding Septimus Warren Smith's suicide, as a "shock" administered by Sir William Bradshaw, runs

through Clarissa Dalloway's apperception of her life in the very presence of the party given "for no reason"-other than to characterize and confirm her sense of fulfillment in life.

But a natural death, unlike a choice of suicide, would be "committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall." As (even) David Daiches (1963) recog- nizes in Mrs. Dalloway: "There is the suggestion throughout that the experiences of individuals combine to form a single indeterminate whole, and that wisdom is the recognition of this" (p. 73).

Throughout the novel there are hints of the effort to arrive at a comprehension of that "single whole." Early in the day, when she tries to restore stability for herself, Clarissa Dalloway, in thinking of her youth-

142 Morris Philipson Mrs. Dalloway

ful experience of love, describes the revelation as "for that moment, she had seen an illumination: a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over-the moment." It is that longing to comprehend "the experiences of individuals" as combined in a whole greater than themselves not indeterminate (but determinable) that her thoughts recur to, at the end, when she contemplates the suicide of "people feeling the impossibility of

reaching the center ... ," when "closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone."

The pursuit of an insight into such an "inner" meaning of life is the essence of Virginia Woolf's poetic search. Josephine O'Brien Schaefer (1965) attempts to relate the experience of a party of people to con- sciousness of a revealing or illuminating moment of vision.

In Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, . .. the group of people has as real an existence, as peculiar an individuality, as each of the guests. In those novels the party is something that lives, as it were, spatially in the area surrounding the guests, in the thoughts and emotions that unite them. ... The shared emotion spins threads between people, the threads that form an almost tangible middle ground. Like the guests at the party, the reader becomes aware of the atmosphere of the party. Here is the intensified real- ity, the heightened sense of existence that Virginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury friends so highly valued.... The conventional, pat- terned, and almost ritualistic dinners are enjoyed by the guests whose existence in nature is affirmed by the participation in the eating and drinking and whose role in the continuation of human achievement is indicated by their communal celebration of their relation to each other in this particular moment in time. Monday and Tuesday pause in the presence of the Moment. Virginia Woolf gives these moments of vision almost religious importance. They are ... the clearest expression of her vision of reality. [P. 29]

They are also the cause for considerable uncertainty if not confusion regarding the concept of time in her novels. Whether the experience of a sudden revelation, an illumination, "an inner meaning almost ex- pressed" is of something central to one's comprehension of himself, of someone else, or central to the comprehension of life, nature, or reality-it is not so much an instant of clock time as it is independent of time, transcendent of time; but what is called "timeless" is inexpressible other than in contrast to the ordinary experience of mechanical time.

The content of "a vision" is inexpressible except in contrast to a "visual perception." While both make use of the language of sight, there is no confusion over the means by which either may be verified. A perception

September 1974 143

is confirmable or not through the commonly held conditions of what is meant by optical experience; a vision is conceptual, not an optical ex-

perience, and confirmable or not only as a principle of interpretation. The one is an instance of sensation, the other is an instance of emotion or intellection. Although the words for vision are taken from the lan-

guage for seeing, the language of vision employs metaphorically what the

language of sight or visual perception uses literally.

Similarly, expressions of a moment of illumination make use of the

language of time metaphorically-the difference being that the literal

vocabulary of temporal experience, as a measure of motion, is always a means to an end; whereas the metaphoric use in expressing a moment of illumination names an experience which is an end in itself.

Time is not a phenomenon found in nature. But in nature there is matter in motion which shows rhythmic similarities. Time is the man- made means of measuring motion by mechanical techniques for dividing a continuum, according to an arbitrary scheme, into separable but equiv- alent units. The concept of a minute or of an hour, of a day or week or

year or decade offers the mathematical means for ordering-describing and relating-events which occur sequentially. It is an invaluably efficient means by which records may be kept, in order for comparisons to be made, in order for patterns to emerge, in order for extrapolation to be calculated, in order for choices to be exercised. As an invention of human intellect, it is an expression of a value, namely, a simple, not to

say elegant, efficiency for the formulation of regularities-which offers a standard against which to contrast aberrations in the processes of na- ture. In other words, the measurement of motion and their variations in nature; but, as such, it expresses only,one value: the efficiency of mea- surement in arithmetic terms.

Felt time, existential time, expresses the value of differences rather than similarities among experiences. One day drags and another races. One hour is full and another is empty. One week is heavenly and another hellish. In order to express qualities of experience (in direct contrast to quantities of experience) through the metaphoric use of "time" is to play feeling and thought of the value of an experience privately held and not translatable into mathematical terms against an awareness of the measurement of motion which is publicly held and

expressed in equal units (one minute, one day, one week, etc.).

If, instead, one reifies time and mistakes it for an entity rather than the expression of a mathematized use value, one may conclude (as James Hafley [1963] does) that what Virginia Woolf attempted to show in Mrs. Dalloway is "that there is no such thing as a single day." But Virginia

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144 Morris Philipson Mrs. Dalloway

Woolf is not a philosopher of time. She is a poet of human existence, which occurs in space and through time. Human beings are creatures of nature; and nature demonstrates change. Mathematical time, which is

always the same, is one measure of change; but felt time, which is never identical, is given expression through metaphors played against mechan- ical time. In contrast to inanimate objects or botanical and biological life lived exclusively through instinct, human life is profoundly affected by the memories of previous events and the anticipation of future events. Thus, the sense in which Hafley means "there is no such thing as a single day" is that the characters in Mrs. Dalloway show how the experience of any period of time felt as the present is not limited to itself (single) any more than a person is isolated in himself-for the reason that one's present personal experience results from what one brings to it from the past-as well as one's hopes or fears of what might happen in the future-played against what is encountered at "present."

The Moment is an apotheosis of an enormous intensity of emotion or of thought, which we may call "timeless," because the value that it has for us is of so much greater importance than the value we attach to ordinary events. The only way to express the qualitative difference is to metaphorically annihilate the quantitative equivalent. Thus, "the Mo- ment" is not similar to "the Minute" or "the Hours." The word comes from the Latin, momentum. Virginia Woolf's use of it is less dependent upon its reference to mechanical time-as for brevity-than upon its sense of importance, its gravitas, as in the phrase, "a business of great moment." It is that by which we are most moved-raised up, fulfilled in thought and feeling, illuminated: the momentous event.

It may be that some critics have been stimulated by Mrs. Dalloway to take off on flights of fancy regarding the philosophy of time because the literary structure of the novel employs the device of announcing clock time-hourly and occasionally quarter-hourly-in order to locate tem-

porally the experiences of the characters portrayed, just as it employs the device of naming the parks or the streets or the buildings in which the character is present to identify his physical location spatially. But the streets and the parks and the buildings also have a history. And the thought is also present in the novel that long before the history of Lon- don began there existed the natural phenomenon of the contours of the land, of marsh and of trees and of the river that flows through them all.

When she wishes to or needs to seek for greater strength to reaffirm herself, Mrs. Dalloway thinks of trees, looks to the sky, and expresses an emotion through the imagery of water: of ponds or brooks or lakes or rivers, the sea. And the tolling of the bells from the various towers and steeples of London, which mark the hours throughout the day, are almost always associated with the rippling of circles as caused by a stone

September 1974 145

dropped in water. Thus, through the imagery, the instances of clock time are themselves reunited with change in nature-the movements of which mechanical time was originally created to measure. Water imagery throughout the writings of Virginia Woolf serves either to remind one of the ultimately all-embracing Nature of which human life is a part, out of which it comes and back to which it returns, or to represent merging into something greater than oneself.

The range of literary expression lies along a spectrum between chaos at one extreme and cliche at the other. This is analogous to the range of events in consciousness, from psychosis at one extreme to rigidity and dessication at the other. The focus of Virginia Woolf's prose fiction is the character of private consciousness, the quality of shared experience, and the place of human life in history and nature. Out of history: what threatens human life are such forces as result in economic catastrophe, social ostracism, or political and military conflict. But whatever threatens the conditions of life is not so terrible as what threatens the value of living. It is not that the unexamined life is not worth living but, rather, for life to be distinctly human is equivalent to saying an unexamined life is not possible. Still, mental chaos is the threat to normal "examination," and psychosis thus breaks down the possibility of being human. Why the dynamic structure of a psyche loses sanity remains unknown. Why some people are able to cope with shocking experiences while others are overwhelmed remains a mystery. In any event, the danger of psychic disintegration-like one's mortality-is a threat to everyone at all times.

Clarissa Dalloway experiences visions, fantasies, terrors very similar to those of Septimus Warren Smith. When his great message is ready to be presented to the prime minister it will state: "First that trees are alive; next there is no crime; next love, universal love." But he will not be ready to present the message, for to do that requires admitting to or accepting certain "facts in the outside world" of which he is no longer capable. He can no longer participate; he can only withdraw. When he is threatened with loss of the conditions under which he can endure his withdrawal, he chooses to annihilate himself. But Clarissa Dalloway has not lost her sanity. She accepts those "facts in the outside world." Her tendencies may be those of a mystic, but she is a realist as well.

Virginia Woolf was acutely concerned with the differences between sane and insane states of mind, whether they differ in degree or in kind. The following commentary from Leonard Woolf 's autobiography (1963) is especially poignant:

One might be inclined to say that "insanity" of the kind which was a perpetual menace and terrifying curse in Virginia's life is solely a matter of degree, the degree of duration or violence of mental

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states which habitually, in certain circumstances, occur in everyone. In that case everyone is slightly and incipiently insane, and Virginia differed from ordinary "sane" persons only because, when she had a "breakdown," there was a great increase in the degree of intensity and duration of symptoms which occurred in her when she was "sane" and occur in all other people, "sane" or "insane." I do not think this view is correct. For nearly 30 years I had to study Virginia's mind.with the greatest intensity, for it was only by recog- nizing the first, most tenuous mental symptoms of fatigue that we could take in time the steps to prevent a serious breakdown. I am sure that, when she had a breakdown, there was a moment when she passed from what can be rightly called sanity to insanity. On one side of this line was a kind of mental balance, a psychological coherence between intellect and emotion, an awareness and accep- tance of the outside world and a rational reaction to it; on the other side were violent emotional instability and oscillation, a sudden change in a large number of intellectual assumptions upon which, often unconsciously, the mental outlook and actions of everyone are based, a refusal to admit or accept facts in the outside world. [P. 78]

Comparing E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, S. P. Rosenbaum [1971] calls both

philosophical realists, and there is something of the mystic in each as well. Ignoring either aspect results in misrepresentation, though in fact it is the realistic assumptions that are most often overlooked.

Consciousnesses are indirectly related to one another in Mrs. Dalloway by a web of their perceptions. The warp and woof of this web are the various perceptions of space and of time. ... The spatial perceptions that link consciousness are often of an external event that provides a transition in the novel of one mind to another.... The pervasiveness of London in Mrs. Dalloway comes from Virginia Woolf's concern with her characters' awareness of their environment; a city is a very convenient setting in which to represent shared objects of perception and different responses to them....

Even the function of time past in Mrs. Dalloway is part of the novel's philosophical realism that presents time as something that is experienced by consciousnesses ... and that they share in the per- ception of....

Just what other rooms and their occupants have to do with the mystical experience of closeness in Virginia Woolf 's art can be seen in Moore's and Russell's early philosophical realism; other people and the mystical center are both independent of our consciousness of them [pp. 331-46]:

objective facts in the outside world which we can order for our experi- ence with clock time.

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Critical Inquiry September 1974

But insights into the inner meaning of a person, or of life in general, are "momentary in duration and ecstatic in character," which we de- scribe in the vocabulary of felt time. Such insights are always subjective, although what binds different people together is what they are conscious of in common. Mutual ecstacy-being the ultimate shared experience -the ultimate merging of subject and object, may well be called mystical, inasmuch as objective confirmation of it is not possible. But there is

nothing unknowable about the physical basis of that quality of experi- ence: it is sexual. One must not forget the importance of her sensuality, as E. M. Forster (1947) wrote about it, in the works of Virginia Woolf. "Closeness" is the essential operational metaphor. Sexual intercouse is the ultimate achievement of physical closeness, of sharing, of merging.

I submit that the intimations of"inner meanings" as presented in this novel should be reread as transpositions from the language of sexual intercourse to the language of idealized consciousness, that is, from

physical sensation to felt thought. Consider the imagery employed when Mrs. Dalloway reminds herself of her experiences of love:

It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pres- sure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close with- drew; the hard softened. It was over-the moment. [P. 47]

What is implied by the phrase "inner meaning"-secret, hidden, private-discoverable only by letting go of the protecting, preserving defenses of the self merged in the most fulfilling involvement with another, through rhythmic participation and withdrawal, is expressed in the superb image of"a match burning in a crocus." The ecstatic, climactic moment bursts into the vision of a flower, even a common flower, a crocus, seen, first as an object of beauty only: for flowers are felt to be useless, as having no use for us other than as objects for aesthetic con- templation, and then, as a match-straight, hard in the center-burning. Thus, the vividness of the visual perception is combined with the thrill of a danger involved, the inherent destructive potential of fire. Thereby, the flower image is experienced as an event, a performance, not a useful means to an end other than itself but of use only as expressive of con- summatory pleasure, an end in itself. Expressions of such moments of insight characterize culminating experiences in answer to the question: "What will ever be enough?" to make life worth living.

This is what I take Mrs. DaUoway to be about: the appreciation of

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148 Morris Philipson Mrs. Dalloway

consummatory pleasure. Clarissa Dalloway loves life but feels fragile and threatened. Her pursuit of reassurance results in her confirmation that the value of life is continually rediscovered in such experiences of daily life as result in consummatory pleasure. Virginia Woolf's pursuit of the "inner meaning" of life is the literary artist's search for the intelligible equivalents in social intercourse to consummatory sensory experience, those secular situations of revelation in which it is possible to come to

peace in the belief: "It is enough."

Works Cited

Bell, Quentin. 1972. Virginia Woolf. New York. Daiches, David. 1960. The Novel and the Modern World. Rev. ed. Chicago.

1963. Virginia Woolf. Rev. ed. New York. Forster, E. F. 1947. Virginia Woolf. Cambridge. Hafley, James R. 1963. The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as a Novelist. New York. Rosenbaum, S. P., ed. 1971. English Literature and British Philosophy. Chicago. Schaefer, Josephine O'Brien. 1965. The Three-Fold Nature of Reality in the Novels of Virginia

Woolf. The Hague. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. 1968. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Chicago. Woolf, Leonard. 1963. Beginning Again. New York. Woolf, Virginia. 1925. Mrs. Dalloway. London.

1953. A Writer's Diary. New York.