Clarissa Dalloway, an average housewife in turn of the century London, is pondering her party later in the evening, brooding over the disarray of her new hat, wondering if she should have had a lesbian love affair in her youth with her best friend, contemplating if she married the right man, and agreeing that men are indeed better than cabbages. While all this is transpiring, Peter Walsh, one of her old paramours, is back in town, recovering from a bad divorce and preparing for a new marriage. Meanwhile, Mr. Dalloway feels a love for his wife that he cannot state. Sally Seton, Clarissa’s childhood friend and possible love interest is back in town, and a totally unrelated World War I veteran, Septimus, is moaning about life, love, and cabbages. All of these mental musings transpire within one day in Mrs. Dalloway’s life following the stream of consciousness style, which attempts to portray a more realistic humanity, all the while confusing plot devices with obscure musings and unrelated, mundane life events.

When I was assigned Mrs. Dalloway in my sophomore year of college, I was delirious with delight. I was finally getting to indulge in the great Virginia Woolf! I was excited to learn of Woolf’s unique concentration on one day in the life of an average woman, seeing great potential for melancholy poignancy and deep character identification. Indeed, wouldn’t the life of an ordinary person, their hopes and dreams, appeal to everyone, touching some internal, primal level of identification with humanity secretly located in all of us? And so, full of hopes and wild romantic idealisms of Mrs. Dalloway, I opened the book and prepared to ardently love Virginia Woolf, only to come away disappointed before the first ten pages had elapsed. As the book wore on, disjointedly slinging between characters, altering the space time continuum with abandon, and offering up supposedly deep musings on the clackings of domestic trivia, I progressed from a state of confusion and mild irritation, to full blown loathing. How, indeed, did I loath this novel. Let me count the ways.

The first aspect that assaults the reader like a sledge hammer between the eyes is the writing style. Disjointed, confused, and annoyingly grandiose, Woolf has what I have termed the mile long sentence. Starting down one path, the sentence stops midway to comment on meaningless trivia, before picking up again and going off on anther tangent, ending several pages later, leaving the reader cross eyed with confusion. Of course, don’t just take my word for it. This is an example from the novel itself, pulled randomly out because, frankly, every sentence in the novel suffers from the same sickness:

“For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? Over twenty, - one feels even in the midst of traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; cant be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”
 
Firstly, allow me to congratulate the author on bestowing the largest amount of commas and semicolons ever seen in the written word since stylus was put to papyrus so many centuries ago. The above quoted section, placed on page 4 and thus one of the first impressions the reader receives, is consistent with Woolf’s style in this work, succeeding in keeping the reader continually confused, reading, and re-reading each oddly structured paragraph until a vague meaning is finally extracted with much pain and blasphemy.

Likewise, the total confusion this stream of conscious method engenders is exacerbated by a total disregard for the space time continuum, that respected scientific fortress of modern authors. Clarissa is allowed to jump between remembrances of her idyllic teen years and missed opportunities and her present day preparation for her party without any forewarning leaving the reader entirely confused, always having to read carefully, searching for those missing clues that delineates between past and present. Likewise, a similarly disjointed, unpredictable slingshot effect is created between the narration of one character which randomly jumps into the narration of another character keeping the reader continually pondering, wondering who is talking about what and, in the end, if it even really matters. After all, everything in the novel tends to focus on death, depression, random cabbages, and love affairs that could have been (if the characters had refrained from pondering and just simply lived).

And, what of the characters more specifically? Each character is expertly imbued with several facets that successfully make them utterly repugnant to the reader. Clarissa is a worrier, indulging in self doubt, contemplating the meaning of life (and cabbages), fancying herself a rather deep individual for her inability ever truly to make up mind on anything whether it concerns what hat to wear or what man to marry. Flighty and indecisive, she successfully pushes all the readers’ buttons, annoying them to no end.

Her used-to-be lover is definitely the male equivalent of her, questioning and re-questioning life, love, and hair styles jumping from one bad relationship to the next because he cannot find himself. Of course, as the novel progresses, we realize that the fool does indeed love Clarissa, but, since he is too busy philosophizing and pontificating, he never truly comes to the realization of his love, leaving the readers glowering in anger.

Septimus, the haunted WWI vet, who is obviously suffering from acute PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), is one of the more interesting individuals, although his connection to the story is tenuous until the end at which point his suicide drives Clarissa to realize that depression and death are some type of holy couple. This negative focus on depression also brings the novel down, as its entire message is a lonely dirge, revealing Woolf’s idea of humanity as a base animal, destined to meet only unhappiness and woe righteously espousing that the only true way to live life is to end it. This grand philosophical stance is offensive to most readers and degrades life and everything that humanity holds dear.

Imbued with a deliberately obtuse writing style, a black philosophy, and unsympathetic characters, Mrs. Dalloway flounders throughout, concluding as it started, ending Clarissa’s day without any actual plot progression. The tale focuses only on stream of conscious babble, regrets, characters who cannot live life or admit to their true feelings for one another, and meaningless psycho babble, culminating to produce an unsatisfying conclusion that leaves everyone and everything as we originally discovered them, solving none of the problems, healing none of the wounds, and leaving the reader with a despondent sense of grief in that the novel was so sad, and, in the conclusion, so meaningless. Is Woolf’s true message that everyone is trapped? That life is irrevocable and death is better than bearing mistakes, or other people’s cruelty? If so, then life is indeed bleak.

While I was initially delighted to enter the world of Woolf that I have heard so much wonderment over, I soon became disenchanted by the complexity of the sentence structure, the time and character confusion, and the black hearted musings of a cynical author, who seemed to see no true beauty in life, but rather longed for death too much. I respect that Woolf is a great author, but her appeal failed to reach me and in the end I must caution future readers that Woolf is an author who engenders either love or hate and I was of the later party. This will be my first, and last, entrance into any world of Woolf’s creation. Not recommended.

Countess_Eva

Recommended: No