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Scott Black: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her; the doors would be taken off their hinges. Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then thought Clarissa Dalloway, what? A morning fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark. What a plunge. For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear.

Now she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this? Of course, the air was in the early morning, the flap of a wave, the kiss of a wave, chill and sharp. And yet, for a girl of eighteen, as she then was, solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen.

Looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them, and the rooks, rising, falling, standing, and looking, until Peter Walsh said, musing among the vegetables, “Was that it? I prefer men to cauliflowers.” Was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on the terrace, Peter Walsh.

He would be back from India one of these days, June or July. She forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull. It was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocketknife, his smile, his grumpiness. And when millions of things had utterly vanished, how strange it was. A few sayings about cabbages.

Welcome to the Virtual Jewel Box Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center.

I am Scott Black, director of the Tanner Humanities Center, and that was the first page of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, written in 1925. As Mrs. Dalloway starts its second century, we’re going to try a new thing on the Virtual Jewel Box: an occasional series of discussions about great books. We’re starting with one of my very favorites, Mrs. Dalloway, and I’m joined by my colleague from the English Department, Jessica Straley, also a fan of Woolf and someone who’s just taught a class on Virginia Woolf. Welcome, Jessica.

Jessica Straley: Hi, Scott. Really happy to be here.

Scott Black: Glad you can join me to talk about Woolf’s great novel. Do you want to set the scene a little bit, talk about some of the key features of the novel that you like to start with when you talk to students about it?

Jessica Straley: Sure, I can do that. Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s fourth novel, but for a lot of classes coming to Woolf, or readers first starting with Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway is still a really good novel to start with. It’s usually considered the one where we see her accomplishing her style, although her style changes from novel to novel, which is what makes her an amazing writer.

To give listeners a really quick background: Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf were part of what we call Bloomsbury, a group of artists, authors, philosophers, initially gathered by Woolf’s brother, Thoby Stephen, when he was a student at Cambridge, and who continued to meet and talk about social issues, political issues, current events, art, the meaning of art, new ways of expression in both literature and the visual arts, in the Bloomsbury district in London.

Woolf was working as a reviewer of contemporary fiction, and she was very frustrated by the baggy realism of the Victorian style. As a Victorianist, I love the baggy realism of the Victorian style, but her lampoons are quite on the nose and very good. As an author, she still felt constrained by that style. In 1917, she and her husband started their own press, the Hogarth Press, and it was there that they could really publish what they wanted, how they wanted, not only in the content of the books they were publishing, but the material style of what the books looked like.

So this is her second novel written for the Hogarth Press, and here she develops what we might want to talk about as stream of consciousness, where the novel is weaving in and out of different people’s thoughts as they move through London.

She has this wonderful moment in a review she does of an author named Arnold Bennett, who she really takes to task because he wrote a review that criticized her previous novel. She says he has every detail, every detail of the clothes people are wearing and the wood that the banisters are made out of, and she says, “But where is life? Life escapes somehow.” It’s to capture that that she’s using this stream of consciousness style.

What that means is, in this first passage that Scott read, we’re mostly in Clarissa’s head, hearing her thoughts. But the novel weaves in and out of multiple characters, some that Clarissa knows, some that she doesn’t know, many as they pass each other on the streets of London where the novel takes place. We’re getting their thoughts to touch at something more real than realism.

If we look at this page, what I love, and what I always start with when I teach, and what I get stuck on again and again when I read, is this first sentence, which almost says everything we need to know: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Completely mundane sentence. You can read that and pass over it. Okay, who’s this lady, and she’s going to buy flowers.

And yet, in this three-part repetition of the character, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” there are three different versions of character being represented here. The Mrs. Dalloway, her official title, her social standing, the one who speaks, the one who exists at the level of discourse, “said she would buy the flowers.” The second “she,” the doing, the active, the she who is declaring she’s going to buy the flowers herself, moving independently, almost immediately away from Mrs. Dalloway, her social title. She’s not going to have the servants do it. She’s going to buy the flowers. She’s going to cross London. She’s going to have this experience.

But the one that the sentence lands on, “herself,” that’s the one that Woolf is trying to get at. That’s subjective selfhood, and that is the project of the novel. And that self is something adjacent to, attached to, but not completely contained by the Mrs. Dalloway and the she that come earlier in the sentence.

Scott Black: It’s really interesting because it’s a third-person sentence that is an omniscient narrator telling you what Mrs. Dalloway said to Lucy, who we hear from the next moment, but there’s a subtle shift in that third person. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” is actually reporting what Mrs. Dalloway thought and said, in what we call free indirect discourse, which is the representation of someone’s thinking in their own terms in a third-person narration.

The rest of the passage I read before is actually what Mrs. Dalloway is thinking. “For Lucy had her work cut out for her.” This is why Mrs. Dalloway said to Lucy, “I’m going to buy the flowers myself.” And then the next paragraph, “What a lark, what a plunge,” is fully within Clarissa’s head. It’s her memories of the time when she was eighteen at Bourton, and she’s comparing the morning she’s stepping out into in London in the 1920s.

This is a postwar novel, set after World War I, in a recovering, or partially recovering, London. Septimus Smith is one of the main characters. He is a war veteran with what was then called shell shock, what we would call PTSD. Her friend Peter, whom we’ve met, is another of the main characters. She has a husband, Richard. She has a daughter. Her daughter has a tutor. There are all kinds of people who show up in the novel.

The main characters, however, are Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus, and the novel spends the most time in each of their heads, although it jumps out into other heads.

To back up a second: “What a lark. What a plunge.” I always imagine Clarissa standing on one of those London stoops, about to walk down the stairs, thinking about stepping down the stairs and what a beautiful morning it is. This beautiful morning reminds her of this morning at her family’s house in the country, Bourton, when she’s eighteen years old, as we find out, “for a girl of eighteen, as she then was,” and she’s imagining stepping down the stoop in London in the same way that she stepped out of the French windows at Bourton on this really gorgeous spring day.

Jessica Straley: Part of that self, that herself, is about memory. This novel takes place on a singular day in June in 1922 for Clarissa, but it also contains this previous day thirty-four or thirty-five years earlier. She’s at this summer house. She’s with Peter, this friend of hers from her youth. She remembers him. He comes to visit during this day in the present as well. He’s in London, and both go back and forth remembering their previous relationship.

They almost married. He wanted to marry her. She married someone else. They’re remembering a summer when she makes the decision to marry someone else, when their relationship comes to an end, and that lives within this moment and their relationship in the present day.

Scott Black: They have remained very close friends. There’s a sense that each of them feels almost closer to each other than they do to anyone else, including their current spouses. Richard Dalloway, including Peter—he’s been married once, he’s now about to marry again. He’s been in India as a colonial administrator. But they still feel incredibly close.

There’s a scene, as you said, where Peter has just come back from India, as he told Clarissa he would. She doesn’t remember exactly when, but then he shows up at her house. There’s a really powerful scene where they’re together and all this stuff is coming back to them.

The book itself is full of Clarissa’s thoughts, her stream of consciousness, but it dives into memory as our consciousness does. Suddenly things remind her of Peter. Their day, where they each spend time walking around London and thinking, is full of that summer. They’re both remembering this summer kind of in concert but separately, this really momentous moment where Clarissa chose to marry Richard instead of Peter.

Jessica Straley: You like this part of the first passage, the movement from her present material reality to what’s happening in her memory at the little squeak of the hinges.

Scott Black: Right.

Jessica Straley: What’s happening in the house is she’s planning a party that night. Lucy, who we’ve mentioned several times, is one of the servants working in the Dalloway household. Other people are there to take the doors off the hinges, the interior doors, to allow more flow of the partygoers.

When she hears that little squeak of the hinges, she hears another squeak of the hinges, which is what you were saying, throwing open the French windows of this summer home on the coast. It is that sound that moves her into the past. That is what Woolf is capturing, not only this movement, but what moves us. Those lovely little sounds or little things that happen are also what connect the characters as we move through London.

She’s crossing the street and a car backfires. She hears the car backfire. Everyone else hears the car backfire, and Woolf moves us from Clarissa hearing it to another character hearing it. Those are the hinges. They’re literally hinges, right? The hinges from one character to another, from one state of being to another, from one sense of reality to another.

Scott Black: Exactly. The first time we hear Septimus Smith, who is just one of a group of passersby on the sidewalk, the first time we meet him and his wife, Rezia, is when they are hearing that car backfiring, which sounds like a gun to some people. That’s significant. It’s significant because this is a moment of postwar London, a moment of peace after World War I has finished.

It’s significant that what sounds like a gun is actually just a mundane car backfiring. But for Septimus, or for some people, that memory of the war is still very much with them. This is a thematic point of the novel, the unequal recovery from the war.

Before we get away from the first passage, I want to say one last thing about it. When Clarissa says, “What a lark, what a plunge,” this is a moment where she’s plunging physically down the stoop, but Woolf also builds in a plunge into memory. As she’s walking down the stoop in front of her house in London, she’s also plunging into the past.

This is something the novel keeps saying. “She comes back,” is what Peter thinks of Clarissa at the strangest times. He’ll suddenly think of her. Clarissa keeps saying this about Peter. He comes back.

Let’s read just a little bit more. This is from the second page of the novel:

“For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? Over twenty—one feels even in the midst of the 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; can’t 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; and the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved: life; London; this moment of June.”

It’s absolutely wonderful prose. One of the things I love most about Woolf is what she talks about as waves. She talks a lot about waves. She’s got a novel entitled The Waves. The rhythm of the prose itself is so compelling. If you hear it read, if you read it to yourself, you’re caught up in the rhythm. She’s a master of the semicolon, that lost form of punctuation that’s somewhere between a comma and a period, giving you just the pause you need to capture the rhythm of the sentence, but driving you forward so you never come to a complete stop.

What’s going on in this passage is, for me, thematically central to the whole novel. The problem of making it up as she goes along is her account of perception. Perception is an active activity. “How one sees it: so making it up, building it round one.” We’re not passively receiving things. We’re participating in the construction of our experience of the world through the act of seeing it.

There’s also the idea of love. Everyone feels this sense of beauty, or some kind of commitment or passion for the world. Then she has, for me, almost a Walt Whitman–like list of all the things she’s seeing in London, concluding with what she loved: life, London, this moment of June.

Jessica Straley: It’s worth noting that this novel occurs over the course of a single day, and yet that day contains her entire life and all of the characters’ entire lives because of the way memory or selfhood or consciousness works. It is a love story. The novel is a love story to life, London, this moment in June.

What you’re saying about perception tells us a lot about Clarissa. We learn she has a heart problem. We learn she has problematic attitudes about the unhoused. We learn she’s taken in by the technologies of traffic and transportation. You mentioned car backfires. That’s new in 1925. We’re at the beginning of automobile transportation.

Big Ben is an important figure here. The clock gives a sense of official time that is subjectively understood. “There it boomed.” First a warning, musical, then the hour irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolve in the air. I’ve always been taken by this image of sound as a physical manifestation. As it dissolves, the hour is there; time has passed.

This comes right after a parenthetical about her own mortality, the sickness in her heart. It’s as if those leaden circles are the parentheses, dissolving into the narrative, as the past comes into the present and the present into the past. Time is heavy, but it also evaporates and allows us to move back and forth.

Scott Black: The prose is capturing the sound waves themselves. On the first page, when she talks about something awful about to happen, that’s an older sense of awful, more literally full of awe. Awesome is what we would say. That sense of awe is what Big Ben suggests here.

This novel tells time throughout. Big Ben keeps striking every fifteen minutes. The plot, such as it is, is Clarissa throwing a party. The flowers she said she would buy herself are for the party that night. The novel ends with an absolutely gorgeous scene of this party where all her acquaintances and old friends gather. Peter comes. Sally Seton comes. The Prime Minister comes. Richard Dalloway is a Member of Parliament. William Bradshaw, the doctor who has treated Septimus disastrously, comes.

Everyone we’ve met throughout the day gathers at Clarissa’s house. This is something Clarissa feels good about: she can put together a good party. Peter used to tease her, calling her the perfect hostess in disdain. She’s embarrassed by this, but it turns out she’s great at it.

The idea of making it up, building it round one, is a suggestion of Clarissa’s real gift: bringing people together. It’s what consciousness does. It’s what she does socially. It’s what the novel does, bringing all these people together in one narrative that slides in and out of them.

Jessica Straley: We open with her thinking about taking the doors off the hinges for the practical realities of a party, so people can move from one room to another and form new constellations. The party takes the doors off the hinges. It allows connection between minds, between consciousnesses.

The party is a bourgeois luxury, but it’s also about real human connection with limits. We’ve talked about this later in the novel: how close can you be? What is being too close? That plays into why she doesn’t marry Peter and marries Richard instead.

Scott Black: I want to talk about Sally Seton. Sally is the other major figure in the Bourton memory. She barges in. She is exuberant. She’s an early twentieth-century New Woman. She shocks Clarissa’s father. She smokes. She cuts off the stems of flowers and floats the heads in bowls of water. Clarissa, Peter, and Sally are intensely close. Clarissa is erotically in love with Sally.

There’s a moment where Clarissa stands at the top of the stairs holding a watering can and thinks, Sally is in this house. They kiss. It’s a momentous kiss. But this is 1922 Britain. Lesbianism is not accepted. Nothing comes of it. Sally marries. Clarissa never thinks of marrying Sally. That wouldn’t be possible.

Jessica Straley: Part of the beauty of that relationship is that it’s removed from the expectations of marriage. That gives it freedom. It’s of the moment. The prospect of marriage would almost ruin it.

Scott Black: When Clarissa decides to marry Richard, Peter sees it as a cop-out. The novel is concerned with connection, but also with its limits. Septimus Smith is also concerned with connection, but for him it’s overwhelming. His shell shock makes the world unmanageable. Things Clarissa values terrify him.

Jessica Straley: What brings Clarissa joy brings him terror. The airplane overhead, the car backfire, these sounds are horrifying for Septimus. The present moment contains the violence of war for him.

Scott Black: Peter thinks they went in and out of each other’s minds effortlessly. That’s what the novel does stylistically. Yet Clarissa chooses Richard. She’s happy because there’s space in her marriage. They communicate without talking. Clarissa thinks boundaries are necessary.

The novel is empathetic, but it also recognizes the necessity of privacy. Clarissa reflects on the privacy of the soul. The novel respects that discretion.

Jessica Straley: There’s a moment where Richard brings Clarissa flowers. He wants to tell her he loves her, but he can’t say it. For students, this looks like failure, but it’s chosen. Clarissa wants distance. Her memories are hers. They’re not for Richard. That privacy is essential to selfhood.

Scott Black: This is difficult for students. It seems cold or upper class. But silence can be part of good relationships. Silence is as important as sound. Woolf’s rhythm depends on both.

Jessica Straley: And now we’re back to the glory of the semicolon.

Scott Black: Exactly.

Jessica Straley: The semicolon allows connection with separation. It gives clauses discrete identity while connecting them. The grammar is thematically relevant.

Scott Black: This is why Woolf is brilliant. Sound, punctuation, and sense come together. Every moment contains every other moment. Punctuation becomes meaning and sound at the same time.

Jessica Straley: My students told me the semicolon has become significant in suicide prevention messaging. It means the sentence continues. There’s something on the other side. That fits this love of life, despite mortality and trauma.

Scott Black: That’s lovely. Let’s end with the semicolon. There’s much more to Mrs. Dalloway and to Woolf. There’s more to discover. There’s more to love. Thanks so much for talking with me, Jessica.

Jessica Straley: This was great.

Scott Black: Please go read Mrs. Dalloway. It’s an absolutely wonderful novel.

You’ve been listening to the Virtual Jewel Box Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center. Our music is Jelly Roll Morton’s “Perfect Rag.” Thanks for joining us.