I'd like to think I have a healthy skepticism of the canon, particularly the idea that writers of previous generations had some mysterious skills missing in modern writers. Yet reading Moby Dick earlier this year, and now Mrs. Dalloway, has suggested to me that there's a reason these texts endure. They assume the reader is intelligent and thoughtful; that the reader is willing to work for a literary reward. They're books that provoke discussion and rereads. Like Moby Dick, Mrs. Dalloway is not an easy read, but I felt something gained in the effort.
At its core, Mrs. Dalloway is a simple story. It follows one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-crust woman living in London in the 1920s, as she prepares to host a party that night. Clarissa's life intersects with a number of people, including Peter Walsh, a friend from her youth recently returned from India who is still in love with Clarissa; and Septimus Smith, a suicidal WW1 veteran.
Woolf structures her novel in a stream-of-consciousness style that reminded me of Ellman's Ducks, Newburyport. Both novels flip our expectations of narrative. In a traditional novel, the focus is on the physical reality--who's talking, what's happening, what's visible--with occasional glimpses into the characters' interior realities. Conversely, in these novels, the characters' interior is made primary, with the tangible taking the backseat to reflections, memories, anxieties, and questions. Ducks, Newburyport follows only its protagonist, but Woolf instead jumps into the minds of dozens of characters with abandon--not only significant characters like Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus, but even minor passing characters. The effect is disorienting but expansive and allows Woolf to explore just how little we understand of others' thoughts.
One of Woolf's great tools for this effect is the semicolon, an underrated punctuation mark (I think I've been prejudiced by Vonnegut's curmudgeonly warning that "All [semicolons] do it show you've been to college"). Ellman's novel is one giant sentence--a powerful effect, but one that dilutes the individual power of the semicolon when the entire structure is reliant on it. Woolf, instead, uses semicolons liberally but intentionally, a way of emphasizing how disparate elements combine to frame our thoughts and emotions. Take this sentence--one of my favorites--from Clarissa's point of view very early in the novel:
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. (4)
In the semicolons, you see Clarissa's joy at London--and it's not just one element of London, but her existence within a busy and happening London that makes her think, "this is life! I'm a part of it!"*
Colons are assertive and absolute; they know the truth. Semicolons are reflective and connective; they suggest relationships and inter-connectedness. Woolf's novel is predicated on this inter-connectedness, and the semicolons are an essential tool in conveying that message.
The least obvious connection, at first glance, is between Clarissa and Septimus, who never meet, though Clarissa hears about his suicide during her party. Septimus is suffering some sort of PTSD following his time in World War I and is appalled by what he perceives as his lack of feeling, particularly over the death of his friend Evans. Throughout the novel, Septimus' wife Rezia tries to get Septimus medical help, but the doctors are dismissive and reductive. After experiencing a lovely moment with his wife, Septimus dies by suicide after throwing himself out a window--attempting to preserve that ephemeral happiness--rather than be subject to the doctor's misguided attempts to "cure" him through rest (in other words, nothingness).
Unlike Septimus, Clarissa is not suicidal, and she experiences a range of emotions. Yet she feels a kindship with Septimus--"She felt somehow very like him"--and she feels "glad that he had done it; thrown it away." Woolf tells us Septimus "made [Clarissa] feel the beauty; made her feel the fun" (186). She sees the beauty in the world evoked in that early thought about London and realizes the importance of claiming her place within it.
There's so much within Mrs. Dalloway I haven't touched on at all, particularly the love between Clarissa and Peter, and the love between Clarissa and her childhood friend Sally. It's another book that makes me eager to take a college English class again.**
*A needless aside, but reading this sentence immediately made me think of my time at Vanderbilt as an undergraduate. I'd be walking through the quad on my way to class; it would be spring, the sky a perfect cloudless blue. I'd feel my backpack on my back. I'd see people walking by, and I'd think "they know I belong here." And though I couldn't write it nearly so well, that moment could be perfectly evoked by my version of that final part of Woolf's sentence--"was what she loved; life; [Nashville]; this moment in [April]."
**This didn't fit naturally above, but Mrs. Dalloway is now part of a series of novels I've read recently that take place in or around the 1920s: Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nick, and The Great Gatsby (which I just finished teaching). It's not surprising that Nick, the only modern book of the four, takes an absurdly grim picture of WW1--and life in general. Smith thinks people struggling thrash on the floor and make bold pronouncements. Though none of the books are uplifting novels, the three written during the time period have a more nuanced view of human nature, recognizing the ways in which happiness and sadness, hope and despair, coexist--or ebb and flow--against a society that suggests we behave "normally."
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