Woolfin' It Up: The Role of Women in Virginia Woolf's Later Fiction

"A Sister, Less Smiling, More Formidable"
The Military England of Mrs. Dalloway

Addison Godel
Virginia Woolf And The Fabric of Things
Instructor: Dr. David Bradshaw
Worcester College, Oxford

The novel Mrs. Dalloway is widely recognized as encompassing a wide range of social criticisms aimed at a truculent England by a sharp-eyed Virginia Woolf. Perhaps the most interesting of these critiques are those which concern the British military culture (and by extension, World War One) and its implications. While Dr. David Bradshaw may be correct that “Woolf’s fourth novel is a commemorative text which memorialises the dead of the First World War in a variety of ways even as it dissents from the necrolatry of the state,” the emphasis is clearly on dissenting, pointing the finger at the contemporary military complex. She is refusing to let the decision-makers (a class which she personally was prevented from entering) get away with their indefensible war and the indoctrination of future soldiers for future indefensible wars. Two curious elements within the novel will help us to perceive this subtle attack: the strange lack of direct encounters with the horrors of the war, and the presence of tremendous amounts of encoded violence throughout the novel. Let us begin with the first of these.

A Gap In History

A vast gulf seems to separate the idyllic youthful world of Bourton from the present-day events that create the novel’s story. The missing decades are like a blind spot; it is as if all the characters are suffering from post-traumatic retrograde amnesia. The very first page finds Clarissa noting what a nice day it is and plunging back thirty years to Bourton, as if no more recent pleasant days are handy to recall. The only relatively recent development in Clarissa’s life that we know anything about is her occasionally-mentioned “illness,” whose details are as unclear as that of the illness which has apparently befallen unseen character Evelyn Whitbread (mentioned on page 5). Then there is Peter Walsh, who knows nothing of the recent past in Clarissa’s life and “suspects” that the five years of his absence (1918-1923, during which the post-war mindset was developing) “had been … somehow very important.” (p 61) A woman named Maisie Johnson, looking at Septimus and his wife, mentally skips back to her first visit to Regent’s Park, a full fifty years into the past. The events of the nineteen-teens – the influenza pandemic, and especially the First World War – repel memory for the characters, the majority of whom (it is worthwhile to note) are of the middle or upper classes. For them, the war is “over, except for someone like Mrs Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin…” (p 4) Obviously, the war was something far more serious and horrible to those whose lives were destroyed by it.

But again, for the elites, the War shows up only as it relates to certain casual daily-life annoyances. Clarissa notes “a glove shop where, before the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves” (p 9). Presumably, one cannot find such gloves there now; there is no way to know for sure, because Clarissa does not conduct her train of thought through the War and its consequences. Lucrezia, Septimus’s suffering wife, reflects (concerning Evans’s death) that “Such things happen to everyone. Everyone has friends who were killed in the War. Everyone gives up something when they marry.” (p 56) And Mr. Brewer offers a glimpse into how a well-to-do Englishman (he is identified as Septimus’s boss and “managing clerk” at a made-up firm) views the war:

[He] was seeing his way to consider recommending a rise of salary, when something happened which threw out many of Mr Brewer’s calculations, took away his ablest young fellows, and eventually, so prying and insidious were the fingers of the European War, smashed a plaster cast of Ceres, ploughed a hole in the geranium beds, and utterly ruined the cook’s nerves at Mr Brewer’s establishment at Muswell Hill. (p 73)

The war is an annoyance, a minor disaster at worst, for Mr. Brewer – but it is treated as an entity unto itself, not the work of men, which Woolf clearly recognizes it as (see Jacob’s Room). It is an unexpected development, like a rainstorm on the day of a planned picnic; one pictures Mr. Brewer snapping his fingers in frustration, shaking his head, and remarking “Rotten luck, that war coming along.” It is hard to sympathize with such terribly exhausting concerns when Woolf pointedly presents the much more horrible consequences of the war through the experiences of the traumatized Septimus.

This detachment from reality and history is also evoked by those uses of figurative language which call up versions of warfare that were clearly antiquated in 1924. The characters think in terms of horses and riders; with a moment’s thought to the new and horrifying character of the First World War, these images would have been tossed aside as absurdities. Clarissa and Peter’s awkward conversation is like the scene “before a battle begins [;] the horses paw the ground; toss their heads; the light shines on their flanks; their necks curve.” (p 37-38) Then there are Peter’s visions of the solitary traveller, which include an elderly woman who seems “to search for a rider destroyed; to be the figure of the mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of the world.” (p 49)

Ingrained Violence

So, memory of the War in the England of Mrs. Dalloway is deliberately elusive; the characters have clearly not come to terms with its meaning and its existence. But they are not strangers to war in a subtler way, because violence and death wriggle nastily beneath the surface of Mrs. Dalloway’s world. Consider Peter Walsh, a respectable (if not entirely successful) member of society whose frankly disturbing habit of playing with a pocket-knife is written off by those who know him as an eccentric quirk. Indeed, in the very first paragraph in which Peter speaks, Clarissa notes “He had his knife out. That’s so like him.” (p 35) Many paragraphs might be dedicated, as well, to the horrific content of Septimus’s hallucinations. But violence is found outside of specific individuals; the prose itself is saturated with it. We have “discreet dowagers […] shooting out in their motor cars” (p 4, emphasis added), and Clarissa who “sliced like a knife through everything” and thinks it is “very, very dangerous to live even one day” (p 7). A motorcar backfiring startles her: “oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!” (p 12) Lucy handles Mrs. Dalloway’s parasol “like a sacred weapon” on page 25; on the next page the reader is informed that Clarissa “pierces” a pincushion. And as Clarissa reflects on Bourton, she comes to Sally’s picking of “all sorts of flowers that had never been seen together – [she] cut their heads off, and made them swim on the top of water in bowls.” (p 29) Shortly after, in the present, Clarissa feels a spasm and “icy claws” within her (p 31); talking to Peter, she “shapes” Daisy in her mind “with three strokes of a knife.” (p 39) Peter imagines “skeletons” beneath Regent’s park; a “silver casket” is among the objects Lucy arranges for the party (p 32). And so on and so on.

However, from the third page of Mrs. Dalloway, the most overwhelming violent presence is none other than Big Ben, whose ringing is heard everywhere and which is described in ways that remind one distinctly of war; it is funereal, explosive, and unstoppable. The bell booms “warnings" (p 4); its stroke, like some poisonous gas, is “wafted over the northern part of London […] and [dies] up there.” (p 80) We are also given reminders that the clock’s sounding is arbitrary, the result of human decisions: first, there are the bells of St. Margaret’s, which are shown as ringing two minutes after Big Ben (example, p 108); second, there is the casual mentioning of “the great revolution of Mr. Willett’s summer time” (p 137) – a reference to the recent and war-imposed innovation of daylight savings time. Big Ben is not time itself, but man-made time, part of the man-made system of society.

And as a representative of that society, it is profoundly warlike. Over and over, the sounding of the bells is associated with a variation on the sentence “The leaden circles dissolved in the air.” (pp 4, 41, 80, etc) Elsewhere, it brings to mind “a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, […] swinging dumb-bells this way and that.” (p 41) In other words, Big Ben’s ringing is an indiscriminate display of force, launched from above and making its presence known physically to all below in the form of a leaden orb expanding out into space: Big Ben is a cannon, its bells exploding shells. Representing not merely the passing of time, it is the physical avatar of contemporary British military values.

Denial and Repression

We see clearly that while the war is over, and its consequences lamely lamented, the spirit of war in the general sense is still very much a part of the world Woolf is observing, and excess violence seems to be spilling out everywhere. We may find it useful to view this as a case of repressed thoughts. In the 1920s, the English government was active in memorialising the war through such ceremonial objects as the Cenotaph and such ceremonies as the “11 o’clock Silence.”^[1] The Cenotaph and its cousins memorialise but do not apologize; the forces that unleashed the First World War remained intact in the 1920s, and the culture was saturated by a strange collective denial. The war had taken place, and it was a tragedy – but not one worth lingering on, or worth changing anything over. The London of Mrs. Dalloway is saturated with subconscious violence, but its people avoid, with great zeal, any direct confrontation with the facts of the Great War. They are in fact not able to, because their society and their government are still just as deeply militaristic and destructive as they always have been (if not more so). This becomes painfully clear as Peter Walsh watches a procession of young soldiers in the Territorial Army^[2] marching to the empty tomb. These young men (described as “weedy for the most part, boys of sixteen” [p 43]) have already been seized by the military culture, and their description suggests that they are both weapons and victims of the state:

“Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England […] and sure enough, on they marched […] in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline.” (pp 43-44)

Notably, the marchers, human embodiments of the official script for memorialising the war, leave Peter and everyone else nearby behind. Also notably, Peter’s eye wanders from the marchers to the statues of Nelson, Gordon, and Havelock, made into black silhouettes by the sun; the boy soldiers are linked to the wars of the past, and perhaps the future - after all, Virginia Woolf could not know in 1924 that these particular young men would escape the next major war. What is striking in this scene is that the state (and by extension, English society) is capable of memorialising the dead of one war, and simultaneously perpetuating the spirit of war for the future. The doublethink surrounds and ultimately destroys Septimus. And this same doublethink induces the leakage of violence - displaced from the characters’ official “the war is over” thoughts, it oozes out into the world around them and the very language used to portray them, as seen above.

All this talk of denial and repressed thoughts may seem a bit of a stretch – especially given Woolf’s professed distaste for psychoanalysis – but denial is plainly a powerful force in Mrs. Dalloway concerning subjects other than the war. Consider Peter Walsh’s inability to come to terms with his feelings for Clarissa, and his vigorous attempts to tear down her character in his mind. The reader shakes her head knowingly when Walsh declares to himself, “No, no, no! He was not in love with her any more!” (p 65) Similarly, on page 67 he makes a resolution that it is impossible for him to be as hurt by Daisy as he was by Clarissa; on page 68 he is made jealous and “furious” by a casual comment in one of Daisy’s letters. Woolf plainly is giving us a man in denial, and leaves it up to us to deduce that this denial is one of the many things keeping him from a happy life.

Denial is also crucial in Septimus’s story, and plays a much more critical role in illuminating how deeply the forces behind the war were still a part of common sense and good-Englishmanism in 1924. Note the way in which Septimus’s declining mental health is linked to his denial of his feelings - this unhealthy denial is in turn linked back to military training: it was during the war that he “congratulated himself on feeling very little and very reasonably” on the death of his friend Evans (p 73). This military training is itself linked back to the pre-war advice of Septimus’s civilian boss, our friend Mr. Brewer, that football would do the young man some good; completing the circle, Holmes in the present day lamely advises Septimus that “When he felt like that […] he took a day off with his wife and played golf.” (p 77) Woolf clearly establishes that, in the life of Septimus, denial is unhealthy, and is deeply linked to the forces of modern medicine, English society, and especially militarism. The links between Septimus’s destruction and England’s sinister values is reinforced when Woolf ruminates on page 85 that the “proportion” of Sir William Bradshaw “has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a goddess even now engaged […] in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly ….” There is a direct line drawn between Sir William, who does not understand (and wishes to get rid of) a man wrecked by England’s war, and the impulses of expansionism and destruction. The alliterative name of Septimus Smith may even be intended to evoke that of Septimius Severus, a Roman emperor associated with the folly of militarism: “By creating a larger and more expensive army and increasing the influence of lawyers in administration, Severus planted the seeds that would develop into the highly militaristic and bureaucratic government of the later empire.”^[3] The classically self-educated Woolf would almost certainly have been familiar with this history, after all.

Septimus himself is the only character who seems to have genuinely existed during the war, and the experience has driven him mad. The boundary between real and unreal has become unclear, along with the boundary between life and death (p 21, et cetera). If fully experiencing the meaning of war, and The War, means ending up like Septimus, the rest of the world’s repression of this memory seems understandable – but terribly cruel to Septimus the man.

Everywhere in Mrs. Dalloway, the presence of an oppressive, life-destroying government/society is “on” one like Holmes on Septimus: dropping bombs of time from Big Ben, prescribing football and trench warfare to cure weaknesses in character, plotting to export undesirables to Canada – Woolf gives us in Mrs. Dalloway an England under attack by its own values, and by leaders who do not see the horrors they inflict, most significantly the First World War, as anything to be ashamed about. These harsh observations are woven throughout the novel with great sophistication, suggested rather than imposed. When all her clues are gathered together, the meaning is clear: there may have been an armistice, but England in 1924 was by no means a peaceful nation.

[1] Information on the 11 o’clock Silence, as well as the evidence that the marching boys Peter Walsh sees are members of the Territorial Army, can be found in “`Vanished, Like Leaves’: The Military, Elegy and Italy in Mrs Dalloway,” by David Bradshaw in the Woolf Studies Annual, Volume 8 (2000).

[2] See footnote 1.

[3] Meckler, Michael L. De Imperatoribus Romanis: An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Emperors. http://www.roman-emperors.org/sepsev.htm

Addison Godel, July 2002
with some revisions August 2006

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