Chapter 1: What is the significance of Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs. Dalloway'?
Hello, and welcome to Who's Afraid of Realism, a close readings podcast from the London Review of Books. My name is James Wood, and our book today is probably the most famous novel by Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925. Woolf worked on the book roughly between summer 1922 and the summer of 1924.
And most of it was written in the heart of London, in Bloomsbury, at 52 Tavistock Square. And many of you will know that The book actually started out as a set of stories. Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street, I think, is the first one. A sort of set of exercises in which Woolf puts Mrs. Dalloway through her paces in London.
And if you go back and look at those stories, they're notably more conventional and more old-fashionedly realistic than the famously modernist novel series. We have in our hands today.
Chapter 2: How did Virginia Woolf's 'tunneling process' transform her writing?
And some of you will also know that there was a famous shift happened as Woolf was writing this book about halfway through the process in August 1923. And she records it in her diary as her discovery. And her discovery is that she's going to, as she puts it, dig out beautiful caves behind my characters. The caves shall connect and each comes of daylight at the process.
And she called this my tunneling process. And she clearly understood this to be a moment, a transformative moment in which she found a way forward and began to radically change the way she was writing the book, which then came quite fast in that final year.
So if you know that about the creative process, then you certainly know that it is a famous modernist text, that it's set on a single day in June 1923. Woolf was reading James Joyce's Ulysses as she was writing this book. And you might also know that it takes characters from an earlier novel, The Voyage Out.
It takes Clarissa Dalloway and her husband, Richard Dalloway, and sort of repurposes them for this new, brilliantly modernist, innovative enterprise of seeing what happens to a group of circulating consciousnesses in London.
Chapter 3: What conventional elements of realism are present in 'Mrs. Dalloway'?
But before we get to the modernist stuff... I want to emphasize the conventionalities, in a way, of the novel. And I'm doing this not because I cherish conventionalities for their own sake. I'm doing it partly because I want to keep
our through line of realism going so that we keep on, as we advance through the series, we keep on remembering, we can go back to Flaubert and remember that we talked about realism in terms of technical elements like free and direct style, aka close third person, or the writer's use of detail, that we talked also about realism as a as a powerfully, dangerously repertorial account of the world.
In Flaubert's image, it's the scalpel cutting down through the flesh into the bone. The bone, I would say in this novel, the bone of the body politic in the case of Mrs. Dalloway.
So I want to keep just in mind, before we get to all the innovative things that Woolf does with form, with consciousness, with character in this novel, I want to just remind ourselves of some of the solid, as it were, solid 19th century elements that she inherited and that she always respected and indeed loved as an extremely well-read novelist.
And we do that also because we're doing it for the pleasure, just in the same way that when we started reading Flaubert, we spent a lot of time just enjoying the sentences and the details.
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Chapter 4: How does 'Mrs. Dalloway' reflect the social dynamics of early 20th-century London?
I want to do that, too, with Mrs. Dalloway, because anyone can talk about the modernist innovations in this book, stream of consciousness, Woolf reading Ulysses, perhaps not very much liking Ulysses, but clearly being influenced by it.
Her famous essay, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, which was written in 1924, a year before the book was published, in which she changes the idea of how the novelist will write character in novels. That's been written about a million times and talked about in a million lecture halls. But before we do that...
We're missing something if we don't sink down into the book as we did in the case of Madame Bovary or Death of Ivan Illich and just enjoy the solid particularities. And these solid particularities are not so different from the same kinds of things that Flaubert was enjoying in Madame Bovary. And they also belong in many ways.
There's a continuity here because they belong to a 19th century way of writing fiction that despite Woolf's modernism and innovations, she never exactly forewent. She was a loving and respectful reader of the great 19th century novels, perhaps not always of her immediate local English tradition, though she deeply admired Middlemarch, as we know.
But certainly, she was a keen reader of, as we know, the Russian and French 19th century tradition. So if we were just enjoying the novel as an almost pre-modernist, conventional, realist novel, what would we say it does? What are its sort of standard realist achievements? Well...
First of all, you'd say this is an incredibly rich and satirical portrait of London and London's imperial power at really a peak. Well, it's like a moment of the fever cresting. It's actually a peak moment of power that doesn't know quite yet in certain circles that power is already gone or power is receding. It's essentially the world, say, that the economist John Maynard Keynes
elegized in his famous book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in 1919. Keynes talks about the world that ended in 1914, and interestingly and tellingly describes it from the center point of London. He writes, "...the inhabitant of London could order by telephone..."
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Chapter 5: What influences did Woolf draw from Dickens and Flaubert?
sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.
He could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages.
He could secure, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could dispatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank. But most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent. So that is the Old Etonian economist John Maynard Keynes talking about the view from London in 1914.
And you will note that, first of all, it's the view from London, and secondly, our inhabitant is male. It's palpably, is it not, the world, if not quite, of Clarissa Dalloway, certainly of Clarissa Dalloway's MP husband, Richard. It's their London, the sort of London where, as Peter Walsh says at the end of the novel, at Clarissa's famous party, everyone in this room has six sons at Eton.
Places like Eton, the famous elite boarding school, or tropes like writing a letter to the Times, or institutions like, of course, the Houses of Parliament or Big Ben. are central to the way power is seen in this book. Big Ben quarters the hours. Time is, as Woolf puts it, ratified by Greenwich. And a phrase she uses three times in the book is, The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
Once Big Ben strikes, the vibrations of the sound go out from the clock, out through Westminster where the Dalloways live. And then we might think of the novel's portrait of a certain kind of English society and power as a series of concentric circles. If you have this kind of power, then you have the kind of power that Keynes is talking about, to order things up, to prospect in other countries.
Messages, as Woolf puts it, were passing from the fleet to the admiralty in this kind of London. And as Mrs. Dalloway goes out to buy flowers for the party she will have later on in the day, so she sees a mysterious car, a grand car with dove-grey upholstery that seems to be slowly making its way through the nicer parts of London. Who is in it?
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Chapter 6: How does Woolf's portrayal of characters challenge traditional realism?
Is it the Queen? Is it the Prime Minister? Some Duke? Someone of importance, that's for sure. But what about this marvelous description as the prime minister's car, let's say it's the prime minister's car, passes one of the gentleman's clubs in St. James's. It's the club White's. And we just get this little description. Wolf sort of goes inside the club.
The white busts and the little tables in the background, covered with copies of the Tatler and siphons of soda water, seemed to approve, that's to say, seemed to approve of whoever was in the car, seemed to indicate the flowing corn and the manor houses of England.
So it's a novel that starting in London can take in the whole entitled country and then in concentric circles of entitlement take in the whole world. In that sense, we might think of the book, though it's nothing like, say, Bleak House.
But we might think of it as having in its compressed way something of the ambition of, say, Dickens' Bleak House that can muse and brood over an enormous gallery of people all gathered together in London. This is much more miniature, but it has similar ambitions. And it also has, interestingly, sort of minor flat characters that aren't exactly... Well, they are somewhat Dickensian.
We might say that the difference being that Dickens repeats these characters so that the sort of leitmotif thing that we associate with Dickens' characters. can come back again and again and again and precisely repeat, whereas Woolf tends to use a flat character in a satirical portrait only once. But they're quite Dickensian. Let me give you some examples of these flattish characters.
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Chapter 7: What role does time play in the narrative structure of 'Mrs. Dalloway'?
Some of whom we only glimpse once, some of whom, like Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw, these two famous society doctors, we glimpse more often. So here is one character who we only hear of in this one occasion, Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life.
The aforementioned Dr. Holmes, who treats the morbidly depressed Septimus Warren Smith, a victim of the First World War. Dr. Holmes's approach essentially is eat more porridge. I think he also says to Septimus Warren Smith, you're in a bit of a funk, aren't you? We encounter Hugh Whitbread, a friend of the Dalloways. He's in their social circle.
He has some sort of silly job as a courtier, sort of works for the king, and is one of those people who are expert at writing letters to the Times and sort of greasing the imperial machine. Or as Wolfe puts it, he had been afloat on the cream of English society for 55 years. That then follows a hilariously minimizing description of what Hugh Whitbread has actually done in those 55 years.
And this is summarized as the improvement of shelters and the protection of owls in Norfolk. Clarissa has a formidable old aunt, Aunt Helena, who is mentioned several times through the book but really makes a major appearance at the end of the book at the party. Aunt Helena is a throwback. Her main moment in life was when she died. when she was living in Burma.
So she's an absolutely imperial creature, Burma of the 1870s, and she has a glass eye. It seemed fitting, writes Wolfe, that she should be turning to glass. And then when we encounter her at Clarissa's party at the end of the novel, we're told that people who had known Burma in the 1870s, people who had known Burma in the 1870s, We're always led up to her.
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Chapter 8: How does the character of Clarissa Dalloway embody the themes of the novel?
She's sitting in a chair. She's old and not very able-bodied. So we have to, again, if we're thinking in this old realist dispensation, so we're thinking not so much Wolfe and more like Dickens. So how would Dickens do this party? Or how would Austen do this party? Well, Woolf has plenty of that spirit in her too. Here is Aunt Helena in her sort of bath chair, as it were, at the party.
And people are being led up to her. People who had known Burma in the 1870s being led up to her. And what she likes to talk about once you encounter Aunt Helena is the book that she wrote about orchids in Burma and how it was praised by Charles Darwin. At that same party, very glancingly, we see two young, well, we'd call them nowadays Sloanes, basically.
or in American parlance, sort of preppy socialites, Lord Gaten and Nancy Blow. And we're simply told about Lord Gaten, who's very good with horses, that ponies' mouths quivered at the end of his reins.
And we're told about Nancy Blow, who's expensively dressed in the best, finest new fashions from Paris, that she stands there looking as if her body had merely put forth of its own accord a green frill. Wolf writes about them. It's a phrase I want to draw your attention to because I'm going to come back to it later. Of these two people, Lord Gaten and Nancy Blow, that they would solidify young.
In other words, they're like a lot of people, posh people you might meet at a party party. They've never really thought about any other existence than the one they are in and the one they're heading towards. And even at 20 or 24 or however old they are, they seem essentially already to be sort of living on their extensive estate somewhere looking after the dogs and the horses.
They would solidify young people. Richard Dalloway is caught in this marvellous little description crossing a street in Westminster on his way back to the Dalloway house. Grey, dogged, dapper, clean. Grey, dogged, dapper, clean.
And then there's the monstrous society doctor, more famous than Dr. Holmes, though probably no more efficacious than him, also treating Septimus Warren Smith, Sir William Bradshaw. Sir William Bradshaw, who worships proportion. We're told about Sir William Bradshaw, that he worships, that he counsels in all things proportion. Sanity is proportion.
So if you are morbidly depressed, manic depressive, suffering from shell shock, as Septimus Warren Smith is, you must be taught the art of proportion. proportion, which will probably involve going to a private nursing home for rest and seclusion and, well, more porridge, actually. milk and porridge and such things to build up your strength.
Of Sir William Bradshaw, Wolfe writes, proportion his goddess had been acquired by Sir William walking hospitals, catching salmon, begetting one son in Harley Street by Lady Bradshaw, who caught salmon herself. Well, what about this lovely little phrase that is essentially from the point of view of Peter Walsh, Clarissa's old friend who has come back from India.
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