I must be maturing; I think I’m developing a deeper appreciation for Virginia Woolf. My first encounter with this author came when I was 18 and had to read Edward Albee‘s play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in high school. I had no idea what Virginia Woolf had to do with the play, and so, because I didn’t know any better, I decided to read something by Virginia Woolf. I can’t remember the title of the book; it was an anthology of essays including “A Room of One’s Own.” The prose was dense, almost impenetrable. I understood little of what I read. It felt like I was swimming in a stream that was just a little too deep for me to touch bottom.
A few years later, while doing an undergraduate degree in English at Victoria College, I had to read To The Lighthouse. Again, I waded into this dense prose, and again, I understood little of what I read. Now, as my 42nd birthday approaches (roughly the same age as Woolf when she published Mrs. Dalloway) and after countless bouts of major depression (just like Woolf), I find myself reading her with a great empathy. Unexpectedly, I hear her words with new ears and a new mind. I feel her writing. Its weight bears down on me and I can no longer shrug it off the way I could when I was younger. But I forgive myself; inexperience guaranteed my failure to understand this woman.
When I was younger, I had male expectations of writing. There would be conflict and then resolution of the conflict. All writing was like an Agatha Christie mystery novel—there was a puzzle to be solved, fractured meanings to be assembled like shards of pottery at an archeological dig. There were facts in an objective world and these facts had to be glued together in ways that make a novel. But Woolf presents a new—but no less real—world of interior puzzles. Her objective reality is the reality of the mind in operation. And so Mrs. Dalloway opens in a kind of free association game which, among other things, demonstrates the mysterious workings of the human mind. A motor car passes. However, what we encounter is not so much the fact (through its description and exposition and exegesis) of a motor car passing, as it is a pageant of responses. Characters stop and watch as the motor car passes. It is the motor car of an important person. The windows are obscured. Could it be royalty? Characters reflect upon the meaning of the motor car, and in the course of their reflections, they reveal as much about themselves as they do about the object of their attentions. These are the “caves” Woolf speaks of, the spaces she carves out behind each of her characters, spaces she fills with a boundless depth. And so the novel proceeds—swimming through the minds of the people who form its landscape, and as it proceeds, Woolf offers us an account more real than the most substantial of facts, proving to her readers that these gossamer things we call thoughts and feelings lie at the foundation of all that gives us our being. In the novel, Woolf herself likens this view of consciousness to a “single spider’s thread” which “after wavering here and there attaches itself to the point of a leaf.”
Two characters dominate the novel, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, sanity and madness, civilised gentility and the brokenness of war, coherence and gibberish. Clarissa Dalloway is an upper-class woman in her early fifties and, ostensibly, she is preparing for a party that evening. Septimus Warren Smith is a young man who served during the Great War (the novel is set in or around 1923) but is suffering the effects of “shell-shock” as he tries to return to life in the ordered world of post-war London. Woolf offers us a first-hand glimpse at the mind as it wanders through responses tainted by depression and psychosis. Septimus Warren Smith responds to the real world in ways that are real and meaningful—but not for us.
Although just as opaque and as rich as anything else by Woolf, here she sounds out all the notes for me to grasp, if only I would listen. In fact, it is easy to understand Mrs. Dalloway. Although Woolf scatters clues throughout the novel, I need offer only two to equip the prospective reader for a rich encounter.
First, is a meeting between Dr. Holmes and Septimus Warren Smith when the good doctor is preparing Smith for a retreat to the country where he can recover. Holmes notes that Smith served with distinction during the war and his employer has the highest opinion of him, so he should have no concern about taking a little time for his own care. Then comes this line, apparently a product of Smith’s madness: “He [Smith] had committed an appalling crime and been condemned to death by human nature.” Smith’s appalling crime is this: he can feel nothing. He had a commanding officer, Evans, whom he regarded as an admirable man, but when Evans was killed, Smith felt nothing. In the same manner, he met a young woman in an Italian village, Rezia, and asked her to marry him; but now, as he recalls all this, he recalls also that he felt nothing.
Second, is the reflection of Peter Walsh after his meeting with Clarissa Dalloway. Peter Walsh has just returned from service in India and is trying to re-establish himself in London because he is arranging to marry a woman he met in India. Years ago, as a young man, he loved Clarissa. ” … Clarissa had a theory in those days—they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people.” Not knowing people and not being known. This is the essential tragedy of consciousness. We are isolated yet we crave connectedness. As Peter Walsh reflects, the situation is wholly unsatisfactory—and, we note, wholly inevitable.
Woolf presents us with what seems to be the intractable dilemma of being. And yet she does not leave us without hope. Her novel poses a great question: how are we ever to know or to be known? Her novel stands, in itself, as an answer to the question—or at least as an example of how one goes about answering the question. One relies upon empathy and imagination. As a monument to both these skills, Woolf demonstrates how it is we nurture them, then execute them. She drifts in and out of the minds and hearts of her characters in a way that knows them intimately and, while leaving them wholly known, preserves their integrity and dignity.
A final note of a more idiosyncratic nature. Dr. Holmes is (perhaps) drawn from Virginia Woolf’s own encounters with the mental health professionals of her day. At that time, psychiatry was a fledgling specialty of medicine. What is most striking about the portrayal of both Dr. Holmes and his patient, Septimus Warren Smith, is the poverty of the language to account for Smith’s depression and psychosis. Now, we might say of Smith that he was suffering from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But at the time Woolf was writing, Sigmund Freud was still a practitioner and lecturer in Vienna, and it could hardly be said that any one methodology or “science” of the mind had yet acquired anything approaching the status of an organized discipline. Except for a few words like “shell-shock,” Woolf could not name Smith’s illness; the best she could do was to describe its effects. Although, when measured against other branches of medicine, psychiatry remains a fledgling discipline, nevertheless, the changes in our understanding, and more especially, in our vocabulary, are astounding. Now, we talk about neuroreceptors and serotonin and norepinephrine; and psychoanalysis is only one in a growing array of tools which mental health professionals have at their disposal, tools like electromagnetic stimulation, deep brain stimulation and mindfulness.
Naming a thing makes it no more real. A person who is depressed or psychotic or both is no less so because we neglect to diagnose them. But naming a thing has one great virtue. A name, a specialized vocabulary, a more refined assignment of meaning—all these are social acts. They depend upon the existence of a group for whom the name or vocabulary or meaning is common. And so, to the extent that we join hands when we name something, to that extent do we know a thing more fully, and are known—even if only by a little—by those with whom we share our vocabulary. Those like Septimus Warren Smith and, more notably, Virginia Woolf, who have lost sight of their connectedness also lose sight of meaning in their lives, and so they see no alternative but to hurl themselves from a window or to walk into a stream with pockets weighted by rocks.