Mrs Dalloway Read Online Free Page B

planned that ‘Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway should be entirely dependent on each other.’ 37 But as the book developed, Woolf realized that she could not simply present Clarissa and Septimus in stark contrast to each other, or even in a triangular relation to the allegorical Prime Minister. Clarissa too ‘must be seen by other people,’ she writes on 26 February, 1923. 38 Rather, she needed to fill out and deepen their lives. Thus in May she came up with the idea of including an old suitor for Clarissa, Peter Walsh:
    There shd. now be a long talk between Mrs. D & some old buck. Hurry over. His view of her. Her substratums of feeling about dead youth the past: with her anxiety about Dick threading it together. Story to be provided by Elizabeth. Must all be kept in upstir; in extreme of feeling. 39
    The main problem Woolf faced in the novel was that of making her characters four-dimensional: getting the element of time into the book through the characters’ memories. This preoccupied her through the summer of 1923, as she wrote about the period in which the novel itself is set. ‘Too thin and unreal somehow,’ she writes on 18 June. 40 After much struggle, a breakthrough came at the end of August:
    My discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity,humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment. 41
    Yet the insight did not translate automatically into structure and language. In October, about one hundred pages into the novel, Woolf consoled herself for the slowness of the process – perhaps fifty words a morning – by recalling that it had taken ‘a year’s groping to discover what I call my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it.’ 42
    Nonetheless, there were to be many more false starts and dead ends. Her notebooks show that she was trying to work towards the scene of the party, and its contrast with the death of Septimus: ‘All must bear finally upon the party at the end; which expresses life in every variety & full of antic[ipa]tion; while S. dies.’ The ways in which this movement was to be given shape and structure evaded her, and she had in mind the models of the Greek dramatists, whose plays she was reading. Should she eliminate chapters and have an ‘observer in the street’ acting as a connecting Chorus? Should she divide the text, ‘like acts of a play into five, say, or six scenes’? 43
    Through the spring and summer of 1924, as the book reached its final pages, Woolf was still testing out various approaches and ideas, realizing that she had underestimated the amount of time and delicacy involved in writing certain linking scenes, such as Peter Walsh eating dinner. Even as she came to the ‘last lap,’ with the party, she sketched out various possibilities, and noted ‘I don’t want to tie myself down to that yet.’ 44 Finally, the whole novel had to be pulled together withimages and allusions. Cubist paintings, strange as they looked to the uninitiated eye, had a unity on the canvas that came from the use of colour, and from the boundary of the frame. In
Mrs. Dalloway
, the striking of Big Ben acts as a temporal grid to organize the narrative.
    Woolf’s working title during most of the time she was writing had been ‘The Hours,’ and the insistent chiming of clocks keeps us aware of the passage of time and the measuring out of human lives and seasons. A major motif of the book is the analogy between the hours and the female life cycle, what we would now call the biological clock. Woolf gives us a full range of portraits spanning the seven ages of woman. Elizabeth Dalloway is almost eighteen, just beginning her adult life. Rezia Smith is in her twenties. Milly Brush and Doris Kilman are past forty. Clarissa and Sally Seton are in their fifties. Millicent