Mrs Dalloway (4 page)

Throughout the day Clarissa is haunted by the dirge from
Cymbeline
:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun
Nor the furious winter's rages.

The heat of the sun stands for sexuality, for a kind of feminine blossoming and ripening which peaks in the heat waves of the June day and of the reproductive cycle, and ends in the furious winter of old age. Elizabeth is a ‘hyacinth which has had no sun.' That is, she is
a virginal flower, like a lily, as Sally Seton remarks. Clarissa's own sexuality has always been muted and moonlit; her one memory of erotic bliss has the delicate intensity of ‘a match burning in a crocus' (p. 35).

The parallels between the sexual and the natural cycles are reinforced by the colour of women's attire, almost always green as if it were a kind of leafing or natural exfoliation of the female body. For the young girls this identification seems innate and spontaneous. Elizabeth is ‘like a hyacinth, sheathed in glossy green'; at the party, the debutante Nancy Blow, though she is ‘dressed at great expense by the greatest artists in Paris' looks as if ‘her body had merely put forth, of its own accord, a green frill.' (p. 195) Septimus is entranced by the memory of Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square, and sees his wife Rezia as a ‘flowering tree'. Clarissa too admires ‘lovely old sea-green brooches' at the jewellers, and her favourite dress is ‘a silver-green mermaid's dress.' Even Miss Kilman wears a green mackintosh coat.

In another sense, Clarissa's retrospect of her sexual history has to do with her time of life. Woolf's original intention was to show Mrs. Dalloway as a woman going through menopause. This theme is clearly, if euphemistically, alluded to in ‘Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,' when Clarissa compares herself with the ailing Milly Whitbread, come up to London to see doctors for a vague woman's ailment:

Of course, she thought, walking on, Milly is about my age – fifty, fifty-two. So it is probably
that
. Hugh's manner had said so, said it perfectly – dear old Hugh, thought Mrs. Dalloway, remembering with amusement, with gratitude, with emotion; how shy, like a brother –
one would rather die than speak to one's brother – Hugh had always been, when he was at Oxford; and came over; and perhaps one of them (drat the thing!) couldn't ride. How then could women sit in Parliament? How could they do things with men?

Although this passage was revised in the novel, and the references to menstruation and menopause edited out, Clarissa's time of life (‘T. of L.', as Woolf would later call it in her diary)
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has much to do with her sense of ageing, mortality, and loss. The illness or influenza which has turned her hair white and left her a kind of nun is a metaphor for the loss of fertility, for the unnamable ‘women's ailments' of her generation. The passage is particularly ironic in the contrast between Clarissa's adolescent internalization of menstruation as a crippling obstacle to women's participation in public life, and the change which took place after the war, when for the first time, there were indeed eight women sitting in Parliament.

Menopause is sometimes called the ‘little death' of women. As we see in the story, menopause not only could not be discussed in polite company, but was implicitly linked with illness. In the 1920s it fascinated and even obsessed Woolf. Although she was in her early forties when she wrote
Mrs. Dalloway
, Woolf was troubled by the decision imposed upon her by her doctors that she should not have children, a decision reflected in the portrait of Sir William Bradshaw, the man who ‘forbade childbirth'. Menopause was the symbol of the irrevocable end of childbearing which, in her forties, she recognized as a practical if not a biological fact. The novel is preoccupied with these questions on many levels – in Septimus's mad horror of the
body and reproduction, in Rezia's longing for a baby, and in Clarissa's coming to terms with the finality of a central aspect of her identity.

Moreover, according to the medical opinion of Woolf's day, menopause was a condition to be dreaded and feared as much as insanity, and indeed closely allied with it. The attitudes towards the menopausal woman which form an elegiac background to the novel were representative of Woolf's own generation. She had inherited a dismal mythology about the ‘change of life' that made it a subject of deep interest and anxiety in her middle years. From the mid-nineteenth century on, menopause had been increasingly medicalized, and linked with depression, madness, and even suicide. Doctors warned that a menopausal woman's melancholia could lead her to kill herself. In a particularly grim description published in 1924, Helene Deutsch described menopause as a hopeless process of decline: ‘Everything she acquired in puberty is now lost piece by piece; with the lapse of the reproductive service, her beauty vanishes, and usually the warm, vital flow of feminine emotional life as well.'
⁴⁶

Clarissa has internalized these views. She feels that her body, now that there is ‘no more marrying, no more having of children' (p. 11) has become invisible, almost ceased to exist. Her fear of insubstantiality and social invisibility is triggered by the discovery that she has been excluded from Millicent Bruton's lunch party, a moment that leaves her feeling ‘shrivelled, aged, breastless' (p. 33), and that introduces an extraordinary lyric meditation:

There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At
midday they must disrobe . . . Narrower and narrower would her bed be.' (pp. 33–4)

The passage hauntingly echoes the Fool's last speech in
King Lear
: ‘And I'll go to bed at noon.' (III. vi. 85) In her attic room, with its candle half-burnt down, Clarissa pauses ‘at midday' to consider the midpoint of her life. For women, Woolf suggests, the prime years are solitary, and empty as the womb; the female body sheds its ‘rich apparel' as the ageing woman must divest herself psychologically of her sexuality in a preparation for death. The narrow bed, with its tight white sheets, where she ‘sleeps undisturbed,' is a figure for the grave. This decline is Clarissa's equivalent of the wintry retreat from Moscow she reads about alone at night.

But menopause involves reintegration as well as loss, and can lead to growth if a woman confronts both consciously and unconsciously issues regarding femininity, sexuality, and identity. Indeed, Clarissa works through some of these feelings during the course of her day, and does come to feel at peace with ‘having done with the triumphs of youth'.

One major aspect of this process is Clarissa's confrontation with her sexual feelings for Sally Seton, and her effort to apply these insights to her own daughter's infatuation with the lesbian Miss Kilman. In her attic room, Clarissa remembers her girlhood fascination with Sally Seton, for whom she felt ‘what men felt' (p. 34). With Sally there had been excitement, ecstasy, and a kiss: ‘the most exquisite moment of her whole life' (p. 38). This remembered love between women seems much freer and richer than any of her feelings for men. Even with her beloved husband, Clarissa has been unable to
overcome the inhibitions and timidity of her upbringing. Like many sensitive characters in Woolf's fiction, she understands her own capacities for bisexuality and sympathizes with them in others.

Yet these musings about the nature of her sexuality seem less an expression of Clarissa's lesbianism than an effort to understand a sexual dimension in her life that she feels is now irrevocably lost. She and Richard are no longer sharing a bedroom; sexual relations between them have ceased, and she can no longer expect that erotic pleasure will come to her. Richard is as repressed as she is, but a loving and tender partner who has accepted and perhaps not even missed this aspect of their marriage.

In part, Clarissa's concern about her lack of sexual responsiveness – after thirty years of a happy marriage – reflects the changes in attitude after the war. As the historian Susan Kent argues, ‘British society sought in the establishment of harmonious marital relationships a resolution to the anxieties and political turmoil caused by the First World War.'
⁴⁷
The standards for sexual harmony within marriage were changing. Thus:

discourses about female sexuality which before the war had emphasized women's lack of sexual impulse, and even distaste for sexual intercourse, underwent modification to accommodate the political, social, and economic requirements of the post-war period. The new accent on motherhood was accompanied by a growing emphasis on the importance of sexual activity, sexual pleasure, sexual compatibility, between husband and wife.
⁴⁸

When we think of Clarissa as a menopausal woman, the connections between her crisis and Septimus's
become more clear and sharp. Initially, Woolf had intended the book to end with Clarissa's death: ‘Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party.'
⁴⁹
We may surmise that in this plan, Woolf was thinking of Clarissa as a deeply depressed woman, someone so sensitive to the suffering behind the masquerade of gaiety around her that she becomes a scapegoat.

Instead, however, it is Septimus Smith who kills himself, and who serves as Clarissa's double. He is linked to Clarissa through his anxieties about sexuality and marriage; his anguish about mortality and immortality; and his acute sensitivities to his surroundings, which have gone over the line into madness. When she first imagined the character of Septimus in October 1922, Woolf saw him as a madman who believed himself to be Christ and planned to assassinate the Prime Minister and become a political martyr: ‘As I am going to die I will kill the Prime Minister . . . I shall be immortal, he thought, my name will be on all the placards.'
⁵⁰
Several themes muted in the final draft of the book – the fascination with crime and assassination, the sense of messianic martyrdom, and the post-war obsession with publicity – appear in this early formulation. Although she did not develop them fully, Woolf anticipated many of this century's concerns with the psychology of the assassin and the serial killer.

In revision, however, Septimus became a figure specifically connected with the war. At Clarissa's party, Sir William Bradshaw discusses a Bill to deal with ‘the deferred effects of shell shock' (p. 201), and Septimus is a symbolic ‘shell shock' case. This term, alluding to the shell explosions military doctors initially blamed for the epidemic of psychological disturbances among soldiers
in World War I, actually described various forms of male hysteria in which the terror, anguish, and immobility of combat led to a variety of physical and emotional conversion symptoms: limps, contractions, paralysis, stammering, loss of voice, sexual impotence, blindness, deafness, heart palpitations, insomnia, nightmares, dizziness, or acute depression.

A widespread early military reaction to shell-shock was to condemn it as a form of cowardice or malingering. At the War Office Committee of Enquiry into ‘shell-shock' which met from 1920–22, E. MacPather testified that cowardice was ‘action under the influence of fear, and the ordinary kind of shell-shock, to my mind, was chronic and persisting fear.'
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The unluckiest soldiers were threatened with court martial if they did not give up their disabling symptoms; others were subjected to punitive treatments involving electric shocks. Only a small percentage of officers received more enlightened care based on pyschoanalytic concepts of repression and release.

As the historian Eric Leed explains in his book about World War I, the extraordinary range of hysterical symptoms that afflicted fighting men was ‘a psychic effect not of war in general but of industrialized war in particular.'
⁵²
The forced immobility and passivity of soldiers in the trenches facing long-range artillery, air bombardment, and a faceless enemy created anxieties that could not be dissipated in action or controlled through expression.

The psychoanalytic explanation of shell-shock traced it to a web of emotional contradictions.

The soldier was encouraged to kill at the expense of unleashing infantile sadistic impulses that had previously been successfully repressed. He was encouraged to form
close emotional bonds with other men and yet homosexuality was forbidden. Moreover the whole lopsidedly masculine scenario . . . was reinforced by wartime ideology and propaganda – and by a recruitment drive that amongst other things promised the fulfilment of masculinity in the battlefield.
⁵³

Some Freudians argued that unconscious homosexual impulses contributed to the development of shell-shock, a view that both scandalized conservative doctors and confirmed their view that only the unmanly and the effeminate could succumb to war neurosis.

In 1921, Freud had declared that ‘most of the neurotic diseases which had been brought about by the war disappeared with the cessation of the war conditions.'
⁵⁴
But he was wrong. Not only did shell-shock not disappear with the Armistice, but also the worst outbreaks of neurosis came after the war. In the years immediately after the war, so many thousands of veterans sought medical treatment for nervous disorders that over a hundred special treatment centres had to be set up by 1922.
⁵⁵
In 1922 Lord Southborough, addressing the House of Lords about a committee to investigate shell-shock, insisted that it could not be forgotten or swept under the table:

‘The subject of shell-shock cannot be referred to with any pleasure. All would desire to forget it – to forget . . . the roll of insanity, suicide, and death; to bury our recollections of the horrible disorder, and to keep on the surface nothing but the cherished memory of those who were the victims of this malignity.'
⁵⁶

Emotions that had to be repressed during combat came to the surface with renewed ferocity after the war, including the anxiety of survivors' guilt.