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“Septimus was one of the first to volunteer,” the narrator tells us. Clarissa, at times both pitiable and detestable Peter Walsh, a tool of colonialism whose life of privilege has inculcated a fatal indecisiveness Septimus Smith, less heroic than deluded and even his wife Rezia-perhaps the most sympathetic character in the novel-used up, impatient with her husband’s mental health crisis.Įngland’s self-mythologizing, Woolf saw, had destroyed itself. There is a decadent callousness in the novel that runs through nearly all of the characters, one that makes it harder to feel much for any of them. Mrs Dalloway is a meditation on an empire at its end, a decadent and wasted culture that has destroyed its younger generations for the self-satisfied comfort of its old. Meanwhile, her old flame Peter Walsh is just back from India, a place that looms like an idle curiosity and distant concern through the minds of Woolf’s characters, belying a reality of brutal colonial oppression that was taking place at the time. After a crisis in which so much economic disparity was bared plain and deadly, the novel’s iconic opening line felt coarse-who among us now could ever even conceive of being able to pay servants to buy our flowers, such that buying them ourselves could be seen as some magnanimous act or gesture of individuality? Reading it again in the fall of 2021, the writing felt as vibrant as ever-but having now gone through a world-changing event myself, I was stuck once again on these characters, their faults and failures. I was old enough by then to understand Woolf’s satirical edge towards Clarissa, and came to the conclusion that despite the novel’s title, it was Septimus Smith’s book-equally if not more so than Clarissa’s. Her mode is rarely aphoristic instead it unfolds from an observation or idea, sometimes blossoming out slowly, sometimes zigzagging abruptly, revising and undercutting itself. What saved me then was the beauty of Woolf’s prose, the elegant structure of her sentences, her rhythms that take whole paragraphs to reveal themselves. I came back to Woolf six years later in grad school, through Orlando and The Waves first, attempting Dalloway again only with trepidation. When I first tried to read Mrs Dalloway in college, I hated her and I hated the novel, deciding it a celebration of a trite and callously superficial busybody, a middle-class affirmation of trivialities. How can anyone have a party in the wake of the flood? It is a question the novel takes both rhetorically- how dare anyone have a party in such a time-and literally: how might it be possible to do such a thing? It is a novel about a broken, hobbled England, unable to face the wreckage of war and influenza and the death throes of its own empire, where nonetheless the work of the living persists, where, as the character Peter Walsh observes, “life had a way of adding day to day.”Ĭlarissa, like much of her circle, is not a likable or noble figure, and she is often blind to her privilege. Our faces are still turned toward the past, fixedly contemplating the single catastrophe of the past two years, wreckage upon wreckage, still wanting to wake the dead and make whole what’s been smashed, even as the storm called Progress propels us into the future.įew books capture this moment like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, a novel obsessed with the question of how moving on can be possible. There are birthday parties to plan, quarterly reports due, new books to read, new friends to make. We have not yet even begun to face the task of what we owe the dead, and we are nonetheless still faced with the question of what we owe the still living. The pandemic is now over except for those who’ve lost something, which is every one of us.Īnd yet, the work of living goes on-doggedly, at times obscenely. Those with compromised immune systems, for whom the vaccines don’t take.
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Those who lost jobs, lost homes, fell behind, fell out. Restaurant workers who saw their colleagues decimated and now face entitled patrons who tip poorly. Healthcare workers, stunned and traumatized by what they’ve seen, and still processing late breaking waves and public indifference. The pandemic is now over-except for those for whom it is not.