Learning From Virginia

One of the great benefits of summer in Santa Fe is the chance to take classes at St. John’s College, a small private college that calls itself with pride “The Most Contrarian College in the US.”

One of the aspects of its contrarianess (not to be confused with contrariness) is its Summer Classics Program, featuring a broad array of books, fiction and otherwise, at a time when it seems this country is moving resolutely away from reading.

This summer is my sixth at Summer Classics, and I’m fortunate to be re-reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway with seventeen other people and two tutors, as professors are called here.

It is my favorite book by my favorite writer.

During the free-flowing discussion that occupies ten hours divided into five daily sessions, I have to repress my ardent wish to talk all the time. I have so much to say! But so do the other students. It’s a real exercise in patience and the art of listening. And, of course, I disagree with most of what I hear; fifteen women and two men mean the women do most of the talking, and we do love to talk about love.

Mrs. Dalloway like all great novels has a good deal to say about love—its compromises, its disappointments, its radical demands and comforting rewards. But the novel has many other fish to fry. Written in the waning days of the British Empire, the seemingly solid background of Woolf’s parents’ lives, it offers parallels to the waning of the American Empire we are facing if not yet experiencing. Peter Walsh, returning to London from romantic disasters in India, can yet reflect that as an Official of the Crown, he has ruled a land larger than Great Britain and can still believe that “The future of civilization lies in the hands of young men such as he was thirty years ago; with their love of abstract principles; getting books sent out to them from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading science; reading philosophy…” His rejection by Clarissa, years earlier—she who is the heart and soul of the novel—and which he in many ways still regrets is set against his sudden apprehension, waking from a nap, that success would have meant “the death of the soul.” Something about Clarissa is cold, wooden; but Woolf is also hinting that any marriage is “the death of the soul.” She doesn’t need to explain; we see this death in Clarissa’s conventional comfortable marriage to Richard Dalloway. He has subsumed her.

Woolf never explains. With the lightest of touches, she sets her characters in a historical context that affects all their choices and decisions, even though they remain unaware: Septimus Smith Warren, shell-shocked during World War One, understands that the two doctors’ attempts to heal him are, in fact, going to destroy him with isolation and confinement to bed in a country sanitorium, the regime that drove the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper to insanity.

Dr. Holmes preaches “proportion” when Septimus threatens to kill himself but here Woolf, at her most oracular, reminds us that “Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable… Conversion is her name, and she feasts on the wills of the weakly; offers help but desires power… loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.” Septimus flings himself out of a window to escape this goddess, released on him by Dr. Holmes.

There are many goddesses in this novel, although not noticed by the members of my seminar; they are half-hidden but their significance is plain. The battered woman, hardly recognizable as human, that Peter hears singing by “The Regent’s Park Tube Station, a tall, quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree.. .the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth…” She is the powerful eternal feminine whom Woolf would never mention by name. And she is always battered.

Here again I admire Woolf’s subtlety, her discretion. A well-known outspoken feminist—her essay, “A Room Of One’s Own” is bedrock for many of us—she is far too fine a writer to issue bromides and proclamations, not because they would alienate most of her readers, then and now, women as well as men, but because specificity is not art, preaching, no matter how justified is not art, and nobody wants to read a lecture.

But it is all here. Clarissa Dalloway—always, since her marriage, Mrs. Dalloway, she reflects, never Clarissa—in the fully formed, subtly indicated center of the novel. All efforts, all responses spring from her presence, not because she is special but because she is simply there, are the center.

The novel ends with Peter wondering, “What is this terror? What is this ecstasy? What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?”

“It is Clarissa,” he said.

For there she was.

Shakespeare’s herald in Henry V longs for “a muse of fire” but as an always questing writer, I long instead for the softest touch of a feather, the genius that never proclaims itself and never explains.

In Women, Writing St. Johns College Virginia Woolf