Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury avant-garde : War, Civilization, Modernity

ix weeks after Mrs. Dalloway appeared, its author speculated on “a new name” for her novels: “A new———by Virginia Woolf. … Elegy?” (D 3:34, 27 June 1925). In modernizing the elegy by adapting its poetics to prose fiction and its work of mourning to postwar London’s post-theological cosmos in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf moves beyond the “satiric elegy” of Jacob’s Room to explore the genre’s full profundity, complexity, and power.¹ This communal elegy unseals “a well of tears”—for the survivors no less than the war dead—and enters into colloquy with the pastoral elegy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to Shelley in search of consolations for “This late age of the world’s experience” (MD 9). In making Clarissa Dalloway its central elegiac consciousness and transposing certain conventions to feminine registers, furthermore, the novel embraces the terrible losses that the war inflicted on “poor devils, of both sexes,” and critiques the war-making society that Three Guineas figures as “a father” (TL 159, TG 206). But Mrs. Dalloway’s distinction as a war elegy arises from its discovery of the genre’s deep resources for dramatizing and mediating violence both psychic and social: the violence of war and of everyday death; the violence of everyday life; and the violence intrinsic to mourning, the grief-driven rage that threatens to derail the mourner’s progress toward acceptance and consolation. In making the elegy a field for confronting the violence that had devastated Europe and still loomed as a threat to its future, Mrs. Dalloway joins the internationalist contributions of Woolf’s Bloomsbury contemporaries John Maynard Keynes and Sigmund Freud to postwar debates about Europe’s future. Its characters’ struggles animate Keynes’s prophetic castigation of the Peace as war by other means and anticipate Freud’s arguments against class oppression, and for the consolations of science, philosophy, and art over “religious illusion,” for a civilization that must manage but can never eradicate the aggression that imperils it from within.²

In approaching Mrs. Dalloway as a communal postwar elegy, I rely on Peter Sacks’s psychosocial analysis of the classical elegy as a dynamic, eventful working through of loss, fraught with real dangers. Sacks shows how the genre’s conventions mediate the mourner’s arduous journey from loss, grief, and rage to the renewed life and hope epitomized in the last line of Milton’s “Lycidas,” “Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.”³ Three features stand out in Mrs. Dalloway’s exploration of mourning. First, with roots in ancient fertility rites, the classical pastoral elegy figures the work of mourning through ceremonies surrounding the death and rebirth of a vegetation god such as Adonis, and its dialectical movement toward consolation (always necessarily symbolic) recalls the funeral games and contests through which a community of mourners negotiates its inheritance from dead father figures or paternal deities. Mourning, then, has an oedipal dimension as an immediate loss reawakens old crises of loss and brokenness, early wounds to narcissism and sexuality that psychoanalysis figures as castration. To mourn is to relive every loss back to the first loss of the mother and to suffer again the anguish of submitting to the reality principle figured as the law of the father.⁴ As we shall see, the accidental death of Clarissa’s sister Sylvia—caused, it seems, by their careless father—feminizes the vegetation myth as Sylvia becomes the matrix of Clarissa’s homemade consolation. Moreover, Clarissa herself “survives” her historical prototype Kitty Maxse’s death to body forth the “divine vitality” that the elegy seeks to recover, while her double, the (partly autobiographical) war veteran Septimus, suffers a death that enacts a potentially redemptive “message” of witness to social violence (MD 7, 83). In exploring its characters’ conflicts with a society that is “a father,” Mrs. Dalloway analyzes a civilization founded, as Freud shows, on the sacrifice of female desire and lends critical substance to his prediction that the war’s survivors will perhaps rebuild their shattered civilization “on firmer ground and more lastingly.”

Second, in correlating the elegy’s formal conventions with the painful work of mourning, Sacks contrasts the elegy with its bad other, revenge tragedy. The poetic elegy submits mourning’s formidable psychic turbulence to the rigorous formal mechanics of elegiac temporality. Meter, rhyme, repetition, refrain, repeated questions, procession, and ceremony: all serve to divide, order, pace, tame, channel the mourner’s chaos of feelings. This finely elaborated order indirectly attests to the dangers that threaten the mourner’s progress: on one side, melancholia—the refusal to relinquish the lost one, to submit to reality, to attach one’s desire to a substitute object; on the other, the rage that may explode the genre’s bounds, veer from symbolic expression to actual murder or suicide, pervert symbolic consolation into sacrificial violence in the failed mourning of revenge tragedy. In Mrs. Dalloway, as looser structures of repetition and refrain (Big Ben’s striking of the hours, “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun”) mark their progress through the day, the characters battle psychic perils that write small the great crisis of loss, grief, and anger facing postwar Europe. Miss Kilman, impoverished because of her German ancestry, is beset by violent rage; Septimus’s experience of his society’s disavowed violence is labeled madness; Clarissa feels almost annihilated by existential doubt. Through them Mrs. Dalloway poses the great question of Europe’s future after what was not yet the First World War (the novel calls it “the European war”) as the fate of collective mourning—a historic question of genre for a traumatized Europe poised between elegy and revenge tragedy (MD 129).

Third, in keeping with the pastoral elegy’s eclogic division of mourning voices, Mrs. Dalloway projects the dialectic of mourning into urgent social critique and contestation of the future.⁵ The funeral games and “apparently innocent” singing matches of elegiac tradition, Sacks observes, channel grief into skilled performances that contest and carry on those virtues of the dead “deemed important for the community’s survival” (36). In the novel’s depiction of a great European capital five years after the war, an intricate tournament of such “poetry contests” pits Clarissa’s “atheist’s religion” against Miss Kilman’s allegiances to God and Russia; Septimus’s prophetic witness against his prosperous doctors’ policy of “Conversion” to social norms; the furtively sexual Hugh Whitbread against the telling silences of Sally Seton and Milly Brush (EE 36, MD 78, 100). I shall first trace Clarissa’s emergence as an elegiac consciousness from The Voyage Out to Mrs. Dalloway and then locate the novel’s intramural poetry contests within public debates in and beyond Bloomsbury over postwar Europe’s inheritance and future. Addressing the communal task—not yet negated by events—of navigating beyond anger and revenge toward peace, Mrs. Dalloway conjures from the “beautiful caves” of its characters’ grief-ravaged psyches vistas of fresh woods and pastures new (D 2:263, 30 August 1923).

Set on a June day in 1923, Mrs. Dalloway emerged amid an outpouring of art after a war that military historian John Keegan describes as a “tragic and unnecessary conflict,” which mobilized sixty-five million, killed over eight million, left twenty-one million physically and/or psychically wounded or disabled, and blighted the lives and hopes of uncounted loved ones.⁶ A voice in Eliot’s 1922 Waste Land marvels of a crowd streaming over London Bridge, “I had not thought death had undone so many”; to Lucrezia Warren Smith it seems that “Every one has friends who were killed in the War” (MD 66). The war not only shattered millions of lives but unleashed virulent nationalisms that rent the economic and cultural fabric of what had been becoming an increasingly international civilization. As we saw in chapter 1, for Keynes, Leonard “Woolf, Clive Bell, Einstein, and others, it was a “Civil War” that threatened “the end of a civilization.”⁷ Yet even as it seemed to negate even the idea of Enlightenment, it also dismantled four ancient empires, swept away an outworn social and political order, and left Europe “‘a laboratory atop a vast graveyard’” in which communism, fascism, and liberal democracy vied to promise the suddenly enfranchised masses “a New Order,” a “state of their own”; and, as Mark Mazower reminds us, “it was not preordained that democracy should win out over fascism and communism.”⁸

By 1923 Freud’s early confidence that Europeans would rebuild and perhaps improve their democratic and internationalist civilization after the war was losing ground to the totalitarian political orders that, fostered by the Versailles Treaty, were already beginning to form.⁹ On visiting postwar Austria, British diplomat Harold Nicolson reported, “Everyone looks very pinched and yellow: no fats for four years. The other side of the blockade. … I feel that my plump pink face is an insult to these wretched people.”¹⁰ A few years later Peter Walsh returns from India to a civilization that seems a “dear … personal possession,” a London pulsing with the resurgent creativity (“design, art, everywhere”) and commercial prosperity of the 1920s (MD 55, 71). Through the great and small events that befall its characters this June day, Mrs. Dalloway portrays a postwar civilization fraught with agonizing social contradictions yet vibrating with the vital force of the future.

Could the elegy rise to this historic moment—mourn war losses of unimaginable magnitude yet everywhere suffered as local, capture contending social forces, work through communal grief toward consolation and hope? The “moderns” Clarissa rejects in “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” suggest not (“The moderns had never written anything one wanted to read about death” [CSF 155]). In the war poets’ harrowing turns on the genre, savage ironies all but eclipse consolation: Wilfred Owen’s nightmarish “Dulce et Decorum Est”; the proleptic self-elegies of Rupert Brooke (“The Soldier”), Isaac Rosenberg (“Break of Day in the Trenches”), and Yeats’s Major Robert Gregory (“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”); Siegfried Sassoon’s “Everyone Sang,” with its stunning reversal of the mourner’s progress from anguished grief to solacing vision.¹¹ On the home front, Ezra Pound’s bitter epitaph on soldiers slaughtered “for a botched civilization” in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and Eliot’s monumental allegory of postwar Europe as a waste land where parched spirits strain toward “dry thunder without rain” memorialize a blasted civilization in which no consolation survives beyond the art of the poem.

The “tinselly” Clarissa, who has lost no one very close to her in the war, seems an unlikely candidate for renovating the elegy, yet her three major portrayals—The Voyage Out (1915), “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” (1923), Mrs. Dalloway (1925)—link her intimately with the genre.¹² The 1915 Clarissa tells Rachel Vinrace that as a girl she “sobb[ed] over” “Adonais”: “‘He has outsoared the shadow of our night,/Envy and calumny and hate and pain—…/Can touch him not and torture not again/From the contagion of the world’s slow stain,’” she recites. “How divine!—and yet, what nonsense! … I always think it’s living, not dying, that counts” (VO 58, cf. M 42–43). If every loss awakens every earlier loss back to the first loss of the mother, the glamorous Clarissa—a substitute for Rachel’s dead mother—embodies the elegy’s very principle: the necessity of relinquishing the dead and of forming new attachments in order to carry on with life.¹³ Rachel’s death dramatizes this lesson’s failure, but Clarissa’s deft critique reclaims the earthly solaces that “Adonais” sacrifices in its uncannily prophetic, near-suicidal closing ecstasy to urge Rachel toward fresh woods and pastures new.¹⁴

In “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” Clarissa steps into the glorious June morning to Big Ben’s “solemn,” “stirring” strokes and reflects that her fellow Londoners are “not all bound on errands of happiness. … How people suffered” (CSF 152). Again “Adonais” is her touchstone as she thinks of one friend’s son, killed in the war, and another’s death: “And now can never mourn—how did it go?—a head grown grey … From the contagion of the world’s slow stain … have drunk their cup a round or two before” (CSF 154, ellipses in original). But now she herself fights despair as she quests for perfect gloves through London’s glittering “contagion.” She almost weeps to see, upright and immobile in her carriage, her idol, ancient Lady Bexborough, said to be “sick of it all”; later she quells an impulse to send the shopgirl, who looks “tired” and “twenty years older,” on holiday: “Selling gloves was her job. She had her own sorrows quite separate, ‘and now can never mourn, can never mourn,’ the words ran in her head. ‘From the contagion of the world’s slow stain,’ … for there are moments when it seems utterly futile” (CSF 156–58). The floating predicate “and now can never mourn” dissolves the shop girl’s “separate” sorrows in the submerged pool of common, unconsoled grief beneath Clarissa’s thoughts:

Lady Bexborough, who opened the bazaar, they say, with the telegram in her hand—Roden, her favourite, killed—she would go on. But why, if one doesn’t believe? For the sake of others, she thought. … For one doesn’t live for oneself. … Fear no more she repeated. There were little brown spots on her arm. And the girl crawled like a snail. Thou thy worldly task hast done. Thousands of young men had died that things might go on. At last! Half an inch above the elbow; pearl buttons; five and a quarter. (CSF 158–59)

As the 1923 Clarissa marks the elegiac place vacated by “the moderns,” Mrs. Dalloway’s working title, The Hours, announces its aspiration to public elegy (A New Elegy by Virginia Woolf) by echoing Shelley’s apostrophe to the “sad Hour” of Keats’s death:

Materializing these compeer hours in Big Ben’s mundane strokes, Woolf adapts Shelley’s figure to prose fiction’s modernist-realist world through the novel’s technical innovation: her “discovery” of how to light up her characters’ psyches from within by arraying their interior monologues as a system of “beautiful caves” linked by passageways of common memories and experiences, in which each character’s past meets “daylight at the present moment” (D 2:263, 30 August 1923). Translating Shelley’s personified hours schooled by the Hour of loss into her characters’ memory-haunted present, Woolf jettisons plot for the elegy’s inward work of mourning and voices communal loss as a polyphony of private griefs: a tapestry of thought and feeling that interweaves all the characters’ separate sorrows. Septimus’s sublime hallucination of Evans, Rezia’s poignant memories of Italy, Doris Kilman’s consuming rage, Peter’s anguish at losing Clarissa, Clarissa’s grief for Sylvia: all summon Hours of loss that present and future cannot, or dare not, forget.

The 1925 Clarissa is first among equals in the compound elegiac subject formed by these “beautiful caves,” privileged especially as the mourner of Septimus’s death; but through this technique she now represents “all deaths & sorrows” in a way not limited by her limitations.¹⁶ Mrs. Dalloway’s genesis in the death of Clarissa’s original—a friend of Virginia’s youth, Kitty Lushington Maxse (1867–1922)—dramatizes the referential diffusion and psychic mobility by which the elegy makes the death that occasions it encompass “all deaths & sorrows,” including the elegist’s own (QB 2:87). After Julia Stephen died in 1895, the glamorous and vivacious Kitty had exerted herself to conduct her friend’s two young daughters into “good” society and marriages until, after their father’s death in 1904, Vanessa and Virginia escaped to Bloomsbury to invent their modern lives and arts. Kitty was particularly severe on Virginia Stephen’s artistic ambitions: she “scream[ed] against Bloomsbury,” dismissed her writings, condemned her friends (“oh darling, how awful they do look!”), disliked her memoir of her father, and moaned, “Virginia might marry an author and they always talk about themselves!”¹⁷ Safe beyond Kitty’s Kensington, Virginia recalled having felt herself “a kind of slug” in that “unreal Paradise,” with Kitty “like salt” on that “very sensitive snail” (L 1:209, 1 October 1905). But Kitty still animated her memory and imagination. The 1915 Clarissa “is almost Kitty verbatim; what would happen if she guessed?” (L 1:349, 10 August 1908); and when Woolf read of Kitty’s death in October 1922, she was at work on the short story sequence begun with “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.”¹⁸

The news brought a flood of ambivalent memories of her old antagonist:

the day has been spoilt for me—so strangely. … I hadn’t seen her since, I guess, 1908—save at old Davies’ funeral [in 1916], & then I cut her, which now troubles me—unreasonably I suppose. I could not have kept up with her; she never tried to see me. Yet yet—these old friends dying without any notice on our part always … saddens me: makes me feel guilty. I wish I’d met her in the street. My mind has gone back all day to her. … She got engaged at St Ives. … I keep going over this very day in my mind. (D 2:206, 8 October 1922)

now Kitty is buried & mourned by half the grandees in London; & here I am thinking of my book. Kitty fell, very mysteriously, over some bannisters. Shall I ever walk again? she said to Leo. And to the Dr ‘I shall never forgive myself for my carelessness.’ How did it happen? Someone presumably knows, & in time I shall hear. … I adumbrate here a study of insanity & suicide: the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side. Septimus Smith?—is that a good name?—and to be more close to the fact than Jacob.¹⁹

Woolf’s curiosity about Kitty’s “mysterious” fall persisted: “there’s Kitty Maxse falling over the bannisters and killing herself”; “I’ve heard nothing about Kitty, and couldn’t face the memorial service—my black being incomplete. How on earth did it happen?” (L 2:573–74, 22, 29 October). Her later recollection that Clarissa “was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party” while “Septimus, who later is intended to be her double, had no existence” may refer to this doubt, since she invented Septimus almost immediately, and nothing in The Hours suggests that Clarissa was to die or kill herself.²⁰ About November 9 Woolf devised the double design that displaces Kitty/Clarissa’s death onto Septimus: “All must bear finally upon the party at the end; which expresses life, in every variety & full of conviction: while S. dies” (H 415). If Woolf ever settled whether Kitty threw herself downstairs or “merely” died, she did not record it; but in keeping with Sacks’s point that the death the elegy mourns is always the elegist’s own, her fantasy casts Kitty—hence Clarissa and Septimus—as her doubles. Kitty stands to Woolf (who had twice tried to kill herself) in much the same specular and sacrificial relation as Septimus stands to Clarissa; “S.” substitutes for Kitty, Clarissa, and not least, Woolf—the seventh/septimus of eight Duckworth/Stephen children.²¹

Once Kitty died Clarissa could not go on “living” in quite the same way, despite her fictional status and the displacement of her death onto Septimus. Kitty’s death shadows the fictional counterpart who survives her:

did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her … or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part … of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. (MD 9, my emphasis)

As her fear that she must cease swerves from the normative future conditional (somehow she would survive) to the declarative past (somehow … she survived), it is as if Clarissa (like Kitty) were already dead, or as if Kitty were speaking through her; as if Kitty’s actual death were converging grammatically with her afterlife in the 1925 Clarissa; or as if death were scarcely to be distinguished from life’s moment-by-moment vanishing into the past. Or, since somehow … Peter survived too, as if any ontological distinction between life and death were obscured by the ontological resemblances between absence and death, and between life and its afterlife in memory, imagination, art. Clarissa and Peter have, after all, borne each other like mist on their branches through their long mutual absence, just as one would carry the other if one of them should die, and just as Woolf carried Kitty in life and after death, in memory and art, in stories that “branched” upon her death into this elegiac novel. In bringing Kitty back to “life” on a radiant June day that in fact she never lived, Woolf flaunts the elegist’s power, invisibly flourishing Clarissa herself in Escher-like proof of Clarissa’s own vision of life-after-death. Through her art Kitty symbolically survives, spreads ever so far, her life, herself, borne on in time by those who knew her (including Woolf, who had not seen her for years and whose art Kitty scorned) and by people she never met, including the novel’s ever widening circles of readers.²²

But the “beautiful caves” poetics that the 1925 Clarissa bodies forth transcends sentimental memorial. At once portrait and persona (originally a facial image of the dead as well as a mask through which one speaks, EE 126), she is no longer Kitty verbatim, an object drawn by Woolf-as-writing-subject, but an image of the deeper, more complex ways people survive—or not—in and through one another. For Woolf can raise her old antagonist Kitty from the dead only by breathing her own life into her. Books, she observes in her 1928 Introduction, are “flowers or fruit stuck here and there on a tree which has its roots deep down in the earth of our earliest life,” so that “the truth” behind fiction’s “immense facades”—“if life is indeed true, and if fiction is indeed fictitious”—would require “a volume or two of autobiography” (I 197). But is life “true” and fiction “fictitious”? Is Kitty the inaccessible real behind Clarissa’s marmoreal “facade”? Or does the novel’s modernist poetics, continuous with its symbolic consolations, debunk the distinction between subject and object such propositions assume? How exactly does Kitty survive transfigured in art, her counsel “it’s living, not dying, that counts” revived from beyond the grave?

At stake in these questions is, first, a composite modernist self/other-portraiture that weaves biography and autobiography, “Kitty verbatim” and “invented” memories, observed surface and imagined depths, into fiction’s “truth,” Clarissa. An interfused Kitty/Woolf, dead yet living, absent yet present, a psyche unbounded by even a fictional body, Clarissa is a symbolic subject/object entity that captures as in a hologram the way the historical Woolf lifted the historical Kitty on the branches of her life and art.²³ But its postwar context gives this modernist portraiture deeper resonance. In 1918 Woolf saw her brother Adrian talking with a German prisoner of war and reflected, “The reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one’s imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his life means to him—the infinite possibilities of a succession of days which are furled in him, & have already been spent” (D 1:186, 27 August). In this light, her resurrection of Kitty—whom in Julia’s stead she had, in a sense, fought for her life—as a Clarissa who somehow survives, blooming on the tree of her author’s “earliest life,” her infinite possibilities unfurling through the book of her day, marks not just a technical breakthrough but an elegiac act of imagination that intrinsically opposes violence.²⁴ Against the still unvanquished violence of its postwar moment—everyday death, everyday life, as well as the murderous ethos of war—this modernist narrative poses a counterforce ontological, aesthetic, and ethical, writ small in Clarissa’s thoughts on the death of a young man she has never met, writ large in the narrative’s luminous divinations of its characters’ unfurling lives.

If Kitty’s symbolic resurrection dramatizes a daughter-artist’s victory over Conversion-worshipping mothers, Clarissa’s dead sister Sylvia figures not the contingent opposition of a Julia, a Kitty, or a German POW but the absolute antagonist death. This feminine vegetation deity, at once naturalized and mythified in Clarissa’s figure of consolation, modernizes the pastoral elegy and opposes to the objectifying metaphysics of a war-making society an ontology, or theory of being, that locates being in “Odd affinities”—not discrete “subject and object” (MD 153, TL 38). Feminine in origin and history but not essence, this metaphysics frames the novel’s intersubjective character drawing as a consolation for “poor devils, of both sexes.”

Dropping the 1923 allusions to “Adonais,” Mrs. Dalloway’s opening pages follow Clarissa’s thoughts from Sylvia (from Latin silvanus: forest) to the figure of survival as mist-bearing branches. The phrase somehow she survived thus condenses Clarissa with Sylvia, to whose death Peter Walsh traces Clarissa’s “atheist’s religion”—an aberration from the nationalist religion proper to her “public-spirited, British Empire, tariff-reform, governing-class spirit.” Possibly, Peter speculates,

she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship …, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners … be as decent as we possibly can. Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all their own way,—her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady. That phase came directly after Sylvia’s death—that horrible affair. To see your own sister killed by a falling tree (all Justin Parry’s fault—all his carelessness) before your very eyes, a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them, Clarissa always said, was enough to turn one bitter. Later she wasn’t so positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness. (MD 77–78)

If Peter is right, Clarissa took no solace in providential father-gods or promises of heaven but blamed malevolent “ruffians” and her inept father (if the parenthetical condemnation is hers too), later abandoning this childlike fantasy for a stoic ethics of decency. As her disillusion with father figures originates with Sylvia’s death, so do the consolations of her “atheist’s religion,” whose figurative expression seems to have influenced Peter’s earlier reverie in Regent’s Park. There, longing “for solace, for relief, for something outside these miserable … craven men and women,” he too imagines a sylvan feminine apotheosis:

Sylvia, of whom we learn almost nothing, is less a character than a figure of death itself. She is the specter of Clarissa’s, the harbinger of Septimus’s, the ghost of Kitty’s, and also, in this book that flowers on the tree of its author’s earliest life, of Julia’s and Leslie Stephen’s, and (as shocking as Sylvia’s) of Stella’s at twenty-eight and Thoby’s at twenty-six. As the vegetation god of this public elegy, she is also the deaths of the millions destroyed by the war and the prospective deaths that shadow the survivors. Sylvia—all dead sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers, friends, soldiers known and unknown, lost companions of war and peace—is death as the “life” or “truth” behind Mrs. Dalloway’s fictional “facade,” the mystery of mortality: death as reality, necessity, Ananke, intrinsic to life and nature, to thrushes breaking snails on stones and to the falling tree that fells her.

As death transfigured, Sylvia is also art. As Clarissa transmutes her death and proper name into mist-bearing branches, Sylvia figures consolation’s necessarily purely symbolic nature without losing her meaning of natural death. Her name condenses the work of mourning, at once memorializing her and dissolving her into nature’s generic matrix: silvanus to Sylvia to figural mist-laden branches; dust to Dust to an urn filled with ashes. Her literary name also resonates with Woolf’s memory of how Julia Stephen’s death “unveiled and intensified … perceptions, as if a burning glass had been laid over what was shaded and dormant … as if something were becoming visible,” “quickening” her thirteen-year-old self so that, desultorily perusing Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in Kensington Gardens, she was startled to find a poem “instantly and for the first time … intelligible. … No one could have understood from what I said the queer feeling I had in the hot grass, that poetry was coming true. … It matches what I have sometimes felt when I write. The pen gets on the scent.”²⁵ Sylvia is death as the alpha and omega of poetry, art, writing; the sign of Julia’s, Kitty’s, and all the past and future deaths that coalesced to transform stories of shopping, prime ministers, and “Cut flowers” into this modern pastoral elegy.²⁶

It is no accident that Sylvia’s memory sparks a reverie that takes Clarissa to Hatchard’s bookshop window, where, on seeing Shakespeare’s “Fear no more” from Cymbeline, she wonders, “What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country” (MD 9). The posthumous Kitty/Clarissa evokes the Posthumus (so named because he survived his mother’s death at his birth) of Cymbeline—the play that inducted the nineteen-year-old scoffer Virginia into the bard’s “company of worshippers.” What she thought the “best lines” in this or perhaps any play, “Imogen says—Think that you are upon a rock, and now throw me again! and Posthumous answers—Hang there like fruit, my Soul, till the tree die,” find echo in Clarissa’s mist-laden branches and Woolf’s tree of life hung with flowers/fruit/books (L 1:45–46, 5 November 1901). Envisioning himself as a tree embraced by his soul Imogen—or perhaps faithful Imogen as a tree on which his soul hangs “like fruit” till death—Posthumus rejoices in Imogen’s awakening from what turns out to be only a sleep, and in his own release from suicidal despair at the mistaken thought that he has destroyed her, his “only jewel.” Imogen’s “Why did you throw your wedded lady from you?/Think that you are upon a rock, and now/Throw me again” gently mocks his fort/da game. He has foolishly tested and accidentally “killed” her, discovered his error and wished to die, only to find her miraculously restored: will he throw her again? Literalizing loss restored as only the romance can, Cymbeline reunites Posthumus and Imogen as living “tree” and “fruit” in deferral (“till the tree die”), if not defiance, of death.²⁷

The modernist-realist character Clarissa cannot literally “recover” what she has lost, but her longing for some “white dawn in the country” summons pastoral memories of Bourton that recur throughout the day. The most striking, Sally Seton’s kiss—“the most exquisite moment of her whole life”—she compares to “a present, wrapped up,” hers to keep but not to look at; an indestructible “diamond, something infinitely precious,” a “revelation” imbued with “radiance” and “religious feeling” (MD 35–36). Only through memory does Clarissa “recover” her lost love, burnished with such metaphoric richness as young Virginia found in Cymbeline. This “present,” a gift too precious to unwrap or look at—a moment once present now past, yet preserved in memory and symbolically “present” again—bespeaks memory’s power to conjure lost “jewels,” make them “present” in dazzling splendor. In other words, Mrs. Dalloway adapts Posthumus’s consolation for a later age of the world’s experience by rescuing love-lost-and-recovered from the romance’s unreal paradise and relocating it in the symbolic realms of memory, imagination, and art—where it defeats time and loss more securely than does the romance of presence Posthumus’s very name belies, even as it enacts the mourner’s necessary submission to the reality of loss.²⁸

The young Virginia’s query as to why Cymbeline’s characters “aren’t … more human?” foreshadows the mature Woolf’s translation of Imogen’s survival to Clarissa’s realist world (L 1:45). Peter recalls how, riding atop an omnibus, young Clarissa consoled herself for “how little one knew people” and allayed her “horror of death” by theorizing that human lives are not bounded in time and space but indefinitely dispersed through a space/time continuum that extends beyond the organism’s apparent life and death:

she felt herself everywhere; not “here, here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. … She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter—even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with … the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death … perhaps—perhaps. (MD 152–53, last ellipsis Woolf’s)

The apposition of survive with the passive be recovered finesses the question of who survives, who recovers, as it answers Clarissa’s longing for some lost “image of white dawn in the country.” How can this theory of being palliate a “horror of death” when it renders Clarissa alive scarcely different from Clarisssa dead; confounds life and death, self and other, presence and absence; values memory and imagination over actualities, one’s unconscious “unseen part” over conscious “apparition”? Like Clarissa’s branches and Peter’s arboreal goddess, the passage embeds the theory in its practice. Clarissa’s unseen part already spreads wide as she rides the omnibus with Peter; already she is not (just) “here” where she seems to be, for, as she speaks, her disavowed apparitional “here” detaches itself from accidents of time and place to endure in Peter’s memory, “haunting” him in her absence, as now in the narrative present. Her assertion that she is not (only) “here” survives to make her “present”—here—to Peter decades later while, on this June day, her apparition busies itself elsewhere with party preparations, thinking of her life’s moments as “buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness” (MD 29). The Clarissa who was once (not) “here” on the bus with Peter “survives” “attached” to his later self; is “recovered” in his memory and by the narrative, a diamantine “present” preserved from time, death, loss, absence.

Does it matter that it is Peter, not her apparition, for whom her unseen part survives, or that her apparition must die as surely as Posthumus’s tree? Does it matter that their shared moments, once “buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness,” are now memory’s “fruits” on the tree of life and death? And of art, for the narrative structure on which Peter and Clarissa hang like souls or fruits is founded on this theory of being that branches beyond one’s apparition in all directions, indeterminate and unseen. It is not plot that connects Clarissa with Septimus but such odd affinities with “people she had never spoken to” as exist between, say, Adrian—or Woolf—and the German POW. As theorized by Clarissa and practiced in the novel’s intersubjective character drawing, odd affinities lift elegiac consolation out of the register of the sentimental to counter the “death of the soul”: the atrophy of imaginative powers presupposed, Woolf thought, in the murderousness of war (MD 58).

What then of the odd affinity between two strangers and semblables at the heart of the book: “Mrs D. seeing the truth. S. S. seeing the insane truth” (H 412)? What is its nature and how does it console? One source of Clarissa’s feeling “somehow very like” Septimus is her own everyday battle against despair (MD 186). Her ontology does not permanently allay her “horror of death” but itself forms part of a rich web of imagery, a very garment of consolation, that she spins out moment by moment as her mind tosses up metaphors (and genius, says Aristotle, is metaphor) that show what life is literally “like” for her.³⁰ As Peter observes, she “enjoy[s] life immensely”; it is “her nature to enjoy,” to be “all aquiver” and “such good company, spotting queer little scenes, names, people from the top of a bus”; she possesses an “indomitable vitality,” “a thread of life which for toughness, endurance, power to overcome obstacles, and carry her triumphantly through he had never known the like of” (MD 78, 152, 155). Yet her “gift … to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed” ceaselessly contends with her dread of death, her feeling that it is “very, very dangerous to live even one day,” her everyday fight to affirm that “it’s living, not dying, that counts” (MD 174, 8). This familiar “horror,” highlighted in the draft, attacks Clarissa when she hears of Septimus’s suicide and imagines his

dread, that horror, the terror; she felt it too; horror filling her … the incapacity to withstand, the overwhelming hostility of the race … its vast loneliness, its entire feebleness, … so that if Richard had not been there, merely to read the Times aloud; so that listening one could recoup … could hear him breathing in the room; could wait like a crouched bird under a leaf; could gradually recover … her [?belief³¹]; not in Gods & power, but only in the breath, in the Times, in the fire; & so fanning this little flame, could feel rise within once more the imperious thing. But he had not recovered.³²

Doubles and mirrors, exemplars of “Sanity & insanity,” these two who meet at a party as if death were no unbridgeable divide see the “truth” and alike fight despair. But whereas Clarissa fans her wavering flame back to life, Septimus “had not recovered.” Almost nothing separates the suicide displaced onto Septimus from Kitty/Clarissa/Woolf (and perhaps Shelley, with his divine nonsense) from the “divine vitality” Clarissa adores (MD 7). In Clarissa, life triumphs; in Septimus, death; but in their redoubled reflection, death-in-life mirrors life-in-death. She, like him, battles despair; he, like her, basks—moments before he leaps—in sanity, happiness, hope.

This is why death comes to Clarissa’s party, of all the parties in London: because she can admit it; because she lets it in. Clarissa, that “thoroughgoing sceptic,” recognizes the death that arrives uninvited, like Sally Seton, as surely as if Wilkins had intoned its name. Death comes to her party because she (the perfect hostess) can entertain it, a guest and a familiar. Its only seemingly fortuitous arrival clinches the novel’s “idea,” “the contrast between life & death,” in an odd affinity: resemblance and difference attenuated, infinitesimal, yet absolute, momentous (H 414). He is somehow very like her, borne on her branches with Sylvia and Peter, barns and trees, a man behind a counter (“To look at, [Septimus] might have been a clerk,” MD 84), a woman in the street.

We shall return to Clarissa’s impromptu elegy for Septimus and the poetry contest it stages between her ontology of odd affinities and the objectifying positivism of the doctors who would “forc[e his] soul,” sacrifice him to their “Goddess[es]” Proportion and Conversion (MD 184, 100). But first it will be helpful to consider a more vexed affinity between Clarissa and that woman in the street Miss Kilman. Through their contending metaphysics—Clarissa’s “atheist’s religion” and ruling-class nationalism against Doris Kilman’s turn to God and Russia—this postwar elegy stages competing truths and values in a post-theological cosmos in which communities and nations must grapple with their differences and their aggression. Their conflict displays the nationalism and class antagonism that, Keynes warned, threatened Europe’s hope of a democratic civilization as it prefigures Freud’s postwar writings on the dangers of class oppression and religious “illusion” to Europe’s future.

I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense.

—Woolf, Diary, 23 June 1923

Miss Kilman … got up, blundered off among the little tables, rocking slightly from side to side, and somebody came after her with her petticoat, and she lost her way, and was hemmed in by trunks specially prepared for taking to India; next got among the accouchement sets, and baby linen; through all the commodities of the world, perishable and permanent, hams, drugs, flowers, stationery, variously smelling, now sweet, now sour she lurched; saw herself thus lurching with her hat askew, very red in the face, full length in a looking-glass; and at last came out into the street.

—Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard say so over and over again)—no, [Clarissa] could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?).

—Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“With another throw of the dice,” Clarissa “would have loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No” (MD 12). Here the “brutal monster” of involuntary hatred lumbers in “that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul,” although she knows what she really hates is “the idea of her, which undoubtedly had gathered in to itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; had become one of those spectres with which one battles in the night; … who stand astride us and suck up half our life-blood, dominators and tyrants” (ibid.). The feeling is mutual. Doris Kilman thinks Clarissa not kind but “merely condescending,” from “the most worthless of all classes—the rich, with a smattering of culture,” and pictures her turned out of her sofa and installed “in a factory; behind a counter; Mrs. Dalloway and all the other fine ladies!” She violently envies her beauty, elegance, charm, domestic luxury, glamorous social life, adoring husband, and lovely daughter: “If she could have felled her it would have eased her. … If only she could make her weep; could ruin her; humiliate her; bring her to her knees crying, You are right! But this was God’s will, not Miss Kilman’s. It was to be a religious victory” (MD 123, 125).

Clarissa’s intuition that she hates not Miss Kilman but a “spectre” comprised of “a great deal” else provokes us to inquire into that abstraction of domination and tyranny and so to grasp their class antagonism as a microcosmic cross section of the nationalist conflicts in which Europe’s future is indeed at stake. This poetry contest indicts postwar nationalisms that, while pretending to battle external threats to peace and security, in fact produce enemies, dominators, and war by an unacknowledged violence within. The dominator-tyrant that Clarissa projects upon Doris Kilman, whose family (then Kiehlman) came from Germany in the eighteenth century, evokes a defeated and still belligerent postwar Germany, thrust like a pariah outside the Allies’ international community, while the decadent Clarissa, whom Miss Kilman would reeducate, personifies an England tyrannical in victory and heedless of the political consequences of the international class oppression instituted at Versailles. In facing these women off, Mrs. Dalloway explores the competition, envy, hatred, and aggression between classes and nations that had already engulfed Europe in war and would slowly rise to a boil again in the 1920s and 1930s.

Doris Kilman, indeed, bodies forth Keynes’s warning that the economic sanctions imposed by the Peace could only provoke another war. By the time Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway, her old friend Maynard had gained world fame by his critique of the Allies’ war reparations policy as a punitive, barbaric, and self-destructive holdover of nationalism.³³ Participating as a British Treasury officer in the Paris Peace talks, he had resigned in protest in May 1919 and retreated that August to Vanessa Bell’s country house (near Monks House, which the Woolfs had just taken), to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published that December. Keynes had urged the Allied leaders to embrace internationalist policies that would promote Europe’s welfare as a whole, not enrich some nations at others’ expense. Instead they instituted what he diagnosed as the “abhorrent and detestable” policy of a backward-looking “old man” who sees only the rivals France and Germany, not “European civilization struggling forwards to a new order” nor “humanity … at the threshold of a new age” (ECP 225, 36). An instrument of nationalist rivalry, the Versailles Treaty would, he predicted, “sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe” by “reducing Germany to servitude for a generation,” “degrading the lives of millions of human beings,” and “depriving a whole nation of happiness” (ECP 225).

Keynes, in short, prophesied not just the economic consequences of the Peace—“actual starvation” of “the European populations”—but their social, psychic, and political consequences: social unrest, revolution, and ultimately another “civil war” (ECP 228, 268). Since Germany’s starving peoples would resist a foreign tax not compelled by “their sense of justice or duty” (282), the reparations would incite “vengeance,” a “final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation” (ECP 282, 268). Condemning a treaty that violated both “human nature” and “the spirit of the age” and would foment political revolution as surely as Russia’s “bloodthirsty philosophers,” Keynes urged that “expediency and generosity agree”: “the policy which will best promote immediate friendship between nations” would also favor “the permanent interests of the benefactor”—peace, prosperity, the security of Europe’s democratic civilization (ECP 282, 238).

“Had Keynes’s 1919 programme been carried out,” Robert Skidelsky writes, “it is unlikely that Hitler would have become German Chancellor.”³⁴ Ignored at Versailles, Keynes dedicated his book to “the new generation,” which he sought to influence through “those forces of instruction and imagination which change opinion”: the “assertion of truth, the unveiling of illusion, the dissipation of hate, the enlargement and instruction of men’s hearts and minds” (ECP 298, 296–97). In pacifist Bloomsbury, opinion was already with him. The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Woolf mused, was “a book that influences the world without being in the least a work of art: a work of morality, I suppose” (D 2:33, 24 April 1920).

Works of art too may hope to influence the world. Not for nothing does Miss Kilman possess “a really historical mind” (MD 11). Despite her commanding “knowledge of modern history”—“thorough in the extreme”—Doris Kilman has lost her teaching post because of her German ancestry.³⁵ Deprived of her livelihood, she is a walking allegory of the aggressively aggrieved postwar Germany Keynes tried to forestall. She enters Clarissa’s orbit through the kindness of Richard, who has found her “working for the Friends”—presumably, for peace—and, pained by her misfortune, has engaged her to tutor Elizabeth.³⁶ Miss Kilman reflects on how wartime nationalist paranoia has blighted her life:

An Englishwoman whose brother has, it appears, fought and died for England, Doris Kilman nonetheless finds herself a racialized outcast. Unjustly deprived of her livelihood, she feels “cheated” of her “right to some kind of happiness”—the one kind she can hope for, “what with being so clumsy and so poor” (MD 123). Too homely to find happiness in “the opposite sex” (men being in short supply in any case after the war) and too poor to buy “pretty clothes” (anyway, “No clothes suited” her “unlovable body”), she does not hope to “come first with anyone.”³⁷ Still, she might have had the modest happiness of her teaching post—a vital social world, a secure if small income, the intellectual satisfactions and social place for which her degree and “more than respectable” expertise in “modern history” qualify her—had not her fellow English, anticipating both Versailles and Hitler’s racialized violence, impoverished and degraded her in her own country (MD 132). The spelunking narrator, in short, traces her near-murderous envy of Clarissa not to an essentially tyrannical personality but to a natural resentment of social injuries. Her psychic “cave” illuminates her rage and self-righteousness not as isolated character faults but as a case study of the dynamics of nationalism and class in collective aggression—a fictional animation of Keynes’s prophecy that an impoverished Germany would avenge itself on the Allies.

Miss Kilman’s history anticipates the theory of human aggression that Freud read out of the “atrocities” and “horrors of the recent World War”:

The … truth … which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. … [T]heir neighbour is … someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. [Man is a wolf to man.] Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?³⁸

Aggression and the death instinct, Freud argued, are not pathological aberrations but inherent in human nature and ineradicable. Civilization demands that individuals renounce instinctual aggression (murder, cannibalism, incest) as well as submit to moral strictures against lust, avarice, lies, fraud, calumny, and so on; hence every individual is “virtually an enemy” of civilization.³⁹ Although civilization disarms this hostility with various forms of recompense, its economy of aggression renounced in exchange for benefits is inherently unstable, easily disturbed by social and economic inequities that exacerbate this fundamental discontent.⁴⁰ As we noted in chapter 1, Freud, like Keynes, saw class oppression as a formidable threat to Europe’s democratic civilization, which could pacify its citizen-enemies only by reasonably equitable sociomaterial rewards.

One especially effective form of recompense, Freud notes, is identification with “cultural ideals,” which consoles both oppressed and privileged classes, “since the right to despise the people outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within”: “No doubt one is a wretched plebeian, harassed by debts and military service; but, to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen, one has one’s share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws” (FI 17). So it is for the Londoners (“poor people all of them”) who wait swelled with pride by Buckingham Palace for “the Proime Minister’s kyar” while dreaming of “the heavenly life divinely bestowed upon Kings” no less than for the already “upright” Clarissa, who “stiffen[s]” further at any manifestation of Empire and sees “character,” “something inborn in the race; what Indians respected,” in the Palace’s “foursquare” architecture (MD 12–19, CSF 153). So it is for the imperial Lady Bexborough, who “opened a bazaar” with the telegram informing her of her youngest son’s death in her hand, and for Mr. Bowley, in whose “British breast” the breeze ruffles “some flag flying” (MD 5, 20). And so it ought to be but is not for Doris Kilman. When she loses her livelihood because she cannot pretend that all Germans are villains, England’s cultural ideal ceases to be hers (as it has ceased to be international); and her aggression, which the civilization that subjects her is supposed to reward her for renouncing, erupts in a “violent grudge against the world” (MD 129).

What prevents Miss Kilman (an “outlaw” and “brigand” in the draft) from acting on her urge to “fell” Clarissa, if not that she is civilized, that she has a conscience (H 202)? In Freud’s analysis, self-policing “conscience,” not external police, is civilization’s most powerful weapon against aggressive instincts, which civilization can frustrate but never destroy (CD 70). The repository of civilization’s prohibitions, conscience absorbs forbidden aggression and redirects it against the self, producing unconscious guilt.⁴¹ By this means civilization transforms its enemies into agents: it restrains each individual’s “aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city”—though at the cost of “a loss of happiness” (CD 71, 81). While Miss Kilman takes pride in her virtue, “out of her meagre income set[ting] aside so much for causes she believed in,” her civilized state—her conscience—has obviously not been bought and paid for by her society (MD 125). Even the London poor, the vagrant woman who grins at Richard, the servants to whom Clarissa sends “love” at her parties, let alone the ruling-class Bexboroughs, Dalloways, and prime minister, are better compensated than she (MD 165). Yet conscience forbids her to “ease” her “hot and painful” rage and redirects her aggression against herself (MD 124). In precise proportion to the fact that she is civilized, she is wracked by suppressed and thwarted appetites, envy, self-pity, self-reproach.

For consolation and hope, the aggrieved Miss Kilman turns to “Russia,” which helps her to manage homicidal rage without veering into suicidal despair by converting violent envy into ideological aggression against Clarissa and her kind. “With all this luxury,” she thinks, looking at Clarissa’s Reynolds engraving while imagining a communized Mrs. Dalloway laboring in a shop or factory, “what hope was there for a better state of things?” “She could not help being ugly; … Clarissa Dalloway had laughed—but she would … think of Russia; until she reached the pillar-box” (MD 124, 128–29). “Russia”—an alternative civilization, a more just cultural ideal—sanctions her contempt for such emblems of the old order as Clarissa. Her career “absolutely ruined” by the England for which her brother died, Miss Kilman stands like a powder keg near Russia’s stillsmoldering revolution (MD 130). Her socialist fantasies illustrate Keynes’s warning that to bring “economic ruin” upon “great countries” by “political tyranny and injustice” is to foment revolution—thus far forestalled in Central Europe only by its failure to offer any “prospect of improvement whatever” (indeed, for all her misery, Miss Kilman is still in London).⁴²

When “Russia” fails, Miss Kilman “th[inks] of God,” parodying Marx’s attack on religion as palliating the masses’ suffering without curing its economic causes (MD 124). Her religious practice amounts to a strenuous effort to fortify her conscience against her violent outrage, for “two years three months” after “Our Lord had come to her,” her “Bitter and burning” anger remains unappeased. Thoughts of God bring not peace or mystical ecstasy but a holy warrior’s righteousness: “Rage was succeeded by calm. A sweet savour filled her veins, her lips parted, and, standing formidable upon the landing in her mackintosh, she looked with steady and sinister serenity at Mrs. Dalloway,” savoring imminent “religious victory” (MD 124–25). Although her vow to “fight; vanquish; have faith in God” restrains her violence, neither Russia nor religion soothes her “hot and turbulent feelings” or the worldly desires she is too poor, homely, and oppressed to satisfy (“It was the flesh that she must control”) (MD 124–29).

Abandoned by Elizabeth and assailed by “shocks of suffering,” Miss Kilman remains suspended between those strange bedfellows God and Russia as she makes her lonely way through “all the commodities of the world” out of the Army and Navy Stores and into “that other sanctuary, the Abbey,” where she kneels in dogged prayer among “reverent, middle class, English men and women, some of them desirous of seeing the wax works” (MD 133). The narrative pointedly declines to dissociate God and the soul from commodities, nationalism, and class. Whereas better-fed Londoners find “God … accessible and the path to Him smooth,” Miss Kilman, hiding her face in twitching hands, “struggle[s]” “to aspire above the vanities, the desires, the commodities, to rid herself both of hatred and of love, … so rough the approach to her God—so tough her desires” (MD 133–34). So laboring, she “impresse[s]” the well-fixed Londoners with “her largeness, robustness, and power”—Mr. Fletcher, Mrs. Dalloway, the Rev. Edward Whittaker, “and Elizabeth too” (MD 134). Religious warrior, communist sympathizer, unwitting prophet of a humiliated and downtrodden Germany’s working-class hero, Miss Kilman in her starved longing “for a better state of things” is a casualty of the nationalist hatreds against which Keynes inveighed. She stands as a small, ominous emblem of the economic ruin of great countries and a portent of revenge tragedy, counterposed to the effaced German elegy—an “ancient song” of “love which prevails”—sung by another “battered woman” in the street at the Regent’s Park Tube station.⁴³

More striking, finally, than the differences between Clarissa’s ineffectual noblesse oblige and Miss Kilman’s odious righteousness are their odd affinities. “Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians,” thinks Clarissa, in whom luxury has bred a lighter, freer, if not more honest or noble conscience; “she was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from school during the War—poor embittered unfortunate creature!” (MD 12). Unlike the aptly named Miss Kilman, who must be very, very good in order not to be positively criminal, the pampered Clarissa has no need of a heavy-duty conscience. She takes her privilege for granted, confuses Armenians with Albanians, tosses threadbare cushions to her servants “in gratitude … for helping her to be like this, … gentle, generous-hearted,” and rides the coattails of Richard’s social conscience from the haven of her sofa.⁴⁴ Claiming to wish “everybody merely to be themselves,” she yet finds the idea of praying shut up in a room “nauseating,” and she is “really shocked” by the glowering Miss Kilman: “This a Christian—this woman! This woman had taken her daughter from her! She in touch with invisible presences! Heavy, ugly, commonplace, without kindness or grace, she know the meaning of life!” (MD 125–26, 117). Yet hardly does she project on her “the power and taciturnity of some prehistoric monster armed for primeval warfare” than “hatred (which was for ideas, not people) crumble[s]” and Clarissa laughs in relief to see her “los[e] her malignity” and become “merely Miss Kilman, in a mackintosh, whom Heaven knows Clarissa would have liked to help” (MD 126).

For her part, Miss Kilman’s conscience is weighty in proportion to the mass of rage it has had to absorb and find some nominally civilized alibi for. In truth she would far rather resemble than despise Clarissa, and if she did, she would not need the righteousness that weighs her down: “she minded looking as she did beside Clarissa. … But why wish to resemble her? … She despised Mrs. Dalloway. … Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit. Yet Doris Kilman had … very nearly burst into tears when Mrs. Dalloway laughed at her” (MD 128). As the ur-Clarissa reflects, “All men were brothers. For that very reason, one must hate some of them, as one hated part of oneself” (H 271). As Clarissa glimpses her role in creating the monster she mistakes for Miss Kilman, Miss Kilman admits her secret wish to be like this woman she pretends has no virtues. No one wins this contest, but it shows that insofar as Miss Kilman is a monster, she is one created by the social system—a casualty of an economic war between the wars, a mute witness to Britain’s unacknowledged tyranny.

Is Septimus Warren Smith mad or does he have a message? That he is mad would seem indisputable; even sympathetic discussions cast him as a war victim not a prophet.⁴⁵ Yet Mrs. Dalloway’s postwar world of multifarious and contested realities pits Septimus’s reality against that of his doctors to frame “madness” as censored truth. If, as Michel Foucault argues, civilization disciplines madness to suppress its truths, art recaptures truths branded madness to confront the world with the necessity of change: “by the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, … where the world is forced to question itself. … [T]he world finds itself arraigned by that work of art and responsible before it for what it is.”⁴⁶

Mrs. Dalloway’s opening scenes frame this contestation of a multiplicitous reality as an outworn monotheism confronts an immanent modernist cosmos. Clarissa’s cutting-edge metaphor “another throw of the dice” is way ahead of Einstein’s mistaken objection, “God does not play dice,” in the 1926 controversy over Born and Heisenberg’s quantum theory.⁴⁷ In Mrs. Dalloway’s cosmos God does not play dice, for God does not exist. Fate plays dice. As the infinite possibilities that ride the crest of time collapse moment by moment into events, fate is arbitrary, time irreversible, disaster, suffering, and death inevitable if also unpredictable, and promises of heaven obsolete. Old transcendences metamorphose into an airplane swooping “like a skater … or a dancer” to leave an advertising slogan in a melting trail of smoke.⁴⁸ No two groundlings whose caves meet “daylight” at this moment read this celestial sign in quite the same way. “‘Glaxo,’ said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awe-stricken voice”; “‘Kreemo,’ murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a sleep-walker”; “It’s toffee,” murmured Mr. Bowley; “So, thought Septimus, … they are signalling to me”; “Hadn’t Mrs. Dempster always longed to see foreign parts?”; “a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination … to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory” (MD 20–28). Meanwhile, the earthbound counterpart of this heavenly sign, the inscrutable state motorcar (“probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dalloway”), stops traffic in Bond Street with a loud backfire—a parodic “voice of authority” that rouses “the spirit of religion,” “her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide” (MD 16, 14). Stirring nationalist piety in bystanders of every class, this blind spirit of monarchy and monotheism constellates an aleatory community of spectators marveling at manmade miracles, even as transcendence falls into immanence, revelation into high-tech marketing stunts, cathedrals into waxworks, divinely invested monarchs into a blank though “enduring symbol” of England’s “majesty” (MD 16). Loss of monovocal authority becomes gain as the weird enchanting harmonies of irreducible differences surround and displace the totalizing “spirit” in their midst.

Freud’s meditations on Europe’s future in The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents illuminate the contending poetries, or metaphysics, of Miss Kilman’s religious belief, England’s nationalist religion, Clarissa’s stoic atheism, and, not least, Septimus’s war experience. Consigning religion—“perhaps the most important item in the psychical inventory of a civilization,” without which many feel life would be intolerable—to humanity’s childhood, Freud advocates an “education to reality” (FI 18, 81). Such an education would teach that sexuality and aggression are profound and ineradicable human instincts; that civilization must continually be fought for in the unceasing “battle of the giants” Love and Death for “world-dominion”; and that creative endeavors to make life “tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone” console for the renunciations civilization demands better than can illusions of a heavenly afterlife (CD 69, FI 82). The European religions, he complains, depict a cosmos so lacking in rationality and realism as to reduce believers to childish credulity. They falsely soothe an infantile “need for a father’s protection” from sufferings inflicted by nature and humanity, exacerbate unconscious aggression and guilt by holding up impossible ethical ideals such as the Golden Rule, and foster hopes of “Heaven” that promote passivity and dissipate creative energies (CD 19, FI 82n). An “education to reality,” by contrast, would emphasize science, which subjects its accounts of reality to empirical verification, and art, which claims no transcendent authority. People so educated would find consolation in scientific understanding of the world and in such pleasurable pursuits as relationships, thought and creativity, power to act in and change the world, nature, beauty, and art. Freed from religion’s “bitter-sweet … poison,” humanity would grow up: it would abandon fantasies of a beneficent Providence, accept its helpless and insignificant place in the cosmos, resign itself to fate (those aspects of life not susceptible of change), and direct its “liberated energies” toward improving life for all here and now, leaving “heaven to the angels and the sparrows” (FI 81–82 and n).

When Freud speculated that the “experiment of an irreligious education” might yield “hope for the future,” a “treasure” to “enrich civilization,” his English publisher—a daughter of agnostics educated at home not in institutions long steeped in Church sponsorship—had already created such treasures.⁴⁹ The skeptic Clarissa and the scapegoat Septimus dramatize the power of art, thought, and imagination to grapple with reality and console for loss in this late age of the world’s experience when “simply one doesn’t believe … any more in God”; and the novel’s odd-affinities ontology and immanent cosmos anticipate Freud’s this-worldly philosophy (CSF 153). At the crossroads between modern Europe’s (first) civil war and its uncertain future, Freud’s meditations on the aggression that threatens civilization from within resonate with Septimus’s message; and his advocacy of art, philosophy, and science over religious “illusion,” with Clarissa’s arduous belief that “life”—though poised over an abyss, unwatched by any Providence, unredeemed by any heaven—is “enough” (MD 121–22).

Never spoken in so many words, Septimus’s message exists as a depth charge in his character, story, and fate. A prophetic witness to the aggression instinctive in human nature and ineradicable from European civilization, he brings the war home in his very person. He not only exposes his fellow citizens’ “really fearful … ‘settling down’” as if the war had never been, as Katherine Mansfield put it; he brings the war home as their war, their violence, which they disavow in a contestation of reality to the death.⁵⁰ Tortured by the memory of Evans blown to bits before his eyes, confessing that he has “committed a crime,” besieged by guilt at being alive but unable to feel, Septimus entertains the possibility “that the world itself is without meaning” (MD 88). To salvage its meaning, he tries to attest to the collective murder his civilization has commissioned from him, to offer a “truth” on which to rebuild civilization more lastingly. While Sir William Bradshaw and Dr. Holmes—gatekeepers of a society strategically blind to its own violence—pathologize his reality as “the deferred effects of shell shock,” he tries to “tell the whole world”; when that fails, he acts out his “astonishing revelation” through his sacrificial death (MD 183, 70). Although Septimus loses his life in this poetry contest, Mrs. Dalloway captures his “truth” for the real-world contest between Love and Death that art, like Keynes’s “moral book,” may aspire to influence.

Septimus too is an elegiac consciousness. Despite his overwhelming grief, he is not inconsolable but struggles in his own way to survive his message—to communicate it without going insane in the elegiac progress toward life and the future that his suicide interrupts. Since his “brain [i]s perfect”—he can read the Inferno and add up his bill—he surmises that “it must be the fault of the world” that “he could not feel” (MD 88). Yet he does feel extremes of ecstasy and pain as his wavering gaze takes in the ravishing phenomenal world, its breathtaking beauty intensified in proportion to his devastation. He is amazed to tears by the mysterious “smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty!” (MD 21–22). Everything sings to him: Evans sings “from behind the tree,” sparrows sing in Greek, the word time “split[s] its husk,” Rezia’s voice lapses into “contented melody,” sounds make “harmonies with premeditation,” even silence sings, “the spaces between … as significant as the sounds” (MD 70, 69, 146, 22). His rushing thoughts tumble out revelation after revelation. “Scientifically speaking,” he theorizes, “the flesh was melted off the world,” his body “macerated until only the nerve fibres were left,” “spread like a veil upon a rock”; “I have been dead and yet am now alive,” he hazards (MD 68–69). To his “ode to Time,” a pastoral, symbolically reborn Evans sings antiphonally that the dead wait in Thessaly for the war’s end when they will return, then suddenly materializes as Peter Walsh on the path: “‘for God’s sake don’t come!’ … But the branches parted. … It was Evans! But no mud was on him; no wounds. … I must tell the whole world, Septimus cried … (as the dead man in the grey suit came nearer)” (MD 70). Where his insupportable memories meet “daylight,” the everyday world splinters into the incandescent visions, music, and poetry that hold him to life.

Paul Fussell documents the chasm between the incommunicable reality experienced by the English soldiers at the front and the sentimental jingoism of civilians in England.⁵¹ Back “home” (“avoid the use of the word home,” notes Bradshaw), Septimus’s boss, Mr. Brewer, applauds his distinguished war service and promotes him “to a post of considerable responsibility”; Septimus, appalled and revolted by the patriotic lies by which his fellow Londoners transform collective murder into “pleasurable … emotion” and himself into a war hero, is diagnosed as mad (H 138, MD 88). Sir William inquires,

“You served with great distinction in the War?”

The patient repeated the word “war” interrogatively.

He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious symptom, to be noted on the card.

“The War?” the patient asked. The European War—that little shindy of schoolboys with gunpowder? Had he served with distinction? He really forgot. In the War itself he had failed.

“Yes, he served with the greatest distinction,” Rezia assured the doctor; “he was promoted.”

…

He had committed an appalling crime and been condemned to death by human nature.

“I have—I have—,” he began, “committed a crime—”

“He has done nothing wrong whatever,” Rezia assured the doctor.

…

“I—I—” he stammered.

But what was his crime? He could not remember it.

“Yes?” Sir William encouraged him. (But it was growing late.)

Love, trees, there is no crime—what was his message?

…

“I—I—” Septimus stammered.

“Try to think as little about yourself as possible,” said Sir William kindly. Really, he was not fit to be about.

…

“Trust everything to me,” he said, and dismissed them. (MD 96, 98)

Septimus’s doctors act as agents for a society that scapegoats him for bringing home the murderous aggression it would disavow, that projects its aggression upon him and expels him, its symbolic embodiment, so that he seems to bear it away. But the scapegoat who does not suffer silently turns victimage into prophecy.⁵³ While Rezia, following doctors’ orders, exhorts Septimus to “Look” at the everyday sights in Regent’s Park, a different reality absorbs him:

the lord of men … called forth in advance of the mass of men to hear the truth, to learn the meaning, which now at last, after all the toils of civilisation—Greeks, Romans, Shakespeare, Darwin, and now himself—was to be given whole to … “To whom?” he asked aloud. “To the Prime Minister,” the voices which rustled above his head replied … these profound truths which needed, so deep were they, so difficult, an immense effort to speak out, but the world was entirely changed by them forever. (MD 67)

From his scapegoat’s perspective, Septimus’s premonition of the “birth of a new religion” (or an old one always in need of rebirth) is sane (MD 23). If the world could avow its violence, would it not be radically altered, redeemed from its lies, filled with the power to atone for and even renounce it? Meanwhile, his doctors—civilization’s well-compensated disciplinarians—seek to ensure that the scapegoat stays a victim: “when a man … says he is Christ … & has a message, … society appoints the doctor to shut him up till he is cured. … Sir William not only prospered himself but saw to it that England should prosper too” (H 149–50, cf. MD 99). Making rounds in his sleek motorcar with his wife nestled in silvery furs, Bradshaw is “the judge, the saviour, the super man, in whose hands powers of life & death were lodged, torture, isolation; the great gaoler; the heavy compassionate man, who had seen so much of this sort of thing, made an excellent after dinner speech, & was at the top of his tree” (H 142). As Bradshaw lists reasons why Septimus must not kill himself (“King George … duty, & self-sacrifice, & humour & courage & the family”), Septimus muses on the oil portrait of Lady Bradshaw over the mantelpiece and Bradshaw’s income of “£10,000 a year” and objects, “But life … offers no such bounty to us … And perhaps there is no God. [Sir William] shrugged his shoulders” (H 154). Having “devour[ed] “Shakespeare, Darwin, The History of Civilization, and Bernard Shaw,” Septimus grasps his meaning: the “whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes” (MD 85, 92).

Back “home,” in short, Septimus is fated to know “everything,” to grasp “the meaning of the world,” and to bear the burden of witness to his civilization’s unimaginable violence without being driven mad (MD 66). “The War had taught him,” for example, “the message hidden in the beauty” of even Shakespeare’s words, sacred text of the civilization he went to war to “save”:

The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus (translated) the same. … [H]uman beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity. … They hunt in packs … scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness. They desert the fallen. … Brewer at the office, … brutality blared out on placards; men were trapped in mines; women burnt alive; and once a maimed file of lunatics … ambled and nodded and grinned past him. … And would he go mad? (MD 86, 88–90)

Septimus’s “insane truth” is still truth, in face of which “not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.”⁵⁴ He suffers, owns, and tries to bear witness to his civilization’s “appalling crime” but is finally forced to reenact it through a death that he expects to be read—a death that he offers as a gift and that the narrative insulates from dismissal as madness. Bathed in the light of his last afternoon, he tests his sanity, looking cautiously at objects in his room and finding with relief that “None of these things moved. All were still; all were real”; “He would not go mad” (MD 142). He does “not want to die”:

The sun feels hot, life good, the future full of possibilities that emerge in miniature in the hat he and Rezia, laughing together “like married people,” create for Mrs. Peters (MD 143). Now the world’s found order (“Mrs. Peters had a spiteful tongue. Mr. Peters was in Hull”) seems not so “terrible”; his writings and drawings seem “insane. all about death, nightingales”; his fear of “falling down, down into the flames!” (“Actually [Rezia] would look for flames, it was so vivid”) momentarily abates: “Miracles, revelations, agonies, loneliness, falling through the sea, … all were burnt out, for he had a sense, as he watched Rezia trimming the straw hat … of a coverlet of flowers” (H 313, MD 141–43). He foreknows that he must sacrifice his elegiac progress, perform the revelation no one heeds. But, feeling “Every power pour[] its treasures on his head” as his heart sings “Fear no more,” he delays “till the very last moment” the death in which two realities converge: the suicide his society demands and, as Clarissa somehow divines, “an attempt to communicate” (MD 139, 149, 184). He is pushed, yet he also jumps. He frames his death as the antithesis of madness, “an immense effort to speak out” difficult, “profound truths”; an offering, a sacrifice, a gift to “human beings”: “what did they want? … ‘I’ll give it you!’ he cried” (MD 149). Might recognition of his gift not help refound his civilization on firmer, more lasting ground? If so, is he mad to think that he dies for the sins of the world, dies so that others may live?

Through the artwork that reclaims his death from obscurity, Septimus bequeathes his message to the future. His suicide, pathologized by Sir William and Richard to promote the shell shock bill, is received by Clarissa precisely as a message: “defiance,” a breathtaking escape from soul-destroying doctors, a Shelleyan “plunge[] holding his treasure” (MD 184, cf. H 386, where Shelley’s name appears). In her spontaneous private elegy for him, his death inversely mirrors her life. Echoing “Adonais,” she reflects that the living “would grow old,” he never. By flinging his life away he has preserved “a thing … that mattered,” something “defaced, obscured in her own life,” lost “every day in corruption, lies, chatter” (MD 184). In opposing truth/treasure/death to lies/corruption/life, Clarissa confronts her own Conversion—her compromised treasure, Sally’s kiss. Channeling her own rage and grief into social contestation, she indicts Sir William as Conversion’s agent—“a great doctor yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrage—forcing your soul”; such men “make life intolerable” (MD 184–85).

We shall return in a moment to the sexual crises Clarissa’s language evokes. Now her anger turns inward as existential “terror,” an “awful fear” of having wasted her life, seizes her: “it was her disaster—her disgrace … her punishment. … She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success. Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton” (MD 185). At last she makes peace with her own defection from love’s “sublimity” as the price of the life with Richard that she simply likes and, accepting this reality, glimpses her survival and future in the old woman in the window opposite (H 186). Rising like a sylvan goddess in her green dress, Clarissa concludes her small elegy with Septimus’s fate and her own in equipoise:

Elegy’s brutal principle of substitution dictates the emotional logic by which the unknown young man’s death helps Clarissa to embrace life, beauty, fun, her party, all her consolations in face of time and inexorable loss—“That’s what I do it for” (MD 121). Her elegiac progress repeats in small her navigation from Sylvia’s death through perilous grief and rage to the existential consolation simply “that one day should follow another,” that she should “wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough” (MD 122).

If Clarissa’s elegy for Septimus is inadequate to arraign the world before the truths it brands madness, Mrs. Dalloway captures his message within its fictional bounds for the actual world beyond them. Not Clarissa but we readers receive (or not) the message of Septimus’s death, the costs of the war he names a “crime,” the measure of what his life means to him, the infinite possibilities of his unfurling days. Meanwhile, Clarissa reflects on her Conversion, acknowledges loss, and affirms the consolations that reward the elegist’s exigent bowing to reality. Let us now return to Clarissa’s brief flare of rage at Sir William, which illuminates the protagonists’ elegiac doubling as a splitting of authorial voice into the sane survivor and the insane war veteran whom Woolf created partly out of herself: “S’s character. founded on R[upert Brooke?]? … or founded on me? … might be left vague—as a mad person is … so can be partly R.; partly me” (H 418). The novel’s genetic text illuminates Woolf’s transmutation of her own harrowing “madness,” and of the losses, grief, and rage that fueled it, into an elegiac work of art that might influence the world. The Septimus who is partly Woolf, these manuscript traces suggest, dies not only for his society’s “crime” of war but also for the violence that its ruling “father[s]” visit upon women.

These words belong to a draft sequence that leads from Rezia’s despairing thoughts in Harley Street to Lady Bruton’s luncheon. The London medical establishment’s “truth” forcibly embraces a “miserable rag & relic” of a soul who comes “fluttering … bereft of shelter, shade, or refuge, naked, defenceless,” to suffer “the terrific stamp of Sir Williams rage. He swooped; he devoured. … Such decision, combined with humanity, … endeared Sir William greatly to the relations of his victims” (H 155, cf. MD 99–101). No reader of Woolf’s letters about her incarceration in a home for the insane could fail to sense here the remembered “mad … me” on whom she drew for Septimus nor the “raging furnace” of feelings about “madness and doctors and being forced” that she “kept cooling in [her] mind” for years before she could “touch it without bursting into flame all over.”⁵⁵ Refracting Septimus’s war traumas through her experiences of the social system in action, Woolf discloses and disguises the tangled sources of “madness” in familial and societal dynamics, including her Duckworth half brothers’ incestuous abuse, the reactions of family, friends, and doctors to this history, her relations’ power over her incarceration, and the pressures of “Proportion” and “Conversion” (MD 100). In The Hours Septimus, like Woolf’s “mad … me,” hears nightingales sing Greek, Philomela’s incestuous violation retooled to his war experience: “Evans was a Greek nightingale … & now sang this ode, about death … ‘And so I reached Greece’; where he joined the poets, in Thessaly” (H 66). In Mrs. Dalloway nightingales become sparrows singing “in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death” (MD 24–25). Yet Septimus never ceases to be “partly” the ghost of that “me” who signed herself “Sparroy” to Violet Dickinson—one friend who could grasp a “truth” that might as well have been Greek to the society that exalted George Duckworth.⁵⁶

In creating a war veteran “partly” out of that former “me,” Woolf foreshadows Three Guineas’ analysis of the war at home, the abuses of women under the social law of masculine and heterosexual privilege. In The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway, women’s telling of truth and lies dramatizes their negotiations of elegiac inheritance, sexuality, and social law in a civilization being rebuilt, perhaps, on firmer ground. As Sacks observes, the critical question of communal inheritance from the dead implicates the mourners’ sexuality psychically and legally. The old crises of narcissism and sexuality that mourning awakens, inheritance must somehow resolve. Through same-sex attractions, intimations of incest and madness, and conversion dramas, The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway expose the systemic social violence that governs inheritance, dictates the mourner’s sexuality, and provokes the violent energies that the elegy diverts from tragic enactment into social critique. More specifically, women must choose between challenging social law and submitting to it in exchange for socioeconomic rewards. Submission to the Goddess of Conversion, as Clarissa knows, entails lies—silences, omissions, censorship. Thus Lady Bradshaw has “gone under” fifteen years earlier: “a nervous twitch” signals something “really painful to believe—that the poor lady lied”; and Clarissa contrasts Septimus’s uncorrupted “treasure” with her youthful passion for Sally, renounced and now obscured by “lies, corruption, chatter,” as she consoles herself with the pleasures her bargain has bought her (MD 100–1). This recognition—her legacy from Septimus—weighs conversion’s advantages against its costs: “she did not pity him”; she too has felt, “if it were now to die ‘twere now to be most happy’”; still, life is enough (MD 186, 184, 35).