It was in relation to Arnold Bennett that Virginia Woolf most clearly declared her aim as a novelist, and even a cursory glance at later studies of fiction shows that it is common to accept their confrontation as typical of that between (in her own terms) ‘Edwardian’ and ‘Georgian’ novelists or, very often, ‘modern’ as opposed to ‘traditional’. In the next chapter I shall consider some effects of this general adoption of her argument, but here I shall discuss what she says only so far as it throws light on her own work.
Her argument is set out in two notable texts - the various versions of‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ and the essay, ‘Modern Fiction’. The first of these was provoked by Bennett’s review of Jacob’s Room in which he declared that the creation of character was the foundation of good fiction and that the characters of Virginia Woolf’s novel ‘do not vitally survive in the mind’. ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ first appeared in the Nation and Athenaeum in 1923 and was later enlarged into a lecture and an article, in which form it is more commonly known. It is here that the famous statement ‘in or about December, 1910, human character changed’ appears. She finds the evidence for this in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, the plays of Bernard Shaw, and (with a frivolity which she may well have regretted later) the behaviour of one’s cook:
The rest of the essay asserts that Bennett and Wells and Galsworthy have so much emphasized the social situation, the belongings, the economics of the situations with which they deal that the Georgian writers cannot follow them. Here she repeats what she said more briefly and more stylishly in 1919 in ‘Modern Fiction’.
This essay has become perhaps the most famous text by a practising novelist on the subject of fictional technique. In it she rejects Bennett, Wells, and Galsworthy on the grounds that they are ‘materialists’ who cannot catch life because they are constrained to construct plots which must have an air of plausibility, and that they aim at this by emphasis upon externals.
By contrast, she says:
In relating her technical innovations to changes in the way of seeing human beings and perceptions, and conceiving of these as a kind of shared Zeitgeist, Virginia Woolf is not only declaring the seriousness and necessity of the innovations but also responding to the observable fact that a number of writers, largely in isolation from one another, came to use a form of presentation which has commonly been called the ‘stream of consciousness’ or ‘interior monologue’. She herself first developed it in Jacob’s Room, published in 1922, though she had obviously been brooding about it for some time before. Ulysses was published in the same year, though sections had been appearing previously; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had been published in 1916 and the first of Dorothy Richardson’s sequence of novels, Pointed Roofs, a year earlier. Joyce claimed that Edouard Dujardin’s Les Lauriers Sont Coupes (1887) was an influence on him and Virginia Woolf mentions Proust as a fellow explorer and Chekhov’s ‘Gusev’. There are differences between the methods of these writers and they would certainly not have agreed in all points on their aims, but they all share the intention in at least some parts of their works of giving the reader a sense of receiving the direct flow of a character’s perceptions, unmediated by a narrator and giving thus some sense of the richness, untidiness, and associativeness of the mind.
It is not difficult to find such earlier examples of the uses of this technique as the first paragraph of Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), and frequent occurrences in Dostoevsky, but what distinguished these earlier examples is that they are incidental effects, normally rather short, and in all of them the perceiving mind is in an abnormal state - drugged, delirious, or drunk. J. J. Mendilow, in Time and the Novel, gives a number of examples of an awareness by nineteenth-century writers of the theoretical possibilities, most strikingly one by Stendhal, but they remain theoretical; Stendhal’s clear and analytical style could hardly be further from an internal monologue, and Maupassant specifically rejects it on the grounds of the need for selection. But Virginia Woolf uses basically the same method for the sane Peter Walsh and the mad Septimus Warren Smith. Leopold Bloom, musing as he goes out to buy breakfast, is not treated totally differently from his wife when she is three-quarters asleep. Gone is any feeling that the sane and waking mind is best represented by coherent sentences given to us by a narrator who shares with the reader a belief that the mind is potentially knowable and best explained as clearly as possible. To produce this technical change required two concomitant influences. The first is, obviously, those changes in the conception of human personality which found expression in depth psychology and which are most often associated with the name of Freud; the second is a view of fiction which sees its aim as approximating as closely as possible to an imitation of reality. Just as novelists had increasingly made their characters talk differently from one another so they now set to work to make them think and perceive differently. The stream of consciousness novel is, in this sense at least, a natural continuation of realism.1
Indeed, despite her repudiation of Bennett’s kind of realism, Virginia Woolf’s way of talking about her novels and her practice within them clearly starts from certain realistic premises. Her objection to Bennett is that he tells us so much about the social or physical circumstances of Mrs Brown (or, when she uses an example from Bennett’s own work, Hilda Less ways) that he cannot convey the reality of the character herself. It has often been suggested that Jacob’s Room is rather unsatisfactory because in it Virginia Woolf discovers her technique for rendering experience but does not do very much with it. This criticism might well have meant less to her than to her critics; the rendering of perception with a feeling of immediacy and freshness might seem self-sufficient and self-justifying. Lily Briscoe, in To the Lighthouse (1927), when she is trying to remember Mrs Ramsay, feels that ‘what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything’ (m. 12). We do not have to rely for our conviction that this expresses Virginia Woolf’s own feelings upon our sense that Lily Briscoe resembles her creator, for in her diary in 1926 Virginia Woolf writes:
It must, of course, go without saying that what I have called ‘technique’ is equally subject-matter and that to discuss what the novels are ‘about’ may seem to give an unjustified primacy to a concept or an argument or a philosophy which predates and is more important than the work itself Virginia Woolf’s claim for the necessity of a method is equally a claim for a subject.
Yet, though she omits it from her argument in ‘Modern Fiction’, Virginia Woolf knows perfectly well that the atoms falling upon the mind do not, of themselves, produce a pattern. We select and Lily Briscoe, taking up her unfinished painting, might be speaking for the novelist when she formulates it thus:
Given Virginia Woolf’s feeling for Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, the resemblance is not surprising, but here, again, we do not have to rely upon an assumption that this is her way of conceiving a novel, for it echoes what she had written in her diary for 8 April 1925 about Proust: ‘he is is tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom. And he will, I suppose, both influence me and make me out of temper with every sentence of my own.’
Having decided that a traditional form of plot misrepresented life, however, she was committed to finding some other - to discovering what form emerged from the revelation of the characters upon whom she focused her attention, following where this inspiration led. In practice this meant that even a frolic like Orlando (1928) has an unconventional structure and if we consider her mature novels we see very clearly that, more perhaps than any other novelist, she feels that each experience requires a different form for its expression. These forms are all not only highly individual, but also highly elaborated. Mrs Dalloway (1925) follows two characters who never meet and yet whom we are meant to link; To the Lighthouse creates a scene and a mood in the first part which, after a short section which disposes of ten years and a number of major happenings, is recovered and, as one character says, ‘unfolded’ by survivors; The Waves (1931) gives a rather dematerialized account of six lives, counterpointed with the rising and setting of the sun over the sea; The Years (1937) is a variant on a highly selective family chronicle and it is tempting to speculate that this novel cost her more than any other in terms of work and agony because the form resisted her urge to dematerialize, to move ever further inwards into her personages; Between the Acts (1941) sets an amateur pageant play, interpreting the history of England, against the feelings of characters facing the threat of war.
To the Lighthouse has generally been thought the best not only by those devoted to her individual vision but also by those who have some reservations about much of her work, and I therefore propose to discuss it in some detail, exemplifying through it the main, characteristics of her writing.
The two elements of the technical method used in this novel - the presentation of moment-by-moment sensation and the underlying structure - are inseparable; the one necessitates the other and they both imply the subjectivity of time. As if to emphasize this, Virginia Woolf sees to it that the opening pages are less readily locatable in time than anything else in the book. It seems to me unlikely that any reader at first acquaintance will realize immediately, when she writes: ‘it was odious of him [Tansley] to rub this in, and make James still more disappointed; but at the same time, she would not let them laugh at him’ that the words ‘at the same time’ have more or less the opposite of their literal meaning. We have moved here from the specific moment (Mrs Ramsay talking about the chances of going to the lighthouse tomorrow, Mr Ramsay saying that the weather will not allow it) to a general reflection which means something like ‘nevertheless, despite the typicality of this behaviour on Tansley’s part, she reflected that she was not in the habit of allowing her family to mock him’. From this we go to an apparent immediacy,—‘“Nonsense,” said Mrs Ramsay, with great severity’ - which is actually a specific moment in a previous discussion with her children about Tansley. Then we modulate to description of a repeated action ‘When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better’, then back to the moment when she said ‘Nonsense’ and find that this was at a meal, for we are told that her family are looking up from their plates. We are at last, after about two pages, brought back to the original time by Tansley’s speaking about the lighthouse, only, a few lines later, to find that her memory has again brought the past into the present - ‘He was a sarcastic brute, Andrew said.’ Thereafter, until the end of the first section everything is memory, including a lengthy description of a visit to the town with Tansley, though some is not her memory but that of Tansley himself. Section 2 is only six lines and is all in the present, acting as a kind of summing up, perhaps giving the reader a chance to feel for a moment unquestioningly fixed, before going on to Section 3, which again begins in the present but once more wanders back into the remembered experience of Mrs Ramsay.
Virginia Woolf, throughout her writing, is preoccupied with time. Sometimes this is an apparently technical matter; she writes in her diary about the problem of ending the novel so that the boat’s reaching the lighthouse and Lily Briscoe’s completing her picture seem to come together. ‘Could I do it in a parenthesis? So that one has the sense of reading the two things at the same time.’ The expedition of Paul and Minta to the shore with Nancy and Andrew is given in a six-page parenthesis (1. 14) between the asking of a question - ‘Did Nancy go with them?’ - and its answer. But in general it is far more than technical. Virginia Woolf is both obsessed with a sense of the flux of experience and with the mind’s desire, and ability, seemingly to abolish time, to recover the sharp immediacy of past experience. The paradox at which she aims is the simultaneous recognition that everything flows and that only by accepting this flowing can some permanence be achieved.
I have used the common expression ‘stream of consciousness’ to express the manner in which Virginia Woolf presents the experiences of her characters, but, as previous critics have often emphasized, the term, though virtually indispensable, covers a multitude of devices. If we compare Virginia Woolf’s method with that of Joyce, we find vast differences. Joyce is careful that no word, no idea, no idiom should occur in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy which she would not have recognized. The aim is to give us as far as possible (bearing in mind that Joyce can only say one thing at a time while Molly can think several and feel them, too) the sense that we are watching the atoms as they fall upon the mind. Virginia Woolf certainly wants to give us this sense of partaking in a character’s intimate thoughts and sensations, but she quite frequently chooses to register them not as a sequence of discrete reactions but as a metaphor or simile. Mrs Ramsay, having given her husband the ‘reassurance that he wants’, feels that ‘there throbbed through her, like the pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation’ (1. 7), and this image is followed through for some forty lines. These images, it could be argued, are those of the character herself. But what are we to say of one which immediately precedes it: ‘Immediately, Mrs Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself’? Does she see herself thus? And in the splendidly funny sequence in which we see Mr Ramsay trying to think out his problem in philosophy and then finding that he is thinking about himself trying to think and so will not think any more, we are often in doubt. That he sees himself as a doomed explorer may be appropriate to Mr Ramsay in his self-dramatizing mood (and to that great mountaineer Sir Leslie Stephen, as his daughter no doubt intended), but what can we make of the likening of logical thought to repeating the alphabet from A to, say, R (1. 6)? This is surely an author’s image; it is inconceivable that Ramsay himself would translate whatever his problem is into this terminology.
It might seem that to chop logic thus is pointless; does it matter whether it is Mr Ramsay’s own image or his creator’s? I think that it does (for if Ramsay did function in this way he would be a much stranger kind of philosopher than he is intended to be) but that few readers think the image is his own and thus the problem is normally solved in the reading. But elsewhere there are more puzzling and potentially more damaging matters. When Mrs Ramsay goes down to dinner, preoccupied with the question of whether Paul had proposed to Minta, her descent is presented thus:
Mrs Ramsay manœuvres people and she wants to be the centre and to make people happy, but she cannot, surely, be such a self-regarding monster as this. Given what we have been told about her before, it seems more likely that what Virginia Woolf is saying, a little playfully, is that this is how she has often appeared to other people and that she cannot be totally unaware of the effect which she makes upon others. But this cannot be demonstrated and, even taking the view which I do, it is uncertain what tinge of irony may be implied in the description. What is certain is that Virginia Woolf is often present, appealing to us directly, in what at first sight look like accounts of the experienees of her characters. Consider, for example, the function of the word ‘one’ in the following account of Mr Ramsay:
Her frequent use of ‘one’ in such passages usually has this effect as does her frequent use of the present participle - a form of speech which asserts a continuity of a happening but does not attach it to any person.
Again and again we find ourselves in the position of saying that a perception could be in the mind of a character, that no signal has been given to us that we have passed out of this character’s mind into that of another, and yet to accept the perception as part of this character’s stream of thought and perception would call for a marked shift of our attitude. It seems clear that what is often happening is that Virginia Woolf is herself commenting without making any very clear separation between the character and the creator. Her way of dealing with her characters is, if one accepts this view, seen to be similar to the way in which she deals in her essays with real people.
The attitude which we take up to the second part, ‘Time Passes’, is of importance in determining our judgement of how present she is throughout. It is possible to see it as a necessary interlude, a way of making ten years pass, and therefore stylistically different from the rest, but the more we see it in relation to the other two parts the more will we feel the persona of the author permeating the whole novel, for in it this element of the writer brooding or ruminating or dreaming her characters is most pronounced.
All the elements of Part 11 are to be found in the other two parts, though sometimes in more developed and sometimes more attenuated forms. It starts and ends with personal experience, rendered in dialogue or reflection by named characters. In between there are fanciful an thropomorphisms about the winds, the furniture, the seasons, the mythologization of Mrs McNab into the archetypal charwoman, parenthetical accounts of happenings elsewhere. Throughout, surfacing in various forms, there is a Protean consciousness which weaves the whole together. This perceiving persona is sometimes the asker of rhetorical questions (‘What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature?’) sometimes ‘one’, sometimes ‘any sleeper’, sometimes ‘the dreamers’, sometimes ‘those who had gone down to pace the beach and ask the sea and sky what message they reported or what visions they affirmed’ (II. 6).
Virginia Woolf seems to be implying that there is a shared experienee, a collective awareness, which breaks down the barriers between individualities, so that in solitude powers for which we hardly have names can move us. This is to express matters metaphorically, as she herself does. She implies in The Waves (1931) that there is some kind of common consciousness which can make people feel that they are all parts of some larger, undifferentiated being; Mrs Dalloway conceives of her continuance after death in memories and the continued existence of places at which she has looked; in To the Lighthouse, Mrs Ramsay returns in the consciousness of Lily and of her family. Less metaphorically we can say that she is prepared to stand in the middle of her novel, flowing in and out of her characters, but also, at times, speaking in her own person in descriptions which cannot be those of any character, or in perceptions unattached to anyone or in images which direct our feelings. Often such passages are very ornate, sustained set pieces, such as the description to which I shall revert later in my discussion of the structure of the book, of the effect of the lighting of the candles at dinner.
It is clear that such a narrative method carries inevitable risks of ambiguity; we will not receive an answer, for example, if we ask whether or not the rumours of Mrs Ramsay’s earlier unhappy love affair are true. We can only say, as we might of some person in real life, that we do not know but that she is the sort of person about whom people speculate thus. I do not think that in this novel, unlike some of her others, these uncertainties are damaging, for the shared ground which is indisputable is great.
This element of lifelike ambiguity is embodied also in the structure of the novel. Essentially it is the rediscovery, the re-creation in Part in of a moment which is created in Part 1 but which might seem to have been made irrecoverable by the passage of ten years in Part II. In various places Virginia Woolf draws attention to the pattern in terms which make sure that we shall not overlook it. Lily Briscoe, remembering Mrs Ramsay and speculating about how she had come to marry Mr Ramsay, feels that ‘She was not inventing; she was only trying to smooth out something she had been given years ago folded up’ (m. 12). That could stand very well for a description of the effect of the book. So could Mrs Ramsay’s own feeling when, in the middle of dinner, William Bankes reminds her of some old friends, the Mannings, and she remembers them and ‘it fascinated her, as if, while she had changed, that particular day, now become very still and beautiful, had remained there, all these years’. A little later, in the middle of a babble of conversations, she feels that her remembering the Mannings ‘was like reading a good book again, for she knew the end of that story, since it had happened twenty years ago, and life, which shot down even from this dining-room table in cascades, heaven knows where, was sealed up there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its banks’ (1. 17).
The choice of metaphor by Mrs Ramsay points to one important structural characteristic of To the Lighthouse - that it is largely incomprehensible at a first reading and only achieves its significance at a second and thus demands a spatial understanding. Just as Mrs Ramsay can only know in retrospect that the Mannings’s room will acquire significance for her as it is contrasted with the ‘cascades’ of present life, so we will only recognize what is significant in Part 1 when we look back to it from Part II.
A movement towards the spatial, towards what Henry James called ‘the figure in the carpet’, has been observable in much fiction of this century. It goes along with a diminishing interest in narrative and, paradoxically, with a desire for an effect of immediacy. Its triumphs are obvious and To the Lighthouse is one of them. But the paradox entails a price. Here, for example, we find that to understand the book we must read it more than once but that on a second reading we cannot forget what we are supposed not to know. We cannot enter into Mrs Ramsay’s wonderings as to whether the evening at dinner will be remembered without an undesirable knowledge that she will shortly die but that the evening will be remembered ten years later, just as we cannot forget that the Rayleys will not be a happy couple and Prue will not have for long the happiness that her mother foresees for her.
But though we cannot totally re-create the freshness of first acquaintance and though the sense of the remembered moment is, finally, what matters, we should not undervalue the book’s effect of complexity and even of that muddle against which Mrs Ramsay fights. We need to remember, for example, that for some time at the dinner table William Bankes is bored and Charles Tansley has a good case in feeling that there is something infuriating in the prevailing social manner. Mrs Ramsay herself is well aware of this and it is her task to create unity. ‘Nothing seemed to have merged,’ she feels at table, ‘They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested upon her’ (1. 17). The moment when things do merge is produced when she orders candles to be lit; she sees them illuminating the arrangement of fruit and a shell on the dish in the middle of the table, in a sudden passage of baroque description of it as ‘a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune’s banquet’. She sees Augustus Carmichael looking at the plate of fruit and reflects; ‘That was his way of looking, different from hers. But looking together united them.’ But, in the manner which I have already discussed, the centre of perception moves away from her, we float in and out of several minds and though we come back to Mrs Ramsay’s as the presiding mind, we first have an assertion of a general perception, shared by them all:
Thereafter Mrs Ramsay feels secure. When she leaves the room she casts a glance back and feels that it has already become the past, but
The third part of the novel is to demonstrate the truth of this intuition; at its opening we are told that the expedition to the lighthouse is planned again and that Lily Briscoe is returning to the painting which she had started ten years before. In both actions Mrs Ramsay is rediscovered but in neither is the remembrance simple; Lily, in particular, admits to very mixed feelings about her and about that day in the past. The link which for her joins it to the present is the recollection, suddenly, that
This motif had indeed preoccupied her but the revelations associated with it were far from simple. First it was linked with her feeling that Mrs Ramsay sometimes misunderstood people - in particular that she had pitied William Bankes in a manner which ‘seemed to be instinctive and to arise from some need of her own rather than other people’s. He is not in the least pitiable. He has his work’ (1. 17) - and then she had thought reassuringly that she, too, had her work, her picture. Later at dinner, it was linked with her being nice, at Mrs Ramsay’s unspoken request, to Charles Tansley and feeling that so many human relations are insincere. Later still, it came to her in the middle of violent images about Minta and Paul Rayley and love and the sense that ‘she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation’. And amid the complexity of her memories of Mrs Ramsay comes, very strikingly, the recollection of ‘this mania of hers for marriage’ and how she, Lily, would triumph over her now by telling her that the Rayleys had not had a happy marriage. Above all,
But as she goes on painting, trying to stay immersed in the painting but coming to the surface of what surrounds her and to memories, she feels grief for Mrs Ramsay and anger at having to feel grief again, and details about the daily life of the Ramsays impose themselves upon her, including a very vivid recollection of Mr Ramsay stretching out his hand and raising his wife from her chair, and she feels that this is how they must have been when she agreed to marry him. What we observe here is that Lily, who has fled marriage, seems only to be able to complete her picture - to remember clearly enough the shadow on the steps which is Mrs Ramsay’s shadow and which will give a centre to her painting—by reconstructing something of the relationship of husband and wife.2 She walks to the edge of the lawn with her paint-brush in her hand and looks for the boat, feeling that she must share her vision - ‘Where was that boat now? Mr Ramsay? She wanted him.’ Remembering from that same morning that he had sought sympathy and that she had been unable to give it directly and that when she wanted to give it he no longer demanded it and the time for it had passed, she feels at the very end of the book that ‘Whatever she had wanted to give him, when he had left her that morning, she had given him at last’ (m. 14).
A similar complexity and a similar resolution is experienced by Cam and James in the boat. United in embarrassment at their father’s peculiarities and in resistance to his domination they too remember what we have been shown in Part 1. James, not fully understanding what it is, remembers the image of a beak striking which in Part 1 represented his father’s hated interruption of his mother’s reading to him; but, intruding upon this is another image which reminds us of Mr Ramsay’s own vision of himself as he walked on the terrace and tried to think and dramatized himself as a lonely thinker:
Cam, falling asleep, dreams of the island they have left as ‘a hanging garden; it was a valley, full of birds, and flowers, and antelopes’ (in. 13). This echoes directly what her mother had said as she talked her to sleep as a child frightened by the pig’s skull, which has been covered with a shawl:
She has already virtually abandoned her rebellion, though she would wish to maintain it for the sake of loyalty to James. But at the end they are both in a situation akin to that of Lily when she cannot give sympathy and then is enchanted by Mr Ramsay’s tirade about boots and then wants to give when Mr Ramsay no longer asks. Here, too, we end with Mr Ramsay as a lonely and impressive figure and the description of him shows that his children are in effect seeing him as his wife must have seen him:
Mrs Ramsay’s triumph, here, her last, is that her feeling about her husband survives all other views of him.
The novel is so organized that it concludes with two simultaneous revelations and it is appropriate that its last word is ‘vision’, for it is beyond question a novel which seeks a meaning beyond the simply representational. It is notable that, while most nineteenth-century novelists were content to leave fundamental beliefs to take care of themselves while they dealt with questions of ethics which do not demand religious scrutiny, many twentieth-century novelists, writing in a period when religious orthodoxy has been in decline, have probed this question of fundamental meaning. Here it is Lily who, as a character, formulates what Virginia Woolf, throughout her work, takes as central:
It is a tenuous revelation, that memory and love can survive and give emotional significance after the passage of time and, as if to make clear beyond question her own awareness of just how limited it is (though no less precious for its limitation), Virginia Woolf introduces into the book a repeated image of quite extraordinary horror - the mackerel which they use as bait. We know from her diary, 14 May 1925, that this was part of her plan from the beginning:
In the novel the mackerel, which is given a complete parenthetical section to itself, is treated less mercifully:
There are, Virginia Woolf seems to be saying, some agonies which even the memory of Mrs Ramsay cannot redeem. We should not be surprised at this harshness, though she may wish us to be shocked at the gruesomeness, for throughout the book there has been a sense that her characters must seek a meaning in life just because of a horror which attends us all the time. When Marie, the Swiss girl, speaks of the beauty of the mountains she does it with tears in her eyes and Mrs Ramsay knows it is because her father is dying of cancer. The sound of the sea, which for Mrs Ramsay ‘for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo’ will suddenly ‘like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life’ and make her ‘look up with an impulse of terror’ (1. 3).
This image of the sea reminds us that a sense of impermanence and threat and a sometimes rather desperate seeking for some belief or experience which can keep it at bay, is central, also, to Mrs Dalloway, the novel which she wrote before To the Lighthouse. Mrs Dalloway, too, seeks some stability in the midst of flux and the sea which she imagines as comforting her (paradoxically, through the dirge from Cymbeline with the message that none of us are exempt from death) is also there in the mind of Septimus Warren Smith, for here, more openly than anywhere in To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf suggests that minds may in some way flow into one another and communicate without ever the people meeting. Mrs Dalloway’s belief, reported by Peter Walsh, is akin to Lily Briscoe’s feelings about Ramsay, but with an outright descriptiveness replacing the slowly emerging suggestion:
What vitiates Mrs Dalloway as an exploration of a similar range of feelings to those of To the Lighthouse is in part the obtrusively obvious element of contrivance in the parallelism of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith and partly a radical ambiguity. It is said that Virginia Woolf had originally intended to have Mrs Dalloway die at the end of the book and that, changing her mind, she introduced Septimus as a surrogate. Whether or not this is true, it is certainly how he functions; but the interrelationships between the two groups are often asserted with a slickness which obtrudes. That Peter Walsh, returning to his hotel, should hear the bell of the ambulance which will deposit Smith at the mortuary and reflect that it is one of the triumphs of civilization, comes too pat; it is the kind of irony which belongs more to the world of Graham Greene’s ‘entertainments’. That Sir William Bradshaw should bring to Clarissa’s party the news of Septimus’s death and should provoke in Clarissa the same feelings which Septimus has had about him is too obvious. The whole linkage with ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ and the dog barking draws attention to itself. In the work of a writer like Hardy who is overtly constructing plots as the framework of a story there may be no harm in such contrivance, but if the writer comes before us as tracing the marks of the atoms as they fall we cannot accept such neatnesses. We certainly have a sense of Virginia Woolf’s presence in her novels, but in speaking of her ‘brooding or ruminating or dreaming her book’ I have tried to draw attention to the way in which we feel that her consciousness is part of the book without being an overtly controlling, far less a contriving, device.
But there is an ambiguity in Mrs Dalloway which seems to me even more damaging. I have suggested that Virginia Woolf’s narrative method leads inevitably to ambiguities. It is possible (though insensitive) to produce a reading of To the Lighthouse in which Mrs Ramsay is a contriving and ageing beauty, totally mistaken about other people’s feelings, Mr Ramsay an equally ageing and also outdated pedant who bullies women and children and is admired intermittently by those who have some taste for being bullied, and Lily Briscoe a sexually frustrated but also timid spinster who compensates for these disadvantages by high-flown rapture about water-colour painting. It is possible to take this view because there is often no logically incontrovertible way of assigning feelings and beliefs to the right people; it is insensitive and, for a receptive reader, difficult to do this because to take up such a perverse view leads eventually to an awareness that one is pushing one logic against the pressure of other suggestions; the book pulls itself back into shape. It leaves us, reasonably enough, with that range of ambiguities to which we are accustomed in real life. But in Mrs Dalloway there is a radical ambiguity in the judgements which we are invited to make. Put with crude brevity we might say that we can see Mrs Dalloway as a woman who, haunted by the knowledge of death and reminded on this day of an irrecoverable past in which her feelings flowed more deeply, bravely throws her party in the face of fear and, reminded of death in the middle of her party, acknowledges its power and feels a link with all who die; others, from Scrope Purvis at the opening to Peter at the very end, are given some joy and love by her gallantry and her power to feel. Or we can see her as a remarkably self-dramatizing woman (note how she thinks that her maid Lucy sees her as a brave knight going out with her parasol to conquer), despising Hugh Whitbread but basically no different (how she is hurt by Lady Bruton’s non-invitation to a luncheon party which any sensible person would avoid at all costs), who tries to inject significance into her worldly party (how glad she is to have the Prime Minister and how mean she is to Ellie Henderson) by claiming kinship with the unknown dead young man (he has thrown away his life and she likens it to throwing a shilling in the Serpentine). I do not think that one can get the book into focus because the two utterly opposed views constantly jar on one another. The ambiguity is not such as we deal with in life but rather the ambiguity which evades the issues, which refuses to decide between incompatible views and which seeks therefore to dazzle us with momentary set pieces.
Virginia Woolf’s resolute avoidance of ‘issues’ tends to make such ambiguity not only possible but inevitable. Clarissa’s inability to distinguish whether her husband’s committee is concerned with the Armenians or Albanians is typical. We might take this as a good satirical jab at a political wife, and hence move towards my second account of the book and of Clarissa’s character, were it not that Virginia Woolf similarly disposes of such facts throughout her writing. There is a very striking example in The Years. Eleanor, in the 1891 section of the book, attends a committee meeting; we are never told what the committee meeting is about, Eleanor is never shown thinking about the issues involved, although the obvious assumption is that its purpose is to do good to the poor. Eleanor is, however, aware of her position of some prestige as compared with the other committee members and the section ends with ludicrous abruptness: ‘She pulled herself together and gave him her opinion. She had an opinion - a very definite opinion. She cleared her throat and began.’ The effect of this is not merely to assert that Virginia Woolf has no interest in the purpose of the committee and feels that we do not need to know what it is; it is also to make us feel, whether Virginia Woolf desires this or not (and I do not think that she wants us to despise Eleanor), that Eleanor herself has no interest, that she is concerned only with a conception of herself as a member of the committee. It is an unwanted triumph of ‘life-style’ over life.
No writer can include everything, but if we compare the nature of her omissions with those of Bennett, with whom she contrasted herself, we can see very clearly the consequences of her choices. There is much not revealed in The Old Wives’ Tale but it is private, intimate. We feel that perhaps we should not explore it or even, almost, that the writer does not know. There is an irreducible privacy to the human personality. What is not explored in To the Lighthouse is usually not intimate at all but we may feel that we need it if we are to understand the characters. Often, of course, it is external and unnecessary, but the omission of the external may very easily suggest mysteries to us. We are given no reason why, ten years after his wife’s death, Mr Ramsay chooses to return to the island. But we have enough sense of his personality to envisage a need to memorialize and even to exacerbate his feelings. But why does he ask Lily Briscoe and Augustus Carmichael? Both would seem, from what we know of him, rather odd choices, unless he is trying to reconstruct so far as possible the circumstances of his last visit. But if so why is Mrs Beckwith there? I do not think that there can be any answer; the guests are there because they are there and the re-creation of the past is what the book is about. But if we once begin to wonder - and in a book which proceeds by flashes of insight we cannot be blamed if we do wonder - we are in danger of spinning theories and imputing motives and making mysteries.
The novel in which she most eschews that concern for social issues which she mocks in Bennett is The Waves. To such an extent are the characters and their circumstances dematerialized that it has often been suggested that the best way to look at the book is to think of the named personages less as individual characters than as aspects of one character. Virginia Woolf’s habit of dissolving the boundaries between the perceptions of different characters and between those of the characters and of the creating mind tempts one to this suggestion, but it is difficult to see that this means more than that all the characters have in them some of her own sympathies and preoccupations. It is surely more plausible to think of her as having gone as far as is possible in removing the tiresome accidentals and rendering the essence of characters, as in To the Lighthouse Mrs Ramsay feels herself at times to be a ‘wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others’ (1. 11). But in omitting so much of what makes up our daily life - work, routines, opinions, beliefs, convictions, everything that is socially conditioned as well as much which comes from day-to-day human relationships - in omitting both the opportunities and the restrictions which spring from relationships (not just love relationships, but working ones and neighbourly ones and even political ones) she creates not true essences but shades who appear psychotically self-regarding. In not having to take into account most of the rest of the world the characters, appear as people who choose not to consider them. The weirdly snobbish effect of some parts of The Waves, the apparent lack of any sense that those outside a magic circle could be human, is less an individual characteristic of Louis or Bernard than an inevitable consequence of Virginia Woolf’s aim.
It seems that in agreeing with Bennett that the creation of character is the basis of value in fiction Virginia Woolf was right but that she was wrong in thinking that there could be an essence detached from accidentals. Her own masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, is such because there she is concerned not only with essence but with experience; the search, by the characters as well as by their creator, for essence comes up against the hard, unyielding, formative experience of relationship, the sense that other people exist.