Mrs. Dalloway: Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Woman

Abstract

If nature of artist is to transmute personal experience and feeling into a public act, Clarissa Dalloway is certainly an artist, and Virginia Woolf's novel a portrait of artist as a woman in middle age. The fundamental action of Mrs. Dalloway is to elucidate mechanisms of Clarissa's thoughts and actions and to chart in which her existence profoundly controverts ideology and power relations of her cultural sphere. Critical appraisals of novel have recognized Clarissa's identity as an artist, but usually in context of another interpretation. Suzette Henke, for instance, notes that Clarissa's gatherings serve as . . . creative acts of social (127), but centers her analysis on religious models Woolf uses. David Daiches writes, There is a suggestion throughout that experiences of individuals combine to form a single indeterminate (73), a suggestion central to Dalloway's aesthetics. Deborah Guth reveals Clarissa's modes of self-invention, glancing at importance of her parties to character's self-definition. Clarissa's artistry is essential key to understanding her character, and depiction of that character is novel's key event. Woolf is concerned, before anything else, with absolutely private mental world of a woman who, according to patriarchal ideology of day as well as her own figure in world, was not imagined to have any artistic feeling at all. Woolf criticizes conceptions of character bound by exterior forms of life: whole complex (job, family, assets) that fixes every person firmly in world of business and power relationships. Against this system Woolf places a world of private significance whose meaning is wholly irreducible to facts of external world. By conceiving of personality as a private fact, apparently alienated from public, political culture and its imperialistic and death-dealing ways (Rosenman 77), Woolf shows Clarissa's actual existence to be an unrecognized but fundamental contradiction of traditional assumptions about gender. Maria DiBattista points out the novel's vague but universal sense of malaise, of spiritual incapacity, of frustrated expectations (24). This malaise arises from each character's perception of an inadequacy in her or his world view to encompass a world that increasingly seems unexplainable. The Europe of early twentieth century was characterized by a breakdown of traditional models, as Woolf emphasized throughout her work. Clarissa is modernist in outlook, fundamentally a nonbeliever. With her horror of psychological engulfment (Henke 139), she rejects society's common props against void: Walsh's passion, Kilman's religion, Bradshaw's Proportion, simplistic patriotism of her husband and Lady Bruton. As a result, she must face disordered reality without accepted props and create her own meaning for it. This process is central to Mrs. Dalloway. Perhaps most fundamental fact of Clarissa's psyche is pleasure she takes in physical, sensual existence. She bursts onto street to buy flowers and appreciates everything; carriages, motorcars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and singing (Mrs. Dalloway 4). She neither condemns what seems like an altogether noisy and irritating urban scene (her London is not a Waste Land), nor approves it with air of a connoisseur; her appreciation depends only on experience. In fact, her delight is free of self-interest or discrimination. She does not appreciate scene for what it is, but simply because it is. Her world view is suffused with sense of solemnity and wonder of existence, but most of all by wonder of living; she takes life very seriously. Being is a self-sufficient value without reference to other values, rational thought, or emotion; indeed, she sees worth of being as directly opposed, and superior, to those other values. She uses non-hierarchical joy-in-life to counter her emotions and desires, conceived of as threatening to her dignity and autonomy. …