Rituals of Self-Deception: Clarissa Dalloway's Final Moment of Vision

Abstract

One of the most intriguing aspects of Clarissa's final moment of vision, when she withdraws from her party, is the variety of mythico-literary modes she uses to shape her interpretation of Septimus' death. Critical analysis of the novel has dealt with various mythic motifs, with Christian symbolism as well as with Clarissa's vestigial romanticism. What is crucial, however, to an understanding of this scene is Clarissa's highly selective use of each mode, the underlying reason for her shifts between them, and the omissions within each one. While mythic structures and images have often been used in literature to connect individual experience to the archetypal dynamics and meanings contained in myth,1 their role in Clarissa's moment of inwardness serves rather different, more deflective purpose. As I have argued elsewhere,2 the private, supposedly real inner self that Clarissa explores during the day in fact duplicates rather than denies the artificial, ceremonial quality of her public self. Stylized, romantic images of herself descending the steps at Bourton dressed in white, bowing her head by the hall table in gesture of devotion,3 cradling her life in her arms and presenting it to her parents by the lake (p. 48); the image of the nun in her cell (pp. 35-36), the martyr standing alone, a single figure against the appalling night (p. 35), of herself seeking pinnacles and standing drenched in fire, brandishing torches and flinging life away (p. 185)-all these reveal that, just as she assembles her public self for presentation, so her inner world is an ingathering of images and imagined gestures, pageant of heightened