Monday, March 10, 2008

Mrs. Dalloway

Last week’s discussion of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land left me with many questions, and I wish we had had more time to fully explore the vast depths of the poem – partly due to the fact that it will, undoubtedly, be a part of the oral exam but also due to the fact that it is one of the great poems of the 20th Century – some would even say that it is the greatest. That being said, I enjoyed the discussion of The Waste Land in light of the Cambpellian monomyth. The notion that the poem is a part of the heroic cycle – but mired in the middle section – casts an interesting light on the poem. If all of Eliot’s works are intensely autobiographical, then The Waste Land places him as hero crawling out of the darkness that is his milieu of modern London.

Rumination: Consider the notion of “meta” with regards to The Waste Land. If The Waste Land is Eliot’s great striving to work, then his “battle” create it is his descent into deepest darkness, and his publication of it and the notoriety derived from it are his Return/Embrace – his gateway to “kingship” and immortality.

After the creative sturm und drang of The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway creates a marked contrast in form and tone, though the central themes of suffocation and entrapment within London society remain. Rather than the heroic emergence and realization of Eliot’s narrator, Woolf ends Mrs. Dalloway simply and reflectively.

“It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.”

We see inside her, but the journey is a gentle flow of impressions and memories, not the tumult of an “artistically” tortured soul. Indeed, If one were to look for a character that might find a home in or around Eliot’s psychic neighborhood, one might look to Septimus. His tortured soul ponders the great questions and thrashes about. In particular, his reverie about addressing the Prime Minister and Parliament exemplifies this. He imagines stating that trees are alive – a plainly obvious fact. He then declares crime to be nonexistent – wishful thinking in the speculative sense, though it does raise the question as to whether Woolf was implying that the rigid set of mores and class created a stifling legalistic structure that suppressed true expression. Finally, he declares love – almost a truth and condition unto itself. I doubt that Woolf had any intention of pronouncing something so facile and sentimental, though, considering the fluid nature of relationships in her circle as well as the devotion of her marriage, one can’t help but see the mere simplicity of “love.”

A later episode with Septimus and Rezia shows a deep ambivalence about love – especially with regards to children. “One cannot increase suffering, or the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions. But only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.” Septimus recoils at the notion of children with Rezia. He knows love as a concept, but he is unwilling to partake in the making of it (either physically or emotionally) with his wife. It is almost as if love is a pre-existing force of nature that mankind is unable to grasp.

Perhaps mankind is merely the conduit, and Septimus, in his depression, is unwilling or unable to recognize the conduit as a vessel for the quality he craves.

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