Love between women comes of age with ‘Mrs Dalloway'

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14 hours ago

Ruth Vanita At 100, Virginia Woolf's classic remains startlingly original—both in its style and depiction of female sexuality Natascha McElhone and Lena Heady in 'Mrs Dalloway' (1997).
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A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, my favourite of all her novels. From the time English novels first appeared in the 18th century, many of them were named after women—Moll Flanders (1722, by Daniel Defoe), Clarissa (1748, by Samuel Richardson), Evelina (1778, by Frances Burney), Emma (1815, by Jane Austen). Most of their heroines are young women and most novels are about falling in love and getting married. Mrs Dalloway (1925) is unusual because it is about a 51-year-old woman, a wife and mother, who has experienced more than one love, and the love of whose life was a woman.
A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, my favourite of all her novels. From the time English novels first appeared in the 18th century, many of them were named after women—Moll Flanders (1722, by Daniel Defoe), Clarissa (1748, by Samuel Richardson), Evelina (1778, by Frances Burney), Emma (1815, by Jane Austen). Most of their heroines are young women and most novels are about falling in love and getting married. Mrs Dalloway (1925) is unusual because it is about a 51-year-old woman, a wife and mother, who has experienced more than one love, and the love of whose life was a woman.
Mrs Dalloway packs its startling originality into less than 64,000 words. James Joyce's Ulysses, published three years earlier in 1922, is about four times as long. Both novels are about one day in the life of one person. Nothing particularly important happens on this day. In the morning, Clarissa Dalloway walks in London, as Woolf loved to do, in the afternoon she rests, and in the evening, she gives a party.
Mrs Dalloway is not about events. It reveals the horrors of war and the self-importance and egotism of colonial bureaucrats but its concern is with the pains and pleasures of individuals. It is about how we live as much in memory and imagination as in a house or a city. Clarissa experiences everything, from fresh morning air to meeting old friends, in two dimensions—the past and the present. She has a tranquil and affectionate marriage, but she fondly recalls Peter, the man she refused to marry because she found his insistence on sharing everything 'intolerable". Although their intimacy was exciting, she refused his proposal because she knew, with wisdom remarkable in a young woman, that 'a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house". This is a sentiment which anyone who has been married for many years would understand. It is also one with which the great heroines of English comedy, from Shakespeare's Rosalind to Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, would surely agree.
A few pages into the novel, Clarissa thinks, with some guilt vis-à-vis her kind and considerate husband, about her lack of erotic warmth towards men, her 'cold spirit", which Peter too comments on. She knows, though, that she has felt for women 'what men felt". In an extraordinary passage, Woolf describes female desire in a way that evokes orgasm, specifically female orgasm: 'It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check, and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over—the moment."
This is the best description of female orgasm I have ever read. As all great writing does, it colours precise description with something more than mere technical detail. The match burning in the crocus, like the Buddhist jewel in the lotus, lights up the world, connects the individual to the universe.
Continuing to think about 'falling in love with women," Clarissa recalls her youthful love for her friend Sally Seton. She 'could not take her eyes off" Sally, she imbibed Sally's radical ideas about literature, society and life, she admired Sally's beauty as well as her reckless, unconventional behaviour.
At first, Clarissa thinks that she cannot feel her old emotions again, but as she undresses and re-dresses, the feeling starts returning to her. As a young girl, dressing to meet Sally, she had felt, as Othello felt when he met his wife, 'if it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy." As she and Sally walked together at night, Clarissa remembers 'the most exquisite moment of her whole life" when Sally 'kissed her on the lips". She felt as if she had been given 'something infinitely precious," when Peter interrupted. The interruption was a painful shock to her. She compares it to running your face against a granite wall in the dark, and she also felt Peter's 'hostility; his jealousy; his determination to break into their companionship." 'Mrs Dalloway' is not about events. It is about how we live as much in memory and imagination as in a house or a city.
Mrs Dalloway is the first major novel in English to explicitly depict a woman falling in love with another woman. The year it was published, Woolf, who was 43 years old, began a passionate affair with the novelist Vita Sackville-West, who was a well-known lesbian and married to a gay man. In her diaries and letters, Woolf evokes Vita's 'incandescent" beauty in lyrical terms: 'she shines in the grocer's shop in Sevenoaks with a candle-lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung."
Three years later, in 1928, when Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, was censored, Woolf and her close friend, the novelist E.M. Forster, who was also gay, published a letter of protest. Hall refused their attempt to draft a statement that many writers were willing to sign, because Hall wanted them to defend the book on the basis of its literary merit, not merely on the basis of freedom of speech. Neither Woolf nor the other writers thought that The Well of Loneliness was a work of literary excellence. Nevertheless, Woolf was ready to testify in court on its behalf but the court ruled out all testimony and banned the book.
The Well of Loneliness is a historically important book read mainly by scholars today; Mrs Dalloway is as vital and surprising now as it was when first published. Woolf's novel Orlando, published in 1928, is much acclaimed these days because it is about miraculous sex change and identity. Orlando is inspired by love. Woolf wrote it as a portrait of Sackville-West. But Orlando is not about love. It is a portrait of a remarkable bisexual person. Mrs Dalloway is a far greater novel than Orlando.
At the end of Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa hears about the suicide of a traumatised soldier, Septimus, who was married to a woman but loved a man who died in the war. Clarissa senses, almost mystically, that she is similar to Septimus and that he died holding on to the thing that matters most whereas she and her friends have let go of it. Is that thing love? Is it the ecstatic sense of oneness with the universe? She is not sure but she knows that it is obscured in her own life: 'closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death. But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding his treasure? 'If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy,' she had said to herself once, coming down in white."
The novel ends with love—Peter filled with excitement at the sight of Clarissa, Clarissa's husband Richard with love for their daughter, and Sally's statement, 'What does the brain matter compared with the heart?"
Ruth Vanita is a professor, translator and author, most recently of the novel A Slight Angle. Topics You May Be Interested In