kthread reads: mrs. dalloway
Last night, I sat with vintage dresses draped across my lap, remembering the moment the bottom seam came loose on the brown velour, thinking about the scene in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway where Clarissa Dalloway sits in her drawing room mending her party dress, recalling the instance of the tear.
The silvery-green dress folds spill over her while she stitches and sorts through the morning’s moments, completely mistress of the room and the household being polished and primped in anticipation of her guests that evening.
All of a London June day somehow fits in Virginia Woolf’s crisp text, and even the doors are about to be taken off their hinges as Clarissa strides into the book’s opening pages and the morning, exhilarated with the day’s possibilities. Her thoughtful musings interrupted with the bombastic Hugh Whitbread’s, “Where are you off to?” She deflects breezily; “I love walking in London,” and carries on toward the shops, reveling in even her errand run.
Though bounded by the “leaden circles in the air” as clocks chime the hour and increments between, Clarissa radidates “on waves of that divine vitality.” And like the flowers in the flower shop, Woolf’s beautiful phrases wait for us to admire, inhale, and gather up as we walk from one basin to another with Clarissa.
How fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale—as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower—roses, carnations, irises, lilac—glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds…
If Clarissa repeatedly mentions her lack of knowledge, gesturing at a life experience limited by class, sphere, role, that combined with the nearness of death throughout (especially appropriate in this post-war novel) brightens the shine around her small triumphs and actions connecting people, one to another. While Virginia Woolf stated Mrs. Dalloway’s double is the doomed war veteran Septimus Smith, Clarissa’s opposite is zombie Lady Bradshaw, who infects others with her stupor as she entertains.
Our heroine Clarissa pours out courage, quietly affirming the extraordinary capacity to give and forgive as we press on into our days, buying the flowers, mending the dresses ourselves. And she is the perfect hostess (a role she both embraces and refuses), standing at the top of the staircase welcoming and wishing us safe passage.
As Peter Walsh, the old flame who truly sees her, notes, she perseveres; “there being in her a thread of life which for toughness, endurance, power to overcome obstacles, and carry her triumphantly through he had never known the like of.”
Your thoughts on, favorite moments in Mrs. Dalloway?
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Posted by Kristen Taylor on Sunday, February 1st, 2009, 3:57 pm * Filed in Books. * Tags: book, clarissa, dalloway, kristen, kthread, read, review, taylor, virginia, woolf. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
