Composition and Compilation of Identity in Mrs Dalloway
Sadie Frank
In Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, identity and existence are not unified or quantifiable. In a narrative that takes place over the course of one day in the summer of 1923, Woolf depicts life as collaborative and collective; individual personalities and interpersonal relationships are formed out of many composite parts. Mrs Dalloway herself is not a dichotomous character who presents a public persona while hiding her ‘real’ self away in private. Her public persona is performative, but not false; her interactions with other people are intrinsic parts of her identity and self. Mrs Dalloway deals with the network of societal and human experience, which creates the world of the novel and all its characters, including but not limited to the novel’s title character. Mrs Dalloway struggles throughout the novel with the anxiety produced by the fact that she has no core of truthful identity, formed as she is by all of her past experiences and by her relationships with other characters. The public Mrs Dalloway and the private Clarissa are, in the end, the same person. Pulling together different parts of herself at different times, Mrs Dalloway synthesizes as she performs herself, but not around an inner core of hidden ‘truth’; difficult though it is to exist in and through a network of social interaction, it is the only manner of existence available in Mrs Dalloway.
Throughout Mrs Dalloway, the physical and social world of London is described as mesh, mist, or water; these figures place an emphatic importance on social interaction as the requisite foundation of existence. When Mrs Dalloway walks to buy flowers early in the morning, London comes into existence around her as she sees it; with the dawn, the city does not wake up from slumber, but returns from the oblivion of an interactionless night. Around the cricket clubs and racing tracks of London “wrap[s] the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day [wears] on, [will] unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies … the whirling young men, and laughing girls” (4). These public sites of social interaction do not exist before they are used by people, before which point they are wrapped not in a literal mist, but in a “soft mesh … of air,” indicating the grid-like connectivity between people and things that makes up London itself. Lucrezia Warren Smith reflects that dawn “lift[s] the mist from the fields, showing the red-brown cows,” at which point “all is once more decked out to the eye; exists again” (20). Just like the cricket fields, cows and fields do not exist without being seen and interacted with. Importantly, the act of seeing also involves qualification: the cows’ colors must be perceived and categorized before their return to existence. As Peter Walsh observes Mrs Dalloway’s house while guests arrive for her party, it seems to him that “the whole of London [is] embarking in little boats moored to the bank, tossing on the waters, as if the whole place [is] floating off in a carnival” (139). Peter’s water imagery separates the physical and social world of London into small boats representing distinct but not separate units of existence; the boats are floating through a water of social interaction that links them together. He later sees the cabs coming up to her house as “water round the piers of a bridge” (139). Even while in their separate, private cars, the characters Peter watches are a part of an interconnected societal scheme.
Relationships between specific characters in Mrs Dalloway are likewise brought into the physical world by the figurative language used to describe them, which emphasizes the importance of others in the creation of self. After Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread have lunch with Lady Bruton, they are “attached to her by a thin thread … as if one’s friends were attached to one’s body, after lunching with them” (95). Their social interaction has created a physical link between them, similar to the water which connects Mrs Dalloway’s party guests. Richard Dalloway later echoes the idea of this physical link in his thoughts about Mrs Dalloway: like a “single spider’s thread … Richard’s mind set[s] now on his wife,” and he goes off to “travel that spider’s thread of attachment between himself and Clarissa” (97). Just the act of thinking about Clarissa creates a physical connection between the two characters, or between Richard Dalloway and the idea he has of his wife. More graphically, when Elizabeth leaves Miss Killman behind in the Army and Navy Stores, Miss Killman feels that Elizabeth is “drawing out … the very entrails in her body, stretching them as she crosse[s] the room” (112). It is not an inanimate thread that connects the two women, but Miss Killman’s very life force; her relationship with Elizabeth is a literal part of her body without which she cannot survive. Miss Killman’s melodramatic thoughts reveal the logical graduation of the types of relationships so far discussed in the novel: if we are connected by a thread to anyone who stops by for lunch, then our closest friends must become an intrinsic and necessary part of us.
If London’s cricket pitches do not exist before they are interacted with and Miss Killman has Elizabeth for intestines, then Mrs Dalloway’s identity is formed using the same mechanisms. Throughout the novel, she struggles with the feeling of falsehood that comes from realizing that there is no possibility of accessing an inherent inner self unaffected by interactions with others. At the novel’s beginning, Mrs Dalloway believes that she herself is “laid out like a mist between the people she [knows] best,” recalling the mists of London; with this, she literally removes her own physical body and allows herself to exist only through other people’s experiences of her (8). She knows that she does things “not for themselves; but to make people think this or that” and views this as a kind of disingenuous chicanery, thinking that “no one [is] ever for a second taken in” by her performance (9). Indeed, she feels her true self to be “invisible; unseen; unknown,” and thinks all that is left of her life is “being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway” (9). When she comes home after a public outing, Mrs Dalloway feels “blessed and purified” by her solitude and compares the outside world to a “field of battle” (25). It is in being seen that Mrs Dalloway feels unseen, and in her public role as wife and society figure that she worries she is losing her true identity as Clarissa. Such language refers to an ideal of genuineness: in order to achieve this ideal, actions must be performed only for themselves with no reference to the people who observe them (impossible in a world where even cows must be seen to exist).
Despite this feeling of falsehood caused by performativity, there is no single truthful entity of “Mrs Richard Dalloway” any more than there is a single truthful Clarissa. Mrs Dalloway has been experiencing the process of identity creation for her entire life, and her existence on a June day in 1923 is a culmination of this process, which includes her past experiences, and varied elements of her present identity. While she is alone in her “attic room” (26), Mrs Dalloway looks in a mirror and “collect[s] the whole of her at one point … seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who [is] that very night to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself” (31). This acknowledgment of self involves collection of various parts into a whole; her collected self encompasses her identity as a public figure and hostess alongside her identity as her private self. Mrs Dalloway is not content with her collected identity, feeling pressured to unite all of herself into one single thing in order to fulfill societal expectations. She feels that there is a “call on her to be herself,” some force which expects her to be “one diamond, one woman who [sits] in her drawing-room … the same always, never showing a sign of all the other sides of her” (32). She refers to the creation of a “diamond shape” again in the same passage, bringing about images of hardness and compression; Mrs Dalloway feels societal pressure to conform and unify akin to the kind needed to create a diamond. As a diamond, she must be unbreakable, uniform, and, importantly, beautiful and desirable. Because of external pressure encouraging uniformity, she cannot accept all the necessarily varied parts of her identity as valid.
Septimus Warren Smith knows that “life ha[s] a way of adding day to day,” and this process of addition is at the center of Mrs Dalloway’s rumination on her past experiences as they themselves add to her identity (55). As she reminisces with Peter about their time at Broughton, Mrs Dalloway realizes that she is made up of every part of her past experiences at once:
For she was a child throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life … (36)
With this, Mrs Dalloway is aware of the process of culmination in her sense of self. She is not Mrs Richard Dalloway, age 53, nor is she Clarissa at 18; she is both people, and all the people in between. In her fantasy, the ideal of a young and genuine ‘Clarissa’ is peacefully and idyllically consumed into Mrs Dalloway’s present identity. Only with this concept of herself can she be content that her life and sense of self is “complete” (36). Realizing the importance of memory in forming identity allows Mrs Dalloway to accept the varied components that make up her existence, and this acceptance allows her to find calm even while performing the hostess to the utmost at her party. Although she begins by feeling that she is always “something not herself” while giving a party, Peter and Sally Seton’s attendance at the novel’s party allows her to begin a synthesis of her past and present (145). She observes Sally and Peter talking and knows that they “must always be” a part of her past, a past that she “share[s]” with them, but that she “must leave them” to perform the duties of hostess—and, indeed, to carry on the life over which she can now accept ownership (154).
When the news of Septimus’s death reaches Mrs Dalloway at her party, Mrs Dalloway’s identity anxiety is brought to a head. Her identity as a compilation of past experiences, interpersonal interactions, and societal expectations has dissatisfied her for the entirety of the novel, but in this moment it becomes insufferable; she longs for death, which she feels to be “an attempt to communicate” sought by “people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evade[s] them” (156). In death, “one [is] alone,” and can let go of all the trappings of life to access this central core of existence, this “thing” that Mrs Dalloway feels to be lost in her own conglomerated identity. However, instead of moving to suicidal thoughts herself, Mrs Dalloway turns from sadness to happiness; she realizes that nothing is as pleasurable as “having done with the triumphs of youth” and moved into adulthood; she knows that there is “something of her own” in the sky above Westminster that she sees outside her window (157). Mrs Dalloway is able to find comfort in all the aspects of her identity: the youthful experiences that shaped it are still a part of her, as is her present connection to the mesh of the universe around her. While she knows that “she must assemble” before she goes back into the party, it is not with the aim of eclipsing or compressing any aspect of her personality; rather, it is a peaceful gathering of her identity into one.
Notable in Mrs Dalloway is the changing manner in which the narrator refers to the novel’s title character, whether as “Clarissa” or as “Mrs Dalloway.” It is tempting to treat these names as an outside imposition of an omniscient narrator—that is to say, to conclude that these labels mean that the woman is Mrs Dalloway while in public and is Clarissa while in private, implying that there is something inherent to her identity which changes depending on who observes her. These monikers, however, are instead the internal impositions of characters in the novel, including Mrs Dalloway herself. When she returns home after an outing in public, at the height of her distress over her public versus her private persona, she allows herself to think that of herself as Clarissa again. When Peter Walsh storms in to see her, she is Clarissa as she hears the doorbell, and Mrs Dalloway straightaway when she hears his voice (34), assuming of her own volition her identity as a married woman to protect herself against her past. There is nothing inherent about this separation of identity. Once she realizes the manner in which her past and present experiences continually create her own persona, Mrs Dalloway can find happiness in herself; the role she plays in June of 1923 does not eclipse Clarissa into Mrs Richard Dalloway, but includes them both.