Page 342 - DENG404_FICTION

Fiction

Notes difficult at times to respond to a character like Clarissa. She discovered a greater amount of
depth to the character of Clarissa Dalloway in a series of short stories, the first of which was
titled, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” published in 1923. The story would serve as an experimental
first chapter to Mrs. Dalloway. A great number of similar short stories followed and soon the
novel became inevitable.

Did u know? As critic Hermione Lee details, “On 14 October 1922 Woolf recorded that
‘Mrs. Dalloway has branched into a book,’ but it was sometime before
Woolf could find the necessary balance between ‘design and substance.’”

Within the next couple years, Woolf became inspired by a ‘tunneling’ writing process, allowing
her to dig ‘caves’ behind her characters and explore their souls. As Woolf wrote to painter
Jacques Raverat, it is “precisely the task of the writer to go beyond the ‘formal railway line
of sentence’ and to show how people ‘feel or think or dream...all over the place.’” In order to
give Clarissa more substance, Woolf created Clarissa’s memories. Woolf used characters from
her own past in addition to Kitty Maxse, such as Madge Symonds, on whom she based Sally
Seton. Woolf held a similar type of affectionate devotion for Madge at the age of fifteen as a
young Clarissa held for Sally.
The theme of insanity was close to Woolf’s past and present. She originally planned to have
Clarissa die or commit suicide at the end of the novel but finally decided that she did want
this manner of closure for Clarissa. As critic Manly Johnson elaborates, “The original intention
to have Clarissa kill herself ‘in the pattern of Woolf’s own intermittent despair’ was rejected
in favor of a ‘dark double’ who would take that act upon himself. Creating Septimus Smith
led directly to Clarissa’s mystical theory of vicarious death and shared existence, saving the
novel from a damaging balance on the side of darkness.” Still, the disassociation of crippling
insanity from the character of Clarissa Dalloway did not completely save Woolf from the pain
of recollection. Woolf’s husband and close friends compared her periods of insanity to a manic
depression quite similar to the episodes experienced by Septimus. Woolf also included frustratingly
impersonal doctor types in Bradshaw and Holmes that reflected doctors she had visited throughout
the years.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. Mrs. Dalloway is published on ......... .
2. Dictonary of National Biography was edited by ......... .
3. Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street was published in the year ......... .

4. The theme of insanity was close to ......... past or present.
5. ......... commented, In this book I have almost too many ideas.
As the novel focused mainly on the character of Clarissa Dalloway, Woolf changed the name
of the novel to Mrs. Dalloway from its more abstract working title, The Hours, before publishing
it. Woolf struggled to combine many elements that impinged on her sensibility as she wrote
the novel. The title, Mrs. Dalloway, best suited her attempts to join them together. As Woolf
commented, “In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity
and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.”
Furthermore, she hoped to respond to the stagnant state of the novel, with a consciously

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