In memory of Helen Barbara Froula (1924-2000)
and Louise Bradbury Austin (1904-2001)
[T]he moderns had never written anything one wanted toread about death . . . "and now can never mourn, can nevermourn . . . From the contagion of the world's slow stain" . . .for there are moments when it seems utterly futile . . . simply one doesn't believe, thought Clarissa, any more in God.
--Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street"
Thou thy worldly task hast done, Mrs. Dalloway read. Tears unshed, tears deep, salt, still, stood about her for all deaths & sorrows.
--Woolf, The Hours
When once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the richs of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.
--Sigmund Freud, "On Transience"
Six weeks after Mrs. Dalloway appeared, its author speculated on "a new name" for her novels: "A new ___ by Virginia Woolf. . . . Elegy?" 1 In modernizing the elegy by adapting its poetics to prose fiction and its work of mourning to postwar London's post-theological cosmos in Mrs. Dalloway , Woolf moves beyond what Alex Zwerdling calls her "satiric elegy," Jacob's Room , to discover and explore the genre's full profundity, complexity, and power. 2 This communal elegy unseals "a well of tears"--for the survivors no less than the war dead--and enters into colloquy with the pastoral elegy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to Shelley in search of consolations for "This late age of the world's experience." 3 In making Clarissa Dalloway its central elegiac consciousness and in transposing certain gender-inflected conventions to feminine registers, furthermore, the novel embraces the terrible losses that the war inflicted on "poor devils, of both sexes" and critiques the warmaking society that Three Guineas res as "a father." 4 But what distinguishes Mrs. Dalloway as a war elegy is its discovery of the genre's deep resources for dramatizing and mediating violence both psychic and social: the violence of war and of everyday death; the violence of everyday life; and the violence intrinsic to mourning, the grief-driven rage that threatens to derail the mourner's progress toward acceptance and consolation. In making the elegy a field for confronting the violence that had devastated Europe and still loomed as a threat to its future, Mrs. Dalloway joins the internationalist contributions of Woolf's Bloomsbury contemporaries John Maynard Keynes and Sigmund Freud to postwar debates about Europe's future. Its characters' struggles animate Keynes's prophetic castigation of the Peace as war by other means and anticipate Freud's arguments against class oppression, and for the consolations of science, philosophy, and art over "religious illusion," for a civilization that must manage but can never eradicate the aggression that imperils it from within. 5
In approaching Mrs. Dalloway as a communal postwar elegy, I rely on Peter Sacks's psychosocial analysis of the classical elegy as a dynamic, eventful working through of loss, fraught with real dangers. Sacks shows how the genre's conventions mediate the mourner's arduous journey from loss, grief, and rage to the renewed life and hope epitomized in the final line of John Milton's "Lycidas," "Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new." 6 Three features stand out in Mrs. Dalloway's exploration of violence. First, with roots in ancient fertility rites, the classical pastoral elegy res the work of mourning through ceremonies surrounding the death and rebirth of a vegetation god such as Adonis, and its dialectical movement toward consolation (always necessarily symbolic) recalls the funeral games and contests through which a community of mourners negotiates its inheritance from dead father-res or paternal deities. Mourning, then, has an oedipal dimension as the immediate loss reawakens old crises of loss and brokenness, early wounds to narcissism and sexuality that psychoanalysis res as castration. To mourn is to relive every loss back to the first loss of the mother and to suffer again the anguish of submitting to the reality principle red as the law of the father. 7 As we shall see, the accidental death of Clarissa's sister Sylvia--caused, it seems, by their careless father--feminizes the vegetation myth as Sylvia becomes the matrix of Clarissa's homemade consolation. Moreover, Clarissa herself "survives" her historical prototype Kitty Maxse's death to body forth the "divine vitality" that the elegy seeks to recover, while her double, the (partly autobiographical) war veteran Septimus, suffers a death that enacts a potentially redemptive "message" of witness to social violence (MD, 7, 83). In exploring its characters' conflicts with a society that is "a father," Mrs. Dalloway analyzes a civilization founded, as Freud shows, on the sacrifice of female desire and lends critical substance to his prediction that the war's survivors will perhaps rebuild their shattered civilization "on firmer ground and more lastingly."
Second, in correlating the elegy's formal conventions with the painful work of mourning, Sacks contrasts the elegy with its bad other, revenge tragedy. The poetic elegy submits mourning's formidable psychic turbulence to the rigorous formal mechanics of elegiac temporality. Meter, rhyme, repetition, refrain, repeated questions, procession, and ceremony: all serve to divide, order, pace, tame, channel the mourner's chaos of feelings. This finely elaborated order indirectly attests to the dangers that threaten the mourner's progress: on one side, melancholia--the refusal to relinquish the lost one, to submit to reality, to attach one's desire to a substitute object; on the other, the rage that may explode the genre's bounds, veer from symbolic expression to actual murder or suicide, pervert symbolic consolation into sacrificial violence in the failed mourning of revenge tragedy. In Mrs. Dalloway, as looser structures of repetition and refrain (Big Ben's striking of the hours, "Fear no more the heat o' the sun") mark their progress through the day, the characters battle psychic perils that write small the great crisis of loss, grief, and anger facing postwar Europe. Miss Kilman, impoverished because of her German ancestry, is beset by violent rage; Septimus's experience of his society's disavowed violence is labeled madness; Clarissa feels almost annihilated by existential doubt. Through them Mrs. Dalloway poses the great question of Europe's future after what was not yet World War I (the novel calls it "the European War") as the fate of collective mourning--a historic question of genre for a traumatized Europe poised between elegy and revenge tragedy (MD, 85).
Third, in keeping with the pastoral elegy's eclogic division of mourning voices, Mrs. Dalloway projects the dialectic of mourning into urgent social critique and contestation of the future. 8 The funeral games and "apparently innocent" singing matches of elegiac tradition, Sacks observes, channel grief into skilled performances that contest and carry on those virtues of the dead "deemed important for the community's survival" (EE, 36). In the novel's depiction of a great European capital five years after the war, an intricate tournament of such "poetry contests" pits Clarissa's "atheist's religion" against Miss Kilman's allegiances to God and Russia; Septimus's prophetic witness against his prosperous doctors' policy of "Conversion" to social norms; the furtively sexual Hugh Whitbread against the telling silences of Sally Seton and Milly Brush (EE, 36; MD, 78, 100). I shall first trace Clarissa's emergence as an elegiac consciousness from The Voyage Out to Mrs. Dalloway, and then locate the novel's intramural poetry contests within public debates about postwar Europe's inheritance and future that took place in and beyond Bloomsbury. Addressing the communal task--not yet negated by events--of navigating beyond anger and revenge toward peace, Mrs. Dalloway conjures from the "beautiful caves" of its characters' grief-ravaged psyches vistas of fresh woods and pastures new (D, 2:263, 30 August 1923).
Set on a June day in 1923, Mrs. Dalloway emerged amid an outpouring of art after a war that military historian John Keegan describes as a "tragic and unnecessary conflict," which mobilized sixty-five million, killed over eight million, left twenty-one million physically and/or psychically wounded or disabled, and blighted the lives and hopes of uncounted loved ones. 9 A voice in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land marvels of a crowd streaming over London Bridge, "I had not thought death had undone so many"; to Lucrezia Warren Smith it seems that "Every one has friends who were killed in the War" (MD, 66). The war not only shattered millions of lives but unleashed virulent nationalisms that rent the economic and cultural fabric of what had been becoming an increasingly international civilization. For Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Albert Einstein, and others, it was a "Civil War" that threatened "the end of a civilization." 10 Yet even as it negated Europe's Enlightenment legacy of reason, it also razed four ancient empires, dismantled an outworn social and political order, and left Europe "'a laboratory atop a vast graveyard,'" in which communism, fascism, and liberal democracy vied to promise the suddenly enfranchised masses "a New Order"--and "it was not preordained that democracy should win out over fascism and communism." 11
By 1923, Freud's early confidence that Europeans would rebuild and perhaps improve their democratic and internationalist civilization after the war was losing ground to the totalitarian political orders that, fostered by the Versailles Treaty, were already beginning to form. 12 On visiting postwar Austria, British diplomat Harold Nicolson reported, "Everyone looks very pinched and yellow: no fats for four years. The other side of the blockade. . . . I feel that my plump pink face is an insult to these wretched people." 13 A fewyears later, Peter Walsh returns from India to a civilization that seems a "dear . . . personalpossession," a London pulsing with the resurgent creativity--"design, art, everywhere"--and commercial prosperity of the 1920s (MD, 55, 71). Through the great and small eventsthat befall its characters this June day, Mrs. Dalloway portrays a postwar civilization fraught with agonizing social contradictions, yet vibrating with the vital force of the future.
Could the elegy rise to this historic moment--mourn war losses of unimaginable magnitude yet everywhere suffered as local, capture contending social forces, work through communal grief toward consolation and hope? The "moderns" Clarissa rejects in "Mrs. Dalloway on Bond Street" suggest not ("The moderns had never written anything one wanted to read about death"). 14 In the war poets' harrowing turns on the genre, savage ironies all but eclipse consolation: Wilfred Owen's nightmarish "Dulce et Decorum Est"; the proleptic self-elegies of Rupert Brooke ("The Soldier"), Isaac Rosenberg ("Break of Day in the Trenches"), and Yeats's Major Robert Gregory ("An Irish Airman Foresees His Death"); Siegfried Sassoon's "Everyone Sang," with its stunning reversal of the mourner's progress from anguished grief to solacing vision. 15 On the homefront, Ezra Pound's bitter epitaph on soldiers slaughtered "for a botched civilization" inHugh Selwyn Mauberley and Eliot's monumental allegory of postwar Europe as a waste land where parched spirits strain toward "dry thunder without rain" memorialize a blasted civilization in which no consolation survives beyond the art of the poem.
The "tinselly" Clarissa, who has lost no one very close to her in the war, seems an unlikely candidate for renovating the elegy, yet her three major portrayals--The Voyage Out, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street," Mrs. Dalloway--link her intimately with the genre (D, 3:32, 18 June 1925). 16 The Clarissa of The Voyage Out tells Rachel Vinrace that as a girl she "sobb[ed] over" Shelley's "Adonais":
"He has outsoared the shadow of our night,
Envy and calumny and hate and pain--
. . .
Can touch him not and torture not again
From the contagion of the world's slow stain,"
she recites. "How divine!--and yet, what nonsense! . . . I always think it's living, not dying, that counts" (VO, 58). If every loss awakens every earlier loss back to the first (oedipal) loss of the mother, the glamorous Clarissa--a substitute for Rachel's dead mother--embodies the elegy's very principle: the necessity of relinquishing the dead and of forming new attachments in order to carry on with life. 17 Rachel's early death dramatizes this lesson's failure, but Clarissa's deft critique reclaims the earthly solaces that "Adonais" sacrifices in its uncannily prophetic, near-suicidal closing ecstasy to urge Rachel toward fresh woods and pastures new. 18
In "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street," Clarissa steps into the glorious June morning to Big Ben's "solemn," "stirring" strokes and reflects that her fellow Londoners are "not all bound on errands of happiness. . . . How people suffered" ("BS," 152). Again "Adonais" is her touchstone as she thinks of one friend's son, killed in the war, and another's death: "And now can never mourn--how did it go?--a head grown grey . . . From the contagion of the world's slow stain . . . have drunk their cup a round or two before" ("BS," 154; ellipses in original). But now she herself ts despair as she quests for perfect gloves through London's glittering "contagion." She almost weeps to see, upright and immobile in her carriage, her idol, ancient Lady Bexborough, said to be "sick of it all"; later she quells an impulse to send the shopgirl, who looks "tired" and "twenty years older," on holiday: "Selling gloves was her job. She had her own sorrows quite separate, 'and now can never mourn, can never mourn,' the words ran in her head. 'From the contagion of the world's slow stain,' . . . for there are moments when it seems utterly futile" ("BS," 156-8). The floating predicate "and now can never mourn" dissolves the shopgirl's "separate" sorrows in the submerged pool of common, unconsoled grief beneath Clarissa's thoughts:
Lady Bexborough, who opened the bazaar, they say, with the telegram in her hand--Roden, her favourite, killed--she would go on. But why, if one doesn't believe? For the sake of others, she thought. . . . For one doesn't live for oneself. . . . Fear no more she repeated. There were little brown spots on her arm. And the girl crawled like a snail. Thou thy worldly task hast done. Thousands of young men had died that things might go on. At last! Half an inch above the elbow; pearl buttons; five and a quarter. ["BS," 158-9]
Asking why go on, how go on, and for what--what sort of going on is possible after so many senseless deaths--Clarissa, even while enjoying the worldly luxuries of her class, expresses a communal grief and desolation and a longing for solace assuaged by neither Shakespeare's "Home art gone" (bespeaking an earlier age of the world's experience) nor Shelley's "divine . . . nonsense."
As the 1923 Clarissa marks the elegiac place vacated by "the moderns," Mrs. Dalloway's early title, The Hours, announces its aspiration to public elegy (A New Elegy by Virginia Woolf) by echoing Shelley's apostrophe to the "sad Hour" of Keats's death:
rouse thy obscure compeers
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: with me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity! 19
Materializing these compeer hours in Big Ben's mundane strokes, Woolf adapts Shelley's re to prose fiction's modernist-realist world through the novel's technical innovation: her "discovery" of how to light up her characters' psyches from within by arraying their interior monologues as a system of "beautiful" psychic "caves," linked by passageways of common memories and experiences, in which each character's past meets "daylight at the present moment" (D, 2:263, 30 August 1923). Translating Shelley's personified hours schooled by the Hour of loss into her characters' memory-haunted present, Woolf jettisons plot for the elegy's inward work of mourning and voices communal loss as a polyphony of private griefs: a tapestry of thought and feeling that interweaves all the characters' separate sorrows. Septimus's sublime hallucination of Evans, Rezia's poignant memories of Italy, Doris Kilman's consuming rage, Peter's anguish at losing Clarissa, Clarissa's grief for Sylvia: all summon Hours of loss that present and future cannot, or dare not, forget.
The 1925 Clarissa is first among equals in the compound elegiac subject formed by these "beautiful caves," privileged especially as the mourner of Septimus's death; but through this technique she now represents "all deaths & sorrows" in a way not limited by her limitations. 20 Mrs. Dalloway's genesis in the death of Clarissa's original--a friend of Virginia's youth, Kitty Lushington Maxse (1867-1922)--dramatizes the referential diffusion and psychic mobility by which the elegy makes the death that occasions it encompass "all deaths & sorrows," including the elegist's own. 21 After Julia Stephen died in 1895, the glamorous and vivacious Kitty had exerted herself to conduct her friend's two young daughters into "good" society and marriages until, after their father's death in 1904, Vanessa and Virginia escaped to Bloomsbury to invent their modern lives and arts. Kitty was particularly severe on Virginia Stephen's artistic ambitions: she "scream[ed] against Bloomsbury," dismissed her writings, condemned her friends ("oh darling, how awful they do look!"), disliked her memoir of her father, and moaned, "Virginia might marry an author and they always talk about themselves!" 22 Safe beyond Kitty's Kensington, Virginia recalled having felt herself "a kind of slug" in that "unreal Paradise," with Kitty "like salt" on that "very sensitive snail" (L, 1:209, 1 October 1905). But Kitty still animated her memory and imagination. The 1915 Clarissa "is almost Kitty verbatim; what would happen if she guessed?" (L, 1:349, 10 August 1908); and when Woolf read of Kitty's death in October 1922, she was at work on the short story sequence begun with "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street." 23
The news brought a flood of ambivalent memories of her old antagonist:
the day has been spoilt for me--so strangely. . . . I hadn't seen her since, I guess, 1908--save at old Davies' funeral [in 1916], & then I cut her, which now troubles me--unreasonably I suppose. I could not have kept up with her; she never tried to see me. Yet yet--these old friends dying without any notice on our part always . . . saddens me: makes me feel guilty. I wish I'd met her in the street. My mind has gone back all day to her. . . . She got engaged at St Ives. . . . I keep going over this very day in my mind. [D, 2:206, 8 October 1922]
Six days later the stories "branched into a novel" as, instead of attending the memorial service, Woolf remembered Kitty from afar: 24
now Kitty is buried & mourned by half the grandees in London; & here I am thinking of my book. Kitty fell, very mysteriously, over some bannisters. Shall I ever walk again? she said to Leo. And to the Dr "I shall never forgive myself for my carelessness." How did it happen? Someone presumably knows, & in time I shall hear. [D, 2:207, 14 October 1922]
Two days later she set down the idea for Mrs. Dalloway: "Sanity & insanity. Mrs D. seeing the truth. S. S. seeing the insane truth. . . . The pace is to be given by the gradual increase of S's insanity. on the one side; by the approach of the party on the other" (H, 412).
 How on earth did it happen?" (L, 2:573, 574, 22 and 29 October 1922). Her later recollection that Clarissa "was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party" while "Septimus, who later is intended to be her double, had no existence" may refer to this doubt, since nothing in The Hours suggests that Clarissa was to die or kill herself, and she had invented "S. S." almost immediately. 25 About 9 November 1922, Woolf devised the double design that displaces Clarissa's death onto Septimus: "All must bear finally upon the party at the end; which expresses life, in every variety & full of conviction: while S. dies" (H, 415). If Woolf ever settled whether Kitty threw herself downstairs or "merely" died, she did not record it; but in keeping with Sacks's point that the death the elegy mourns is always the elegist's own, her fantasy casts Kitty--hence Clarissa and Septimus--as her doubles. Kitty stands to Woolf (who had twice tried to kill herself) in much the same specular and sacrificial relation as Septimus stands to Clarissa; "S." substitutes for Kitty, Clarissa, and not least, Woolf--the seventh/septimus of eight Duckworth/Stephen children. 26
Once Kitty died Clarissa could not go on "living" in quite the same way, despite her fictional status and the displacement of her death onto Septimus. Kitty's death shadows the fictional counterpart who survives her:
did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her . . . or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part . . . of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. [MD, 9; emphasis mine]
As her fear that she must cease swerves from the normative future conditional (somehow she would survive) to the declarative past (somehow . . . she survived), it is as though Clarissa (like Kitty) were already dead, or as though Kitty were speaking through her; as though Kitty's actual death were converging grammatically with her afterlife in the 1925 Clarissa; or as though death were scarcely to be distinguished from life's moment-by-moment vanishing into the past. Or, since somehow . . . Peter survived too, as though any ontological distinction between life and death were obscured by the ontological resemblances between absence and death, and between life and its afterlife in memory, imagination, art. Clarissa and Peter have, after all, borne each other like mist on their branches through their long mutual absence, just as one would carry the other if one of them should die, and just as Woolf carried Kitty in life and after death, in memory and art, in stories that "branched" upon her death into this elegiac novel. In bringing Kitty back to "life" on a radiant June day that in fact she never lived, Woolf flaunts the elegist's power, invisibly flourishing Clarissa herself in Escherlike proof of Clarissa's own vision of life-after-death. Through her art Kitty symbolically survives, spreads ever so far, her life, herself, borne on in time by those who knew her (including Woolf, who had not seen her for years, and whose art Kitty scorned) and by people she never met, including the novel's ever-widening circles of readers. 27
But the "beautiful caves" poetics that the 1925 Clarissa bodies forth transcends sentimental memorial. At once portrait and persona (originally a facial image of the dead as well as a mask through which one speaks [EE, 126]), she is no longer Kitty verbatim, an object drawn by Woolf-as-writing-subject, but an image of the deeper, more complex ways people survive--or not--in and through one another. For Woolf can raise her old antagonist Kitty from the dead only by breathing her own life into her. Books, she observes in her 1928 Introduction, are "flowers or fruit stuck here and there on a tree which has its roots deep down in the earth of our earliest life," so that "the truth" behind fiction's "immense facades"--"if life is indeed true, and if fiction is indeed fictitious"--would require "a volume or two of autobiography" ("I," 197). But is life "true" and fiction "fictitious"? Is Kitty the inaccessible real behind Clarissa's marmoreal "facade"? Or does the novel's modernist poetics, continuous with its symbolic consolations, debunk the distinction between subject and object such propositions assume? How exactly does Kitty survive transred in art, her counsel "it's living, not dying, that counts" revived from beyond the grave?
At stake in these questions is, first, a composite modernist self/other-portraiture that weaves biography and autobiography, "Kitty verbatim" and "invented" memories, observed surface and imagined depths, into fiction's "truth," Clarissa.  In 1918 Woolf saw her brother Adrian talking with a German prisoner of war and reflected, "The reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one's imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his life means to him--the infinite possibilities of a succession of days which are furled in him, & have already been spent" (D, 1:186, 27 August 1918). In this light, her resurrection of Kitty--whom in her mother's stead she had, in a sense, fought for her life--as a Clarissa who somehow survives, blooming on the tree of her author's "earliest life," her infinite possibilities unfurling through the book of her day, marks not just a technical breakthrough but an elegiac act of imagination that intrinsically opposes violence. 29 Against the still unvanquished violence of its postwar moment--everyday death, everyday life, as well as the murderous ethos of war--this modernist narrative poses a counterforce ontological, aesthetic, and ethical, writ small in Clarissa's thoughts on the death of a young man she has never met, writ large in the narrative's luminous divinations of its characters' unfurling lives.

--Shakespeare, Cymbeline
Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter--even trees, or barns.
--Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
If Kitty's symbolic resurrection, dramatizing a daughter-artist's victory over Conversion-worshipping mothers, evokes the oedipal dimension of mourning, Clarissa's dead sister Sylvia res not the contingent opposition of a Julia, a Kitty, or a German POW but the absolute antagonist Death. This feminine vegetation deity, naturalized and mythified in Clarissa's re of consolation, at once modernizes the pastoral elegy and opposes to the objectifying metaphysics of a warmaking society that is "a father" an ontology that locates "reality" in "Odd affinities"--not in discrete "subject and object" (MD, 153; TL, 38). Feminine in origin and history but not essence, this metaphysics frames the novel's intersubjective character-drawing as a consolation for "poor devils, of both sexes."
Dropping the 1923 allusions to "Adonais," Mrs. Dalloway's opening pages follow Clarissa's thoughts from Sylvia (from Latin silvanus, forest) to the re of survival as mist-bearing branches. The phrase somehow she survived thus condenses Clarissa withSylvia, to whose death Peter Walsh traces Clarissa's "atheist's religion"--an aberration from the nationalist religion proper to her "public-spirited, British Empire, tariff-reform, governing-class spirit." Possibly, Peter speculates,
she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship . . ., as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners . . . ; be as decent as we possibly can.  That phase came directly after Sylvia's death--that horrible affair. To see your own sister killed by a falling tree (all Justin Parry's fault--all his carelessness) before your very eyes, a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them, Clarissa always said, was enough to turn one bitter. Later she wasn't so positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness. [MD, 77-8]
If Peter is right, Clarissa took no solace in providential father-gods or promises of heaven but blamed malevolent "ruffians" and her inept father (if the parenthetical condemnation is hers too), later casting off this childlike fantasy for fatalism and a stoic ethics of decency. As her disillusion with father-res originates with Sylvia's death, so do the consolations of her "atheist's religion," whose imagery seems to have influenced Peter's earlier reverie in Regent's Park. There, longing "for solace, for relief, for something outside these miserable . . . craven men and women," he too imagines a sylvan feminine apotheosis:
if he can conceive of her, then in some sort she exists, he thinks, and advancing down the path with his eyes upon sky and branches he rapidly endows them with womanhood; sees with amazement how . . . majestically . . . they dispense with a dark flutter of leaves charity, comprehension, absolution, and then, flinging themselves suddenly aloft, confound the piety of their aspect with a wild carouse. [MD, 57]
Symbolically reborn in Clarissa's and Peter's metaphysical trees of life and death, the Adonislike Sylvia counters sacrificing fathers and father-gods with a "re of the mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of the world"--everyday conflicts and the Great War alike (MD, 58).
Sylvia, of whom we learn almost nothing, is less a character than Death itself. She is the specter of Clarissa's, the harbinger of Septimus's, the ghost of Kitty's, and also, in this book that flowers on the tree of its author's earliest life, of Julia's and Leslie Stephen's, and (as shocking as Sylvia's) of Stella Duckworth's at twenty-eight and Thoby Stephen's at twenty-six. As the vegetation god of this public elegy, she is also the deaths of the millions destroyed by the war and the prospective deaths that shadow the survivors. Sylvia--all dead sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers, friends, soldiers known and unknown, lost companions of war and peace--is death as the "life" or "truth" behind Mrs. Dalloway's fictional "facade," the mystery of mortality: death as reality, necessity, Ananke, intrinsic to life and nature, to thrushes breaking snails on stones and to the falling tree that fells her.
As death transred, Sylvia is also art. As Clarissa transmutes her death and proper name into mist-bearing branches, Sylvia res consolation's necessarily purely symbolic nature without losing her meaning of natural death. Her name condenses the work of mourning, at once memorializing her and dissolving her into nature's generic matrix: silvanus to Sylvia to ral mist-laden branches; dust to Dust to an urn filled with ashes. Her literary name also resonates with Woolf's memory of how Julia Stephen's death "quicken[ed]" in her thirteen-year-old self "unveiled and intensified . . . perceptions, as if a burning glass had been laid over what was shaded and dormant . . . as if something were becoming visible," so that, desultorily perusing Palgrave's Golden Treasury in Kensington Gardens, she was startled to find a poem
instantly and for the first time . . . intelligible. . . . [N]o one could have understood from what I said the queer feeling I had in the hot grass, that poetry was coming true. . . . It matches what I have sometimes felt when I write. The pen gets on the scent. 30
Sylvia is death as the alpha and omega of poetry, art, writing; the sign of Julia's, Kitty's, and all past and future deaths that coalesced to transform stories of shopping, prime ministers, and "Cut flowers" into this modern pastoral elegy. 31
It is no accident that Sylvia's memory sparks a reverie that takes Clarissa to Hatchard's bookshop window, where, on seeing Shakespeare's "Fear no more" from Cymbeline, she wonders, "What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country" (MD, 9). The posthumous Kitty/Clarissa evokes the Posthumus (so named because he survived his mother's death at his birth) of Cymbeline--the play that inducted the nineteen-year-old scoffer Virginia into the bard's "company of worshippers." What she thought the "best lines" in this or perhaps any play, "Imogen says--Think that you are upon a rock, and now throw me again! and Posthumous answers--Hang there like fruit, my Soul, till the tree die," find echo in Clarissa's mist-laden branches and Woolf's tree of life hung with flowers/fruit/books (L, 1:45-6, 5 November 1901). Envisioning himself as a tree embraced by his soul Imogen--or perhaps faithful Imogen as a tree on which his soul hangs "like fruit" till death--Posthumus rejoices in her awakening from what turns out to be only a sleep, and in his own release from suicidal despair at the mistaken thought that he has destroyed her, his "only jewel."  / Think that you are upon a rock, and now / Throw me again" gently mocks his fort/da game. He has foolishly tested and accidentally "killed" her, discovered his error and wished to die, only to find her miraculously restored: will he throw her again? Literalizing loss restored as only the romance can, Cymbeline reunites Posthumus and Imogen as living "tree" and "fruit" in deferral ("till the tree die"), if not defiance, of death. 32
The modernist-realist character Clarissa cannot literally "recover" what she has lost, but her longing for some lost "white dawn in the country" summons pastoral memories of Bourton that recur throughout the day. The most striking, Sally Seton's kiss--"the most exquisite moment of her whole life"--she compares to "a present, wrapped up," hers to keep but not to look at; an indestructible "diamond, something infinitely precious," a "revelation" imbued with "radiance" and "religious feeling" (MD, 35-6). Only through memory does Clarissa "recover" her lost love, burnished with such metaphoric richness as young Virginia embraced in Cymbeline. This "present," a gift too precious to unwrap or look at--a moment once present now past, yet preserved in memory and symbolically "present" again--bespeaks memory's power to conjure lost "jewels," make them "present" in dazzling splendor. Mrs. Dalloway, that is, literalizes Posthumus's consolation for its later age of the world's experience by rescuing love-lost-and-recovered from the romance's unreal paradise and relocating it in the symbolic realms of memory, imagination, and art--where it defeats time and loss more securely than the romance of presence Posthumus's very name belies, even as it enacts the mourner's necessary submission to the reality of loss. 33
The young Virginia's query as to why Cymbeline's characters "aren't . . . more human?" foreshadows the mature Woolf's translation of Imogen's survival to Clarissa's realist world (L, 1:45). Peter recalls how, riding atop an omnibus, young Clarissa consoled herself for "how little one knew people" and allayed her "horror of death" by theorizing that human lives are not bounded in time and space but indefinitely dispersed through a space/time continuum that extends beyond the organism's apparent life and death:
she felt herself everywhere; not "here, here, here"; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. . . . She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter--even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with . . . the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death . . . perhaps--perhaps. [MD, 152-3; last ellipsis in original]
Clarissa's "transcendental theory" extends Posthumus's tree hung with Soul/fruit into a vast arboreal metaphor that augments conscious and/or bodily presence with unconscious experience, memory, and perception--of and by others--such that one's "unseen part" "spreads wide" in space and "might survive" in time, "be recovered somehow attached to this person or that." 34
The apposition of survive with the passive be recovered finesses the question of who survives, who recovers, as it answers Clarissa's longing for some "lost image of white dawn in the country." How can this theory of being palliate a "horror of death" when it renders Clarissa alive scarcely different from Clarisssa dead; confounds life and death, self and other, presence and absence; values memory and imagination over actualities, one's unconscious "unseen part" over conscious "apparition"? Like Clarissa's branches and Peter's arboreal goddess, the passage embeds the theory in its practice. Clarissa's unseen part already spreads wide as she rides the omnibus with Peter; already she is not (just) "here" where she seems to be, for as she speaks her disavowed apparitional "here" detaches itself from accidents of time and place to endure in Peter's memory, "haunting" him in her absence, as now in the narrative present. Her assertion that she is not (only) "here" survives to make her "present"--here--to Peter decades later while, on this June day, her apparition busies itself elsewhere with party preparations, thinking of her life's moments as "buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness" (MD, 29). The Clarissa who was once (not) "here" on the bus with Peter "survives" "attached" to his later self; is "recovered" in his memory and by the narrative, a diamantine "present" preserved from time, death, loss, absence.
 Does it matter that their shared moments, once "buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness," are now memory's "fruits" on the tree of life and death? And of art, for the narrative structure on which Peter and Clarissa hang like souls or fruits is founded on this theory of being that branches beyond one's apparition in all directions, indeterminate and unseen. Not plot connects Clarissa and Septimus but such odd affinities with "people she had never spoken to" as exist between, say, Adrian--or Woolf--and the German POW. As theorized by Clarissa and practiced in Mrs. Dalloway's intersubjective character-drawing, odd affinities lift elegiac consolation out of the register of the sentimental to counter the "death of the soul": the atrophy of imaginative powers presupposed, Woolf thought, in the murderousness that objectifies beings who are inseparably subject and object (MD, 58).
What then of the odd affinity between two strangers and semblables at the heart of the book: "Mrs D. seeing the truth. S. S. seeing the insane truth" (H, 412)? What is its nature and how does it console? One source of Clarissa's feeling "somehow very like" Septimus is her own everyday battle against despair (MD, 186). Her ontology does not permanently allay her "horror of death" but itself forms part of a rich web of imagery, a very garment of consolation, that she spins out moment by moment as her mind tosses up metaphors (and genius, says Aristotle, is metaphor) that show what life is literally "like" for her. 35 As Peter observes, she "enjoy[s] life immensely"; it is "her nature to enjoy," to be "all aquiver" and "such good company, spotting queer little scenes, names, people from the top of a bus"; she possesses an "indomitable vitality," "a thread of life which for toughness, endurance, power to overcome obstacles, and carry her triumphantly through he had never known the like of" (MD, 78, 152, 155). Yet her "gift . . . to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed" must ceaselessly contend against her dread of death, her feeling that it is "very, very dangerous to live even one day," her everyday t to affirm that "it's living, not dying, that counts" (MD, 174, 8). This familiar "horror," highlighted in the draft, attacks Clarissa when she hears of Septimus's suicide and imagines his
dread, that horror, the terror; she felt it too; horror filling her . . . the incapacity to withstand, the overwhelming hostility of the race . . . its vast loneliness, its entire feebleness, . . . so that if Richard had not been there, merely to read the Times aloud; so that listening one could recoup . . . could hear him breathing in the room; could wait like a crouched bird under a leaf; could gradually recover . . . her [belief? 36 ]; not in Gods & power, but only in the breath, in the Times, in the fire; & so fanning this little flame, could feel rise within once more the imperious thing. But he had not recovered. 37
Doubles and mirrors, exemplars of "Sanity & insanity," these two who meet at a party as though death were no unbridgeable divide see the "truth" and alike t despair. But whereas Clarissa fans her wavering flame back to life, Septimus "had not recovered." Almost nothing separates the suicide displaced onto Septimus from Kitty/Clarissa/Woolf (and perhaps Shelley, with his divine nonsense) from the "divine vitality" Clarissa adores (MD, 7). In Clarissa, life triumphs; in Septimus, death; but in their redoubled reflection, death-in-life mirrors life-in-death. She, like him, battles despair; he, like her, basks--moments before he leaps--in sanity, happiness, hope.
This is why death comes to Clarissa's party, of all the parties in London: because she can admit it; because she lets it in. Clarissa, that "thoroughgoing sceptic," recognizes the death that arrives uninvited, like Sally Seton, as unmistakably as though Wilkins had intoned its name. Death comes to her party because she (the perfect hostess) can entertain it, a guest and a familiar. Its only seemingly fortuitous arrival clinches the novel's "idea," "the contrast between life & death," in an odd affinity: resemblance and difference attenuated, infinitesimal, yet absolute, momentous (H, 414). He is somehow very likeher, borne on her branches with Sylvia and Peter, barns and trees, a man behind a counter ("To look at, [Septimus] might have been a clerk"), a woman in the street (MD, 84).
We shall return to Clarissa's impromptu elegy for Septimus and the poetry contest it stages between her ontology of odd affinities and the objectifying positivism of the doctors who would "forc[e his] soul," sacrifice him to their "Goddess[es]" Proportion and Conversion (MD, 184, 100). But first it will be helpful to consider a more vexed affinity between Clarissa and that woman in the street Miss Kilman. Through their contending metaphysics--Clarissa's "atheist's religion" and ruling-class nationalism against Doris Kilman's turn to God and Russia--this postwar elegy stages competing truths and values in a post-theological cosmos in which communities and nations must grapple with their differences and their aggression. Their conflict displays the nationalism and class antagonism that, Keynes warned, threatened Europe's democratic civilization as it preres Freud's postwar writings on the pressing dangers of class oppression and religious "illusion" to Europe's future.
I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense.
--Woolf Diary, 23 June 1923
[Miss Kilman] got up, blundered off among the little tables, rocking slightly from side to side, and somebody came after her with her petticoat, and she lost her way, and was hemmed in by trunks specially prepared for taking to India; next got among the accouchement sets, and baby linen; through all the commodities of the world, perishable and permanent, hams, drugs, flowers, stationery, variously smelling, now sweet, now sour she lurched; saw herself thus lurching with her hat askew, very red in the face, full length in a looking-glass; and at last came out into the street.
--Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard say so over and over again)--no, [Clarissa] could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn't that help the Armenians?).
--Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
"[W]ith another throw of the dice," Clarissa "would have loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No" (MD, 12).  The feeling is mutual. Doris Kilman thinks Clarissa not kind but "merely condescending," from "the most worthless of all classes--the rich, with a smattering of culture," and pictures her turned out of her sofa and installed "in a factory; behind a counter; Mrs. Dalloway and all the other fine ladies!" She violently envies her beauty, elegance, charm, domestic luxury, glamorous social life, adoring husband, and lovely daughter: "If she could have felled her it would have eased her. . . . If only she could make her weep; could ruin her; humiliate her; bring her to her knees crying, You are right! But this was God's will, not Miss Kilman's. It was to be a religious victory" (MD, 123-5).
Clarissa's intuition that she hates not Miss Kilman but a "spectre" comprised of "a great deal" else provokes us to inquire into that abstraction of domination and tyranny and so to grasp their class antagonism as a microcosmic cross section of the nationalist conflicts in which Europe's future is indeed at stake. This poetry contest indicts postwar nationalisms that, while pretending to battle external threats to peace and security, actually produce enemies, dominators, and war by an unacknowledged violence within. The dominator-tyrant that Clarissa projects upon Doris Kilman, whose family (then Kiehlman) came from Germany in the eighteenth century, evokes a defeated and still belligerent postwar Germany, thrust like a pariah outside the Allies' international community, while the decadent Clarissa whom Miss Kilman would re-educate personifies an England tyrannical in victory and heedless of the political consequences of the international class oppression instituted at Versailles. In facing these women off, Mrs. Dalloway explores the competition, envy, hatred, and aggression between classes and nations that had already engulfed Europe in war and would slowly rise to a boil again in the 1920s and 1930s.
Doris Kilman, indeed, bodies forth Keynes's warning that the economic sanctions imposed by the Peace could only provoke another war. By the time Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway, her old friend Maynard had gained world fame by his critique of the Allies' war reparations policy as a punitive, barbaric, and self-destructive holdover of nationalism. 38 Participating as a British Treasury officer in the Paris Peace talks, he had resigned in protest in May 1919 and retreated that August to Vanessa Bell's country house (near Monks House, which the Woolfs had just taken) to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in December. Keynes had urged the Allied leaders to embrace internationalist policies that would promote Europe's welfare as a whole, not enrich some nations at others' expense. Instead they instituted what he diagnosed as the "abhorrent and detestable" policy of a backward-looking "old man" who sees only the rivals France and Germany, not "European civilization struggling forwards to a new order" nor "humanity . . . at the threshold of a new age" (ECP, 225, 36). An instrument of nationalist rivalry, the Versailles Treaty would, he predicted, "sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe" by "reducing Germany to servitude for a generation," "degrading the lives of millions of human beings," "depriving a whole nation of happiness" (ECP, 225).
Keynes, in short, prophesied not just the economic consequences of the Peace--"actual starvation" of "the European populations"--but their social, psychic, and political consequences: social unrest, revolution, and ultimately another war (ECP, 228). Since Germany's starving peoples would resist a foreign tax not compelled by "their sense of justice or duty," the reparations would incite "vengeance," a "final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation" (ECP, 282, 268). Condemning a Treaty that violated both "human nature" and "the spirit of the age" and would foment political revolution as surely as Russia's "bloodthirsty philosophers," Keynes urged that "expediency and generosity agree": "the policy which will best promote immediate friendship between nations" would also favor "the permanent interests of the benefactor"--peace, prosperity, the security of Europe's democratic civilization (ECP, 282, 238).
"Had Keynes's 1919 programme been carried out," Robert Skidelsky writes, "it is unlikely that Hitler would have become German Chancellor." 39 Ignored at Versailles, Keynes dedicated his book to "the new generation," which he sought to influence through "those forces of instruction and imagination which change opinion": the "assertion of truth, the unveiling of illusion, the dissipation of hate, the enlargement and instruction of men's hearts and minds" (ECP, 298, 296-7). In pacifist Bloomsbury, opinion was already with him. The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Woolf mused, was "a book that influences the world without being in the least a work of art: a work of morality, I suppose" (D, 2:33, 24 April 1920).
Works of art too may hope to influence the world. Not for nothing does Miss Kilman possess "a really historical mind" (MD, 11). Despite her commanding "knowledge of modern history"--"thorough in the extreme"--Doris Kilman has lost her teaching post because of her German ancestry. 40 Deprived of her livelihood, she is a walking allegory of the aggressively aggrieved postwar Germany Keynes tried to forestall. She enters Clarissa's orbit through the kindness of Richard, who has found her "working for the Friends"--presumably, for peace--and, pained by her misfortune, has engaged her to tutor Elizabeth. 41 Miss Kilman reflects on how wartime nationalist paranoia has blighted her life:
she had never been able to tell lies. Miss Dolby thought she would be happier with people who shared her views about the Germans. She had had to go. It was true that the family was of German origin; spelt the name Kiehlman in the eighteenth century; but her brother had been killed. They turned her out because she would not pretend that the Germans were all villains--when she had German friends, when the only happy days of her life had been spent in Germany! [MD, 123-4]
An Englishwoman whose brother has, it appears, fought and died for England, Doris Kilman nonetheless finds herself a racialized outcast. Unjustly deprived of her livelihood, she feels "cheated" of her "right to some kind of happiness"--the one kind she can hope for, "what with being so clumsy and so poor" (MD, 123). Too homely to find happiness in "the opposite sex" (men being in short supply in any case after the war) and too poor to buy "pretty clothes" (anyway, "No clothes suited" her "unlovable body"), she does not hope to "come first with anyone." 42 Still, she might have had the modest happiness of her teaching post--a vital social world, a secure if small income, the intellectual satisfactions and social place for which her degree and "more than respectable" expertise in "modern history" qualify her--had not her fellow English, anticipating both Versailles and Hitler's racialized violence, impoverished and degraded her in her own country (MD, 132). The spelunking narrator, in short, traces her near-murderous envy of Clarissa not to an essentially tyrannical personality but to a natural resentment of social injuries. Her psychic "cave" illuminates her rage and self-righteousness not as isolated character faults but as a case study of the dynamics of nationalism and class in collective aggression--a fictional animation of Keynes's prophecy that an impoverished Germany would avenge itself on the Allies.
Miss Kilman's history anticipates the theory of human aggression that Freud read out of "the horrors of the recent World War":
The . . . truth . . . which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. . . .  Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? 43
Aggression and the death-instinct, Freud argued, are not pathological aberrations but inherent in human nature and ineradicable. Civilization demands that individuals renounce instinctual aggression (murder, cannibalism, incest) as well as submit to moral strictures against lust, avarice, lies, fraud, calumny and so on; hence "every individual isvirtually an enemy of civilization." 44 Although civilization disarms this hostility with variousforms of recompense, its economy of aggression renounced in exchange for benefitsis inherently unstable, easily disturbed by social and economic inequities that exacerbate this fundamental discontent. 45 Like Keynes, Freud saw class oppression as a formidable threat to Europe's democratic civilization, which could pacify its citizen-enemies only by reasonably equitable sociomaterial rewards.
One especially effective form of recompense, Freud notes, is identification with the "cultural ideal," which consoles both oppressed and privileged classes, "since the right to despise the people outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within": "No doubt one is a wretched plebeian, harassed by debts and military service; but, to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen, one has one's share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws" (FI, 17). So it is for the Londoners ("poor people all of them") who wait swelled with pride by Buckingham Palace for "the Proime Minister's kyar" while dreaming of "the heavenly life divinely bestowed upon Kings" no less than for the already "upright" Clarissa, who "stiffen[s]" further at any manifestation of Empire and sees "character," "something inborn in the race; what Indians respected," in the Palace's "four-square" architecture (MD, 12-9, "BS," 153). So it is for the imperial Lady Bexborough, who "opened a bazaar" with the telegram informing her of her youngest son's death in her hand, and for Mr. Bowley, in whose "British breast" the breeze ruffles "some flag flying" (MD, 5, 20). And so it ought to be but is not for Doris Kilman. When she loses her livelihood because she cannot pretend that all Germans are villains, England's cultural ideal ceases to be hers, as it has ceased to be international. Her aggression, which the civilization that subjects her is supposed to reward her for renouncing, then erupts in a "violent grudge against the world" (MD, 129).
What prevents Miss Kilman (an "outlaw" and "brigand" in the draft) from acting on her urge to "fell" Clarissa, if not that she is civilized, that she has a conscience (H, 202)? In Freud's analysis, self-policing "conscience," not external police, is civilization's most powerful weapon against aggressive instincts, which civilization can frustrate but never destroy (CD, 70). The repository of civilization's prohibitions, conscience absorbs forbidden aggression and redirects it against the self, producing unconscious guilt. 46 By this means civilization transforms its enemies into agents: it restrains each individual's "aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city"--though at the cost of "a loss of happiness" (CD, 71, 81). While Miss Kilman takes pride in her virtue, "out of her meagre income set[ting] aside so much for causes she believed in," her civilized state--her conscience--has obviously not been bought and paid for by her society (MD, 125). Even the London poor, the vagrant woman who grins at Richard, the servants to whom Clarissa sends "love" at her parties, let alone the ruling-class Bexboroughs, Dalloways, and Prime Minister, are better compensated than she (MD, 165). Yet conscience forbids her to "ease" her "hot and painful" rage and redirects her aggression against herself (MD, 124). In precise proportion to the fact that she is civilized, she is wracked by suppressed and thwarted appetites, envy, self-pity, self-reproach.
For consolation and hope, the aggrieved Miss Kilman turns to "Russia," which helps her to manage homicidal rage without veering into suicidal despair by converting violent envy into ideological aggression against Clarissa and her kind. "With all this luxury," she thinks, looking at Clarissa's Reynolds engraving while imagining a communized Mrs. Dalloway laboring in a shop or factory, "what hope was there for a better state of things?"; "She could not help being ugly; . . . Clarissa Dalloway had laughed--but she would . . . think of Russia; until she reached the pillar-box" (MD, 124, 128-9). "Russia"--an alternative civilization, a more just cultural ideal--sanctions her contempt for such emblems of the old order as Clarissa. Her career "absolutely ruined" by the England for which her brother died, Miss Kilman stands like a powder keg near Russia's still-smoldering revolution (MD, 130). Her socialist fantasies illustrate Keynes's warning that to bring "economic ruin" upon "great countries" by "political tyranny and injustice" is to foment revolution--thus far forestalled in Central Europe only by its failure to offer any "prospect of improvement whatever" (indeed, for all her misery, Miss Kilman is still in London). 47
When "Russia" fails, Miss Kilman "th[inks] of God," parodying Marx's attack on religion as palliating the masses' suffering without curing its social causes (MD, 124). Her religious practice amounts to a strenuous effort to fortify her conscience against her violent outrage, for "two years three months" after "Our Lord had come to her," her "Bitter and burning" anger remains unappeased. Thoughts of God bring not peace or mystical ecstasy but a holy warrior's righteousness: "Rage was succeeded by calm. A sweet savour filled her veins, her lips parted, and, standing formidable upon the landing in her mackintosh, she looked with steady and sinister serenity at Mrs. Dalloway," savoring imminent "religious victory" (MD, 124-5). Although her vow to "t; vanquish; have faith in God" restrains her violence, neither Russia nor religion soothes her "hot and turbulent feelings" or the worldly desires she is too poor, homely, and oppressed to satisfy ("It was the flesh that she must control") (MD, 124-9).
Abandoned by Elizabeth and assailed by "shocks of suffering," Miss Kilman remains suspended between those strange bedfellows God and Russia as she makes her lonely way through "all the commodities of the world" out of the Army Navy Stores and into "that other sanctuary, the Abbey," where she kneels in dogged prayer among "reverent, middle class, English men and women, some of them desirous of seeing the wax works" (MD, 133). The narrative pointedly declines to dissociate God and the soul from commodities, nationalism, and class. Whereas better-fed Londoners find "God . . . accessible and the path to Him smooth," Miss Kilman, hiding her face in twitching hands, "struggle[s]" "to aspire above the vanities, the desires, the commodities, to rid herself both of hatred and of love, . . . so rough the approach to her God--so tough her desires" (MD, 133-4). So laboring, she "impresse[s]" the well-fixed Londoners with "her largeness, robustness, and power"--Mr. Fletcher, Mrs. Dalloway, "the Rev. Edward Whittaker, and Elizabeth too" (ibid.). Religious warrior, communist sympathizer, unwitting prophet of a humiliated and downtrodden Germany's working-class hero, Miss Kilman in her starved longing "for a better state of things" is a casualty of the nationalist hatreds against which Keynes inveighed. She stands as a small, ominous emblem of the economic ruin of great countries and a portent of revenge tragedy, counterposed to the effaced German elegy--an "ancient song" of "love which prevails"--sung by another "battered woman" in the street at the Regent's Park Tube station. 48
More striking, finally, than the differences between Clarissa's ineffectual noblesse oblige and Miss Kilman's odious righteousness are their odd affinities. "Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians," thinks Clarissa, in whom luxury has bred a lighter, freer, if not more honest or noble conscience;
she was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from school during the War--poor embittered unfortunate creature! [MD, 12]
Unlike the aptly named Miss Kilman, who must be very, very good in order not to be positively criminal, the pampered Clarissa has no need of a heavy-duty conscience. She takes her privilege for granted, confuses Armenians with Albanians, tosses threadbare cushions to her servants "in gratitude . . . for helping her to be like this, . . . gentle, generous-hearted," and rides the coattails of Richard's social conscience from the haven of her sofa. 49 Claiming "to wish everybody merely to be themselves," she yet finds the idea of praying shut up in a room "nauseating," and she is "really shocked" by the glowering Miss Kilman: "This a Christian--this woman! This woman had taken her daughter from her! She in touch with invisible presences! Heavy, ugly, commonplace, without kindness or grace, she know the meaning of life!" (MD, 125-6, 117). Yet hardly does she project on her "the power and taciturnity of some prehistoric monster armoured for primeval warfare" than "hatred (which was for ideas, not people) crumble[s]" and Clarissa laughs in relief to see her "los[e] her malignity" and become "merely Miss Kilman, in a mackintosh, whom Heaven knows Clarissa would have liked to help" (MD, 126).
For her part, Miss Kilman's conscience is weighty in proportion to the mass of rage ithas had to absorb and find some nominally civilized alibi for. In truth she would far rather resemble than despise Clarissa, and if she did, she would not need the righteousness that weighs her down: "she minded looking as she did beside Clarissa. . . . But why wish to resemble her? . . . She despised Mrs. Dalloway . . . Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit. Yet Doris Kilman had . . . very nearly burst into tears when Clarissa Dalloway laughed at her" (MD, 128). As the ur-Clarissa reflects, "All men were brothers. For that very reason, one must hate some of them, as one hated part of oneself" (H, 271). As Clarissa glimpses her role in creating the monster she mistakes for Miss Kilman, Miss Kilman admits her secret wish to be like this woman she pretends has no virtues. No one wins this contest, but it shows that insofar as Miss Kilman is a monster, she is one created by the social system--a casualty of an economic war between the wars, a mute witness to Britain's unacknowledged tyranny.
[W]as there, after all, . . . anything to make a passer-by suspect here is a young man who carries in him the greatest message in the world, and is, moreover, the happiest man in the world, and the most miserable?
--Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Is Septimus Warren Smith mad or does he have a message? That he is mad would seem indisputable; even sympathetic discussions cast him as a war victim, not a prophet. 50 Yet Mrs. Dalloway's postwar world of multifarious and contested realities pits Septimus's reality against that of his doctors to frame "madness" as censored truth. If, as Michel Foucault argues, civilization disciplines madness to suppress its truths, art recaptures truths branded madness to confront the world with the necessity of change: "by the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, . . . where the world is forced to question itself. . . . [T]he world finds itself arraigned by that work of art and responsible before it for what it is." 51
Mrs. Dalloway's opening scenes frame this contestation of a multiplicitous reality as an outworn monotheism confronts an immanent modernist cosmos. Clarissa's cutting-edge metaphor "another throw of the dice" is way ahead of Einstein's mistaken objection, "God does not play dice," in the 1926 controversy over Heisenberg's quantum theory. 52 In Mrs. Dalloway's cosmos God does not play dice, for God does not exist. Fate plays dice. As the infinite possibilities that ride the crest of time collapse moment by moment into events, fate is arbitrary, time irreversible, disaster, suffering, and death inevitable if also unpredictable, and promises of heaven obsolete. Old transcendences metamorphose into an airplane swooping "like a skater . . . or a dancer" to leave an advertising slogan in a melting trail of smoke. 53 No two groundlings whose caves meet "daylight" at this moment read this celestial sign in quite the same way. "'Glaxo,' said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awe-stricken voice"; "'Kreemo', murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a sleep-walker"; "It's toffee," murmured Mr. Bowley; "So, thought Septimus, . . . they are signalling to me"; "Hadn't Mrs. Dempster always longed to see foreign parts?"; "a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man's soul; of his determination . . . to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory" (MD, 20-8). Meanwhile, the earthbound counterpart of this heavenly sign, the inscrutable state motorcar ("probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dalloway"), stops traffic in Bond Street with a loud backfire--a parodic "voice of authority" that rouses "the spirit of religion," "her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide" (MD, 16, 14). Stirring nationalist piety in bystanders of every class, this blind spirit of monarchy and monotheism constellates analeatory community of spectators marveling at manmade miracles, even as transcendencefalls into immanence, revelation into high-tech marketing stunts, cathedrals into waxworks,divinely invested monarchs into a blank though "enduring symbol" of England's "majesty" (MD, 16). Loss of monovocal authority becomes gain as the weird enchanting harmonies of irreducible differences surround and displace the totalizing "spirit" in their midst.
Freud's meditations on Europe's future in The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents illuminate the contending poetries, or metaphysics, of Miss Kilman's religious belief, England's nationalist religion, Clarissa's stoic atheism, and, not least, Septimus's war experience. Consigning religion--"perhaps the most important item in the psychical inventory of a civilization," without which many feel life would be intolerable--to humanity's childhood, Freud advocates an "education to reality" (FI, 81). Such an education would teach that sexuality and aggression are profound and ineradicable human instincts; that civilization must continually be fought for in the unceasing "battle of the giants" Eros and Death for "world dominion"; and that creative endeavors to make life "tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone" console for the renunciations civilization demands better than can illusions of a heavenly afterlife (CD, 69; FI, 82). The European religions, he complains, depict a cosmos so lacking in rationality and realism as to reduce believers to childish credulity. They falsely soothe an infantile "need for a father's protection" from sufferings inflicted by nature and humanity, exacerbate unconscious aggression and guilt by holding up impossible ethical ideals such as the Golden Rule, and foster hopes of "Heaven" that promote passivity and dissipate creative energies (CD, 19). An "education to reality," by contrast, would emphasize science, which subjects its accounts of reality to empirical verification, and art, which claims no transcendent authority. People so educated would find consolation in scientific understanding of the world and in such pleasurable pursuits as relationships, thought and creativity, power to act in and change the world, nature, beauty, and art. Freed from religion's "bitter-sweet . . . poison," humanity would grow up: it would abandon fantasies of a beneficent Providence, accept its helpless and insignificant place in the cosmos, resign itself to fate (those aspects of life not susceptible of change), and direct its "liberated energies" toward improving life for all here and now, leaving "heaven to the angels and the sparrows" (FI, 81-2, 82n).
When Freud speculated that the "experiment of an irreligious education" might yield "hope for the future," a "treasure" to "enrich civilization," his English publisher--a daughter of agnostics educated at home, not in institutions long steeped in Church sponsorship--had already created such treasures. 54 The skeptic Clarissa and the scapegoat Septimus dramatize the power of art, thought, and imagination to face reality and console for loss in this late age of the world's experience when "simply one doesn't believe . . . any more in God"; and the novel's odd-affinities ontology and immanent cosmos anticipate Freud's this-worldly philosophy ("BS," 158). At the crossroads between modern Europe's (first) civil war and its uncertain future, Freud's meditations on the aggression that threatens civilization from within resonate with Septimus's message; and his advocacy of art, philosophy and science over religious "illusion," with Clarissa's arduous belief that "life"--though poised over an abyss, unwatched by any Providence, unredeemed by any heaven--is "enough" (MD, 121-2).
Never spoken in so many words, Septimus's message exists as a depth-charge in his character, story, and fate. A prophetic witness to the aggression instinctive in human nature and ineradicable from European civilization, he brings the war home in his very person. He not only exposes his fellow citizens' "really fearful . . . 'settling down'" as though the war had never been, as Katherine Mansfield put it; he brings the war home as their war, their violence, which they disavow in a contestation of reality to the death. 55 Tortured by the memory of Evans blown to bits before his eyes, confessing that he has "committed a crime," besieged by guilt at being alive but unable to feel, Septimus entertains the possibility "that the world itself is without meaning" (MD, 88). To salvage its meaning, he tries to attest to the collective murder his civilization has commissioned from him, to offer a "truth" on which to rebuild civilization more lastingly. While Sir William Bradshaw and Dr. Holmes--gatekeepers of a society strategically blind to its own violence--pathologize his reality as "the deferred effects of shell shock," he tries to "tell the whole world"; when that fails, he acts out his "astonishing revelation" through his sacrificial death (MD, 183, 70). Although Septimus loses his life in this poetry contest, Mrs. Dalloway captures his "truth" for the real-world contest between Love and Death that art, like Keynes's "moral book," may aspire to influence.
Septimus too is an elegiac consciousness. Despite his overwhelming grief, he is not inconsolable but struggles in his own way to survive his message--to communicate it without being driven insane in the elegiac progress toward life and the future that his suicide interrupts. Since his "brain [i]s perfect"--he can read the Inferno and add up his bill--he surmises that "it must be the fault of the world" that "he could not feel" (MD, 88). Yet he does feel extremes of ecstasy and pain as his wavering gaze takes in the ravishing phenomenal world, its breathtaking beauty intensified in proportion to his devastation. He is amazed to tears by the mysterious "smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty!" (MD, 21-2). Everything sings to him: Evans sings "from behind the tree," sparrows sing in Greek, the word time "split[s] its husk," Rezia's voice lapses into "contented melody," sounds make "harmonies with premeditation," even silence sings, "the spaces between . . . as significant as the sounds" (MD, 70, 69, 146, 22). His rushing thoughts tumble out revelation after revelation. "Scientifically speaking," he theorizes, "the flesh was melted off the world," his body "macerated until only the nerve fibres were left," "spread like a veil upon a rock"; "I have been dead and yet am now alive," he hazards (MD, 68-9). To his "ode to Time" a pastoral, symbolically reborn Evans sings antiphonally that the dead wait in Thessaly for the war's end when they will return, then suddenly materializes as Peter Walsh on the path: "'For God's sake don't come!' . . . But the branches parted. . . . It was Evans! But no mud was on him; no wounds. . . . I must tell the whole world, Septimus cried . . . (as the dead man in the grey suit came nearer)" (MD, 70). Where his insupportable memories meet "daylight," the everyday world splinters into the incandescent visions, music, and poetry that hold him to life.
Paul Fussell documents the chasm between the incommunicable reality experienced by the English soldiers at the front and the jingoistic sentimentality of civilians in England. 56 Back "home" ("avoid the use of the word Home," notes Bradshaw), Septimus's boss, Mr. Brewer, applauds his distinguished war service and promotes him "to a post of considerable responsibility"; Septimus, appalled and revolted by the patriotic lies by which his fellow Londoners transform collective murder into "pleasurable . . . emotion" and himself into a war hero, is diagnosed as mad (H, 138; MD, 88). Sir William inquires,
"You served with great distinction in the War?"
The patient repeated the word "war" interrogatively.
He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious symptom, to be noted on the card.
"The War?" the patient asked. The European War--that little shindy of schoolboys with gunpowder? Had he served with distinction? He really forgot. In the War itself he had failed.
"Yes, he served with the greatest distinction," Rezia assured the doctor; "he was promoted."
[. . .]
He had committed an appalling crime and been condemned to death by human nature.
"I have--I have--," he began, "committed a crime--"
"He has done nothing wrong whatever," Rezia assured the doctor.
[. . .]
"I--I--" he stammered.
But what was his crime? He could not remember it.
"Yes?" Sir William encouraged him. (But it was growing late.)
Love, trees, there is no crime--what was his message?
[. . .]
"I--I--" Septimus stammered.
"Try to think as little about yourself as possible," said Sir William kindly. Really, he was not fit to be about.
[. . .]
"Trust everything to me," he said, and dismissed them. [MD, 96, 98]
Captured and stilled in the work of art, Septimus's stammer interrupts the tanklike momentum of the heroic social script ventriloquized by Rezia and Sir William. Like a vulnerable body before their smoothly rolling sentences, his broken utterances mark the site of a reality, the appalling crime of war, against which their supposedly transparent "sane truth" appears unreal and insane. 57
Septimus's doctors act as agents for a society that scapegoats him for bringing home the murderous aggression it would disavow, that projects its aggression upon him and expels him, its symbolic embodiment, so that he seems to bear it away. But the scapegoat who does not suffer silently turns victimage into prophecy. 58 While Rezia, following doctors' orders, exhorts Septimus to "'Look'" at the everyday sights in Regent's Park, a different reality absorbs him:
Look the unseen bade him, the voice which now communicated with him who was the greatest of mankind, Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society, . . . suffering for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not want it, he moaned, putting from him with a wave of his hand that eternal suffering, that eternal loneliness. . . . "Oh look," she implored him. But what was there to look at? A few sheep. That was all. [MD, 25-6]
What are a few sheep to a scapegoat "come to renew society"?--
the lord of men . . . called forth in advance of the mass of men to hear the truth, to learn the meaning, which now at last, after all the toils of civilisation--Greeks, Romans, Shakespeare, Darwin, and now himself--was to be given whole to . . . "To whom?" he asked aloud. "To the Prime Minister," the voices which rustled above his head replied . . . these profound truths which needed, so deep were they, so difficult, an immense effort to speak out, but the world was entirely changed by them forever. [MD, 67]
From his scapegoat's perspective, Septimus's premonition of the "birth of a new religion" (or an old one always in need of rebirth) is sane (MD, 23). If the world could avow its violence, would it not be radically altered, redeemed from its lies, filled with the power to atone for and even renounce it?  Sir William not only prospered himself but saw to it that England should prosper too" (H, 149-50; cf. MD, 99). Making rounds in his sleek motorcar with his wife nestled in silvery furs, Bradshaw is "the judge, the saviour, the super man, in whose hands powers of life & death were lodged, torture, isolation; the great gaoler; the heavy compassionate man, who had seen so much of this sort of thing, . . . made an excellent after dinner speech, & was at the top of his tree" (H, 142). As Bradshaw lists reasons why Septimus must not kill himself ("King George. . . . [D]uty, & self-sacrifice, & humour & courage & the family"), Septimus muses on the oil portrait of Lady Bradshaw over the mantelpiece and Bradshaw's income of "£10,000 a year" and objects, "But life . . . offers no such bounty to us. . . . And perhaps there is no God. [Sir William] shrugged his shoulders" (H, 154). Having "devour[ed] Shakespeare, Darwin, The History of Civilisation, and Bernard Shaw," Septimus grasps his meaning:the "whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes" (MD, 85, 92).
Back "home," in short, Septimus is fated to know "everything," to grasp "the meaning of the world," and to bear the burden of witnessing his civilization's unimaginable violence without being driven mad (MD, 66). "The War had taught him," for example, "the message hidden in the beauty" of even Shakespeare's words, sacred text of the civilization he went to war to "save":
The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus (translated) the same. . . . [H]uman beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity. . . . They hunt in packs . . . scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness. They desert the fallen. . . . Brewer at the office, . . . brutality blared out on placards; men were trapped in mines; women burnt alive; and once a maimed file of lunatics . . . ambled and nodded and grinned past him. . . . And would he go mad?  Beckoning airplanes, whispering trees, birds speaking Greek, Evans cleansed and whole--all threaten to "sen[d] him mad. But he would not go mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no more" (MD, 22).
Septimus's "insane truth" is still truth, in face of which "not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." 59 He suffers, owns, and tries to bear witness to his civilization's "appalling crime" but is finally forced to reenact it through a death that he expects to be read--a death that he offers as a gift, and that the narrative insulates from dismissal as madness. Bathed in the light of his last afternoon, he tests his sanity, looking cautiously at objects in his room and finding with relief that "None of these things moved. All were still; all were real"; "He would not go mad" (MD, 142).  Besides . . . there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know. Holmes had won of course. . . . But even Holmes . . . could not touch this last relic straying on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world. [MD, 92-3]
The sun feels hot, life good, the future full of possibilities that emerge in miniature in the hat he and Rezia, laughing together "like married people," create for Mrs. Peters (MD, 143). Now the world's found order ("Mrs. Peters had a spiteful tongue. Mr. Peters was in Hull") seems not in the least "terrible"; his writings and drawings seem "insane. all about death, nightingales"; his fear of "falling down, down into the flames!" momentarily abates: "Miracles, revelations, agonies, loneliness, falling through the sea, . . . all were burnt out, for he had a sense, as he watched Rezia trimming the straw hat . . . of a coverlet of flowers" (H, 313; MD, 141-3). He foreknows that he must sacrifice his elegiac progress, perform the revelation no one heeds. But, feeling "Every power pour[] its treasures on his head" as his heart sings "Fear no more," he delays "till the very last moment" the death in which two realities converge: the suicide his society demands and, as Clarissa somehow divines, "an attempt to communicate" (MD, 139, 149, 184). He is pushed, yet he also jumps. He frames his death as the antithesis of madness, "an immense effort to speak out" difficult, "profound truths"; an offering, a sacrifice, a gift to "human beings": "what did they want? . . . 'I'll give it you!' he cried" (MD, 149). Might recognition of his gift not help refound his civilization on firmer, more lasting ground? If so, is he mad to think that he dies for the sins of the world, dies so that others may live?
Through the artwork that reclaims his death from obscurity, Septimus bequeathes his message to the future. His suicide, pathologized by Sir William and Richard to promote the shell shock bill, is received by Clarissa precisely as a message: "defiance," a Houdini-like escape from soul-destroying doctors, a Shelleyan "plunge[] holding his treasure" (MD, 184; cf. H, 386, where Shelley's name appears).  Echoing "Adonais," she reflects that the living "would grow old," he never. By flinging his life away he has preserved "a thing . . . that mattered," something "defaced, obscured in her own life," lost "every day in corruption, lies, chatter" (MD, 184). In opposing truth/treasure/death to lies/corruption/life, Clarissa confronts her own Conversion--her compromised treasure, Sally's kiss. Channeling her own rage and grief into social contestation, she indicts Sir William as Conversion's agent--"a great doctor yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrage--forcing your soul"; such men "make life intolerable" (MD, 184-5).
We shall return in a moment to the sexual crises Clarissa's language evokes.  She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success. Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton" (MD, 185). At last she makes peace with her own defection from love's "sublimity" as the price of the life with Richard that she simply likes and, accepting this reality, glimpses her survival and future in the old woman in the window opposite (H, 390).  Fear no more the heat of the sun. . . .  The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. [MD, 186]
Elegy's brutal principle of substitution dictates the emotional logic by which the unknown young man's death helps her to embrace life, beauty, fun, her party, all her consolations in face of time and inexorable loss--"That's what I do it for" (MD, 121). Her elegiac progress repeats in small her navigation from Sylvia's death through perilous grief and rage to the existential consolation simply "that one day should follow another," that she should "wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough" (MD, 122).
If Clarissa's elegy for Septimus is inadequate to arraign the world before the truths it brands madness, Mrs. Dalloway captures his message within its fictional bounds for the world beyond them. Not Clarissa but we readers receive (or not) the message of Septimus's death, the costs of the war he names a "crime," the measure of what his life means to him, the infinite possibilities of his unfurling days. Meanwhile, Clarissa reflects on her conversion, acknowledges loss, and affirms the consolations that reward the elegist's exigent bowing to reality. Let's return now to Clarissa's brief flare of rage at Sir William, which illuminates the protagonists' elegiac doubling as a splitting of authorial voice into the sane survivor and the insane war veteran whom Woolf created partly out of herself: "S's character. founded on R[upert Brooke?]? . . . or founded on me? . . . might be left vague--as a mad person is . . . so can be partly R.; partly me" (H, 418). Traces in the novel's genetic text illuminate Woolf's transmutation of her harrowing experience of "madness," and of the losses, grief, and rage that fueled it, into an elegiac work of art that might influence the world. The Septimus who is "partly" Woolf, these traces suggest, dies not only for his society's "crime" of war but also for the violence that its ruling "father[s]" visit upon women.
(a delicious idea comes to me that I will write anything I want to write).
The truth?--was Harley Street founded on the truth? . . .
. . . [S]he was almost inclined to tell him about her brother, except that she was almost killed her brother [denied once that she] told a lie once about her brother. & would have done so, had it not seemed margin: never let on that her brother was not
--Woolf, The Hours
These words belong to a draft sequence that leads from Rezia's despairing thoughts in Harley Street to Lady Bruton's luncheon. The London medical establishment's "truth" forcibly embraces a "miserable rag & relic" of a soul who comes "fluttering . . . bereft of shelter, shade, or refuge, naked, defenceless," to suffer "the terrific stamp of Sir Williams rage. He swooped; he devoured. . . . Such decision, combined with humanity, . . . endeared Sir William greatly to the relations of his victims" (H, 155; cf. MD, 99-101). No reader of Woolf's letters about her incarceration in a home for the insane could fail to sense here the remembered "mad" "me" on which she drew for Septimus nor the "raging furnace" of feelings about "madness and doctors and being forced" that she "kept cooling in [her] mind" for years before she could "touch it without bursting into flame all over." 60 Refracting Septimus's war traumas through her experiences of the social system in action, Woolf discloses and disguises the tangled sources of "madness" in familial and societal dynamics, including her Duckworth half-brothers' incestuous abuse, the reactions of family, friends, and doctors to this history, her relations' power over her incarceration, and the pressures of "Proportion" and "Conversion" (MD, 100).  'And so I reached Greece'; where he joined the poets, in Thessaly" (H, 66). In Mrs. Dalloway nightingales become sparrows singing "in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death" (MD, 24-5). Yet Septimus never ceases to be "partly" the ghost of that "me" who signed herself "Sparroy" to Violet Dickinson--one friend who could grasp a "truth" that might as well have been Greek to the society that exalted George Duckworth. 61
In creating a war veteran "partly" out of that former "me," Woolf foreshadows her analysis in Three Guineas of the war at home, the abuses of women under the social law of masculine and heterosexual privilege. In The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway, women's telling of truth and lies dramatizes their negotiations of elegiac inheritance, sexuality, and social law in a civilization being rebuilt, perhaps, on firmer ground. As Sacks observes, the critical question of communal inheritance from the dead implicates the mourners' sexuality psychically and legally. The old crises of narcissism and sexuality that mourning awakens, inheritance must somehow resolve. Through same-sex attractions, intimations of incest and madness, and conversion dramas, The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway expose systemic social violence as it governs inheritance, dictates the mourner's sexuality, and provokes the violent energies that the elegy diverts from tragic enactment into social critique. More specifically, women must choose between challenging social law and submitting to it in exchange for socioeconomic rewards. Submission to the Goddess of Conversion, as Clarissa knows, entails lies--silences, omissions, censorship. Thus Lady Bradshaw has "gone under" fifteen years earlier: "a nervous twitch" signals something "really painful to believe--that the poor lady lied"; and Clarissa contrasts Septimus's uncorrupted "treasure" with her youthful passion, renounced and now obscured by "lies, corruption, chatter," as she consoles herself with the pleasures her bargain has bought her (MD, 100-1). This recognition--her legacy from Septimus--weighs conversion's advantages against its costs: "she did not pity him"; she too has felt, "if it were now to die 'twere now to be most happy"; still, life is enough (MD, 186, 184, 35).
Mrs. Dalloway depicts a social system in which sexual desire and practice often diverge from law and publicity. Founded, as Freud points out, on the suppression of women's desire, civilization sanctions--punishes yet permits--incest and same-sex desire: "incest is anti-social and civilization consists in a progressive renunciation of it" ; "we may justly hold our civilization responsible for the spread of neurasthenia" . 62 As Freud explains the contradiction, the incest taboo imposes "perhaps the most drastic mutilation" of erotic life that civilization exacts; it is thus incompletely renounced in modern society. Although civilization polices sexuality as if it were a subject people--it fears revolt, enacts strict precautions, and inflicts "serious injustice" by dictating "a single kind of sexual life for everyone"--it cannot actually enforce its prohibitions and so must "pass over in silence many transgressions which, according to its own rescripts, it ought to have punished" (CD, 51-2). When Clarissa judges Sir William "obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrage," her specific exclusion of "sex or lust" in a context that has not raised any such issue invisibly flags a ghost of Woolf's "mad . . . me" who survives the doctor's dead patient. In The Hours her owning of Septimus's death as her disaster and disgrace leads to a vehement vow to "t Sir William Bradshaw. . . .  Never would she submit--never, never!" (H, 398-9). Later excised, this rather uncharacteristic outburst of social conscience alerts us to other scattered and muted deflections of violated sexuality in both texts, traces of Woolf's own negotiation of social law in the course of writing the novel.
Hard on the heels of the doctor so esteemed by his victims' relations, The Hours portrays Hugh Whitbread, who regularly brings his wife Evelyn (frequently visited by Clarissa "in a nursing home") to London "to see doctors" (MD, 6). A freehand portrait of the incestuous George Duckworth, the "admirable Hugh" captures his smug prosperity, sartorial magnificence, "little job at Court," and the "scrupulou[s] little courtesies & old fashioned ways" that have kept him "afloat on the cream of English society for fifty-five years"--just George's age in 1923. 63 Although Hugh is one of the few characters into whose psychic cave the narrator does not venture, the ur-narrator hints sardonically at what his impeccable facade conceals: "a little information about the subconscious self & Dr Freud had leaked into him"; "He had heard of Freud & Stravinsky. . . . His affections were understood to be deep"; "one or two humble reforms to his credit" include his undersigning of many long "letters on girls, & stamp out . . . nuisances [sic]," "nor did any girl lose her place in his household without being kept sight of" (H, 156-7). Mrs. Dalloway leaves all this on the cuttingroom floor, substituting a double entendre ("malicious" rumors that Hugh "now kept guard at Buckingham Palace, dressed in silk stockings and knee-breeches, over what nobody knew") and an oblique note that "servant girls had reason to be grateful to him" (MD, 103).
The ur-narrator now hands off Hugh, swathed in innuendo, to Lady Bruton's secretary, Milly Brush, who is so irritated by his inquiries after her brother that "she was almost inclined to tell him about her brother, except that she was almost killed her brother [denied once that she] told a lie once about her brother. & would have done so, had it not seemed margin: never let on that her brother was not" (H, 157).  What does she deny/lie about, deny lying about, and/or never let on about? Who or what was or is her brother, or was/is he not? Mrs. Dalloway's narrator affects not to know, indeed, tells us less: Hugh always asks "after her brother in South Africa, which, for some reason, Miss Brush . . . so much resented that she said 'Thank you, he's doing very well in South Africa,' when, for half a dozen years, he had been doing badly in Portsmouth" (MD, 103). As the narrative screws down the lid over a site of near-fatal sibling violence, Milly Brush silently mocks her interlocutor with the subaltern's lie.
Nothing in The Hours or Mrs. Dalloway suggests scattered cinders from Woolf's furnace of white-hot memories more vividly than the narrative convergence of this brother, Milly's incoherent lies, and the George-like Hugh, so solicitous, as it were, of servant girls, in a scene that covertly links the gender dynamics surrounding revelations of sexual violence to women's public speech. The specter of gender-marked "madness" (and familially engineered incarceration) as implements in the social control of "truth" hovers over the ur-Miss Brush, who seems to survive her separate sorrows by sheltering under her powerful employer's wing--a shadowy, diminished double of Lady Millicent Bruton. For her part, Lady Bruton "should have been a general of dragoons" but exhibits her own crippled relation to truth, speech, and social power in her "battle" to compose a letter to the Times, for which, feeling "the futility of her own womanhood as she felt it on no other occasion," she finally commandeers the expertise of none other than Hugh (MD, 105, 109).
Hugh's sleaziness emerges more explicitly in the drama of truth and lies surrounding a rumor that he once kissed Sally Seton in the smoking-room at Bourton. (Innocuous as it sounds, the furor around this incident suggests that, like Richard's kiss in The Voyage Out, it stands in for sexual transgressions ruled unspeakable by actual and internalized censors.) Having fled her "intolerable" home for Bourton, the brilliant young rebel Sally educated the "sheltered" Clarissa in "sex . . . social problems . . . life, how they were to reform the world" and "abolish private property" (H, 43; MD, 33). In The Hours Peter recalls a heated debate on women's suffrage, he and Sally pro, Richard and Hugh con:
Prostitutes . . . came in; & "the poor women in Piccadilly" she called them; & Hugh flushed, & hitched his trousers up. . . . He said nobody could tell what his mother meant to him . . .  She considered him responsible for the state of those poor girls. [H, 76, 86]
Sally, it seems, taxed Hugh with complicity in a social system in which middle- and upper-class men exploit lower-class women to preserve the supposed purity of their disenfranchised mothers, wives, and daughters, and he retaliated by forcing himself on her sexually. 64 Peter's memory is hampered by the fact that "nobody ever knew what happened--it was considered too awful--whether he kissed her or not, merely brushed against her, . . . it had to be hushed up . . . Clarissa murmured something mysterious--but nobody could believe a word against the admirable Hugh, . . . always a perfect gentleman" (H, 79). At the party Sally confirms the story and adds that Clarissa "Simply laughed" when she went to her "in a rage" (H, 403). In Mrs. Dalloway Clarissa sees "her old friend Hugh, talking to the Portuguese Ambassador," and recalls how Sally accused him, "of all people . . . of kissing her in the smoking-room" (that male preserve), so that Clarissa had
to persuade her not to denounce him at family prayers--which she was capable of doing with her daring, her recklessness, her melodramatic love of being the centre of everything and creating scenes, and it was bound . . . to end in some awful tragedy; her death; her martyrdom; instead of which she had married, quite unexpectedly, a bald man . . . who owned . . . cotton mills at Manchester. And she had five boys! [MD, 181-2]
Nowhere to be found in the suffrage debate, Clarissa defended Hugh "of all people" by silencing Sally at family prayers, of all places--family piety the cornerstone of a social system that protects men like Hugh by hushing up "truth" in the name of a hypocritical propriety.
Yet in her own mind Clarissa is not simply protecting Hugh but saving Sally from her own reckless idealism--from "awful tragedy," "death," "martyrdom." Her reaction stages the question of what genre shall govern Sally's life: the revenge tragedy that denouncing Hugh to a society that is a father might set in motion? a martyrdom like Septimus's? or an elegiac conversion narrative like her own? Notwithstanding the ur-Clarissa who vows to t her "enemy" and never submit, Clarissa has submitted to social law for the sake of life, beauty, fun. She recoils from the danger of ting for truth and dictates conversion--lies--for Sally, too. And her influence takes.
The Goddess of Conversion could display no prouder trophy than Lady Rosseter. The bold and visionary Sally suppresses her passion for truth to become a very paragon of conventional prosperous matronhood, amply rewarded by social position, the sexual fulfillment her teeming progeny suggest, and a leisurely country life in which she rarely reads a newspaper.  Whereas the penniless Sally would "reform the world" on behalf of women and the poor, the complacent Lady Rosseter has converted her claim on her civilization's future into individual salvation through a marriage that indeed spells doom for Sally's "Radical" politics (MD, 154).
 Yet the sibylline testimony of The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway intimates the ways Woolf's elegiac art mediated the memories of incest, madness, and social law that threatened to immolate her. The genres open to that remembered "me" would seem to correspond roughly to the fates Clarissa pictures for Sally: a tragic death by unjust social law; unsung martyrdom; suicide as an "embrace" or "attempt to communicate"; revenge, or the eruption of grief into murderous rage; elegiac conversion. In transforming that fluttering, bereft, naked, miserable, defenceless rag and relic of a soul into Septimus--one of the most astonishing characters in modern literature--Woolf wrests from her losses, grief, and life-threatening rage this work of art: a symbolic inheritance that lays her old self to rest (at least for a time) by bringing her to "life." As Clarissa's small elegy for Septimus is also an elegy for a buried self, Woolf's great postwar elegy for "all deaths & sorrows" enfolds a secret elegy for a self her art resurrects from ignominious death for something like tragedy or martyrdom, barely legible as she is in the work's palimpsest. 65 Septimus--not just his death but the life of suffering and witness that endows its gift--is her monument, a fictional facade over autobiographical truth in a work of art that arraigns its civilization and holds it responsible to itself for what it is. In ventriloquizing her "mad" "me" through Septimus, Woolf heeds yet eludes the censors--Dr. Savage, Kitty, Julia, George, even perhaps Vanessa--that her fluttering relic of a soul must have heard cry, Kill yourself, for our sakes.
In vanquishing the life-threatening forces that beset her, Woolf, like Clarissa, emerges as an elegist-hero who ts death and the void and returns from the battlefield bearing trophies of consolation, flaunting her powers of survival: "A new [elegy] by Virginia Woolf"; "This is what I have made of it!" (MD, 43, cf. EE, 226). A triumph of elegiac conversion, Mrs. Dalloway transforms a destroyed "mad . . . me" into a symbolic consolation in which she, disguised as Septimus, poor devil of both sexes, dies for the sins of the world, dies so that others may live. He does not want it. Why "rage and prophesy? Why fly scourged and outcast?" (MD, 142) Why indeed? Not because he is insane but because the world is; only because the sins and wounds of the world, and its consequent madness and art--not least, this postwar elegy with its arduous celebration of "life"--demand it. No guiltier than anyone else, his only "crime" to have tried to bear (in both senses) witness, Septimus dies for the "terrific" institutionalized violence that Harley Street commits against defenceless naked souls, for the admirable Hugh's less admirable acts, for Milly Brush's suppressed history, Clarissa's defection, and Lady Rosseter's conversion, as well as Europe's vengeful crimes against its future, the Great War and the violent Peace.
But if no one in the novel fully claims the symbolic legacy evoked in Septimus's last words, and if The Hours preserves smoldering "truths" that even Mrs. Dalloway cannot openly explore, how can anyone think that art might influence the world? What force can art exert toward change, when to t is out of character for Clarissa, conversion so far the norm that even Sally succumbs, and Septimus's death a silent testimony that leaves even the fictional world unchanged--while the actual world grinds on toward the revenge tragedy for which Versailles set the stage, horrendously enacting Hitler's 1922 vow: "It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain. . . . No, we do not pardon, we demand--vengeance!" 66
As powerless as the eloquence of Keynes and Freud to forestall another civil war, Woolf's elegiac art battles alongside them on the side of Love for a future that history had not yet, in 1925, foreclosed. Further, and in keeping with the expansive web of conscious and unconscious being that Clarissa theorizes on the bus, the novel does depict a changing world even if no one seems to be directly changing it. To Peter his dear old civilization seems freer, less repressed and much improved, especially for women: "Newspapers seemed different. Now for instance there was a man writing quite openly in one of the respectable weeklies about water-closets. That you couldn't have done ten years ago" (MD, 71). As a young man on whose "love of abstract principles" "the future of civilization" rests, he advocated women's suffrage; now "women's rights" are an "antediluvian topic" (MD, 50, 73). As he strolls to the party on an evening marvelously lengthened by that postwar innovation "summer time," he delights in the spectacle of beautiful, well-dressed young people and (unlike fellow Anglo-Indians devoted to "biliously summing up the ruin of the world") "more than suspect[s] from the words of a girl, from a housemaid's laughter--intangible things you couldn't lay your hands on--that shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed immovable" and had "weighed them down, the women especially" (MD, 162). Echoing Woolf's essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" , which proves by cooks borrowing newspapers and parlor maids trying on hats that "human character" has changed, Peter senses an exhilarating forward motion in postwar civilization that no single life--not his, Sally's, Clarissa's, Septimus's, nor even that of Elizabeth, who would like a profession but is "rather lazy"--can account for (MD, 137). 67 Yet there it is.
Lady Rosseter's conversion, moreover, represents no final defeat
of Sally's reformist hopes, since Mrs. Dalloway also immortalizes
Sally, ever streaking Bourton's corridor after her sponge like a modern
successor to Keats's beleaguered maiden. And of course art may inspire
readers to act upon their social worlds not by representing
change but by exposing the social system in action. Precisely because its
characters defect, convert, fail of speech, die, lie, and "go under,"
Mrs. Dalloway carries the "t" to rebuild civilization on
firmer ground into a future that is always becoming in the wake of the
work of art--the future of its readers, whose myriad-minded creativity
the skywriting airplane's beholders only suggest. Woolf, meanwhile,
triumphed over loss, grief, and maddening rage to reach fresh woods and
pastures new--to write her books, found her press, and persevere into the
next war as "the only woman in England free to write what I like"--and
she felt, on finishing her great communal elegy, no longer "inclined to
doff the cap to death": "More & more do I repeat . . . 'Its life that
matters'" (D, 3:43, 7-8, 8 n. 5; 22 September, 8 April 1925). If
water closets in respectable weeklies now, perhaps Milly Brush's brother
soon? For the moment, Mrs. Dalloway embraces the world as it is,
letting Milly, Clarissa, Hugh, and Lady Rosseter live while Septimus
dies for his civilization's barbarities--the sexual violence buried in
this novel's news of the day no less than the war on its front page.
1. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977-84), 3:34 (27 June 1925); hereafter abbreviated D.
2. See Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), chapter 3.
3. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981), 9; hereafter abbreviated MD.
4. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981), 159; hereafter abbreviated TL; Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966), 135.
5. The Woolfs' Hogarth Press took over publication of the International Psycho-Analytic Library in 1924, after which it published English translations of all Freud's works. The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929/1930) align Freud with Bloomsbury's internationalist stance toward the war.
6. Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 2, 1; hereafter abbreviated EE. On the roots of elegiac conventions in "specific social and literary practices," see "Interpreting the Genre," EE, 1-37. See also Maria diBattista, "Virginia Woolf's Memento Mori," in Virginia Woolf's Major Novels: The Fables of Anon (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), chapter 2; Claire M. Tylee, The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women's Writings, 1914-64 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), 150-67; and Caroline Webb, "Life after Death: The Allegorical Progress of Mrs. Dalloway," Modern Fiction Studies 40 (summer 1994): 279-98; J. Hillis Miller, "Mrs. Dalloway: Repetition as the Raising of the Dead," in Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), chapter 7; hereafter abbreviated "RRD."
7. EE, 8f. I agree that there is "substantial overlap in men's and women's mourning" and that a woman's mourning recapitulates the loss of the mother and "her internalization and identification with the idealized parent re"; but Woolf translates psychoanalytic theory's androcentric terms of art into the ontological loss and sexual wounding inherent in being, distinct from the systemic, socially-inflicted losses women suffer through "male culture's establishment of an almost exclusive relation between masculinity and the res of authority" (EE, 13, 15, 321).
8. EE, 34-5. Sacks interprets this ancient strategy of elegy as, first, a symbolic recapitulation of "the 'splitting' and self suppression that accompanied the self's first experiences of loss and substitution, its discovery of signs both for lost objects and for the self"; second, a "dramatizing strategy" that calls attention through ritual and ceremony to the mourners' "'work' as survivors"; third, the "confrontational structure required for the very recognition of loss," which furthers mourning's "necessarily dialectical movement"; fourth, the "poetry contest" whereby contestants channel grief into skill as they contend over the communal inheritance from the dead (EE, 35-6).
9. John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Knopf, 1999), 3.
10. Leonard Woolf, Barbarians Within and Without (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 131; Clive Bell, Peace at Once (London: The National Labour Press, [1915]), 53; J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920), 5, hereafter abbreviated ECP; Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1967), 9; cf. Albert Einstein, The t against War, ed. Alfred Lief (New York: John Day, 1933), 5-7.
11. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1999), x-xii, citing Czech political philosopher Thomas Masuryk.
12. Mussolini came to power in 1922; Hitler was arrested and imprisoned after the "beer hall putsch" of November 1923.
13. Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 293. Nicolson's diary traces the "horrible" treaty negotiations through the signing ceremony, which sent him "To bed, sick of life" (370-1). See also Keynes, "Dr Melchior: A Defeated Enemy," Two Memoirs (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949), 11-71.
14. "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street," in Collected Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick, 2nd. ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989), 155; hereafter abbreviated "BS."
15. Jahan Ramazani pursues Owen's description of his war elegies as "to this generation in no sense consolatory" in a study that begins by positing "the modern elegy's repudiation of the traditional elegy" and ends in acknowledging "the persistence of the traditional elegy within the modern" (Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994], 69, 361). On Woolf's response to the death of her childhood friend Brooke in April 1915 and his subsequent "canonisation," see Karen L. Levenback, Virginia Woolf and the Great War (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999), chapter 1.
16. Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1948); "BS," 152-9. I cite the Clarissas by publication date, but Woolf composed The Voyage Out between 1908 and 1913, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street" in 1922, and Mrs. Dalloway in 1923-24. As she approached The Hours (composed 1923-24) she expressed dissatisfaction with the 1923 Clarissa ("Mrs Dalloway doesn't seem to me to be complete as she is," L, 3:45, 4 June 1923); Orlando's draft takes a last swipe at her: "'There's that tiresome Mrs. Dalloway!' recognizing a lady [Orlando] very much disliked looking in at a glove shop window" (Orlando: A Biography, ed. J. H. Stape [Oxford: Blackwell, 1998], Appendix A: 170 3Pr 1E 1A).
17. Elegies often re the mother's symbolic loss, whether understood ontologically as differentiation contingent on birth or in sexual terms as oedipal prohibition, as her literal death; thus a guest tells Clarissa that she looks "so like her mother as she first saw her walking in a garden in a grey hat," bringing tears to her eyes (MD, 176). Sacks discusses Amy Clampitt's redressing of the tradition's "multiple exclusion or occlusion of res representing the mother" in "Procession at Candlemas" (EE, 325).
18. As Sacks remarks, "Adonais," completed the year before Shelley's enactment of its closing lines, drives the genre "to the brink of . . . ruin" (EE, 165). In a letter of 18 May 1933, Woolf described "sitting, by an open window, by a balcony, by the bay in which Shelley was drowned, wasn't he, 113 [actually 111] years ago, on a hot day like this . . . Mary Shelley and Mary Williams walked up and down the balcony of the house next door [Casa Magni] waiting while Shelleys body rolled round with pearls--it is the best death bed place I've ever seen" (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975-80], 5:186-7; hereafter abbreviated L). I thank Pierre-Eric Villeneuve for bringing this letter to my attention.
19. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Adonais," in Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson and G. M. Matthews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 432, stanza 1, lines 4-9.
20. The Hours: The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Helen Wussow (New York: Pace University Press, 1997), 266; hereafter abbreviated H. For some critics--e.g., Trudi Tate, Modernism, History, and the First World War (New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 165f, and Sharon Ouditt, ting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (New York: Routledge, 1994), 189f--Clarissa's class privilege and snobbery overwhelm any elegiac sensibility; in Ouditt's words she is "a trivial woman who represents a dying age" and lacks "political vision and fortitude" .
21. See Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), 2:87.
22. L, 1:134-5, 212, March 1904, 10 November 1905; Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1985), 191; hereafter abbreviated MB; Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1997), 214.
23. On 14 April 1922 Woolf told T. S. Eliot that she expected to finish this story in three to six weeks (L, 2:521). In August she told Ottoline Morrell that she had finished two Mrs. Dalloway stories (teasingly referred to as "my Garsington novel") (L, 2:543)--apparently prematurely, for on 28 August she planned to finish "Mrs Dalloway" on "Sat. 2nd Sept" and then to work on "the next chapter of Mrs. D. . . . The Prime Minister?" until "say Oct. 12th" (D, 2:196). A plan dated 6 October lists eight titles: "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street," "The Prime Minister," "Ancestors," "A dialogue," "The old ladies," "Country house?," "Cut flowers," and "The Party" (H, 411); cf. Mrs. Dalloway's Party, ed. Stella McNichol (New York: HBJ, 1973). "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street" appeared in the Dial in July 1923; Woolf sent it and another story to Eliot on 4 June for the Criterion, but he published neither.
24. Jacqueline E. M. Latham, "The Model for Clarissa Dalloway--Kitty Maxse," Notes and Queries 214 (July 1969): 262-3, finds no condolence letter from Woolf among the five hundred-odd in the Maxse papers at Chichester; she prints a letter from Virginia to Kitty, probably of summer 1905 when the Maxses visited the Stephen children at Carbis Bay in Cornwall (Bell, Virginia Woolf, 1:195).
25. Virginia Woolf, "Introduction to the Modern Library Edition of Mrs. Dalloway ," in Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Morris Beja (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), Appendix C, 198; hereafter abbreviated "I."
26. Daniel Ferrer makes this point but questions Kitty's death as a decisive event in the novel's genesis in Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (New York: Routledge, 1990), 154 n. 25.
27. For other interpretations of Woolf's remark in "I" see Edward Mendelson, "The Death of Clarissa Dalloway: Two Readings," in Textual Analysis: Some Readers Reading, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: MLA Press, 1986), 272-80; and "RRD," 176-201. Mendelson makes (and rebuts) the case that Clarissa does die, citing her fear of death, the heart condition that makes her sleep alone in a narrow, coffinlike bed, Peter's vision of her "falling where she stood, in her drawing-room" on hearing St. Margaret's bells toll "for death that surprised in the midst of life" ("No! No! . . . She is not dead! I am not old, he cried, and marched up Whitehall, as if there rolled down to him, vigorous, unending, his future"), and her sudden vanishing from her party (MD, 50). Miller frames Woolf's storytelling as "the repetition of the past" in the characters' memories and that of the narrator, who "remembers all" and "resurrect[s] the past": an "invisible mind . . . more powerful than their own," she "rescues them from the past," "registers with infinite delicacy their every thought and steals their every secret," and "speaks for them all," "'after' anything [they] think or feel"; thus "narration is repetition as the raising of the dead" and Clarissa's return to her party, her "resurrection from the dead" ("RRD," 176-9, 201).
28. For Lytton Strachey this compound Kitty/Woolf registered as a "discrepancy in Clarissa herself; he thinks she is disagreeable & limited, but that I alternately laugh at her, & cover her, very remarkably, with myself. . . . I think there is some truth in it. For I remember the night at Rodmell when I decided to give it up, because I found Clarissa in some way tinselly. Then I invented her memories. But I think some distaste for her persisted. Yet, again, that was true to my feeling for Kitty" (D, 3:32, 18 June 1925; emphasis mine). Woolf lent Clarissa her girlhood passion for Madge Vaughan ("I see myself now standing in the night nursery at Hyde Park Gate . . . saying . . . 'At this moment she isactually under this roof" (D, 2:122, 2 June 1921; cf. MD, 51) and experience of "Constantinople" (often a code word for lesbian love), and otherwise freed her from fact (e.g., that Kitty had no children).
29. Woolf depicts Julia Stephen's antifeminism in Mrs. Ramsay and recalls her stern rebuke when Kitty broke her first engagement in "22 Hyde Park Gate" (MB, 165).
30. MB, 93. In Jacob's Room (1922; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1960) someone sings "Who Is Silvia?": "She excels each mortal thing / Upon the dull earth dwelling. / To her let us garlands bring" . Virginia's half-sister Stella Duckworth died in 1897.
31. H, 411. Sacks relates the elegy's cut and broken branches and flowers to the "vegetation god, whose death and rebirth governed the phases of the rites" and "allowed the devotees or survivors to . . . intensify their grief or gratitude regarding an otherwise manifold and ungraspable world of nature"; the withering vegetation also symbolically "reverses man's submission to nature," which becomes no longer "the cause of human grief but rather the mourner or even the effect of a human-divine loss" (EE, 20-1). On Jane Harrison's influence upon Woolf's vegetation imagery, see Beverly Ann Schlack, Continuing Presences: Virginia Woolf's Use of Literary Allusion (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979), 52-3 and passim.
32. Miller aligns Imogen's return from "death" with Clarissa's return "from her solitary confrontation with death during her party" ("RRD," 200).
33. Posthumous derives from Latin posthumus "erroneously (by association with humus earth, ground, as if referring to burial) for postumus last, superl. of posterus" (OED). As Sacks points out, Guiderius/Polydore and Arviragus/Cadwal first sang "Fear no more," their dirge for Imogen/Fidele, for their dead mother, Euriphile (EE, 18).
34. Building on Elizabeth Abel's reading of Mrs. Dalloway as a "progression from a pastoral female world to an urban culture governed by men" (Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989], 42), Joseph Allen Boone relates this passage to Nancy Chodorow's theories of female psychological development (Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Making of Modernism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 187).
35. For example, kissing Peter in her drawingroom stirs "the brandishing of silver flashing--plumes like pampas grass in a tropic gale in her breast"; when Elizabeth barges in, Big Ben strikes the half hour "with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that" (MD, 46-7).
36. Wussow transcribes "beauty" here; it seems likely that Woolf meant to write "belief."
37. H, 388; cf. MD, 185. In citing The Hours I make some silent elisions and corrections and do not differentiate its temporal layers.
38. Keynes had lived in the communal household at 38 Brunswick Square with Virginia, Adrian, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf. Before Versailles Woolf wrote rather satirically of his "prophecies" about Lloyd George and England's economic future (L, 2:208, 1 January 1918); later she recorded his resignation from the peace talks (D, 1:280, 288; 10 June, 8 July 1919). In 1921 she praised his Memoir Club piece "Dr Melchior" (L, 2:456, 3 February).
39. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed 1883-1920 (London: Macmillan, 1983), 399; he adds that Keynes's "case on reparations remains unshakeable" .
40. MD, 125. Miss Kilman's historical model was the classical scholar Louise Ernestine Matthaei (1880-1969), Fellow and Director of Studies at Newnham from 1909, who was forced out in 1916 "under a cloud"; she explained to Leonard, "my father was a German. I find it makes a good deal of difference--it is a distinct hindrance commercially" (D, 1:135-6, 135 n, 14, 9 April 1918). Woolf recorded Leonard's intention to hire her on the International Review at a salary of £200-250 (D, 1:143, 21 April 1918). The resentful, belligerent Miss Kilman has nothing of Matthaei's "limp, apologetic attitude," her "odious" reluctance "to declare her opinions--as if a dog used to excessive beating, dreaded even the raising of a hand" but shares her "unattractive" person, blotchy complexion, "inconceivably stiff & ugly" dress, and "quick mind" (D, 1:136).
41. MD, 124. Masami Usui notes Miss Kilman's association with Quaker peace activism and relates her to international struggles for women's rights in "The Female Victims of War," in Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality and Myth, ed. Mark Hussey (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), esp. 158-63; cf. Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World, 133. Her work "for the Friends" apparently supplements her traditionally hierarchical Protestant denomination, with its Reverend Whittaker.
42. MD, 129. This wistful thought coexists with her passion for Elizabeth. Tylee, 165f, and Eileen Barrett ("Unmasking Lesbian Passion: The Inverted World of Mrs. Dalloway," in Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, ed. Barrett and Patricia Cramer [New York: New York University Press, 1997], 159-62) read Miss Kilman as a narrative and psychic locus of Clarissa's displaced and disavowed lesbian desire; cf. Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, 20-44, and Boone, Libidinal Currents, 172-203.
43. Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 58-9; hereafter abbreviated CD.
44. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, ed. James Strachey, trans. W. D. Robson-Scott (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1964), 3; hereafter abbreviated FI.
45. Forms of recompense include: protection against natural forces; material wealth and comfort, which accrue to individuals and classes in greater and lesser degrees; the "mental wealth" of cultural identity, political ideals, communal pride, art, religious ideas, and science; and such personal satisfactions as drugs, love, "cultivat[ing] one's garden," beauty, work, and the "pleasure principle" by which individuals adapt so as to gain all possible gratification from their environment (FI, 16; CD 22-3). For Freud as for Keynes, civilization encompasses, on the one hand, all the knowledge and capacity by which humankind controls destructive natural forces and uses natural resources to satisfy its needs, and, on the other, the regulation of human relations, "especially the distribution of the available wealth." These material and social economies are inseparable, since human relations "are profoundly influenced by the amount of instinctual satisfaction which the existing wealth makes possible" (FI, 3). Because social relations organize both power and wealth, some individuals function as wealth for others through labor or sexual attachment; thus Freud sees class oppression as a threat to civilization's stability.
46. Freud considers this unconscious guilt--a hidden reservoir of unacknowledged aggressive desire--"the most important problem in the development of civilization" (CD, 81).
47. ECP, 295-6. Cf. Freud on how "the narcissism of minor differences" (Spaniards v. Portuguese, North Germans v. South Germans, English v. Scots, Christians v. Jews) makes "intelligible" the fact that "the dream of a Germanic world-dominion called for antisemitism as its complement" and that "the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois" (CD, 61-2).
48. MD, 81. Miller ("RRD," 189-90) identifies the song "Allerseelen" by Hermann von Gilm and Richard Strauss as the source of the beggarwoman's age-old "fertilising" song ("ee um fah um so / foo swee too eem oo"), which encompasses "the pageant of the universe" and makes the earth seem "green and flowery," and which issues from a mouth that seems the archetype of all graves: "a mere hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root fibres and tangled grasses, . . . soaking through the knotted roots of infinite ages, and skeletons and treasure, stream[ing] away in rivulets over the pavement and all along the Marylebone Road, and down towards Euston, fertilising, leaving a damp stain" (MD, 81). Woolf's draft translation breaks off: "Lay by my side a bunch of purple heather / The last red aster of a" (H, 98 and passim).
49. MD, 39. Tate points out that Richard Dalloway, M. P., may that very day be orchestrating the Armenians' dire fate at Britain's hands (Modernism, History, and the First World War, 147-70).
50. On Septimus, war trauma, and shell shock, see Elaine Showalter (who aligns him with Sassoon), The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Penguin, 1985), chapter 7; Sue Thomas, "Virginia Woolf's Septimus Warren Smith and Contemporary Perceptions of Shell Shock," English Language Notes 25:2 : 49-57; Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 49, 52; Ouditt, who sees Septimus as homosexual and attributes his death to "a civilian metonym of war, the logical corollary to the brutal imposition of a fixed gender identity" (ting Forces, Writing Women, 197); and Karen DeMeester, "Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway," Modern Fiction Studies 44:3 : 649-73.
51. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1973), 288-9; cf. x-xi.
52. MD, 12; Cf. H, 271 (MS dated 20 October 1924). See Paul Davies, Other Worlds: . . . Space, Superspace, and the Quantum Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), 43.