The year, 2025, marks a literary milestone: that of the publication of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. First published in 1925 by the Hogarth Press in London which published books by modernists, such as Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and E.M. Forster, Mrs Dalloway steps into its centenary year not as a relic but as a mirror. This is because it reflects a myriad impressions of the human mind, its joys, ruptures and the relentless attempts to make meaning in a world shadowed by catastrophes, wars and conflicts.
Woolf, born in 1882, was a major British novelist at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day, and Jacob’s Room. Between 1925 and 1931, she produced her finest masterpieces, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate, feminist essay, “A Room of One’s Own”, and an insightful treatise on war, Three Guineas. Suffering from recurring mental illness,
she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.
Originally titled The Hours, Mrs Dalloway chronicled the events in a single day in the life of the fifty-two-year-old Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class English woman who intends to arrange for a party in which she hosts a plethora of characters like Peter, Sally, Mrs Kilman, Dr William Bradshaw, to name a few. Mrs Dalloway is paired with the thirty-year-old Septimus Warren Smith, the shell-shocked victim of the Great War. In a rather small spatial segment, Woolf presents the whole breadth of London’s milieu on a certain day in June 1923, five years after the armistice, after Londoners had been through the Great War (1914-1918), which was shattering, terrible and transformative. Moving in and out of the characters’ minds, using the stream-of-consciousness technique to explore the outer and the inner states of consciousness, the novel culminates in Clarissa’s party and Septimus’s suicide resulting from his madness, reeling as he is under the ruins of war. Experimenting with form and content of realist writing, the novel cuts across the issues of class, gender, age and deliberates on the idea of sanity and insanity in the aftermath of the war.
It is a curious thing that modernity, or the consciousness of living in post-War London transcribed by Virginia Woolf one hundred years ago, should still throb with vitality in our own, post-modern condition characterised by new wars, mass displacement, and the psychic aftermath of violence. While rummaging through the pages of the manuscript of Mrs Dalloway in the British Library, Elaine Showalter, the American literary critic and feminist, observed that Woolf was struck by the changes in family, society and personal relations in the aftermath of the Great War and modernity. The scholar, Mark Hussey, treats Woolf as “an artist whose practice is always informed by a clear sense of political reality” and observes that “Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway is irrefutable proof of her direct concern with one of the most tangible aspects of her contemporary political situation.” It is through the character of Septimus that Woolf dissected modernity as both thrilling — motor cars and aeroplanes whizzing across the London sky — and terrifying — the Fields of Flanders echoing with the thunder of distant bombs. Septimus Warren Smith — the fragile veteran, hallucinating in Regent’s Park in London — therefore, becomes not a fictional figure but a contemporary one, perhaps the ghost of every civilian and soldier wallowing on the streets of Bucha and Mariupol in Ukraine and Gaza in Palestine and, now, in Tehran and in Tel Aviv. There is, too, an eerie symmetry between the lines, “the War was over except for someone like
Mrs Foxcroft” and the lives of the members of the families of the victims of the terrorist attack in Pahalgam.
The centenary of Mrs Dalloway is not merely a literary occasion — it is a reckoning, a reminder of the spectrality of war. It is a comment on the grotesqueness of modernity, warfare and death. It is during the war that the body gets subsumed by the shrill political or nationalistic discourse, denying the idea of man being a free, conscious, political subject. The First World War initiated the possibility of death being organised politically, through bureaucratic planning and governmental decisions, reflecting the way in which modern warfare caused the body to shift into a “zone of indistinction”. Woolf’s depiction of Septimus bears evidence of the fact that warfare dons a new mask in modern culture. The death of countless civilians during the First World War degraded the conflict into frantic and random military action, which lacked any form of accountability. Septimus’s gaze, the “thousand-yard stare”, now has a contemporary, clinical vocabulary — post-traumatic stress disorder. Septimus is Woolf’s great cry against the casualness with which societies treat trauma. Many of Woolf’s writings are explicit with anti-war rhetoric. Some essays, such as “Thoughts on Peace and Air” (1940), become relevant in the context of today’s blackouts and air raids near borders. In it, she writes: “It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet, which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound — far more than prayers and anthems — that should compel one to think about peace. Unless we can think peace into existence we — not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born — will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead.”
Mrs Dalloway endures as prose as lyrical as verse, as a visionary literary work, and as a commentary on how our private lives are shaped by global forces: Empire, war, religion, patriarchy and power. Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf — is also a reminder of the trauma and the triumph of the human condition in the midst of euphoria, nationalism, terror and ecstasy. One hundred years since its publication, the book still fills us with extraordinary excitement, “for there she was” carrying forward the ravages of war through her literary self.
Antara Ghatak is Assistant Professor, Department of English, St. Xavier’s University