A Lifetime of Lessons in Mrs. Dalloway | Jenny Offill
The first time I read Virginia Woolf, it was for extraliterary reasons. I knew she had gone mad. I wanted to know how, exactly. Some dark wing was crossing over me that fall. The middle register of experience had abruptly fallen away. I didn’t need to sleep anymore, it seemed. My brain buzzed and whirred in terrifying ways. Everything seemed connected to everything else, but in ways I didn’t dare try to explain. I was seventeen, I think, eighteen maybe. I worked an early shift at a bakery, and I’d ride there on my bike before dawn, the whoosh of the darkness soft and creaturely around me. Why are you crying for no reason? I’d think, brushing my hands across my face.
I suspected I should tell someone about the buzzing and the whirring and the crying, but I couldn’t work up the nerve. Instead, I went to the university library one night and checked out books I thought might contain clues about what was in store for me. “Mrs. Dalloway” was one of them. Before I sat down to read it properly, I opened it at random, and this sentence was given occultly to me: “The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.”
I could feel my loneliness recede slightly as I read the words.
I backtracked to the first introduction of Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked soldier, loosely tethered to the world, into whom Woolf had poured many of her own experiences of madness. In the first scene, he is standing on the same street as Mrs. Dalloway. They do not know each other (they will never meet), but, in this one moment, they are briefly connected, both startled by the sound of a car backfiring. Here is our first glimpse of him:
Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?
The world has raised its whip; where will it descend? Yes, this. Exactly this, I thought. I started the book over from the beginning and found that the darkness gathering around Septimus was woven into other narrative threads, ones I was less interested in. All these old people talking about houses and parties and hats—what did they have to do with me? I skimmed over these other stories, noting here and there the stunning beauty of the language, then raced ahead to find more Septimus sections. His thoughts, blazingly sad, seemed beautiful to me. I wrapped myself in an old blanket and read through the night, hoping it wouldn’t end badly for him.
I didn’t return to “Mrs. Dalloway” again until I was in my thirties when I was on a different kind of quest. I was a wife and the mother of a young child, and, after years of living alone, I found myself suddenly, startlingly mired in the domestic. My days at home with my daughter were full of emotion yet anecdote-less. I wanted to write a novel about this feeling, which was one of want amid plenty, but I worried it would not make a good book, that it would be too trivial. I’d had an idea before my daughter was born that I would keep a diary during the early years. I imagined it structured like a kind of ledger. On one side it would read “In the House” and, on the other, “In the World.”
A poet friend of mine had stamps made up with these phrases imprinted on them and gave them to me just after my daughter was born. But after only a month, I abandoned the idea. I hated to see the blank space where my impressions of life in the world should have been. It was February, blizzarding, and I stayed shut inside most days with the baby. But still, I kept wondering how to do it, how to tear down this screen between House and World. What would a philosophical novel set in a domestic sphere look like? Stupidly, I did not think of “Mrs. Dalloway,” which I remembered narrowly as a book about madness. But then, one day, I reread Woolf’s essay “Modern Novels,” from 1919. It is a manifesto of sorts, and I found it spoke directly to me. (Six years later, she would put many of these ideas into play when she wrote “Mrs. Dalloway.”)
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.
I loved this idea of recording the atoms as they fell, of registering each one, however small a moment it appeared to be. Woolf’s insight seemed sneakily mystical to me. Many mystic traditions teach that the distinctions between the mundane and the sublime are more porous than we imagine: if one is truly awake, these differences cease to be apparent.
Once I started noticing this idea, I found traces of this collapsing of scale throughout the modernist canon. Robert Walser wrote about how Cézanne’s genius lay in “placing in the same ‘temple’ things both large and small.” And Picasso said, “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. That is why we must not discriminate between things.”
But it was in “Mrs. Dalloway” that this radical levelling of high and low found its most thrilling expression for me. I returned to it as a model for the domestic novel that I hoped to write. Woolf’s brilliant soaring sentences were a far cry from my modest, pared-down ones, but the leaps in consciousness, the insistence on the importance of the half-seen, of the subterranean feeling, of the quicksilver joys and sorrows of domestic life was a revelation. This time around, I cared less for Septimus and his grand soliloquies about human nature and death. I knew his story moved deathward at a mighty clip. Instead, I was hungry for signs of life. This time, I lingered over Clarissa’s delight in the incidental things that crossed her path: the laughing girls taking their “absurd woolly dogs” for a run; the aging dowagers in motorcars off on “errands of mystery”; and, on the pond, “the slow-swimming happy ducks.” This time, I was interested in the old people talking about houses and parties (though the hats still left me cold). I started to ask myself, as I pushed my daughter on a swing or bought pork chops or counted out change at the bodega, Wait, what is the exact nature of this moment? Or, in short, What would Virginia Woolf do?
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