Mrs Dalloway (3)

1. Mrs Dalloway (3) 4 May 2009

2. As Peter returns to the clamour of city life, Clarissa's parting words reverberate in his mind: "Remember my party." Although he does not blame her, he cannot understand why she gives these parties. • English Society: Although Peter critiques the governing class for a number of reasons, including their emotional stoicism, we see here that he still feels ashamed of his own emotional displays. This is our first glimpse of Peter as a compromised rebel.Peter's thoughts drift, and he is struck suddenly by an image of Clarissa falling where she stands. "No! No! he cried. She is not dead! I am not old" (65). He assures himself that he "cares not a straw" what the Dalloways, the Whitbreads, and their set say about him.English Society: Repulsion and admiration. • Peter as the Anglo-Indian. Peter is reassuring himself that the passion and radicalism of his youth are not dead.

3. Anti-Militarism (Rigidity vs life) • can’t keep up with them, Peter Walsh thought, as they marched up Whitehall, and sure enough, on they marched, past him, past every one, in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline.

4. As Peter continues, he spots a pretty, young girl, whom he follows until she disappears into a house. He fantasizes about a life with her. The moment she is gone, he feels empty and isolated.And it was smashed to atoms - his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up as one makes up the better part of life, he thought - making oneself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share - it smashed to atoms (70).Independence of the Soul: Peter is left alone with his fantasy. Fantasies and dreams cannot be shared, as they are the privacy of the soul.In this passage, we also see the process of creation as the essence of life.

5. Anglo-Indian identity • Peter notices details of the city as he walks. However, unlike Clarissa or Septimus, he does not observe moments of beauty, but rather the "splendid achievement" of London, of civilization (71). • The colonial margin

6. Peter sees Regent's Park and remembers it fondly from his childhood. He decides to find a nice shady spot, next to a "grey nurse," to sit and smoke (73). He falls into reverie. He has a vision of a solitary traveller greeted by a nurturing, compassionate female force.(Feminine force as something for which Peter longs, lacking it himself.)

7. Peter awakens from his dream saying to himself, "The death of the soul" (76), words which remind him of Bourton. He recalls the day Clarissa met Richard and the awful moment of rejection, a moment that felt to him like the death of his soul. • “Come along,” she said. “They’re waiting.” He had never felt so happy in the whole of his life! Without a word they made it up. They walked down to the lake. He had twenty minutes of perfect happiness. (81)

8. Marriage • While Peter sits on one park bench, Septimus sits on another, talking to himself. Rezia wanders away from her husband wondering, "Why should I suffer?" (84). [Echoing Peter’s “It was awful”] Rezia accepts that everyone gives up something in marriage. She has given up her home in Italy. But now, her husband is acting stranger and stranger: seeing things; talking out loud to no one, or no one living; making her write things down; claiming he knows the meaning of the world; and threatening to kill himself. • Marriage is presented as a form of compromise, a theme that recurs in other marriages throughout the novel

9. Septimus insists on continuing to talk to his dead friend, Evans, who was his closest companion at the battlefront and was killed just before the war ended. Septimus sees Evans in the shrubbery and in the curtains, addressing him directly. Yet Dr. Holmes insists there is nothing wrong with Septimus. Rezia's thoughts drift as she notices her finger has grown too thin for her wedding ring. She takes it off and slips it into her bag to keep from losing it. When she returns to Septimus sitting on the bench, he thinks to himself that she has left him; their marriage is over."Since his wife had thrown away her wedding ring," Septimus concludes he has been freed (87). He was now alone to "hear the truth, to learn the meaning, which now at last, after all the toils of civilization - Greeks, Romans, Shakespeare, Darwin, and now himself - was to be given whole to . . . 'to whom?' he asked out loud. 'To the Prime Minister,' the voices which rustled above his head replied" (102).

10. pp. 87-92 (Focus on Septimus) • P. 90: rising and falling • P. 90 (Time) • Sanity and Insanity: Septimus, like Clarissa, experiences life as a succession of piercingly beautiful moments. However, for Septimus, the distinction between external reality and his personal response to the outside world is blurred. The sound of a motor car is like that of music bouncing between rocks, and the old man playing the penny whistle is a shepherd boy's piping. In Septimus' mind, his response to reality merges with reality itself.Much like Clarissa's sewing was interrupted by Peter ringing the doorbell, Septimus's visions of beauty as truth are interrupted by Rezia saying, "It is time" (90).As Peter Walsh passes the young couple in the park, the clock strikes a quarter to twelve. He has no idea he has been mistaken for a dead man named Evans. Instead, he thinks about the significance of the five years he has been gone.[He thinks of his argument with Clarissa, p. 92]

11. p. 93-- (Peter) • Reflecting on the people who figured largely in his past, Peter Walsh notes Hugh Whitbread embodies all that is detestable about the British middle class (95) Hugh, who plays no meaningful role in the governing body, nevertheless defines himself and his respectability by his "little job at court" (7). In their youth, Sally, like Peter, despised Hugh for he "read nothing, thought nothing, felt nothing" (95). Peter despises Hugh for all that he represents. He hates the governing-class mentality, yet as he leaves the park, railing against high society, he thinks about how he can get Hugh or Richard to help him find work. • And India…(p. 93) • P. 98: Richard and Shakespeare

12. P. 102: Clarissa and life • Peter passes an old woman singing as he leaves the park. This woman is significant, insofar as she is a nurturing female image, like the nurse in Peter's park reverie. The song she sings is Strauss's Allerseden. Allerseden is the day on which a collective resurrection of spirits occurs. In the song, a bereaved woman hopes her beloved will return from the grave. • This passage, much like the ravings and visions of Septimus, is written in a style that bears a greater resemblance to verse than prose

13. London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them. (p.110)

14. Septimus, we learn, is a self-educated man, who left home as a boy to pursue writing in London. He found he was anxious to improve himself and fell in love with Miss Isabel Pole. She inspired him to write and "lit in him such a fire as burns only once a lifetime" (111).

15. He volunteered early for the war so as to defend an England which, for him, consisted primarily of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pool. There in the trenches, Septimus developed an important friendship with his officer, Evans. After Evans died, however, shortly before the end of the war, Septimus felt nothing. He found himself in Milan and married the young girl who made hats with "little artist's fingers“ . He married her not because he loved her, but because he was panicked by his lack of emotion (113). He could reason but he could not feel.

16. Septimus / Literature • Septimus's obsession with Shakespeare and his former literary ambitions mark him as an artistic outsider - a status that is reinforced by his marriage to a foreign hat-maker. The ruling class in this novel shuts out not only the lower classes and immigrants, but artists as well. The position of the power elite depends upon conservatism and complacency, and because artists threaten such conformity, the governing set has a deep distrust of writers: Richard claims "no decent man ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes; Lady Bruton has "never read a word of poetry herself“; and Dr. Bradshaw "never had time for reading“ .

17. Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That boy’s business of the intoxication of language—Antony and Cleopatra—had shrivelled utterly. How Shakespeare loathed humanity—the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus (translated) the same. There Rezia sat at the table trimming hats. (115)

18. Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business of copulation was filth to him before the end. But, Rezia said, she must have children. They had been married five years. (116) • One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.

19. Communication (122) • Once you stumble, Septimus wrote on the back of a postcard, human nature is on you. Holmes is on you. Their only chance was to escape, without letting Holmes know; to Italy— anywhere, anywhere, away from Dr. Holmes.(120) • [Dr Holmes putting aside Antony and Cleopatra] Holmes had won of course; the brute with the red nostrils had won (121)