Reading Mrs. Dalloway in 2021

Those who have read Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway more than once know that it is one of those books that ages with you. In my early readings, I ruminated over how much Clarissa Dalloway lives in her past, especially in unreconciled painful moments from her past. She keeps moving on, and she keeps going back. Later, a friend who had sat in on a class I was teaching on Mrs. Dalloway told me that her reading had planted the seed that ended her marriage. As I approached and then passed Clarissa’s 53 years, I was keenly aware of her bewilderment at the disjunction between how society perceived her as a woman of a certain age which seemed to bestow both gravitas and neglect and how she perceived herself as still very much in the thick of it, not desirous of the gravitas and not deserving of the neglect. Her quiet but passionate desire to matter to her maturing daughter moved me to tears. Even with this history of Mrs. Dalloway tracking with my own life, I felt unprepared for the revelations of my most recent reading while teaching the novel in a Masters class at the University of Hong Kong.

That reading coincided with a report published on March 10th by UN Women UK [https://www.unwomenuk.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/APPG-UN-Women-Sexual-Harassment-Report_Updated.pdf] which found that in a poll of over 1,000 women, of those who were ages 18–24, 86% had experienced harassment in a public space. The report prompted a conversation with one of my daughters, who is 19; she shared that every single one of her friends, including her, was a victim of sexual harassment or assault, and at least one a victim of violent rape. In this light, it is no wonder that I saw two moments in the novel differently, or rather I gave them much more attention and understood them differently. The first is an unwanted kiss, and the second is a stalking.

The kiss is mentioned throughout the novel by different characters. It is first described by Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s old friend and one-time suitor. He is remembering a summer from his youth spent with Clarissa and her best friend Sally Seton at Clarissa’s summer house. Sally was, at the time, a bit wild and on the ropes. During that fateful summer, Clarissa forsakes Peter and decides to marry Richard Dalloway, a decision she reassures herself over and over again was the right one. A frequent guest at the house is Hugh Whitbread who features in the novel mainly as a well-bred, well-positioned, entitled pompous ass. What Peter remembers is this: “Something had happened–he forgot what–in the smoking-room. [Hugh] had insulted [Sally]–kissed her? Incredible! Nobody believed a word against Hugh of course. Who could? Kissing Sally in the smoking room! If it had been some Honorable Edith or Lady Violet, perhaps; but not that ragamuffin Sally without a penny to her name” (73).

Much later in the novel, Clarissa also remembers the incident: “[Sally] accused Hugh Whitbread, of all people . . . of kissing her in the smoking-room to punish her for saying women should have votes” (181). She is the only one who mentions this motivation on Hugh’s part, that it was a sexual power play in retribution for an expressed desire for political agency. Finally, Sally, now the wealthy Lady Rosseter, remembers while she and Peter are chatting at Clarissa’s party, the event the whole novel has been driving toward, and tells Peter that the kiss was “[o]n the lips . . . in the smoking-room one evening. She went straight to Clarissa in a rage. Hugh didn’t do such things! Clarissa said, the admirable Hugh!” (189).

What strikes me now is not so much the unwanted kiss, objectionable though that is, but the disbelief. Peter’s assessment of that skepticism seems so succinct and true: Sally was a “ragamuffin.” She was on the periphery; Hugh Whitbread was smack in the center of proper society. Even Clarissa, whose own consensual kiss with Sally Seton remains the most passionate moment in her entire life, does not believe her. Sally’s straightforward nature suggests that the kiss happened, but all we know is that no one believed her. Hugh never even had to deny it. Sally mentions that she had wanted to confront Hugh at “morning prayers” but that Clarissa refused to allow it, effectively shutting down what could have been an informal adjudication. Though the kiss echoes throughout the novel, Sally herself was silenced.

Interestingly, it is Peter Walsh, so insightful about the kiss and generally considered a good friend to women, who is the stalker. I think this speaks to how it’s not just loutish men who are engaging in threatening behavior. It never could be with statistics like those reported in the UN Women UK report, but still there is an image in the public imagination of who a stalker might be, and it’s not Peter Walsh. He is the man with whom women feel comfortable, with whom they can really talk. This is what Clarissa misses in her own marriage that keeps her revisiting that fateful decision to reject Peter and marry Dalloway. Women feel safe in the company of Peter Walsh; however, that warmth with women of his own ilk is utterly absent when he spots a stranger of a different ilk while aimlessly walking around London. He decides to follow her, all the while fingering his pocket knife: “But she’s extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as, walking across Trafalgar Square in the direction of the Haymarket, came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon’s statue, seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had always had in mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting. Straightening himself and stealthily fingering his pocket-knife he started after her to follow this woman, this excitement, which seemed even with its back turned to shed on him a light which connected them, which singled him out, as if the random uproar of the traffic had whispered through hollowed hands his name” (52).

It is, for him, a lark. When it ends, he says to himself, “Well, I’ve had my fun” (54); however, it was a student essay, written by an insightful young man, that highlighted for me how menacing that flight of fancy might have felt for the black woman being followed. An interesting aspect of modernist fiction and its use of stream of consciousness is that as a reader you really fall into the consciousness of the character. It’s very hard to step back and see the big picture, in this case what the woman is feeling. We are in his whimsical, racist, performatively masculine fantasy and almost become complicit in his utter disregard for what it would feel like if you were a woman of color being followed by a well-heeled white man with such purpose. Also, though I’m sure it would not have felt that way for her, his fantasy has almost nothing to do with her. She is utterly disembodied: “But other people got between them in the street, obstructing him, blotting her out. He pursued; she changed. There was color in her cheeks; mockery in her eyes; he was an adventurer, reckless, he thought, swift, daring, indeed . . . a romantic buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties” (53).

This isn’t about her; it’s about him — except that she is the one being followed. Based on my own, albeit limited, experience, it’s rare not to sense when you are being followed and not to be terrified. The enchanting black woman’s silence on this lark is deafening, but you need to step way back to hear it. Finally, it’s hard not to linger on the phrase, “black, but enchanting.” Would Peter Walsh have felt the same freedom to pursue a white woman? Would he have included the “but” in describing a white woman? I suspect the answer to both is no.

As a self-confessed victim of incest, Virginia Woolf was no stranger to being sexually abused and silenced. On this beautiful day in June 1922, as Clarissa Dalloway plans the party she will host that evening, Woolf exposes the reader to the patriarchal, hierarchical, and racial machinery that dismisses women who speak up for themselves and erases women who don’t even get the chance to speak. I wish I could say that we have made progress; the UN Women UK report suggests otherwise. Maybe that conversation with my daughter is a sign of progress as her friends are speaking, being heard, and not dismissed by their closest friends, but honestly it doesn’t feel like progress. Progress would be the Hugh’s of the world leaving the Sally’s of the world alone in the smoking room; it would be allowing grievances to be aired in whatever our version of “morning prayers” is, and it would be Peter stopping himself in his tracks, aware that his public behavior is threatening and predatory. Almost a century after the publication of Mrs. Dalloway, we have not achieved that kind of progress.

In this reading, I finally saw what was hidden in plain sight: the explicit silencing of Sally Seton through disbelief and the structural silencing of the “young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting” young woman, and I thought of my daughter and her friends and the 86% of women from the report. There is so much joy in Mrs. Dalloway, but this reading left me heartsick.