Tag: modernism

Posted on Jack Allen

“I am the sole author” : Performativity at the Periphery in Zadie Smith’s NW

At its heart, Zadie Smith’s 2012 novel NW is an exploration of boundaries. Smith’s writing pays particular attention to the power of location – whether that be in a physical sense through her highly accurate walks through north-west London or chapters made entirely of Google Maps directions, or the metaphorical place one inherits in terms of class boundaries, race, or social standing. Each of Smith’s characters are pinpointed in relation to these boundaries, with the traversing of their borders the key theme of the text. Focusing on the journeys of Leah and Natalie, the two female protagonists of the text, I argue that in Smith’s creation of a work so focused on place, NW calls for an intersectional view of movement through class, race, and geographic lines, demonstrating that the path of the immigrant is much more complex than a simple question of their background.

 

From its name to its title chapters, geography plays a crucial role in constructing NW. The name itself – a reference to the NW postcode area of north-west London, or as Slavin suggests, additionally a reference to the area being a “NoWhere” (98) – sets the boundaries of the text from the outset, pushing readers to understand the text as an exploration of how its four central characters interact with the geography of the British capital. Crucially, however, as Slavin argues, the characters of the text inherit the periphery of the city, rather than its imagined centre. Slavin suggests that this contributes to Smith’s construction of Willesden and Kilburn as “‘somehow outside Britain,’ ‘elsewhere,’ and not part of the national or city narrative,” (100) allowing for a narrative that pushes against what might be seen as a traditional or normative conception of the city, where “Smith wedges into a tradition of postcolonial writers remapping the city of London in their own image.” (101). Indeed, Smith’s own experience of this part of London undoubtedly contributed to the novel’s visceral locative abilities; Smith herself grew up in Willesden and attended local schools, later returning to live in nearby Queen’s Park during her adult life.

 

Though both Leah and Natalie spend most of the novel living within the boundaries of NW, the differences between the two women’s exploration of life outside the borough of Brent also contribute to a reading of their character. Leah, from the very start of the novel, is introduced as “in a hammock, in the garden of a basement flat. Fenced in, on all sides.” (Smith 3) Aside from a brief exploration of her life at university, Leah generally remains within the bounds of NW in the novel – a geographic manifestation of her static social life, love life, employment prospects, and friendships. On the occasions that Leah is depicted as travelling, such as with her mother in chapter 12 of the first “Visitation” section, Leah’s intended destination is unexplored. Instead, Smith focuses on the sites of entry and exit to the geographical boundary of the Willesden/Kilburn area, and the journey away from it. In doing so, Leah appears ignorant or uninterested in the actions of life outside of her spatial boundary – one that she is “as faithful in her allegiance to […] as other people are to their families, or their countries.” (Smith 6).  Natalie, instead, spends much of her novel outside of the bounds that Leah largely restricts herself to, with attention paid to her experiences at her chambers in central London, her journeys abroad with her husband, and other endeavours far outside the bounds of the borough she was raised in. Much like Leah, Natalie’s conception of travel can be viewed in a metaphorical sense in terms of her own ‘journey’ in the novel; as opposed to Leah’s sense of stagnation and lack of adventure, Natalie glides over both physical and societal boundaries throughout the novel, demonstrating her own desires to expand beyond the places she was born into.

Just as important as an exploration of these locative boundaries is to the narrative of NW, Smith’s interest in exploring constructed social boundaries of a number of kinds is also present throughout the text. First and foremost are the pervasive boundaries of class, the traversals of which form one of the central themes of the text. Whereas their immigrant mothers approach class with a sense of ambivalence, where “neither woman was in any sense a member of the bourgeoise but neither did they consider themselves solidly of the working class either,” (Smith 206), and Leah’s immigrant husband Michel rallies repeatedly against the class boundaries of the British society, as first-generation immigrants Leah and Natalie are tacitly aware of their positions in the British class structure and their own actions in attempting to rise the ladder of class. Both received a university education, ostensibly in the hopes that doing so would allow them to progress above their working-class roots. For Leah, however – a “state-school wild card” (Smith 35) and underachiever both in secondary school and at university – going to university did little to assist her. Instead, the process left her “out of pocket, out of her depth” (Smith 35), and seemingly underemployed as the only university graduate at her workplace.

 

Natalie’s path, meanwhile, is altogether different, with her desire to pursue education and improve her social standing. For her, class appears pervasive throughout the novel – a consideration even in social situations, where when getting drinks with a friend “as working-class female pupils they were often anxious to get it right.” (Smith 274).  While the “it” in the sentence on first glance refers to the drink orders for her round, it could also more abstractly be read as her desire to fit into the social milieu of the barristers and lawyers that make up her group of colleagues and friends. Yet her ascent to the middle classes is not left unchallenged by the other characters in the book. Throughout the book, Leah attacks her best friend for her class ascendancy, criticising her for her “cava socialist” tendencies (Smith 292) and consistently comparing her own situation to that of her friend’s. In some references, Smith brings together the concept of both locative and class boundaries when referring to Natalie’s house – a place that is, according to Leah, “just far enough to avoid” seeing the working-class estates where she grew up (Smith 70), in an example of physical and imagined boundaries fusing together.

 

Race similarly appears as an example of the testing of both physical and imagined boundaries throughout the work, with both Leah and Natalie living on the edge of these racial boundaries. Though Cuevas has suggested that Smith is writing ‘from a “post-ethnic” perspective’ (394, quoted in Shaw 18), I agree with Shaw’s assertion that the exploration of ethnicity remains a key part of NW and the two women’s experience of their London lives (Shaw 18). Leah, the daughter of a Protestant Irish mother (or, as she is presented by Smith in harsher terms, “a rare Prod on the wing, back when most were of the other persuasion.” (Smith 19), is acutely conscious of her race, being “the only white girl on the Fund Distribution Team,” (Smith 39) and married to an Algerian immigrant. For Natalie, race is quickly presented as a hurdle for her legal career, exemplified in her conversation with Theodora Lewis-Lane, one of the barristers on her chambers’ diversity programme, who explains to Natalie that the Black lawyer “is never [seen as] neutral” in court, but instead seen by the White-dominated justice system as an “interloper” that needs to be toned down (284). While not a post-ethnic novel, the novel’s exploration of race and ethnicity represents another layer of periphery and boundary that NW explores, upending the idea of White homogeneity in modern-day London.

 

In addition to this post-colonialist reading of NW that “portrays postcolonial London as a space where race and ethnicity are still important epistemic realities in need of continued interrogation” (80), Fernández Carbajal also argues for viewing NW through Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, in both texts’ demonstration of a “queer modernist dissidence” (76). When Leah spots Shar in the street, for example, she comments on her “neat waist you want to hold,” and “something beautiful in the sunshine, something between a boy and a girl, reminding Leah of a time in her own life when she had not yet been called upon to make a final decision about all that.” (Smith 44) Leah, Fernández Carbajal argues, is a more modern version of Clarissa Dalloway herself, in her seeming hints towards love for Natalie and her unfulfilling marriage; for her part, Natalie resembles Sally Seton, with her decision to choose a simple marriage than explore her own sexual desires. In doing so, Fernández Carbajal draws attention to another lens through which readers might understand the novel as one of demonstrating and breaking boundaries – whether in the physical or metaphorical sense. Indeed, he suggests that the novel’s depiction of sexuality is used “as a release from a sense of social inadequacy” (Fernández Carbajal 79) present in 21st century British society.

 

It is in the sum of these boundaries where we see Leah and Natalie performing their role as actors in the metropolitan space, with both of these first-generations immigrants seeking to refashion themselves throughout the text. Even from the first page of the novel, Leah is presented as ruminating on the fact that “I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me,” a nod to her reclamation of the power to define her relationship to the boundaries that society places her in. Natalie, meanwhile, is presented “in drag” in her intersecting characteristics:

 

Daughter drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag. British drag. Jamaican drag. Each required a different wardrobe. But when considering these various attitudes she struggled to think what would be the most authentic, or perhaps the least inauthentic. (Smith 333)

 

In this question of authenticity, both women are presented as unsure of their own place among these shifting borders (both real and imagined). Even at the end, despite the creations of these new identities, both women appear to have reverted to their original personas. As Pérez Zapata notes in her article, “‘In Drag: Performativity and Authenticity in Zadie Smith’s NW,” the end result of Natalie’s exploration of her own boundaries is that, by the end of the novel, Natalie “has no self and, consequently, no origin,” (93) with her character reverting back in name, form and speech pattern to the character of Keisha (her birth name, having changed it in the process of her secondary schooling.) This performative aspect is encapsulated by the novel’s final paragraph, where the two call the police to report what they know about a murder:

 

Leah found the number online. Natalie dialled it. It was Keisha who did the talking. Apart from the fact she drew the phone from her own pocket, the whole process reminded her of nothing so much as those calls the two good friends used to make to boys they liked, back in the day, and always in a slightly hysterical state of mind, two heads pressed together over a handset. “I got something to tell you,” said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice. (402)

 

With this final image of a certain circularity to the novel for both Natalie and Leah, Smith appears to ask the reader to question the ability of the immigrant to refashion their own identity, suggesting that, in the multi-ethnic, socio-economically diverse London of the 21st century, the inheritance and persistence of one’s locations of birth are both inevitable and inescapable.

Works cited:

Fernández Carbajal, Albert. “On being queer and postcolonial: Reading Zadie Smith’s NW through Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Volume 51, Number 1, 2016, pp. 76–91

Pérez Zapata, Beatriz . “In Drag: Performativity and Authenticity in Zadie Smith’s NW.” International Studies Interdisciplinary Political and Cultural Journal, Volume 16, Number 1, 2014, pp. 83-95.

Shaw, Kristian. “A Passport to Cross the Room’: Cosmopolitan Empathy and Transnational Engagement in Zadie Smith’s NW (2012)”. C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, Volume 5, Number 1, 2017, pp. 1–23.

Slavin, Molly. “Nowhere and Northwest, Brent and Britain: Geographies of Elsewhere in Zadie Smith’s NW.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Volume 48, Number 1, Spring 2015, pp. 97-119.

Smith, Zadie. NW. New York: Penguin Books, 2012.

This paper represents my own work in accordance with University regulations. Jack L. Allen

Posted on Sophie Garcia

Revulsion Toward the Human in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

“Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That boy’s business of the intoxication of language—Antony and Cleopatra—had shriveled 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 the 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. She trimmed hats for Mrs. Filmer’s friends; she trimmed hats by the hour. She looked pale, mysterious, like a lily, drowned, under water, he thought.

“‘The English are so serious,’ she would say, putting her arms round Septimus, her cheek against his.

“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.”

Mrs. Dalloway, 88-89

Woolf begins this passage with Septimus’s post-war reflection on Shakespeare. The passage takes place after Septimus’s return from the war with Rezia. The painting of Septimus’s earlier “intoxication” with Shakespeare’s language as “boy’s business” illustrates more than just the ending of a fascination or interest. The alliteration in “boy’s business” brings attention to it, gives it a name that sounds almost silly, that can be dismissed or condescended when read aloud. The use of the word “intoxication,” meanwhile, evokes a certain kind of sensuality. At this point, years after the war, the sensuality has “shriveled utterly.” Woolf’s language subtly tells her reader that while Septimus assures himself that he has matured or been enlightened—he has moved on from his “boy’s business”—what has really occurred is an absolute loss of sensation. Septimus points it out himself earlier on when he says he cannot feel anything. But it has seeped into his reading of plays that once intoxicated him, so the reader cannot necessarily trust Septimus’s readings.

Thus, when he remarks how “Shakespeare loathed humanity,” really it is Septimus who loathes humanity. Woolf piles up imagery for the reader to understand the depths to which Septimus can no longer feel, employing repetition of “the” to generate almost her own kind of assault on the reader’s senses. Septimus loathes “the putting on of clothes” because he can no longer feel the joy of nice fabric or the decorative properties of clothing; he loathes “the getting of children” because he no longer feels sexual excitement; he bemoans “the sordidity of the mouth and belly!” He takes no pleasure in the taste of food, and feels a disgust in the human body. The word “sordidity” employs repetition of sounds in itself, so the reader might understand that Septimus’s loss of feeling, the “shriveling,” is not so much the result of an extended lack of feeling, but the constant assault that has been placed on his senses while in the war.

Woolf repeats the word “trimming” three times when describing Septimus’s observations of Rezia. The effect is almost chant-like, or like a nursery rhyme, and reveals the way Septimus finds her actions silly, especially when compared to these great truths he believes to have uncovered, from none other than classic writers. Then he compares her to a “lily, drowned, under water.” This might be an allusion to Shakespeare, where Woolf Rezia equates Rezia to Ophelia from Hamlet. Hamlet, concerned with great issues of his father’s death and proper succession, rejects Ophelia. Septimus is thus like Hamlet; burdened with these great truths, or his own beliefs that the world’s “great signal” is of loathing, hatred, despair, Septimus rejects Rezia and avoids giving her children.

Woolf’s prose turns matter-of-fact as Septimus recounts an act of physical love from Rezia: how she puts her arms around him, “her cheek against his.” There is no sensation here, no stirring of emotion either positive or negative. One can practically see the coldness with which he responds, how he stiffens, utterly not at ease, as Rezia reaches out to him. Then the prose turns even colder, the sentences even shorter and straight to the point. “Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business of copulation was filth to him before the end.” Shakespeare wrote comedies whose endings were marked with marriage. This is not Shakespeare’s opinion; it is Septimus’s. After all, the reader already knows Septimus regards the human body with disgust. How could he ever endure sex?

We’ve discussed at length in class the novel’s historical context as taking place after World War I, leading to discussions of shellshock and mental health in regard to Septimus. I think Woolf illustrates a really interesting understanding of trauma here, however, perhaps even ahead of her time. Today we understand that a characteristic of trauma and PTSD is the constant assault on a person’s nervous system, often triggered through sound or other sensory experiences that remind the victim of the traumatic event. Woolf’s prose, in its constant repetitions and almost bombarding Septimus with sensory experiences, might be trying to replicate the same feeling. In this way, the passage illustrates the ways in which literature can bring to life a phenomenon that might not yet be clinically understood.

Another intriguing historical context is of the novel as a post-pandemic work. Septimus’s aversion to touch, though primarily a symptom of his PTSD, feels incredibly fitting as a response to influenza. It is comparable to the social distancing we undertake in the COVID-19 era, and the near constant anxiety people feel when confronted with contact with another person’s body. The complete revulsion he feels toward the human body seems to have more to do with his general hatred of human existence; however, it would not be farfetched to think of it too as a disgust toward a physical being that carries disease.

Rezia’s character raises the question of women’s history here. I wonder whether she had different rights in England as an Italian immigrant, but either way, women’s suffrage was established in England following World War I. Septimus married her because she was the youngest of the sisters, because she was the “gayest,” perhaps because he thought her silly and unable to challenge him. I wonder whether we are meant to think of her assertion at the passage’s end—that “she must have children”—as a result of this era of women’s expanded liberty. Or is it more of a supplication?

Then, there is the literary context. We now know Woolf as an important voice in the British literary canon, but her inclusion of authors such as Shakespeare, Dante, and Aeschylus illustrates for her reader both what is regarded as a literary canon at the time, and how deeply she deviates from it. Aeschylus comes from Ancient Greece, Dante from the medieval era, and Shakespeare from Elizabethan England. They all wrote in verse and are regarded as important figures, whether in classics or medieval literature. Woolf’s writing, in its plunging into characters’ consciousness and unconventionally structured prose, is revolutionary against this literary backdrop.

Posted on Jack Allen

The Street Dance: An Upper-Crust Celebrity Intrigue in ‘Mrs Dalloway’

The crush was terrific for the time of day. Lords, Ascot, Hurlingham, what was it? she wondered, for the street was blocked. The British middle classes sitting sideways on the tops of omnibuses with parcels and umbrellas, yes, even furs on a day like this, were, she thought, more ridiculous, more unlike anything there has ever been than one could conceive; and the Queen herself held up; the Queen herself unable to pass. Clarissa was suspended on one side of Brook Street; Sir John Buckhurst, the old Judge on the other, with the car between them (Sir John had laid down the law for years and liked a well-dressed woman) when the chauffeur, leaning ever so slightly, said or showed something to the policeman, who saluted and raised his arm and jerked his head and moved the omnibus to the side and the car passed through. Slowly and very silently it took its way.

Clarissa guessed; Clarissa knew of course; she had seen something white, magical, circular, in the footman’s hand, a disc inscribed with a name — the Queen’s, the Prince of Wales’s, the Prime Minister’s? — which, by force of its own lustre, burnt its way through (Clarissa saw the car diminishing, disappearing), to blaze among candelabras, glittering stars, breasts stiff with oak leaves, Hugh Whitbread and all his colleagues, the gentlemen of England, that night in Buckingham Palace. And Clarissa, too, gave a party. She stiffened a little; so she would stand at the top of her stairs.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (p. 17)

 

After perusing some of London’s highest-end boutiques in preparation for the evening’s big party, Clarissa Dalloway ends up on Bond Street when a celebrity convoy rolls past. The passage – much like the rest of Mrs Dalloway – is packed with information; indeed, in the passage presented above, there are only eight sentences. That is not to say that their construction is uniform, however; the three longer sentences meander in their unfurling of information, much like one might imagine the car doing on the unimpeded stretches of its journey. The shorter ones that end each paragraph, however, feel like they interrupt the text, just as the “crush” of people glaring at the convoy and the omnibus impede the car on its journey through the streets.

 

The first sentence of the second paragraph demands particular attention for its sprawling nature.  The narrative perspective of the sentence seems to jump multiple times, while keeping its focus squarely on Clarissa and how she perceives the street scene before her; indeed, at one point when it feels like the focus is just about to shift away from Clarissa onto following the car down the street, Woolf adds a bracketed aside, noting that “(Clarissa saw the car diminishing, disappearing)”. Having said that, occasionally it can be tricky to pin down whether the narrator is voicing their own perspective, or that of Mrs Dalloway; for example, the footman’s disk is “inscribed with a name – the Queen’s, the Prince of Wales’s, the Prime Minister’s?”. Although likely that we are hearing Mrs Dalloway’s thoughts here, it is uncertain, considering the penchant of the novel to rapidly cycle through characters’ thoughts and points of view.

 

It also adds to the uncertain mood of the sentence as a whole – first Clarissa “guessed” who was in the car; then she “knew of course” who the occupant was; then, the narrator seems to question whose name is really on the disc that allows the car passage through the streets.  In the passage, Clarissa is presented as both questioning and self-assured, headstrong and yet unsure of herself, as she is for much of the book. By the end of the paragraph, though, Clarissa becomes much surer of herself once again; we are told that she “gave a party,” (implied to be the on the same level of those at Buckingham Palace!), then that she “stiffened a little,” as if to assert her own dominance, like she would “at the top of her stairs” later that evening while surveying the scene of the party.

 

Asides such as these that appear out of nowhere also crop up in the first paragraph, and in particular the nature of Woolf’s invocation of “Sir John Buckhurst, the old Judge” who stands on the other side of the road from Clarissa. Buckhurst appears completely out of nowhere in the passage, as seems the tendency of Mrs Dalloway in general to jump from character to character, and occasionally to make a single, seemingly throwaway, reference to a random person. In mentioning Buckhurst across the road – and especially in yet another bracketed explanatory aside, that “(Sir John had laid down the law for years and liked a well-dressed woman)” –  Dalloway’s status as a socialite who can go anywhere in London and pick an acquaintance of prominent societal standing out of the crowd.

 

It is not simply Dalloway’s evocation of material wealth and social capital that makes this passage rich; the descriptions Woolf offers throughout the passage are particularly fascinating for their delicate, precise nature. For example, the interaction between the chauffeur and the policemen is laid out in particular detail, with the exact, dance-like movements of both noted by the narrator in a way that underlines the hyper-observant nature of the text. I also find the description of the disc that the footman holds as “white, magical, circular,” interesting; the first and third descriptors seem sensical and objective, whereas the description of the disc as “magical” feels somewhat more out of place, as if to heighten the prestige of the (presumably) royal party that Dalloway tracks in the streetscape. The narrator then comments how the convoy “burnt its way through […] to blaze among candelabras, glittering stars, breasts stiff with oak leaves, Hugh Whitbread and all his colleagues, the gentlemen of England, that night in Buckingham Palace.” This list has an almost dream-like wistfulness to it, particularly in its beginning with the more abstract descriptions; later in the list, we see Dalloway (through the narrator) emphasise her role in the upper portions of English society, by reminiscing over “that night in Buckingham Palace.”

 

With more space and time, I would very much like to dive even deeper into the class-based context of the passage. In the second sentence of the excerpt, Clarissa reels off names of the upper-class social sporting calendar, wondering whether the crush was “Lords, Ascot, Hurlingham,” referencing the upper crust of cricket meets, horse races and polo matches respectively. We then see Clarissa’s somewhat disdainful attitude towards the middle classes after that, noting how “ridiculous” it was that they were wearing “furs on a day like this.” I would love to explore how areas such as Bond Street create aspirational spaces for the middle classes – and, inevitably, spaces in which they face the ridicule of the upper classes for trying to be things that they are not.

Posted on Kayra Guven

Peter Walsh’s Flashback: Memory, Austen, and Tradition in Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, pp. 60-61 (Penguin, 2012 edition):

“He sat down beside her, and couldn’t speak. Everything seemed to race past him; he just sat there, eating. And then half-way through dinner he made himself look across at Clarissa for the first time. She was talking to a young man on her right. He had a sudden revelation. ‘She will marry that man,’ he said to himself. He didn’t even know his name.

For of course it was that afternoon, that very afternoon, that Dalloway had come over; and Clarissa called him ‘Wickham’; that was the beginning of it all. Somebody had brought him over; and Clarissa got his name wrong. She introduced him to everybody as Wickham. At last he said ‘My name is Dalloway!’—that was his first view of Richard—a fair young man, rather awkward, sitting on a deck-chair, and blurting out ‘My name is Dalloway!’ Sally got hold of it; always after that she called him ‘My name is Dalloway!’

He was a prey to revelations at that time. This one—that she would marry Dalloway—was blinding—overwhelming at the moment. There was a sort of—how could he put it?—a sort of ease in her manner to him; something maternal; something gentle. They were talking about politics. All through dinner he tried to hear what they were saying.”

Through using free indirect discourse in Peter’s recollection of the day Clarissa met Richard Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s language mimics the pace and nature of Peter’s thoughts, allowing the reader to peek into his point of view despite the third person narration. From the perspective of someone who was at Bourton that day and did not have access to Peter’s mind, he appears to not care much for his environment as he barely moves and does not speak; however, since Woolf shows us Peter’s line of thought, we know that this expressionless exterior is a result of his inner conflict. This mute and immobile state is reflected in the punctuation. In the first sentence of the passage, there is a comma before “and couldn’t speak,” causing the reader to pause like Peter. Most of the sentences in the passage are fragmented by semicolons, dashes, and commas. Peter is nervous, because he is not aware of everything that is happening and is too afraid to do anything at that moment, and the punctuation emulates his emotions. It is almost as if he is trying to stop—or at the very least slow down—time through semicolons and dashes; however, he only manages to speed his perception of the passage of time by trying to slow down while everyone else is moving at normal speed. As a result, “everything seemed to race past him.” The rest of the first paragraph in the passage has no pauses within sentences as Peter is rushing to make up for lost time. The following two paragraphs, however, revert to using increasingly fragmented sentences as Peter gets more and more nervous. The inconsistent pacing from sentence to sentence is disorienting, and the reader is able to feel Peter’s discomfort.

Peter’s anxiety comes from his limited viewpoint. He “sa[ys] to himself” that Clarissa will marry Richard, but he does not talk to Clarissa about this fear. When the narrator confirms Peter “didn’t even know [Richard’s] name,” we also understand from the use of the word “even” that this lack of knowledge frustrates Peter. He seems disappointed at how little he really knows Clarissa’s life. Here is this man who Clarissa will one day marry, and Peter does not even know his name. It is clear that Clarissa does not know Richard at this point either; however, Peter has a fatalistic tone that suggests he pinpoints the end of his potential relationship with Clarissa to this event. Despite being in the room, Peter is an outsider to Clarissa and Richard’s meeting. “All through dinner he tried to hear what they were saying,” meaning he was not actually able to listen. Again, there is that nervous tone exacerbated by the five dashes, two semicolons, and question mark used in the sentences leading up to this line. It makes sense that Peter cannot hear anybody else as he is too distracted by his own thoughts, leading to a myopic recounting of events.

The fragility of memory further complicates Peter’s recollection of the events of that day, making Peter an unreliable narrator. Peter superimposes his current thoughts into the past “for of course it was that afternoon, that very afternoon, that Dalloway had come over.” The addition of “of course” is Peter’s current thought. At the time, Richard was just some guy. However, Peter is having a hard time believing his luck in what he is recounting, which explains the desire to pretend all of his regrets were predestined. The incredulous tone is evident in the repetition of “that afternoon” with the addition of “very” for emphasis the second time around.

Peter’s relative insignificance to Clarissa is explored in Woolf’s allusion to Pride and Prejudice. Clarissa accidentally calls Richard “Wickham,” the charming yet deceitful soldier in Austen’s novel. In that case, is Clarissa Lydia? Or is she Elizabeth, disillusioned with Wickham’s character? Since she will eventually marry Richard Dalloway, it is tempting to say Clarissa is Lydia; however, Richard refuses his identity as Wickham by “blurting out ‘My name is Dalloway!’” He is described as “awkward,” and he shares Mr. Darcy’s pride and wealth. Nonetheless, it does not feel appropriate to compare Clarissa’s marriage to that of Lizzy’s, because there does not appear to be that similar happiness. Here, we see Woolf’s twist. In Mrs. Dalloway, Darcy is split into two characters: Richard and Sally. Pride and Prejudice makes it abundantly clear that Elizabeth Bennet is interested in Darcy because he makes her happy, but also because he is wealthy, and “to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!” (P&P, ch.43). Austen does not make her protagonist choose between security and happiness in the end. Woolf does. Clarissa’s kiss with Sally Seton is the happiest moment in all of her life, but Richard Dalloway provides a certain security that Sally could never. This leaves Peter as Mr. Collins. Earlier in the novel, Clarissa thinks to herself that she made the right choice marrying Richard as being in a relationship with Peter would have never worked, which parallels the relationship between Elizabeth and Mr. Collins.

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf talks about the importance of tradition and the want of a “common sentence ready for [women authors]” (ch.4). In Mrs. Dalloway, there is a deliberate evocation of women authors past, especially Austen (Woolf not only explicitly mentions Austen’s characters but also develops Austen’s frequent use of free indirect discourse in her own writing); this is a novel steeped in tradition. At the same time, there is a reinvention of tradition. In addition to Austen, Woolf is also reinventing the themes and styles of contemporary authors—most notably Joyce and Proust. The novel takes place over one day in June, like Joyce’s Ulysses. In addition, there are two protagonists, one of whom could be seen as a semi-autobiographical Woolf, akin to the relationship between Stephen Dedalus and Joyce. What is more, both novels depict the ordinary moments of life as beautiful and worthy of the same examination and reflection as the actions in epics. In this veneration for the daily, Mrs. Dalloway is also taking elements from Proust’s body of work. However, especially in this passage, Proust’s influence is most visible in the representation of memory as both fragile and sometimes involuntary. As a result of this simultaneous reinvention and preservation of tradition, Mrs. Dalloway becomes a bridge between the past and the present.