{"id":761,"date":"2021-04-05T16:01:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-05T20:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/?p=761"},"modified":"2021-08-14T14:38:52","modified_gmt":"2021-08-14T18:38:52","slug":"clarissas-walk-in-the-park-human-connection-death-and-legacy-in-mrs-dalloway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/clarissas-walk-in-the-park-human-connection-death-and-legacy-in-mrs-dalloway\/","title":{"rendered":"Clarissa\u2019s Walk in the Park: Human Connection, Death and Legacy in Mrs. Dalloway"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHer only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat\u2019s; or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seton\u2014such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the waggons plodding past to market; and driving home across the Park. She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards\u2019 shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open:<\/span><\/p>\n

Fear no more the heat o\u2019 the sun<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Nor the furious winter\u2019s rages<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

This late age of the world\u2019s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears\u201d (Woolf 9).<\/span><\/p>\n

The titular character of Virginia Woolf\u2019s <\/span>Mrs. Dalloway<\/span><\/i>, Clarissa, begins this passage by naming her \u201conly gift\u201d: a near-instinctive sense of others\u2019 characters. She describes these instincts through a metaphor, comparing them to how a cat \u2014 an animal popularly regarded as a uniquely insightful judge of character \u2014 might respond to an unfamiliar person. For a character frequently described as the consummate hostess by family and friends, this metaphor seems to offer the reader an explanation for Clarissa\u2019s social success. However, Woolf complicates this metaphor through her use of a semicolon, writing that, with a new person, \u201cup went [Clarissa\u2019s] back like a cat\u2019s; or she purred.\u201d Here, Clarissa\u2019s concern about a new person is presented as her first response; her comfortable, friendly \u201cpurring\u201d only occurs after a break in the sentence. Clarissa is fundamentally interested in people but she is also wary of them, leading the reader to wonder whether Clarissa sits entirely comfortably with human connection, even as she spends the rest of this passage considering its power.<\/span><\/p>\n

Clarissa soon extends this idea of connecting with and impacting others into an exploration concerning legacy after death. Woolf employs anaph<\/span>ora to show how\u00a0<\/span>Clarissa interrogates herself on the question of death. \u201c<\/span>Did<\/span><\/i> it matter then…<\/span>did<\/span><\/i> it matter that she must inevitably cease completely…<\/span>did<\/span><\/i> she resent it; or <\/span>did<\/span><\/i> it not become consoling\u2026.\u201d The repetition of the word \u201cdid\u201d suggests a sense of active urgency driving towards answering the question. Even more striking, once Clarissa reaches a sort of conclusion with the repetition of \u201cdid,\u201d the sentence itself does not conclude. Clarissa rhetorically asks, \u201cDid it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived\u2026\u201d Here, the sentence structure <\/span>mirrors the point that Clarissa makes about legacy. Even though the natural stop of the sentence is the question mark that follows the idea that death ends absolutely, Woolf chooses to not capitalize the \u201cbut\u201d that would have begun the next sentence. Thus, rather than two separate sentences, the sentences merge into one and continue on: a representation of the unbroken life force flowing into legacy-after-death that Clarissa ponders.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The notion that one can live on after death in the people and places one encountered in life is a huge part of Clarissa\u2019s sen<\/span>se of the world, and very similar to what Peter describes as Clarissa\u2019s \u201ctheory\u201d later in the novel (153). In this passage, Clarissa imagines herself after death as a mist laid out \u201cbetween the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches.\u201d Beyond the obvious connotation of being lifted towards Heaven and physically supported by the loved ones left behind after death, this imagery of mist is powerful when trying to understand Clarissa\u2019s ideas about death and legacy. On the one hand, mist acts as a blanket covering the trees here, evoking a sense of comfort or of peace f<\/span>or loved ones. However, there is also a strong thread running through this image that Clarissa\u2019s legacy might not be the comfort she imagines \u2014 rather, it comes \u201cbetween the people she knew best,\u201d acting as an obscuring agent more than as a peaceful one. Just as Peter struggles to interpret Clarissa throughout the novel, here too there is a suggestion that Clarissa\u2019s legacy after death might be in forcing the \u201cpeople she knew best\u201d into futile efforts to comprehend her (after all, they are not called the \u2018people who knew <\/span>her<\/span><\/i> best\u2019). As with the cat metaphor that begins this passage, here too human connection serves as a stressor as well as a boon.<\/span><\/p>\n

All of this musing a<\/span>bout death and legacy brings the reader to the conclusion of the passage, in which Clarissa\u2019s eye is drawn to a quote from a book in the window of Hatchards. It reads, \u201cFear no more the heat o\u2019 the sun \/ Nor the furious winter\u2019s rages,\u201d pulled from Shakespeare\u2019s <\/span>Cymbeline<\/span><\/i>. It is an excerpt of a song that Guiderius sings to two dead bodies at his feet, Cloten and Imogen (disguised as the page Fidele). The song looks at death through a lens of hope, and uses apostrophe to tell the dead to rejoice because they have escaped the many fears life presents, like the heat of the sun or the raging winter. Once again, Clarissa is drawn towards death as a welcome escape from life\u2019s challenges. The allusion to <\/span>Cymbeline<\/span><\/i> also serves another purpose, though this interpretation is admittedly more of a stretch. In <\/span>Cymbeline<\/span><\/i>, both Cloten and Imogen lie dead, but Cloten is genuinely dead while Imogen m<\/span>erely appears dead, but is actually only temporarily weakened by the effects of poison (Act IV, Scene 2). These characters can be read as doubles of Septimus and Clarissa. Despite how Septimus and Clarissa are linked as two liminal figures, existing between life and death, only Septimus actually dies in the book. Crucially, even at this early stage in the novel (before the reader has been officially introduced to Septimus), he still casts a subtle shadow over Clarissa\u2019s meditation on what death may actually offer<\/em> to a sufferer.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHer only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat\u2019s; or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Clarissa\u2019s Walk in the Park: Human Connection, Death and Legacy in Mrs. Dalloway”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3602,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,35],"tags":[153,150,152,154,151],"class_list":["post-761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-project-2-text-and-context","category-virginia-woolf","tag-cymbeline","tag-dalloway","tag-legacy","tag-walkingtour","tag-wwi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3602"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=761"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":780,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761\/revisions\/780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}