Virginia Woolf’s Authorial Agency-4

47 Chapter Four: It Is Clarissa, For There She Was A shared consciousness between two strangers Within the final pages of M ​ rs. Dalloway, ​ the traumatized war veteran Septimus Smith, in a purposeful attempt to escape involuntary hospitalization at the hands of his doctors, jumps out of his apartment window and swiftly impales himself upon the sharp fence below. Although Clarissa Dalloway has never met Septimus, her much-anticipated party is still touched by his suicide when the renowned doctor, Sir William Bradshaw, bursts into the room and apologetically attributes his lateness to the sudden death of his patient. Woolf writes, “the clock began striking. The young man had killed himself…” to describe the subsequent moment in which Clarissa briefly steps away from the chaos to reflect upon how life always seems to go on, even in the event of an immense loss like Septimus’s death.139 Despite the sudden nature of this 139 ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway​ , 186. 48 tragedy, Clarissa is quite certain that “she did not pity [Septimus]; with the clock striking the hour one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on,” because, in fact, she feels “somehow very like him” in regards to being feeling overwhelmed by life’s unrelenting hardships. Woolf’s use of onomatopoeia — the methodical sound of “one, two, three” — to emphasize the unrelenting passing of time further highlights its utter meaninglessness in the face of a trauma survivor’s fractured consciousness. Although it is not until ​Mrs. Dalloway’​ s conclusion that Woolf confirms the existence of a shared connection between Septimus and Clarissa, with Clarissa making the illuminating remark that she feels very much like him upon learning of his suicide, the pair serve as doubles to each other throughout ​Mrs. Dalloway​ — each grappling with their own recurring traumatic memories from the past, and how such memories continue to influence their actions in the present. Woolf uses a variety of animal descriptions to highlight the pair’s similarities, for even though they are not seen side by side for the entirety of the novel, their likeness is indicated by Clarissa’s nose being described as “beaked like a bird,” while Septimus is also referred to as being “beak-nosed” like that of a “young hawk.”140 ​Furthermore, Clarissa has the “touch of the bird,” while Septimus is often called a “hawk or crow,” a name he decides is fitting because just as crows destroy crops, he had been senselessly forced to kill men fighting in the Great War.141 Further cementing their narrative function as two parts of the same whole, Clarissa and Septimus possess an intense connection to the natural world around them, finding brief moments of spiritual solace in the surrounding trees and mist that the rest of the novel’s characters seem to ignore. Finally, Woolf repeatedly interjects her narration of the day with lines from a Shakespearean funeral dirge, ​“Fear no more the heat ’o the sun / Nor the furious winter’s rages,” 140 141 ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​14, 20, 148. ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​4, 148. 49 to serve as a reminder to both characters that death should not be feared, but rather viewed as a welcome respite from “winter’s rages” of life. However, it is important to note that despite their inherent similarities, the two handle the “heat of the sun” in disparate manners in relation to their own personal traumas.142 While Clarissa forces herself to continually put out fires within her life, such as the “match burning in a crocus” she associates with her love for Sally Seton, to fit in with societal expectations of an upper-class housewife — Septimus feels in danger of becoming consumed by his fire’s fiery heat, and of “falling down, down... into the flames!”143 This constant repetition, scholar Allie Glenny argues, is intoned in a manner​ suggesting that, “like the heroine of Cymbeline, Clarissa experiences a living death” due to her refusal to embrace the danger and excitement of living a fulfilled life.144 Although Clarissa and Septimus handle the heat of the sun differently, this thesis strives to reach beyond the level of mere aesthetic similarity, and argues that Clarissa and Septimus understand each other through an inherent shared consciousness, which serves to both structure the novel and textually represent Woolf’s own gendered experience of trauma. Originally, Woolf planned to have Clarissa commit suicide at the novel’s conclusion, yet instead chose to develop the character of Septimus as means of ​viewing “the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side — something like that,” and representing the innate difference in male and female experiences of trauma.145 As Poole explains, “[l]ike a Cubist painter, Woolf wants to show different facets of the whole” by utilizing the shared consciousness of the two characters to make sense of the multitude of past, present, and future memories they confront over the course of the novel.146 He further argues that this continuous parallel, between the “socially prominent Mrs. ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway​, 9. ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway​, 32, 66. 144 ​Glenny, 121. 145 ​Woolf, ​A Writer’s Diary,​ (New York, Mariner Books, 2003), 52. 146 ​Poole, 205. 142 143 50 Dalloway” and “the insane outsider, Septimus Smith” demonstrates Woolf’s understanding “that placement on one side or the other of that line,” in reference to being categorized as mad, “often depends upon circumstances and who is doing the perceiving.”147 Through this conscious authorial decision, Woolf uses Septimus to illuminate the fervid passion that Clarissa believes is missing from her soul, writing, “it was not beauty; it was not mind. It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together.”148 Although Septimus feels in constant danger of being consumed by intrusive memories, he refuses to let his doctors seize control of his life, going as far as to ask Rezia to burn his writings to prevent them from falling into the hands of Dr. Holmes, who would see them as nothing but the musings of a mad man. On the other hand, Clarissa has spent the majority of her life feeling that “it [is] very, very dangerous to live even one day,” and Septimus’s suicide leads her to the realization that she has spent the majority of her life living on the “on the fringes of life, walking on the porch at Bourton, watching the woman from her window, standing at the edge of the Serpentine, and even dying vicariously through [Septimus].”149 150As Henke notes, Clarissa’s “ideals have been tempered, her beliefs eroded in the gradual process of adaptation and compromise.”151 Both Septimus and Clarissa have “beasts” raging in the depths of their souls, yet Clarissa eschews the excitement and exuberance of life in order to remain safely entrenched in the upper echelons of London society. However, it is due to their shared consciousness, DeMeester explains, that Clarissa is still “uniquely able to receive Septimus’s message because she senses the brutal monster — the vulnerability, the frailty, the evil — stirring about in her and her social and political circles where ​Poole, 207. ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway​, 46. 149 ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway​, 11. 150 DeMeester, 90. 151 ​Suzette Henke, “​Mrs. Dalloway: T ​ he Communion of Saints,” ​New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, ​(London, Palgrave MacMillan, 1981), 143. 147 148 51 it is “wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured… let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter.”152 Unlike the rest of the people at her party, who are saddened to hear of a stranger’s suicide, Clarissa can see that there exists an “embrace in death” — one that reaches “[a] centre” which is no longer shrouded by the mundanities of everyday life.153 Although Clarissa’s decision to sacrifice her passion for a stable life with Richard causes others, such as Peter Walsh, to view her as being “hard” and “cold,” I believe that viewing her disunified selfhood through the lens of critical trauma studies shows how such behavior serves as a representation of the manner in which extensive trauma can fragment the psyche, making a survivor’s place in society feel increasingly destabilized.154 The irregular manner in which Clarissa’s trauma presents itself, so different than Septimus’s more traditional exemplification of “shell shock,” is a testament to Woolf’s unique status as a survivor of sexual abuse and how, until now, most scholars have overlooked such experiences as meaningful locus of trauma study in ​Mrs. Dalloway​. Thus, in order to foreground Clarissa’s experience, I will draw from the work of Suzette Henke, as well as other modern trauma scholars, to illustrate how the language Clarissa uses to talk about hosting her party emulates the language Woolf uses to talk about the process of writing in her diaries, and that this continuity is critical to understanding the eventual unification of Clarissa’s fractured sense of self, as well as the restorative potential ​Mrs. Dalloway holds as a trauma narrative. Due to this critical continuity between the purpose behind Clarissa’s party throwing and Woof’s narrative writing, I work to illuminate Woolf’s empowered selfhood over the course of my close-readings using ​Henke’s theory of scriptotherapy — a decision stemming from Woolf’s musings that the very acting of writing helped her make sense of the “shocks” and “blows” of ​DeMeester, 88. ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​184. 154 ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway,​ 149. 152 153 52 her traumatic youth. ​According to DeSalvo, Woolf “wrote about her sexual abuse in order to understand why it happened and how it affected her. She wrote about it in her fiction, in her essays; she wrote about it in her memoir and in her letters…”155 Furthermore, As​ ​Woolf ​worked on “the mad part” of the novel during a time she was also “tied, imprisoned, [and] inhibited” while recovering from a depressive episode, I will turn to her diaries to make critical connections between pertinent events in her own life and how she chose to represent such events within her texts.156 ​B​ased on this extensive collection of evidence, I will read ​Mrs. Dalloway, a​ nd specifically the characters of Clarissa and Septimus,​ a​ s being part of a textual space within which Woolf both represented memories of, and textually worked through, her own trauma. In this statement, Henke further explains how scriptotherapy can aid the traumatized subject in grappling with his or her intrusive thoughts, allowing them to present such painful memories, if needed, under the guise of fictional characters: What cannot be uttered might at least be written — cloaked in the mask of fiction or sanctioned by the protective space of iteration that separates the author/narrator from the protagonist/character he or she creates and from the anonymous reader/auditor she envisages… It is through the very process of rehearsing and reenacting a drama of mental survival that the trauma narrative effects psychological catharsis.157 Due to such evident unity across Woolf’s real and fictional timelines, Katt Blackwell-Starnes asserts that such “autobiographical elements” present within ​Mrs. Dalloway​ are “neither ​DeSalvo, 12. ​Woolf, ​The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2: 1920-1924,​ (New York, Manner Books, 1980), 248-259. 157 ​Suzette Henke, ​Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life Writing, ​(New York, Palgrave MacMillan US, 2000), xix. 155 156 53 shocking nor surprising.​” ​ Even more notably, by including these autobiographical elements, Woolf is able to undergo a “psychological catharsis” during the writing of her novels.158 Through its illumination of the often overlooked manner in which Clarissa represents Woolf’s gendered experience of trauma, as well as the restorative potential of trauma narratives, this thesis seeks to moderate Poole’s overly reductive argument that draws parallels between Woolf’s inability to “externalize the horror of incarceration in her marriage” and Septimus’s inability to “externalize the horror of being unable to feel….”159 Such an an argument privileges Septimus’s traditionally masculine experience of war trauma as being more significant than sexual abuse, as well as propagates the false narrative that Leonard oppressed Woolf within the confines of their marriage. As critic Harvena Richter asserts in a 1984 review of ​The Unknown Virginia Woolf,​ “if Poole was trying to prove that Virginia was not at times mentally unbalanced, he succeeds only in presenting the figure of a woman who seems far less sane than any of her writings suggest: someone so full of hate, jealousy, and suspicion that she takes on the guise of the traditional madwoman in the attic.” Although I find Richter’s review to be especially condemning, he clearly delineates how, in Poole’s quest to free Woolf from accusations of madness, the scholar only proliferates the unfortunate tradition of trying to rewrite Woolf’s life story in a manner most fitting with his overly reductive narrative. Rodriguez takes issue with this method of analysis, as she argues that studying PTSD solely through the lens of warfare fails to encapsulate how trauma is an inherently gendered experience. Since trauma study’s pertinence to literature was established decades ago in regards to journalistic reports on the “wounded minds” of soldiers, the critical material surrounding Septimus’s representation of trauma is comprehensive and generally well-respected. ​However, ​Katt Blackwell-Starnes, “Life Was Good, The Sun Hot: Septimus Smith, Sanity, and Suicide,” ​Virginia Woolf Miscellany,​ (New Haven, Southern Connecticut State University, 2017), 32-22. 159 ​Poole, 140. 158 54 Woolf was a survivor of sexual abuse rather than a war veteran, and although the historical trauma of World War I undoubtedly influenced her writing, I believe it is only by reading Clarissa as a traumatized subject that one can comprehend the inherent unevenness of the representation of female traumatic experience in ​Mrs. Dalloway​ that results from Woolf’s own unique lived experience. As Hartman asserted, the​ “radical aspect” of trauma study becomes much more clear when it “​draws its attention to ‘familiar’ violence such as rape, and the abuse of women children.”160 By failing to recognize the manner in which Clarissa represents Woolf’s experience of “familiar” violence, Poole ignores her potential to subvert societal standards of what constitutes legitimate trauma. Due to the proliferation of critics who uphold Septimus’s trauma as being representative of Woolf’s experience, this thesis seeks to highlight to how Clarissa spends the majority of the novel in a similar state of disunity, torn between her identity as wife of Richard Dalloway and memories of her more youthful, passionate self. It is only by bringing these disparate fragments together through the form of her party, the site of her edifying introspection on the nature of sanity and insanity in regards to both Septimus’s death and her own banal life, that Clarissa is able to unify her conception of self and confront Peter Walsh and Sally Seton in the present moment — a decision which represents the reintegration of traumatic memories into her consciousness in order to ​‘recreate the flow’ of . . . life and restore a sense of continuity.”161 Woolf’s decision to have Clarissa continue to carry onwards in the midst of her own perceived oppression, despite feeling envious of Septimus for escaping stringent societal norms, clearly illustrates the restorative quality of the party in positively shaping the way Clarissa begins to perceive her selfhood by the conclusion of the novel. For these reasons, I find it critical to ​Hartman, “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” 546. ​Judith Herman, ​Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror,​ (New York, Basic Books, 1992), 176. 160 161 55 foreground Clarissa’s experience in my analysis as this restorative quality is made much less apparent when scholars, such as Poole, analyze solely Septimus through the lens of trauma theory and fuel his forceful argument that Woolf’s abuse dominated both her life and life-writing. She sliced like a knife through everything In the opening pages of ​Mrs. Dalloway,​ Woolf makes clear that Clarissa is undergoing some sort of identity crisis as she walks through the bustling streets of London, noting that she feels “very young,” while “at the same time unspeakably aged” and wishes for the ability to live her life over again — especially in regards feeling like “she [knows] nothing; no language, no history.” Furthermore, she describes Clarissa’s utter lack of bodily solidity, reflecting on how “she slice[s] like a knife through everything; at the same time [is] outside, looking on.”162 Clarissa’s sense of fragmented identity seems to stem from her marriage to her husband, Richard, as she thinks: But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing — nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen, unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.163 Clarissa feels consumed by the societal expectation that she transform herself into the perfect housewife, as she has not only been transformed into “Mrs. Dalloway,” but “Mrs. Richard Dalloway.” Furthermore, the inclusion of the phrase “but often now” serves to show that she has 162 163 ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​8. ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway​, 13. 56 not always thought this way about her body, but the nature of aging and its “rather solemn progress” has caused her to feel panicked about her life’s inevitable conclusion of death. Due to this intense anxiety about aging, Clarissa thinks of her figure as something that can be easily discarded, like a party dress, or forcefully manipulated in order to present a unified front to the outside world. When she looks in the mirror, she purses her lips to “give her face point,” and it is only through this action that she can become a “definite” being, “her self when some effort, some call on her to be herself, drew the parts together.”164 As Clarissa must work actively to compose these parts of herself, “she alone [knows] how different, how incompatible” the scattered segments of her psyche truly are in comparison to the unified image she presents to the world.165 This passage illustrates that Clarissa feels an intense sense of disunity between her body and mind — a common symptom of trauma in which the survivor undergoes the ​“experience of being an outside observer of or detached from oneself.”166 Although, as Lee notes, “​passionate celebrations of London filled the diaries and letters and spilled over into Mrs. Dalloway,” Woolf still felt perpetually “haunted” by the threat of sinking into another deep fit of illness, and “in her novels, and as in her letters to Jacques, present life was shadowed and intercut with the past.”167 Seeing as ​Mrs​. ​Dalloway i​ s replete with characters whose lives are also “shadowed and intercut with the past,” it follows that Woolf’s own experiences — of battling illness in marriage, of being made childless under the orders of her doctors — would reappear throughout its pages. ​Mrs. Dalloway​ is replete with a sense of immense emotional distance between Clarissa and her husband, Richard — one that is augmented by frequent descriptions of her “nun-like, chaste existence, sleeping alone in her ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway​, 37. ​Poole, 73. 166 ​“What is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” American Psychiatric Association. 167 Lee, ​Virginia Woolf, ​467. 164 165 57 bedroom, and resting during the afternoons while her husband is away on committee work.” Clarissa sleeps alone in the attic bedroom, and no matter how hard she tries, “she [can] not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which [clings] to her like a sheet.”168 This image of Clarissa as an asexual being is further strengthened by descriptions such as “like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went, upstairs, paused at the window, came to the bathroom.” She reflects on how “there [is] an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room” that is felt when all of the additional rituals and concerns are stripped away.”169 Just as Septimus exhibits an intense fixation on the loss of his friend Evans, so intense some critics regard it as homosexual, Clarissa is haunted by thoughts of a long ago passionate romance, and “the most exquisite memory of her whole life” — a kiss that she once shared with past love interest and friend, Sally Seton.170 However, Clarissa eventually gives up this friendship, one possessing an ardent “quality which could only exist between women,” for the normalcy and social status of a life with Richard Dalloway.171 As scholar Allie Glenny explains, on one hand, Clarissa derives personal satisfaction from the emotional “gulf” between herself and Richard, yet on the other, she sometimes refers to such a distance as being forcefully imposed upon her. She writes: It is Richard who (reminiscent of Leonard Woolf) daily compels her to retire into the seclusion of the bedroom for one hour after lunch, and will do so until the day he dies. It is Richard who insists that she must sleep without disturbance, in other words, that she must abandon the marital bed. For really she prefers to read alone, “He knew it.” If Peter would have denied Clarissa her desire for personal space, ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, 35-36. ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway​, 31 170 ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​35. 171 ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​34. 168 169 58 Richard, albeit perhaps unwittingly, turns it back upon her, instituting a dependent-caretaker relationship that effectively infantilizes his wife and mitigates against real communication.172 Richard finds that he cannot even say “I love you” aloud to his wife, believing rather that “she understood; she understood without his speaking; his Clarissa.”173 Yet, he is not the only character who finds himself unable to express the depth of his feelings to Clarissa. The rather exuberant Peter Walsh finds his voice equally silenced when his demanding inquiry of “are you happy, Clarissa? Does Richard —” is interrupted by her daughter, Elizabeth, suddenly bursting into the room. These two scenes should be read through the lens of trauma scholar Patricia Moran’s argument that Woolf, informed by her own experience of abuse, foregrounds the tension between wholeness and rupture in her work — the author often undermining her own narrative in an “interrupted moment” that is in “essence an expression of traumatic experience.” 174 As Clarissa’s sense of selfhood is fractured, Richard and Peter only communicate with the parts of her psyche that they can understand. Like a trauma survivor unable to comprehend his or her own chaotic past memories, Clarissa’s disunified selfhood prevents communication from occurring with those around her — further contributing to the melancholic loneliness and pervasive silences that fill the pages of ​Mrs. Dalloway. The woman in the window Despite this sense of disunity, it is clear that Woolf felt inspired to push the boundaries of her own authorial agency in the writing of ​Mrs. Dalloway​ — a desire that may have also been shaped by her admiration of female authors of the time, like Dorothy Richardson, who were ​Glenny, 120. ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​118. 174 ​Patricia Moran, ​Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma, (​ New York, Palgrave MacMillan US, 2007), 1. 172 173 59 implementing modernist techniques and highlighting the unique subjectivity of the female experience in their own work. Of Richardson, Woolf writes: She has invented, or if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which she might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender. It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes.175 This declaration invokes ​l’ecriture feminine, a practice which urges women to write themselves into existence, asserting that they are “spacious singing Flesh: onto which is grafted no one knows which I” in order to gain power in a patriarchal society.176 Woolf’s praise of Richardson must be viewed more potently than one writer appreciating the work of another, as her alignment with such a subversive text further points to how she may have viewed literature in a similar manner — as a prime site for the exploration of feminine subjectivity. Thus, Clarissa Dalloway, so emblematic of modernist narrative form in her “​emphasis on interiority, memory, psychological verisimilitude, personal isolation, and development of fragmented nonlinear plots,” should be read as a subversive character in her ability to represent Woolf’s unique experience of sexual trauma, while simultaneously demonstrating its healing potential through her intense focus on uniting disparate parts of her past and psyche.177 In order to mediate Poole’s aggrandizing discourse regarding the effects Woolf’s trauma had on her overall wellbeing and productivity, this thesis will highlight moments of textual resolution in which Clarissa successfully confronts the disparate fragments of her past. Woolf herself propones the restorative function of her novels, writing “I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts for their ​Schönfelder, 191. ​Cixous, “Sorties,” ​La jeune nee​, (New York, IB Tauris, 1996), 88. 177 ​Moran, ​Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma, 3​ . 175 176 60 patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.”178 Despite her fragmented sense of selfhood, Clarissa is able to find a sense of wholeness and fulfilment on her morning walk through London: 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 houses there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of the 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.179 Woolf’s syntax — one long sentence punctuated by a multitude of seemingly disparate fragments, represents the half-formed thoughts and rapidly shifting memories of a trauma survivor. Although Septimus’s thoughts are also conveyed in this stream of consciousness style when he experiences intrusive flashbacks inside Regent’s Park, Clarissa finds joy, rather than despair, in feeling that her soul is an integral part of so many different entities. As Glenny explains, she shares Septimus’s “distressed aversion to the physical and the biological but is ultimately able to reunite body with self through a creative act, her party… Like her, he responds intensely to life, but unlike her, he possesses no effective means of assimilating the stimulus of the ecstatic.”180 Clarissa is able to assimilate the ecstatic by thinking about her party happening later that day, during which she plans to organize the disparate fragments of her past and present, and it is through this mindful thinking pattern that she is able to mitigate the overwhelming intensity of life that ultimately consumes Septimus. Even when Peter is about to question ​Woolf,​ Moments of Being, ​80-81. ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway​, 9. 180 ​Glenny, 155. 178 179 61 Clarissa’s happiness with Richard, she diffuses the situation by crying “My party to-night! Remember my party to-night,” the sound of clock chimes almost drowning out her voice.181 In the same manner that Woolf speaks of using writing to make sense of the various horrors of life, modern trauma scholars recognize the artful manner in which Clarissa is able to cultivate elegance and order from the chaos of her parties. As Christine Froula explains in “Mrs. Dalloway’s postwar elegy,”​ C ​ larissa’s “attempt to organize post-traumatic chaos is elegiac in nature… [she] embodies the elegy’s very principle: the necessity of relinquishing the dead and of forming new attachments in order to carry on with life,” while her parties “mediate the mourner’s arduous journey from loss, grief, and rage to renewed life and hope.”182 Meanwhile, Henke views the party as an artistic creation which wrenches her guests from the dullness of habitual activity and serves as a stage for moments of heightened consciousness.”183 DeMeester furthers this idea of Clarissa as artist by writing, “One gets the sense that the order, the pattern that emerges at her party is not organic but cultivated. Clarissa envisions the components — the people, flowers, the china — converging, crystallizing into an intricate pattern of perfect balance and symmetry.”184 Within the party, the “young people could not talk,” yet Clarissa does not worry for she has brought them together in unity, “they looked” and this facade is enough.185 Although some people, like Peter, struggle to understand her reason for hosting such grandiose parties, Clarissa is sympathetic as “nobody could be expected to understand… they’re an offering; which sounded horribly vague.”186 To Clarissa, the parties are not a grand social gesture, but a personal coping mechanism — an offering to the beast within her soul — to help ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway​, 48. ​Christine Froula, “Mrs. Dalloway’s Postwar Elegy: Women, War, and the Art of Mourning,” ​Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-garde: War, Civilization, Modernity, (​ New York, Columbia University Press, 2006), 126-129. 183 ​Henke, ​“Mrs. Dalloway: The Communion of Saints,” 145. 184 ​DeMeester, 89. 185 ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​177. 186 ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​121. 181 182 62 unite the disparate fragments of her life. Just as trauma scholar ​Michèle Crossley explains how scriptotherapy helps survivors overcome the “threat of chaos, of meaninglessness” stemming from abuse, Clarissa’s parties help her feel the underlying beauty and fun buried beneath life’s traumatic excesses.187 As I discussed the association between anorexia and survivors of sexual abuse earlier in this thesis, it is important to briefly discuss Glenny’s argument that through Clarissa’s dinner party, Woolf works “to explicate the relationship between food and sociopolitical power within patriarchy while also considering how food may be used as a medium for self-definition within a patriarchal cultural framework.”188 She notes how the men in power within the novel also hold “privileged positions” in regards to food supply. Consider how for Hugh Whitbread, lunch arouses “not a sense of divine ecstasy but of gluttonous delight” and reminds him of how secure his social status is within the world. Meanwhile, for women, “access to power, as to food, is only ever vicarious and the physiological, political, and personal sustenance thus received never really nourishing.”189 Glenny asserts, that of all Woolf’s main characters, Clarissa most closely emulates the “anorexic use of food” as a way of “mediating between the artificial polarities of spiritual and sensual uneasily cohabiting within her.”190 Ultimately, by holding power over the serving of dinner at her party, the hostess “connects her essential self on a profound level with other identities (for, as Lady Bruton notes, one feels one is webbed to the friends one has lunched with) and, further, with the ineffable center of existence itself.”191 Thus, while Septimus becomes fixated on the “the sordidity of the mouth and belly,” disgusted at the manner in which ​Schönfelder, 84. ​Glenny, 117. 189 ​Glenny, 125. 190 ​Glenny, 117. 191 ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​123. 187 188 63 Dr. Holmes consumes his porridge, Clarissa is able to surmount the traumatized subject’s disgust of food by placing herself in the powerful position of being its provider.192 Despite the success of her party, Clarissa still struggles with feeling “something not herself, and that everyone was unreal in one way,” until the moment she learns of Septimus’s death — an event that causes her to realize she has been holding on much too tightly to her memories of the past and “she must leave them” behind in order to truly embrace the present. 193 Clarissa thinks herself very much like him as she reflects on how just that morning she had also felt “the terror; the overwhelming incapacity… in depth of her heart an awful fear.”194 Yet, she notes gratitude for the fact that Richard was there beside her, so she could crouch in his comforting presence, like a small bird, in an act of self-preservation. Due to the pair’s shared consciousness, Septimus has dealt with similar intrusive memories over the course of the novel, yet he is unable to consolidate such flashbacks in the manner that Clarissa successfully does through her parties. Rather than consigning himself to doctors he does not trust, he kills himself, in an act that both he and Clarissa see as self-preservation. For, while “they went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming),” Septimus had preserved the “thing there was that mattered” through death. Septimus will remain young and eternally pure, while “they (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old.”195 Scholar Janet Lyon further explains the importance of the shared consciousness, writing, “​Septimus’s throbbing interiority is preserved for its next stage: it becomes a space that Mrs. Dalloway sympathetically inhabits when she learns of his suicide.”196 ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​88. ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​171. 194 ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​185. 195 ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​184. 196 ​Janet Lyon, "On the Asylum Road with Woolf and Mew," ​Modernism/modernity​ 18, no. 3 (2011): 551-574. 192 193 64 As Clarissa ponders Septimus’s decision, she watches an elderly lady move through her house, across the window, and wonders if the woman can see her as well. “It [is] fascinating,” Clarissa thinks, “with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that old woman, quite quietly, going to bed.”197 As Clarissa’s party rages on below, she finds a sort of subtle beauty in watching the woman perform her night routine in solitude, realizing that she will eventually become this woman and be utterly alone in life. In accepting the inevitable progression of aging, she also realizes the silliness of being “forced to stand [there] in her evening dress,” fretting about returning to Sally and Peter and the rest of them, while she had just witnessed, at least in her mind, a man “sink and disappear.” Clarissa’s meditative reflection upstairs serves as the ultimate restorative moment in ​Mrs. Dalloway​ — for although she had “lost herself in the process of living,” she realizes “no pleasure could equal” finding herself again. This restoration of selfhood is made complete when Clarissa is startled by the fact that “​in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her!” An intense moment of sudden unity is reached as the old woman’s gaze completes the restorative connection between the two. As the woman puts out her light, “the whole house... dark now with this [the party or life itself] going on,” Clarissa prepares to return back to the party — the refrain of “fear no more the heat of the sun” echoing in her mind to illustrate that she has finally made peace with her all-consuming fear of death.198 Due to this unification of her once fractured selfhood, Clarissa can finally accept Peter and Sally as they exist in the present, rather than continually being consumed by thoughts of them in the past. She even reflects on her gratefulness for her husband, someone she has thought of only in regret for the majority of the novel, for remaining steadfast in his presence whenever terror seized her soul. As she moves to return to the commotion below, feeling much 197 198 ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​186. ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​186. 65 more empowered than before, the novel’s perspective suddenly shifts to Peter Walsh, who proclaims ​“It is Clarissa” upon seeing her standing confidently at the top of the stairs, her fully unified self visible for the first time — “for there she was.”199 Epilogue It is not until the final pages of ​Mrs. Dalloway​ that Clarissa throws her much anticipated party, effectively uniting her conception of selfhood in the present with fragmented memories of her past. The sense of beatitude Clarissa attains from hosting this event clearly emulates the pleasure Woolf received from using her novels to make sense of the traumatic “shocks and blows” which interrupt the “cotton-wool” monotony of her everyday life, writing that ​“it is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together… we are parts of the work of art.”200 Furthermore, she discusses how this specific manner of writing helped her uncover intricate patterns of human connection hidden away beneath the veil of trauma clouding her everyday existence. As evidenced by such quotations, Woolf carefully worked to create continuity between the complex art of party throwing and the craft of her writing, as well as between the titular character of Clarissa Dalloway and her own personal life, throughout ​Mrs. Dalloway. ​By illuminating such connections, and foregrounding clinical research on the restorative nature of writing for trauma survivors, this thesis has highlighted the manner in which Woolf’s novels served as a form of scriptotherapy — through which she could textually re-enact her own traumatic memories of sexual abuse from a safe distance and ultimately allow herself to work towards healing her own battered psyche. 199 200 ​Woolf, ​Mrs. Dalloway, ​194. ​Woolf, ​Moments of Being, ​73. 66 In order to illuminate the risks of overgeneralizing Woolf’s traumatic childhood, as well as aid readers in their understanding of how the organization of language in ​Mrs. Dalloway served a therapeutic purpose, this thesis further upholds modern clinical research on the potential for scriptotherapy to help individuals successfully re-integrate trauma memories into their everyday consciousness and incite healing. This clarifying modern research, marked by its restorative framework, has led me to return to the subversive theory of formative French feminist philosophers, and in doing so I’ve shown how it is critical to read the textual gaps and silences within Woolf’s work as an example of ​l’écriture féminine, or the manner in which marginalized writers can gain agency in a society dominated by male hegemony and the silencing of female voices. The specific research conducted by these trauma specialists has clarified how as marginalized members of society, women, such as Woolf, can unlock a heightened understanding of the world by taking advantage of the very traits that elect them as outsiders. In the same​ New Yorke​r article within which he discusses Woolf’s modernist writing prowess, Hisham Matar furthers this assertion of authorial agency, writing, “What takes our breath away in [her] literature is not the new but the encounter with what has been silently known.”201 Since the literature of trauma has been limited to traditionally masculine experiences, such as war, for so long, Woolf’s ability — to create several critically-acclaimed novels that both discuss and represent sexual trauma through their avant-garde styles and focus on female characters — is indicative of a highly-skilled writer capable of subverting the patriarchal literary paradigm. Thus, propelled by linkage between modern developments in trauma studies and the l’écriture féminine of 20th century French philosophers, this thesis seeks to fully realize the societal significance, accomplishment, and courage of Woolf’s groundbreaking work. 201 ​Matar, “The Unsaid: The Silence of Virginia Woolf.” 67 Despite her literary genius and conscious use of restorative practices such as scriptotherapy, it is important to recognize that Woolf battled with intense depressive episodes and hallucinatory voices all of her life — afflictions which only grew more intense as society around her prepared for the uncertain chaos of World War II. Due to her and Leonard’s intense fear that the German army would eventually invade the mainland, the couple formed a suicide pact, keeping enough gasoline stored in their garage that they would be able to asphyxiate themselves in the case that Nazis sought to eradicate British society as they knew it. ​As scholar Claire Kahane writes in “Snakes, Toads, and Duckweed,” Woolf was “anticipating a national violation on the real historical horizon: a future rape writ large” during this time, a worry that would certainly been exacerbated by her past experience with sexual abuse.202 This formidable invasion never came, yet, merely two months after her 59th birthday, Woolf filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse, leaving behind multiple versions of a suicide note on which she had painstakingly worked.203 In her letter to Leonard, the one quoted most frequently by biographers, Woolf praises Leonard for his unyielding devotion and love, writing “I begin to hear voices and can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.”204 However, Henke notes that a shorter version of this letter also exists, in which Woolf’s distress seems much more palpable and death more imminent — there she writes, “But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this madness… You see I can’t write this even, which shows I am right.”205 Eberley and Henke posit that, due to her stringent dedication to her work and “art of word-shaping,” it makes perfect sense Woolf would draft multiple versions of her suicide notes, each shaped by their intended recipient. The scholars ​Eberly, 273. Lee, 274. 204 ​Eberly, ​ 2​ 72​. 205 Eberly, 272. 202 203 68 further assert that it “​would seem all the more crucial, then, for twenty-first century readers to define Woolf’s heritage in terms neither of “madness” nor of suicide, but through acts of writing, which sustained her and bequeathed so many literary gifts to her readers”206 For, alth​ough Woolf dealt with severe depressive episodes, as well as other symptomatology connected to her childhood sexual abuse, she “functioned successfully, into her 60th year, as a creative and productive writer who incorporated her experiences as a trauma survivor into an extraordinary modernist oeuvre.”207 This revelation, that Woolf implemented her traumatic experiences into her own writings to create a brilliant collection of work, is critical to my own argument, as throughout this thesis, I have illuminated the importance of reading her experiences of “madness” through a trauma informed lens while remaining cognisant of her own authorial agency and complex conception of selfhood. Woolf was sexually abused for the duration of her childhood and adolescence, a collection of traumatic incidents that, as proven by modern clinical research, undoubtedly affected her mental and physical health, and have been improperly represented by her earliest critics and biographers. I applaud Poole and Trombley for highlighting the immense impact such abuse can have on the life of a survivor, yet at the same time, hope to have tempered their somewhat finalizing prescription that Woolf’s experience with trauma not only completely dominated her life, but also was responsible for her distinct narrative style. Poole and Trombley designate Woolf’s polyvocal narration and stream of consciousness shifts as clear markers of her abuse at the hands of the Duckworth brothers, yet offer no discussion of the restorative potential enacted by Woolf writing in this manner, and reduce her agency in doing so. As loss of one’s 206 207 ​Eberly, 15. ​Eberly, 15. 69 agency is a foundational experience of trauma, Poole and Trombley’s reductive analysis only perpetuates, even if unintentionally, its violence. Thus, using the work of scholars such as ​Schönfelder, Henke, and Eberly, I have demonstrated how, through her pointed description of Clarissa’s fragmented identity and the way in which she finally unifies her psyche through her realization of her shared consciousness with Septimus, Woolf depicts her experience of abuse in a manner that demonstrates the restorative potential of trauma narratives. I believe this trauma-informed method of literary analysis will continue to grow, especially through the addition of other pertinent disciplines such as medicine and psychology, and foreground textual spaces where marginalized authors have strived to write themselves into existence.​ For future scholars studying Woolf, ​Schönfelder foregrounds several questions she believes are critical to the sensitive understanding of the “complexities and paradoxes of trauma.” She asks,“​What kinds of responses are psychologically and politically empowering for trauma survivors?”, “to what extent should we strive for knowledge of trauma?”, and “to what extent should we insist on aspects of incomprehensibility and attend “to the traces of that which remains foreign to us?”208 This incomprehensibility, the impossibility of ever having a “complete view,” is inevitable, as scholars of today will never be able to fully comprehend Woolf’s medical diagnosis, the extent of her sexual abuse, or the manner in which her treatment spurred, maintained, or abated her symptoms. A thorough consideration of these questions is essential to fostering a sensitive expansion of this interdisciplinary framework of trauma analysis, for, as has been shown in the case of scholars such as Trombley and Poole, it is all too easy to further strip survivors of their agency. As noted earlier in this section, only her vast collection of writing remains, and hand-selecting passages to fit a certain narrative only furthers harmful narratives that uphold the name “Virginia Woolf” as if she were an ephemeral 208 ​Schönfelder, 77. 70 idea, subject to being shaped to fit any array of scholarly theories, rather than a complex, self-reliant human being. Woolf’s life was replete with tragedy, and her death was certainly no different. In opposition to Poole’s romanticized remark that drowning oneself “had no terrors for Virginia… she regarded it as a happy release, a going home,” Henke reminds readers that the “the water of the River Ouse would have been frigidly cold in March; the sludge of the riverbank viscous and muddy; the stones, desperately gathered, solid anchors to oblivion.”209 However, it interesting to note that in the same manner Septimus begged Rezia to burn his writings before his fateful plunge out the window, Woolf asked Leonard “will you destroy all my papers [?]” in her own suicide note.210 Even in the midst of an all-consuming depressive episode, Woolf maintained a sense of authorial agency, knowing that her writing was her main vessel for composing her fractured psyche and presenting her unified self to the world, and did not want to risk having papers of such value be seized by fascist Nazi troops. Furthermore, just as Clarissa Dalloway looks into her neighbor’s window and sees her future, unified self in the figure of the old woman, a shared connection that allowed her to return to her party and re-integrate her past memories of Sally and Peter with the current versions standing in front of her, I hope that Woolf could gaze upon her novels and be comforted by the successful manner in which she wove her past traumas into coherent, groundbreaking narratives. For, before she let herself be silenced by the rapidly flowing waters of the river Ouse, Woolf wrote in her memoir that “the whole world is a work of art… But… certainly and empathetically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”211 Despite her mind being consumed by obsessive thoughts, Woolf still sought to capture the artistry and complexity of the human consciousness, engaging with her 209 Eberly, 274. ​Eberly, 274. 211 ​ ​Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,”​ ​72. 210 71 trauma in the most intimate, sometimes uncomfortable, of manners by formulating her personal experiences into a novel capable of being read by all. Woolf fully embraced the heat of the sun — the shocks and blows hidden behind seemingly mundane aspects of everyday life — and in turn has been recognized and celebrated as one of the most brilliant modernist writers of all time. 72 Works Consulted Alexander, Caroline. "The Shock of War." Smithsonian. September 2010. 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