I have only listened up to perhaps a little past noon of Mrs. Dalloway's day as it is presented in the book. And the liberated nature of the narrative is what makes the greatest impression on me. Here is what I wrote at the side of Lake Merritt before leaving Oakland, while I listened to the story:
How easy it is these days as a privileged white woman to contemplate a life of following one's own heart, trusting one's own instincts, indulging one's own thought patterns and providing sufficient girth for one's romantic and childish thoughts. I am struck as I walk around Lake Merritt on this (marvellously) overcast Labor Day morning, listening to a very good audiobook of Mrs. Dalloway, I am struck with the thought that Virginia Woolf cannot have had many women in the canon before her whose example would have encouraged her to examine every part of a woman's day, of a woman's heart, of a woman's memory. It is exciting to think about being unconventional when one can read this kind of literature and have unconventionality so beautifully articulated, expressed. Who wouldn't want to deviate from society's expectations with such a resplendent image of what deviance can look like, glimmering before one's eyes (ears)?
The most prominent example of deviation from normally expressed sentiment is the love towards Sally. Below I have cut a long excerpt, but it is too great a passage to curtail. I will comment on each paragraph so as not to seem lazy and as though I'm overquoting.
She sat on the floor — that was her first impression of Sally — she sat on the floor with her arms round her knees, smoking a cigarette. Where could it have been? The Mannings? The Kinloch-Jones’s? At some party (where, she could not be certain), for she had a distinct recollection of saying to the man she was with, “Who is THAT?” And he had told her, and said that Sally’s parents did not get on (how that shocked her — that one’s parents should quarrel!). But all that evening she could not take her eyes off Sally. It was an extraordinary beauty of the kind she most admired, dark, large-eyed, with that quality which, since she hadn’t got it herself, she always envied — a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything; a quality much commoner in foreigners than in Englishwomen. Sally always said she had French blood in her veins, an ancestor had been with Marie Antoinette, had his head cut off, left a ruby ring. Perhaps that summer she came to stay at Bourton, walking in quite unexpectedly without a penny in her pocket, one night after dinner, and upsetting poor Aunt Helena to such an extent that she never forgave her. There had been some quarrel at home. She literally hadn’t a penny that night when she came to them — had pawned a brooch to come down. She had rushed off in a passion. They sat up till all hours of the night talking. Sally it was who made her feel, for the first time, how sheltered the life at Bourton was. She knew nothing about sex — nothing about social problems. She had once seen an old man who had dropped dead in a field — she had seen cows just after their calves were born. But Aunt Helena never liked discussion of anything (when Sally gave her William Morris, it had to be wrapped in brown paper). There they sat, hour after hour, talking in her bedroom at the top of the house, talking about life, how they were to reform the world. They meant to found a society to abolish private property, and actually had a letter written, though not sent out. The ideas were Sally’s, of course — but very soon she was just as excited — read Plato in bed before breakfast; read Morris; read Shelley by the hour.
(Mimi: I love how exciting Sally seems, in her role as a woman who is not afraid to do or say what she wants. Especially the first and most telling tendency - to sit on the floor! That does seem radical, and something that would still be remarked upon, even today. I guess that's what endears this passage to me - Sally would be just as compelling today. It wasn't just that she did unusual things, she seemed to exude a newness, and excitement and authenticity that is just as compelling and palpable in people today as it has ever been, set against a backdrop of repression and conformity. The final image I find absolutely intoxicating - the idea of being so excited by the ideas of those around you that you delve into complex texts before breakfast. This is how I felt in Russia, absolutely enthralled in learning everything I could about it, and I would wake early and read all the New Yorker's archived articles on Russia, before peppering breakfast with questions for Judy and Johan.)
Sally’s power was amazing, her gift, her personality. There was her way with flowers, for instance. At Bourton they always had stiff little vases all the way down the table. Sally went out, picked hollyhocks, dahlias — all sorts of flowers that had never been seen together — cut their heads off, and made them swim on the top of water in bowls. The effect was extraordinary — coming in to dinner in the sunset. (Of course Aunt Helena thought it wicked to treat flowers like that.) Then she forgot her sponge, and ran along the passage naked. That grim old housemaid, Ellen Atkins, went about grumbling —“Suppose any of the gentlemen had seen?” Indeed she did shock people. She was untidy, Papa said.
(Mimi: More wonderful images of bucking others' opinions, like cutting flowers into floating heads, and running back to a room, naked, for a sponge.)
The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one’s feeling for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which could only exist between women, between women just grown up. It was protective, on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling which was much more on her side than Sally’s. For in those days she was completely reckless; did the most idiotic things out of bravado; bicycled round the parapet on the terrace; smoked cigars. Absurd, she was — very absurd. But the charm was overpowering, to her at least, so that she could remember standing in her bedroom at the top of the house holding the hot-water can in her hands and saying aloud, “She is beneath this roof. . . . She is beneath this roof!”
(Mimi: Here I am interested in the description of the connection between the women. The "integrity" of the feeling, and especially the idea that the feeling that could only exist between women, which "sprang from the sense of being in league together." That is something indeed rare between a man and a woman. They may be allied, but they are in different leagues, as far as society is concerned. I feel that opposition in my interactions with men and women. No matter how obliging the man is, no matter how separated from any remnant of toxic masculinity - I still feel like we are in opposing leagues. With women, I don't feel that opposition. The other night at a social event I felt relieved when placed in a group of women. We were all in the same league. This morning I felt relieved when my lyft driver to the airport was a woman. We were automatically in the same league. I believe there was a sense of integrity in our interaction precisely because of this same-league status.
The women who came before did the heavy lifting. Virginia Woolf did some of this lifting, as did Kate Chopin, whom I read earlier this year. Thank goodness that they paved the way and made non-convention seems as tantalizing as it did. Before Mad Men they waged a successful advertising campaign to sell us all, all we modern women, on the delights of bucking the trends.
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