Peabody imagines death to be “merely a function of the mind – and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement” (43-44). He goes on to think, “The nihilists say it’s the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town” (44). Certainly, the beginning of this novel is focused very much on the logistics of death, on the movement required to lay something to rest. In the process of Addie Bundren’s death, some things linger – Peabody thinks that the problem with where they live is that the weather “hangs on too long” (45), it seems like every character is continually surprised each time a conversation does not reveal that Addie has died – and some things are on the move, antsy – Addie herself refuses to stay put even in death, men in general with their legs that aren’t roots.

The rest of the Bundren family, too, is on the move, all capitalizing on the momentum of death to propel them towards things they want. If death is a function of the minds of those left behind, action is a function of death for the Bundren family. They are fundamentalists in that way, looking for new beginnings in this schism. Dewey Dell might be somewhere in the middle, looking for a nihilistic ending that will restore a kind of stasis, making this restoration a new beginning that she is hoping nobody will understand.

Peabody’s own thoughts on death situate him firmly in the fundamentalist camp. He frames death as the beginning of a certain conception in the minds of those continuing to live. Death precipitates the beginning of a way of thinking. It precipitates the start of thinking that something has ended, which flies in the face of the perhaps more traditional conception of death as the end of thoughts, the end of a particular person and, amongst other things, the end of their mind and the way that they think. Seeing death as a fundamentalist makes death this compounding thing. Somebody being dead means that somebody is thinking of them as dead, and when that person dies, they will be thought of as dead in the mind of yet another living person. A fundamentalist death is a living one, one that makes choice, one that moves people. The Bundrens, Addie included, see death as the beginning of a new kind of movement.

My syllabus somewhat cheekily calls the section we’re currently working through “peak modernism,” playing a bit with our tendency to reduce the messiness of literary and cultural history into neat arcs. Joan Stamler shared with me this piece from the NYT** that argues in a similar vein that 1925 was the peak:

This is perhaps “inside baseball,” but 1922 is more common as the “peak,” since Eliot’s “The Waste-Land” and Joyce’s Ulysses appeared then. Michael North has published an amazing book to that effect called Reading 1922. At any rate, the piece has a nice reading of Dalloway and includes a riff on “Modern Fiction” as well. Plus some stuff, like Hemingway’s In Our Time and Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, that fell out of our course, regrettably!

**All Hunter students can get free NYT access through the library, so use it!!!!

We’ll be reading Faulkner’s weird and wonderful As I Lay Dying next. A couple of things:

• study questions are up for the entire novel. I’ve divided them into arbitary 50-page units that don’t track our syllabus, so take note.
• for a deeper dive, take a look at Yoknapedia, a resource I’ve built from student-submitted articles of all lengths on all topics pertinent to Faulkner. What does “pussel-gutted” mean? It’s in there. A fabulous reading of the figure of the “gourd” in AILD by our own Florencia Ledesma? It’s in there. Equally fascinating readings of “keening” by Christina Fox and “female dope” by Eileen Medina? They are in there.
• Here’s a page of all the entries tagged AILD for As I Lay Dying. Spoiler alert: there be spoilers.

To repeat what I emailed to everyone, here are the instructions for the midterm:

• As promised, the midterm template is here via Dropbox link
• no Zoom tomorrow; see you Thursday, when we’ll kick off our discussion of Faulkner
• due Tuesday at 5pm via Dropbox link: let me know if any tech issues come up and email it to me as a last resort
• please reach out to me with any questions or concerns
• note that there is choice for both the short answers and the essay: please read instructions and don’t answer everything!

Perhaps- and I really am just guessing here- Woolf was inspired by the Freudian idea that all people crave death on a subconscious level. It would fit with the narrative of the book. Clarissa wanted to die. She thinks on whether or not Septimus died with his ‘treasures’ and then immediately thinks of her wedding day. Her ‘treasure’ and how she could die happy as she was on her way to her own wedding. But her wedding day is long behind her, her treasure was already acquired and now what treasure does she have?

Throughout the novel she seems to have been reflecting on her own life’s meaning from the small (like the flowers for the party etc.) to the larger themes of marriage, love, social acceptance and finally death. 

Clarissa is ‘introduced’ so to speak to death at her party, as if it is one of her guests, a guest uninvited yet brought to the party by the Bradshaws. “Oh, here’s death.” is what she thinks as Mrs. Bradshaw tells her of Septimus’s suicide. She thinks it as if she had been waiting for it to appear just like any other of her party guests. Clarissa then begins wandering around her party as if looking for death itself, to have a conversation with it and yet the conversation only happens in her own mind. 

As she is wandering through the party she is also attempting to find someone, anyone to distract her from thinking about death but “There was nobody.” in the room to which she wanders. Only when she doesn’t find any can her mind wander to its deeper subjects instead of everything she had busying herself with all day. They were distractions from her true thoughts, her ignored thoughts of how unhappy she was and is. These people and parties, flitting between guests and the mental work that went into planning them seem to work as self induced medication to ignore her true feelings and thoughts about death which can only come out when the party is in full swing and there is no one and nothing to distract her. 

This seems to be supported by her continually interrupted thoughts while she is in the room alone. She is thinking of death and horrified that it was talked about at her party. “The Bradshaws” had essentially invited their own guest to her party, one she didn’t want to interact with and one she wanted to and had been ignoring at the party and all day. She thought the car back firing was a pistol at the beginning of the novel after all. Though she tries she cannot stop thinking of death. She tries and fails to fall back on her usual coping mechanisms of people and party details. These are her usual coping methods of distraction. 

But it fails. Her self medication is failing and she cannot help but think about death. Her distrust and dislike of Sir William is most likely resulting from her fear of her own mental state and the fear that Sir William will discern it, if he were to closely look, pointing out what she refuses to acknowledge. She says there is something in him that is “Forcing your soul” and that it “made life intolerable, men like that.” Then, finally, we see what she thinks about death. 

“They went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop everyday in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance.”

Eileen helpfully pointed out that I did this whole riff on “biopower” or “bio-politics” without explaining what it was. As you may remember, the context was Mrs. Bruton’s deep identification with the imperial project of encouraging the migration of young Britons to Canada. This urge, aligning herself with the Empire’s power to manage entire populations of people, keep demographic statistics, worry over how to manage inflows and outflows of different kinds of people across borders, is a paradigmatic example of what the cultural theorist Michel Foucault calls “bio-power” or “biopolitics.”

For Foucault, this modality of power manifests in the nineteenth century in an intensification of the “disciplinary” model he traces in Discipline and Punish, his study of 18thC technologies of surveillance and incarceration. Bio-power focuses outward in scale, onto entire populations at the national and international level, and inward in intensification, aiming at the biological functions of nutrition and sexuality (e.g., birth control policy, anti-obesity efforts).

For more, check out this essay by Rachel Adams, this article from Wikipedia, and, if you want the horse’s mouth, the .pdf of the final chapter of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, where he introduces the term for the first time, which I’ve put in our Dropbox under “general sources.”

In the opening scene of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway walks the streets of London in anticipation of the chime of Big Ben, deciding that each new hour delineates past from present and holds the incredible power to “create[s] every moment afresh” (Woolf 4).  But in fact, the opposite is true for the English, post-war, on a Wednesday in “the middle of June,” “1923” (Woolf 5, 71).  Escape from the past is shown to be mere wishful thinking based on Clarissa’s desire to leave the horror behind.  “The War was over,” “it was over; thank Heaven―over,” the protagonist’s thoughts echo repeatedly as she walks the chaotic streets of Westminster, every stop evoking a prewar memory… Mrs. Dalloway “paus[es] for a moment at the window of a glove shop where, before the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves” (Woolf 5, 11).  Despite the middle-aged Mrs. Dalloway’s fervent wish that life would be renewed with each peal of the bell, it is not, and the British now inhabit an eternal present borne of trauma endured during World War I and the Influenza Pandemic (July 1914 to November 1918 and February 1918 to April 1920 respectively).

The trauma left by experiencing the decimation of the population leaves survivors with two inadequate choices: just carry on or obliterate the debacle by suicide.  “One reason that we need to understand the war as trauma is, of course, the dead and what they represent: a lost promise; a future never realized,” explains Tim Armstrong in Modernism (17).  For her part, Woolf explores, through many of her characters, the meaning of being a survivor among so many dead.  Lucrezia Warren Smith (Rezia) muses: “Everyone has friends who were killed in the War;” her former-combatant husband, Septimus Warren Smith, deals with shell shock, hallucinations and the inability to feel any emotion which, improperly treated, leads to his suicide (Woolf 66).  Clarissa Dalloway struggles with the lingering symptoms of influenza along with the stress left by years of international conflict; and Uncle William who, in the belief that they “have had enough,” kills himself (Woolf 11).  Through these characters, and others, Woolf shows how the scars left by war and illness impact minds and bodies in such a way as to lock past and present together and hopes for a future vanish into thin air.  “Everything had come to a standstill,” Clarissa notices during her walk on a “Wednesday morning” (Woolf 14, 16).  The observation transcends the moment as it describes English society petrified in trauma and seemingly incapable of coming back to life.  Clarissa’s words trigger a new inquiry: “[D]id it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?” (Woolf 9).

Although subtler than the presence of war and the mental illness caused by it, influenza permeates the deeper layers of the novel, concealed from the inattentive eye.  Woolf “contracted the virus repeatedly,” but also witnessed the passing of her mother “after complications from a severe case” (103-104).  This is the reason Outka argues that Woolf “centered [her] novel on influenza, though it is rarely read as such” (104).  “Woolf was plagued with influenza in the years surrounding the pandemic,” and it is believed that what she contracted in 1919 “was likely part of the pandemic strain” (Outka 104).  “I thought I was probably dying [conveys Woolf to her sister Vanesa] but Fergusson says it’s only the nerves of the heart go wrong after influenza” (Outka 104).  Clarissa Dalloway also experiences this symptom as she copes with the “long-term damage to the body’s systems” of the flu: “that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza;” Clarissa “was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness” notices Scrope Purvis when they run into each other at a crossing; and Peter’s first thought, after five years without seeing each other, is expressed in these terms: “She’s grown older,” a thought that he kept to himself (Woolf 4, 12, 40; Outka 105).  “Half alive,” “the death of the soul” and being left “feel[ling] nothing” are recurring phrases pronounced by Rezia, Peter and Septimus, respectively, which describe the present and the past as an indivisible unit (Woolf 23, 59, 90).  “Modernist literature gives expression to historical changes or historical traumas,” such as these two (war and pandemic) addressed by Woolf.  In a similar way, “[i]magist poetry and the experimental novels of the postwar decade reflect the fragmentation of consciousness and the disorder and confusion that a victim experiences in the wake of a traumatic event,” explains Karen DeMeester in “Trauma and Recovery in Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway” (650).  The reader of Mrs. Dalloway embarks on a journey to discover a new way to see the world facilitated, mainly, by Clarissa and Septimus.  This ride “allows for a new form of experimentation,” as the reader sees the characters’ world through the prism of sickness, delving into “humanity, humour, depth” (Scott 39).

Woolf explores the notion that the power of language has weakened as the result of World War I.  According to Henry James, the overuse of certain words and rhetoric during the war led to “a fraying of the power of language, and a haunted discourse” that leaves individuals to face “the depreciation of all [their] terms or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression” (Armstrong 17).  This idea is most obviously conveyed by Woolf in the scene when Londoners are looking up at the sky and trying to decipher what the “aeroplane overhead” is writing in “white smoke” (Woolf 4, 20).  The crowd is gathered under dissipating shapes whose meaning they attempt to grasp but fail to, as the words languis[h] and mel[t] in the sky” (Woolf 21-2).  “But what letters?  A C was it? an E then an L?” or “writing a T, an O an F” (Woolf 29).  Before anyone can read a single word (although Mr. Bowley mistakenly guesses the hopeful, sweet, “toffee”) letters “moved and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky” and the aeroplane slips over to a clear spot to start the guessing game all over again (Woolf 20-21).  “Glaxo,” said Mrs. Coates and “[k]remmo, murmured Mrs. Bletchley” incapable, like the rest of the multitude, of making sense of the message written in the heavens―an allusion, perhaps, to the coded language and jargon used during war and a metaphor for the inability to understand the purpose of the immense death brought by war and the plague.  Survivors are left without words while they all look straight to heaven, maybe in inquiry to God, maybe in hope that it becomes the destination of all souls (Woolf 20).

“This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears” that cannot cease, not even with the clangs of Big Ben “and the sound of all the clocks striking” the hours and half-hours (Woolf 4, 48).  A gentle movement of the hand holding a handkerchief cannot console the most vulnerable members of the postbellum British society: “Poor women, nice little children, orphan, widows,” along with the “old men and women, invalids, most of them in Bath chairs” (Woolf 9).  War creates “the mentally ill” whose cry to “[c]hange the world” does not stop, which Septimus’ “revelations on the back of envelopes” coming from an addled brain demonstrates (Woolf 20, 24).  “A well of tears” that knows no end (Woolf 9).  Not back then, not even now: for trauma knows no past.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: Themes in 20^th Century Literature & Culture. Polity: 2005.

DeMeester, Karen. “Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Modern Fiction Studies: vol. 44, no. 3, 1998, pp. 649-673.

Outka, Elizabeth. “On Seeing Illness: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” In Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. JSTOR: www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312.

Scott, Bonnie Kime. “Transforming the novel.” In the Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, edited by Linett, Maren Tova, 17-32. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Florida: Harcourt, Inc., 1990. Print.

Imagine being able to travel from mind to mind and get an insight into what it would be like to be someone else for a day. This is exactly what Virginia Woolf does in Mrs. Dalloway. The author was way ahead of her time in all aspects. Her writing portrays elements of modernism, and feminism while simultaneously asking the readers to follow this thread of looking beyond what is on paper. There’s no denying that Woolf’s work is quite amazing. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf takes a specific approach and launches us into a modern idea of looking beyond our own lives. In fiction literature, we are often exposed to the lives of the main characters and all those involved with them, but in this specific novel, we are both introduced to their lives while also being able to live inside their minds for a day. Woolf seems to be exploring this idea of being aware that there are other things in life besides ourselves. This in itself is a modernist idea. The world does not revolve around us, but rather we live in this world that revolves entirely by itself. We often go about our day selfishly trying to get by regardless of what that might do or mean for someone else. So, it’s clear that Woolf is doing this but the real question is why? Why might the author expose this reality we often ignore? What might the author be telling us about how we perceive things and how we consciously choose to live inside of our own world and only ours. 

There’s so much to unpack here with this novel and I can barely wrap my head around one idea. Clarissa is an upper-class woman that views life mostly through her own perspective. Because of the life she lives, she is able to escape the horrible aspects of a reality that everyone is going through. She often chooses to ignore the reality of things that others like Septimus cannot. Septimus represents the lower class society that cannot escape the unfortunate reality they are living through. Clarissa on the other hand is a wealthy woman who can turn this reality on its head and practically escape most of it if need be. When I think of Septimus, I also think about a physical representation of what dealing with mental illness is like. Septimus represents those that are overlooked by society because of their illness. He also represents those that suffer because of these illnesses but are often convinced that nothing is wrong with them. We see Woolf signaling this out in the very beginning of the book when Lucrezia tries to distract Septimus, “ ‘Look, look, Septimus!’ she cried. For Dr.Holmes had told her to make her husband (who had nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts) take an interest in things outside himself”(21). Woolf exposes this view on Mental Illness that tends to diminish the reality of it. This in the end leads to a tragic ending for Septimus. We also see a bit about how Septimus, even when going through his PTSD understands that it is better to get away than to stay where they are. We also see a glimpse of what it is like to want to escape but having nowhere to go and having death as the only option. “Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it…He was too weak ”(92). 

I can’t say for sure what the author’s intentions with this novel might be but I do know that one thing she is definitely doing is allowing us to experience the same reality through many different perspectives. In doing this, the author allows us to see what it would be like to see things through a different lens, and maybe even one we have never been exposed to but must understand.