Clarissa Dalloway

’s ‘Double’ Essay, Research Paper

Clarissa Dalloway’s ‘Double’

Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” is a day-in-the-life story that folds back and forth in time, examining one woman’s life decisions and one man’s postwar nightmare. The woman is Clarissa Dalloway, a “perfect hostess” in her early fifties, confronts the decisions she made thirty years ago. The man, intended by the author to be Clarissa’s “double”, is the “shell-shocked” war veteran Septimus Warren Smith who suffers delayed flashbacks over the wartime death of a comrade. The novel follows parallel stories of Clarissa and her “double,” whom she has never met. Their lives are connected through interaction of external events in time and space, such as Clarissa’s evening party, a motor car passing both, an airplane overhead. The two are further connected through the writer’s use of various poetic techniques such as imagery and “literary echoes.” Septimus and Clarissa also parallels and contrasts in many aspects of characterization, as in their emotional problems, their marriage, their pasts, their suicidal impulses and their homosexual relationships. However, Clarissa will ultimately differ from Septimus, who, fails to confront the requirement of the society, commits suicide the night of Clarissa’s party.

Virginia Woolf manages to make use of time and space to join the apparently disconnected journeys of Clarissa and Septimus. Their stories take place in a single June day in 1923, within the city of London. The day culminates with the party to be held in the evening. The party is not only looked forward to as a great event for Clarissa and her guests. More significantly, the party also foreshadows the only direct connection we could find between Clarissa and Septimus, with a doctor who, having treated Septimus, shows up at the party to report his fate.

Again, Clarissa and Septimus are joined in time and space as Clarissa is shopping on Bond street. Among the London traffic, Clarissa is pondering how to make sense of her life in relation to other people: “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 of the people she had never met”(11). Clarissa’s feeling that we are part of everything and live in each other justified as we are given a cross-section view of London as various people in the city respond to the same event. The motor car, for instance, is used as a spatial device to unify the individual characters as they respond to it with curiosity, terror or patriotism. “Mrs. Dalloway… looked out with her little pink face…Everyone looked at the motor car. Septimus looked…as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him”(18). Septimus makes his first appearance as Clarissa, from her florist’s window, watches the mysterious motor car. Similarly, in the scene where the airplane is skywriting, we are again introduced to both of their psyches through their respective stream of consciousness.

Poetic techniques are constantly used to relate Clarissa and Spetimus in the novel. Big Ben is a sound image of great symbolic importance linking the activities of the two. Throughout the day, it counts out the hours, marking the progress of Clarissa and Septimus: “It was precisely twelve o’clock, twelve by Big Ben…twelve o’clock struck as Clarissa Dalloway laid her green dress on her bed, and the Warren Smiths walked down Harley Street. Twelve was their hour of their appointment”(122). Towards the evening, the strikes of Big Ben mark the climax of their journeys. Clarissa’s party is about to begin while Septimus is undergoing a nervous breakdown and eventually commits suicide.

Water is the recurring imagery used by Woolf to associate Clarissa and Septimus. Water is something that cannot be contained, it therefore suggests irregularity. Despite that Clarissa is being seen as a realist by the others, she identifies herself strongly with different images of water, and these indicate the irrationality in her characters. Standing on the street, Clarissa suddenly feels “herself being out, out, far out to the sea”(10). Sea appears as a dangerous element and the individuals are likely to be carried away by it. This irrational thoughts interplay with her physical illness, pulling her closer to the insane double of her. For Septimus, he pictures himself as “a drowned sailor on a rock”(89) when his sense of alienation and indifference becomes all but intolerable. Before committing suicide, he allows his madness to pour like water on him by imagining “the sound of water was in the room…Every power poured…on his head…when he was bathing, floating, on the top of the waves”(182). As such, Septimus is reaching the climax of his emotional disorder which makes his death inevitable.

Apart from water, rose is also used as imagery to reveal the essential differences and similarities between Clarissa and Septmius. The novel begins when Clarissa goes to the florist to “buy the flowers herself”(3) for the party, indicating that she belongs to a class that can afford the beautiful and frivolous. Septimus’s wife, on the other hand, can only buy the half death roses. Septimus is like his roses, “almost dead already”(121). He will be destroyed, either through losing his selfhood by accepting Sir William’s advice or killing himself. As exemplified by the roses, the society deman