Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf’s classic has an uncanny relevance to today’s world.

It is said that in Britain there have been two periods in the past hundred years during which the conflict between the young and the old was more acute than now. These were the cultural changes of the 60's and the period following the first world war, the older generation having sent the younger to die for their country in the trenches of France and Belgium.

In ‘Mrs Dalloway’, the main protagonists are on either side of this divide. The year is 1923. Mrs Dalloway is a high society lady in her fifties: too old to have had her friends fight, too young to have had her children fight and of too high a social class to have felt the effects on the home front. She and her associates are firmly stuck in an echo chamber, in an inward-looking, closed-off world of their own. Mrs Dalloway spends much of the book reminiscing about the days gone by, about her sheltered Victorian upbringing, about whether she married the right man, about her feelings for people around her. Her inner world is very rich in those complicated feelings, boasts a colourful palette of very delicate emotions, however it is restricted, closeted, closed off from reality. The agonizing of Mrs Dalloway, her friend Peter Walsh and the others is very refined, very nuanced, but it all happens on a scale that is very small. They are ants who look at their, admittedly intricate, anthill and think it to be the entire world.

Septimus Warren Smith is a war veteran suffering with PTSD: very much of ‘the real world’ outside Mrs Dalloway’s bubble. These two main characters live their lives on different scales: he on the scale of wars and death, she on the scale of minute feelings. When the story of him killing himself is recounted at her party, she is taken out of her comfort zone: she feels it is beastly for death, depression, suicide to be even talked of in her presence, she cannot bear to be brought face to face with their very existence. (In her final scene in the book she goes away to a little room and makes peace with the idea however). Miss Kilman, the tutor to Mrs Dalloway’s daughter and the epitome of a woman failing to realise her not inconsiderable talents in a male-dominated world, is another character who makes Mrs Dalloway uncomfortable. She feels Miss Kilman to be morally superior, threatening, ‘because she has suffered’, because her real-world problems dwarf anything Mrs Dalloway might be concerned about.

This was not always the case: in her youth she — like her friends — was a Radical, reading William Morris and thinking of social change, but now she prefers to not think of societal problems, let alone of ways to change the system to fix them. The two main characters are separated spatially as well as socially and generationally: the Dalloways hardly ever venture into the City whilst Septimus rarely goes to the West End except sometimes in the evenings. Dalloway’s daughter Elizabeth, the tutee of Miss Kilman, takes an omnibus down the Strand in a rare act of attempting to break boundaries.

It is a clash of worlds not dissimilar to the one of today. The older generation of today’s Mrs Dalloways, comfortable home-owners and in many cases second home owners as well, simply do not understand the younger generation: struggling to get their foot in the door, failing to get decent jobs, to start a family and to buy ‘a house of one’s own’ before they are 40. The older generation have no appreciation for the mental health problems among the young and feel that the younger generation is lazy and spoilt, ‘want it all too fast’: yet they themselves, like Mrs Dalloway, are insulated from many of the current problems, having grown up in an altogether more comfortable age. More than that: those problems are incomprehensible to them, off their scale of ‘normality’, of what is possible and reasonable.

But ‘young versus old’ is perhaps not the only present-day divide that Woolf’s work applies to. The ‘small-scale thinking’ can be seen in many in the so-called ‘political bubbles’ —they are particularly well observable through social media, but also through the mainstream media. These ‘bubbles’ consist of those who participate in the political life of the country — from politicians and journalists through to ordinary people. They seem constantly obsessed over who said what to whom, about whose post on twitter may have breached what guidelines, what quote from a past speech might have offended someone or some other minor detail from the political circus. It is all very petty, very small-scale, very inward-looking, and yet at the same time highly rich in detail, in feeling, in nuance: a whole world of its own. It all generates bitter arguments on social media that can rage for many hours. From the inside, it feels vitally important, crucial, life and death, yet the whole thing exists, like Mrs Dalloway’s internal world, in a closed-off bubble whose occupants cannot comprehend that some aspects of the ‘real life’ at large might be more important.

Now, it would be entirely wrong to say they do not care about the wider issues: similarly, many of Mrs Dalloway’s associates do engage in charitable causes, do acknowledge social issues to be important — but not as important, as, for instance, the colour of the dress one would wear to Mrs Dalloway’s party or who might have said what to whom the day before. Indeed, the idea of trying to fix social problems all too often serves as a backdrop to their interpersonal relations. Likewise, for many in the present-day ‘political bubbles’, jobs, housing, crime are theoretically important, but not so crucial as the latest ‘abuse scandal on twitter’ or the latest careless remark that might have been misinterpreted wrong and caused offense. When reminded that ‘twitter abuse’ is not perhaps as serious as poverty or real life crime, they react in the way Mrs Dalloway reacts to most real world problems — with horror.

At least, they bother justifying this feeling of horror. They would usually describe some dreadful consequences of assigning a lower priority to their cause célèbre: the anti-semitism scandal in the Labour party will somehow turn into widespread pogroms, praising the resolve of Derek Hatton’s rebel council of the 80’s means a real danger of Communism, some slightly over the top criticism on twitter by a group of people equates ‘intimidation of opponents’ and so on. All highly speculative and yet with the aim being to frighten, the result being to distract attention from far bigger issues outside the bubble.

I often feel like wanting to shake them and say ‘wake up! There is a real world with real people outside: look away from your anthills, see the wood for the trees and prioritise the important over the trivial and incidental’. But one fears that this message will, sadly, be a cry in the wilderness.