Yes, I realize that this is a classic. And I do enjoy the use of language to its fullest potential. But honestly, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is beginning to wear a bit thin. I think perhaps that once the dazzle of the different technique in writing style, the poetic phrasing, the stream of consciousness manipulated wonderfully well by Woolfe as she jumps from inside one head into another; once that is properly appreciated, one might admit to finding the reading a bit tedious and bordering on boring.
Here Clarissa is considering what her husband as well as Peter Walsh must think of her, and she justifies to herself her position:
But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Her was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom? (p. 122)
Clarissa is comparing her caring for her friends and giving them parties to her husband’s work in helping the (Armenians or Albanians, Clarissa isn’t sure which).
Yes, there is insight into people of this social strata and era, and yes, it is done in an artistic way, so there is meaning behind the story of Clarissa giving a party. There is more to it; there is a love affair brought up be a reunion. And there are parallel stories going on that are heart-rending; Septimus Smith and his wife, who fears he is losing his mind after losing his sense of all feelings during his service in the war.
But there is a limit to my appreciation, I guess, of the form. The excerpt above is one of the simpler ones, and more direct. There are others that hold more weight than they appear, and are poetic and metaphorically graphic.
But I’m just getting tired of it all. Now I might think that it is a character of the times that I cannot relate to, but I am caring less and less about most of these characters while I joyfully read Dorothy Parker (not deep, but instinctive, I’d say) and felt much more for her worlds, and they were very much the same as the world of Clarissa Dalloway. Maybe I’m just not up for Woolf right now. But I I’m only sixty pages away from the end (please, Dear God) and I know that if I put it down, I shall never pick it up to complete it.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology