{"id":248,"date":"2020-03-03T16:18:07","date_gmt":"2020-03-03T16:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevesearls.com\/?p=248"},"modified":"2020-03-03T16:18:07","modified_gmt":"2020-03-03T16:18:07","slug":"mrs-dalloway-and-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevesearls.com\/?p=248","title":{"rendered":"Mrs. Dalloway and I"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019m reading Mrs. Dalloway, <\/em>by Virginia Woolf, again.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am always fascinated at how she shifts from the consciousness of one character to another, sometimes in mid-sentence. We\u2019re introduced to them, not just outwardly, from Clarissa\u2019s perspective, but often when Woolf reveals to us their unspoken thoughts and emotions, the inner speech that runs through all our brains and never truly stops. \u00a0The entire novel is one long stream of her characters\u2019 consciousnesses, and though we experience the mind of Woolf\u2019s title character, Clarissa Dalloway more than anyone else, we see into everyone we meet. The inner life of each new mind is presented to her readers, all of them looking for someone with whom to converse, but most often talking only with themselves. Each so different: some light and frothy, perhaps a bit fragile; others dark and mysterious or sad or dangerous. And then there are the ones with minds as blank and vacant and open as any summer landscape one might gaze upon while driving across the flat lands of Nebraska or Kansas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the\nmoment, I\u2019m observing Mrs. Dalloway and her thoughts, and then the thoughts of\nher former beaux, Peter Walsh, who still loves her, still wants her, and yet\nstill retains such bitter feelings because Clarissa rejected his proposal when\nClarissa was of an age when women of her era were expected to marry. She saw\nhim as unstable, and he \u2013 well he was in his way, a man who failed to live up\nto the expectations of the English upper class back when Britain was still an\nEmpire. Woolf shifts back and forth between the two of them, moving from their\npresent to what they each remembers of their shared past. Woolf lets us wallow\na while among the very separate and distinct memories each recalls regarding\nClarissa\u2019s closest female friend, Sally, the wild child who Clarissa in a\nmoment of unusual spontaneity for her once kissed and then imagined that unexpected\nevent  was a sign pointing to who she loved\nbest.  But now, looking back to that\nsingular moment in time, she views her younger self as only a child who was\njust old enough to masquerade as an adult, acting the part expected of her,\nexhibiting a pretense of maturity, blind to the fact that,  despite believing her experience was  unique and special, it was, in truth, no\ndifferent than what  all young people experience,\nwhether they lived in Edwardian England before the Great War, or today amid the\nriot of iPhones and tablets and other instantaneous communication devices to\nwhich our age has provided us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then I\u2019m interrupted by a different reality. I turn away from the world of Mrs. Dalloway because a small black bug, in appearance like a miniature beetle, crawls near my open eye, the one that was reading Woolf\u2019s book as my head lay atop a pillow. I stop to watch the creature, marking slow progress across the surface of my pillow as it fumbles upward toward a goal I cannot determine, clinging to the tiny cotton threads of the pillow case as if they were steps of a ladder of infinite length. It wobbles from side to side on its six legs, which cannot be seen immediately; and I marvel at its perfection. The tiny black head; the much larger carapace that flows from that head; and the stick-like legs, showing themselves only for the briefest of instances before movement and its great body (great in proportion to those legs if I ignore its size relative to my own) again obscure them from my view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my mind,\nI imagine Clarissa Dalloway seeing the same scene, but in her world, the world\nof well born gentry and servants in a London that was the center of the English\nspeaking world. But I also I imagine the \nother, smaller worlds within which Clarissa had caged herself: her\nmarriage to a stolid, competent, well settled husband, and her daily routines,\nthe parties she threw and, of course, her incessant need for flowers, flowers\nshe must select herself. I think about her possible reaction to the little\ncreature I see in my world, one that she would believe was formed by God or at\nleast by the semblance of one, that eternal but absent watchmaker who set the\ngears of the universe in motion once upon a time among  the vacuum that lies between the stars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I ask\nmyself, \u201cWhat would Clarissa do?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A foolish\nquestion, really, since I already chose to take the tiny animal and smother it\nbetween my fingers, feeling only the slightest of sensations, as though its\nsmall form existed in two dimensions, not three. Then I begin to think that I\u2019d\nimagined everything (Mrs. Dalloway, the book, the pillow, the little black bug\nand the fingers held closed so tightly), and I open those fingers, the index\nfinger and the thumb of my right hand. And there it appears as the perfect\nspecimen, no longer alive but not crushed either, still and motionless and\nquiet, outside of time and space, in that eternity the Tibetans named the Bardo<\/em> , of which only the dead have any knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* \n* *<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The legend\ntold about of Virginia Woolf as regards Mrs.\nDalloway<\/em>, speaks of her great crisis while writing it, a crisis not\nphysical but psychological, a crisis of the spirit, one she agonized for days.\nWhat was it? No less than the question of who must die in her overwhelming,\npreposterous novel\u2014 that is, which character must be her sacrificial victim\u2014not\nfor purposes of advancing the plot, but to appease the author\u2019s own capricious\nnature.  For days it\u2019s said, she sat in her\nchair at her desk, her pen poised in midair over a piece of paper, when\nsuddenly she spoke aloud to no one but herself: \nSomeone must die.  But who? \nWho must die?  <\/em>Then she gasped\nin astonishment, not outwardly so much as inwardly, a gasp one might have seen expressed\nonly as the briefest flash playing across the irises of her eyes, like a solar\nflare –  the moment when she knew which\none it must be, and why it must be that particular poor sod and not another of\nher creations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later that\nmorning she tells her husband her decision has been made.  He knows the story, knows all the characters\nalready, knows that she has been struggling to find a dramatic climax against\nwhich to contrast the lives of her characters and bring them into focus, a\ncounterpoint to all their internal joys and sorrows and banality of their\nlives; and he says simply, Who?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poet, <\/em>she says.  The poet is Septimus Warren Smith, a war veteran, a man traumatized by his\nexperience, the character who knows that he is going slowly, inevitably mad. He\nhears voices no one else can hear and sees the ghosts of his dead comrades, the\nones he loved and yet could not mourn. In his hallucinations they come to him\nto offer the only grace he is willing to accept for having survived the war\nwhen they did not.  Suicide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today a doctor would be diagnose him with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and handed him a prescription for one of many antidepressant medications \u2014 likely one of the selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors such as Sertaline, Fluoxetine, Paxil, Celexa, etc.\u00a0 In addition, therapy of some kind would be offered, whether individual counseling or group therapy with others who share his affliction.\u00a0 This outcome assumes, of course, that our present-day military psychiatric professionals, resisting pressure from those higher up the chain of command (for whom our mentally ill poet warrior would be seen as a future liability of undetermined and unknown expense and not as a human being to whom some measure of respect and dignity is owed) would be willing to make that diagnosis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But PTSD was\nnot recognized as a mental illness in the years between The Great War and WWII,\nand there were no specific chemicals to adjust one\u2019s brain chemistry to stave\noff depression.  As for therapy, only\nanalytic psychologists, like Freud, believed in any sort of \u201ctalking\ncure.\u201d   At worst, ordinary physicians\nwould treat Woolf\u2019s poet as a malingerer, coward or, if feeling generous, affix\nthe label \u201cshell-shocked\u201d to him when invariably they would find no\nphysiological cause for the his bizarre behavior and emotional distress.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At best, he\nwould be offered the benefits of the prevailing psychiatric theory that\nindividuals suffering from such symptoms should be treated with the rest cure<\/em>:  total isolation from all extraneous stimuli,\nsuch as family and friends, at a facility in the country staffed by strangers\nwho would provide meals and housekeeping services, but nothing more. He might\nbe allowed mild physical exercise, such as walks through the woods or fields\nthat surrounded these houses of healing, but nothing more.  No companionship would be provided and\nintimate compassionate friendship would be denied.  He would not even be permitted a book to read\nto pass the time.  He would receive only\ndisinterested oversight by staff for the sole purpose of preventing him from\nharming himself or others. The institution would not employ caregivers, only\njailers designed to impose on their patients a universe of less: less empathy,\nless human contact, less of everything but mist especially less love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be\ntreated in this fashion was In effect, a type of solitary confinement, which we\nnow consider torture. Under solitary confinement, human beings, social\ncreatures that they are, lose the vital sense of community we all require, and\nthus a large part of their identity.  Oh,\nthe rest cure worked in a fashion for a few people.  It might have blunted the sharp edges of certain\nindividuals with anxiety disorders, but at the expense of imposing a terrible\nmelancholy. If fortunate, those who survived the pain it demanded of them would\nbe allowed to return to their mundane lives; but it could not stave off a return\nof their worst symptoms and behaviors that brought them to the attention of\nthose who advocated for a rest cure in the first place.  Regrettably, this cure did nothing to help those\nwho were treated resist the terrors of their paranoia or hallucinations, and gave\nthem nothing to ward off the degradation of the self that serious mental\nillness imposes.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rest\ncure was at best a stopgap measure, like slapping a Band-Aid over a\nwound that requires surgery.  Its claimed\nsuccesses more often than not were exaggerated, at best.  Inevitably those with disturbed minds would relapse\nand require another stay at one of these places, another rest cure that\nisolated them from family and friends, with each new cycle of hysteria<\/em> or neurasthenia<\/em> requiring a longer period of recovery, until the day\nwhen the patients became permanent fixtures living out their lives in these institutions\ndesigned more to warehouse them than cure them, unless they chose the only\nalternative treatment available to all: taking their own lives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That Woolf\nchose to kill off Septimus Warren Smith,\nher war poet, and the only other character Woolf reveals as much about as Clarissa\nDalloway, was not surprising; for Septimus, gender notwithstanding, was the\ncharacter with whom she most identified. \nThe poet\u2019s death in Mrs. Dalloway <\/em>prefigured\nWoolf\u2019s own suicide a little less than two decades later when she placed heavy\nstones into her coat pockets and walked into a river where she drowned.  For Woolf had received the benefit<\/em> of the rest cure herself, and despised\nit. She never thought it was a legitimate medical treatment, recognizing it as torture\nlong before the medical community finally did. \nHer description in Mrs. Dalloway<\/em>\nof the renowned physician and psychiatrist who conceived of this \u201drevolutionary\ntreatment,\u201d a man who also directly benefited financially from placing the\nmentally ill in his facilities where it was employed,  is a no less than a thinly veiled jeremiad\nagainst the ignorance and self-importance of the medical practitioners of her\nday, who in their arrogance believed they had discovered the only way to cure patients\nsuffering from  hysteria, melancholia and\nall the other terms they invented to disparage those suffering from mental and\npsychological disorders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Woolf likely\nsuffered from a bipolar disorder for most of her life, exacerbated or created\nby childhood trauma.  The early death of\nher mother was one trauma she endured, but not the only one.  She was sexual molested on countless\noccasions by her older half brothers. \nWhen her father died nine years after her mother\u2019s death, she was\ninstitutionalized for the first time for what is usually described by her\nbiographers as a \u201cnervous breakdown,\u201d an amorphous term that hides more than it\nreveals about the stress and anxiety that led her family to take such a drastic\nmeasure.  Indeed, at least one of her\nbiographers, Peter Dally, who wrote The\nMarriage of Heaven and Hell: Manic Depression and the Life of Virginia Woolf<\/em>\n(St Martin’s Press, NY, 1999), believed that she sought to understand and\ncontrol the chaos of her madness through her writing, which \u201c\u2026 provided the\n‘strongest pleasure’ she knew.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She could\ndiscern the parameters of her mental condition far better than most medical\nprofessionals of her time.  Woolf , as\nshe grew older, knew that her symptoms were worsening over time, and she did\nnot wish to end her days confined  in a\npsychiatric institution, unable to write, unable to read, lost in the maelstrom\nof her own emotions.   In truth, her\nsuicide can be considered a rational response to a problem that had no\nsolution.  In retrospect, her life long fight\nto write and publish her work, and the brilliance of her writing, with its\ncelebration of life as it is and not as we would wish it to be, are all the\nmore poignant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, which is\nworse:  the death in Mrs. Dalloway<\/em> of Septimus Warren Sutton, her guilt-ridden war\nsurvivor poet, or the death of that tiny black insect I suffocated between your\nfingers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You may think\nthe answer is easy.  The insect was alive\nbefore I killed it.  It was real.  Septimus, a fictional character, though based\non actual veterans who survived the horrors of the First World War and\nstruggled for the rest of their lives because of those grim and terrifying\nexperiences, was not.  He was an imaginary\nbeing brought to life only when we read Mrs.\nDalloway<\/em>.  But perhaps, for some of\nyou, doubt may begin to find a pathway into your consciousness, casting its\ngrey shadow and obscuring the clarity of your thoughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For wasn\u2019t\nSeptimus Warren Smith real to you while you read the book? Was he not, in fact,\nmore real in your mind than the people in Haiti who died from a catastrophe\nthat dwarfs the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the one that brought forth\nVoltaire\u2019s scorn on the idea of a just God, the argument made by Leibnitz that we\nlive in the best of all possible worlds? \nDidn\u2019t you fee a spark of empathy for Semptimus\u2019 anguish, his despair at\nthe unraveling of his mind, more than whatever you feel for the suffering those\nbombed by America\u2019s armed forces in faraway places where no one we know resides?  Don\u2019t lie. \nYou know it to be true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such is the way an artist works her will on the world.\u00a0 For what matters are your perceptions of reality, and what you do not perceive directly is less real to you.\u00a0 We see fleeting pixels on the screens of our devices of the dead around the world, and for many, our reaction is muted. For inundated with thousands of images of death and destruction every day, many of us have become numb. All those images of violence or starvation or poverty or tragedy broadcast from every corner of the world into our homes by satellites have desensitized us.\u00a0 Where once the staged portraits of the Civil War dead taken by Matthew Brady\u2019s company of roving photographers stirred emotions so intense that their photographs were deemed too realistic and inflammatory, now we observe brutality in living color <\/em>every day if we so choose. It\u2019s not a surprise so many choose to turn away from what is real, preferring fictional violence and tragedy in the books we read, the movies we watch \u00a0and the video games we play, instead. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trick\nthe novelist uses in crafting a great work of art is to make you perceive the\nemotions of her characters, people who live in only as words on a page, in a world\nshe conjures for you and into which you can escape any time you desire.  And, as Woolf did in Mrs. Dalloway<\/em>, an author does that by placing you inside her\ncharacter\u2019s minds, giving you unprecedented access to their fictional lives. We\nbear witness to their dreams, desires, thoughts and actions, their moments of joy\nand of sorrow, and every other emotion in between.  In Mrs.\nDalloway<\/em>, Woolf seduces you; and if you permit that seduction to take root,\nyou identify with her characters, engage with them, and care deeply about what\nhappens to them. In them, you may see a part of yourself. They become real to\nyou because she crafted them with such artistry that you forget they are\nnothing but constructs fashioned with the tools all writers use \u2013 words and\nwords alone.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The great\nmovie directors do the same with clever editing of the images they capture on\nfilm, the dialogue spoken by actors from the screenplay, ambient sound and a musical\nscore added to make you to feel sympathy for the protagonists, whether they are\n good or evil.  Who has not secretly rooted for Ray Milland\nto escape justice in Dial M for Murder <\/em>despite\nthe cold beauty of Grace Kelly, who plays his wife and intended victim?  Is that wrong?  Of course it is wrong; but you feel his\ndesperation as the Police Inspector closes in on him, and you pity him despite\neverything he\u2019s done to bring about the murder of his wife, don\u2019t you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking\nback, many of you may find it is easy to view me as a villain for killing that\npoor black bug that was no threat to me. But if that thoughtless act were\nportrayed in the right way, you might forgive me, provided I framed my action\nwithin a different context, say one of abject terror caused by an irrational\nfear of insects. For what is a bug but a mindless automaton, a mere semblance\nof life without consciousness as we know it? \nAnd are we not also a part of nature, where death is meted out on a\ndaily basis?  All life is fated to die, you,\nme and the bug as well.  The best any\ncreature can manage is to pass on a partial and inadequate copy of itself in\nthe DNA of its progeny.  The replication\nof your voice or the line of your jaw in a son or daughter is but a ghostly\nreminder of what you will become when death claims you, just as you are an\napparition formed from a multitude of ancestors, your life just the\ncontinuation of dreams that existed before you were born and that will continue\nafter you die.  It was the bug\u2019s time to\npass over from life into death.  I was\njust the instrument of its transition from one state to the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You see the\nlogic of this argument; yet still I suspect many of you may never forgive me\nfor this small act of violence. Yet how many of us forgive those who have spent\nyears killing countless human beings, many of them innocent bystanders, because\nas soldiers we accept that their murderous acts are justified in order to\nprotect us?  I know of people who cry\ntears over abused animals they watch on television, while applauding drone\nstrikes by our military against people in Muslim countries, because they believe\nwith all their heart that, regardless of the guilt or innocence of the dead, they\nmust be terrorists who threaten our way of life, if not now then in the future,\nand so killing them was an act of national self-defense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furthermore,\nwhat about political leaders who make decisions that harm millions every day,\ntaking away needed services from vulnerable populations because a budget must\nbe balanced or a tax cut implemented? Or those in government agencies who\nbrutalize people because they are illegal immigrants that have no right to be in\nour country and so deserve whatever abusive treatment our government doles out?\n Or all the black men and women, poor or\nnot, who are killed or wrongfully terrorized by police forces across the\ncountry, because they are presumed by so many to be a threat to more civilized people\n\u201clike us?\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut,\u201d you\nmight say to me, \u201cIt\u2019s impossible not to do harm in this world! \u201c That may be\ntrue. But who ever said that the truth would let you off the hook? No wonder we\nseek solace and\/or catharsis in fiction, caring more for the deaths of people\nwho live only in our imaginations than for those who suffer and die in the\nworld outside the confines of a book we\u2019re reading or a film we\u2019re watching. No\nwonder I return again and again the Mrs. Dalloway,<\/em>\nfor in the world Virginia Woolf crafted, I can escape the harsh reality of the\nimmoral acts that are perpetrated against my fellow humans every day, reserving\nmy tears for the tragic death of a man who never took a breath, because he was\nnever real to begin with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m reading Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, again. I am always fascinated at how she shifts from the consciousness of one character to another, sometimes in mid-sentence. We\u2019re introduced to…<\/p>\n

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