There She Was

One of the most pivotal and important themes in Mrs. Dalloway is what one might call “identity”.  A big question that Virginia Woolf poses is, “What does it mean for one to truly know another person or one’s self?” We spend a huge part of the book viewing Clarissa’s internal image of herself and other people’s opinions and views of her, but yet by the end of the book we still cannot definitely say that at any point in time Clarissa is exactly one thing or another.  One of my favorite questions posed by Mr. Mitchell in class was, “Is Clarissa Dalloway happy?” This question does not have any correct answer.  Clarissa, like all of us, is in constant fluctuation, and Woolf’s internal camera shows us that even when she appears to be very pleasant and “happy” from the outside, there is always more going on beneath the surface.  Woolf dives so deeply into the central characters’ brains that the reader knows much more about each central character than the other characters know about them, but yet we still see that even those central characters are conflicted in their own views of themselves.

One passage key to Woolf’s sense of identity, which we mentioned briefly in class, occurs when Clarissa is alone in her room, looking at a mirror, trying to “assemble” herself:

“How many million times she had seen her face, and always with the same imperceptible contraction! She pursed her lips when she looked in the glass. It was to give her face point. That was her self — pointed; dartlike; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy no doubt in some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps; she had helped young people, who were grateful to her; had tried to be the same always, never showing a sign of all the other sides of her — faults, jealousies, vanities, suspicions…” (pg 36)

            The picture on the cover of the Scott edition of Mrs. Dalloway (see below) is extremely symbolic and connects well to this quote and Woolf’s views on identity. The abstract spheres, squares, and other shapes all are coming to one central point, like Clarissa’s pieces of herself coming together while she’s looking in the mirror. You can identify specific parts of the picture, but you cannot say what the picture is as a whole: you can say specific things about parts of Clarissa, but you cannot simply summarize her with these statements. Clarissa, like all of us, is in constant motion and her identity is always changing.  And yet there she was, on this mid-June day in London, doing what she does best: being Clarissa Dalloway.