Clarissa Dalloway Chases Immortality

Image: Godward, John William. The Jewel Casket. 1900. WikiArt.org.

Clarissa, Mrs. Richard Dalloway, is not like other heroes from classical Greece. For starters, she’s not Greek but English, and she lives in 1923. Still, her life follows a common pattern of that tradition. The first scene opens in medias res, dumping us on the street next to Clarissa as she pursues flowers for the night’s engagement. She has a recurring encounter with Fate—“the hour, irrevocable…leaden circles dissolved in the air” (Woolf 2157). Rather than sacrifice to fickle and fallible gods, she caters to the ancient rituals of proper English society. Homemaking and hospitality are her idols, the ones that stave off her obsession with death.

And death slinks through every page of her story, like the myths of gods and mortals. It whispers that life is dwindling, towers in the long shadow of the War, startles her with the sound of a gunshot. It appears to every character in images of Marie Antoinette at the guillotine, a bed narrow and stark as a coffin, a restless pocketknife, uniformed boys marching to a tomb. Despite a flurry of airy thoughts and London bustle, the presence of mortality lurks everywhere.

Like every ancient Greek, Clarissa believes the only path to immortality runs through social memory. Balancing the ordinary folk is the godlike royal family, “the majesty of England…the enduring symbol” (Woolf 2164). When the car passes with its hidden aristocrat, Clarissa inhales dignity with all the rest on the street. Her deepest desire is to be known as a noble member of society, one of the immortals. That’s why she marries Richard instead of Peter. That’s why she hosts a party for the elite. That’s why she constantly fusses over her memories. She is the classical archetype in a modern world.

Sources:

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2012, pp. 2156-2264.