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Dalloway
, Woolf was troubled by the decision imposed upon her by her doctors that she should not have children, a decision reflected in the portrait of Sir William Bradshaw, the man who ‘forbade childbirth’. Menopause was the symbol of the irrevocable end of childbearing which, in her forties, she recognized as a practical if not a biological fact. The novel is preoccupied with these questions on many levels – in Septimus’s mad horror of thebody and reproduction, in Rezia’s longing for a baby, and in Clarissa’s coming to terms with the finality of a central aspect of her identity.
    Moreover, according to the medical opinion of Woolf’s day, menopause was a condition to be dreaded and feared as much as insanity, and indeed closely allied with it. The attitudes towards the menopausal woman which form an elegiac background to the novel were representative of Woolf’s own generation. She had inherited a dismal mythology about the ‘change of life’ that made it a subject of deep interest and anxiety in her middle years. From the mid-nineteenth century on, menopause had been increasingly medicalized, and linked with depression, madness, and even suicide. Doctors warned that a menopausal woman’s melancholia could lead her to kill herself. In a particularly grim description published in 1924, Helene Deutsch described menopause as a hopeless process of decline: ‘Everything she acquired in puberty is now lost piece by piece; with the lapse of the reproductive service, her beauty vanishes, and usually the warm, vital flow of feminine emotional life as well.’ 46
    Clarissa has internalized these views. She feels that her body, now that there is ‘no more marrying, no more having of children’ (p. 11) has become invisible, almost ceased to exist. Her fear of insubstantiality and social invisibility is triggered by the discovery that she has been excluded from Millicent Bruton’s lunch party, a moment that leaves her feeling ‘shrivelled, aged, breastless’ (p. 33), and that introduces an extraordinary lyric meditation:
    There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. Atmidday they must disrobe . . . Narrower and narrower would her bed be.’ (pp. 33–4)
    The passage hauntingly echoes the Fool’s last speech in
King Lear
: ‘And I’ll go to bed at noon.’ (III. vi. 85) In her attic room, with its candle half-burnt down, Clarissa pauses ‘at midday’ to consider the midpoint of her life. For women, Woolf suggests, the prime years are solitary, and empty as the womb; the female body sheds its ‘rich apparel’ as the ageing woman must divest herself psychologically of her sexuality in a preparation for death. The narrow bed, with its tight white sheets, where she ‘sleeps undisturbed,’ is a figure for the grave. This decline is Clarissa’s equivalent of the wintry retreat from Moscow she reads about alone at night.
    But menopause involves reintegration as well as loss, and can lead to growth if a woman confronts both consciously and unconsciously issues regarding femininity, sexuality, and identity. Indeed, Clarissa works through some of these feelings during the course of her day, and does come to feel at peace with ‘having done with the triumphs of youth’.
    One major aspect of this process is Clarissa’s confrontation with her sexual feelings for Sally Seton, and her effort to apply these insights to her own daughter’s infatuation with the lesbian Miss Kilman. In her attic room, Clarissa remembers her girlhood fascination with Sally Seton, for whom she felt ‘what men felt’ (p. 34). With Sally there had been excitement, ecstasy, and a kiss: ‘the most exquisite moment of her whole life’ (p. 38). This remembered love between women seems much freer and richer than any of her feelings for men. Even with her beloved husband,