Mrs Dalloway Read Online Free PDF Page B

Clarissa has been unable toovercome the inhibitions and timidity of her upbringing. Like many sensitive characters in Woolf’s fiction, she understands her own capacities for bisexuality and sympathizes with them in others.
    Yet these musings about the nature of her sexuality seem less an expression of Clarissa’s lesbianism than an effort to understand a sexual dimension in her life that she feels is now irrevocably lost. She and Richard are no longer sharing a bedroom; sexual relations between them have ceased, and she can no longer expect that erotic pleasure will come to her. Richard is as repressed as she is, but a loving and tender partner who has accepted and perhaps not even missed this aspect of their marriage.
    In part, Clarissa’s concern about her lack of sexual responsiveness – after thirty years of a happy marriage – reflects the changes in attitude after the war. As the historian Susan Kent argues, ‘British society sought in the establishment of harmonious marital relationships a resolution to the anxieties and political turmoil caused by the First World War.’ 47 The standards for sexual harmony within marriage were changing. Thus:
    discourses about female sexuality which before the war had emphasized women’s lack of sexual impulse, and even distaste for sexual intercourse, underwent modification to accommodate the political, social, and economic requirements of the post-war period. The new accent on motherhood was accompanied by a growing emphasis on the importance of sexual activity, sexual pleasure, sexual compatibility, between husband and wife. 48
    When we think of Clarissa as a menopausal woman, the connections between her crisis and Septimus’sbecome more clear and sharp. Initially, Woolf had intended the book to end with Clarissa’s death: ‘Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party.’ 49 We may surmise that in this plan, Woolf was thinking of Clarissa as a deeply depressed woman, someone so sensitive to the suffering behind the masquerade of gaiety around her that she becomes a scapegoat.
    Instead, however, it is Septimus Smith who kills himself, and who serves as Clarissa’s double. He is linked to Clarissa through his anxieties about sexuality and marriage; his anguish about mortality and immortality; and his acute sensitivities to his surroundings, which have gone over the line into madness. When she first imagined the character of Septimus in October 1922, Woolf saw him as a madman who believed himself to be Christ and planned to assassinate the Prime Minister and become a political martyr: ‘As I am going to die I will kill the Prime Minister . . . I shall be immortal, he thought, my name will be on all the placards.’ 50 Several themes muted in the final draft of the book – the fascination with crime and assassination, the sense of messianic martyrdom, and the post-war obsession with publicity – appear in this early formulation. Although she did not develop them fully, Woolf anticipated many of this century’s concerns with the psychology of the assassin and the serial killer.
    In revision, however, Septimus became a figure specifically connected with the war. At Clarissa’s party, Sir William Bradshaw discusses a Bill to deal with ‘the deferred effects of shell shock’ (p. 201), and Septimus is a symbolic ‘shell shock’ case. This term, alluding to the shell explosions military doctors initially blamed for the epidemic of psychological disturbances among soldiersin World War I, actually described various forms of male hysteria in which the terror, anguish, and immobility of combat led to a variety of physical and emotional conversion symptoms: limps, contractions, paralysis, stammering, loss of voice, sexual impotence, blindness, deafness, heart palpitations, insomnia, nightmares, dizziness, or acute depression.
    A widespread early military