The hated Ms. Kilman

The Panel Presentation my group gave this week focused around a paper titled Equating Performance with Identity: The Failure of Clarissa Dalloway’s Victorian “Self” in Virginia Wool’s Mrs. Dalloway. Kind of a long title, but it was an interesting and thought provoking paper. Most of it focused around Clarissa Dalloway herself and her role as the perfect hostess, but a section of the paper also focuses on her daughter Elizabeth. More specifically it talks about Elizabeth’s life choices and how they compare to Clarissa, but it does by comparing her choices of role model between her mother, Mrs. Dalloway, and Ms. Kilman.

Ms. Kilman was a very interesting character to me, and one I wish we had looked at a little more in class discussions. The general sense I seemed to be getting from people was that they didn’t like Ms. Kilman very much, but I actually found myself empathizing with her quite a lot. What she represented in the paper however was Elizabeth’s desire to find a profession herself, as opposed to resigning herself to the same role her mother represents. Eventually Elizabeth seems to side with her mother as far as that she decides to attend her mother’s party as opposed to staying with Ms. Kilman and as a result chooses the perfect hostess roll over that of a profession.

If one were to assume that this is how Woolf meant it to be interpreted this presents an interesting view on Woolf’s own view of how a woman might define her sense of identity. Feminism was an important idea to Woolf and she wrote and extremely influential essay on the matter titled A Room of One’s Own. In it she states, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”, and more broadly she talks about the idea that women need similar support to that which a husband traditionally acquired from his wife if they are to have a fruitful career. What I find so striking here though is that there’s really no clear bias as to which root Woolf seems to feel is the better one.  Despite being an outspoken feminist and someone who had a lot to say about what women needed for their careers her novel doesn’t present a particularly pleasant idea of what the professional woman is like. Ms. Kilman certainly isn’t the happiest character in the book.

There wasn’t a great deal of discussion in my class about the extent to which Woolf’s own life is reflected in her novel, but I’ve always enjoyed trying to get to know the author a little better. After every good novel I’ve read I’ve always wanted to sit down with the author and just talk with them and get to know them a little better. Anyways, maybe this could provide a certain insight for the curious author into who Virginia Woolf was.

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

As one reads Mrs. Dalloway it becomes very clear to the reader that one of the main focuses of the novel is to explore the various ways in which we as human beings are related to one another. One of the biggest questions that her characters cause you to wonder is to what extent do we really understand one another? Well I haven't got a clear answer to this one, but it does seem that there's an awful lot in the novel to suggest Virginia Woolf feels that we don't really understand one another very well. I may or may not agree with her here, I haven't made up my mind, but I think it's a failed reading of the novel to assume that this is all Woolf has to say regarding our connectedness to one another. Understanding is a big motivator behind human action and it's understandable she would want to explore it's role in our lives, but I feel that another aspect of human interaction that Woolf plays with--and one which in my own opinion wasn't very well represented in class discussion--was that of how we influence one another and the connections formed as a result. 

Clarissa Dalloway as a character seems to spend a very large portion of her time contemplating the idea of death. I suppose it could be said that she also contemplates the idea of life a lot, since the two go hand in hand, but it does seem to be something that ways very heavily on her, as it probably did on Virginia Woolf. In fact for a self-proclaimed atheist she has a remarkably religious view on the role interconnectivity amongst humans plays in life and death. It says,

"Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? But that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in eachother, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself” (9)

Clarissa really seems to feel as though her essence as a being is what she refers to as the mist that spreads out over all the people and places she knows, and that that connectedness is what she considers to be her life.

            Such contemplation of the nature of life and death continues throughout the novel for Clarissa, but perhaps the most striking example of this is what the mention of Septimus Smith’s suicide evokes in her. Merely at the mention of it from Lady Bradshaw Clarissa wanders solitarily into a room separate from her party in order to contemplate the nature of suicide. In fact as Mr. Mitchell has pointed out a number of times it seems almost mystical the manner in which she pictures the very way that Septimus takes his own life. For a novel whose main goal is present an accurate representation of life there must be something that Woolf is trying to say with this scene. At least one of the messages I take away from it is that she’s trying to demonstrate the nature in which all our lives can be connected and influence one another, even in regards to the way Septimus who isn’t even living any more can cause such a strong response from Clarissa. In fact this was really the only time in the novel when someone seems to really understand some of the troubles that Septimus faced.

            Maybe this is my own feeble attempt to try and draw some hope for the idea that we aren’t all just floating in our bubbles, unable to see clearly into anyone else’s. That being said I do hold that there is a lot in Mrs. Dalloway that supports the view that we’re all ultimately very connected to one another. I remember that during one class discussion I proposed as a response to the idea that there’s not a real connection between Septimus and Clarissa the relationship that we as readers hold with Virginia Woolf herself.  Certainly she couldn’t have predicted the influences her book might have on future readers, and indeed it’s not hard to imagine a book like this being extremely influential in some reader’s lives. It’s definitely been quite a journey for me to read through its pages and think through the ideas contained within. In some way you might even be able to say readers had an impact on her life, in that she undoubtedly worried about the ways in which readers would interpret what was to become one of her masterpieces. Maybe I’m just deluding myself with a fantasy though.