Rooms of Their Own: The Spatialized Consciousness of Clarissa and Septimus in Mrs Dalloway

BY TEO CHEE YAN, YALE-NUS COLLEGE

Introduction

The feminist critique on the politics of space was central to Virginia Woolf’s conception of the private space in many of her works. Scholars have discussed at length Woolf’s interrogation of the private space as “the site of middle-class female domestic confinement” and its duality as “the site of dynamic female potential” in A Room of One’s Own (1929) and her later works The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938).[1] Beyond Woolf’s preoccupation with gendered spaces, what is perhaps less widely addressed is her portrayal of “the imbrication of space and individual consciousness”[2] and the complex relationship between physical space and the identity one manifests within it. This relationship is perhaps most markedly and thoroughly explored in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), where Woolf employs the stream of consciousness narrative mode. By weaving in and out of characters’ minds to construct a narrative of the titular character’s life, Woolf skillfully elucidates the intersection between physical space and individual consciousness. As Woolf reveals the interiority of her characters through the spaces that they inhabit, Woolf’s explication of spatialized consciousness in Mrs Dalloway warrants deeper study and further dissection.

  This essay pays particular attention to Woolf’s use of physical space in Mrs. Dalloway to explore and evince the mental and emotional headspace of the protagonist Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged upper-class lady, and Septimus Warren Smith, a young World War I veteran suffering from shell-shock and hallucinations. Woolf seeks to examine the relationship between characters’ interiority and their private rooms, namely the attic room for the former and Mrs. Filmer’s sitting room for the latter. For both Clarissa and Septimus, the private rooms facilitate their ruminations in two ways: First, the privacy of their rooms provides the characters with a refuge from the gaze of society and enables them to engage in candid dialogue with their truest and innermost selves. Second, the objects and physical space of the private rooms anchor their consciousness to the present reality even as their minds wander across fluid time and space, transfixing past, present, and future into ordinary and yet revelatory moments of being. Yet while these evanescent moments of private reflection translate to a renewed sense of vigour and enthusiasm for life in Clarissa, expressed through her love for parties, Septimus’ moments of clarity lead him to embrace the liberation of death as he renounces life and thus preserves its dignity. In revealing the characters’ interiority through their deepest reflections in the private space, Woolf evinces the striking similarity between the parallel characters of Clarissa and Septimus, providing a lens through which we can begin to understand Septimus’ eventual suicide. Ultimately, as we navigate Clarissa and Septimus’ consciousness amidst the physical space, Woolf subtly highlights the transcendent healing power of the private space as the “heart of life”.

Self-reflection in the private space

In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf denotes the attic room as the titular character’s private space, into which she retreats for a respite from the public eye. Historically, in Victorian literary culture, the attic room has been associated with the social oppression of women, as well as a place of release: consider, for example, Bertha Mason’s imprisonment in Jane Eyre and Maggie Tulliver’s retreat into the attic in The Mill on the Floss. Gilbert and Gubar’s seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic further highlights its paradoxical image as a space of women’s physical confinement as well as one associated with their creative freedom and imagination.

Figure 1: Artistic representation of popular conceptions of “the madwoman in the attic” in the Victorian literary imagination.

Woolf’s choice of the attic as Clarissa’s private space is therefore significant, situating Clarissa amidst a broader understanding of the “quintessential woman in the attic”.[3] In the attic room, as Clarissa engages in critical evaluation of her private self-vis-à-vis her public persona presented to others, we see that Clarissa embodies the trope as a woman who retreats into the attic to escape the oppression of Victorian society and seeks her true identity in its privacy. As Perla Korosec-Serfaty also notes in The Home From Attic to Cellar, the public dimension of the home’s visible spaces serves as a visage of a person’s mode of being on socially-acceptable terms, while simultaneously acting as a mask that distances the outsider from the private dimension of hidden spaces, such as the attic.[4] We see this manifest as Clarissa notes upon entering the attic room that it is in the attic that “[w]omen must put off their rich apparel” and “disrobe”.[5] As she withdraws from the visible space of the sitting room and retires to the safety and comfort of the hidden attic room, the shedding of these layers of fine clothing is akin to Clarissa’s casting off of her outward layers of social identity as a hostess, wife, and mother, serving an important function in dismantling the veneer of upper-class nobility and refinement that Clarissa otherwise constantly maintains to leave only her most fundamental and vulnerable self. In the attic, Woolf also alludes to the ineffability of the self as Clarissa ruminates upon how “she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world” she was.[6] Clarissa is described to be “composed,” which suggests an intentional construction of a public identity compatible with societal expectations, departing from her true nature with its “faults, jealousies, vanities, suspicions”.[7] Woolf thus creates a striking juxtaposition between the constructed Clarissa “who sat in her drawing-room,” a “radiancy…in some dull lives” and a “refuge for the lonely,” and the real Clarissa we see in the attic, vulnerable, brooding, and isolated.[8] From this, we glimpse the attic’s liminality as Clarissa straddles the public and private spheres within it and is afforded the mental headspace to recognize and confront the divergence between her public and private self. Woolf thereby highlights the relationship between space and the identity one manifests within it, setting up the private space of the attic as a site of critical self-examination and in turn potential reconciliation of the divided self.

The nature of the attic room as a private space also creates a refuge that permits Clarissa to express her repressed emotions, free from the judgment of society. Korosec-Serfaty describes the attic as an “intimate place that only the dweller is thoroughly familiar with,” where its quality of being safe and secretive affords one with “opportunities of withdrawal and protection”.[9] This quality of the attic room is demonstrated as Clarissa unveils her deepest secret amidst the safety and privacy of the attic, confronting for the first time her socially transgressive queer desires towards “the charm of a woman”, and in particular that of her childhood friend Sally Seton, who Clarissa has not seen in years.[10] In the “emptiness” of the attic, Woolf draws out the emptiness that Clarissa feels within herself, as she senses her lack of “something central” in her relationship with her husband Richard.[11] This realization prompts Clarissa’s acknowledgment of her attraction instead to a woman, as she “did undoubtedly…feel what men felt” despite having a “scruple” “sent by Nature”.[12] Here, we see the ironic juxtaposition of Clarissa’s internalized homophobia from society, which leads her to “resent” her queer desires as unnatural and transgressive,[13] against her emphatic and almost orgasmic expression of homophilia in the attic, as she relives the moment of attraction in her head:

It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores. Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over—the moment.[14]

Revisiting the moment in the privacy and safety of the attic, Clarissa’s rapturous description is completely uninhibited and unabashed, characterized by hyperboles of rushing to the “farthest verge,” and being touched by “astonishing significance” and “extraordinary alleviation.” It is only in the most private and intimate of spaces in the attic, that Clarissa allows herself to indulge, utterly unbridled, in forbidden fantasies about women to their fullest extent.

Amidst the cleanliness and material purity of the attic room with its “clean” “white” sheets and bare decor,[15] we also observe a spatial correspondence in how Clarissa’s mind wanders back in time to reflect on the innocence and purity of her youthful days with Sally in her attic bedroom in Bourton, her childhood home. She recalls “the most exquisite moment of her whole life” when Sally kisses her, igniting what she describes as a “religious feeling”.[16] Her superlative choice of words reflects her passionate emotions, while her allusion to this “religious feeling” expresses a divine feeling of transcendence, emphasizing the purity and spirituality of her love for Sally. The sheer extent of her love and idolatry is also evident as she seems to sacralize the moment, likening Sally to a goddess to devote oneself to. Herein, Woolf demonstrates the transformative power of the attic room as it turns conventional notions of spirituality and religion on its head, morphing the sacrilege of homosexuality into something sacred and holy, thus masking its transgressive nature. As Clarissa permits herself to emancipate her otherwise shameful and repressed sexual desires and relishes them at their full intensity, uninhibited by heteronormative societal expectations, we gain a brief glimpse of the healing experience that the individual undergoes through reflections in the private space. Ultimately, through Clarissa’s cathartic release of repressed emotions and intimate examination of her core identity in the attic, Woolf alludes to a larger social commentary on how the stifling societal expectations of Victorian England suppress the free expression of identities and emotions, thus necessitating the existence of the private space as the only recourse through which incompatibilities between individuals and society can be mediated.

  The attic offers a private space that affords reflection and a temporal respite for the individual who contends with self and society, personal values, and social norms. Yet, as in the case of Septimus Smith, a veteran of World War I, private space can be a luxury. In comparison to the complete privacy of Clarissa’s attic room, Septimus’ only refuge lies in the semi-privacy of Mrs. Filmer’s sitting room. The space is not his own but belongs to his neighbor; he also shares the sitting room with his wife Rezia. Despite the nature of the sitting room as one with communal functions, Mrs. Filmer’s sitting room nevertheless serves as the only safe space available to Septimus that shelters him from the prying eyes of society and enables him to become his true self.

Figure 2: A shell-shocked soldier from the First World War. Shell shock is a term coined in World War I by British psychologist Charles Samuel Myers to describe the type of post traumatic stress disorder many soldiers were afflicted with during the war before PTSD was termed.

In the relative privacy of Mrs Filmer’s sitting room, Septimus, who suffers from shell-shock[17] due to the ravages of war, gains a respite from his hallucinations and his all-consuming fears of Dr. Holmes and Bradshaw, who threaten to institutionalize him, as well as traumatic apparitions of his fallen comrade Evans, that constantly plague him elsewhere. The sitting room thus enables Septimus to regain some sense of normalcy as Rezia notes that he “become[s] himself” and “speak[s] as he used to do” for the first time in days.[18] Through Rezia’s eyes, Woolf makes it clear that Septimus’ return to his true self can be attributed to the fact that they are “alone together”, in the safety of Mrs Filmer’s sitting room where they are able to poke fun “privately” without fearing that anyone would overhear them.[19] This idea is reinforced by Septimus’ own inner monologue:

The sun might go in and out, on the tassels, on the wallpaper, but he would wait, he thought, stretching out his feet, looking at his ringed sock at the end of the sofa; he would wait in this warm place, this pocket of still air, which one comes on at the edge of a wood sometimes in the evening, when, because of a fall in the ground, or some arrangement of the trees (one must be scientific above all, scientific), warmth lingers, and the air buffets the cheek like the wing of a bird.[20]

Deciding contentedly as he watches Rezia sew to “wait in this warm place” reminiscent of “the edge of a wood sometimes in the evening,” where “warmth lingers”,[21] Septimus’ description of the sitting room evokes a sense of comfort, tranquility, and security that starkly juxtaposes with the hyperstimulation and anxiety we observe in him at the park, earlier in the novel. Beyond that, the sophistication of Septimus’ inner monologue in the sitting room is also significant in demonstrating his lucidity and the sharp clarity of his thoughts as he sheds the appearance of a raving madman to reveal his genuine and articulate self in the safety and serenity of Mrs. Filmer’s sitting room, suggesting that like Clarissa, it is only in the private space that Septimus is liberated – at least momentarily – from the mental oppression of societal forces to truly become himself.

However, where the semi-private sitting room experiences lapses in privacy, Septimus also experiences a concomitant compromise of his mental faculties. Through Rezia’s recollections in the sitting room, we are reminded of a time when “the girl who did the room” discovered and ridiculed Septimus’ papers in Mrs Filmer’s sitting room.[22] Septimus’ relapse into his hysterical ravings about “Holmes” and “human nature” as a result of this breach of privacy thus emphasizes the inextricable link between the security of the private space and individual consciousness.[23] Ultimately, whether it is in the way Clarissa no longer conceals the facets of her identity incompatible with her public persona, or in how Septimus’ mind is no longer compromised by delirium and fear, the safety and tranquility of the private space – as far as it is truly private – negotiates the tensions that exist between individuals and external forces, providing an escape that enables and sustains the endurance of the true self.

The healing power of the private space

The objects and physical space of the private room serve to anchor the characters’ memories to the present reality, even as their thoughts wander across fluid time and space. Through Clarissa’s ruminations in the attic, Woolf presents the inextricable link between the past and present, illustrating how perception of the present is mediated by memories of the past. As Clarissa revels in the moment of impassioned attraction to women, she is drawn back to reality by objects in the attic, specifically ones associated with her husband Richard as she notes that “against such moments there contrasted the bed and Baron Marbot and the candle half-burnt”.[24] Woolf makes Clarissa’s attitude clear as Clarissa’s orgasmic description of the moment of attraction is juxtaposed against the plainness of language in her detached and monotone listing of mundane objects linked to Richard, highlighting the banality of her humdrum marriage to a man she does not truly love. Woolf filters Clarissa’s perceptions of her marriage through her memories, and it is through the lens of her past experiences with a passionate love that Clarissa views her present marriage and gains awareness of what is lacking. In the same way, the dressing table in the attic pulls Clarissa from a past memory of Bourton back to the present, and as she looks upon her reflection in the glass, she is suddenly cognizant of the “[m]onths and months” that still lie ahead of her.[25] The attic exists as a liminal space that transcends time, as past, present, and future coalesce and are transfixed in a single moment. The moment is significant and revelatory, a turning point where Clarissa suddenly abandons her fears and “plunge[s] into the very heart of the moment”, enkindling hope for life (for “[s]he was not old yet”) as if she had been “fix[ed]” by her “mus[ings]”.[26]

The healing power of the private space is evident again at the party, as Clarissa enters the private “little room” where “there was nobody” upon hearing about Septimus’ death.[27] As Clarissa’s “terror” and “awful fear” of “this life, to be lived to the end” gives way to an “incredible” feeling that “no pleasure could equal” the experience of living life through the triumphs of youth and age,[28] Woolf charts the shift in Clarissa’s attitude towards death from one that is filled with a sense of foreboding, reminiscent of et in Arcadia ego[29] (“Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death”[30]), to one that indulges in the reverie of life and embraces the liberation of death as the words “Fear no more the heat of the sun” from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline come to her.[31] Clarissa’s consequent imperative that “[s]he must go back” to the party thus represents her renewed hope and vigour for life, even and especially in light of inevitable death.[32] Ultimately, through Clarissa’s epiphany in the attic and her moment of private reflection away from the hustle and bustle of the party, Woolf seemingly alludes to the restorative power of memory and reflection that can only be invoked in the private space, and elucidates the significance of these ordinary, evanescent moments of being.

Figure 3:’Et in Arcadia Ego’, a 1637-38 painting by Nicolas Poussin depicting a pastoral scene. The inscription on the tomb reads ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, literally translated to ‘Even in Arcadia, here am I’. The ‘I’ commonly understood to refer to death, the painting is a memento mori reminding us that even in the idyllic Arcadia, death still lurks.

As for Septimus, the significance of the physical space of Mrs. Filmer’s sitting room in anchoring him to the present reality is all the more pronounced as he grapples with his hallucinations and struggles to differentiate between delusion and the real world. Despite the compromised nature of the sitting room as an inconsistently private space, Septimus maintains his grip on reality through the permanence of the objects within it, which function seemingly as a compensatory mechanism for what the room lacks in constancy. Septimus tries to ascertain the nature of reality and seeks confirmation by looking around the room at the “gramophone”, “the plate of bananas”, and even “Rezia [who] sat sticking pins into the front of her dress”.[33] In contrast to the volatility of his hallucinations, the “still” ness of these objects and the physicality of Rezia as she trims the hat emphasizes their concrete materiality and substantiality to Septimus,[34] anchoring his sense of reality and causing the “[m]iracles, revelations, agonies, loneliness, falling through the sea, down, down into the flames” that he raved about in his delusional state to all “[burn] out” and disappear.[35] As Septimus tells himself that “[h]e would not go mad”,[36] we see that the objects in the room serve not only as physical proof that grounds Septimus to the current reality, disengaging him from his hallucinations, but also function more significantly to preserve Septimus’ sanity and control over his own mind. This moment where Septimus makes the conscious effort not to go mad reflects a moment of revelation and clarity, and his specific use of the modal verb “would” demonstrates a metacognitive awareness of his past, present, and future mental state, while at the same time conferring him with a sense of authority and control over himself that he typically seems to lack.[37] We see such a moment of clarity materializing once again seconds before Holmes enters the room, as Septimus meditates upon how best to take his own life:

Getting up rather unsteadily, hopping indeed from foot to foot, he considered Mrs Filmer’s nice clean bread- knife with ‘Bread’ carved on the handle. Ah, but one mustn’t spoil that. The gas fire? But it was too late now. Holmes was coming. Razors he might have got, but Rezia, who always did that sort of thing, had packed them. There remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury lodging-house window; the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out.[38]

The objects of the room once again tether Septimus’ thoughts to present time and space, the split second before Holmes intrudes into the private space and he kills himself. Like before, Septimus demonstrates an acute and almost morbid level of rationality as he detachedly evaluates the merits of each object as his means to an end.  This rationality does not falter even as he seemingly contradicts himself when he commits suicide despite saying that “[h]e did not want to die”.[39] As Septimus notes that “[t]he sun was hot” just moments before his death, the line harks back to the recurring refrain “Fear no more the heat of the sun” of Cymbeline, and Woolf seems to invite us to view Septimus’ death as an emancipation from the labour of life.[40] Clarissa’s “transcendental theory” about death further supports this reading:[41]

It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her skepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps—perhaps.[42]

When we perceive Septimus’ suicide through the lens of Clarissa’s “transcendental theory”, we come to realize that the Septimus we see at the moment of his death is but a small fraction of his entire being diffused across time and space, “so momentary” compared to “the unseen part,” and Woolf seems to suggest that the transcendent, spiritual part of Septimus still lives on even after his physical death.[43]

Ultimately, though the moments of revelation evinced by the physical space appear to propel Clarissa and Septimus in opposite directions, one towards a renewed love for life and the other towards an embrace of death, the familiar lines of Cymbeline that punctuate both Clarissa and Septimus’ thoughts unite the two and reconcile their seemingly contrasting outlooks. While there is an embrace in death as the catharsis of the labour of life, it is ultimately this acceptance and fearlessness of death that empowers one to live life with exuberance and vitality. Yet Clarissa and Septimus are not the only parallels. In Hermione Lee’s biography Virginia Woolf, Lee recounts Woolf’s note that Septimus was to be “founded on [herself],” yet “not so much character as idea”[44]. The similarities between Woolf and Septimus’ lives are uncanny, both suffering from mental illness, threatened with institutionalization, and attempting suicide by throwing themselves out of a window. As we consider Septimus the idea and what he represents, Mrs Dalloway reveals keen insight into Woolf’s own illness and suicide, and perhaps engenders a more hopeful understanding of Woolf’s tragic death. After all, though the “apparition” of Virginia Woolf may have ceased to exist for a long time, the “unseen part” “spreads wide”, and it has and will continue to live on in her literature and legacy.[45]

Endnotes

[1] Stevenson, Christina. “‘Here Was One Room, There Another’: The Room, Authorship, and Feminine Desire in A Room of One's Own and Mrs. Dalloway.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 49, no. 1 (2014): 112

[2] Jiménez, Ángel Luis, "The Politics of Space and Place in Virginia Woolf’s The Years, Three Guineas and The Pargiters". Graduate Theses and Dissertations. (2009): 2

[3] Donaldson, Elizabeth J.. “The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness.” NWSA Journal, vol. 14, no. 3 (2002): 99

[4] Korosec-Serfaty, Perla. “The Home from Attic to Cellar.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 4, no. 4 (1984): 304

[5] Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. 1925. (Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 26

[6] Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 32

[7] Ibid, 32

[8] Ibid, 32

[9] Korosec-Serfaty, “The Home from Attic to Cellar.” 312.

[10] Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 27

[11] Ibid, 26-27

[12] Ibid, 27

[13] Ibid, 27

[14] Ibid, 27

[15] Ibid, 27

[16] Ibid, 30

[17] Shell shock is a term coined in World War I by British psychologist Charles Samuel Myers to describe the type of post-traumatic stress disorder many soldiers were afflicted with during the war (before PTSD was termed).

[18] Ibid, 121

[19] Ibid, 121

[20] Ibid, 122

[21] Ibid, 122

[22] Ibid, 119

[23] Ibid, 119

[24] Ibid, 27

[25] Ibid, 31

[26] Ibid, 31

[27] Ibid, 156

[28] Ibid, 157

[29] Et in Arcadia Ego is a painting by Nicolas Poussin. Its literal translation is “Even in Arcadia, there am I”, with ‘I’ referring to death. The painting is a memento mori, ominously reminding the viewer that even in the blissful utopia of Arcadia, death still exists.  

[30] Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 156

[31] Ibid, 158

[32] Ibid, 158

[33] Ibid, 120

[34] Ibid, 120

[35] Ibid, 121

[36] Ibid, 120

[37] Ibid, 120

[38] Ibid, 126

[39] Ibid, 126

[40] Ibid, 126

[41] Ibid, 129

[42] Ibid, 129-130

[43] Ibid, 130

[44] Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. (Print, Vintage, 1996), 373

[45] Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 129-130

Bibliography

Donaldson, Elizabeth J.. “The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness.” NWSA Journal, vol. 14, no. 3, 2002, pp. 99–119. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4316926.

Jiménez, Ángel Luis, "The Politics of Space and Place in Virginia Woolf’s The Years, Three Guineas and The Pargiters". 2009. Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/2030.

Korosec-Serfaty, Perla. “The Home from Attic to Cellar.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 4, no. 4, 1984, pp. 303–321., doi:10.1016/s0272-4944(84)80002-x.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Print, Vintage. 1996.

Stevenson, Christina. “‘Here Was One Room, There Another’: The Room, Authorship, and Feminine Desire in A Room of One's Own and Mrs. Dalloway.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 49, no. 1, 2014, pp. 112–132. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/pacicoasphil.49.1.0112.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. 1925. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Teo Chee Yan is currently a sophomore at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, majoring in Global Affairs. Her interests lie in the humanities, and she is especially concerned with politics and international relations. Outside of university, Chee Yan has worked for various non-profit organizations as well as public policy and governance think tanks. In her freshman year at college, Chee Yan took a Literature and Humanities class taught by Professor Carissa Foo, where she explored different texts, including Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Intrigued the stream of consciousness style, Chee Yan examined the intersection between space and consciousness and produced this essay for the class.