To Live Even One Day

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

On the Esopus, Meadow Groves, ca. 1857–58

&

Cows in the Meadow, 1878

both paintings by Scottish - American Artist
William M. Hart, 1823 - 1894

There are so many things to say about Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's elegant interior novel of one day -- plus flashbacks -- in the life of Clarissa Parry Dalloway. Is it my favorite novel? I always hesitate to choose only one, but it just might be, especially after I earned the nickname of "Clarissa / Mrs. Dalloway" a couple of different times:

1. Once by an old grad school friend who said: "Maybe you're not the life of the party in a class clown kind of way, but you are CLARISSA DALLOWAY" (this was after we had taken one of those personality profiles that placed me higher than I thought was accurate on the "social butterfly / loves company" scale).

2. And again by a friend who alluded to Mrs. Dalloway when she wrote to congratulate me upon being included in an historical house tour: "Congratulations! Glad you had a good house tour, Clarissa. Sounds like a lot of work, but you love doing it and wouldn't consider not. You go, super mom, super Mrs. Dalloway. Did everyone behave with proper respect, or were they touching your stuff and leaving their BIG GULP cups all over the place? Did you have to dress up like a house slave, or were you allowed to be Mrs. O'Hara? (Remember the "Designing Women" episode when Julia's house is on a tour?) Perhaps you wore an elegant Ann Taylor dress and cooly answered questions regarding the age of the fireplace. Or, in true British fashion, retired to your private quarters during the tour (pronounced too-ah). By the way, I have yet to read that book so I hope my Mrs. Dalloway hostess attribution is a good one!" I assured her that am always honored to be compared to Mrs. Dalloway and that, yes, her reference made perfect sense!

I vividly recall walking into the theatre (Ritz at the Bourse, Philadelphia, 1997) right in the middle of a preview for Mrs. Dalloway. Without any prior knowledge of this upcoming film or verbal hints (voice over or text on the screen), I knew, the instant I saw the depiction of London streets and houses and Vanessa Redgrave in her gorgeous Virginia Woolf dress and hat: "It's Mrs. Dalloway!" In that sudden "moment of being," I was transported to the last page of the novel when Peter Walsh looks across the room and says, "It is Clarissa."

So where do you start? How do you solve a problem like Clarissa? "Down, down into the midst of ordinary things . . . the supreme mystery . . . was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that? Or love?" (193, emphasis added).

Mrs. Dalloway (Vanessa Redgrave) on the balcony,
glancing across the street into her neighbor's room


I'll begin with a letter I received from my sister Peggy last summer. I was excited when she told me she was reading Mrs. Dalloway. I hoped that she would love it as much as I do, and I gave her permission to go ahead and watch the movie version even if she hadn't finished the novel yet. I know some may disapprove, and I surely wouldn't recommend that in all cases, but this excellent movie is so consistent, so true to the novel word for word, and so beautiful, that I made an exception!

Soon after Peg finished the novel, she wrote: I've been meaning to write for several days now to tell you two of my favorite lines:

"She was for the party!"
[Response from me: What a great party quote! I have always loved Peter Walsh's comment, but after Peg's note, I began to think that "She was for the party!" is an even better encapsulation of the essence of Clarissa.]

and [returning to Peg's letter] Clarissa's description of Sir Harry:

"'Dear Sir Harry!' she said, going up to the fine fellow who had produced more bad pictures than any other two Academicians in the whole of St. John's Wood (they were always of cattle, standing in sunset pools absorbing moisture, or signifying, for he had a certain range of gesture, by the raising of one foreleg and the toss of the antlers, 'the Approach of the Stranger' --all his activities, dining out, racing, were founded on cattle standing absorbing moisture in sunset pools)" (266).

I just love the thought of such a banal subject as cows standing around in ponds at sunset "absorbing moisture." Still makes me smile.

Cows Watering

Seems that Woolf may have had artist William M. Hart in mind
when she created the character of Sir Harry.
I told Peg at the time that her observation about the cow painting was perfect for my Quotidian blog because she expresses so well the thought that the cows are quotidian! Sir Harry keeps us grounded -- maybe in a boring way, but also in a good way!

Peg went on to say: I've watched both of the movies, Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours. I liked them both, and they did play well with the book, but I have to say that The Hours was a sad movie. Brenda let me borrow her copy which had commentary by the various actors, writers, and producer(s) which explained some parts of the movie that I had difficulty understanding, but they didn't make it any less sad. The book had it's sad parts, but the movie seemed to be just one sad tale after another with no real joy. I think they needed Sir Harry and his paintings to lighten the movie a little.

My response: Remember Clarissa's thought right at the beginning of Woolf's novel: "she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day" (11). That's the one line that has stayed with me more than any other from the first time I ever read Mrs. Dalloway.

Perhaps it is also very very sad to live even one day. Clarissa conveys as much when she hears about the death of Septimus Warren Smith, and makes the startled observation: "Oh . . . in the middle of my party, here's death" (279). Maybe that explains the deep sadness of The Hours -- it concentrates more on death than on the party. [See also the conclusion of my post "American . . . Gothic," for a little twist on the idea of "death in the middle of the party, a successful allusion, I hope.]

I was thrilled with the movie of Mrs. Dalloway but skeptical to learn that Michael Cunningham's contemporary (1998) novel The Hours was woven around Mrs. Dalloway. I was filled with misgiving at first: how dare anyone touch Woolf's masterpiece! I love Mrs. Dalloway so much, I wasn't sure that I wanted to see it experimented with. However, it turns out that Cunningham's re - perception of Woolf's novel is equally and amazingly beautiful. I became a true believer in no time; after only a few pages, I was mesmerized by Cunningham's finely crafted novel and the way in which it honors Woolf. You may remember that Virginia Woolf's first title idea for Mrs. Dalloway was The Hours, thus Cunningham's choice of title. What he has done is use Virginia Woolf as a character in his novel, plus a contemporary New Yorker named Clarissa Vaughan, and a 1940's housewife, Laura Brown, who is reading Mrs. Dalloway just a few years after Woolf's suicide. The Hours is really a hymn -- can't think of a better way to say it -- to Virginia Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway.

Just as I found the movie of Mrs. Dalloway more beautifully done and true to the novel than I would have ever imagined possible, so too was the subsequent movie of The Hours, starring Meryl Streep and Ed Harris. It's hard, impossible really, for me to imagine what reading or seeing The Hours would mean if I were unfamiliar with Mrs. Dalloway. Possibly Michael Cunningham is such a genius that the reader can still love his story without the literary background of Woolf and her contemporaries. I can't say for sure since there's no way for me to go back and read The Hours without knowledge of Mrs. Dalloway. Of course, each book / movie stands alone as a complete creative expression; so I guess you could read or see them in any order: Mrs. Dalloway, book and movie; then The Hours, book and movie. Or maybe both books, then both movies. You pick! How can you go wrong?

Vanessa Redgrave as Clarissa Dalloway


Meryl Streep as Clarissa Vaughan


Several years back (2004), Gerry, Ben, and Sam allowed me to orchestrate a Christmas Day Film Festival, to include Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours. Both movies are so perfectly rendered and aligned with the books that the boys could follow every single nuance -- they were not too young for it. I hope one day they'll read the novels; but, if not, they've got those stories and a bit of Virginia's prose inside their heads now, one way or another.

Which is to say, if you absolutely can't find time to read Mrs. Dalloway, then go ahead and watch the film and consider yourself ready to view The Hours. Both books and both movies are now and forever on my list of all-time favorites; and I would happily recommend all four to anyone in search of a literary project for the summer. Anticipating the fact that you might miss a few allusions along the way, here are some to look for:

1. In addition to the Mrs. Dalloway parallels, Cunningham also includes an extended allusion to Doris Lessing's story "To Room Nineteen." Laura Brown's quest for personal space is taken straight from Lessing, with Laura even checking into Room 19 when she goes to the hotel to contemplate suicide and read Mrs. Dalloway for the afternoon.

2. Yet another passage in The Hours calls to mind the artist Lily Briscoe in Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse. [See my post on Mrs. Ramsay: "A Little Strip of Time," 12 May 2012]

In Woolf's novel, while seated at Mrs. Ramsay's famous dinner table, Lily Briscoe's mind wanders away from the conversation as she thinks of her painting: "She remembered all of a sudden as if she had found a treasure, that she had her work. In a flash she saw her picture, and thought, Yes, I shall put the tree further in the middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space. That's what I shall do. That's what has been puzzling me. She took up the salt cellar and put it down again on a flower in the pattern in the table-cloth, so as to remind herself to move the tree . . . There's the sprig on the table-cloth; there's my painting; I must move the tree to the middle; that matters -- nothing else . . . her spirits rose so high at the thought of painting tomorrow that she laughed out loud . . . she would move the tree rather more toward the middle" (To the Lighthouse, 128, 130, 140, 154). Not until the last page of the novel does the idea for the final stroke occur to Lily, when she takes out the old rolled up painting and finally finishes it at long last.

Likewise, Cunningham's character in The Hours daydreams of the creative process while arranging the silverware: "As Laura set the plates and forks on the table--as they ring softly on the starched white cloth--it seems she has succeeded suddenly, at the last minute, the way a painter might brush a final line of color onto a painting and save it from incoherence; the way a writer might set down the line that brings to light the submerged patterns and symmetry in the drama. It has to do, somehow, with setting plates and forks on a white cloth. It is as unmistakable as it is unexpected" (The Hours, 207).

And then there's Clarissa Dalloway, who

"was going that very night to kindle and illuminate;

to give her party. . . .

All was for the party."
(6, 56)
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Thursday, June 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Sunset With Cows
by Scottish - American Artist ~ William M. Hart, 1823 - 1894

Life -- A Little Strip of Time

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

MONK'S HOUSE ~ HOME OF LEONARD & VIRGINIA WOOLF

VIRGINIA WOOLF'S LIVING ROOM
For Mother's Day, I thought I would write about one of the most steadfast mothers in modern British fiction, Mrs. Ramsay from Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf had no children, but Mrs. Ramsay has eight; and Woolf intuitively fills Mrs. Ramsay's head and the first half of the novel with touching motherly insights. Except for the youngest son James, the Ramsay children are rarely mentioned in literary criticism of To the Lighthouse. James, of course, figures prominently at the center of the conflict that opens the novel: will he or will he not be taken to the lighthouse the next day?

But what of James' siblings and Mrs. Ramsay's feelings for them: Andrew, Prue, Jasper, Rose, Roger, Nancy, and Cam? Sitting out on the yard, visiting with her guests and surrounded by her children, Mrs. Ramsay is the image of earthliness, providing spiritual and artistic inspiration to others. Her ability to inspire is rooted in her role as a living, earthly mother, caring for her children, experiencing conflict with them and for them, providing for them at present, and hoping they may find a solid happiness that will stand against the unknowable future of temporal existence. Monitoring the behavior of her brood, Mrs. Ramsay wonders at the early development of their capacity for strife and prejudice: "They were so critical, her children" (17).

One of the guests, Mr. Bankes, relates his singular method of distinguishing the children one from another: "As for being sure which was which, or in what order they came, that was beyond him. He called them privately after the Kings and Queens of England; Cam the Wicked, James the Ruthless, Andrew the Just, Prue the Fair -- for Prue would have beauty, he thought, how could she help it? -- and Andrew brains" (37). Mr. Ramsay, himself, makes the following assessment of his role as father: "The father of eight children -- he reminded himself. And he would have been a beast and a cur to wish a single thing altered. Andrew would be a better man than he had been. Prue would be a beauty, her mother said. They would stem the flood a bit. That was a good bit of work on the whole -- his eight children" (106).

From Mrs. Ramsay's point of view comes the one list in the book to mention every child. She presents a brief but full bodied portrait of each, thinking of James and Cam first with especial longing, for they are her babies:

"Oh but she never wanted James to grow a day older! Or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long - legged monsters. Nothing made up for the loss. . . . why should they grow up and lose all that? . . . She would have liked always to have had a baby. She was happiest carrying one in her arms. . . . Prue, a perfect angel with the others, and sometimes now, at night especially, she took one's breath away with her beauty. Andrew -- even her husband admitted that his gift for mathematics was extraordinary. And Nancy and Roger, they were both wild creatures. . . . As for Rose, her mouth was too big, but she had a wonderful gift with her hands. . . . She did not like it that Jasper should shoot birds; but it was only a stage; they all went through stages. Why she asked, pressing her chin on James's head, should they grow up so fast? . . . And, touching his hair with her lips, she thought, he will never be so happy again. . . . They were happier now than they would ever be again. A tenpenny tea set made Cam happy for days." (89 - 90)

She sees the mortality of her children; and despite the promise she sees in each one, she senses the fleeting quality of their happiness and their childhood. She questions the temporariness and the temporality of their existence, but she does not consider immortality, only their earthly happiness. She does not want them ever to grow away from the state of "radical innocence" that Yeats refers to in his poem "A Prayer for My Daughter":

Prayer For My Daughter
Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

William Butler Yeats, 1865 - 1939
Irish poet and dramatist
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1923

[See previous posts:
September 14, 2009
November 28, 2010]

Mrs. Ramsay's wish for her children is as fervent as Yeats' but not as hopeful. She wishes for a prolongation of childhood rather than a recovery of innocence. She has no faith in reparation for loss nor in any power which will guarantee happiness to her children in the face of unkindness and upheaval. Instead she wishes that neither she nor they would ever lose the days of their innocence. When she says, "Nothing made up for the loss," she thinks of her own loss as the mother of little dependent children. But knowing how they will slip away, she resigns herself, thinking of Mr. Ramsay's accusation that she is "pessimistic" and has a "gloomy view of life" (91). Though her view of life and time passing angers her husband, the nostalgia she anticipates and her clear sense of loss and finality ("She thought life -- and a little strip of time presented itself to her eyes," 91) is not unfounded. It is, in fact, confirmed by the detached narrator of the middle section of the novel who impartially and in merest passing records the deaths of Prue in childbirth, Andrew at war, and Mrs. Ramsay herself in the night.

Prue's early death, though, is quite the opposite of the future envisioned for her by her mother. For despite Mrs. Ramsay's private certainty that "there was no treachery too base for the world to commit" (98), she holds out hope and endurance to her children:

" . . . she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she said to all these children, You shall go through it all. To eight people she said relentlessly that." (92)

Tablescape by Katy Bunder

At the dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay notices that Prue is "just beginning, just moving, just descending" into the adult world (164) and protectively wills that Prue shall have a happy future. In her concern for Prue's contentment, Mrs. Ramsay mirrors another of the desires expressed in Yeats' "Prayer," his hope that his daughter will be blessed with a loving mate and a happy home, grounded on the stability and affirmation of tradition. She expresses her appreciation of a place "where all's accustomed." She knows the significance of being "rooted in one dear perpetual place."

Mrs. Ramsay joys in her children ("For one's children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust forward," 122); and she is sensitive to their aches and pains, especially their emotional woes. Her heart breaks at the thought of James' disappointment when the excursion to the lighthouse is cancelled. The novel is punctuated by her motherly concern for James's frustrated expedition and a desire to somehow make up to him what cannot be made up.

She is sympathetic also with her creative daughter, Rose, seeing that in some ways they are so alike. In the scene preceding the famous dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay is seen at her most intimate and relaxed with the two children, Rose and Jasper, who visit her room before dinner, ministering to her as she looks to them to inspire her perceptions. She is happy, teasing and indulging them as they help her decide what necklace to wear to dinner.

She urges them to hurry with the jewels, " 'choose, dearests, choose.' " She is not loathe to be associated with their choices. She is patient, knowing that Rose has "some hidden reason of her own for attaching great importance to this choosing what her mother was to wear. . . . And Rose would grow up; and Rose would suffer, she supposed with these deep feelings. . . . Choose me a shawl, she said, for that would please Rose, who was bound to suffer so." She identifies closely with Rose and realizes that her feelings for Rose are for herself as well. When exploring her own bewilderment over Rose's little ceremony of choosing the jewels, she thinks, "Like all feelings felt for oneself . . . it made one sad" (122 - 23).

Mrs. Ramsay is intuitive and creative, exhibiting love and care and motherly concern in numerous instances throughout the first section of the novel. She is filled with anxiety on her children's behalf, but also with pride. Fearing that the children are about to erupt in laughter over some private joke at dinner, she says to them -- by way of maintaining order and altering the dinner table dynamic: " 'Light the candles' " (145). Standing down the length of the table and illuminating an elaborate centerpiece designed by Rose, the tall candles number eight, just as Mrs. Ramsay's children do.
Happy Mother's Day!
Tablescape by Tina McCartney

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Monday, May 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

My friend Jill sent me the little wreath of roses a couple of years ago, and I put it inside this larger Easter wreath to make a summery candleholder.