Rituals of Self-deception:
Clarissa Dalloway's Final Moment of Vision
Deborah Guth
One of the most intriguing aspects of
Clarissa's final moment of vision, when she withdraws from her party, is the
variety of mythico-literary modes she uses to shape her interpretation of
Septimus' death. Critical analysis of the novel has dealt with various mythic
motifs, with Christian symbolism as well as with Clarissa's vestigial
romanticism. What is crucial, however, to an understanding of this scene is
Clarissa's highly selective use of each mode, the underlying reason for her
shifts between them, and the omissions within each one. While mythic structures
and images have often been used in literature to connect individual experience
to the archetypal dynamics and meanings contained in myth,(n1) their role in
Clarissa's moment of inwardness serves a rather different, more deflective
purpose.
As I have argued elsewhere,(n2) the private, supposedly "real"
inner self that Clarissa explores during the day in fact duplicates rather than
denies the artificial, ceremonial quality of her public self. Stylized, romantic
images of herself descending the steps at Bourton dressed in white, bowing her
head by the hall table in a gesture of devotion,(n3) cradling her life in her
arms and presenting it to her parents by the lake (p. 48); the image of the nun
in her cell (pp. 35-36), the martyr standing alone, "a single figure against the
appalling night" (p. 35), of herself seeking pinnacles and standing drenched in
fire, brandishing torches and flinging life away (p. 185)-all these reveal that,
just as she "assembles" her public self for presentation, so her inner world is
an ingathering of images and imagined gestures, a pageant of heightened
self-images in the service not of self-discovery but of imaginative
self-invention.
Her use of myth during her final vision fits quite
naturally into this pattern. As subjective visionary experience becomes
indistinguishable from the fictional self it creates, myth serves both to shape
the inner drama of life and death that she plays out and as her most
sophisticated internal strategy of self-evasion.
The three prominent
frameworks underlying Clarissa's final vision are the romantic, the pagan, and
the Christian. The romantic is apparent in the well-known passage where the
meaning of Septimus' death is revealed to her:
A thing there was that
mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, obscured in her own life, let
drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was
defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility
of reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart;
rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
But this
young man who had killed himself had he plunged holding his treasure? "If it
were now to die, 't were now to be most happy," she had said to herself once,
coming down, in white. (p. 204)
Clarissa's vision of death as a sublime
state of unity, the triumph of the visionary imagination over destructive
time,(n4) and the love-death implicit in the quote from Othello--all pertain to
this tradition. Similarly, her sense of Septimus' leap as a glorious act of
defiance evokes the non serviam of the romantic rebel.
Significantly,
however, her quasi-mystical interpretation in no way reflects Septimus' own
experience, which is characterized neither by a sense of embrace nor by
wide-ranging metaphysical considerations, but by terror and an ever-narrowing
focus on the prosaic details of his Immediate surroundings as he casts around
for a means of escape:
What is more, the pure self which Clarissa feels him to be preserving--"did he plunge holding his treasure?"--is conspicuously absent from his thoughts; he does not actually want to die--"Life was good. The sun hot"--and his final words, "I'll give it you," hurled at the old man opposite, denote neither ecstatic self-affirmation nor, as has sometimes been thought, a bequeathing of his vision.(n5) On the contrary, this ungrammatical phrase--a coarser form of "I'll just show you"--is a cry of contempt and helpless self-derision as he prepares himself to enact the melodrama--the "it" in his phrase--which he knows "they" will enjoy.
Clarissa's interpretation should thus not be attributed to visionary insight or preternatural communication but to her own desire to see Septimus' death in these terms, and her reconstruction serves two purposes. The first is to evade, or "transcend," the shocking immediacy of death--of which, according to Peter Walsh, she has a horror--by transforming it into a purely symbolic gesture. The second is to distance herself from the hollow "celebration of life" her party has revealed itself to be and, by identifying with a romanticized image of Septimus, to defy the world that never seems to live up to her dreams.
This ineffable vision of death, however, carries hidden dangers. As unequivocal affirmation, it constitutes a call for action; as epiphany it precludes a simple return to the world that has been renounced with such grandeur. Clarissa's shift, after a short distancing passage of conjecture ("Suppose he had had that passion . . ."[p. 204]), away from the romantic mode to a pagan configuration constitutes a strategic move away from this call. On one level, the image of the scapegoat, with its attendant fear, serves to intensify her denunciation of society and to dramatize the wanton brutality that underlies civilized appearances. But there is a deeper purpose to this motif: by shifting the locus of control away from Septimus onto society and transforming the romantic hero into hapless victim, she can modify the level of response required from active emulation to a passive, purely internal level--pity--which she can wholeheartedly fulfill. Most significantly, perhaps, the image of the scapegoat offers her a more fluid framework for identification and thus a modified destiny. Indeed, the pagan myth through which she now relates to Septimus as potential to fully realized victim ("She had escaped. But that young man had killed himself" [p. 204]) postulates the substitution of one life for another which the romantic mode precluded.
The pagan schema, however, has no less problematic implications. Caught between a death that has inexplicably passed her by and a life she has denounced, Clarissa is left in an existential no-man's-land an needs a symbolic constellation that will both release her from this limb and give meaning to her reprieve.
The superbly crafted mutation of the pagan scapegoat into the Christological victor provides her with precisely this and perfects the theme of substitution as evasion. Initially evoked in Clarissa's image of Septimus impaled on the rusty spikes of the fence reminiscent of the nails, the Christian model dominates the final part of Clarissa's vision when, eucharistically communing with his spirit as in a Mass, she confesses her sins ("She had schemed; she had pilfered . . . "), fee] purified, and assumes the role of mater dolorosa, grieving and rejoicing, at the death of her son.(n6)
This shift from pagan to Christian framework has significant repercussions on Clarissa's own self-image. In the first place, the implicit transformation of Septimus from, hapless victim into Christological victor releases her from identification with an image of tragic surrender. But more essentially, insofar as Jesus' death was freer, assumed, this model legitimizes the substitution of one life for another without implicating Clarissa, as the pagan model would, in the actual sacrifice. It sanctifies her survival as part of a divine plan and transforms her from guilty beneficiary of another's suffering into the intended object of a conscious act of love. <!--pagebreak-->Psychologically, this schema enables her to unite the conflicting responses--admiration and pity--evoked by the previous modes and frees her from the implications of her previous self-images. As visionary of the romantic love-death, her survival would have spelled betrayal or anticlimax. As denouncer of a barbaric society, she would have been doomed to the wilderness in which, according to Blake, angry prophets roam. As mater dolorosa, she can grieve and rejoice at a death which in no way calls on her to follow, and be sanctified in her very passivity.
Other shifts and evasions within Clarissa's vision are equally noteworthy. As critics have pointed out, the internal rhythm of her experience can be seen as a rite of passage, reflecting a cycle of ritual death, a passage through the underworld and rebirth or return to the world of reality.(n7) Yet this pattern serves mainly to reinforce the illusion of illumination and change that Clarissa is enacting for herself Although she does go back to her party, her identification with the old woman opposite closing the blinds denies the symbolism of return: like her mirror image, she has shut out the external world to bask in the self-reflecting light of vision where self and imagined other can become one while remaining distinct. And while she does experience a sense of renewal, this feeling is not connected to the world she returns to, nor does it imply acceptance of it; on the contrary, her joy derives from her visionary alienation from it.
If we look at the structure of ritual celebration and sacrifice of the scapegoat, a similar discrepancy between form and content becomes apparent. While Clarissa as "high priest"(n8) presides over the initial stages of the ceremony--her party--she deftly avoids assuming the priestly role, with all the responsibility it implies, when it comes to the actual sacrifice, by shifting to the role of prophetic denouncer of the very rite that she had prepared. What is more, her vision subverts the fundamental significance of the rite, for in these moments it is not the power of life which she celebrates but rather the high appeal and beauty of death.
Finally, while one might be tempted to see in Septimus the dying and resurrected god of mythology, a comparison between the man who actually dies and the image she resurrects offers a different interpretation. Like the ambulance that so efficiently removes Septimus' mangled remains in the name of civilization, Clarissa's reconstruction largely ignores the human specificity that underlies her image. For her Septimus has no substantive reality; he has no past, he does not even have a name--she refers to him repeatedly as "that young man who killed himself." Visionary resurrection is but a word; in point of fact, by reducing Septimus to a symbolic leap of defiance, Clarissa, no less than society, indulges in ritual sacrifice--the sacrifice of an individual reality in favor of the vision.(n9)
In the introduction to his brilliant work on repetition in fiction, Hillis Miller, following Deleuze, distinguishes two major types of repetition in Western literature, based on the Platonic and Nietzschean models respectively. The Platonic, he states, "is grounded in a solid archetypal model which is untouched by the effects of repetition. All the other examples are copies of this model. The assumption of such a world gives rise to the notion of a metaphoric expression based on genuine participative similarity or even on identity...." The Nietzschean mode, on the other hand, "posits a world based on difference" in which each thing is "unique, intrinsically different from every other thing. Similarity arises against the background of this `disparite du fond'" and presents a world not of copies but of "simulacra," or "ungrounded doublings."(n10)
If we look at the transfiguration passage of Mrs. Dalloway in the light of this distinction, it becomes clear that while Clarissa invokes the first form of repetition, seeking to valorize her personal moment through various archetypal models, her constantly shifting images of Septimus and of herself, as well as the relation between these images and the characters to which they relate, reveal rather the second form, the world of simulacra, with all the connotations of illusion that this word includes. In point of fact, Clarissa is not merging her individual moment with a timeless model, but adapting a number of timeless models to the constant fluidity of her perceptions, so that the notion of multiplicity itself becomes the visionary prototype for her everchanging roles. <!--pagebreak-->The truly grounded repetition, however--unwittingly performed by Clarissa--relates not to the images she invokes but to the existential position that they serve to mask. Indeed, by the end of the passage, Clarissa has reverted from her initial identification with Septimus' leap, that is from imaginative enactment, to the passive onlooker position--encoded in the grieving mother--that has characterized her day and which she sought in these moments to overcome. "She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more," she had lamented when she first heard of his death, "but he had flung it away." In her own terms, by identifying with Septimus' leap she overcomes her "perpetual sense . . . of being outside, looking on" (p. 17). Simultaneously, she consummates this exclusion in its ultimate form--death--and in so doing reaches the "mystical center," the embrace that had eluded her grasp. For her, momentarily, outside has become the true locus of being, attained through a vision that both defies and, for her, replaces reality.
Beyond the spell of her subjectivity, however, her transcendence of the onlooker stance is deceptive. The discrepancy between Septimus' death and her reconstruction negates her sense of mystical union, and her subsequent return to the party denies the commitment to selfhood she had glorified in his leap. With words that in any other context would appear heartless and smug--"she felt glad that he had done it" (emphasis added)--she gracefully revokes the unity she had previously affirmed, and with a loving look back at the death she has not died, she simply returns to the world she had denounced. Imaginary action is thus resolved into non-action: Clarissa's vision is like the shilling she had once thrown into the Serpentine, and she herself, the onlooker newly configured as mater dolorosa, still stands on the edge.
The allusions to various myths and traditions become an ever-receding jeu de miroirs through which Clarissa loses and re-create herself in another form. "It is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses," Peter Walsh had said (p. 167). By enacting for herself an entire drama of death and transfiguration, Clarissa can see herself in a rich plurality that essentially reenacts her incapacity to choose and legitimizes conflicting roles--romantic rebel, victim, seer, grieving mother--without confining her to any.(n11)
The model for her self-protective dissociation, however, has already been established by the text. By casting Clarissa's potential destiny as an entirely separate character, textually present but unacknowledged by the heroine until death negates its threat, Woolf has created the prototype of imaginative self-evasion. Through the metaphor of parallel fates she--not unlike Bradshaw--is suggesting that madness can be contained, that it can live itself out, as it were, without Clarissa having to live it or to be directly confronted with its terrifying and complex reality. Unlike Peter Walsh, who represents another unlived destiny of Clarissa's, Septimus never enters her life to challenge her preconceptions. The dead, as Lily Briscoe once pointed out, are "at our mercy,"(n12) and visionary images do not answer back. In the figure of Septimus, Woolf is thus redefining the double, no longer a troublesome alter ego such as Kurtz in Heart of Darkness or Ivan Karamazov's devil, who invade the hero's life to precipitate painful self-confrontation, but on the contrary as a bracketed entity whose self-effacing (and ultimately self-canceling) evolution actually releases the hero from the need to face its implications.
As Hillis Miller has pointed out, Clarissa's day is a resurrection of the past and the dead.(n13) But if this is so, its culmination is no more than a ritualized evasion of precisely that world of death which she had appeared to embrace. However, in a final Christological allusion the text betrays her betrayal: as she takes inner leave of Septimus, she hears the clock striking one, two, three....
NOTES
(n1) See John Vickery, "Mythologies and Modern Literature," in The Shaken Realist: Essays in Modern Literature, ed. Melvin Friedman and John B. Vickery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1970), p. 223. <!--pagebreak-->(n2) Deborah Guth, "`What a lark! What a plunge!': Fiction as Self-Evasion in Mrs. Dalloway," Modern Language Review, 84 (1989), 18-25.
(n3) Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 33. All subsequent references are to this edition and are included parenthetically in the text.
(n4) In this context, see Suzette Henke's comparison between Septimus and Michael Furey in Joyce's "The Dead" as "romantic martyrs." Like Shelley's Adonais, Henke points out, both escape through death from "the contagion of the world's slow stain," a phrase that Clarissa actually mulls over in the short Story Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street." ("Virginia Woolf Reads James Joyce: The Ulysses Notebook," in James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium, ed. Morris Beja, Phillip Herring, Maurice Harmon, and David Norris [Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1986], pp. 40-41).
(n5) For this interpretation, see Jeremy Hawthorn, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: A Study in Alienation (Sussex, Eng.: Sussex Univ. Press, 1975), p. 33, and Alice van Buren Kelley, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 107.
(n6) For the image of Clarissa as mater dolorosa I am indebted to Suzette Henke, "Mrs. Dalloway: The Communion of Saints," in New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jane Marcus (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1981), pp. 141-44.
(n7) Avrom Fleishman refers to a cycle of "withdrawal and return" which is a variation on the same pattern (Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975], p. 88). See also Erwin R. Steinberg, "Mrs. Dalloway and T. S. Eliot's Personal Wasteland," Journal of Modern Literature, 10 (1983), 18-19. For an in-depth analysis of this pattern, see Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, trans. P. Mairet (London: Collins, 1968), pp. 80-86, 198-204.
(n8) Henke, "Mrs. Dalloway: The Communion of Saints," p. 126.
(n9) Alex Zwerdling discusses how the governing class translates individuals into "cases" or categories in order to protect itself and maintain control (Virginia Woolf and the Real World [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986], pp. 124, 128). Clarissa duplicates this procedure on the internal level by transforming Septimus into a symbol. There is also an interesting parallel between Clarissa's approach and Mrs. Ramsay's attitude to Paul and Minta: "Mrs. Ramsay, Lily felt, exalted (marriage), worshipped (it); held her hands over it to warm them, to protect it; and yet, having brought it all about, somehow laughed, led her victims, Lily felt, to the altar." (Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse [Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1964], p. 117). In both instances, sanctification involves the sacrifice of the individual reality.
(n10) J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), p. 6.
(n11) Clarissa's capacity to transform the outside world into art "simply by looking" is emphasized by Ellen Rosenman (The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1986], p. 91). This is clearly what Clarissa does: she transforms both Septimus' death and her own self-image into high art. Maria DiBattista's comment on Woolf's art, however, is eminently applicable to Clarissa herself: "Her art . . . creates those necessary fictions that conceal the void incertitude, [it is] the Conradian art [of lying] that finds its ultimate justification in the lie that saves." (Virginia Woolf's Major Novels: The Fables of Anon [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980], p. 55).
(n12) Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 198.
(n13) J. Hillis Miller, "Virginia Woolf's All Souls' Day: The Omniscient Narrator in Mrs. Dalloway," in The Shaken Realist: Essays in Modern Literature, ed. Friedman and Vickery, p. 115.
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Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Spring90, Vol. 36 Issue 1, p35, 8p.
