LOVE VERSUS “the twin goddesses of CONVERSION and Proportion” IN MRS. DALLOWAY ENGB02 UTSC

UTSC ENGB02

LOVE VERSUS “the twin goddesses of CONVERSION and Proportion” IN
MRS. DALLOWAY

In Mrs. Dalloway, “time” and “reality” are related to a more specific issue: the conflict between love and conversion/proportion (the favorite forces of Sir William Bradshasw: to “stamp” his own image on other people).

Early in the novel Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway has a private searching moment when she examines her image in the mirror. There she sees a face, “her” face, distinctively "pointed; dartlike; definite"—the familiar face, composed and tense, that her mirror has reflected back to her "many million times."' This clearly focused image represents a unified and static self: the person she can “produce” whenever she needs a recognizable social mask. But she knows—unlike every other character in the novel except Septimus-- that her social image conceals "incompatible" aspects of her personality which, were they to surface, would shatter this coherent image  into divergent and contradictory images.  What helps keep this potentially shattered image coherent is its place in a coherent “social imaginary”—that is, society as imagined by all who participate in it.  The “social imaginary” is a particular form of ideology that gives a sense of collective agency. 

When Peter Walsh sees an ambulance moving through London, he thinks about what an amazing society he lives in—so organized—it can speed help where needed in a busy urban environment.  In fact, this is the very ambulance on the way to pick up the remains of Septimus—a man pushed out the window by the SAME social  imaginary Peter is admiring.  Bradshaw, too, is at the center of a monstrous “collective agency” that gives him the right to lock up Septimus—put him out of sight, deny him the company of his loved ones, and condemn him to a living death.  His decision to leap out the window instead is understood by Clarissa as a refusal to conform to the current social imaginary that permitted World War I (and will permit World War II).  What Septimus calls “brute human nature” is, in fact, the current social imaginary that sent ten million young men to their deaths for an economic war from which few of them, always assuming they ever came home again, would benefit directly. 

The social efficiency Peter admires is the same one one that “cleans up” anything that threatens to expose the limitations of the social imaginary.  Lady Bruton’s plan to get more white couple to emigrate to Canada to assure that it remains “British” in her sense of the term (i.e. white) is another example of the “social imaginary” at work.  Woolf shows us the luncheon where Lady Bruton gets “her” letter to the newspaper written (NOT by her, but the sycophant Hugh Whitbred who has made a career out of properly phrasing  dominant “converting” discourse so it seems like “common sense”).  Maintaining the the social imaginary is a lot of work.  . 

Thus, as the novel progresses, the early static image in the mirror of Clarissa’s gives way to a series of shifting and contradictory views of Mrs. Dalloway;  her identity expands to encompass all the divergent images while remaining unencompassed by them.

The special way that each character has of seeing Mrs. Dalloway reflects an incompatibility in points of view. While one character can see her as a sophisticated lady (the woman in the flower shop), another sees her triviality (Lady Bruton); while one sees her generosity (Richard Dalloway), another sees her selfishness (Peter Walsh); while one reacts to her life-giving force (Sally Seton), another responds to her parasitism (Miss Kilman). Thus, her personality begins to emerge as a relative quality.  She herself, at the age of 53, declares “she would never say again that anything was this or that” and in this way she begins to sense a “beyond”--something out past the current horizon of the social imaginary in which she is embedded.

Clarissa Dalloway, however, never experiences this loss of identity—despite the ambiguities of her personality and the various images reflected to her by others. Whenever she wishes, she can summon to the mirror her dependable and familiar image, her pointed, dartlike face, yet she ALSO remains—especially after unexpectedly hearing of the death of Septimus-- certain of a fundamental identity beneath all her masks. This is the identity she reveals in the novel by her decisions, not the trivial decisions of the day—such as, which book to select for an invalid friend, how to arrange her flowers, whom to invite to her party—but by her fundamental decisions to dedicate herself to resist destructive strategies of  “conversion and proportion,” embodied by the hateful Sir William Bradshaw. Her opposition to conversion and proportion gives Mrs. Dalloway the opportunity for the moral choices by which she creates herself apart from the regard of others, or of the roles she is expected or presumed to play.

And what is the opposite of conversion and proportion?  Love.  Not love of one’s self, or even love of the other (which can be a kind of imposition) but love of all the differences between and among us that make declaring anything to be “this” or “that” impossible and false. 

Love vs. proportion/ conversion :

the creative vs. the coercive.

In the novel, love implies

--an attitude of allowance;

-- letting others be;

-- recognizing in them an inviolable private self.

A character who experiences love has a sense of wonder at life, for he or she sees that it offers the possibilities of both solitude and society. One is free to be who one is, and yet also come together with others in a close but unstultifying relationship. Love inspires creativity, without which there is no hope for escape from the constrictive horizon of the social imaginary where “conversion and proportion” insist that everything must be “this” or “that”.  

The exponent of love wishes to express the beauty of his or her vision of life as it allows the one and the many to come together.

Conversion, on the other hand, is a destructive force, always indicating coercion. It is symbolized in the novel as an iron Goddess whose worshippers identify themselves by their desire for power.

The followers of conversion seek out people they can dominate: the weak, or sick, or disenfranchised. They "swoop" upon their victims, always concealing their true motives under a charitable guise. They appear as the helpers, the philanthropists, scientists, or evangelicalists, who “know” what is good for others.

Their true natures are not concealed from Mrs. Dalloway: she (along with Septimus, but he cannot communicate it) has the ability to see through the charitable gesture to its tyrannical meaning.

Indeed her principal and coherent action, the action, that like her party preparations, gives unity to the novel, is to expose and condemn the various forms of conversion. Her basic opposition to the coercive will is an absolute quality of her personality. As she stands intransigent in her resistance to conversion, she becomes more than the sum of her multiple roles, and more than the sum of responses to her.

Love and proportion/conversion are dramatized by a double apposition of characters: in the main plot, Peter Walsh, Miss Kilman, and Lady Bruton are set against Mrs. Dalloway;

in the sub-plot, Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw are opposed to Septimus Smith.

The conflict in the sub-plot, which ends in violence and death, intensifies the more tenuous position involving Clarissa. This double polarity of characters creates a structure for the novel as important thematically as the careful structuring of time and place. The narrative progresses through a series of revealing encounters between the exponents of love and those of proportion/conversion.

Some encounters juxtapose present and past; Clarissa, as she now is, recalls the girl of eighteen, where she made her first discovery of proportion/conversion in her first encounter with love in the form of Peter Walsh. 

She realizes, shortly before she flees the relationship and into the arms of Richard Dalloway, that Peter is intent on making her something she is not to conform to what he feels he needs her to be—what he is convinced she “actually” is—and when she runs from him he pronounces her lost—insulting her as nothing but a future trivial hostess standing at the top of a stair.  In fact, this will be the final scene of the novel, but she is a great deal more than Peter’s caustic comment suggests—and even he feels it in this final moment, despite himself.

 Some encounters show the clash between reality and delusion. The most terrible of these are Septimus' hallucinatory meetings with the brute conversion –“human nature” --bearing down on him with nostrils aflame.

Clarissa's party, the climax of the action, unites both plots as it gathers together the double set of characters. The party is Clarissa's creation, her equivalent to a work of art. The party brings to life Mrs. Dalloway's vision of the irrefragable possibilities for free and easy mingling. The exponents of conversion are present at her party, but deprived of the opportunity, and even the will, to exercise power.

As the party momentarily banishes differences between the strong and the weak, the "dominators" and their victims, it becomes Clarissa's symbolic victory over the forces of conversion.

Here, in this configuration of people that she has created and maintained for the evening, she establishes her presence and shows the full weight of her personality. Her party is for her an existential act by which she deliberately evokes and expresses her preference for love over proportion/conversion.

For secretly, beneath the veneer of her conventional middle-class manners, Mrs. Dalloway lives as a rebel and existentialist before her time. Outwardly, her life is one of propriety and order; her gestures seem gentle and conservative. But inwardly, she is carried away by overwhelming emotions: she hates, she fears, she achieves ecstasy, and she rebels. She most clearly asserts this unsubdued and unsuspected private aspect of her personality when she identifies herself with Septimus Smith. 

She feels a tremendous empathy with this mad poet whom she has never seen, because he  chose death in defiance of authority. This act, she felt, had created even as it had destroyed him, and only by acts of volition, those seemingly passive (like her own) and those violent (like his), does one achieve and assert a reality beyond the grasp of the “social imaginary”.

Clarissa sees  Death as that which gives meaning to life.   Ironically, all the deaths of World War I were deaths caused by an increasing need to try and “conquer” death through the acquisition of wealth and power (the European Nations went to war partly over a squabble as to who would continue to control the most lucrative colonies, such as the Congo).  Like many contemporary characters, Clarissa ignores conventional linear time and exalts “the moment” and seeks within it an "illumination," which she imagines to be as "a flame burning in a crocus."

Preoccupied as she is with  death, she withdraws into the private world of herself, and her rebelliousness finds implicit expression in her refusal to conform to prescribed social roles. Through excuses of ignorance, ineptness, frailty, or disinterest, she keeps herself apart from social institutions (much to lady Bruton’s disgust, who considers Clarissa to have failed at being the political wife Richard  needed to “advance”). She does not participate in politics, religion, philanthropy, or social reform. Despite her sociability, she lives, essentially, a life of her own, as detached and singular in its way as the pathologically isolated life of her counterpart, Septimus Smith.

She gives parties—quiet, staid affairs, but purposeful only in their purposelessness. Parties are her gestures toward art, for they create what she considers to be a free and self-contained configuration of people that is beautiful and unavailable to the coercive forces of proportion and conversion.

Thus Mrs. Dalloway's day represents a search for values—values that the current “social imaginary” that led to world War I will not allow, values that Septimus, too, wishes to express, but will not be allowed to do so.   

 Clarissa seeks the meaning of life while her "double," Septimus, becomes progressively convinced that life is meaningless if he is handed over to the likes of Sir William Bradshaw. By sifting through her memories, by taking an imaginative leap into the lives of others, by questioning her own image in the mirror, and above all, by exposing and condemning proportion/conversion, she tries to arrive at a hierarchy of moral values and to define a code to live by.

Peter Walsh, in his demanding passion, first revealed to her man's hidden will to dominate, and Sally Seton revealed the possibility of "disinterested love." As Clarissa saw how Peter could not tolerate either Sally's idiosyncrasies or her own conventionalities, she understood his drive to "maul" and "maltreat" people until he had shaped them to his own desires. Thus Peter became the first personification of conversion and the first of her "enemies"—for Clarissa realized that "it was enemies one wanted, not friends" (p. 266). Enemies forced her to rally to herself, to achieve definition and point, to mobilize her inner energies and become who she was. Peter Walsh prepares the way for an assemblage of enemies that will include Miss Kilman, Lady Bruton, Dr. Holmes, and Sir William Bradshaw.  All of these people have a disguised will to dominate and control; all worship conversion, the iron Goddess, "who loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace ... feasts most subtly on the human will".

The most blatant example of conversion is the eminent physician and "priest of science," Sir William Bradshaw.For his wife and patients he set a standard, his standard, of normality, and if they did not conform to it, he threatened confinement. Fifteen years ago his wife had "gone under" and submitted her will to his: "there had been no scene, no snap; only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his" . Now he presents Septimus with his standard of "proportion" as the cure for his madness. But while he appears in the guise of the healer, with "love, duty, self sacrifice" as his ostensible motives, his real drive is for power. If the sick or helpless refused his version of normality, then, "He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up" . 

That evening at her party, Mrs. Dalloway recognizes Sir William as the quintessential enemy, the disciple of conversion; but all during the day she has been weighing love and conversion, and she has found beneath the spurious masks of charity, passion, or religion, the same cruel will to dominate.

What else, she thinks, is Miss Kilman's relationship to young Elizabeth Dalloway than the expression of a desire to convert? Miss Kilman's possessive desire for Clarissa's daughter is presented as almost comically excruciating: "She (Miss Kilman) was about to split asunder, she felt. The agony was so terrific. If she could grasp her, if she could clasp her, if she could make her hers absolutely and forever and then die; that was all she wanted" . Her pressing emotions are hatred, frustration, embarrassment, and greed. Unable to devour the girl, she gorges on sticky chocolate éclairs. But she cannot enjoy even her gluttony, for she is uncomfortable and awkward wherever she is because she always feels herself frustrated in her desire to dominate. Even her religion, or especially her religion, makes her ugly and potentially cruel, so thinks Mrs. Dalloway: "religious ecstacy made people callous,"— and she adds "(so did causes)."

The main exponent of social causes is Lady Bruton.Her great cause, one of many in the novel, is a "project for emigrating young people of both sexes" to Canada.  This project has become the focus of her life, giving her "pent egotism" a form of release. Through emigration she will assume, she dreams, a position of leadership like that her forebearers held, the commanders and generals whose lust for power she has in her blood. Like Miss Kilman (both women have names that belie their good intentions), Lady Bruton stuffs herself at lunch, until bloated and drowsy, she falls into a sleepy fantasy of domination that leaves her content: "Power was hers, position, income". While Clarissa earlier held the drunkard on the street inviolate, Lady Bruton never asks whether the "young people" want to be moved to Canada, for her philanthropy, like Miss Kilman's religion and Sir William's science, is the sublimation of her strong egocentric will for power.

Peter Walsh represents another disguise of conversion. His dominating will takes the form of passion. As a young man in Bourton, his love for Clarissa threatened the privacy she held inviolate. He insisted that she change herself to conform to his image of the ideal woman; he wanted to absorb her personality into his. Thinking back on Bourton, Clarissa unites the present with the past, for she still believes that "in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.... But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into" .  In Peter's dominating love, Clarissa found the first clue to the tyranny hidden behind the masks of the Goddess conversion, and she realized also that conversion destroyed, no matter what its benevolent guise. Peter said he loved her, but he could not let her be: his passion was a fire that consumed as it embraced. Richard, on the other hand, offered love that was protective but unconsuming, and that allowed her the solitude and freedom to be herself. Thus her early choice between the two young men is a distinction between love and conversion, Although she occasionally regrets the decision, thinking that with Peter she would have had a more intense and exciting life, she has found in her marriage that balance of solitude and society that she absolutely needs:

... there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought Clarissa, ... for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one's husband, without losing one's independence, one's self-respect—something, after all, priceless

The symbol that expresses for Mrs. Dalloway the balanced relationship between self and others is the window. The window reveals people to each other, but also keeps them separate. Through her window, Mrs. Dalloway can see the old lady in the house across the way as she goes through her preparations for the evening, privately and undisturbed. For Clarissa, this ordinary sight is reassuring, and indeed, beautiful:

... she watched out of the window the old lady opposite climbing upstairs. Let her climb upstairs if she wanted to; let her stop; then let her, as Clarissa had often seen her, gain her bedroom, part her curtains, and disappear again into the background. Somehow one respected that—that old woman looking out of the window, quite unconscious that she was being watched. There was something solemn in it—but love [passion] and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul . 

At one point in the novel, Septimus Smith cries out that for him too "beauty was behind a pane of glass." But to him the glass represents total withdrawal, a barrier that shuts him away from society and keeps in his pain.  Solitude without society is madness. Septimus cannot share experience; he has lost the ability to relate to others except in a way that victimizes him. He feels himself either totally isolated or under coercion. His pathological withdrawal, first symptomized by a strange numbness at his friend's sudden death, has continued into his marriage. Shut in upon himself, he experiences horror at the sheer emptiness of life. To live in dread as he does must mean, he thinks, that he is guilty of unspeakable crimes, and guilt haunts him in the form of hallucination. Hallucination takes him out of a terrifying reality to an even more ominous world filled with unseen voices and figures of the dead. When he finally confesses his utter helplessness and turns to others for support, he encounters the iron Goddess conversion. She appears to him under the masks of the Doctors Holmes and Bradshaw, those "repulsive brutes, with blood-red nostrils" who threaten to lock him up if he does not submit to them. In reaction to the forces that Septimus feels to be coercing him—Holmes and Bradshaw telling him what he "must" do—he calls forth the one strength left to him in his weakness. He has the freedom of utter detachment: "now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know" .  His sense of freedom is delusory, but it gives him the courage for defiance. At the expense of his life, he keeps himself inviolate—his suicide assures that he will never be converted to Sir William's standard of "proportion."  

Septimus Smith's sense of inviolability, though symptomatic of his paranoia, makes him Mrs. Dalloway's dark complement. He represents her possible destiny were she to lose her tenuously free contact with other people which gives her a hold on sanity. For like Septimus, she feels herself threatened, and she too experiences panic at the fact of being alive. Unlike him, though, she has the support of money, maids, position, and her husband; but her strongest support is really her own illuminated vision of life.

In a sense, Mrs. Dalloway's party saves her from Septimus' fate (originally Virginia Woolf had intended her to die). Her party expresses her affirmation of life and creativity, even as it forces her to face the knowledge of death: "In the middle of my party, here's death, she thought" (p. 279). At this confrontation, she achieves more than a reconciliation to the fact of death: she comes to view it as the ultimate form of man's defiance. "Death was defiance," she thought, and secretly she applauds Septimus' suicide because she surmises that it had preserved the integrity of his inviolable self. When once again the old lady appears in the window across the way, Mrs. Dalloway feels a rush of affirmation and love; and she reasserts the value of her party as a creative gesture. Her desire "to combine, to create" is her tacit acknowledgment of the darkness of life, and her victory over it. This darkness is not merely the threat of death: it is the possibility for total isolation in the solitude of madness, or for the brutality of power. As her party serves "to kindle and illuminate," it expresses her answer to the powers of darkness. Her party has taken the individual out of the possible panic of isolation while it has at the same time rendered powerless the "dominators and tyrants" who serve the Goddess conversion. At her party, she has momentarily vanquished the arch-enemy, Sir William Bradshaw, a man capable of that "indescribable outrage,": "forcing your soul."

No one sees the parties in the same light as she.

To Peter Walsh, who cannot conceive of an unegocentric or gratuitous act, they seem attempts at social climbing, directed towards her husband's advancement.

To Lady Bruton, with her ideal of military command, they seem idle and vain. To her husband, they seem undue taxations of her strength.

To Miss Kilman, sin. But her party nevertheless establishes her in juxtaposition to the others and elicits their secret if begrudged admiration. For it shows her to be truly untyrannical; and while it also reveals her as trivial, snobbish and dependent, she can transcend her faults to become a definitive central figure. Having recognized and rejected the multifaces of power and coercion, she has achieved, through a mature and comprehending acceptance of self and others, her moral victory.

The form of the novel attempts to transmute the everyday realities of life into a metaphorical equivalent of the sea. The sea was Virginia Woolf's primal symbol of fluid continuity, and she tried to create an impression of life as being as flowing, as timeless, as continuous, as the sea. As Mrs. Dalloway flows in one uninterrupted stream from first word to last, aesthetic form mimetically simulates the theme of continuity. The stream-of-consciousness technique makes past and present continuous in the character's mind. The poetic language of the novel achieves a compression and ambiguity suited to its organic view of life; and symbolism weights a seemingly insignificant object or gesture with ramified meanings from other times and other contexts. Thus the surface of the novel suggests the movement of the sea, constantly flowing; and like the sea, it contains beneath its surface the dimension of depth.