Thesis

I wrote the underlined section below before our discussion today:

In class, Mr. Mitchell pointed out the section of the Mezzanine where Baker uses the white background trick as a metaphor for his style of writing. He called this Baker's "thesis", and I think we may have just encountered Woolf's thesis (or perhaps one of several) in this weekend's reading. The passage has a striking similarity to some of the essays we read in class that were written by Woolf right around the time that she was writing Mrs. Dalloway. Just to recap, the essays argued for character driven rather than plot driven writing in which the characters sacrificed nothing for the plot and the reader could get to know them on a deep level-- see all of their idiosyncrasies and motivations, etc.


It's a goal that Woolf realizes extremely well throughout Mrs. Dalloway by familiarizing the reader very intimately with the characters. The novel also explains the goal indirectly by presenting the characters as unable to fully understand each other-- which reflects Woolf's criticism of real life, and justifies her call for literature that bridges the gaps between people in the real world. In what I've been calling the "thesis passage", her criticism is quite directly explained.


It's presented as a theory of young Clarissa's (one of "heaps"), but Woolf frames it through Peter's point of view.


"(the theory) was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. (...)(Clarissa) felt herself everywhere;(...) 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."(Woolf 148)

I don't quite know what to make of most of this passage, but the 'apparitions are so momentary compared with the the unseen part of us' bit definitely makes sense in terms of Woolf's essays and the rest of the novel. One of the benefits of Woolf's wandering free indirect discourse is the illustration of this concept: that we are more complicated than we seem to be (not to mention the benefit of overcoming it by giving the reader more than the 'apparitions'). We are constantly being shown how characters are more complex than they seem to one another. A good example is the scene where Clarissa speaks to Peter while she's sewing up her dress. He thinks, but doesn't tell her that she looks older. And she's been having qualms about being too boring which he obviously doesn't think she's bothered by (though he is bothered by it--as she knows he will be). It's also a good example because they had "met every day; then not for six months, or years" like Clarissa complains about in the first bit of the theory (which she presumably came up with before they had stopped regular contact-- that's not really relevant, it's just interesting).

So I read the passage in a slightly less positive light than Mr. Mitchell. He seemed to think that Woolf was making a case for our relationships with other people completing our characters (which would really justify Clarissa's parties). And, now that he's explained this, I believe him and the latter parts of Clarissa's theory make a lot more sense. However, I originally thought that Woolf was still complaining a bit about our distances from other people, and the discrepancies between people's surfaces and their underlying thoughts. And I suppose this passage could sort of fit both of our interpretations, because if you're unsuccessful at finding other people or places to impress upon and have relationships with--if you remain too distant from other people--you would definitely have something to complain about--perhaps even the loss of some form of life after death in the preserved impressions you've made on other things. Like poor Miss. Kilman, who's not doing very well at extending her unseen self wide (at least not among people-- maybe among places). But I now agree with Mr. Mitchell that this problem doesn't seem to be presented as inevitable.








I'd also just like to note that Clarissa's theory that we might survive in some sense through our impressions on others fits in beautifully with her fear of and fascination with death (as we've seen throughout the book) as an atheist who doesn't believe in a conventional afterlife. We've seen her worry in disbelief about being gone, and it's like she's trying to console herself with the thought that maybe she will last after she dies.

Note #2: It's clear that Clarissa was never quite convinced by her theory ("perhaps -- perhaps"), and it seems that she's abandoned it mostly by age 52 because she hasn't mentioned it, even though she's been talking a lot about death.