Mrs. Dalloway, the Dictator, and the Relativity Paradox
Author(s): Christopher Herbert
Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 104-124
Published by: Duke University Press
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andthe
Mrs.Dalloway,theDictator,
Paradox
Relativity
CHRISTOPHER HERBERT
Walter Pater, a keen observer of contemporarytrends and a writerfor whom
declared in 1865 thatthe definingfeatureof
VirginiaWoolf had close affinities,1
modem thoughtwas "its cultivationof the 'relative' spiritin place of the 'absolute"' (Appreciations66). This statementis bound to seem enigmatic,since the
great philosophical, scientific,and polemical movement that took place in the
second half of the nineteenth century under the banner of the relativity
principle-the principlethatnothingexistsbut relations-has yetto be redeemed
fromthe oblivion into which, forvarious ideologically inflectedreasons, it fell
afterthe turnof the century.Yet relativity,
along with evolution,to which it was
so closely tied as oftento be nearlysynonymouswith it,was well recognized at
the time as the distinctivetheme of much of the Victorianavant garde. It was
proclaimed as such by HerbertSpencer, the most eminentearly spokesman of
relativity,in his once-famousmanifestoFirstPrinciples(1862) and by a constellationof otherdistinguishedVictorianradicals and freethinkers
including,to name
W.K. Clifford,
the
mathematician
a
the
Alexander
Bain,
psychologist
only few,
the statisticianKarl Pearson, theeconomistW.S. Jevons,and the theoristof physics J.B.Stallo. These writersset forththe doctrineof what Bain called as early as
1855 "the law of RELATIVITY" (Senses8) and, later,the "principleof Universal
Relativity"(Logic1: 255) as the foundationof a newly rigorousscientificrationality,one emancipated fromthe reign of "metaphysical"absolutes unable to give
logically coherentaccounts of themselves.Restoringthis movement to view is
indispensable to a fullyarticulatedunderstandingof modernist,and thus postmodernist,intellectualculture;and restoringVirginia Woolf's great novel Mrs.
Dalloway(1925) to its connectionwith the philosophical traditionof relativityis
necessary-so I argue in thisessay-to understandingit in its fullhistoricalmatrix.There may be littleneed at this late date to challenge once again, as many
Woolf scholars now have, Lukacs's implausible idea of her as a writerof hermeticallyself-enclosed"subjectiveexperience"and as an instanceof themodernist "negationofhistory"(51, 21); but her importantlinkto thenineteenth-century
relativity movement and, in particular, its bearing upon her literary
have yetto be broughtto light.2
experimentalism,
From the start,this movement of radical intellectual reconstructionwas a
therise of relativitythinking
moral and politicalmovementas well. In attributing
to "the influenceof the sciences of observation,"Pater makes the point clearly,
For an extended study of the relation between Woolf and Pater, though one that does not
considerthe themeshighlightedhere,see Meisel.
2
In the opening paragraphs of this essay and to a lesser extentlater on, I draw on materials
more fullydeveloped in VictorianRelativity.
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PARADOX
CHRISTOPHERHERBERT I THE RELATIVITY
105
rebuttingin advance the thesis,widely assertedsubsequently,thatscientificrelativityand "moral relativism"were separate and independent things.3As a function of the development of the antiabsolutisticpremise, he says, contemporary
thinkershave begun "a new analysis of the relationsof ... good and evil," and
"[h]ard and abstractmoralitiesare yieldingto a more exact estimateof the subtlety and complexity of our life" (Appreciations 66, 67). When Edward
Westermarckin The Originand Developmentof theMoral Ideas (1906-08) and in
EthicalRelativity(1932) dismantles systematically"[t]he supposed objectivityof
moral judgments" in order to vindicate a sweeping theoryof "ethical subjectivism and relativity"(Ethical3, xviii),he builds in facton a long-establishedifalways volatile and perplexed tradition of the radical Victorian intelligentsia.
"There is no absolute code of morality,no absolute philosophy nor absolute religion," declares Karl Pearson in 1887,forexample (428). Westermarckgives this
traditionhis own sharp polemical twistby maintainingthatmoral systemseven
at advanced levels of civilization are rooted in a primitivebasis of resentment,
retribution,and "the instinctivedesire to inflictcounter-pain ... that gives to
moral indignationits most importantcharacteristic,"and by protestingagainst
the persecutionin Christiansocietyof such harmless taboo behaviors as homosexuality (Ethical85). So, too, when Woolf herself,in a 1932 essay, identifies
Laurence Sterne'sinnovationsin relativisticfictionaltechniquewith the principle
that"thereis ... no universal scale of values" (Collected1: 97), she is highlighting
not only the radical characterofher own novelisticenterprise-her idea of fiction
as an instrumentforrevisingthe fundamentalmoral behavior of her society(including the anathematizingof homosexuality)-but also the derivation of her
radical outlook from that of the Victorian age that so often,in the defining
polemical gestureof modernism,she disavows.5
The critique of "hard and abstract moralities" takes its political form in
Victorian relativitydiscourse as a credo of resistanceto what these writersregarded as the acute contemporarymenace of authoritarianismand dogmatic absolutism. This theme is prominent,forexample, in the work of George Grote,
radical Benthamitepolitician,eminenthistorianof Greece, and militantspokesman for the relativitymovement.Grote never tiresof exhortinghis readers to
beware the momentwhen "the dogmatistenacts his canon of belief as imperative, peremptory,binding upon all" (Plato 3: 153), forthis,he says, is the fatal
momentwhen persuasion and rationalityare abolished and "you leave open no
other ascendency over men's minds, except the crushing engine of extraneous
coercion with assumed infallibility"(History7: 41-42n). Rejecting the almost
3
For one example of thiscardinal doctrineof twentieth-century
intellectualhistory,see Toulmin
1:89.
4 See also Ethical258 and
Origin2: 456-89.
5 See, forexample, Woolf'sevocation of thenineteenthcenturyas an age of rampant
dampness,
rot,and suffocationin chapter5 of Orlando.For an illuminatingstudy of Woolf's indebtedness
to Victorianwriting,see Beer's "The Victoriansin VirginiaWoolf: 1832-1941"in Arguingwith
the Past. "The Victorians are not simply represented ... in her novels," says Beer; "the
Victorians are also in Virginia Woolf. They are internalized,inseparable, as well as held at
arm's length"(139).
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106
NOVEL I FALL 2001
universalvilificationof ProtagorastheSophist,the originalformulatorof relativity,by nineteenth-century
philosophicalcommentators,Groteexalts him forprowhat
he
declares
to be the one genuine creed of human liberty:"the
claiming
of
the
and
the affirmation
of universalrelativityin all concepabsolute,
negation
and
3:
tions,judgments,
127). By way of contrast,Grote
predications" (Plato
stressesthe image of Plato as he appears in his late treatisethe Laws,a promoter
of a totalitariandictatorshipdevoted to the brutal repression of all deviations
fromofficialthinking(Plato 3: 148). Accordingto Grote,some such political system is implied necessarilyby any invocationof thatpurelyideological and antiscientificcategory,to the demolitionofwhich Protagorasdevoted his intellectual
life,"TruthAbsolute" (Plato3: 138).
As forPater,he raises the prospectof dictatorshipand coercion only in a far
less polemical-though ultimatelyequally provocative and scandalous-form.
"Beauty, like all otherqualities presented to human experience,is relative,"he
says in the opening paragraph of the prefaceto The Renaissance(1873), defining
theprinciplefromwhich his esthetictheoryflows.He concludes thatall attempts
"to find some universal formula" for defining beauty are futile-that the
question of "what beauty is in itself,or ... its exact relationto truth"is a "metaphysical" one and thus "as unprofitableas metaphysicalquestions elsewhere"
thereare no privilegedreference
(xix,xx). In the Paterianestheticfield,therefore,
framesand no principles of dogmatism or sectarianexclusion: to one who has
embraced the new way of thinking,"all periods, types,schools of taste,are in
themselvesequal" (xxi).6The vocation of the criticwhose basic postulate is that
"beauty ... is relative"is thus not to striveto determinethe inherentor absolute
propertiesof art objects,forno such propertiesexist,but to cultivateas keen, as
generous, and as impartiala sensitivityas possible to all manifestationsof that
thingindefinable"in itself,"beauty.No attitudeis more alien to thisone than the
idea of criticismas an agency forthe purificationof taste or forthe enforcingof
fixedcodes of values. Predictably,the Pateriandoctrineof impartialityand cultivated pleasure seemed to guardians of orthodoxyto be a formof immoralism
and an incitementto perversion(specificallypederasty)and provoked the same
calls for the violent repression of deviancy in the name of social hygiene that
relativitynever has failed to provoke since the exiling of Protagoras and the
burning of his works, including his famous lost treatise On Truth, by the
Athenian police. Hence the criticismdeployed, forexample, by Leslie Stephen,
Woolf's father,in an essay condemningthe relativisticestheticismof Pater himself (thoughwithoutmentioninghim by name). When an authorproposes "sentimentswhich implymoral disease," says Stephen,then"the criticshould step in
and administerthe lash with the fullstrengthof his arm. The harderhe hits and
thedeeper he cuts thebetterfortheworld" (94, 92).
6
Need one commentthatwhen Einsteinsubsequentlyproposes as thebasis of a new physicsthe
principleof "the equal legitimacyof all inertialsystems"(World69), he transposesthe Paterian
theme-no doubt mediated forhim by a host of interveningculturalagencies-fairly directly
contextinto a scientificone? Gross's and Levitt'scaim thatit is "wildly
froman extrascientific
that
relativitytheoryin physics was affectedby "something in the ambient
implausible"
culture"(HigherSuperstition
103) is itselfrenderedimplausibleby such evidence as this.
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CHRISTOPHERHERBERT | THE RELATIVITY
PARADOX
107
In marked contrastto thisimageryof the sadistic officialviolence thatalways
in absolutisttheories,being in fact
is implicit,accordingto partisansof relativity,
theresultthatthetheoriesexistto produce,Paterpromotesan idea of criticismas
a mode of analysis in which "the instinctivedesire to inflictcounter-pain... that
gives to moral indignationits most importantcharacteristic"is entirelyin abeyance. This is no incidentalaspect of his thinking,which appears on the Victorian
culturalscene specificallyas a challenge to the ascendency of a puritanicalmentalityin which moral indignationand the love of inflictingpain ("the justice that
desires to hurtculpritsas much as theydeserve to be hurt,"as George Eliot puts
it in TheMill on theFloss [48]) were widely diagnosed as paramount. For a critic
under Pater's dispensation, "the negation of the absolute" implies the ideal of
riskilyexperimental,nondogmatic,ever-mobilefreethoughtarticulatedby the
line of culturallydissident writersthatruns fromJ.S.Mill and Cliffordto their
latter-daydisciple, the late Paul Feyerabend."What we have to do," says Pater,
"is to be forever curiouslytestingnew opinions and courtingnew impressions,
never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy"(Renaissance189)7 Such, in part, is the
moral theory,pledged to the potentiallysevere perturbationof the status quo
and keyed to a mission of resistanceto theideology of purificatory
violence,that
is given extended fictionalformin Mrs. Dalloway.To tracethe logic of its expositionin Woolf's textis to discover therea line of concertedphilosophical intention
that most commentary on the novel heretofore-Lukacs's
first and
foremost-would not prepareus to find.
Not to seek to reduce this richlymultifariousbook to a diagram, but merelyto
make its affiliationwithVictorianrelativityliteraturestand out as clearlyas possible, we may imagine it as envisioningtwo opposed zones of experience:on the
one hand, thatofcoercionand violence;on theother,thatof relativity.
It would be hard to name many novels-Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) might
be one-in which imageryof physicalviolence is more startling,more expressive
of theappalling, intolerablecharacterof violence,thaninMrs. Dalloway.That this
is so is testimonynot so much to the absolute contentof violence in thiswork as
to the principle that fictional effects are as subject to Bain's "law of
RELATIVITY" as are "all otherqualities presented to human experience." The
violence in Woolf's novel takes on its peculiar intensityof effect,thatis, by appearing as the antithesisand the nullificationof a fictionalscene defined by a
radically differentsystemof imagery-imagery, forexample, of partygiving(of
of floraldisplays and polished silver,of ceremoexquisite domesticrefinements,
nious social intimacy) and of the delightfullyanimated London scene out of
doors. Both of these settingsradiate in Mrs. Dalloway an atmosphericsof paradisal beauty and happiness probablywithoutan equivalent in any otherserious
novel except for the firsthalf of Du cote de chez Swann. "Never had he seen
London look so enchanting,"thinksPeterWalsh, sounding the distinctivenote of
feelingin thisnovel: "-the softnessof the distances;the richness;the greenness;
7
For a disapprovinglatter-dayaccountofPater's relativity,
see Small 91-111.
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108
NOVEL | FALL 2001
the civilisation"(Dalloway 107). The juxtapositionof thissystemof effectsand its
opposite, the ugly horror of violence, formsin effectthe central trope of the
novel. Clarissa Dalloway herselffeelsit keenlyat the momentwhen the news of
Septimus Smith's death, with all its imageryof a shattered,"horriblymangled"
(227) human body, eruptswith obscene effectin the midst of the rarefiedsetting
ofher party(279-80).
Smith's suicide by impaling himselfon the spikes of Mrs. Filmer's area railings (226) formsthe most graphicepiphany of violence in the novel, but it signifies froma wider perspective just one minor aftershockof the vast system of
organized violence representedby the Great War of 1914-18.Though the shooting stopped fiveyearspreviously,war stillovershadows thescene.
For it was themiddleofJune.The War was over,exceptfor someone likeMrs.
at theEmbassylast nighteatingherheartout becausethatniceboywas
Foxcroft
killedand nowtheoldManorHouse mustgo toa cousin;or LadyBexborough
who
openeda bazaar, theysaid, withthetelegramin herhand,John,herfavourite,
killed;butitwas over;thankHeaven-over. (5)
In otherwords, the carnage of the world war is not over at all, but renews itself
daily, all these years later, in the private lives of innumerable survivors.
Septimus Smith's anguished hallucinationsof his dead armycomrade Evans express thisthemein its most drasticformand illustratethe prevalence throughout
the novel of an unstable psychic state marked by uncontrollablemood swings
between euphoria and sudden piercing sensations of grief, dread, and
desolation. This is the symptomology,we come to realize, of a sort of allpervading and seemingly indelible shell shock that affectseveryone in deeply
traumatizedpostwar society,ex-combatantsand civilians alike. In its searching
diagnosis of this syndrome,Mrs. Dalloway rehearses a fantasy of impending
European cataclysm,of what Spencer called prophetically"a returnto barbaric
principlesof government"(Study244), thathaunts the literatureof the Victorian
relativitytradition and forms,in fact,one of its most insistent motifs.W.K.
Clifford,forexample, warns repeatedlyof a revival of religiouspowers claiming
"to declare with infallibleauthoritywhat is rightand what is wrong," a developmentthatwould raise theprospectof a "civilisationpervertedto the serviceof
evil"; in such a case, he declares,"the wreck of civilised Europe would be darker
than the darkest of past ages" (2: 224, 234, 256). This motif appears in Mrs.
Dallowaynot in the formof a dire premonitionbut in thatof a compulsive,lacerating memory.The two versions, the propheticand the recollective,are essentiallyequivalent, not only imagisticallybut because the traumaticmemorythat
haunts the minds of Woolf's charactersdoes constitutea kind of prophecy after
all; or rather,it carries a dreadfulawareness thatthe prophecyhas perhaps not
ceased to be operativejust because it has already come true.It conveys a warning
too appalling to be stated outright,and all too prescient,thatthe demon of militaryviolence may not have been exorcisedforgood, as everyonelongs to believe,
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PARADOX
CHRISTOPHERHERBERT I THE RELATIVITY
109
but may onlybe awaitingthechanceto breakout froma temporary
phase of
into
terrible
action
once
again.8
latency
Neverare we farin Mrs.Dallowayfromshockingeruptionsofimageryofviolencethatmakethenovel'scelebration
of delightfully
festivesocial intercourse
ifnotdelusional.Clarissathusreflects
seemfragileand precarious,
amid
briefly
on thegenocidalviolenceinflicted
herpartypreparations
on theAlbanians-or
was it theArmenians?-"[h]unted
out ofexistence,
maimed,frozen,thevictims
ofcruelty
and injustice"(182);PeterWalshthinksin thesameway of"therascals
who gethangedforbattering
thebrainsofa girlout in a train"(263).Vindictive
in
like
this
seem
aliento thegenteelsocialenvironment
may
altogether
savagery
it
not.
Clarissa
herself
from
her
own
whichthenovelis mainlyset,but is
suffers
raspinghatredofMissKilman,whichseemstoherlikea "brutalmonster"inher
and religiousrightown heart(17); and Miss Kilman,seethingwithresentment
eousness,reciprocates,
savoringtheimaginary
pleasureofscourgingClarissain
muchthesame sadistictermsin whichLeslieStephenimaginedinflicting
punishmenton WalterPater:"thererosein heran overmastering
desireto overcome
her;tounmaskher....Ifonlyshecouldmakeherweep;couldruinher;humiliate
You are right!"(189).This is "theinstinctive
her;bringherto herkneescrying,
inshocking,
desiretoinflict
undilutedform.
counter-pain"
The syncretic
ofWoolf'snovelintimates
as one ofitsmostpressing
structure
fromthegeopoliticalto theprivate
suggestionsthatviolencein itsmanyforms,
and theintimately
personal,is alwaysthesame thing,alwaysspringsfromthe
This submergedtrainof thoughtin
same fundamental
psychosocialstructure.
Mrs.Dallowayis latertheorizedat lengthin ThreeGuineas(1938),in whichWoolf
on thelinkbetweenmilitaryviolenceand theviolence
meditatesparticularly
as
she claims,upon thefemalesex in Englishsociety.Both
inflicted,
pervasively
are definedby her as expressionsof a primitive"desireto imposeauthority"
in Westernsociety.
tomalepsychology
(Three155n)thatallegedlyis fundamental
is incarnatedforWoolfin thearchetypal
Thispropensity
figureoftheDictator,
and realavatarsas citedby herincludeSophocles'sCreon,
whose fictionalized
embodied,she says,in a host
Hitler,and Mussolini,butwho is no less distinctly
liketheRev.PatrickBronteor Mr.Barrett,
the"monsterof
ofsubsidiarytyrants
in
"is
called
This
Germanand
Street"
(Three132).
menacingfigure
Wimpole
ItalianFuhreror Duce; in our own languageTyrantor Dictator"(142); he perofhumanenergyupon "the
sonifiesin hisvariousguisesthetotalconcentration
of
and
dominion"
and
task
coercion
(185n)
repulsive
uponreplacingall possibiliin humanlifewithrigid
and
creative
tiesofvariety,
multiplicity,
improvisation
In
all
this
Woolf
makes
one
thinkofBramStoker's
uniformity.
exposition,
again
fableoftheclandestine
invasionofEnglandbya monstrous
whoboastsof
tyrant
his ancestraldescentfromthedictator
who
is
venerated
as
"dear
Master"
Attila,
and
who
no
than
a pure
his
is
driven
other
motives
followers,
seemingly
by
by
will (60,
maniato subjugateothers,and womenparticularly,
to his all-powerful
8
While Woolfwas composinghernovel,AdolfHitlerwas composinghis own meditationon the
unhealed wounds of the world war, Mein Kampf,in the fortressprison at Landsberg. The two
books, each in its own idiom conjuringthe specter of a new age of militaryviolence, were
published in thesame yearof 1925.
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110
NOVEL I FALL2001
137). But the clearest foreshadowingsof Woolf's polemics against dictatorship
are found, as we have seen, in nineteenth-century
relativityliterature,with its
insistentwarningsabout thecomingto power of "the dogmatist[who] enacts his
canon ofbeliefas imperative,peremptory,
bindingupon all" (Grote,Plato3: 153).
It may or may not be reckoneda shortcomingof Woolf's account of this type
in ThreeGuineasthatit is, like Stoker's and Grote's,relentlesslysimplistic,positing as it does a monolithic will to domination, or that it contradicts the
Foucauldian model according to which the ancien regime of brutallyvindictive
state power exercised directlyon human bodies has been eclipsed by a postcarceral regimeof more sophisticated,more pervading and diffusiveinstitutionsof
supervision and control(institutionsthatWoolf by no means discounts and, in
fact,investigatesintensively).This model is to some extentdangerously naive,
she would presumablyinsist.What it leaves out, treatsas obsolete, is precisely
the pathological dynamic of violence.The institutionthat in fact overshadows
moder societyin the aftermathof thecollapse of thedivine rightof autocracyis
thatof the megalomaniacal Plato-likedictator,she argues, and dictatorsby their
nature are insatiably prone to violence. To some degree (so her work, like
Hannah Arendt's, lets us speculate), the prospect of a totallydocile, indoctrinated, disciplined populace actually runs counterto the craving of dictatorship
to inflictmurderousreprisalson real or make-believeenemies.9
Mrs. Dalloway's unforgettableincarnationof the Dictator is the Harley Street
psychiatristSir William Bradshaw, "a great doctor yet to [Clarissa] obscurely
evil, withoutsex or lust, extremelypolite to women, but capable of some indescribableoutrage-forcing your soul, thatwas it" (Dalloway281). Sir William figures in literaryhistoryas one of the last and scariestexemplarsof the lineage of
vampire-likesoul-destroyers,"those spectreswho stand astride us and suck up
half our life-blood,dominatorsand tyrants"(Dalloway 16-17),who emerge from
Victorianfictionin a host of sinisterforms-Mr. Murdstone,St. JohnRivers,Mr.
Casaubon, Angel Clare, Dracula-as somethinglike the archetypalmodem personality.(Of course, thispersonalityis intimatelyinterlockedat every turnwith
its necessarycomplement,thatof the victim,such as Lady Bradshaw, who willingly acquiesces in the structureof domination,findingin it a perverse kind of
self-aggrandizement.)Sir William worships two great deities: Proportion (the
principle of normalcyand of the strictrepressionof emotion and imagination)
and, especially,Conversion (the principleof evangelical religiosity).His religion
professesaltruisticideals but is, in fact,like thatof his immediateliteraryancestor,Count Dracula, a cult of sheer domination."Conversion," which "feasts on
the wills of the weakly," says Woolf's narrator,"offershelp, but desires power."
She is active in building churches and hospitals, "[b]ut conversion, fastidious
Goddess, loves blood betterthan brick,and feasts most subtly on the human
will" (Dalloway151-52).
With thisconcentratedimageryof epicurean cannibalisticor vampiricperversion, Woolfseems to allude back beyond BramStokerto thework thatfigures(as
9
Once Hitler ran out of Jews and Slavs to massacre, says Arendt,he would inevitablyhave
begun slaughtering ordinary Germans, because "terror ... is the very essence" of the
totalitarianformof government(Origins344; see also 391,411, 416n,424).
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PARADOX
CHRISTOPHERHERBERT| THE RELATIVITY
111
I do not have space here to demonstrate) as something like the ur-textof
Victorian relativitythinking,Feuerbach's Essenceof Christianity
(1841). "There
Feuerbach
lurksin thebackgroundof [Christian]love,"
said, "an unloving monster,a diabolical being,whose personality,separable and actuallyseparated from
love, delightsin theblood of hereticsand unbelievers,-the phantomof religious
fanaticism" (52-53). Woolf also seems to evoke another nineteenth-century
Feuerbachian refraction,Nietzsche's morbidly diseased ascetic priest, whose
and who mustbe
"awful historicmission" it is to exercise"lordshipoversufferers"
"impregnable ... in his will forpower, so as to acquire the trustand the awe of
the weak so thathe can be theirhold, bulwark, prop, compulsion, overseer,tyrant,god." He comes in thisrole,says Nietzsche,"to representpracticallya new
type of the beast of prey,"one who is "venerable,wise, cold,,fullof treacherous
superiority"(162-63). Stoker's,Feuerbach's, and Nietzsche's tyrannicalmonster,
the incubus of nineteenth-century
nightmares,takes on a recognizable contemin
the
form
of
the
porary image
great medical researcher Doctor Benjulia in
Wilkie Collins's 1882 novel Heart and Science.Benjulia is a specialist, like Sir
William Bradshaw, in "brain disease"; his "hideous secret"is thathe runs a vivisectionlaboratoryand confessesin an unguarded momentthathis greatestlonging is to put not just animals but living human beings on his "torturetable" for
experimentalpurposes. "A scrupulouslypolite man," says Collins's narrator,in
language that Woolf echoes closely, "he was always cold in his politeness"
(Collins 183,247, 190,99). UndoubtedlyWoolf's portraitof Sir William,the quintessentialDictator,derives in some degree fromher own unhappy experiences
with psychiatrists,as commentatorshave said;'0 firstand foremost,however, he
is a deeply characteristicemanation of the nineteenth-century
fictionaland phiIn
a
1910
Frazer
comments
losophical imagination.
preface,James
implicitlyon
thisnative mythographictraditionin declaring,in a definitiveformula,thathis
central subject in The GoldenBoughis "men who have masqueraded as gods"
(Magic 1: ix). Such men are driven to excesses of sadism, we may intuit,by the
maddening awareness thattheirclaim to divinityis only a masquerade afterall.
They inflicttortureon the helpless to keep at bay the knowledge of theirown
common humanity:such is the insightthatthis complex of uncannilyprophetic
fictionalimagerygives us into multiplyingtwentieth-century
incarnationsof the
"diabolical being," fromAdolf Hitler and the ultimate avatar of the medical
monsters of literature,JosefMengele, to JimJones,the genocidal psychiatrist
Radovan Karadzic, and othersof theirtype.
In her fixationon the terrifying
dangers of tyrannyand coercion,Woolf distinctlyaligns herself,in any case, with the Victorian avant-garde traditionof
Feuerbach, Spencer, Clifford,Grote,Pater, and others:modernisticand experimental as her fictionmay be froma technicalpoint of view, in this thematicretradition,too,
spect it is old-fashioned.Like thewritersof thenineteenth-century
she explicitlyidentifiesthe prospect of a restorationof human freedomand of
humane social life with the radical transformativepower of the principle of
relativity-the principle,in the Protagorean phrase, that "nothing is one thing
10
See Gordon 64, Trombley95-106,and Showalter277-78.
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112
NOVELI FALL2001
just by itself"(Plato 17), that"TruthAbsolute" is a chimera,and thatall framesof
referenceare equally valid.
At least part of thisphilosophical argumentis spelled out, again, in the indispensable companion text for Mrs. Dalloway, ThreeGuineas. Woolf's guiding
axiom, as she here statesrepeatedly(Three5, 18, 23), is the one thatis enunciated
by Feuerbach (4-5) and then by one writerafteranotherin Victorianrelativity
literature:the axiom thatdifferently
positioned observerswill perceive and unIf only her contemporariescould be led to grasp
derstand the world differently.
fully this one supreme principle, Woolf's insistent stress on it implies, a
revolutionarychange would follow.
It seemsplain thatwe thinkdifferently
there
accordingas we are borndifferently;
is a Grenfell
pointofview;a Knebworth
pointofview;a WilfredOwen pointof
view; a Lord ChiefJustice'spointof viewand thepointof view of an educated
All differ.
But is thereno absolutepointofview?Can we notfind
man'sdaughter.
writtenup in lettersoffireor gold "This is right.This wrong"?11-a
somewhere
moraljudgmentwhichwe mustall, whatever
ourdifferences,
accept?(9-10)
But the quest forthe "absolute point of view" is futileand misguided, she concludes. She illustratesthe point by noting thatcontemporaryAnglican bishops,
the officialmoral custodians of English society, are "at loggerheads" among
themselvesabout so pressingand definitean issue in 1938 as thatof the acceptability of pacifism. "It is distressing,baffling,confusing,but the fact must be
faced," she concludes, in termsthat again echo the long rhetoricaltraditionof
"thereis no certaintyin heaven above or on earthbelow"
Victorianfreethought;
(Three10).
The doctrineof the inescapabilityof differingpoints of view and thus of the
decisive abandonment of the ideal of "certainty"-that is, of discovering true
interpretationsof things to which everyone must subscribe-in all mattersof
serious concernis not a formulaof pessimism or passivityforVirginiaWoolf; it
does not mean, as it is oftenmisread to mean, thatone is helpless to understand
the world or to findmeaningfulgrounds formoral agency. On the contrary,it is
the formulaof emancipationfromthe ideology thatsustains dominatorslike Sir
William Bradshaw. It is the same militantformulathatunderlies, forexample,
F.C.S. Schiller'sextended 1912 crithepragmatistphilosopherand arch-relativist
tique of syllogisticlogic as "a machineforyieldingcategoricalcertainty."Schiller
declares thatany rigorouslyrelativisticscience will treatits analyticaloperations
"with the utmostfreedom,and will recognizeno finalityabout them,"forwherever antirelativistic
finalityand certaintyprevail,he says, repressionby the constitutedauthoritiesis sure to follow (224, 55). A closely similar argumentpervades ThreeGuineas,where Woolf declares that embracing a relativisticmoral
theory-one void of privileged referenceframesand thereforeof certaintyand
finality-offersthebest possible warrant"to experimentfreelyin alteringcurrent
values" (117). Specifically,such a theory forms the very precondition of an
"Faith discriminates thus: This is true, that is false. And it claims truth to itself alone"
(Feuerbach248).
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as she says, not shyingaway fromthe statement
activistprogramthatone fulfills,
of what may almost seem a naive or sentimentalpolitical creed, "by protecting
the rights of the individual; by opposing dictatorship; by ensuring the
democraticideals of equal opportunityforall" (Three100).
Such is the line of argumentthat is played out very fullyin Mrs. Dalloway,
where it is expressed,however,not forthemost part in the formof philosophical
in a constellationof metaphor
dicta and logical demonstrationsbut figuratively,
and allegory. Logical argumentsmay in factbe of limited efficacyin arousing
resistanceto the idolatryof certaintyand of its accompanyingapparatuses of coercive violence, the novel suggests, though it does so without reference to
Schiller'sclaim thatlogic by its verynatureis inscribedwith the ethicof dictatorship. Everyone who comes near him may find Sir William Bradshaw repellent
and threatening,but the cult of dogmatic science and dogmatic moral authority
thathe embodies is so reveredthateven Clarissa, who instinctivelyloathes him,
has no choice but to receive him as an honored guest at her party-an anomaly
expressing in vivid formthe irresistibleand irrationalcharacterof ideological
compulsion.No theoreticalcritiquewill overthrowthissystem;what is needed is
a more fundamentalreeducationof culturalimaginationand the moral sensibilities. Such is the premise on which Woolf seems to base the freelyexperimental
method of thisgreatnovel, which dismantlesmuch of thestructureof traditional
prose fictionas part of a radical strategyfor"alteringcurrentvalues" and forming a new contemporarymentality,one wholly alien, above all, to the mentality
of dictatorship.
Hence Woolf's disestablishment,in the name of a symbolic imagery of "utmost freedom,"of the chiefinstitutionof narrativein the traditionof realistic
fiction to which Mrs. Dalloway (which has distinct thematic similarities to
Middlemarch,
say) belongs: the institutionof the single controllingpoint of view.
Rather than vesting the storytellingfunctionin one central consciousness, she
distributesit among a fluidconsortiumof eighteenor so major and minorcharacterswho take turnsrecitingthe tale-except thatit is barely a tale (consisting
as it mainly does of events thatwould seem unworthyof narrationby the standards of conventionalfiction)and thatit never occurs to thesenarratorsto assert
the formalprerogativesand the declarative voice of a storyteller;they merely
meditate inwardly on theirexperiences and immediate surroundingsin a way
thatwe are somehow, inexplicably,enabled to overhear.The most strikingstylistic effectof the novel by faris thus the constantfluctuationof its point of view.
The centralstoryline of theopening episode is thatof Clarissa's outingon footto
buy flowersforher party,forexample, but thisline is punctuated by a series of
narratorialshifts.For one thing,it divergespersistentlyinto Clarissa's freelymeanderingstreamof consciousness,a medley of spontaneous memoriesand reflections triggeredby sometimeslabyrinthineassociations with stimulisuch as the
squeak of a door hinge (Dalloway3). Further,Clarissa's point of view alternates
contrapuntally with those of a random-seeming series of onlookers and
passersby: people outside the shop gazing at a mysteriousmotor-caridling portentously in Bond Street (19); Septimus Smith and his wife Lucrezia (20-21);
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114
NOVEL [ FALL 2001
spectatorsin thebow-windowed precinctsof Brooks's overlookingthe street(26);
Moll Pratt,a sidewalk flower-vendor(27)-and so on.12
Woolf constructsthis fluid fictionaluniverse in order to investigate(among
other things) the ideological structuresimplicitin conventionalnovelistic form
and particularlyin thatunchallengeablesource of knowledge known as the omniscientnarratoror the "implied author." This numinous figurepresides over a
conventionalnovel as its supreme agency,possessing sole authorityto dictatethe
of theeventsin question and, in Clifford'sphrase, "to declare with
interpretation
infallibleauthoritywhat is rightand what is wrong." Justas Paul de Man says,
giving the point his own polemical import,"the fallacyof a finiteand single interpretationderives ... fromthe postulate of a privileged observer" (11). Given
the constitutionalprimacyof the privileged observer(that metaphysicalwraith
who in the field of physics is abruptlydissolved in 1905 in the foundingact of
Einsteinianspecial relativity)in orthodoxfictionalnarrativeand in the criticism
it fosters,one mighthazard a definitionof this mode of fictionas precisely that
formofnarrativethatis basedinprincipleon thesubjection
ofthereaderto thesovereign
Mrs. Dallowaymakes this definitionsuddenly legible by
authority
ofthenarrator.
seemingto constitutea revisionaryresponseto it.
In the voluminous criticalliteraturedevoted to thisnovel, one or two scholars
have called attentionto theeffectjust mentioned,thoughwithoutdeveloping the
point very fully."In Mrs. Dalloway,"as PatriciaMatson thus says, "no one point
of view dominates"; Woolf in thisway "mocks the conventionalauthorityof the
omniscientnarrator"(171, 173).13 In echoing and amplifyingthis observation,I
seek to make a numberof interconnectedpoints,each arisingfromthe close historical nexus that I have sought to draw between the novel and the Victorian
relativitytraditionthatit strivesto incorporate.
The firstemphasizes the drasticcharacterof Woolf's experimentationand the
resistance that any interpretationof the novel-this one or any other-fully
consonant with relativitytheoryis bound to encounter.Such resistance is implicit,forinstance,in a work itselfdeeply shaped by therelativitytradition,M.M.
Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination."The prerequisite for authentic novelistic
prose," he claims (264), almost as thoughhe had Mrs. Dalloway in mind, is that
centrifugal,multiplystratifiedconditionof language called "heteroglossia."The
primordialfunctionand the genius of the novel as a genre is to give a fullregistrationof a symphonicallyrich multiplicityof competing voices or points of
view, of "heteroglot,multi-voiced,multi-styledand oftenmulti-languagedelements" (265). Bakhtinaccordinglyproposes a definitionof the genre thatseems
one I have venturedabove but is so only
contradictoryto the authority-centered
in appearance. "The novel can be defined as a diversityof social speech types
(sometimeseven diversityof languages) and a diversityof individual voices," he
states, but then adds the crucial qualifier,"artisticallyorganized" (262). This
forit signifiesin
functionof artisticorganization poses a theoreticaldifficulty,
12
In inventing this multiperspectival method for Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf no doubt shows
indebtedness to Joyce'sUlysses,firstpublished threeyears before,in 1922. For a stimulating
see DiBattista.
accountof her ambivalencetowardJoyceannovelisticexperimentation,
13
The same pointis made by Mepham 140.
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115
of heteroglossicimpulses. The
factnothingotherthan a subduingand disciplining
multiple and dissident voices that Bakhtin means to affirmare finally compressed in thismodel withina singlelinguisticstructure.Novelisticheteroglossia
is in the last analysis inevitablysubject,Bakhtinsays, to "the styleof the whole"
and inevitably"participatesin the process whereby the unified meaning of the
whole is structuredand revealed." This "combiningof languages and stylesinto
a higherunity"is preciselywhat novelisticformis designed to do (262, 263). No
dissident, unmanprovision is finallymade in Bakhtin's theoryforrefractory,
ageable elements that mightstrive to resist being subsumed into the "unified
meaning of the whole," as Septimus Smith,forinstance,strives desperately to
resist being subsumed into the interpretivepatterns dictated by Sir William
Bradshaw.
The ideological secret of all fictionset under the sign of "higher unity,"so
Mrs. Dallowayseems designed to intimate,is thatit gives idealized symbolicform
to the greatprinciplethatHerbertSpencer,one of the firstanalysts and decriers
of its dominantrole in modem society,called "centralizedadministrationand ...
compulsoryregulation"(PrinciplesofSociology1: 570). Imaginativeliteratureproduced under thisregimetrainsthe reader at least subliminallyin unquestioning
subservience to the voice of authority,throughwhich some definitebody of
meaning makes itselfknown. The trainingprocess is vested much more distinctly,obviously enough, in the institutionof literarycriticism,based as it is on
that"desire to account forthe totalityof a given work" by constructing"a total
reading" of it thatJ.Hillis Miller,forexample,holds up in his discussion of Mrs.
Dallowayas the criticalideal (17, 18). It is just thispedagogical apparatus and all
its sustainingrhetoricof higherunitiesand totalreadings thatWoolf attemptsto
overthrowin Mrs. Dalloway.This she does, as the presentessay argues, in obedience to her insightthateveryassertionof an "absolute point of view" has its affiliationwith the great networkof violence. The chief textual sign of the overthrowis preciselythe relativityeffect:a multiplicationof independent points of
view and a reestablishmentof somethinglike heteroglossia.Similarly,the effect
of rationalcoherenceor "artisticunity"thatin conventionalnarrativeis synonymous with the narrator'ssteady intentionalityis disrupted in this book by an
outbreak of haphazard, prankish,irrational-seemingfictivephenomena-Moll
Pratt'ssudden appearance in the role of privileged observer,forexample-that
no narratorconscious of his importantadministrativeand regulatoryfunctions
would ever tolerate and that finally has a deeply troubling effect on the
resemblanceof thisnovel to a canonical precursortextsuch as Middlemarch.'4
In arguing foran uncompromisinglyrelativisticreading of Mrs. Dalloway,one
needs again to distinguishsuch a reading fromany species of philosophical pessimism and thus fromthe provocative accounts of the book given by Patricia
14
A kind of vestigial omniscientnarratordoes persist throughoutMrs. Dalloway,and J.Hillis
Miller has focused a strikingessay upon thisfigureand its supposed functions.In what seems
to me to be a vain attempt to reduce Woolf's tale to the workings of a mechanistically
explicable model, Miller very emphaticallyinscribesit withina set of assumptions about the
necessarilyauthoritarianand panoptical characterof fictionalnarration.See Miller 178-81.His
account of Woolf's novel and mine begin with similar preoccupations and come to sharply
divergentconclusions.
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NOVEL I FALL 2001
Matson and Pamela Caughie. In seeking to depict a "subversive" (Matson 163)
antiauthoritarianWoolf,these scholars have tended to identifyher proleptically
with a certainstrainof nihilisticpostmodernism.In Mrs. Dalloway,says Matson,
"meaning cannot be pinpointed with any certainty";Woolf disavows "consistency"and "clarity,"fillsher tale with "incoherencies"and by such means "insertsa degree of confusion(of non-sense)into the text"(170, 171). "The textcontinuallyproposes that nothingcan be pinpointed with any certainty"(Matson
165). "Equivocation ... is forWoolf a stance against ... certainty,a guard against
the desire to prevail" (Caughie 8). These commentsraise a trickyset of issues for
relativitytheoristsin generaland forWoolfin particular.There is no doubt of the
essential role played by nihilisticlanguage in the relativitymovementsurveyed
in the firstpart of thisessay. We have seen thatKarl Pearson, forinstance,takes
relativityto be equivalent to thedoctrinethat"thereis no absolute code ofmorality,no absolute philosophy nor absolute religion," and that Woolf laments in
Three Guineas the "distressing, baffling,confusing" fact that "there is no
certainty."
As one of its cardinal artisticeffects,therefore,
her novel does indeed baffleall
attemptsto derive "certain"-in the prejudicial sense of "imperative,peremptory,binding upon all"-interpretationsfromit. For instance,the reader has no
way of knowingin an "absolute" sense whetherClarissa's partyis as a matterof
factas wonderfullysuccessfulas she thinks.Evidentlyshe is the only observerto
perceive its epiphanic beauty, as Septimus Smith is the only one, as far as we
know, to hear the sparrows in Regent's Park rapturouslysinging "there is no
death" in Greek (36). Is Clarissa's perceptionof the splendor of her party anythingmore than a kind of hallucinationof her own, a sign of the "intoxicationof
the moment" (265)? The truthis thatthereis no such thingas absolute realityin
the radically relativisticworld of this novel, where "no absolute point of view"
can possibly be set up to measure and evaluate the shiftingpatternof observers'
differingperceptions.It would be alien to Woolf's conceptionfora reader to ask
whether the party "really" possesses the magical beauty that it (momentarily)
seems to possess fromits hostess's point of view. Pater's dictum is precisely
germane to the stern epistemological discipline enforced throughout Mrs.
Dalloway:"what beauty is in itself,or ... its exact relationto truth"is a "metaphysical" question thatis "as unprofitableas metaphysicalquestions elsewhere."
Similarcaveats apply to all-or nearlyall-the broader interpretiveissues raised
in thisnovel. Is Clarissa a figureof redemptivespiritualityand the moral touchstone of the novel thatbears her name or, as various observersin the novel assert,"'spoilt"' and "worldly,""simplya snob" (182, 115,183)? Does she stand for
the affirmationof "life," as Avrom Fleishman and other scholarly interpreters
of death, as J.Hillis Miller asserts no
categoricallyassert,or forthe affirmation
less categorically?15
Is Peter Walsh a second-raterand a "warped personality"
15
"It is at the end of thisprolonged transactionwith death thatClarissa chooses life" (Fleishman
87). On the contrary,claims Miller,"[t]he climaxofMrs. Dallowayis not Clarissa's partybut the
momentwhen, having heard of thesuicide of Septimus,Clarissa ... [recognizesthat][d]eath is
the place of truecommunion."This is "the momentof her greatestinsight"(196-97). As John
HenryNewman explained in Grammar
ofAssent(1870), in any matterof interpretation-thatis,
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PARADOX
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117
(Fleishman 77) or, as he seems to his fellowhotel guests who overhear the magnificentmannerwithwhich he ordershis Bartlettpears (Dalloway 242-43),a noble
"champion," a model of manliness and integrity?The opening tableaux in Mrs.
Dallowayof Londoners puzzling over the deciphermentof the skywriter'sambiguous message and over the identityof the great personage of uncertainsex
glimpsed (perhaps) in themotor-carin Bond Street(19-32) clearlyare to be taken
as, among other things,cautionaryparables of the interpretivereading of Mrs.
Dallowayitself,with its relativisticcollage of discrepantpoints of view thatseem
will to power.'6
theinterpretive
designed withsuch a palpable intentto frustrate
of
the
was
more
vital
to
theorists
nineteenth
Nothing
relativity
century,however, than the need to deny thatthe rejectionof categoricalor "absolute" knowledge implied a disavowal of knowledge itself.They made preciselythe opposite
claim, that it was the mirage of nonrelativisticknowledge that plunged mental
and muddle, at thesame timeas it lentitselfto a
lifeinevitablyinto mystification
syndrome of moral and political perversions. They took as their creed (and
Woolf inscribedin her novel) not a nihilisticpraise of ambiguityand "equivocation," but what could be called Poincare's Principle,though the great scientist
Henri Poincare,the co-discovererof special relativity,
was not the firstto stateit:
the principlethatthereis not a single trueexplanatorytheoryof any given set of
facts, but that innumerable theories will always prove to correspond to it
(Poincare 168,222). It is not thatthingscannotbe known,not thatwe are helpless
observersof the indeterminacyof meaning and hostage to "confusion" and the
want of "clarity,"but, rather,thatthingsmay always be known in various competingways among which it will not ultimatelybe possible to decide on empiriof different
cal grounds. This postulate of the irreducibility
perspectivesand the
will
different
of
reference
frames
seem
like
equal legitimacy
"equivocation" or
to
one
who
with
the
that
theremust exista
begins
assumption
"uncertainty"only
if
of
true
we
could
discover
it.
single
interpretation things, only
Relativityliteratureinsistson abandoning thisassumptionas the prerequisiteof any sound and
unmystifiedanalyticalmethod.
The argumentunderpinningWoolf's novel, then,is that it is possible to inhabit a thoroughlyrelativized world without giving up the ideal of genuine
knowledge-or rather,that to move into such a world constitutesin facta tremendous expansionof the possibilityof knowledge, and that not to do so is to
remain in a state of permanently impaired understanding. Definitive value
judgments of charactersand their actions may scarcely be attainable in Mrs.
Dalloway,but nothingcould be clearerthan thatthisimpossibilitydoes not entail
any paralysis of moral insight.Moral problemssuch as the question of Clarissa's
alleged superficialityare not rendered futileor meaningless by the relativistic
formof Woolf's novel; on the contrary,theyare at the foregroundat every moment and are investigatedwith the greatestpossible acuity-all under the aegis
in any scientificinquiry in a world where relativityprevails-experts are bound to disagree
(287-89).
16
FleishmannullifiesWoolf's carefullycalculated effectof indeterminacyby strugglingto show
thattheoccupant of themysteriouscar is in factthePrimeMinister(75n).
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NOVEL I FALL2001
of the principle that in the absence of an ultimateand privileged authority,no
Differentobservfinal,categoricalanswers to themcan possibly be forthcoming.
ers will inescapably come to differingconclusions; thereis no such thingas "a
moral judgmentwhich we must all, whateverour differences,
accept" (Three10).
This is not confusionbut rigorous clarity,preciselythe mode of rationalityaccording to which "hard and abstractmoralities"may be made to yield, as Pater
said, "to a more exact estimateof the subtletyand complexityof our life."To defend the mode based on the ideology of total readings,on the otherhand, is to
render thoughthostage to "the repulsive task of coercion and dominion" and
finally,Woolfsuggests,to participatehowever unwittinglyin themaintenanceof
"the whole iniquityof dictatorship"(Three103) in human society. It is to reinforce the authorityof the "judges," who, as Septimus Smith phrases it, "saw
nothingclear, yet ruled, yet inflicted"(Dalloway 225). This is Woolf's insistent
and of course almost unacceptablytendentiousintimationto thecriticalreader of
Mrs. Dalloway.
In constructingher novel according to "the negation of the absolute," Woolf
does of course proclaimone absolute: therejectionof absolutismitself.In a world
where all nonrelativistictruthhas been abolished, the relativityprincipleitselfis
proclaimed as a universalverity.This is one versionof the paradox thatinhabits
every species of relativityand that antirelativistsfromPlato onward have declared to constitutea fatallogical self-refutation.
(If all propositionsare relative,
how can one framesuch a propositionto begin with?)Woolf,unwillingto finesse
any problem,seems to go out of her way to acknowledge thisone by causing the
abolished omniscientnarratorsuddenly to reappear in her textfor the specific
purpose of analyzing and denouncingSir William's pervertedcult of Proportion
and Conversion, according to which no relativisticindeterminacyis allowed
(Dalloway 149-54). The jarring effectproduced in the novel at this moment is
Woolf's signal of the logical difficulty
implicitin any programof rigorouslyrelativisticthinking(and implicit,forexample, in the presentessay, which invokes
the emancipatorymotive of relativitywhile insistingon one privileged reading
of a novel thatis open, as Poincare's Principledecrees, to any number of other
legitimatereadings). Those in sympathywithWoolf's mode of thinkingwill conclude with her thatit is preciselythe overshadowingproblem of violence in human lifethatrequiresus to freeourselves frommakinga supreme idol of logical
coherence.Mrs. Dallowayimplies thata certainquotientof incoherenceis simply
the toll to be paid fordeliverance from"the repulsive task of coercion and dominion" and that the dream of a philosophical outlook cleansed of paradox is
finallya sinisterone fundamentallyincompatiblewith the creationof a humane
social world.
It may never be possible to expunge dictatorshipaltogetherfromany social
construction(such as a literarytext).If only because Mrs. Dallowayis intensively
concernedwith the themeof abusive intrusionson personal privacy,or because
the Victorianrelativityliteratureto which Woolf's imaginationis so deeply attuned is itself preoccupied with the theme of "invasions of State power"
(Spencer,First6), a reader is compelled to wonder,forexample, about the harmlessness of the invasive imaginaryapparatus by which the secretthoughtsof so
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many charactersare discovered and laid open to public view and to wonder
whether the system of organization figurativelyrepresentedby this model of
narrationmay not be preyedupon afterall by an indelibleinternalcontradiction.
Yet the overthrowof constitutednarrativeauthoritythat is carried out in Mrs.
Dallowayis not fatallycompromisedby such anxieties.Chieflyit yields a radical
of individual charactersto express theirviews of theworld free
enfranchisement
of censorshipor coercive "unification."Even characterswidely deemed by their
acquaintances to be mediocrities,like Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh, even
so unsympathetica figureas Miss Kilman, even insignificantbystanders like
Scrope Purvis, Moll Pratt,Maisie Johnson,Mrs. Dempster,and Ellie Henderson
(Dalloway4, 27, 37-41, 256-57)-all are allowed to manifestthemselves and to
participate freelyin narrating a novel that seems designed as the symbolic
equivalent of a tolerant,egalitariancommunity,one dedicated to "protectingthe
rightsof the individual," "opposing dictatorship,"and vindicatingin the most
straightforwardtermspossible-by lettingeveryone share in the telling-"the
democratic ideals of equal opportunity for all." The ideal collectivity that
Clarissa strivesto create in her partyis in thissense realized at least partiallyin
thenovel itselfand is identicalwithits commitmentto theprincipleof relativity.
What follows fromthe enactmentof this policy of novelisticemancipation is
an outpouringof "irrepressible,exquisite delight" (Dalloway 78). Living in a fictional world where the dictatorialnarratorhas been strippedof his powers and
where freedomprevails seems to the charactersthemselveslike a glorious, unprecedented adventure. "What a lark! What a plunge!" thinksClarissa on the
firstpage, as she sets forthon her errands.Moll Pratthas a delirious impulse to
flingone of her precious bunches of roses into the street "out of sheer lightheartedness and contemptof poverty" (27), ostensibly to honor the Prince of
Wales but in effectto express her glee at findingherselfin a novel able to allow
even the likes of her a moment of narratorialglory. The mood of exhilarated
freedom is picked up vividly in the episodes of delightfullyimpulsive forays
throughLondon undertakenin turnby Clarissa, Peter,and Clarissa's daughter
Elizabeth (3-42,78-81,205-11):freemovement
representsa primarysymbolicmotif
of the novel, thatis, as it does also in Woolf's handling of stream of consciousness and of narrativepoint of view. The euphoricmood thatgoes along with this
sense of freedomis experiencedrepeatedlyin the novel as a mysticalrevelation
of "divine vitality"(9) and ofjoy and beauty in almost ineffablyvivid forms.The
urban scene as representedin traditionalBritishfictionis transformedas a result.
Compare, forexample, Dickens's vision of "the roaringstreets"of a prisonlike
VictorianLondon, where "the noisy and the eager, and the arrogantand the froward and thevain, fretted,
and chafed,and made theirusual uproar," in the final
sentence of LittleDorrit(1855-57),with Clarissa Dalloway's delighted sense of
"the bellow and the uproar" thatshe adores in the same streets(5) or with her
daughter Elizabeth's raptureat findingherselfamid the hubbub of Fleet Street,
which signifiesto her, precisely,the presence of a utopian democraticcommunity."She liked the geniality,sisterhood,motherhood,brotherhoodof this uproar. It seemed to her good. The noise was tremendous" (209). One thinksof
newsreelsof crowds of Berlinersdancing in the streetsto celebratethecollapse of
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NOVEL I FALL2001
the Wall in 1989. These rapturousrevelationsare always fragileand unstable in
Mrs. Dalloway,but they are centralto the strains of feelingthat surge into the
world of this novel in the wake of the liberationof fictionalnarrativefromthe
model of despotic authorialcontrol.
The antiauthoritarianprinciplethatthus seems implicitin the whole formof
the work is articulated cogently-though with an anguished sense of
precariousness-by Clarissa. She inscribesat the top of her tabletof moral commandmentsthe necessityof preservinginviolate "the rightsof the individual,"
and her most profound and permanentmoral intuitionis that these rightscan
only be preservedby an uncompromisingdefenseof personal autonomyagainst
all invasions,even well-meaningones. "[T]here is a dignityin people; a solitude;
even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought
Clarissa ... forone would not partwithit oneself,or take it,againsthis will, from
one's selfone's husband, without losing one's independence,
In
a
wonderful
after
all, priceless" (181).
essay that seems
respect-something,
almost like a commentaryon Mrs. Dalloway,Hannah Arendt glorifiesher hero
Lessing as a champion of libertywho "not onlywanted no one to coerce him,but
... also wanted to coerce no one, eitherby forceor by proofs" and whose only
goal was to provoke people "'to thinkfor themselves'" and to preserve at all
costs their"freedomof movement"(On Humanity9). Lessing regarded the use of
logical argumentsto compel anyone's assent to anything,she says, as an especially pernicious formof "the repulsive task of coercion and dominion." In obedience to this same radical moral imperative,Clarissa in her passionate love of
independence and her hatred of every formof dictatorshipinstinctivelyrecoils
fromall attemptsto change others' minds. "Had she ever tried to convertany
one herself?Did she not wish everybodymerely to be themselves?" (191). For
her, in opposition to the malign culturalprincipleincarnatedin such figuresas
Doctor Benjulia, Count Dracula, and Sir William Bradshaw, what she calls "the
privacyof thesoul" is sacrosanct(192).
Yet she also dreads solitude and (in anothermanifestationof the foundational
paradox of relativity thinking) venerates communication and combination-specifically,in her case, theactivityofbringingseparate individuals,by the
exercise of an irresistibleinfluencethatshe possesses, into unifiedcollectivities,
even if only forthe duration of an evening's party."It was an offering;to combine, to create," she thinksto herself,echoing Septimus Smith's intuitionthat
"[c]ommunicationis health;communicationis happiness" (185, 141). This theory
translatesinto an expressly moral proposition the general axiom of relativity:
thatnothingis one thingjust byitselfand thata thingcut offfromcommunication
with otherthings,as theearlyrelativitytheoristJ.B.Stallo declared in 1881,refuting a famous thoughtexperimentof C.G. Neumann's, would simplycease to exist (Stallo 212-15).Clarissa defiesthethreatof solitude and annihilationby giving
her party,where she is overjoyedto hear again, as Elizabeth does in Fleet Street,
the roaring sound of unstintinghuman interrelation:"Clarissa turned, with
Sally's hand in hers, and saw her rooms full,heard the roar of voices, saw the
candlesticks,the blowing curtains,and the roses which Richard had given her"
(261). In her combinatorygenius,she seems to demonstrate,as her creatorputs it
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CHRISTOPHERHERBERT I THE RELATIVITY
PARADOX
121
in ThreeGuineas,"the capacity of the human spiritto overflowboundaries and
make unityout of multiplicity"(143).
In the finalextensionof its guiding line of thought,Mrs. Dallowaythus plays
audaciously on the relativisticconundrum that individual points of view, the
preservationofwhich in theirunimpairedstateis themost importantthingof all,
can only achieve theirfullvalue, can only in factexist,by being broughtinto reciprocityand democraticcommunionwith others.Inviolable solitude and unimpeded, unprejudiced communication need each other: somehow the state of
wonderfullyfreemovementthat this novel opposes to the state of dictatorship
and violence consistsin theparadoxical coexistenceof the two opposite terms.To
grantpreferenceto one or theotherwould be, thenovel suggests,to createone of
those "hard and abstractmoralities" that,according to Pater, were yielding in
modern timesto the influenceof "the 'relative' spirit";it would in factbe symptomaticof that"desire to dominate" thatblights,Woolf says, everydimensionof
modern existence (Three181n). This is the desire that is both intensivelyportrayedand, fora briefimaginarymomentcorrespondingto a radical experiment
with theideology ofnarrativeform,suspended in Mrs. Dalloway.
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