Though the title of the book is "Mrs. Dalloway" I feel like it actually should be "Mrs. Dalloway and Mr. Smith" because Septimus is such a powerful, important part to this novel, and in some ways is Clarissa's counterpart. She revels in life, he defies it in death. But what really strikes me is the difference between Clarissa's and Septimus' thoughts. It's such completely different narration, and it gives both characters a sense of depth and reality that I have to applaud Woolf for.
Clarissa's thoughts sound like a regular internal monologue, except that she's not performing for anybody. It's like we're peering into her head, seeing the road her mind takes, hearing her thoughts and the connections she makes. We don't necessarily understand everything (what the hell happened in Constantinople) but it feels like a real person's thoughts. I mean, the way that Clarissa will get sidetracked and go back and repeat certain phrases or words, or how her thoughts will get interrupted, or how she'll even completely lose her train of thought is just so normal and it's almost kind of funny to see real thoughts put on a page like that. I don't think mine would be quite as interesting, but it would be cool to see what people thought of my stream of consciousness thoughts. I wonder if they would understand what I was thinking about or not.
Anyways, Clarissa's thoughts are normal and what you would expect to hear if you could actually tune in to other people's thoughts. Septimus, on the other hand, has this unbelievably vivid mind, you would think he was either an artistic genius, a prophet of some sort, or just on drugs. While his thoughts, like, Clarissa's, are coming straight from the mind to the page with the same instances of repetition, interruption, and loss of train of thought, his thoughts are way more vivid. It's like Clarissa's thoughts are words on a wall, and Septimus' are flashes of words and ideas and colors and images on a canvas. I feel Septimus' thoughts when he says them, the emotions come across clearly. I see the images he paints, and I can see them in his mind's eye. I get so caught up in Septimus' thoughts, I almost feel like I'm him. With Clarissa, I feel like I'm like her, I can relate to the way her mind works, but Septimus just draws me in until I think that I'm thinking his thoughts. It's intense, and I don't think I've quite had a reading experience like it before.
I think Septimus' thoughts are so vivid and seem so real and inviting is because Woolf had had very similar, if not the same, thoughts. It doesn't feel like someone is writing Septimus as a crazy character, having these wildly absurd thoughts. No, Septimus feels just as real as any other character, and his thoughts do as well, if not more! The mental illness feels real. That sounds weird to say, but it's true. Sometimes, the problems characters have in other books doesn't feel as real, and I think it's because of the author's lack of firsthand experience with said problem. Woolf having suffered from mental illness and thoughts similar to Septimus' makes her writing seem perfectly accurate.
Now, that isn't to say that Clarissa doesn't seem accurate. No, she's very relatable, and that's just it. I don't think there's very many people in the world who can say that they haven't had a normal thought similar to the kinds Clarissa has throughout the novel. Not as many people can say they've experienced what Septimus has and can relate to his thoughts. It really is something else for Woolf to take an experience and a voice so foreign to most of the public and to make it something tangible and real.
Clarissa is believable. Septimus is believable. But Clarissa just lives, and Septimus, to me, thrives.
1 comment:
I agree that by the time we make it to the end of the novel, Clarissa and Septimus enjoy pretty much equal status as co-protagonists in our minds. One way to look at Woolf's (slightly misleading?) title is to see "Mrs. Dalloway" as an identity, a single individual around whom this whole swirling cast of characters revolves. This accords with the "spider's thread" idea and Clarissa's own "transcendental theory": a novel "about" or "focusing on" her must necessarily involve Peter, Richard, Sally, Elizabeth, etc., at least as much as her alone, since we "are" who we are surrounded by, in Woolf's view. But where does Septimus fit in? This is the ultimate test of Woolf's idea: we can start with "Mrs. Dalloway"--the woman who steps out to buy the flowers herself on this fine June morning--and end up immersed in the world of a man who seems to exist worlds apart from her.
And while Septimus's train of thought is indeed "vivid" and extremely intense, he lacks a certain grammatical coherence--the fitting-together of thoughts into a coherent life-narrative. Clarissa's internal monologue has this more familiar quality: she is always turning over and over the "story" of her life, and these intense moments are all part of a more or less coherent portrait. Septimus's torment is that he is unable to follow a train of thought to its conclusion. (Your description of his consciousness resembles Rezia's description of his "writings" in many ways.)
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