One Day Should Follow Another: Clarissa Dalloway’s 100 year party

Think of Clarissa Dalloway next time you are organising a party. It may be a surprisingly warm Friday evening for September in Scotland. You will be leaving a too-long lecture you couldn’t really focus on with a particular bounce in our step, or it will be a rainy Wednesday morning. You will be waiting it out in one of the quaint cafés on town, a textbook on one hand and an attendee list on the other. Maybe you will be helping organise a post-Don't Walk Fashion Show party, one of those cultural society events with nostalgic dishes, or a relaxed hangout with friends before deadlines hit and they disperse throughout the continent for Independent Learning Week – but think of her. What better place to emulate Mrs Dalloway than in our lovely St Andrews?

When you go shopping, buy flowers, prepare the venue, and welcome your attendees, think of Mrs Dalloway in post-war London, celebrating the life fought for and won now over 100 years ago. Think of the behaviour and intentions that unite you to the vivacious Mrs Dalloway, despite the years, and think of how excited she would be at the prospect of being a hostess again. Try not to think about the party’s untimely ending, and try not to go on and on with a melancholic speech that single-handedly gives every English student an existential crisis by questioning whether true happiness is possible, though. Do not worry, this article does not include any other spoilers (you should have kind of known what has already been said, anyway) or a content warning.

Credit: Wikimedia

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway was at first two separate short stories, ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ and ‘The Prime Minister’. However, we first met the character of Clarissa Dalloway in ‘The Voyage’ in 1915, before either of these short stories were published – Mrs Dalloway, modelled after the period’s socialites who the Longchamp-wielding influencers of our sweet town are so reminiscent of, slowly became a recurrent feature of Woolf’s works. Altogether, these texts set out the basis for what Woolf hoped would become a series of separate stories, but ultimately united in Mrs Dalloway. Woolf only came to consider them parts of a greater novel she had not yet outlined in 1922. It was in late 1924 that the manuscript was finished, and on May 14 1925 that Mrs Dalloway finally graced the shelves of our libraries. The novel, being a concoction of separate pieces and a myriad of influences, combines an exploration of the inter-war period, consumerism, the nature of time, and persona prose; it perfectly encapsulates the heart of the modernist movement in British literature while remaining uniquely personal to Woolf’s works.

The executive summary of Mrs Dalloway is that everyone’s favourite hostess (yes, yours too), Clarissa Dalloway, has set herself out to throw her best party yet, while the attendees go on about their day. However, there is a reason why English students leave tutorials on Mrs Dalloway with a little less hope on society. Despite the apparent jollity, Mrs Dalloway is modernist, introspective, and timely. The book is ‘timely’, not for being a paragon of optimism and happiness (again, no spoilers), but for the way that the time period is crucial to its plot. Mrs Dalloway can be better interpreted as a reflection of a society riddled by loss than as a novel about a hostess and the thoughts of other slightly traumatised characters. 

In the book, there would be no party without grief to blacklist, and no lesson without the consequences of this same grief to spark it. Sorrow is essential to the plot. Mrs Dalloway’s stream of consciousness is epiphenomenal of a torturous time period, unfortunately still relevant in modern society. While we have the fortuity to be in a charming little Scottish town where the greatest heartbreak one can experience might just be 9 A.M. tutorials, we must not forget what the situation is beyond the borders of our student lives and St Andrews: our world, much like Mrs Dalloway’s, is being shaken by armed conflicts, humanitarian crises, and widespread animus.

Credit: Psychogeographic Review

The Hours (the novel’s original working title), that English students have spent reading and rereading Mrs Dalloway, have not been for naught (if only to understand this poor attempt at a joke). Woolf’s novel proves that, despite everything, “one day should follow another”. Mrs Dalloway is more than a hostess, Septimus Smith is more than a soldier, and even Peter Walsh is more than simply Mrs Dalloway’s love interest; at the same time, they are all only characters in a novel, perfectly encapsulating the ethos that only you have complete authority over yourself. If nothing else, turn Mrs Dalloway’s last page knowing that life will always go on – Clarissa’s party is 100 years old this year, after all.