However, her inner self is far from lost. It is simply reflected more in her thoughts than her behaviour. For instance, the note from Richard inspires her to think of Bourton. Her memory of these characters and how others view her reveals her class-conscience apparent on page 89 when Peter cynically says “Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English!” Nevertheless, after reminiscing of her love for Sally Seton she exposes that she is in fact far deeper than the conventional socialite, as is illustrated by her inner thoughts “ the strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one’s feeling for a man”
Woolf often juxtaposes inner being and social role to draw attention to complexities of the human mind. Looking at the previous quote it becomes apparent that Mrs Dalloway’s feelings for Sally extend beyond heterosexuality. Throughout the novel Clarissa thinks back to that one kiss and yet she never tells anyone else about her feelings. This is conforming to her social role in the days where homosexuality was a taboo subject and is one of the many social criticisms Woolf depicts through her characters, “a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything; a quality much commoner in foreigners than Englishwomen”. These juxtapositions are used to the same effect with many of the characters and at times she may use literary technique such as repetition to demonstrate this. When Peter Walsh sees Clarissa he performs his social role by greeting her and kissing her hands whilst his mind makes its own judgement, “She’s grown older, he thought, sitting down. I shan’t tell her anything about it, he thought, for she’s grown older.”
Contrary to Clarissa, Septimus has let his inner self overtake his social role that was irreparably damaged during by war with the death of his friend Evans. His inner consciousness often shines through the cracked social persona and results in visions, for example, seeing “a dog becoming a man”. Revisiting the pair of streams analogy, it can be said they have become turbulent. Since he is still trying to achieve a balance between the two he becomes insane. Both “personalities” so to speak are trying to reach the forefront of his persona. This can be seen on page 159, “He was very happy... But directly he saw nothing the sounds of the game became fainter and stranger and sounded like the cries of people seeking …further and further away. They had lost him!” Woolf explores the connection between madness and identity. The social character dominating social role is created by one’s surroundings. This applies to all of the characters in both novels. Clarissa and Septimus as well as Laura Brown in “The Hours” show this distinctly. We see this (in the same sequence as the afore – mentioned names) at: the party, the hotel room and the park. Sometimes they can be ignored to an extent and the focus placed on the inner being. Septimus does this, “ He would shut his eyes, he would see no more”. Too much neglect of one’s surroundings results in madness, as is the case with Septimus.
Cunningham has taken this notion into his account of Laura Brown and her expedition to the hotel. In the chapter entitled Mrs Brown on page 142 Laura describes her attempts to lie down whilst her son is napping. In effect she is retreating from ‘the world’ to her room to in order to be left with her inner thoughts. Then “She lay on the double bed…she wondered, Is this what it’s like to go crazy?…she’d imagined shrieks and wails”. She has left her house now enacting her inner thoughts and is overwhelmed with desire to rent a hotel room. It should be noted how bland the room is when she arrives. It is a neutral environment secluded from foreign surroundings. This is a return to Woolf’s suggestion that a harmony between the two “worlds” cannot exist (which led to Septimus’s suicide) and we see Laura’s thoughts progress towards death. The inner mind depends on a conscious social temperament or it looses control and conversely the social persona relies on a controlled internal character or else one flounders in the social role and becomes confused because one cannot possibly take in all of one’s surroundings. This is exactly what has happened to Clarissa Dalloway, hence her paranoia of her poor social performance (referring to the party), “Oh dear, It was going to be a failure; a complete failure”
Laura Brown is also much like Clarissa Dalloway in as much as she too acts her own social role. In her case she tries to conform to the genre of a typical mother whereas Clarissa is more diverse since she plays several roles including that of upper- class lady and hostess. Interestingly Cunningham has taken the identity idea a step further than Woolf. Unlike Clarissa Laura sees the distinction of her social role from her self. On page 76 her thoughts change from inner self “At this moment she could devour him…” to social role which takes control and is acknowledged “She is precisely what she appears to be…She is herself and she is the perfect picture of herself; there is no difference”. In this instant her social role becomes completely dominant and alters her inner thoughts to a complete focus on the task of making a cake. This is an example of the previously mentioned dependence of the social role on the inner self. This helps perform the social role as opposed to becoming lost in her surroundings. Notice also the use of Woolf - inspired literary technique of repetition and symbolism in the case of fulfilment of the social role. She is enacting her mental projection of an ideal mother and wife and thus performing her social role. Once again this is due to her surroundings. The presence of her own son makes her instinctively motherly whilst the cake represents her love for her husband. Hence the reason why as soon as she leaves her house alone her inner thoughts once again surface as previously mentioned.
Cunningham often makes use of Woolf’s techniques of “digging a cave” behind his characters. Certainly he took her mastery of free indirect speech and used it as an inspiration for his own characters. It is often used to convey inner feelings usually in conjunction with appropriate syntax such as hyphens and brackets seen throughout the text i.e. on pages 72 and 73. Also notice that the dialogue is at times deliberately uninformative and regularly followed by omniscient narration. This was a technique used occasionally by Woolf and prolifically by Cunningham to create variation suspense and or highlighting the difference between inner and outer characteristics. This can be seen on page 197 in Mrs Dalloway when Lady Bruton asks Clarissa how she is and Clarissa replies ”Oh, perfectly well! Followed by”(Lady Bruton detested illness in the wives of politicians)” and on used for all of the above-mentioned reasons on page 90 in The Hours.
Both writers also use language to create tone and altered emotional states. This is another technique to differentiate between the internal consciousness and societal function. Woolf uses this technique during the scene on page 73 involving Septimus’s and Rezia’s outing to the park. A child runs into Rezia, begins crying, and she reacts with a physical response, “She stood her upright, dusted her frock, kissed her”. The language is simple and the word “kissed” has positive overtones. The next sentence begins “But for herself she had done nothing wrong”. Immediately this casts negative overtones with the doubt in the word “but” and the negativity of the word “wrong”. The contrasting phrases show the difference between her troubled thoughts and inherent yet detached adjustment to her social role. Cunningham uses the same method in the chapter Mrs Woolf on page119. After Angelica has made a deathbed for the bird Mrs Woolf says with a similar detachment to Rezia before, “That’s nice”. Yet this is then followed by a disconcerting phrase involving her, “unanticipated pleasure at this modest circle of thorns” culminating in “She would like to lie down on it herself”.
Also very fascinating of Cunningham’s continuation of Woolf’s concept of identity is his suggestions of how one person’s inner identity can clash with another’s. The same applies with social personas and a variation of these formats. This is encompassed in the scene between Clarissa Vaughan and Mary Krull. On page160 Clarissa’s social persona automatically engages after Julia says, ”Mary, let’s go” and she becomes “mother” and says “Take good care of her”. Mary’s inner personality immediately reacts and her mental response is “Fool…Smug, self – satisfied witch.”
Additionally this clash exhibits how over time a gap forms between older members of the populace and younger members whereby the young challenge the old. This is portrayed in Mrs Dalloway too by Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth and her escape from the clutches of how women should behave by taking a bus journey down Oxford Street. So Cunningham is merely reinstating the idea that changes in society can create a change in identity.
Virginia Woolf used Mrs Dalloway as a medium to represent her understanding of what makes a person. The novels emphasise the fact that our immersion in our surrounds leads to a creation of a censored persona that we use to present ourselves to the eye of any beholder. We shape this identity to conform to our environment and this is the identity that people perceive when thinking of any individual. Any person who lets down this shield down is prone to criticism. This happens on pages 78 – 9 of Mrs Dalloway when Septimus mistakes Peter for Evans and calls out thus breaking the appearance of a social conformist. This confuses Peter who puts it down to “being young” and sees the situation as “an awful fix”. This is because inside each one of us there is an unceasing stream of consciousness. However it is far from visible to anyone looking at another person. We hide it using body language and words that could be the exact opposite of what we are thinking. Laura Brown goes to great lengths to hide her true inner motives to a hotel clerk on page147 concerning her true reason for checking in to a hotel room. Why? Would the clerk have thought differently of her if she had said she wanted a room to read in for a couple of hours. Would he have cared? And yet her social role doesn’t fit this behaviour since she is a wife and has a son waiting. Therefore she has to lie to suppress her true reason suggested originally by her inner self. This is because on the inside we do not at all conform to the social institute. Our thoughts cannot be censored and are thus safeguarded.
This is why both Woolf and Cunningham extensively use characters’ interactions to help define each other. This can be said of Clarissa Dalloway. She has many thoughts of self-awareness, but continues to retreat inside the role of “hostess” so that she can mask her real feelings. If not for Woolf’s detailed descriptions of other characters, how they react to Clarissa and how she reacts to them, the character of Mrs. Dalloway would not be nearly as interesting or complex. Even the title is representative of how her character is defined by others in that “Mrs.” is used instead of “Clarissa.”
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