The Making of a Clarissa

Similar to the white background trick in The Mezzanine, Woolf formulates her thesis for Ms. Dalloway in my favorite passage:

Clarissa has theory in those days – they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It 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. But she said, sitting on the us going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not “here, here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter – even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed, 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. (149)

Here are my three observations about this paragraph. First, Clarissa’s theory that one must seek out all the people, places, and objects to truly know someone is the thesis of this book. After all, we spend a hundred and ninety pages in Clarissa’s memories and experience the world through her in addition to other character’s minds to understand her. In some ways, I wonder if Ms. Dalloway is Woolf’s response to the question if we will ever truly know anyone. After all, people can easily hide sides of them and can also lie to themselves. Indeed, I sometimes get the feeling that Clarissa herself understates and diminishes her importance by highlighting her lack of education and characterization of the parties she gives.

My next observation in the passage stems from class when we were asked to tackle the undeniable connection Septimus has to Clarissa; I think the reasoning behind their intersecting storylines is found in the passage. While Septimus never has any direct interactions with Clarissa, I think that Septimus is an example of the “odd affinities” that complete Clarissa and is in some ways the embodiment of the feeling Clarissa has that she is “everywhere.” After all we can see some uncanny similarities between their thinking, such as their references to Shakespeare.  The fact that Clarissa leaves her party to mourn a stranger’s death strongly implies that Septimus means more to Clarissa. Septimus may even be a representation of Clarissa’s dark thoughts, such as her musings on death. In addition, Septimus fulfils Clarissa’s theory on death as his “unseen”-self survives, attaching to Clarissa and haunting her thoughts by evoking Clarissa’s own contemplation of suicide.

My last observation attempts to connect this passage with the last lines of the book. In the end of the book I was struck how Ms. Dalloway ends on the realization: “For there she was.” This line could have been thought of by anyone, Peter, Clarissa, or the Narrator herself, which made it into an enigma as I didn’t know exactly how to interpret the line. However, the line evoked the feeling that it was connected to Clarissa’s idea that she was not “here,here,here” but “everywhere.” I wonder if the ten minutes Clarissa spent on Septimius’s death alone that was ended with the chime of the Big Ben signaled a fundamental change in Clarissa and brought her back into the present, making her truly in the moment. Any thoughts?