Hers is not the language of sexual liberation, but it is scarcely the language of Victorian sexual convention. In it’s own quiet manner, Woolf’s treatment of the subject was helping her readers to think in a new way (Zwerdling 172).
In her novel, Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf explores the inner thoughts of several characters whose lives are interconnected. Throughout the novel, issues of societal expectations and social class are dominant themes. Among these issues is the topic of sexuality. Several critics, such as Joseph Allen Boone and Ann Ronchetti, have explored the topic of homosexuality in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Some critics view not only Clarissa Dalloway as a “repressed homosexual victimized by patriarchal cultural,” but Septimus Warren Smith as well (Ronchetti 164). For both Clarissa and Septimus have emotionally, if not physically, intimate relationships with friends of the same sex. According to critic Alex Zwerdling, “Woolf’s fiction frequently depicts homosexual and lesbian attachments with sympathy and yet without special pleading,” challenging Victorian sexual prejudices by treating homosexual characters with the same “basic dignity as sexually conventional characters” (171). In Mrs. Dalloway, the lives of Clarissa and Septimus parallel one another in many ways - in ways that seem to emerge from a similar place. In either case, Woolf does not discriminate against neither Clarissa nor Septimus for their respective desires, but rather creates a dichotomy of two emotionally repressed lives with different outcomes, but remain very similar.
In her novel, Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf explores the inner thoughts of several characters whose lives are interconnected. Throughout the novel, issues of societal expectations and social class are dominant themes. Among these issues is the topic of sexuality. Several critics, such as Joseph Allen Boone and Ann Ronchetti, have explored the topic of homosexuality in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Some critics view not only Clarissa Dalloway as a “repressed homosexual victimized by patriarchal cultural,” but Septimus Warren Smith as well (Ronchetti 164). For both Clarissa and Septimus have emotionally, if not physically, intimate relationships with friends of the same sex. According to critic Alex Zwerdling, “Woolf’s fiction frequently depicts homosexual and lesbian attachments with sympathy and yet without special pleading,” challenging Victorian sexual prejudices by treating homosexual characters with the same “basic dignity as sexually conventional characters” (171). In Mrs. Dalloway, the lives of Clarissa and Septimus parallel one another in many ways - in ways that seem to emerge from a similar place. In either case, Woolf does not discriminate against neither Clarissa nor Septimus for their respective desires, but rather creates a dichotomy of two emotionally repressed lives with different outcomes, but remain very similar.
The Repressed Homosexual Desires of Clarissa and Septimus
For Clarissa, memories of her friend, Sally Seton, evoke feelings of “purity” and “integrity,” unlike any feeling she has shared with a man. She recollects, many years later, the first time she sees Sally and the feeling of not being able to take her eyes off of her, of being intoxicated by the feelings of love and admiration that Sally had awakened in her:
“...’if it were now to die ‘twere now to be most happy.’ That was her feeling - Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton” (36).
Reflecting on her love for Sally, at age 52, Clarissa reminisces about the “most exquisite moment of her whole life” - the moment in which Sally kisses her. Unlike any feeling she appears to have shared with either her husband, Richard Dalloway, whom Clarissa appears to have a sexless, but financially stable marriage, or her former beau, Peter Walsh, whom she “had to break with or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined,” Clarissa experiences with Sally a moment in which “the whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared...She uncovered, or the radiance broke through, the revelation, the religious feeling!” Interestingly, critic Ronchetti notes that Clarissa’s later deficiency of passion “protects her from the intensity of love which like institutionalized religion, she feels, destroys the ‘privacy of the soul’” (51). Thus, having shared that single moment of “religious feeling” with Sally, Clarissa turns away from passion and toward another life, one in which she is “not even Clarissa any more,” but “Mrs. Richard Dalloway” (9).
As Peter is fully aware, Clarissa’s seeming coldness is not simply a matter of what he considers to be insufficient feminine warmth and sensuality in heterosexual relations, but a condition of her mind ( Ronchetti 54).
Clarissa’s attraction to women extend beyond Sally Seton and stretch beyond the years they shared as young women:
It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of woman together. For that she could dimly percieve. She resented it, had a scruple picked up heaven knows where, or, she felt, sent by Nature (who is invariably wise); yet she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly. And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or that she was older, or some accident...she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt (32).
On a similar note, Septimus Warren Smith shares a friendship with Evans, his commanding officer, while “in the trenches” where he “develops his manliness” (93). The nature of their friendship is relatively ambiguous, but could be perceived as being one that also extends beyond platonic heterosexual camraderie.
"They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other” (93).
When Evans is killed, Septimus discovers that he has ceased to feel anything. His ability to connect emotionally dies with Evans. With “the panic” of not feeling upon him, he becomes engaged to Lucrezia whom he had not and does not love. He experiences great remorse for having “lied to her, seduced her” (98). It is possible that his greatest remorse is the fact that he could never openly confess his love for Evans. The fact that Evans appears one of his schizophrenic hallucinations and that he repeatedly wonders what would happen “...if he confessed? If he communicated? Would they let him off then, his torturers?” (98). But another question is posed “But what was his crime? He could not remember it,” just as he could not remember feeling anything after Evans died. It is possible that the guilt he feels for “lying” to Lucrezia and the “crime” he cannot remember are the result of repressed homosexuality and the guilt for harboring feelings beyond his control.
"Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business of copulation was filth to him before the end. But Rezia said they must have children. They had been married five years" (93).
“...’if it were now to die ‘twere now to be most happy.’ That was her feeling - Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton” (36).
Reflecting on her love for Sally, at age 52, Clarissa reminisces about the “most exquisite moment of her whole life” - the moment in which Sally kisses her. Unlike any feeling she appears to have shared with either her husband, Richard Dalloway, whom Clarissa appears to have a sexless, but financially stable marriage, or her former beau, Peter Walsh, whom she “had to break with or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined,” Clarissa experiences with Sally a moment in which “the whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared...She uncovered, or the radiance broke through, the revelation, the religious feeling!” Interestingly, critic Ronchetti notes that Clarissa’s later deficiency of passion “protects her from the intensity of love which like institutionalized religion, she feels, destroys the ‘privacy of the soul’” (51). Thus, having shared that single moment of “religious feeling” with Sally, Clarissa turns away from passion and toward another life, one in which she is “not even Clarissa any more,” but “Mrs. Richard Dalloway” (9).
As Peter is fully aware, Clarissa’s seeming coldness is not simply a matter of what he considers to be insufficient feminine warmth and sensuality in heterosexual relations, but a condition of her mind ( Ronchetti 54).
Clarissa’s attraction to women extend beyond Sally Seton and stretch beyond the years they shared as young women:
It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of woman together. For that she could dimly percieve. She resented it, had a scruple picked up heaven knows where, or, she felt, sent by Nature (who is invariably wise); yet she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape, some folly. And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or that she was older, or some accident...she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt (32).
On a similar note, Septimus Warren Smith shares a friendship with Evans, his commanding officer, while “in the trenches” where he “develops his manliness” (93). The nature of their friendship is relatively ambiguous, but could be perceived as being one that also extends beyond platonic heterosexual camraderie.
"They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other” (93).
When Evans is killed, Septimus discovers that he has ceased to feel anything. His ability to connect emotionally dies with Evans. With “the panic” of not feeling upon him, he becomes engaged to Lucrezia whom he had not and does not love. He experiences great remorse for having “lied to her, seduced her” (98). It is possible that his greatest remorse is the fact that he could never openly confess his love for Evans. The fact that Evans appears one of his schizophrenic hallucinations and that he repeatedly wonders what would happen “...if he confessed? If he communicated? Would they let him off then, his torturers?” (98). But another question is posed “But what was his crime? He could not remember it,” just as he could not remember feeling anything after Evans died. It is possible that the guilt he feels for “lying” to Lucrezia and the “crime” he cannot remember are the result of repressed homosexuality and the guilt for harboring feelings beyond his control.
"Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business of copulation was filth to him before the end. But Rezia said they must have children. They had been married five years" (93).
Sources
Ronchetti, Ann. The Artist, Society, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf’s Novels. New
York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1925. Print.
Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkley: U of California Press,
1986. Print.
York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1925. Print.
Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkley: U of California Press,
1986. Print.