Virginia Woolf S Cotton Wool of Daily Life - Liesl Olson

Virginia Woolf's "Cotton Wool of Daily Life"
Author(s): Liesl M. Olson

Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2, Virginia Woolf and Others (Winter,
2003), pp. 42-65
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3831894
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Virginia Woolf's
**
"cotton wool of daily life
Liesl M. Olson
Columbia University
[Poetry] has never been used for the common purpose of life. Prose has
taken all the dirty work on to her own shoulders; has answered letters,
paid bills, written articles, made speeches, served the needs of business-
men, shopkeepers, lawyers, soldiers, peasants.
? Virginia Woolf, "The Narrow Bridge of Art"1
[T]he everyday is what we are first of all, and most often: at work, at lei?
sure, awake, asleep, in the street, in private existence. The everyday, then,
is ourselves, ordinarily.
? Maurice Blanchot, "Everyday Speech"2
v? irginia Woolf's prose has frequently been called poetic, a description that alludes to the r
and sound of her sentences, the lyric plotlessness of her novels, and the self-conscious inter
of her characters. Woolf's friend, E.M. Forster, once claimed that Woolf's "problem" was t
should have been a poet, not a novelist.3 But poetic is a term that invites question, largely be
suggests that Woolf does not tackle the pedestrian world of ordinary life, or that her novels
prosaic subjects. While Woolf sought to remove the heavy furniture of the realist and natu
novel in order to render the inner workings of the mind ? the "atoms as they fall upon th
1. Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, Vol. 2 (Hogarth Press, 1966), p. 223.

2. Maurice Blanchot, "Everyday Speech" in Yale French Studies 73 (1987), p.12.
3. "So that is her problem. She is a poet, who wants to write something as near to a novel as possible," Forster w
his somewhat hesitant tribute to Woolf after her death. See Forster's Virginia Woolf (Harcourt Brace, 1942), p.23.
Liesl M. Olson, "Virginia Woolf's 'cottonwool of daily life,'" Journal of Modern Literature, 26.2 (Winter 200
pp. 42-65. ?Indiana University Press, 2003.
Olson: Woolf's "cottonwool of daily life" 43
in the order in which they fall" ? she knew that the modern novel could not flee f
world of everyday things, from "the common objects of daily prose, the bicycle a
as she writes in "A Letter to a Young Poet" (1932).4 Her characters will not dw
heads; they will dwell, for instance, in a physical world of London streets and pub
vagrants sing for money and airplanes advertise overhead.
Woolf's finest writing calls attention to ordinary experiences in a world full of or
Celebrators and critics of modernism have typically focused on Woolf's interest in
"moment of being," but have left the ordinary largely overlooked, a tendency eviden
fascination with modernism's fantastic revelations: Joyce's "epiphany," Pound's "
Eliot's "still point of the turning world," or Proust's explosion of memory, trigger
as the taste ofthe madeleine.5 The modernist preoccupation with self-consciousne
strikingly in such moments as these, has been both praised and criticized, but it
questioned.6 Yet, as I will show, Woolf's modernism is not purely concerned wi
subjective mind or heightened experience, but is deeply invested, stylistically an
representing the ordinary.7
Certainly, those who argue that Woolf shares with other modernists an emp
tive interiority, above all else, find much support in Woolf's writing. In "Modern
herself states that "For the moderns 'that,' the point of interest, lies very likely i
of psychology," and many critics have taken this statement (among similar on
departure.8 Elizabeth Abel, in Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis
the way Woolf's works "echo and rewrite the developmental fictions of psychoan
the introductions to Woolf's major works also pick up on what Abel describes as
in internal states, "the points of origin marked by mother and father," or other
ful sources."10 Beginning readers of Woolf's work will learn that "the external ev
primarily for the way it triggers and releases the inner life" and that "there is
so many ofVirginia Woolf's characters, a sense of mystery and ofthe inexplicable
4. Virginia Woolf, "Modern Fiction" in The Common Reader, 1st series (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
ginia Woolf, "A Letter to a Young Poet," in The Death ofthe Moth and Other Essays (Harcourt Bra
p. 214.
5. As Alex Zwerdling has recently pointed out, "moments of being" is a phrase that Jeanne Schulkind chooses as the
title to her collection of Woolf's memoirs, but Woolf herself does not give the phrase such primacy. See Zwerdling's "Mas-
tering the Memoir: Woolf and the Family Legacy" in Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2003), pp. 165-88.
6. "The most influential formal impulses of canonical modernism," Frederic Jameson writes, "have been strategies
of inwardness, which set out to reappropriate an alienated universe by transforming it into personal styles and private
languages." See Jameson's Fables of Aggression (University of California Press, 1979), p. 2. The Marxist critique of
modernism has always claimed that modernism represents a withdrawal to privacy, a denial of history, and a privileging
of subjectivity. In this vein, Georg Lukacs disparages the turn from the "objective reality" of the nineteenth-century novel
to the "decadent" subjective experience of modernism, arguing that "specific individuality cannot be separated from the
context in which they were created." See Lukacs' Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle (Harper and
Row, 1971), p. 19. Lukacs fails to understand that modernists were profoundly skeptical ofthe "objective reality" in which
he believed.
7. My exploration of Woolf's work is part of a larger project that examines literary modernism's preoccupation with the
habitual, pragmatic actions of everyday life. I also look at the work of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens,
focusing on how these writers emphasize the non-transformative power of the ordinary as its most compelling attribute:
literary modernists depict ordinary experience as a satisfaction with the material rather than the spiritual, the local rather
than the exotic, the constant rather than the unknown, and the democratic rather than the privileged.
8. Virginia Woolf, "Modern Fiction," p. 152.
9. Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. xvi.
10. Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, p. 3.
44 Journal of Modern Literature
enclosed in precise outlines."11 Woolf also has been

inward of all British writers," an appraisal that
dislike.12 A general sense, in both popular and sch
explores a fluid state of consciousness, always heigh
ment is not that these claims about Woolf's writing
mentally miss something crucial about her commit
that are not heightened.
When Woolf, in "Modern Fiction," asks us to "e
an ordinary day," she demands two things, seemi
both "ordinary," and of the "mind," though by her
subjective mind is a shifting, wildly complex thing
tastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness o
experiences with which every reader is familiar,
might modern fiction represent both psychologica
that are shared among us? Woolf bridges this div
als do the things that they always do ? repeated
fabric of what she calls "character." Woolf identifie
writings. She continues to emphasize a distinction
tenable, in retrospect, than revealing of Woolf's be
loway, in particular, is a novel obsessed with the or
person. The ordinary in Mrs. Dalloway lies at the h
functioning as a powerful force of life, prevailing o
ordinary, however, is not limited to Mrs. Dalloway
ing her experimentation in subsequent novels. The
representation, or that no representation of it (no m
tory. Woolf's concern with how best to represent t
in fiction, as she herself implies in her long essay
ists who capture the ordinary particularly well, "P
Woolf positions herself. Partly because Woolf was
self, "Phases of Fiction" reveals Woolf's strong atta
it is, who satisfy our need to believe in a fictitious
determined disassociation from the Edwardians, w
should be considered in context of her admiration f
she emulates as a means of achieving the ordinary.
In "A Letter to a Young Poet," a long piece writte
the 1930s (her nephew Julian Bell, John Lehmann
Auden), Woolf criticizes poets who are self-obsess
the room at night with the blinds drawn."14 The po
11. See Elaine Showalter's Introduction to the Penguin edition

Introduction to Moments of Being (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1
12. See Michael North's Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene
Prevailing notions about Woolf's work, as I show, are similar.
13. Woolf, "Modern Fiction," p. 150.
14. Virginia Woolf, "A Letter to a Young Poet," p. 218. "A Lette
from abstraction and impenetrability; even a discerning reader like Woolf is

Woolf also questions poetry that is too crass in its attempt to include "the actua
She quotes verse from Lehmann, Spender and Day-Lewis (although she does not
and notes the abrupt shift from romantic images to common vernacular.16 Th
between the private language of the mind and colloquial language of the pub
in essays like "The Narrow Bridge of Art" (1927) and "The Leaning Tower" (
Woolf's central concern with how the novel should capture the ordinary withou
poetic or utterly crass.
Woolf's attitude in "A Letter to a Young Poet" echoes her famous response to
a novel that she ultimately felt was too adolescent in its representation of or
criticizing Joyce's experimentations as merely "conscious and calculated inde
fault with similar moments in the work of younger poets, Woolf emphasizes l
bowels" and "buggers are after," and then explains: "The poet is trying to inc
is honestly of opinion that she can be brought into poetry and will do very wel
feels, will be improved by the actual, the colloquial. But though I honour him f
doubt that it is wholly successful. I feel a jar. I feel a shock. I feel as if I had st
the corner of the wardrobe."18 Ironically, the poet's motives, as Woolf describ
Woolf's own.19 While the name "Mrs. Gape" suggests a woman who draws a
or astonishes, she may not be so different from Woolf's own charwoman "
are ill-served by poetry, according to Woolf. She argues compellingly in "Mr. B
Brown" (1924) that such women should not be overlooked. A modern writer mu
superfluous, tiresome tools of Edwardian description and represent ordinary
and completely. Of course, Woolf's feminist aims also underscore her concer
Mrs. Brown represents the type of woman (older, unsupported, burdened by
often overlooked, in literature and in life.20 Thus Woolf quarrels with the you
poets not so much because of their motives (with which she is explicitly sympat
of their disappointing method. Only the novel, "the prose of the world," in
Letters series, a project planned by John Lehmann, who was then working for the Hogarth Press (an
buy Virginia Woolf's share in it.) The "Letter" was specifically addressed to Lehmann, who brought
and Day-Lewis.
15. Woolf, "A Letter to a Young Poet," p. 215.
16. The examples Woolf chooses are not the poets' best. She noticeably ignores Auden in "Lette
poet in the group.
17. Woolf writes: "Mr. Joyce's indecency in Ulysses seems to me the conscious and calculated inde
man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows. At moments, when the window i
cent. But what a waste of energy! And, after all, how dull indecency is, when it is not the overflow
energy or savagery, but the determined and public-spirited act of a man who needs fresh air!" See
Brown" in The Captain s Death Bed and Other Essays (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p.116.
Woolf described Joyce: "A queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." See The Diary of Virg
Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984), pp. 188-89.
18. Woolf, "A Letter to a Young Poet," p. 215.
19. When John Lehmann criticized the "Letter," Woolf maintained that "the young poet is rather c
realism and beauty . .. he doesnt [sic] reach the unconscious automated state ? hence the spasmod
effect of his realistic language. But I may be transferring to him some of the ill effects of my own
round ? writes poetry in prose." See The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V, p. 83.
20. Woolf's discomfort with the younger generation of poets also seems to stem from her susp
adequately represent a woman like "Mrs. Gape," even though Woolf claims that this is what they ar
viewed the 30s poets ? privileged, male and mostly homosexuai ? with some skepticism, parti
views on gender. See Hermione Lee's chapter "Young Poets" in Virginia Woolf (Chatto & Windus
capture a person's complexity.21 The form of the nov

rich, elastic, and alive," Woolf writes in "Mr. Bennett
character.22
In her critical essays on the novel, Woolf insists on the danger ? for the artist ? in retreating to
the purely subjective, to the entirely interior, to what she defined as overly poetic. The not always
stable associations she makes among subjectivity, interiority, and poetry are influenced by the
artistic experiments of her time; she recognizes one of the most pressing issues posed by literary
modernism and the artistic developments that followed: To what extent should writers depict the
facts of an external world, "to disenchant and disintoxicate," as W.H. Auden wrote, and to what
extent should they represent psychological depth or inner vision? Which is the more authentic
reality? Woolf's engagement, late in her career, with the poets of the 1930s highlights her persis-
tently mixed feelings about literature's responsibility to a real or external world outside the world
that modernist experimentation, according to many, was trying to represent. The word "real," of
course, is bandied about by Woolf to mean almost anything, partly because she sought to redefine
it. Woolf sympathizes with the younger generation's desire to supplant the imagination with a
more politically-minded realism, particularly in response to the inexplicable violence of the first
war, and England's political and economic difficulties during the summer of 1931, when the letter
was composed.23 But her own artistic struggle is slightly different. Her work is not split between
representations of inner versus outer or personal versus political.24 Rather, her representation of
ordinary experience works to reconcile two sides of a dichotomy that we usually understand as
dominating literary modernism.
At the start of her unfinished memoir, "A Sketch of the Past" (1940), Woolf distinguishes
between "moments of being" and "moments of non-being." She describes her childhood as one
long period of ecstasy, a "moment of being" marked by the sound of waves crashing outside her
nursery room window at St. Ives. And yet, Woolf acknowledges, her childhood certainly consisted
of more than just this one morning lying in bed: "If I could remember one whole day I should be
able to describe, superficially at least, what life was like as a child. Unfortunately, one only remem?
bers what is exceptional. And there seems to be no reason why one thing is exceptional and another
not."25 Parts of the day that are not lived consciously, and thus not remembered, comprise what she
calls "non-being," of which her adult life seems to be full. As an example, Woolf gives the events
of the day before: "ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbind-
ing."26 While Woolf seems somewhat wearied by all of these events (if we can call them events),
21. Laurie Langbauer essentially modifies Woolf's assessment by arguing that the Victorian series novel is the special
province of the everyday precisely because of the expansiveness, repetitiveness, and complicated closure that constitutes
an extended series. See Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850-1930 (Cornell University Press,
1999). Langbauer considers Mrs. Dalloway as it breaks from and incorporates the series tradition, though I would argue
that Woolf's novel calls into question Langbauer's very model. The novel of one day seems especially suited to capturing
the experience of the everyday (particularly the everyday's temporality).
22. Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," p. 102.
23. Ramsay Macdonald's Labour Government collapsed in August, on the heels ofthe General Strike in England and the
stock market crash in America. Rapid inflation threatened to follow. The summer was marked by "violent political argu?
ment," Woolf noted in a letter. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. IV, p. 373.
24. Contrast Harvena Richter's study of Woolf's subjectivity, Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage (Princeton University
Press, 1970), with Susan Squier's analysis of London's exteriority, Virginia Woolf and London: Sexual Politics ofthe City
(University of North Carolina Press, 1985). Also see Alex Zwerdling's Virginia Woolf and the Real World (University of
California Press, 1986), an analysis of Woolf's fiction which pivots on these binaries.
25. Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," in Moments of Being, pp. 69-70.
26. Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," p. 70.
she places particular importance on their role in revealing character ? in this in

reveal something about who she is, as she struggles to describe herself in her m
The importance of "non-being" in Virginia Woolf's work has received conside
tion than the "ecstasy" or "shock" that Woolf also describes. In "Sketch of the
"Often when I have been writing one of my so-called novels I have been baf
problem; that is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand ? "non-b
nary, forgettable events of the day, Woolf suggests, must exist in her novels ?
Dalloway, Woolf of course creates "one whole day," not of her childhood, as she
do when writing her memoirs, but of Clarissa Dalloway's adult life: Clarissa buy
a dress, meets an old friend, takes a nap, throws a party.28 The ordinariness of t
the focus to be Clarissa's character ? and character is Woolf's chief novelistic co
Woolf even suggests that a writer must be more attuned to ordinary experience
In a 1911 letter to her sister Vanessa Bell, she writes: "As a painter, I believe
conscious of the drone of daily life than I am, as a writer. You are a painter. I
about you, for purposes of my own, and this seems to me clear. This explains yo
writer, composing the stuff that establishes character, must be attentive to the du
life, the non-being that constitutes a realistic novel.
Woolf's distinction between moments of being and non-being, like her di
poetry and prose, demonstrates her awareness that the modern novel cannot rep
ened moments of self-consciousness, but must be made up of more mundane mo
our lives. Woolf's ambivalence about how the novel should respond to the subjecti
reveals a red thread running through literary modernism: despite the desire to g
depth, many modernists sought to retain and amplify a world of ordinary exp
day things. On a large scale, we might acknowledge many modernist classics
this representation of an ordinary human, existing ? as Maurice Blanchot wr
(Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, The Man Without Qualities, Beckett's Trilogy, to nam
ernism rejected or subverted conventional literary devices (plot, closure), many
still preserve and even privilege the coherence of character. To represent or
becomes the means by which characters are best revealed, an idea at the he
artistic credo like Woolf's "Mr. Bennettt and Mrs. Brown" (1924) or Gertrud
and Repetitions" (1934). While Woolf argues that the character of an ordinar
Mrs. Brown should not be overlooked in fiction, Stein similarly, defends the inn
portraits by explaining that her use of repetition is an attempt to get at "the rh
personality."30 Rejecting a beginning, middle and end, Stein's portraits do no
recreate the "existence," as she calls it, of an individual. Routine and habit, ena
become more important than heightened or significantly ordered events.
27. Woolf, "A Sketch ofthe Past," p. 70.

28. Certainly it could be argued that that party which ends Mrs. Dalloway is not an ordinary even
the presence of the Prime Minister as well as the most significant people from Clarissa's past. Howe
temporary reprieve from the ordinary as a defining feature of the ordinary's repetition. As Henri
anomalies often serve as a confirmation of the ordinary. Certain types of pleasure, if they happen
parties do) give the ordinary its emphasis, its cycle of suspension and re-instatement. See "Notes W
the French Countryside," the penultimate chapter in Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1 (Verso, 1991)
29. Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I, p. 475.
30. Gertrude Stein, "Portraits and Repetition," in Lectures in America (Beacon Press, 1935), p. 1
The modern novel treats the everyday with a new

disapprovingly) is not limited to the form of the n
reveals the slippery boundaries between poetry an
attempt to separate their provinces, as if poetry sh
should treat the everyday. But as the genres of t
dominant strain of modernist poetry also foregrou
to a romantic idealism and poetic language of the
Buttons, a playful study of ordinary things in the s
this development; moreover, the poetry that Woolf
Poet" (and which influences the 1930s poets) ? th
captures what she calls "the actual, the colloquial."
hinges on her opinion of its quality, since she actual
ing more prose-like at the time.
"[W]e are going in the direction of prose," Wo
(1927), an essay in which she looks to poetry for "b
rejects it in favor of a new kind of novel, one large
with just "something of the exaltation of poetry."3
of the novel, the actual fiction she produces is root
sometimes stylistically less radical than her essay
Despite her distaste for Edwardian materialism, so
Brown" and "Modern Fiction," Woolf does not actua
"the fabric of things."33 She transforms, but does
most successful works render ordinary experience,
All the same, that one day should follow ano

Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up
walk in the park . . . it was enough.34
? Mrs. Dalloway
If Mrs. Dalloway explores how people respond to

pressures within the class system, and the realizatio
31. The desire to replicate ordinary experience, it should be ack

century novel, as many critics of the novel have sustained, is
realism of the domestic and the natural. Franco Moretti's work c
special province ofthe novel. See Moretti's "The Moment of Trut
pp. 249-61 for a discussion of the novel's reification of the every
everyday. My examination of Woolf's work assumes that there i
Woolf rethink the modalities of the everyday, but that her work
resentation than she would have us believe.
32. Woolf, "The Narrow Bridge of Art," p. 224.
34. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Penguin, 1992), p.134. All subsequent citations from Mrs. Dalloway will be paren?
thetical within the text.
we might understand Woolf's focus on ordinary events as showing how her ch

these changes. In a novel where nothing happens twice, but much that happ
happened before (Clarissa's walk through London, Lady Bruton's luncheon, E
ride), Woolf suggests that no event is the same event, even if it appears everyd
sense, no action is the same because each action is affected by time. "If eve
everything changes inwardly, and the same concrete reality never recurs," Be
etition is therefore possible only in the abstract: what is repeated is some aspe
and especially our intellect, have singled out from reality, just because our act
the effort of our intellect is directed, can move only among repetitions."35 Ch
moment of our existence, essentially making repetition of any event impos
pivots on this experience of the ordinary as something strange, in that the ord
in a new moment of time. Yet as Woolf explains in "Sketch of the Past," repet
actions is what we use to orient and control our lives, relying on the samenes
before. Though we might not be aware of it, Woolf writes, we are protected b
ably covered in the "cotton wool of daily life."36
In his study of Proust, Samuel Beckett describes the way in which tempora
day-to-day existence: "There is no escape from the hours and the days. Neith
nor from yesterday. There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has d
deformed by us."37 Woolf's novel foresees Beckett's theory: "daily life" in M
tions as something her characters crave, as a natural reaction against the defor
Peter Walsh notes, walking around Regent's Park: "Those five years ? 1918
he suspected, somehow very important. People looked different. Newspaper
(p. 78). London pedestrians, going about their daily business, seem new and s
as it affects a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, is not illustrated by sudden
ness, but in the desire ? felt by so many characters ? to preserve the ordinary
moment passing.
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Woolf's novel open
task, suited by a simple sentence ? iambic, like natural speech, and set apart a
Yet move quickly down the page and the task is tinged with a sense that "so
about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees" (p. 3). Clarissa's death
owing and echoing Septimus Smith's, complicate the early morning freshne
first page of Mrs. Dalloway immediately establishes a dichotomy between an
a heightened event, running an errand and plunging towards death. Similarly,
ordinary woman and a woman who feels extraordinary emotions: "she always
it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself
of the ordinary" (p. 9). This back-and-forth style characterizes the novel ("S
any one in the world now that they were this or were that" [p. 8]); Clarissa's s
walk through London and her party preparations, as well as the movements
throughout this June day, make up the substance of the novel's action; they do
in check ? moments of anxiety or self-realization.
35. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, Trans. Arthur Mitchell (Dover Publications, Inc, 1998)
36. Woolf, "A Sketch ofthe Past," p. 72.
37. Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit (John Calder Publishers
Experience in this novel certainly can be heighten

Septimus is best revealed when he is doing ordinary
back to his habits before the war. Unselfconscious
rissa thinks about Peter Walsh, at the novel's openin
but remembers things about him that are constant.
gotten, leaving a person composed in memory by w
one of these days, June or July, she forgot which,
ings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, h
things had utterly vanished ? how strange it was! ?
Clarissa knows Peter based on little things ? not his
habit of fiddling with a pocketknife.
Of course, Clarissa's remembering these things
she paradoxically removes them from their ordin
with importance ? a symbol of his sexual energy, t
his sadly tamed danger and masculinity. There are
habits not only reveal character, but can also be r
her sofa sewing her green dress when Peter, just r
wonders how she could be doing what she's always
sewing is more than just her routine. The episode d
for Odysseus to return; it acquires mythic importa
actions of this novel so heavily loaded. In fact, mos
symbolic; they are not exceptional moments. To tr
a representation of character would undermine the
Woolf wants to depict the way habits function, the
In his study of Proust, Beckett is compelled and
physical obligations, and tie us to our animal selves
Waiting for Godot, as they are for the characters
substance of "life": "Habit is a compromise effected
or between the individual and his own organic ecc
ity, the lightning-conductor of his existence. Habit
Breathing is habit. Life is habit."39 Woolf, certainl
with memory, as "the laws of memory are subject t
38. Allusions to Odysseus's journey also draw attention to Wo

and then re-read in 1922. See Harvena Richter's "The Ulysses
the Novel, 21.3 (1989), pp. 305-19. While Richter usefully connec
notes and reaction to Ulysses, I find some of Richter's parallels b
able suggestion is that Woolf was essentially driven to write Mr
or trump Ulysses, a novel that her friends (most importantly T.S
39. Beckett, Proust, pp. 18-19.
40. Beckett, Proust, p. 18. Woolf read and reread Proust from 1
my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the senten
such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensific
it ? that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then
nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession." See The L
notes how the functioning of past and present in Mrs. Dalloway
Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, a book much admired
figures from his past turned now into aged specters of themselv
ideas about habit differ from Beckett's in that she sees habit as something
than degrades character. The routine needs of the body, while sometimes bo
of who a person is. For instance, Woolf describes Peter eating his dinner alon
reinforcing the simple fact that people must eat, including this Englishman, w
pears for dessert (p. 176). Peter's solitary dinner, narrated to emphasize its nec
from Krapp's obsession with bananas. Other events in Woolf's novel ? "betw
and his environment" ? are simply mentioned and dropped; they happen and c
frequently. Clarissa has bought flowers before and she will most likely buy flo
the same florist, Miss Pym. Repetition of such actions allows characters to neg
between the present and the past, so that events from long ago become par
moment, as J. Hillis Miller has noted in his celebrated essay on repetition in M
Woolf takes the ordinary as her central subject ? an ordinary that is not alw
something else. "Ordinary" (like "character") is a catchword for Woolf; in m
such as "Phases of Fiction," she draws attention to writers who capture it pa
fiction of Turgenev, Austen, and her friend Forster (among others) locates and
experiences and ordinary things, often through an attention to facts. Woolf's
writers mixes praise with a desire to translate their aesthetic into something m
her essay on Jane Austen, for instance, she praises Austen's ability to take the
it profoundly revealing of character. In Austen's novels (as in Woolf's), "[t]her
no heroism," Woolf writes, just commonplace moments of living.42 These m
repetitions and habits of any day ? for instance, a man and woman talking o
dinner ? but these moments can also spark a character's self-revelation: "But, fr
commonplace, their words become suddenly full of meaning, and the moment f
most memorable in their lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before
serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this drop, in which all th
has collected, gently subsides again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordi
Woolf's praise for Austen is striking because it so aptly describes her own f
the "housemaid" passing, for nearly all Woolf's novels include servants, char
and control domestic routines, whereas Austen's novels rarely mention serva
would be easy to read this passage as a description of a modernist epiphany, it
tant to highlight the ordinariness of what Woolf describes, and implicitly h
Austen's materialism. Woolf locates a moment, not solely in an Austen novel
of her own ? perhaps the charged, unspoken intimacy between the Ramsays
Window" or Isa's quickly stifled attraction to Haines in the opening scene of
happened long before the single day in the novel's present" See Fiction and Repetition: Seven E
University Press, 1982), p. 188. Hermione Lee also draws a parallel between Woolfian and Prous
hood: "Virginia Woolf's earliest memories 'come back' to her rather like Marcel's 'vast structure of
the taste ofthe madeleine. Like Virginia Woolf, Marcel remembers himself as the child half-asleep
shapes ofthe furniture in the bedroom, or hearing the sound ofthe bell tinkling on the garden door
of M. Swann." See Virginia Woolf p. 30.
41. Repetition in Mrs. Dalloway, according to J. Hillis Miller, is the recurrence of past events in t
characters. Miller focuses on narrative strategies ofthe novel (rather than actual actions that are re
way in which a ubiquitous, all-knowing narrator invades characters' minds, displacing the prese
"Mrs. Dalloway: Repetition as the Raising ofthe Dead" in Fiction and Repetition.
42. Virginia Woolf, "Jane Austen," in The Common Reader, 1st series (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
43. Woolf, "Jane Austen," p. 142.
These moments are not themselves epiphanic, but "

course of life. The "housemaid passing" interrupts the
as "Mrs. Gape" is a jarring "shock" to poetic reverie.
to a Young Poet," actually wants to represent these inte
everyday is a mixture and ongoing flow of events. Woolf
ary criticism) reveals as much about Woolf's ethos and
is a point of fascination for Woolf, alluring because it
flow" denies a stable moment of recognition.
But how can the ordinary be represented, in fiction
becomes more than just ordinary? The Marxist theore
in his description of what he calls the "everyday" (
the Modern World (1968), Lefebvre argues that the ca
located; everyday life eludes metaphor, "evades the gri
lable."44 Lefebvre writes: "It is not possible to construc
the details of everyday life will become meaningful in
supposed to function in any important way ? it cannot
other theorists of everyday life have insisted, the ord
siveness and apprehension; "It escapes," writes Mauri
it is definitively uneventful, is the absence of event, so
forming it. This artistic paradox becomes part of W
by the major characters, as well as many minor ones
London with a collection of insignificant pedestrians, s
attention. Maisie Johnson, "in London for the first tim
the old men and women, invalids most of them in B
queer" (p. 28). She is a girl much like Joyce's Evelin
objects ? but Maisie now stands terrified in a big city,
as Eveline does, paralyzed at the Dublin port. All ofth
Maisie (who is never mentioned again) demonstrates h
textualized when put into such fresh focus, as Woolf
the activity of the city ? listing so many things all at on
deepen the importance of these events. While she incl
Joyce), these things nevertheless are given significance
As Woolf worked on this scene in Regent's Park, she
was "by clinging as tight to fact as I can."47 Facts, he
tions of pedestrians ? described with brevity, but non
44. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life and the Modern World, trans. Sa
Lefebvre's work, somewhat obscure, has influenced more well-kno
Michel de Certeau and Georges Perec. Critique of Everyday Life,
subsequent decades) has received new attention recently in the field
been renewed. See Yale French Studies 73 (1987), a special issue de
Kristin Ross, including essays, among others, by Lefebvre, Blanchot
(2002), also dedicated to "the everyday," drawing on a range of inter
45. Lefebvre, Everyday Life and the Modern World, p. 98.
46. Blanchot, "Everyday Speech," p. 14.
47. The Diary ofVirginia Woolf, Vol. II, p. 272.
of Woolf's Edwardian predecessors. For instance, a reader finds a similar collectio

turning to the opening pages of Arnold Bennettt's Riceyman Steps (1923), in whi
through the industrial streets of London's Clerkenwell in the autumn of 1919. His
ance (stout, with a slight limp), manner of dress (hatless, neatly suited), and o
seller) are emphasized in the novel's first paragraphs, along with many other d
presumably would have criticized for being "outside," lacking depth, as she writes
and Mrs. Brown."48 Bennett's style, according to Woolf, overlooks the essential "
individual, perhaps evident in his depiction of the charwoman Elsie, who is se
from the outside, as a man might see her.49 And yet, even as Bennett overlooks s
to the constitution of character, his materialist style serves a particular purpose,
rooting the reader in a world of ordinary action and physical objects. Woolf's wor
on facts, but Woolf also uses facts to foreground the elusiveness of the ordinary
of its representation. Maisie has many counterparts (as part of a list of people wh
scene ofthe novel), who are not so pointedly aware of their surroundings: Scrope
Clarissa on the curb (p. 4); Edgar J. Watkiss, who carries lead piping (p. 15); Sarah
the baby (p. 21); Mr. Bowley, with rooms at the Albany (p. 21); Mrs. Coates, wh
airplane (p. 21); and Mrs. Dempster, who saves crusts for squirrels (p. 29). These c
late Regent's Park and the streets surrounding it, as they would any other day oft
brierly attends to each, but they are never mentioned again. Like actions that
repeated, these minor characters are noted as if they are regular, recurring aspect
rissa must inevitably pass these people. Woolf thus captures the ordinariness of w
London, and also acknowledges (here, through Maisie) that representing its ord
power to make it seem strange.
Like this pageant of pedestrians on the London streets, resuming their lives
Woolf's deliberate "doubling" of Septimus and Clarissa threads together the exp
shock with the experience of ordinary existence, continuing.51 The relationship b
characters, rather than posing a dichotomy of experience (front lines versus hom
sizes Clarissa's own sense of vulnerability after the war (and specifically after he
as Septimus's struggle to connect to a world that Clarissa represents. Clarissa's
and love of what she calls "the ebb and flow of things" (p. 9) hinges on her theor
nectedness, of finding meaning from the people and events around her rather th
herself. Whereas alone, taking her prescribed afternoon rest, Clarissa acknow

49. Elsie is introduced early in a long paragraph, beginning: "Elsie was a strongly-built wench, plump
the striking free, powerful carriage of one bred to various and hard manual labour. Her arms and bus
had blue-black hair and dark blue eyes, and a pretty curve of the lips. The face was square but soft." S
(Collins, 1956), p. 29. While Bennett's novel indeed takes Elsie's plight as a central subject, the narrator
that he knows more about her, objectively, than she knows about herself.
50. Gillian Beer suggests that these characters are representative of the English classes and their ritu
and the ear that attract the attention of every person in the novel's opening scene become "the sp
comedy of social class." See Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (University of Michigan Press, 1
51. In her introduction to the Modern Library edition of Mrs. Dalloway (1928), Woolf writes: ". . . in
Septimus, who later is intended to be her double, had no existence; and that Mrs. Dalloway was origina
perhaps merely to die at the end of the party" (p.vi). Certainly, if Clarissa had killed herself, her day
ordinary at all, but the fact that Woolf changes her original plan suggests that Clarissa's everyday liv
death.
"lack[s]" ("something central which permeated"), she

streets of London (p. 34). Every pedestrian that she
"what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; t
ter Elizabeth inherits this attraction to the everyday
as she calls it sitting atop an omnibus, constitutes the
in many ways, Elizabeth also hopes that what humans
the grand flow of each day (what Woolf calls "non-be
larger than we. Elizabeth thinks: "Forgetfulness in peo
but this voice, pouring endlessly, year in year out,
this van; this life; this procession, would wrap them
stream of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a
(p. 152). Somehow "life" must be preserved ? not in a
into a vast ocean where all melts and joins. But who c
process of the day, the flow of all the hours? The idea t
the ordinary tasks ? are what constitute "life" is the
persistently by Clarissa. She believes that the moveme
is more important than grand action, even if she ca
part of it" (p. 5), "that divine vitality" (p. 7). The d
here, now") emphasizes her longing after something t
Clarissa's satisfaction with the ordinariness of events
characteristic. As the epigraph to this section suggest
with what has come before, but for Clarissa, this is "e
The word "procession" also summons a distinct event
in England: the procession to bury the unknown war
thousands of mourners to Westminster Abbey, and sti
use of the word "procession" in Mrs. Dalloway re-ima
unknown warrior offered a form of mourning for th
War ? an outcome difficult for England to compre
commemorates life, embodied by small, organic thin
petal, some oak trees" ? suggest the tangible and the n
things also evokes the fragility of living. Woolf's pro
(as well as the Regent's Park pedestrians) seeks out a p
about and carry them on"; vulnerable, she nonethele
world, filled with people and with everyday routines.
Alternatively, Septimus has turned inward after hi
world of people and things. Septimus cannot handle th
"real things were too exciting" (p. 155). Septimus va
these "things" and seeing them metamorphose into a vis
tines and habits establish; now, everything is heighten
as Suzette Henke suggests, are rendered in prose th
the madman."52 His visions ? modeled largely after
52. Suzette Henke, "Virginia Woolf's Septimus Smith: An Analy

guage." Literature and Psychology 31.4 (1981), p. 17.
inexplicable pain and devastating loss.53 For instance, sitting on a park bench wit
Septimus transforms a man in a gray business suit walking through the park
soldier, arisen from the dead (p. 76). Septimus cannot see the man as Clarissa sees
the cab ? as an ordinary stranger going about his daily business ? but envisions
of war instead.
Yet hope remains that Septimus might recover; in one scene, he seems to recuperate his char?
acter before the war, or before his breakdown, and we learn something about his previous per?
sonality. This scene, late afternoon as Rezia sews hats and Septimus lies on the sofa, centers on
Septimus's relationship to the ordinary. For a brief moment, Septimus addresses the materiality of
things around him and he seems able to function without fear. Surrounded by domestic objects that
threaten to metamorphose into something else, he has difficulty opening his eyes, but "gathering
courage, he looked at the sideboard; the plate of bananas; the engraving of Queen Victoria and the
Prince Consort; at the mantelpiece, with the jar of roses. None of these things moved. All were
still; all were real" (p. 156). Septimus's comfort with the ordinary objects of a living room seems
a temporary stay against confusion. He chooses the ribbons for the hat that Rezia is making; "so
real, it was so substantial, Mrs. Peters' hat" (p. 158). And instantly Rezia thinks: "He had become
himself then, he had laughed then" (p. 158). Similar to Clarissa's sewing, Rezia's hat-making
might be understood as representing the satisfaction of ordinary routines, to which Septimus, for
one instant, returns. Moreover, sewing suggests an assembling of things together, a creation of
something whole from individual parts, like Clarissa's final party. To "assemble" is what Clarissa
must do when, in the middle of her party, she hears of Septimus's suicide, his final disassembling,
a turning way from what ? in this afternoon scene ? he briefly embraces.
Karen DeMeester maintains that Woolf's description of Septimus's experience is a mark of the
novel's modernist style, in that modern fiction is particularly well-suited to depict heightened expe?
rience, especially trauma. "Modernist literature is a literature of trauma," she states; "in the 1920s,
it gave form and representation to a psychological condition that psychiatrists would not under?
stand for another fifty years."54 Taking Mrs. Dalloway as a representative text, DeMeester argues
that Septimus suffers not from schizophrenia ? as other critics have suggested ? but from delayed
stress response to trauma, which the novel's repetitions, non-chronological form, and stream-of-
consciousness style "preserve" rather than "reorder." Moreover, DeMeester claims that modernist
forms are ineffective at depicting recovery; Septimus's insanity, not stability, conforms better to
modernist modes of representation.
DeMeester illuminates Septimus's experience of trauma in the context of recent discoveries in
the field of trauma psychology, but her assumption about what makes Mrs. Dalloway modernist
53. In Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), Leonard
Woolf describes how Virginia Woolf (like Septimus) heard sparrows speaking Greek during one of her illnesses. While
biographical readings are usually a tricky endeavor (yet are frequently undertaken with Woolf's work), Virginia Woolf's
personal experience of "madness" might help to explain why she represents the ordinary as a means of keeping change in
check. Ordinary actions and domestic things had a particular allure for Woolf, as they represented health and stability in
her own life, in contrast to the terrifying bouts of madness that threatened to take over her ability to write and function.
(See Hermione Lee's chapter entitled "Madness" in Virginia Woolf for a balanced and insightful examination of the nature
of Woolf's illness.) Once she had recovered, however, Woolf drew upon her madness as material for her writing; thus, in
some ways the stability of habit and routine also took on connotations of artistic dullness, or prose over poetry (See Woolf's
essay, "On Being 111" in The Moment and Other Essays [Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948]). Thus, Septimus' madness,
while terrifying to him, is also "thrilling."
54. Karen DeMeester, "Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway" in Modern Fiction Studies 44,
number 3 (Fall 1998), p. 649.
does not account for the essential role of the ordinary.5

unique to modernism, as Septimus himself comprehen
went to war to save: "How Shakespeare loathed huma
mus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The
under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair.
same" (p. 97). Septimus, having seen the horrors of huma
of humanity depicted in the literature that ? ironically
the first place; he sees himself reflected back.56 A read
Ugolino in Hell to experience the way in which madness
cal disruptions, repetition, and non-chronological form
before the arrival of literary modernism.58
Moreover, in the case of Woolf's novel, the narrativ
way it ends ? represents an affirmation of the ordinar
of Septimus's suicide, in the middle of her party, she fe
she recognizes her own proclivity to "plunge" towards d
death ("her dress flamed, her body burnt" [p. 201]), su
or consumed by suicide; his death causes her to imagi
of happiness that Septimus's death threatens to obliter
retreating to a back room, she arrives at a sense of jo
timus's courage, she wants to go on living: "A thing the
about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let
This he had preserved" (p. 202). Septimus's suicide "pr
55. DeMeester draws upon recent work in the field of trauma stud
Cathy Caruth. As it relates to Woolf's work, trauma has been a very t
other readings of Mrs. Dalloway, see, for instance, Jane Lilienfeld's
in Virginia Woolf's Narrativity" in Virginia Woolf: Turning the C
Briggs' "Veterans and Civilians: Traumatic Knowledge and Cultural
and Communities (Pace University Press, 1999). Lilienfeld argues th
essay "Modern Fiction" is the narrative of trauma enacted in Mrs. D
nary mind on an ordinary day" is actually "intrusive traumatic ima
Septimus's "traumatic knowledge exceeds narrative representation"
56. The "irony" of WWI is best documented by Paul Fussell in his
(Oxford University Press, 1975). Fussell writes: "Every war is ironic be
constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodram
the Great War was more ironic than any before or since. It was a hide
which had dominated the public consciousness for a century. It revers
57. In Wars I Have Seen (Random House, 1945), Gertrude Stein also
and her experience in occupied France during World War II. Stein writ
reading Shakespeare, we have read Julius Caesar, and Macbeth and now
it is all just like what is happening now" (p. 105).
58. Moreover, the assumption that traumatic experience demands a di
cannot be narrated ? seems almost contrary to how Woolf describes th
orable (or traumatic) event. In a 1924 diary entry that foresees this dist
easily passes in her new home (to which she and Leonard have just mo
day: "Indeed most of life escapes, now I come to think of it: the textur
a traumatic scare ? her niece Angelica Bell was hit by a motor ear ? an
call, waiting in the hospital, the evasive nurse, the anguished look on he
memory so as to be printed on the page, unlike the time Woolf spends in h
she continues, " ? the habit of living at 52 Tavistock Sqre is not qui
habit of life in this room." See The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II, p.
she naturally writes, in contrast to habitual experiences that are much
events that Elizabeth watches from atop the omnibus, "this vow; this van; this lif
a glacier preserving a splinter of bone. Septimus's death somehow keeps intact a
purity or unadulterated experience that, for Clarissa, the "chatter" and "corruptio
times obscure, Unable to see life after the war as simple or pure, Septimus can
connection to ordinary things, and yet his suicide propels Clarissa to re-connect
life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely" (p. 203). While Clarissa's
conclusion that "she felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they
(p. 204) ? might seem perverse, it is essentially an assertion of life ("this, here, no
ness, trauma, or death. Woolf asserts the force of Clarissa's everyday living.
The power of the everyday to trump trauma is a possibility that Woolf's o
put forth. Woolfs use of the word "procession" to signify the flow of ordinar
that paradoxically resist representation ? also occurs earlier in Jacob's Room (1
aspires to capture the elusive character of Jacob Flanders. As his loaded last nam
will soon become a victim of the same war that drove Septimus to suicide; and
of events that make up Jacob's life are nothing but "shadows," in Woolf's opin
character disseminates into the unknown, along with the First World War's warr
instance of authorial intrusion (which her subsequent novels generally avoid), an o
fian narrator presents a theory that is worth quoting at length, as it exemplifie
Woolf makes between an ordinary moment and individual character:
It seems then that men and women are equally at fault. It seems that a profound, i
tial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either
men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are y
or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows wh
is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being
ows. And why, if this and much more is true, why are we yet surprised in the w
corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world
most real, the most solid, the best known to us ? why indeed? For the moment aft
know nothing about him.
Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.60
This passage illuminates many Woolfian themes: the difficulty of "knowing" ano
transience of meaningful moments, the shiftiness of perspective, and the desire t
acter. Woolf here also attempts to collapse the inner versus outer dichotomy tha
engagement with the 1930s poets; she does not want to say that individuals a
by subjectivity. Moreover, Woolf's young man foresees Mrs. Brown, the "old la
opposite," whom Woolf hopes the modern novelist, departing from more traditio
tions of character, will not ignore. The interior image ? of a person by a window,
nizable ? also makes its way into To the Lighthouse, whose first chapter (very
Ramsay's inscrutability) is entitled "The Window." Lily Briscoe's abstract repre
59. Woolf s language of course echoes Macbeth's ("Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / That s
hour upon the stage"), although the "petty pace" of Macbeth's "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-mo
to Beckett's notion of daily routine than to Woolf's.
60. Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room (Penguin, 1992), p. 60.
Ramsay attempts to solidify, to stabilize, an emotio

ated with death's contribution to a "procession of sh
identifies the moment when an ephemeral procession
solid." Essentially, "shadows" become "real" when they
man sitting in a chair, doing nothing so different fro
of the passage is markedly melancholy, the situation
ment from "shadow" to "real" enacts the aim of Woo
are rooted in ordinary moments, or in "moments of n
moments most define the "manner" and "conditions" of our lives ? a sentiment that characterizes
the turn away from the heightened in favor of the ordinary in Mrs. Dalloway. Cloaked in cotton
wool or preserved in a procession, ordinary moments embody the substance of Woolf's characters
and constitute the prosaic fabric of her fiction.
It is precisely the random moment which is comparatively independent of

the controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair; it
passes unaffected by them, as daily life. The more it is exploited, the more
the elementary things which our lives have in common come to light.
? Eric Auerbach, Mimesis61
While Clarissa's celebration of "life" depends upon her theory that "everyone was connected,"
class distinctions identify the everyday as an experience fashioned by a particular ideology. The
first page of Mrs. Dalloway reveals that Clarissa's everyday consists of servants, country houses,
and a familiarity with those in positions of imperial power. Class determines just what sort of
ordinary tasks mark one's life; certainly, women who work out of necessity have a much different
experience each day than women who take walks and throw parties.62 Characters in Woolf's fiction
like Lucy, or Mrs. McNab from To the Lighthouse, do the cleaning and cooking, while Clarissa
Dalloway and the Ramsays do not. To what extent, then, is Clarissa's day a privilege of the upper
class? How does the everyday in Woolf's novel account for characters who are not agents of their
own habits (who cannot decide to buy the flowers themselves) but whose habits are imposed upon
them?
While every individual's life necessarily entails certain routines of self-maintenance, the ordi?
nary also has an economic, cultural, and gendered specificity that defies simple totalizing, a point
61. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Trans. Willard Trask (Doubleday
Anchor Books, 1957), p. 488.
62. In The Waves (1931), Woolf wanted to represent the "life of anybody," but realized that she could replicate only the
upper-class voices with which she was familiar. In her drafts, she included the voices of the working-class, but omitted
them in the published text for fear of being condescending. See Virginia Woolf The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts,
transcribed and edited by J.W. Graham (University of Toronto Press, 1976). For a thorough and even-handed examina-
tion of Woolf's attitude towards working-class women, see Mary M. Childers' "Virginia Woolf on the Outside Looking
Down: Reflections on the Class of Women" in Modern Fiction Studies 38, No. 1 (Spring 1992), pp. 61-79. Childers writes:
"Woolf's writing ranges nervously from pointed, responsible commentary on middle-class women ? commentaries for
which she is especially famous ? to unwarranted generalizations about gender, to expressions of discomfort amounting to
distaste for women whose lives are so restricted by material circumstances that they do not inspire elegant prose" (p. 62).
that many theorists who valorize the everyday's revolutionary potential often
most certain chances of liberation are born in what is most familiar," writes
celebrating everyday life as a powerful agent in opposing a capitalist system.6
Mrs. Dalloway certainly critiques systems of power on the level of everyday even
everyday life as potentially defiant or rebellious assumes that individuals have
everyday, or that most people are dissatisfied with their own ordinary habits. Rez
for instance, is instinctively repulsed by Sir William Bradshaw's "proportion" a
and wants to protect Septimus from the doctor's authoritative orders. Before Sept
they wait for the doctors to arrive, she finishes sewing her hat and wraps up Septim
protecting the two of them from what the doctors might impose. But Rezia, of cour
ing in the face of Bradshaw's swashbuckling. Her everyday is overlooked, lacking
As Eric Auerbach argues at the end ofMimesis (1946), the everyday is constitu
that are in fact indiscernible to a dominant order. Literature's ability to unearth
concealed moments, according to Auerbach, illuminates something "elementary
among all individuals, though the everyday manifests itself differently for each per
not this revelation of shared humanity ("being part of it") has any real political po
believes it does) is a question that Woolf's novels after Mrs. Dalloway continue to
ining Mrs. Dalloway's commitment to the ordinary within the context of these la
the ways in which Woolf experimented with how to incorporate the facts of ma
among both the upper and lower classes.
Woolf's representation of everyday moments no doubt tends to favor the per
upper class. Even Woolf's depiction of servants ? often quite sympathetic ? is no
to how servants are related to the people for whom they work. Similarly, Woolf's
of Miss Kilman singles out Miss Kilman's bitterness towards the upper class as
ing feature of her identity. But Woolf's novels ? which always mark the disparit
upper and lower classes and especially between men and women ? seem to ack
than overlook the radical differences in how the everyday is experienced. "Often
remains of a woman's day," Woolf writes in "Women and Fiction" (the essay
basis for A Room of One's Own), understanding that the everyday may hold a sp
women, whose lives go unrecorded.65 Woolf's Mrs. Brown, of course, traveling
to Waterloo, is a vital example of a woman whose life journey has never const
epic. The everyday ? the experience of "non-being" ? seems particularly prevalen
underprivileged women. While Woolf's depictions of characters akin to Mrs.
Kilman or Ellie Henderson), in the end, may not satisfy a reader's need for c
Woolf's novelistic aim is to suggest that a representation of the everyday cannot
authentic experience.
Woolf's depiction of the everyday emerges as both diverse and ultimately colle
how famous an individual or how remarkable a day may be, there is an ordinarin
63. Lefebvre, De Certeau, and Situationists like Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord locate the every
critique of the capitalist system, but only by taking their own subjectivity for everyone else's. Moreo
response to the system becomes more important than the cause(s) of societal problems. See Vaneigem's
Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (The Situationist International Text Library, 1967) for a
and utopian vision of everyday life as the "truth" ? the only "real" source of revolution.
64. Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, <www.nothingness.org/SI/RV/revolution/index.htm
65. Virginia Woolf, "Women and Fiction" in Collected Essays, Vol. II (Hogarth Press, 1966), p. 14
one, and every day, that cannot be escaped. The

contribute to the "procession" of everyday life that
rience. Rita Felski explains: "Everyone, from the
yawns, defecates; no one escapes the reach ofthe quo
only describe the lives of ordinary people, but reco
ordinary. We are all ultimately anchored in the mu
Minister's motorcar, and the chiming of Big Ben, f
personal narrative, even as each person's day is indi
modernity's emphasis on the "random moment in t
found relationship between the individual and a lar
the ordinary, we see "nothing less than the wealth o
which we surrender ourselves without prejudice."68
of fascism, finding his example in Virginia Woolf's
resentation of the overlooked as an enduring sign o
The two women in the "Time Passes" section of
ance between the universality and individuality o
moments reappears with force. "Time Passes" inte
summer holiday and enacts the disruptions of Wor
have the effect of purposely subordinating the traum
family. The brackets also give "the sense of readin
explained in her diary, again recognizing (like the
rience is never just one thing.69 "Time Passes" ?
deflects the traumatic and centralizes what is ordin
death in childbirth, and Andrew's death in battle ar
of Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast cleaning the Ramsa
sweeping floors, and pausing in the study to sip tea
the power to normalize the passing of time during
in the housework of two lower-class women ? serv
war's wake ? the basic and essential routines of hu
struggle of Europe, but also ? on a literal level ? rem
described in the novel's first section.71
66. See Rita Felski's "The Invention of Everyday Life" in Doin

York University Press, 2000), p. 79.
67. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 488.
68. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 488.
69. Woolf, The Diary ofVirginia Woolf, Vol. III, p. 106.
70. "Time Passes" enacts radical cultural and artistic changes wr
in Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf Eliot, Yeats (St
literary forms attempted to include the "idiom of the crowd min
Passes" accord with Woolf's famous line in "Mr. Bennett and
character changed" (p. 2). Taking "Time Passes" and Joyce's "C
Lighthouse and Ulysses, a change of psychology, a change of liter
the emergence into the text of working-class women of margin
Mrs. Bast are at the forefront (rather than in the background) in
ness of characters and events in this section. While Tratner views
be understood as characters who serve to normalize and even dim
71. Lefebvre considers leisure a defining feature of la vie quotid
happen repeatedly, yearly, constitute a continuation as well as a criti
Servants, the only denizens of the Ramsay house in "Time Passes," also emph
looked or unremembered nature of ordinary experience: their routines usually go
and elsewhere, Woolf shifts point-of-view in order to focus on the forgotten, the
of the Ramsay house and the labor of Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast deflect away fro
events of war. Pain and loss are not addressed head on, but through the efforts of
tinuing. Woolf describes the sheer effort and physical exertion demanded in clea
house: "The books and things were mouldy, for, what with the war and help being
house had not been cleaned as she would have wished. It was beyond one person's
it straight now. She was too old. Her legs pained her."72 To "get it straight" requ
effort; Mrs. McNab's attempt to reestablish a sense of continuity and security in
generates a new relationship to the ordinary. Domestic objects and routines of
more powerful than they once were; objects seem to endure longer than hum
is found in ordinary things, in "a jug and basin ... the sharp edges and firm b
drawers" (p. 137). Objects retain beauty in their solidity, withstanding human qu
you fade? Will you perish?' ... they should answer: we remain" (p. 137). Like th
bananas that connect Septimus to an external world, the objects in "Time Passes"
elements of habitual, ordinary life, which a world war cannot stamp out.
Alex Zwerdling argues that the "discontinuous structure [of "Time Passes"] i
mined by [Woolf's] wish to highlight historical and ideological shifts."73 This
dominates critical thinking about "Time Passes" ? a view with which I largely
is undoubtedly true that the brackets in this section may indeed highlight, rather
shocking events described within, I am suggesting that "Time Passes" gives as mu
attention to what is described outside ofthe brackets: the mundane housework of t
ers may feel jarred by the brackets, but they remind us (through their grammati
what's inside is subordinate to what's outside.74 While violence makes its way int
it is not Woolf's primary focus; it is purposefully indirect. In fact, Woolf specific
her earlier references to World War I in this section. War violence, particularly
ness, is more explicit in the drafts for "Time Passes" and in a separate version pub
lier than the finished novel in Commerce, a Paris periodical.75 In the final publish
chooses to de-emphasize, even eliminate, overt references to war. War is acknowl
foremost as a cause of domestic neglect, so that it seems possible to recover, thr
ordinary life before the war. In this way "Time Passes" privileges the routines
the shock of war, even as cleaning takes on a dramatically new meaning in conjun
losses that shake the Ramsay family and the world outside of their house. The ord
writes: "Everyday life is made of recurrences: gestures of labour and leisure, mechanical movements b
erly mechanic, hours, days, weeks, months, years, linear and cyclical repetitions, natural and rational t
72. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Penguin, 1992), p. 147. All subsequent citations from To th
parenthetical within the text.
73. Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World, p. 193.
74. Allyson Booth, for instance, explains her shocked reaction to the brackets in "Time Passes":
positioning of [war] at an extraordinarily complicated remove from both narrator and reader, the fir
Lighthouse, Andrew's death made me gasp." See Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space Be
and the First World War (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 3. Booth uses "Time Passes" as a model for
spaces supplied many modernist writers with a vocabulary for articulating loss.
75. See James M. Haule's "7b the Lighthouse and the Great War: The Evidence of Virginia Woolf'
Passes'" in Virginia Woolf and War, ed. Mark Hussey (Syracuse University Press, 1991), pp. 164-79.
means by which the unprecedented magnitude of t

in comparison to the destroyed libraries of Europe,
cleaned, and repaired. The powerful, bracketed m
astations of war, transform the ordinary into some
becomes a vital assertion of life, continuing.
In Mrs. Dalloway, sl similar re-focusing occurs to
servants prepare for her party. When the first gue
She frets over the Prime Minister, while Mrs. W
emphasizes the work in the kitchen, while Clarissa's
Mrs. Parkinson, old Ellen Barnet, and Mr. Wilkin
ans, drawing attention to the indispensable facts of
sense of human connectedness that Clarissa later f
party are as important as the Prime Minister's a
frying-pans, chicken in aspic, ice-cream freezers, p
pudding basins which, however hard they washed
[Mrs. Walker], on the kitchen table, on chairs, whil
glared, and still supper had to be laid."76 The ordin
nor subordinated; it is an equal part of the novel's f
Passes," this accumulation of cooking objects calls
event of the novel.
In Woolf's last three novels, however, she becomes troubled by this method of including "acts
and things." If we look at what animates Woolf's continued stylistic experiments, it becomes clear
that representing ordinary experience by means of a materialist style emerges as a major uncer?
tainty in her later work. Woolf both spurns and embraces the inclusion of the prosaic, afraid that it
often complicates or covers up what is real about a character. In her long essay "Phases of Fiction,"
Woolf seems to be of two minds regarding the use of facts in fiction, classifying a collection of
writers as "the truth-tellers" ? including Defoe, Swift, Trollope, Borrow, WE. Norris, and Mau-
passant ? because they gratify our sense of "belief." Woolf admires the chief truth teller, Defoe,
because "emphasis is laid upon the very facts that most reassure us of stability in real life, upon
money, furniture, food, until we seem wedged among solid objects in a solid universe."78 Robinson
Crusoe's catalogs and timetables ? an early form of Joycean lists ? and the repetitious nature
of Defoe's narrative are qualities that Woolf ostensibly celebrates. And yet her own ambivalence
about facts softens her praise; "truth-tellers" are liable to fall into the same trap as the Edwardians:
"Truth-telling is liable to degenerate into perfunctory fact-recording, the repetition of the state?
ment that it was on Wednesday that the Vicar held his mother's meeting which was often attended
by Mrs. Brown and Miss Dobson in their pony carriage, a statement which, as the reader is quick to
perceive, has nothing of truth in it but the respectable outside."79 Woolf acknowledges that listing
things can never comprehensively represent experience; a writer must convey the "inside" as well
76. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, p. 181.

77. As Peter Schwenger has recently argued, Woolf's conception of things hinges on how they generate narrative, not
how they deny human subjects or stories. See "Still Life: A User's Manual" in Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2 (May 2002),
pp. 140-55. Schwenger is primarily concerned with the work of George Perec, though he also questions the common des-
ignation of Woolf's novels as "lyric," precisely because she is so fascinated with "things."
78. Virginia Woolf, "Phases of Fiction" in Granite and Rainbow (Harcourt Brace, 1958), p. 95.
79. Woolf, "Phases of Fiction," p. 103.
as the "outside"; again, "Mrs. Brown" reminds us that the inner life of women,
gets overlooked by novelistic facts. The use of facts in fiction, for Woolf, seem
and essentially insufficient.
Though a dramatic departure from her previous novels, The Waves (1931) m
going struggle with facts. Woolf represents the ordinary as entirely stripped f
world that facts establish, testing the limits of a non-material world. Woolf's nove
described as "poetic," The Waves privileges a lyrical "I": six voices speakin
present tense, interrupted by intervals that describe the sun's course over the ea
can the reader locate specific places, visualize appearances, or contextualize char
outside of sensory experience. Facts exist, but are blunted by sensation. When w
Woolf was involved in her discussions with John Lehmann about the distinctio
and prose. She wrote to him: "I wanted to eliminate all detail; all fact; and analy
and yet not be frigid and rhetorical; and not monotonous (which I am) and to ke
prose and yet strike one or two sparks, and not write poetical, but purebred prose,
ments of character; and yet that there should be many characters, and only one; an
a background behind."80 The "purebred prose" of The Waves radically differs f
prose styles; even more than in Woolf's other novels, in Barthes's terms, it dra
"writerly" rather than "readerly" nature. The voices in The Waves do not repli
people actually talk; rarely are the sensations of the body spoken aloud in real li
ences described in this work happen to us all: birth, childhood, adolescence,
and death. Six voices represent the voices of everyone, or anyone. The langua
prose, it seems, because it describes ordinary experiences, not unique events. Pr
ances are equalized among the others (except, perhaps, for Bernard's final solilo
past tense), so that the novel does not demarcate individual "moments of being,"
are of being, not identifiable by any specific time. The ordinary is universal or
of which actual facts seem to play little part.
By contrast, Woolf records exact dates, particular locations, technologica
family genealogy, and historical moments in The Years (1937) ? a fundament
The Waves. The Years systematically (and somewhat pedantically) traces life in t
from 1880 to what Woolf calls the "Present Day." In her earlier version of this
nates between non-fiction essays and chapters of fiction, essentially commenti
it develops, and emphasizing institutional and social facts that controlled wo
such as not being able to go outside alone, or being permitted only restricted ex
essay, Woolf explains that the work "is not a novel of vision, but a novel of fac
copious footnotes in Three Guineas, the facts included in these essays are mean
to the creative work of the text. Facts, for instance, might be the detailed finan
household (found in the second essay) that make clear why the Pargiter daughters
college or art school. But in the end, Woolf abandoned this form of fact giving,
80. Woolf, The Letters ofVirginia Woolf, Vol. IV, p. 381.

81. Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p
any of Woolf's other novels, The Years details the way English life looked, particularly domestic
reader can trace various solid objects ? the spotted walrus with a brush on its back or the "great cr
claws" ? as they reappear from one era to the next, emphasizing experience rooted in a material
technique most strikingly distinguishes Joyce's Ulysses, as a reader follows the journey of certain o
potato) through successive chapters.
sections ofthe novel together. She expressed disappoin

(although it was her only novel to reach the New Yor
Her last novel, Between the Acts (1941), maintain
specifically on a mid-June afternoon in 1939, just six
pivots on the domestic functions of English countr
tied to an historical English past.82 Facts, in this nov
of present and imminent war) as well as history te
favorite book). Woolf wants to connect what gets w
unselfconscious rituals and routines that grow out of
sometimes have the power to resist or subvert the his
ways. Miss La Trobe, the outsider who directs the p
her audience how their origins have shaped them, thu
through the pageant's implicit questioning of how th
hangs heavy with indications of war ? a future tow
be headed, and which the relationship between Isa
are only minor agents of change, assuming what M
of everyday life that resist social and economic syste
Giles, slow down or shift relations, but as De Certeau
organization of power: Miss La Trobe believes her p
the audience return home to dinner once the final sc
the Acts ? what Miss La Trobe's pageant enacts ? w
makes it quite difficult for the Swithins and Olivers to
tors acted. They cannot change their habits; history o
of history dramatically dictate the way the English b
Woolf's method of including facts and things ties
disparages, and to other realist writers (like Austen
ism is not in stark contrast to the realist novels that
depends on facts, foregrounding their intransigence
the elusiveness of the ordinary that facts embody. W
her later fiction continues to renovate earlier literary
sciously engages with the ideological reasons for de
conveying something real in the novel while simultan
sentation. In "Phases of Fiction," Woolf explains: "The
make us believe that it is giving a full and truthful r
to give that full record of life, not the climax and the
ings, which is the novelist's aim, he copies the order
things even if such fidelity entails chapters of descr
82. Most obviously, Miss La Trobe's country pageant dramatize

grims to the Victorian tea room ? and questions how for the audie
83. Resistance in De Certeau, as Ben Highmore has observed, is clo
analysis: resistance is what hinders and dissipates the energy flow
work for the employer: a secretary writing a love note on company
a piece of furniture for his living room, or a factory worker slowin
See Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (Routledge, 2
84. Woolf, "Phases of Fiction," p. 141.
describes the novels of the past as well as the novels of the future ? the novels
Woolf acknowledges that in some writers, a concern with factual truth telling
tion: "The surface is all; there is nothing beyond."85 The "fidelity" of facts, in W
go beyond the "surface," recording overlooked habits and routines, the minute
character. Woolf's battle with facts and truth fueled her own works of fiction,
help but see this struggle in so many other novelists whose realism she inherit
Woolf's representation of the ordinary emerges as the most defining feature
her ambivalence about describing facts and things draws attention to her shifting
views about how this representation should work. In his Rambler essay "On Fic
son argues that a good story emerges from a writer's "general converse and acc
the living world," a line of thinking that Woolf also embraces along with Joh
"common reader."86 A writer should not employ the "machinery" of fiction, ac
but attempt to replicate life. Of course, for Johnson, fiction has unambiguous
should always disgust").87 But Johnson assumes, like Woolf, that all lives ar
not just the lives of the privileged or ? as Leslie Stephen recorded in his dictio
famous British men. "I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life
and faithful narrative would not be useful," Johnson writes in his Rambler es
"for the incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and eva
as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition."88 Wo
precisely the material that escapes memory and upon which literary traditi
While her novels experiment stylistically with how to represent these "evanesc
possible to understand her entire oeuvre as committed to the representation of
It is worth calling attention to the fact that this dominating feature of Woo
biographical roots as well, a connection which has been only partially explored
wool of daily life" that Woolf describes in "A Sketch of the Past," fills up her
often described with great relish, often described with fatigue. Moreover, the
this writing (on average, Woolf wrote six letters a day and kept a diary for f
allowed critics to understand the texture of how Woolf lived, with minute an
tion about how her days were constituted. In a 1925 diary entry, Woolf realize
of work and marriage often adds up to an unseen and private happiness: "T
of our life, is I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common
can touch it. That is, if one enjoys a bus ride to Richmond, sitting on the green sm
letters out ofthe box, airing the marmots, combing Grizzle, making an ice, open
down after dinner, side by side, & saying Are you in your stall, brother?' ? we
this happiness? And every day is necessarily full of it."89 The ordinary is t
triumph, embedded in "common things" and therefore untouchable. Woolf's
satisfaction can come not only from the more obvious achievement s in life, bu
in the next day, or hour.
85. Woolf, Phases of Fiction," p. 98.

86. Samuel Johnson, "On Fiction," in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major
Norton & Company, 2001), p. 1243.
87. Johnson, "On Fiction," p. 1244.
88. Samuel Johnson, "Biography," in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major
Norton & Company, 2001), pp. 1247-1248.
89. Woolf, The Diary ofVirginia Woolf, Vol. III, p. 30.

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1. Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, Vol. 2 (Hogarth Press, 1966), p. 223.

enclosed in precise outlines."11 Woolf also has been

11. See Elaine Showalter's Introduction to the Penguin edition

from abstraction and impenetrability; even a discerning reader like Woolf is

capture a person's complexity.21 The form of the nov

she places particular importance on their role in revealing character ? in this in

27. Woolf, "A Sketch ofthe Past," p. 70.

The modern novel treats the everyday with a new

All the same, that one day should follow ano

If Mrs. Dalloway explores how people respond to

31. The desire to replicate ordinary experience, it should be ack

we might understand Woolf's focus on ordinary events as showing how her ch

Experience in this novel certainly can be heighten

38. Allusions to Odysseus's journey also draw attention to Wo

These moments are not themselves epiphanic, but "

of Woolf's Edwardian predecessors. For instance, a reader finds a similar collectio

48. Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," p. 105.

"lack[s]" ("something central which permeated"), she

52. Suzette Henke, "Virginia Woolf's Septimus Smith: An Analy

does not account for the essential role of the ordinary.5

Ramsay attempts to solidify, to stabilize, an emotio

It is precisely the random moment which is comparatively independent of

one, and every day, that cannot be escaped. The

66. See Rita Felski's "The Invention of Everyday Life" in Doin

means by which the unprecedented magnitude of t

76. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, p. 181.

80. Woolf, The Letters ofVirginia Woolf, Vol. IV, p. 381.

sections ofthe novel together. She expressed disappoin

82. Most obviously, Miss La Trobe's country pageant dramatize

85. Woolf, Phases of Fiction," p. 98.

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