Mrs. Dalloway: Only Authors Get to Understand People

Can you ever know another person? There is an optimistic dogma that even though we struggle to understand each other, it is possible, with effort, to bridge the gap.

It’s easy to see Virginia Woolf’s attentiveness to the limits of subjective knowledge in what is probably her most famous work, Mrs. Dalloway. It’s a novel that will challenge your romantic assumptions about your powers of insight.

The novel follows several characters in a day full of mostly small, mostly inconsequential events, but explores them with a thematic range so broad and so fundamental it’s better not to try to make a list. The novel depicts the psychological incongruities between subjects. The sparse happenings which comprise the novel’s plot essentially all spring from these. We can see this in the private thoughts of ex-lovers Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh, and it’s epitomized in the total mental isolation of the veteran Septimus Warren Smith. The fundamental incompatibility of the world of Septimus and the world of his physician Dr. Holmes leads to the former’s suicide. Despite how close two people might be—as in the case of Clarissa and Peter—and despite a moral and even basic professional commitment to understand the other person—as in Holmes’s and Septimus’s case—this mental friction is the central dynamic of every relationship, and is essentially the source of all conventional human conflict. This is a big claim. Is it true?

If it’s true that our biggest problem is our failure to understand each other, is this because of social forces, or is it something permanent, and essential to human nature? Septimus’s ailments are clearly explicable in terms of war trauma and personal tragedy. But Woolf provides us with more than a list of social forces. This is not just the reaction of a beleaguered post-war World War One British society. A common motif in the novel is the impulse to seek significance in signs. A crowd outside Buckingham Palace anxiously waits for a glimpse of a car carrying Royalty. Next, they’re diverted by an aeroplane skywriting an advertisement for toffee.

Woolf wrote at a time when the world was rapidly becoming more complex. Atomic physics was proving to be as complicated as macroscopic physics. Time was no longer a simple chronology according to Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein (that, at least, they could agree on). Religious convictions were questioned and abandoned. Even literature was becoming increasingly experimental. There was a new doctrine: we are isolated minds in an increasingly unknowable world.

Septimus’s inner monologue is the epitome of this idea. His thoughts are dramatically out of step with those around him, his subjective world is almost completely insular, and he finds significance everywhere. The extremity of his stream of consciousness actually exposes its similarity with those of the other characters. All minds are isolated, all knowledge is limited, all meaning is elusive.

Septimus repeatedly identifies Dr. Holmes, the utmost example of a mind incompatible with his own, as “human nature”. It’s human nature to endure differences with others. The impossibility of full mutual understanding is human nature. To be is to inhabit an isolated world within an isolated world. Human nature menaces everyone. This worldview is even reflected in the unconventional style of narration, a third-person voice observing the characters from a quasi-objective standpoint, but restricted to reporting only the characters' fragmented subjective impressions.

For some of us, the mopey ones, Woolf’s depiction of the world is unfortunately rather convincing. If the limits of understanding are really a fact of human nature, things look pretty hopeless. The natural reaction to this outlook is resistance. I think even Woolf resists.

While the narrator is always limited to reporting the subjective content of characters’ minds—the kind of narration Woolf apparently thinks is the most honest—this is the design of someone separate from the narrator—the author. The author speaks to the reader in every scene, not in plain English, but in irony and metaphor. The author gave Dr. Holmes a detective’s name despite his failure to solve his patient’s headcase. The author doesn’t just have opinions, but a genuine conviction that they express in every facet of the narration. In noticing the deep problems with the care Dr. Holmes provides, the author tacitly suggests the possibility of a better future, where relationships aren’t so destructive, where people don’t make the same mistakes her characters did.