Celebrating 100 Years of Clarissa: The Mrs Dalloway Symposium
I first encountered Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway at sub-honours, reading it from cover to cover on the train from King’s Cross to Leuchars. Its labyrinthine narrative structure, described by Woolf as the ‘caves’ which connect characters, lulled me into a trance. Somehow, by the time I arrived at my tutorial, every single scrap of information had left my head — characters, narrative, the lot. When I reread it for the fourth-year Virginia Woolf module, I was pleased at last to discover a circadian novel rich in linguistic beauty and critical thought.
In the spirit of Clarissa’s party, Conference Organisers Ellie Mitchell and Valery Goutorova put together the Mrs Dalloway Symposium to mark the novel’s centenary. I squandered £20 on a ticket and found myself on 31st October at St Salvator’s Quad, Lower and Upper College Hall. With flowers on the tables and the doors (happily) on their hinges, everything was in place for the 9:30 start.
The day was structured into panels in which papers would be given under different themes. Panel A discussed ‘Nature’s Temporalities’, with Francesco Di Perna, Rasheed Tazudeen and Mattea Gernentz in the line-up. Di Perna’s observations on ‘Botanical Time and Ephemeral Beauty’, in which he discussed the novel’s poetic growth and decay, both aesthetic and temporal, were particularly pleasing. In the context of the novel’s June morning, he noted how youth, beauty and regret create formulative conversations between past and present.
A pleasing harmony developed between the papers, particularly surrounding the image of flowers. Discussing ‘Floral Time and Flower Religion’, Tazudeen noted the role flowers have in landscaping the novel, such as the picking of a flower marking Sally’s kiss, with Di Perna’s phrase ‘cognitive bloom’ encapsulating this technique perfectly. Tazudeen highlighted morbidity in the spiritual presence of nature, seen in Septimus’ horrific image of ‘an old woman’s head in the middle of a fern’. This idea resonated with Gernentz, who highlighted the place of ‘Illumination and Time’ in Mrs Dalloway, noting how flowers taken from the outside and into the domestic are inescapably destined to die. I left the panel with a greater understanding of nature in the novel, with plenty of questions ready to sprout.
The symposium attracted guests from far and wide. Amongst the audience I spoke to first years, fourth years, postgrads, professors, both domestic and international. After a lovely lunch of salads and coconut blondies (and plenty of caffeine!), I was pleased to hear contributions from younger Woolf enthusiasts — all of whom I recognised from class. I took my seat for Panel D: Woolfians of the Future.
This panel consisted of third and fourth-year Undergraduates: Molly Nixon, Emily Owen, Ana Košat, Anisha Minocha and Charlotte Smith, chaired by Dr Annabel Williams. It was Košat and Smith who piqued my interest most, with their discussions of Cubism and subjective time. I enjoyed Košat’s observation of Woolf’s kaleidoscopic narrative vision, connecting relative objects in space to create an archive/hoard/curation for the reader. She discussed Woolf’s “masterful” manipulation of sentence, using hyphens and parenthesis to interrupt internal monologue, her “sentence structure bearing the weight of a myriad of impressions.”
Smith drew on Henri Bergson’s conceptualisation of linear and non-linear time, distinguishing the chronological and the subjective. Her observations on character’s engagement with clock time as well as the intrusion of time on thought were striking. In drawing attention to the last line of the novel in its combination of the past and present, she cemented time and perception as key concerns of the novel.
To conclude a day of panels was Professor Bryony Randall, Professor of Modernist Literature at the University of Glasgow, and her keynote address titled “A dog began to bark far away’: 31 Years of Reading Mrs Dalloway’. This was followed by a wine reception, perfect for networking or preparing for Halloween festivities, depending on which end of the Undergrad to Professor scale you found yourself on.
My day had been a wonderful introduction to the world of academia. The impressive variation of critical thought proved that, even a century later, there is still much to learn and celebrate about both the text and Woolf herself. While my dissertation next semester may not discuss Woolf’s writing, it will certainly be inspired by the dynamic and innovative ways of thinking I witnessed at the symposium.
Photo by Mali Delargy
