A Pocket Knife and a Plate of Bananas: Virginia Woolf's Cure for Common Loneliness

            While talking to Peter Walsh at Clarissa Dalloway’s party, Sally Seton takes a minute to reflect on the party’s guests who represent a cross-section London’s social elite. While she is surrounded by many prominent figures, Sally realizes that despite their positions in government or various London establishments, they are all total strangers. Sally asks herself, “For what can one know even of the people one lives with everyday?”[1]This theme of never fully knowing another person is a prevalent theme throughout Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). While other works examined in this project focus on the feeling of isolation and alienation generated by city itself, Woolf feels that other people paradoxically make one feel isolated and lonely. Furthermore, she raises the debate that we are incapable of even knowing ourselves and, as Sally Seton believes, that we are prisoners serving time in a prison with invisible walls.

            Before Woolf begins to portray the alienation between friends and family, she alludes to some familiar themes discussed earlier in this project. Specifically, Big Ben’s thunderous chime snaps characters out of daydreams and forces them to get back on task. When Mrs. Dalloway introduces her daughter, Elizabeth, to Peter Walsh, London’s taskmaster interrupts their conversation. “The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour,” explains the narrator, “stuck out between them with extraordinary vigor, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb bells this way and that”[2]. Throughout the novel, Big Ben serves as the city’s puppet master with his auditory cue manipulating the characters’ actions and ultimately maintains their complicit cooperation in the city’s grand design.

            As the majority of Woolf’s characters entangle themselves into British high society, the reader can not help but detect the loneliness and depression of her characters while they navigate the elite social circles. After Peter Walsh sits down on a bench in Regent’s Park, the narrator makes the nihilist declaration, “Nothing exists outside of us but our state of mind”[3]. Walsh then begins a thought process that yields a concept he coins as “the solitary traveler”, or one who journeys through world knowing only strangers and never socially connecting with another human being. Strangely, Woolf feels being lonely is almost a noble character trait. While Mrs. Dalloway stares at her husband, she thinks to herself, “And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect”[4]. Remarkably, Woolf continues to push her theme of dominating loneliness further by claiming that we are apparitions while our true self needs us to die if it is to come into existence.

            Similar to those of Joyce, Woolf’s characters use collections and personal interior space to abate their misery. The book’s most tragic figure, Septimus Smith, exhibits such behavior. Smith has a severe form of PTSD following seeing his friend, only known as Evans, die on the Italian front of World War I. His hallucinations transform an idyllic scene in Regent’s Park into a hellish landscape of flames, tortured screams, and Evans’ dead body. Septimus is clearly isolated from everything to include reality itself. His wife is forced to commit him to a psychiatric hospital run by a famous psychiatrist named Sir William Bradshaw.

            Before going to the hospital, Septimus awakes from a deep sleep in his apartment and notices his wife making a hat for a friend’s daughter. Suddenly, Septimus began to realize his surroundings are actually real and not some nightmare. Woolf describes his awakening:

“First he looked at the fashion papers on the lower shelf, then, gradually at the gramophone with the green trumpet. Nothing could be more exact. Therefore, gathering courage, he looked at the side board; 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”[5].

Instantly, Septimus prepares for the return of his hallucinations. However, after a brief pause, he notices he is still safe in his apartment with his wife. The narrator states, “He was alone with the sideboard and the bananas...As for the visions, the faces, the voices of the dead, where are they?”[6]. One can hardly consider the commonplace items in Septimus’ apartment as a unique collection; however, despite their banal nature, the Smiths placed them in their apartment in accordance with their free will. Sadly, Septimus commits suicide when his physician, Dr. Holmes, arrives to take him to the psychiatric hospital. Before that tragic event, Septimus enjoyed a brief reprieve from his illness because of the effect created by the objects in his apartment.

            Although he does not suffer to the same extent as Septimus, Mrs. Dalloway’s rejected suitor Peter Walsh also relies on his personal belongings to establish a sense of familiarity amidst a sterile sense of social solitude. After his failed marriage proposal to Clarissa Dalloway, Walsh escaped the embarrassing, failed proposal by traveling to India to become a planter. Sadly, he fails at this endeavor as well and returns to England in hopes of reuniting with old friends. However, Mrs. Dalloway, as does the rest of London’s social elite, wants nothing to do with him. When he attends the Dalloway’s party, he instantly knows it is a mistake. “He should have stayed at home and read his book,” thinks Walsh, “Should have gone to a music hall; he should have stayed at home, for he knew no one”[7]. He awkwardly rides out the social tension until he is afforded to opportunity to quietly leave the part later that night.

Unlike Septimus, Walsh does not have a place he calls “home” because of his recent return from India. Instead, he lives in a hotel. While sitting in the hotel’s lobby, Walsh reflects, “Hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if you think about it, had settled on other people’s noses”[8]. Like Joyce’s mariner, Walsh’s transports his valuables in his pocket as a result of his transient nature. Accordingly, his two most valued possessions are a pocketknife, which he opens and closes whenever he is nervous, and photograph of Daisy- a women twenty years his junior who is going to leave her husband and marry Walsh. Walsh relies on Daisy’s photograph to suppress his undying love for Clarissa. While looking photo of the attractive Daisy sitting on a veranda, Walsh thinks to himself, “Of course, of course, she would give him everything!...Everything he wanted!...Running to meet him whoever might be looking”[9]. One can also say that Walsh relies on Daisy’s picture to help him forget the fact that he has failed at everything he attempted to accomplish in life.

Woolf introduces the paradoxical notion that other people are capable of making us feel just as lonely as if we were stranded on a deserted island. She goes on to claim that since we are incapable of understanding ourselves, it is impossible for us to truly understand another person. In other words, those whom we consider family and friends are really just strangers who we pretend to understand. Of note, the reader notices Woolf’s characters seeking refuge in personal space in the same manner of Joyce’s cast. Clearly, this bond identifies a prevalent human reaction.

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[1] Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1981), 192.

[2] Ibid., 48.

[3] Ibid., 57.

[4] Ibid., 120.

[5] Ibid., 142.

[6] Ibid., 145.

[7] Ibid., 167.

[8] Ibid., 155.

[9]Ibid., 157.