‘It was over; thank Heaven—over’: Reading Mrs Dalloway in a Post-Pandemic World
.
Opening one morning in the middle of June 1923, Mrs Dalloway spans a single day in the lives of its characters. As Clarissa Dalloway crosses Westminster to buy flowers for her party that evening, she observes the everyday traffic of London life – young men and women out walking their dogs, shopkeepers preparing their window displays and wealthy old dowagers running their morning errands.
But beneath these quotidian scenes is a lingering trauma, as society struggles to move on from the horrors of the First World War. Despite five years having lapsed since the armistice, Clarissa’s relief that ‘it was over; thank Heaven—over’ feels disconcertingly premature, since we are informed that the war was not over for everyone: Mrs Foxcroft, for example, still grieving because ‘that nice boy was killed’, or Lady Bexborough, who had received the news via telegram that her favourite son was dead.
Five years on from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a seismic global health event with a considerable death toll, one may easily see the parallels.
Aside from the devastating loss of life, there is the discrepancy with which different social groups were affected. The introduction of conscription in the First World War and the subsequent deployment of millions of young men into the maw of modern, industrialised warfare resulted in the deaths of an unprecedented number of Britain’s working class – even while the upper classes were disproportionately impacted due to the expectation and requirement that junior officers lead their troops from the front. Likewise during the pandemic, there was dramatic variance in people’s experiences linked to social position, with key workers and certain socioeconomic and ethnic groups being disproportionately exposed to and affected by the virus.
How is it possible to move on from such widespread collective trauma, and forget the innumerable dead?
Both periods also necessitated an unparalleled intrusion of state control into people’s everyday lives. Major government interventions such as rationing during the First World War and successive lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 impinged upon personal freedoms and distorted the quotidian, while anyone who did not conform to the new measures imposed upon them – conscientious objectors and anti-vaxxers, to use two examples of varying justification – was widely condemned for acting against the perceived safety of the nation.
War is not the only collective trauma shadowing the characters’ lives in Mrs Dalloway. The deadly Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919 lurks behind the novel, providing a more obvious parallel to COVID-19 which literary critics began highlighting as early as April 2020. Although never explicitly referenced (for reasons that Elizabeth Outka delineates in her 2019 book Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature), this pandemic lies inevitably in the subtext of the novel as a recent catastrophe which claimed an estimated 40-50 million lives across Europe and beyond.
Following the most recent global pandemic, there was – for many – an understandable desire to move on and return to pre-pandemic life. But how is it possible to move on from such widespread collective trauma, and forget the innumerable dead?
This is the question at the heart of Mrs Dalloway. For in spite of Clarissa’s determination that ‘[t]he war was over’, violence and residual trauma bleed through into the text.
Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked veteran who experiences terrifying hallucinations and debilitating depression, is the most obvious manifestation of war trauma in the novel. Although he ‘served with great distinction’ and survived, Septimus is disturbed and haunted by visions of the dead, having witnessed his closest friend and commanding officer killed in battle.
Those affected by the long-term effects of COVID-19 are now being left behind as society attempts to move on from the pandemic.
Talking to himself aloud in Regent’s Park and to his dead friend, Evans, Septimus makes other characters feel instinctively apprehensive (‘he seemed awfully odd’) and is shunned by them as a result. His moralising about human cruelty – ‘how wicked people were’ – is either laughed at or ignored, while his debilitating symptoms of nervous breakdown are overlooked by his general practitioner, Dr Holmes, who gives the blithe assessment that there was ‘nothing whatever the matter’ with him. Even his wife, Rezia, feels embarrassed by and resentful of his strange behaviour, determining ‘he was not Septimus now’.
From all angles, it seems, Septimus is an uncomfortable reminder of the war that people would rather forget. Likewise, those affected by the long-term effects of COVID-19 (two million people in England and Scotland as of March 2024) are now being left behind as society attempts to move on from the pandemic. In a recent statement, UK charity Long Covid Support – which was set up in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic – accused the Government of failing to acknowledge the lived reality of those suffering from long COVID in their Pathways to Work Green Paper, and of underestimating the mass disabling impact of the condition.
Meanwhile, in a research report published earlier this year, the charity revealed that almost half (46%) of specialist long COVID services across the UK are either closing down or at risk of closure, with only 46 of the original 120 services guaranteed to remain open. They also reported concerns around quality of care, as 28% of adults and 26% of children with long COVID claimed never to have received a consultation (in-person or remote) with a physician, suggesting their condition had been overlooked.
The tragedy of such marginalisation unfolds through the pages of Mrs Dalloway. Emotionally numbed by his experience of war and unable to reassimilate into civilian life, Septimus struggles to identify the source of this new apathy within himself and wonders whether the problem is in fact universal.
It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
Indeed, meaning – and the search for meaning – is a recurring theme in the text. From the skywriter above Green Park, whose message pedestrians attempt to decode (‘it soared up and wrote one letter after another – but what word was it writing?’), to the cryptic statements Septimus makes Rezia write out on scraps of paper, hidden meanings are consistently embedded yet always elusive.
In the confusion of his psychosis, Septimus believes he has unlocked these hidden meanings and is the recipient of secret wisdoms about trees being alive and universal love – ‘profound truths which needed […] an immense effort to speak out, but the world was entirely changed by them forever’. These revelatory messages are intermingled with observations on the violence and sordidness of human nature, as Septimus attempts to organise the fragments of his war trauma and discover some meaning or coherence therein.
Despite the obviously delusional nature of Septimus’ condition, there is something beautiful and even insightful in his attempted discernment of the world around him:
The sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of the pattern; the white and blue, barred with black branches. Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds. A child cried. Rightly far away a horn sounded. All taken together meant the birth of a new religion—
Interrupted by his wife Rezia, Septimus’ study of these patterns in sight and sound is unfortunately incomplete – but this attempt to forge connections is characteristic of the impulse towards meaning making which is intrinsic to human nature.
These two characters, who have experienced the isolating horrors of war and a deadly pandemic, are the ones most instinctively able to appreciate the interconnected nature of things.
Unrelated to Septimus and relatively ignorant of the atrocities of war, society hostess Clarissa Dalloway faces a similar crisis of meaning in the novel. Her heart weakened by influenza, a health outcome also associated with long COVID, she feels there is ‘an emptiness about the heart of life’ and wonders ‘did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely […] or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?’
Like Septimus, Clarissa has moments of deep despair which are counterbalanced by a sense of the profound interconnectedness of things. Believing that she survived ‘on the ebb and flow’ of life, as part of the trees, the buildings and the people that she’d never met, she envisions herself as a disembodied mist lifted up on the branches of a tree. This echoes Septimus’ own interpretation of trees as symbolic of vitality and connection, which recurs throughout the novel.
The unexpected correspondence between these two characters is ratified at the end of Mrs Dalloway when Clarissa hears the news of Septimus’ suicide at her party. Removing herself to another room to reflect privately on the event, she reacts to the death with a kind of horrified, visceral fascination. Despite having no connection with Septimus, she is seemingly able to sympathise with his despair and connect with the tragedy of his death on a personal level. ‘Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace’, she muses, feeling that she was ‘somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself’.
The novel ends in the modernist vein – that is, without clear resolution of meaning – but with the suggestion that there is something to be gained through the connection of shared experience.
As Clarissa Dalloway rouses herself to return to the party, sobered by the impression of this young man’s death, her zest for life is reinvigorated. Death gives life meaning.
It would be crude to apply this lesson in basic terms to the COVID-19 pandemic, mindful that every public disaster is the sum of manifold personal tragedies. But in the connection between Septimus and Clarissa, Mrs Dalloway underlines both the extraordinary value of each individual human life and life itself as relational.
It is surely significant that these two characters, who have experienced the isolating horrors of war and a deadly pandemic, are the ones most instinctively able to appreciate the interconnected nature of things – and the importance of making patterns, of making meaning, for survival. This, more than anything, accounts for the persisting and pervasive legacy of Mrs Dalloway today, as we attempt to push on in an ever-uncertain world of political and economic crisis.
.
.
Dr Elizabeth Gourd is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and a specialist in Virginia Woolf and literary modernism.
To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.