On Splitting Yourself Into Two

Mrs. Dalloway: Virginia Woolf

Last winter, I tried my hand at a short story. I published it on a website, it had thousands of reads, a pretty high rating, so I wrote a few others and published them too. I think the top read one had something like 40,000 reads in about 2 months, but I don’t remember because I deleted and removed my account. Recently, I started writing something that I think will eventually become a novel. If I think about the amount I spend with the written word: writing here, plus reading the books I review here, plus a professional blog, then the novel, it seems like a lot to do on evenings after dinner or at 5:30 am, but here I am. As for writing here versus writing a novel: to use the analogy of the grey goose in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), writing this blog is warming up, stretching, and practicing for chasing the grey goose, the novel is the grey goose. I have no idea why I’m writing this novel, as I had no idea why I wrote the stories: both feel somewhat like a compulsion. When I read and write, as might be evident from how prolific and intense I am here, everything else sort of loses color in comparison, the rest of life feels false and the written word is real. Will anyone read the novel besides me? Who knows? Right now, I want to create it. If it dies on a drive without ever being read by anyone but me, I still want it to live.

One of the concepts I’m playing with in the novel is that I’ve split myself into two imprecise version, so two main characters (note 1). I’d written about 8,000 words before I picked up Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) as I’d read most of her other works (including Orlando more than once). I hadn’t gotten around to this one, and Woolf put two main characters in it. If I’m to judge from the introduction, this was a novel concept at the time, and Woolf wasn’t sure if she could pull it off. Of course, it’s Virginia Woolf, one of the greatest writers of the English language, she pulls it off. Woolf created two imprecise versions of herself here: Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus, one character light and “tinselly”, the other dark and haunted by the specter of combat and death from WWI. In the novel, these two never met. An unsurprising split for someone who suffered from various illnesses and bipolar disorder with severe depressive episodes, as if there’s a baseline version of the person, someone bright and charming which maybe they could have been if it wasn’t for the disorder, and version that allows the depressive episodes to swallow them whole. Sometimes, the person thinks that the version without depressive episodes is shallow, or “tinselly”. Mrs. Dalloway can be that, rushing about, getting so many things done over the single day that this novel takes place over as the loud chiming of Big Ben reminds the reader of the passage of time. Mrs. Dalloway seems the hypomanic version of bipolarity, and although she’s very popular and loved, other characters in the novel sometimes secretly believe Mrs. Dalloway to be snobby and sheltered, focused mostly on socializing with glamorous folks, clothes, flowers, and especially, gardens. Contrast that with with Septimus, who is haunted by images of death and the battlefield, to the point where he ignores the Italian wife who loves him and leaves all she’s ever known to move to England with him, capturing the self-centered of depression. Mrs. Dalloway plans a party while he’s threatening suicide. She cannot understand, nor does she attempt to understand, serious, introverted people, such as her daughter, Elisabeth who might be queer, who is definitely tired of her mother’s parties and would rather be in the country with her father, with her dog or history teacher. Mrs. Dalloway feels no need to understand, as class and marriage shelter and protect her: hers is marriage of two people fulfilling their roles. She’d rejected the man who passionately loved her and for whom she returned some feeling in favor of that better marriage, economic stability, and an easier life. Her innocence extends beyond understanding economic realities: despite having given birth to a child and some same sex inclinations, Woolf repeatedly tells the reader that Mrs. Dalloway knows little about sex. She believes the most wonderful moment of her life was when a slightly older girl kisses her. There are some other strong indications that Mrs. Dalloway might be more attracted to women than men (one such passage at the end of this review), but her relative innocence and era prevents her from exploring that further. There’s a lot about the adult version of her teenage love interest late in this book that’s similar to Woolf’s love, Vita Sackville-West, including the ties to gardening and the dark beauty, and the book was published the year Woolf and Sackville-West met.

I’ve been an avid reader since I was about 5 years old. I’ve also been a writer of non-fiction, one of those people who was excited when assigned essays for English or history classes, ones I’d spent hours writing. I’ve had blogs in the past, I find writing the most therapeutic process for overcoming difficult emotions. I didn’t understand how an author inserts themselves into fiction, even when it’s not autofiction until I started writing fiction. Writing fiction has given me insight into reading fiction, has made me a better reader. I didn’t look into interpretations of Mrs. Dalloway until after I’d read the book (too high of a risk of my views being colored by them, I wait ‘til after I’m done), and not until after I’d read the first two paragraphs of this review. When I did, I learned that Woolf planned for Clarissa Dalloway to commit suicide at near the end of the novel. Which would have been very out of character. Instead, Woolf added Septimus and crafted a different ending for Mrs. Dalloway. I’m glad she did, as that makes the novel and its characters more consistent, and the splitting of self works as device makes this novel stronger. The prose is beautiful, there’s depth and strength in nearly every line and a sort of flawless continuity to the overarching themes and meanings of the novel, prose that tightly circles around the themes. Although it’s a great book, I loved Orlando and The Waves (1931) for their playfulness and originality a bit more, because I loved spending time with the characters Woolf created in those. Yet, it’s so admirable that in creating Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf avoids the pitfall that so many writers fall into: falling too in love with her character, and losing objectivity.

Note 1: I hadn’t known about the two main character/splitting of self before I read Mrs. Dalloway, nor I am splitting myself into two with the same theme, though I’d also imagine that other writers have used the same tactic since. Both of my characters existed from my earliest imaginings. The basis of this story is that someone who read my short stories asked me to create a sapphic story for them, I created a short introduction of this novel for that person, and now I’m expanding it into a longer piece. My characters are romantically and sexually involved, because one of the themes is queerness. One’s younger and one’s older, there’s a broad thematic reason for their age gap…and there are more themes of gender expression and expectations, and some others not so strongly tied to the themes of this Substack For inspiration for this, I re-read Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos and Milan Kundara’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being - for stories of romantic relationships that’s not a just a romance.