From Mrs. Dalloway to Clarissa: A Communitarian Study

Abstract

This essay on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) aims at examining the tension between operative and inoperative communities—following Nancy’s and Blanchot’s terminology—in Woolf’s novel. Through the character of Clar- issa Dalloway, Woolf sheds light on the dichotomy between “the commonly accepted model of community” (Miller 2005, 88), which Nancy calls “operative community” (1991) and which is based on social contracts and essentialist discourses, and an alternative, inoperative community, which is made up by singularities and which is based on the exposure to otherness. In Mrs. Dalloway, Valero Redondo argues, the operative community is represented through the superficial and hypocritical social conventions of the London society after World War I. Clarissa’s constricted social role as “Mrs. Dalloway,” as well as her immersion into middle age, show that her identity is often perceived in relation to her husband, her maternal and social duties, and her role within the upper-class society of London. This organic community is constructed around the foundational myths of marriage, gender roles and the social hierarchy. The London society represented in the novel, with its social gatherings and artificial rela- tionships, reinforces these myths. And yet, Valero Redondo claims, Woolf also shows glimpses of the inoperative community, particularly through the character of Septimus Smith, a war veteran suffering from shell shock. His death—and Clarissa’s epiphany after hearing about it—symbolizes “the negative community: the community of those who have no community” (Blanchot 1988, 24), a space where conventional social bonds are unproductive and which rejects an essentialist appropriation of death. Hence, despite Clarissa’s failed attempts to bring people together at her parties, it is only through her exposure to Septimus’s death that she finally achieves genuine communication.