Lecture notes
Modern Fiction:'Mrs Dalloway' Lecture 2 Notes
- Module
- Modern Fiction
- Institution
- University Of Leeds (UoL)
Some notes from Doctor Robert Jones on 'Mrs Dalloway'.
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02/10/2024‘Mrs Dalloway’ Lecture 2
1. Men and Masculinity
2. Nationhood and Empire
3. Septimus Warren Smith
Encounters with Men
● Peter Walsh - 1st page of the novel. He’s remembered not quite fully, not quite kindly. ‘India’
gives a key note of his character, returning colonial administrator coming back to a country
that much changed, an insider becoming an outsider.
● Hugh Whitbread - tubby, corpulent figure - embodiment of comfort. The notion of ‘little job at
court’ - men of self-importance depicted as silly, scurrying individuals by Clarissa Dalloway.
‘She could remember scene after scene at Bourton - Peter furious; Hugh not of course, his match in
any way, but still not a positive imbecile as Peter made out...he was really unselfish, and as for
saying, as Peter did, that he had no heart, no brain, nothing but the manners and breeding of an
English gentleman, that was only her dear Peter as his worst…’
‘(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young.
Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to
chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on the waves of that divine vitality
which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that).’
● Passage moves from thinking about two men, who are both embodiments in their different
ways of Empire, to reflections on the park; including Admiralty Arch, the HQ of the Navy.
● Switches to more useful, feminine places and pleasures. E.g. ‘the park’ - dancing, riding.
● Empire is noted but then contrasted to pleasure and recollection, rather than the more urgent
present - signified by the quotient messages passing between the admiralty and the fleet.
Sense of being at the heart of London, the nation, the navy and consequently, the Empire.
This is contrasted to the Park and the dissipation of this energy with the pleasurable quiet
surroundings (St. James’ Park).
Nationhood:
‘The violent explosion which made Mrs Dalloway jump and Miss Pym go to the window...came from a
motor car which had drawn to the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mulberry's shop window.
Passers-by, who, of course, stopped and stared, had just time to see a face of the very greatest
importance against the dove grey upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind…..now mystery had
brushed them with her wing; they had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad
with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew whose face had been seen.
Was it the Prince of Wales's, the Queen's, the Prime Minister's? Whose face? Nobody knew.
Edgar J. Watkiss, with his roll of led piping round his arm, said audibly, humorously of course: 'The
Proime Minister's kyar'.
● Introduces us to figures of national importance
● Glimpse of whoever it was has its gravity - makes all the people suddenly collectable in a
singular pronoun ‘them’.
● Grand mystery contrasted with ‘Edgar J.Watkiss’ - class and comedy here that may or may
not disarticulate the nation.
, What makes a Nation?
T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (make English national culture)
'Taking now the point of identification, the reader must remind himself as the author has constantly to
do, of how much is here embraced by the term culture. It includes all the characteristic activities and
interests of as people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup Final the dog
races, a pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in
vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make their own
list. And then we have to face the strange idea that what is part of our culture is also a part of our
lived religion’.
★ ‘The Aeroplane’
● Introduces characters like ‘Edgar J.Watkiss’ and ‘Mrs Coates’, who have no real bearing on
the novel at all, but populate streets and flicker briefly into Mrs Dalloway’s consciousness,
only for them to recede again.
● ‘The aeroplane’ briefly unites those people on the streets, bringing West of London and the
South of London together. Does this moment of unity for ‘Mrs Coates’, Mrs Dalloway and ‘Mr
Bentley’ mean anything?
★ Big Ben
● Marks out national time - creation as a single moment of time. A moment of unity perhaps
pulling all the characters together.
‘Imagining the Nation’ - Benedict Anderson
Benedict Anderson: ‘Imagining the Nation’ - communities reflection on the origin and spread of
nationalism:
● ‘Kingship organises everything round its high centre. Its legitimacy derives from divinity, not
from populations, who, after all, are subjects, not citizens’.
● ‘It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their
fellow members, meet them, or even hear them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of
their communion’.
● ‘What has come to take the place of the mediaeval conception simultaneity-along-time is
[what Walter Benjamin termed] ‘homogenous empty time', in which simultaneity is, at it were,
traverse, cross-time, marked…by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and
calendar'.
● ‘..all these acts are performed at the same clocked, calendrical...by actors who may be
largely unaware of one another, shows the novelty of this imagined world…’
● ‘The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are
deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no precedent in earlier times’ -
Immediate aftermath of WW1. Anderson deliberately argues that there are empty symbols
which people can invest with a significance - the unknown soldier. Pulling together of an
imagination but also, it has resisted and dispersed and made it look slightly absurd in this
novel. A critique of the process.
● ‘Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms
stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written round the base of a
statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England…...They were weedy for the most
part, boys of sixteen, who might tomorrow, stand behind…..counters. Now they wore on them
unmixed with sensual pleasure or daily preoccupations the solemnity of the wreath which
they had fetched from Finsbury Pavement to the empty tomb. They had taken their vow. The
traffic respected it; vans were stopped.’ - Appropriation of the emblems of wreaths, regimental
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