It's my party, I'll jump out a window if I want to

Though Erwin R. Steinberg offered a compelling case for why we should read T.S. Eliot into the character of poor Septimus in his "Mrs. Dalloway and T.S. Eliot's Personal Wasteland," I am suspicious of such a linear, direct ratio between biography and art in this work. Rather, Woolf appears to borrow from her own experiences and those of her social circle to blend and complicate them in her highly fraught, ambivalent characters. For example, in Septimus one can observe not only Eliot's loss of Jean Verdanal, but Woolf's own personal struggles with a "scientific," positivist system that clinicizes and simplifies trauma and difference, as well as perhaps even her own frustrations with supporting her despairing father after her mother's death. Mrs. Dalloway herself also pre-empts singular readings: whether she is emulative of Woolf's own proclivity for London socializing or satiric of traditional domesticity and its "trifles." Indeed, while Clarissa once in a while operates as a mouthpiece for Woolf's preferences and opinions (she also shares Woolf's ambiguous sexuality), we could not imagine a starker contrast between Woolf's and Dalloway's lifestyles and statuses -- Clarissa is overwhelmingly non-intellectual and has chosen to fuse her identity (and obviously her name) with her husband's. Above all, however, Woolf rejects the label of a "perfect hostess" as a condemnation and stereotyping of upper class women's work at the turn of the century; such an activity is crucial for the "soft power" husbands need to strike political bargains and effect change (only at a party does there emerge hope for solving "shell-shock"). Furthermore, trivializing all traditional women's activity only serves the masculinist agenda Bonnie Kime Scott examines as a way of "reclaiming the culture from" so-called Victorian "decadence and feminization" (Intro., li).

Presenting a daughter that is completely dissimilar from Clarissa is perhaps a way for Woolf to analogize changing attitudes in the Modern era towards women and sexuality. Despite this possibility, Elizabeth acts primarily as an enigma, occupying some frankly odd spaces between masculinity and femininity, homosocial and heteronormative roles, and even East and West. Like Lily in To the Lighthouse, Elizabeth has "Chinese eyes in a pale face" and "an Oriental mystery." Her odd aloofness and removal from her family and their posh realm posits her as a differing mirror-image to Clarissa, in a similar fashion to India's frequently mentioned but ostensibly small role to the central action. To return to Steinberg's Waste Land connection, Elizabeth is also, as he briefly notes, associated with Eliot's "hyacinth girl" (14). Woolf depicts her as "a hyacinth which has had no sun" (120). Given that Apollo is the sun god, this passage could be indicative of Elizabeth's virginity and inexperience, but its back story also nods to her homoerotic friendship with Mrs. Kilman and her mother and tutor's possessive jealousy over her. If we are to understand the Hyacinth myth as relevant to Elizabeth's role, we can perceive her desire for agency in this triangle as well as for a more public, active destiny to be as foredoomed as a sunless flower.

Indeed, Kime Scott argues that Woolf uses trees to "offer" "parallel images" and "enable us to see her characters side by side" (lxi) -- I would extend this interesting observation to include flowers, particularly the hyacinths I've mentioned, along with roses. Associated with marriage, domesticity and the month of June (summertime and life), this rose motif is every bit as ambivalent as Mrs. Dalloway. Mr. Dalloway brings his wife "flowers -- roses, red and white roses" in lieu of bringing "himself to say he loved her; not in so many words" (115), after which "she understood" and thanks him. While this scenario may appeal to the sentimentalist in me, the critic in me can also understand it as problematic. Mr. Dalloway does not communicate love, but rather gives her a conventional cultural symbol of it, one that like Hugh's necklace is bought in capitalist exchange, underpins England's political dynamics (Clarissa receives her present instead of being invited to her husband's political luncheon), and resonates with the novel's fixation on appearance and artifice.