"I" on the Run: Crisis of Identity in Mrs.

Dalloway
Ban Wang

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 38, Number 1, Spring 1992, pp. 177-191
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.0.0857

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"I" ON THE RUN: CRISIS OF IDENTITY IN
MRS. DALLOWAY1

irfr
Ban Wang

The issue of private consciousness has enjoyed considerable critical at-

tention when critics discuss the representation of thought in Virginia
Woolfs novels in terms of stream-of-consciousness narrative.2 Such at-
tention apparently has no lack of justifications in Mrs. Dalloway. Each
character in the novel is caught up in his or her own inner consciousness,
has an idiosyncratic way of perceiving and of thinking, and tends to create
the "room" of her own. The novel seems to be a depiction of various
disparate, monadic consciousnesses, isolated from each other and
impossible to be unified into a spiritual community.
The preoccupation with private consciousness nevertheless presupposes
an outmoded notion of the subject that is believed to be autonomous,
self-contained, and fully conscious of itself and which is assumed to be
the source of meaning and thought, independent of social structure,
discourse, and systems of signification—a notion of the subject which has
been stripped of its validity by contemporary critical discourse. This idea
of the subject, deeply mortgaged to Western philosophical tradition, under-
pins such related critical terms as character, personality, individuality,
self, and identity.

1A small portion of this essay was presented on 20 September 1991 at the Sixteenth
Annual Colloquium on Literature and Film held at West Virginia University. I wish to
thank Professor Kathleen Komar of UCLA for her helpful comments.
2For example, J. Hillis Miller has noted that critics have paid much attention to the
"minutiae of the mind." For him Woolf's novel can be considered as a transition to "a
new self-consciousness." See Miller 176, and James Naremore 240-248.

Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 38, Number 1, Spring 1992. Copyright © by Purdue Research Founda-
tion, All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
177
 Private consciousness would not appear to be so private and intimate,
however, as soon as one examines the ways in which consciousness, or
various forms of subjectivity of characters in this novel are constructed
in language, discourse, systems of signification, and, in short, the sym-
bolic order. The symbolic order here is taken in the Lacanian sense. It
consists of images, symbols, icons, representations, myths, and discourse
that envelope the conscious as well as unconscious life of the individual,
and on which the individual depends for the structuration of the psyche
and constitution of her subjectivity (Lacan 65-68). They are also the means
whereby she recognizes and establishes her social identity as a member
of a social group. It is obvious that this concept of the symbolic in some
ways overlaps the concept of ideology advanced by Louis Althusser. The
major difference may be that Althusser's definition of ideology as "the
representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real
conditions of existence" (162) is posited in relation to a "real" that is
different from the Lacanian real.3 It is theoretically necessary, it seems
to me, to confront the two concepts with regard to the problem of the
subject. Althusser's concept of the imaginary representation strongly im-
plies a dimension of language and social structure, that is, the dimension
of the symbolic, whereas Lacan's symbolic realm, in which the mature
subject constitutes his subjectivity, cannot be viewed independently of the
imaginary identification. Such a confrontation allows us to see the sub-
ject not as some entity foreclosed in the structure of language and con-
stituted once and for all, but as a dynamic and unstable process involv-
ing both the imaginary and the symbolic, the unconscious and conscious,
thus putting the subject "in process/on trial" (Kristeva, Revolution 22).
Special attention will be paid in this essay to that part of the symbolic
order that is closely related to the state. I will proceed on the assumption
of a network of symbols and representations that functions to sustain the
political powers that be, and to define the identity of individuals and pro-
duce them as subjects of the state. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz's
formulation of what he calls the "symbolics of power" may help define
this state-oriented symbolic network:

3In the Lacanian scheme the "real" designates the phenomenal world and the biological
status of the subject prior to entry into the realm of the symbolic. Althusser's notion of
the "real" refers to the complex of socioeconomic facts, the relations of production and
class relations. But the Lacanian "symbolic" bears an affinity with the Althusserian "ideology"
in that it stresses the role of social systems of representation, especially language, in con-
stituting the individual as the subject, with perhaps a difference in modality. In Lacan the
subject, before entry into the symbolic, has to go through an imaginary register marked
by the "mirror stage," where the subject identifies with the ideal image of itself, and this
stage is assumed to be spontaneous and somehow less culturally initiated. Althusser seems
to overlap the imaginary identification and the symbolic in his discussion of "interpella-
tion, which, according to Kaja Silverman, indicates the conjunction of the imaginary and
symbolic transactions resulting in the subject's insertion into social discourse. For a more
detailed account of the similarity and difference between the two theorists, see Silverman
215-222 and Fredric Jameson.
178 MODERN FICTION STUDIES
At the political center of any complexly organized society . . . there is both a
governing elite and a set of symbolic forms expressing the fact that it is in truth
governing. No matter how democratically the members of the elite are chosen
(usually not very) or how deeply divided among themselves they may be . . .
they justify their existence and order their actions in terms of a collection of stories,
ceremonies, insignia, formalities and appurtenances that they have either inherited,
or in more revolutionary situations, invented. It is these—crowns and corona-
tions, limousines and conferences—that mark the center as center and give what
goes on there its aura of being not merely important but in some odd fashion
connected with the way the world is built. (124)
This symbolics of power is already Woolfs acute perception in Three
Guineas. In this work Woolf expresses her astonishment, first at the ar-
chitectural structures that house the state machine and ideological state
apparatuses—St. Paul, the Law Courts, the Bank of England, the House
of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey; then at the impressive splendor
of the public attire and decorations of the men who move in these august
spheres—plumes and gowns, button and stripes, badges, and medals. This
ostentatious attire imposes its authority in the even more impressive
ceremonies, processions, coronations, speeches, homages, and rituals.
Woolf sees this official pageantry as a symbolic network of power that
functions to "constrict, to stereotype and destroy" (TG 207). It "hyp-
notized the human mind" (208) and encourages "a disposition towards
war" (40), even toward Fascism (207). Here Woolf raises a question that
Foucault addresses in his preface to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus:
how can one keep from being submitted to the powers that be, from desir-
ing one's own domination and becoming a fascist in one's heart (viii)?
Mrs. Dalloway provides a good occasion to investigate the connections
between the symbolic network of power, the constitution of the subject,
and the psychic resistance. The novel can be read not so much as a
systematic penetration into individual consciousness as an exploration of
the ways in which the individual tries or fails to establish his or her iden-
tity as the subject of the state. Thus it is the concern of this essay to
examine the subtle and complex ways in which the symbolic network of
the state functions, at the most intimate level of private consciousness,
to forge the subject in the service of ideology and the state in Mrs. Dalloway.
At the same time I will demonstrate that however insidious and powerful
may be the sway that the symbolic order holds over the minds of the
individuals, it is shown to be losing its grip on the ever elusive psychic
subterranean and running up against psychic resistance in the form of
schizophrenia.
In one of the most memorable and frequently discussed episodes in
Mrs. Dalloway, a motorcar, which presumably carries British dignitaries,
travels slowly down the streets, attracting a large crowd of people. Nobody
knows whether it is the Queen, the Prince, or the Prime Minister who
is sitting inside the car, but there is no doubt among the curious crowds

WANG 179
that "greatness was seated within; greatness was passing" (MD 23). The
car and the figure seated in it represent the "enduring symbol of the
state" (23). The traveling car exerts a tremendous emotional impact on
the people in the streets, and for a moment seems to unite them—despite
their difference in social class, belief, sex, and occupation—in a spiritual
communion. People look at each other, and look at the nobility, and are
keenly aware that their looks are returned: royalty is "looking at them"
(27). This mutual recognition in an exchange of looks, as in a mirror
reflection, establishes a common identity and communion. Through shifts
from one consciousness to another, we have some glimpses of what is
going on in the minds of the onlookers. They think of the dead, of the
Flag, of Empire. To these symbols or signifiers of the state are added
some others that carry each separate thought process in a homogeneous
stream of consciousness: the ancestors, the flowing corn, the manor houses
of England, the House of Windsor, and Buckingham Palace. Despite the
public and communal nature of these images and symbols, this moment
is also an intensely personal and private one, in which each individual
recognizes himself or herself as the subject of the state and finds his or
her personal identity. For Moll Pratt the person inside the car is the
Prince of Wales for certain, and she wishes to toss a bunch of roses to
express "an old Irishwoman's loyalty" (MD 27). For Clarissa the passing
car must carry the Queen, and the car triggers off a flow of consciousness
that is composed of blazing candelabras, flittering stars, gentlemen of
England, and the Queen's party in Buckingham Palace. She immediately
identifies with the Queen: "for a second she wore a look of extreme
dignity" (23-24): "Clarissa, too, gave a party" (25).
When private consciousness is seen as constructed in this way, the
identity of self becomes an issue that has lost its underlying assumption
of an original, innate essence. It is the social structure, ideology, language,
in short, the symbolic order that constitutes the self or rather the subjec-
tivity of these characters. If the subject is constructed in language, as
Lacan tells us, and subjectivity is no more than a sense of self that is
actually the effect of being interpellated into an ideology, it is particularly
true of such characters as Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread, and Sir William
Bradshaw. Virginia Woolf does not endow these characters with the com-
plex subjectivity that Septimus, Peter Walsh, and Clarissa seem to manifest
and experience. These characters are living examples of the typical and
proper subjects of the state that are produced by the ideological state ap-
paratus. The ideological state apparatus, which I take to mean the same
as the symbolic order in the more empirical form of institution,
functions—through language, social and educational institutions, church,
and the media—to reproduce the appropriate subjects for the perpetua-
tion of the political order of the state. Hugh Whitbread, for instance,
is "a perfect specimen of the public school type" (110). As Sally Seton

180 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

says, "No country but England could have produced him" (110). He
cuts a magnificent figure of the perfect English gentleman, who would
never lunch with Lady Bruton "without bringing her in his outstretched
hand a bunch of carnations" (156). One has to remember that behavioral
and gestural patterns are part of the symbolic, particularly in upper-class
British society. The French linguist Emile Benveniste writes, "It is in
and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject ..." (244).
This well-known proposition about the linguistically constituted subject
finds a good illustration in Hugh Whitbread. Hugh Whitbread's subjec-
tivity is especially manifest in a form of linguistic practice, a linguistic
competence that enables him to be a discursive subject worthy of the of-
ficial newspaper, the Times. He is able to reduce Lady Bruton's "tangles
to sense," to grammar "such as the editor of the Times . . . must respect"
(166), and to draft "sentiments in alphabetical order of the highest nobili-
ty" (167). In this connection Richard Dalloway is also constituted as a
"linguistic subject" of the discourse of the media. Peter Walsh reflects
that with a mind like hers, Clarissa has to quote Richard, "as if one
couldn't know to a tittle what Richard thought by reading the Morning
Post of a morning" (116). Lady Bruton's identity is constructed in the
discourse of moribund imperialism and colonialism. She is able to gain
a sense of her identity simply by looking at pictures of her family, a fami-
ly "of military men, administrators, admirals" (167) and the conquerors
of North America. Emigration, a cause that finds champion and incarna-
tion in Lady Bruton, is the continuation of British colonialism. Even in
her semiconscious dozing after she has her letter written by Hugh Whit-
bread, she grabs "some imaginary baton such as her grandfathers might
have held" (169) in commanding battalions marching to Canada.
Far from exploring the innermost recess of the mind of a character
and transcribing the incessant shower of atoms as they fall on consciousness
and perception, Virginia Woolf exposes the factitious nature of discourse
and the symbolic order. She flaunts the "constructed" nature of language,
symbols as well as consciousness. With the stream of consciousness tech-
nique, she shows the ways in which the consciousness of self shifts from
one discursive position to another, from one mental image to another,
and demonstrates, much in a "deconstructive" fashion, the ways in which
language operates in a ceaseless play of differences that cannot be pinned
down to an authoritative unit of meaning or a transcendental signified.
By exploring the crisis of language and meaning, Woolf shows the prob-
lematic nature of consciousness and identity. This is dramatically enacted
in the motorcar scene followed by the skywriting airplane.
While the sight of the motorcar inspires, in the "British breasts" of
the people in the street, a general feeling of loyalty, a sense of oneness
based on nationalism and tradition, an airplane suddenly bursts into the
sky and flies up and down trailing letters with its smoke in the wide,
open space:

WANG 181
Dropping dead down the aeroplane soared straight up, curved in a loop, raced,
sank, rose, and whatever it did, wherever it went, out fluttered behind it a thick
ruffled bar of white smoke which curled and wreathed upon the sky in letters.
But what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? Only for a moment did they
lie still; then they moved and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky, and
the aeroplane shot further away and again, in a fresh space of sky, began writing
a K, an E, a Y perhaps? (29)
The crowd immediately starts trying to figure out what the smoky letters
mean. This scene, close at the heel of the motor-car scene, is not simply
a case of ironic deflation of solemnity to triviality, of a hot bath of sen-
timents followed by a cold shower of irony (quoted in Booth 329). The
smoky letters only look like letters. They are pure, opaque signs, whose
meaning is not readily available. They can be seen as language in its
"naked" state, in its intractable materiality. They are emblematic figures
waiting to be "figured out." Each person in the crowd tries to recognize
the shape of the letters and connect them up into a word as she or he
sees fit. Mrs. Coates says "Glaxo," Mrs. Bletchley utters "Kreemo," and
Mr. Bowley murmurs "toffee." The dancing and shifting letters in the
sky become a theater where a free play of signifiers is set in motion. These
signs are open to whatever possible meaning the onlookers might settle
on and elusive to any positive meaning. In the arbitrary and random
ways in which individuals try to read meaning into them, there is no
longer any natural bond between the signifier and the signified, any
necessary and transparent relation between language and meaning: the
signifier takes flight from the signified and becomes free-floating.
In a less obvious and exaggerated way, this scene is already prefigured
by the motorcar scene, of which the skywriting airplane is only its more
abstract and geometrical version. Although the very sight of the motorcar
and Buckingham Palace carry with them the meanings of authority, of
power, of nation and tradition—a looking glass in which people immediate-
ly and automatically recognize themselves, these authoritative meanings
are subject to qualification and démystification through multiple con-
sciousness. Clarissa pays homage to the "enduring symbol" of the state,
but at the back of her mind, which is obsessed with human mortality, the
solemn symbol also seems transient, and the mysterious figure in the car
will be known to antiquaries when all the people in the street on that
fine morning become bones mixed with dust. Emily Coates, as she ranges
over the Palace windows, thinks only of "innumerable housemaids," "in-
numerable bedrooms" (MD 28). There is also an erotic dimension in the
response to the symbol of the state: it thrills the nerves in the onlookers'
thighs and echoes in the ears of the girls buying white "underlinen thread-
ed with pure white ribbon for their weddings" (26). By opening up the
symbol of the state to such heterogeneous play of meanings and mental
associations, Woolf reveals through analogy the arbitrary relation of the

182 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

state symbol to its authoritative meaning. She shows it to be nothing but
an empty sign. Like the smoky traces in the sky that scrawl a few vague
lines and then vanish, the royal symbol has no necessary, intrinsic, or
transparent relation with reality.
It would be a mistake, however, to claim that each character's reading
of the smoky letters stems from purely random and individual whims.
The way they connect up the letters into words still obeys the socio-
linguistic rules of pronunciation and spelling. In other words, the disparate
consciousness is still linguistically determined in the symbolic language.
When one deviates from the convention of the symbolic language, one
shows signs of "madness" or psychosis. To some extent this has been
assumed to be the case with Septimus Smith. The opaque letters send
a profound signal to him about the beauty of the sky and in the mere
voices that utter the letters he makes a discovery that the human voice
can "quicken trees into life!" (32). And his discovery means "the birth
of a new religion" (33).
Septimus' experience of fusion with trees, dogs, flowers, and other
objects, as Naremore has noted, is the experience of a schizophrenic (247).
R. D. Laing notes that a schizophrenic feels a tremendous oneness with
the world. This experience involves a loss of identity. In merging with
the external world, a schizophrenic knows no boundaries, no limits, and
no distinctions. Such oneness is, according to Laing, associated with terror
and anxiety: being engulfed in nature is what the schizophrenic both dreads
and longs for (The Divided Self 97). This is only partially true of Septimus.
Throughout Mrs. Dalloway the moments in which Septimus finds himself
merging into nature are also the moments of ecstasy, the moments of tremen-
dous joy and epiphany. They are uncommunicable moments of isolation
and loneliness, it is true, but an isolation "full of sublimity and freedom"
(MD 140). On the other hand the moments of his misery and depression
are the ones when he has to confront the social convention and system:
at Sir William's clinic; at the approach of "human nature" embodied
by the red-nosed Dr. Holmes, and at the hand of Miss Pole, who cor-
rects his poems in red ink because he ignores "the subject." Unlike Hugh
Whitbread, Septimus is incapable of becoming a correct grammatical sub-
ject that is in fact the discursive subject required by social discourse.
Schizophrenia, as Laing's writings have shown, cannot be considered
as a "condition" or illness, whether mental or physical. The term is a
label that some psychiatrists pin on people under certain social cir-
cumstances. The very labeling itself, as Laing suggests, is indeed a political
event, in which "legally sanctioned, medically empowered, and morally
obliged" social groups try to determine the fate of other people (The Politics
of Experience 100). The term has behind it the discourse and practice of
social exclusion, which functions on behalf of the symbolic. Viewed in
this light, schizophrenia can be seen as potentially liberating (The Politics

WANG 183
of Experience 110). It can be viewed positively as a joyous and intense form
of subjectivity that comes about through escaping or breaking through
the delimiting categories of the symbolic order. Such is the line of thinking
and investigation that has resulted in persuasive studies by Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and others. Deleuze
and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a compelling study
of schizophrenia in relation to the symbolic system of capitalism and pro-
vides us with an effective method of schizoanalysis that pays due atten-
tion to the flow of the unconscious desire with regard to the symbolic.
Of particular pertinence to this essay is their discussion of the ways in
which the unconscious forces disrupt the slots of "identity" that the sym-
bolic order imposes on the individual so as to produce him or her as
a subject.
Deleuze and Guattari take issue with the proposition, or a misconcep-
tion of Lacan's theory, that the unconscious is already structured like
language. The subject thus conceived is an Oedipalized subject, already
foreclosed in the symbolic. They define the unconscious as a flow of un-
bound libido, much in the same way Kristeva defines "drives" (Revolu-
tion in Poetic Language 25). They compare the unconscious to "a body
without organs" (9). This means that the body has not yet been "ter-
ritorialized" into its parts, has not been "organized" by the sign-system;
it has not yet been subject to a single unit within a state-system, accept-
ing its castration. The unconscious is thus a flux, a flow, a life force that,
although implicated in systems of representation as a semiotic process,
tends to disrupt and escape them. With such an unbounded flow, what
has been territorialized into Nation, Family, the triangle Mommy-Daddy-
Me, Party, Church, and Tradition can be deterritorialized (9-16). The
body can break through the organizing distinctions that cut it into organs,
into mouth, anus, penis, and so on (for example, for Septimus, hearing
music is to "see" the color of music).
There seem to be two tendencies in the flow of the unconscious as
exemplified by the schizophrenic experience of Septimus. On the one hand
the unconscious tends toward a total union with nature, with other bodies
(for example, with Evans), with nonhuman objects, and with death. Yet,
seen from the perspective of the symbolic, it tends toward multiplicity,
proliferation of sensations and thought, partial objects, fragmentation of
normal experience, and memory. This disruptive tendency, which
fragments the logical construction of language and normal experience,
threatens to break down the boundaries of the established order of what
Sir William Bradshaw calls "Proportion": as soon as Septimus enters
his clinic, he can see "it is a case of complete breakdown" (MD 144).
It would seem to be stating the obvious or a critical commonplace
to claim that Sir William and his psychiatric profession are the target
of Woolfs satire and social criticism. But something still remains to be

184 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

said about the function of the psychiatric establishment in the novel. It
can and should be approached in its relation to the powers that be, a
relation of complicity, as I will suggest. Septimus' schizophrenic symptoms
are not simply a clinic-psycho-pathological "case." Septimus' nervous
breakdown poses a threat to what Sir William represents: the symbolic,
the regime of rationality, the reign of norms and the normal, for Sep-
timus lets his unconscious forces slip or break through the symbolic order
and is unable to stay in the place of identity prescribed by social conven-
tion. What he threatens to throw overboard is the "sense of proportion"
in the name of family, duty, honor, nation, courage, hard work, and
brilliant career. "All of these had in Sir William a resolute champion"
(MD 154). These moral values are vital to the maintenance of bourgeois
society, and it is Sir William's arduous task to bring his patients, who
have gone astray from the beaten track of identity assigned by society,
to a sense of proportion. His job is to convert them from their "unsocial
impulses" to conformity. It is this "divine proportion," Sir William
admits, that "made England prosper" (MD 150). Sir William is not only
at the head of his profession; he is the representative of Morality, Law,
and Order.
To cure Septimus, Sir William wants to assign him to "one of his
homes," the homes of confinement for the "mad." Such homes are im-
mediately and significantly reminiscent of the houses of confinement, the
Hôpital Général, described by Foucault in Madness and Civilization. Com-
menting on the complicity of the Hôpital Général with the state system,
Foucault writes that the Hôpital Général, in spite of its name, is not a
medical establishment. "It is rather a sort of semijudicial structure, an
administrative entity which, along with the already constituted powers,
and outside of the courts, decides, judges and executes." The Hôpital
Général is a power that the King establishes between the police and courts
as a "third order of repression" (40). Moreover, this institution exerts
its control over the inmates not only by administrative enforcement but
also by coercion. Instead, like William Bradshaw, it accomplishes its task
in the name of Virtue (hard work, duty, and so on), for "virtue, too,
is an affair of the state" (61).
With such an analogy it is easy to see Virginia Woolf's profound
understanding of the ideological and political function of Sir William's
psychiatric institution. In her novel, Sir William not only fulfills the func-
tion of ideological regimentation; he himself is physically and institutionally
part of the body politic. He receives his due reward and recognition from
the state for acting as a champion of the cherished values. He is made
a knight for his work and is honored by the Queen. He makes a fine
figure "at ceremonies and spoke well" (MD 144). In spite of Clarissa's
instinctive dislike of him, he is nevertheless invited to her party, where
the "cream" of English society, including the Prime Minister, gather.
We are also informed that he has a seat in the House of Commons, as

WANG 185
the heads of the Hôpital Général were high-ranking parliamentary of-
ficials. At the party he talks to Richard Dalloway about a bill he wants
to get through Parliament. Foucault writes that the Hôpital Général is
in fact a " 'police' matter" (46). Sir William not only acts like a moral
and ideological policeman; he is quite ready to deal with his "mad"
patients with actual police force if they get out of hand: "If they failed
him, he had to support police and the good of society . . ." (MD 154).
"He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up" (154). For Sir William,
as for his predecessors who instituted the Hôpital Général, "the laws of
the State and the laws of the heart" are in the final analysis identical
(Foucault 61). They work to make sure that everybody submits to and
internalizes the laws and becomes the perfect subject of the state.
Viewed in the larger context of ideology and the symbolic order, the
relation between Septimus and Sir William proves to be much more than
an interpersonal relationship. It is not, as some critics would claim, a
question of "one ego trying to impose its will on another" (Naremore
107-108). It is rather a relationship or tension between the subjectivity
of Septimus and the symbolic system, which, through Sir William, at-
tempts to mold Septimus into a fixed and stable subject of the state. This
does not mean that Septimus possesses a self-identical "self or "identity"
that deviates from social norms. For his schizophrenic experience, un-
conscious drives, and imaginary union with nature, with animals, and
with the dead are exactly part of the process that annuls and disrupts
any sure foundation of self and identity—a foundation that stems from
the assumption of a unified, fully conscious, and self-identical self. His
diverse and multifarious forms of subjectivity are a process, a flow that
is impossible to pin down, define, categorize, and socialize into the iden-
tity which Sir William and the social system demand of him. Thus his
schizophrenic symptoms, his moments of madness and abstraction can
be read as signs that he constantly escapes and eludes the coding process
of the symbolic order.
Septimus, as Woolf indicates, is the double of Clarissa Dalloway. And
Peter Walsh is another double of Clarissa. These three characters share
a close affinity with each other in that they tend to participate in the
psychical tendency to escape the imposition of the social system and sym-
bolic order and let their imagination, their sensitivity, their bodily rhythms,
their unconscious desires break through the dominant signifying practice.
It is true that there can be no complete break or rupture with the sym-
bolic. A complete break with the symbolic amounts to a break with
language, thought, logic, and any means of signification. It means a com-
plete shutdown of communication, a complete blackout of consciousness,
and ultimately a plunge into darkness and death, as exemplified by
Septimus' fatal plunge out of the window to the street. But this is only
one side of the escape from the symbolic. There is, however, a positive,
creative, and liberating side to this escape. This is depicted in the

186 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

schizophrenic forms of subjectivity that occur in Septimus but to varying
degrees in other characters as well, notably in Peter and in Clarissa. Such
schizophrenic experience gives rise to a fluid, mobile form of subjectivity
that manifests itself most often in nonconventional, nonlinguistic visual
imagery. Their consciousness seems to run on such images as trees, the
ebb and flow of water, the boundless sky, animals, and mist, to name
just a few. These images are characterized by a hazy obscurity and
mysticism, far removed from logical distinctions and stasis, and hence
are least susceptible to linguistic definition and a conventionally accepted
unity of meaning. They constantly run through the minds of these three
characters. For Clarissa, life seems to be a vast stream that engulfs all
people: "did it not become consoling," muses Clarissa as she walks
toward Bond Street, "to believe that death ended absolutely? but that
somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here,
there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part,
she was positive, of the trees at home" (MD 12). She is part of people
she had never met, "like a mist between the people she knew best, who
lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but
it spread ever so far, her life, herself (12). "[MJyriads of things," thinks
the solitary traveller in Peter's dream, "merged in one thing; and this
figure, made of sky and branches as it is, had risen from the troubled
sea ... as a shape might be sucked up out of the waves to shower down
from her magnificent hands compassion, comprehension, absolution" (86).
"A marvellous discovery indeed," thinks Septimus as he watches the
skywriting airplane, "that the human voice in certain atmospheric condi-
tions . . . can quicken trees into life!
.... But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And leaves being
connected by millions of fibres with his own body there on the seat, fanned it
up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement (32).
These images and their movements as mental processes, to be sure,
are not contents of a fully awakened thought of daylight consciousness
in social interaction, but are submerged in half-conscious, half-asleep
reveries and meditation, as if in the deep water of the mind. Sometimes
they are also the contents of consciousness at the dizzying heights of
ecstasy. The truth about our soul and self, Peter thinks, is like a fish
that "inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way
between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and
on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface
and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves ..." (244). Indeed, it is through
these images that flicker and dance through the mind that these characters
bear the closest affinity with each other.
This does not mean identity. Despite a deep communion among these
characters, especially between Peter and Clarissa, who "lived in each
other," no identity can be established. Once the unconscious flow is let

WANG 187
loose, it not only overflows the symbolic but also runs over its own moment
of revelation and meaning toward a state of ego-loss. Identity, character,
and personality are dissolved. One can become everybody or nobody.
The self is always on the run, on the run toward nonself.
Crisis of identity not only is manifest in the characters of Mrs. Dalloway
but also is part of Virginia Woolfs personal experience. Numerous studies,
biographical as well as theoretical, have traced the parallels between the
schizophrenic symptoms of Septimus Smith and the "bouts of madness"
that Virginia Woolf suffered, especially during the period of 1912-1913.
Like Septimus Smith, Woolf also experienced an inability to feel, "raved"
in an incoherent language, suffered from hallucinations and illusions,
was seized with an overwhelming sense of fusion with outward things,
made suicide attempts, and was treated as a psychotic patient by
neurologists and psychologists in psychiatric institutions. What is notewor-
thy in the more recent studies is a persistent refusal to treat Woolf and
Smith as "mad" in psycho-medical terms and an insistent attempt to
question and redefine the very category of madness or insanity. It is also
a critical consensus that Woolf, in creating Septimus Smith, gives a com-
pelling artistic expression to her problems.4
The point I would like to suggest apart from such rich scholarship
about the Woolf-Smith parallel is that the "madness" of Smith and Woolf
can hardly be assessed positively and sympathetically without reference
to the prevalent sign system of the symbolic order. The problem of Smith
and Woolf is first of all a tension and conflict-ridden relationship with
the reigning sign system and the dominant form of language. We have
already noted Smith's trouble with grammar and his lack of the "sub-
ject" while writing poetry. Coming back from the war, we recall, Smith
feels that literature is but a boy's intoxication with language that has
shrivelled utterly (MD 133). One of his "serious symptoms" that Sir
William notes in his card is that he is "attaching meanings to words of
a symbolic kind" (145). The War, as Poole points out (189), means heroic
distinction and national glory for Sir William, but to Smith it is "that
little shindy of schoolboys with gunpowder" (MD 145). Indeed while using
English in his "ravings," Septimus Smith always suffuses the public
language with a large residue of private significance and often overturns
the established values of conventional words. Similarly Woolf also grap-
ples with the conventional form of language. In her diary she often records
her acute feelings that words are painfully inadequate to her sensations
and perceptions. What a wonder it would be, she writes, if one can catch
works of art "hot and sudden as they rise in the mind" before resorting

'Among numerous studies on the parallels between Woolf and Smith, Roger Poole's
The Unknown Virginia Woolf offers a detailed analysis and refreshing perspectives and is a
sustained effort to question the traditional view of Woolf established by such critics and
biographers as Leonard Woolf and Quentin Bell. For other studies also see Stephen Trombley,
Lyndall Gordon 51-67, and Jean Guiguet 228-248.
188 MODERN FICTION STUDIES
to a process of linguistic signification; "for the process of language is slow
and deluding. One must stop to find a word. Then, there is the form
of the sentence, soliciting one to fill it" (WD 93-94). Contemplating trees
and rooks in a tranquil summer scene, she asks: "What's the phrase for
that?" But she immediately finds that ready-made words are no vehicle
for the colored nuances and the ineffable depths of her sensations and
feelings: "But what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so
vivid to my eyes, and not only to my eyes; also to some nervous fibre,
or fanlike membrane in my species" (WD 128).
Septimus Smith is of the same species as Virginia Woolf. Their bodies
have nerve fibers reaching and spreading out like a veil on the rock of
the world—and running up against the rock of the dominant form of
language. Their difficulty with language is not just an artistic difficulty
of groping for the apt phrase or a communicative difficulty with the right
expression. It runs in the depths of their very beings. For them the domi-
nant sign system is not only inadequate but also constraining and
repressive. Their unconscious desires and bodily impulses constantly ex-
ceed the boundaries of the sign system. Woolf and Smith are fellow
travelers in a constant flight from the well-marked territories of language,
convention, normality, and the symbolic order. Their flight may assume
various forms: incoherent babbles and ravings, nervous "breakdowns,"
a lapse into silence, or even a strong desire for death. Abhorred and ex-
asperated in a mental institution by the nurse's untiring words "the old
Queen the Queen mother & the present Queen represent the highest
womanhood," Woolf wrote to her sister that to escape such talk "I
shall soon jump out of a window" (quoted in Gordon 52). While making
Smith jump out of the window to achieve a symbolic death in the novel,
Woolf also opens a window onto a vista where the socially instituted struc-
ture of meaning collapses, where the mind becomes blank and the
"[cjharacter and idiosyncrasy as Virginia Woolf completely sunk out"
(WD 94), where identity fades and dissolves. It is a horizon where "I"
is on the run toward a space bereft of cultural constraints and linguistic
shackles, and merges with a total fusion with things. It is a death-like
realm, and it is the death of the human, all too human, personified by
the "human nature" of Dr. Holmes and constituted in the symbolic; it
is "a snow field where even the print of birds' feet is unknown," where
the "naked soul looking at emptiness has its independence" (quoted in
Gordon 53)—it is indeed Julia Kristeva's abject realm of imaginary
darkness and chora.5 But this psychic state of ego-loss and selflessness
seems to Woolf to be life-enhancing rather than depressing. In such a
state, she writes, she is "more attuned to existence" (WD 94) and she
has a consciousness of what she calls " 'reality' . . . something abstract;
5For Kristeva's concept of the abject, a preverbal, pre-objectal and death-like realm
of imaginary abyss where meaning and signification collapse, see Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs
de l'horreur: Essai sur l'abjection.

WANG 189
but residing in the downs or sky ... in which I shall rest and continue
to exist" (WD 129-130). Such a reality recalls the "wedged-shaped core
of darkness" that Mrs. Ramsay experienced and cherished in To the
Lighthouse, a psychic state where one joyfully loses one's personality and
"things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity" (TTL 63).
In this light Woolfs breakdowns can be seen as signs of breaking through
the constricting social code that makes individual existence false and
inauthentic.
This psychic resistance to the symbolic order is articulated in Mrs.
Dalloway. It is a resistance against the identity that society confers on the
infinitely complex individual human being and the incessantly mobile and
fluid unconscious. In Three Guineas Woolf proclaims, posing as a feminist
outsider to the symbolic order of patriarchy, "as a woman I have
no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country
is the whole world" (TG 197). She vehemently tries to absent her-
self, through a strategy she calls indifference and "experiment in passivi-
ty" (216), from patriotism, from nationality, from liberal humanist values
on the verge of bankruptcy, from those "chalk marks" scored on the
floor of the earth by the symbolic order, "within whose mystic bound-
aries human beings are penned, rigidly, separately, artificially" (191).
If Mrs. Dalloway gives an expression to this idea, then it is very political
indeed. It is not simply political in its criticism of the social system, but
in its profound and radical questioning of the symbolic order, of the very
stuff that makes us what we are and who we are in society.

190 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

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WANG 191