Another morning, waking up, still “half-cut” as they say, it suddenly occurred to me that I have a great deal in common with the eponymous heroine of Virginia Woolf’s famous novel “Mrs Dalloway”. Having just graduated from university at the tender age of two and twenty I find myself jobless and complacent. Like many unemployed persons I have a lot of spare time on my hands, much like Mrs Dalloway. But what I find most interesting about our situation is how each of us chooses to spend all this free time, and how we might spend it better.
The heroine of the novel; Clarissa Dalloway, was purely a creation of Virginia Woolf’s mind and I’m a real person but it still seems that for both of us the purpose of our respective existence remains largely unwritten. We both fritter away our time on somewhat trivial matters designed to keep ourselves busy, for lack of a singular vocation that might channel our time more effectively.
The novel begins with Mrs Dalloway’s decision to “buy the flowers herself” and so she enters into the busy streets of London and dreamwalks basking in the glow of other people with lives she feels must be much richer than her own. She is famous for her great parties and keen socialising but it is something of a front. In order to while away the hours that make up her life, to quieten her deep sense of dissatisfaction Clarissa does her best to speed up the slow drip of time and thus make her life faster, a whirl of busy engagements and trivial matters blown out of proportion by the intense force of her stream-of-conscious monologue. The exact nature of her sadness is hard to pin down to just one particular cause but it is clear that she is unable to live in pure silence as she is often too busy running away from her own reflection, terrified by the truth that her life is somehow incomplete.
The other lead character in the novel is Septimus, whose story runs loosely alongside that of Mrs Dalloway’s, briefly intersecting toward the end of the book. His own struggle with life echoes the harsh sterility of Mrs. Dalloway’s, his maddening shattered memories of the First World War trenches endless pounding of the heavy guns cause him both detachment, and a rising fear of reality. As he descends further into insanity it becomes harder for him to disseminate experience the world as it really is, everywhere he hears and sees the signs of the war, until his entire vision becomes one continually blurred state.
There is a contrast between them in the way Mrs Dalloway actively seeks out noise, movement, hustle and bustle. She loves London, simply through being there, she engages, perhaps too deeply, in living for the moment. Often, for example, beginning fleeting discussions with party guests about whom she knows all the latest news but cannot bring herself to care about enough, so she moves on from one to the next, never quite settling in one place for to long.
As a result of their conditions both characters find themselves unable to fully engage in love; Clarissa because she is constantly apart from the one man she truly desires, Peter, and Septimus because his psyche is far too damaged and self-absorbed to meet the level of emotional investment that love requires. Both characters are so caught up in themselves the outside world is something of a violent intrusion to their way of life, a distraction and also an abstraction from their private chamber of thoughts.
Clarissa Dalloway is lost in a peculiar fashion. She’s like a moth in a darkened room, with four candles equally spaced apart. She wanders aimlessly in the centre drowning in voices that speak to her but say nothing. Lacking guidance Mrs. Dalloway can make no defining choices in her life, not only that she can find no choices worth making. Her life is marked as a felicitous wandering, building nothing, just existing but without knowing why.
We can draw a parallel between Mrs. Dalloway’s condition, a fear of silence and unchallenged free introspection, with a more modern pre-occupation that comes from living in a digital age. Where Mrs. Dalloway blinds herself to certain truths of her position, married but only half in love, never truly restful, always seeking noise and the violence of flux, the kids of the supposed “Generation-Y” (a loathsome term) have the wonders of modern things to do, or rather to sit around, to watch and listen but without much engagement. In my current state of unemployment I find myself heavily steeped in these electronica activities, something is always on and talking to me. I either have the radio, dreaded classic FM with its jibbering adverts that gradually seep into my prostrate sub-conscious till I know them by heart, or I’m playing GTA (running over pedestrians for three hours can’t be healthy) or I’m listening to another album full of voices and notes to decipher, or repeatedly watching old re-runs of the Simpsons. I go out, like Mrs Dalloway, my heart skips a tremulous beat as I race to Sainsbury’s to find new shiny things to buy and restock my cupboards, even though they are already full, my higher pleasure is simply the kick of spending money!
My point is that in living this way I find myself reading and doing far less than I used to, my life seems a little less meaningful. What do I mean by that? It’s better to sit and write/make music/draw/to talk things over, than to vegetate just watching which celebrity is now fat or thin or stoned or dead, or all of the above. To do something artful, whatever it might be, is a way to fill the gaps in time.
Perhaps “Generation-Y” is a generation of Mrs. Dalloways? A bored generation. We have it too easy so we get bored, throw stones, get drunk, pick fights, then we get up and do it again. This is a boring generation. The majority of us have little to say politically but we do have mass spending power, for what its worth.
In conclusion I think it’s supremely healthy to have a job, an enterprise, everyone needs a cause to fight for, a path to follow. Because in doing so we give our lives meaning, something that Mrs Dalloway and to an extent myself are sadly lacking. So in order to avoid a full transformation into the wilful self-indulgence of the damaged Mrs. Dalloway, or to be absorbed into a bored generation I don’t want to be a member of, I intend to find a job that means something to me, and in doing so escape my cocoon of apathy and emerge a career-seeking butterfly.
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