By Liam Siobhan Luckey ’27 

*Editor Contribution

Majors: English and History

Contributor Biography: Liam Siobhan is a junior English and history double major. He is the Managing Editor of the Review and very excited to share his own work here for the second time. He also works as an information assistant at Miller Library and enjoys getting involved in the theatre department. Siobhan loves watching television and reading the novels of Zadie Smith and Virginia Woolf. He will be working next year to build this paper out into his SCE.

Brief Description: This paper argues that three major allusions to historical empires—the Roman Empire, Mongol Empire, and the British Empire at its height—in minor moment in Mrs. Dalloway are essential cases through which to view the figuring of postcolonial time and history in Woolf’s novel. Mrs. Dalloway, I argue, presents an imperial world where empire creates and shapes history and the ways it is spoken about and understood.

The following was written for ENG 340: Women’s Literature

Early in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Rezia Warren Smith takes a walk down to the Readymoney drinking fountain, where she imagines “her darkness” (Woolf 24)—as a foreigner far from home caring for a husband “[destroyed]” (Nadeau 23) by his empire—similar to the land of Britain at night “as the Romans saw it” (Woolf 24). Later on, a racialized description of Elizabeth Dalloway’s appearance revolves around a reference to possible Mongol heritage. In a novel so deeply concerned with empire as Woolf’s, which is situated at the British Empire’s heart, to make mention of both the people who made up the second largest empire in history after the British Empire itself, and the empire which had possibly the greatest impact on the culture of Europe and Britain in particular, in two of the novel’s references to tangible historical moments is curious. A larger inquiry into the function of history in comparison and contrast to the function of memory in Mrs. Dalloway reveals much about what Woolf has to say regarding the empire’s relationship to the two intertwined but distinct concepts of time. Mrs. Dalloway, a novel “as much… about the empire as the city” (Cohen 87), is colored heavily by the decline of the British Empire following the first World War, and very much represents Woolf’s response to the war and the England that came out of it. Due to Woolf’s modernist reworking of the novel, its sense of time is fractured, with various strains of memory, time, and history playing upon one another. This paper’s aim is to show these historical references as emblematic of the contention between the historical and nostalgic and a post-WWI modern world where the power of empire is waning, and to prove that Woolf’s modernist breaking down of linearity represents a direct response to this contention, with history in Mrs. Dalloway complicated through memory and grounded in mentions of empire. 

Much work has been done on the fracturing of space and time in Mrs. Dalloway. Scott Cohen compares the Wembley Empire Exhibition’s realist and Mrs. Dalloway’s modernist geography (and, I’d add, history); Paul Tolliver Brown wrote on “Woolf’s Londoners… no longer in sync with a single perspective of time and space” (Brown 25) in an inter-war period which was  “complicated,” as Helen Southworth puts it, “by [a] sense of dislocation” (Southworth 107). However, there is still much to be said about the contrasting roles of history and memory (or nostalgia, as Southworth terms it for her purposes) in Mrs. Dalloway and their function in relation to an empire in decline. As Woolf (and Cohen) illustrates, the breakdown of an empire necessitates an extreme insistence on the methods of an empire at its height: rewritings of history and place, glorification of war, and a strong sense of borders and the delineations between the foreign and the familiar, for instance. Wembley is the prime example Cohen gives of the places that serve this stage of an empire by rewriting and clouding over linear understandings of history and place, while displaying their version of the truth as straightforward. Other imperial monuments do this as well. These methods are necessary because of the confusion about time and history that the downfall of empire brings about: without the assurance of the continued glory of empire to structure it, time—especially the future—becomes confused and uncertain, because these methods of reinforcement lose some of their power. Memory, instead, is relied upon to remind imperial agents and subjects of when things made sense under imperial prosperity. In fact, Brown argues that there is no longer one “present moment” (Brown 32) in postwar London, as evidenced by the alternatives given by Big Ben (which is symbolic of imperial authority and structure), St. Margaret’s clock (which is out of step with Big Ben and which Clarissa Dalloway prefers), and Septimus’s “sense of divisionless time and space” (Brown 30) created by his experience in the war. 

Empire structures not just time, but life itself throughout the novel. Richard Dalloway, worried about telling his wife he loves her with flowers and bothered by Hugh Witbread’s imperial, aristocratic haughtiness, falls back on reflections of Buckingham Palace and the royals in one of the most clearly expressed (and perhaps the most pitiful) pictures of nationalism that Woolf provides in the novel: “but he liked being ruled by the descendants of Horsa; he liked continuity; and the sense of handing on the traditions of the past. It was a great age in which to have lived. Indeed, his own life was a miracle” (Woolf 117). Hugh and Richard, along with Lady Bruton, are the most secure characters in the novel; they are strikingly untouched by the effects of the wartime period and its linear confusion. So stable are they that none rely on personal memory to reinforce their security in their lives and, thus, their nation. Security in the empire is what reinforces them. Unlike the vast majority of the novel’s characters, we hear none of Richard’s own ruminations on his past; instead, he ruminates on the empire’s past, remembering having seen Queen Victoria “in her horn spectacles driving through Kensington” (Woolf 117). Lady Bruton, similarly, remembers her personal contributions to the cause of imperial expansion and violence. But for those not acting at the heart of the empire, its signs and gestures still provide structure and unity in their lives, as the diversity of people on Picadilly respond in one voice to the passing of the prime minister’s motorcar, “as their ancestors had done before them” (Woolf 18). Septimus, too, having come face to face with “an imperial system’s ability to destroy its subjects” (Nadeau 23), is aided in his brief return to linear experience by the trappings of the everyday, central to which are trappings of empire: “gathering courage, he looked at the sideboard; the plate of bananas; the engraving of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort; at the mantelpiece with the jar of roses. None of these things moved. All were still; all were real” (Woolf 142). But for these non-agents of empire, these signs are no longer the foundation of life following the war and England’s decline in power, and for the people of Piccadilly, the modern skywriting plane distracts from the prime minister and elicits, instead of unity, a diverse variety of interpretations of its letters (the rejection of this sort of unity in favor of individual perspective, Brown argues, Clarissa embodies and argues for in her experience of time, rejection of Peter and Miss Kilman’s worldviews, and favoring of St. Margaret’s clock). In the afternoon, Dr. Holmes, an imperial agent, pierces Septimus and Rezia’s moment of normality and restores Septimus’s sense of a threat. These supposedly structuring signs of empire become increasingly empty symbols, with these characters’ complex postwar memories much more powerful than the manufactured history which props up the power of imperial symbols. 

In terms of history, I want to draw attention to Woolf’s direct references to past historical moments (both imagined and real) and explore why a notable few hinge on mentions of major empires of the past. By mentions of history in the novel, I mean those accounts which are outside of living memory, though the novel’s sense of time in storytelling is complicated, and so for my purposes, an anecdote’s sense of historicity ultimately has more to do with its purpose and function in the novel and in relation to the theme of empire. For this reason, I am looking at Helena Parry’s memories as history more than memory and nostalgia in the vein of Clarissa’s and Peter’s. Woolf’s characters, who are “caught in a historical transition” (Brown 25) and experiencing time and space in new and changed ways, have Rome and the Mongol Empire on their minds in minor moments, which is far from an accident. Looking at Rezia’s vision of “the country… as the Romans saw it” (Woolf 24), the implications of Woolf’s mention of the Mongols in relation to Elizabeth Dalloway’s racialized appearance, and Helena Parry’s memories of the British Empire’s heyday, and building upon Helen Southworth’s analysis of Clarissa’s nostalgia vs. Rezia’s nostalgia, I aim to highlight the function of history in the novel, particularly Woolf’s understanding of empire’s ability to create history by restructuring the world in which its subjects live.  

Rezia’s image of England “as the Romans saw it” (Woolf 24) lends the novel’s conception of imperial history a framework in which there exist two states for a land and people: pre-colonial or colonized subject, and imperial object. Looking for an image that captures the character of her “darkness,” Rezia comes to this description which will henceforth be called her “vision”:   

I am alone; I am alone! she cried, by the fountain in Regent’s Park (staring at the Indian and his cross), as perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not where—such was her darkness (Woolf 24). 

Here, empire creates history for a character who is neither English, nor old enough to remember Britain’s Roman conquest, but who even still sees this clear picture colored by the notions associated with the British Empire’s colonization of racialized lands. This Britain before exposure to imperialism is boundaryless. Contrasting the notions Cohen emphasizes about the realist geography of imperialism, it is characterized by darkness and clouds, recalling exoticist notions of untamed, “barbaric” lands. One notes the hills which “[have] no names,” the implication being that they are lying in wait for colonizers to name them, as if that power belongs to no one else. There is a sense, with the hills being unnamed, that there are no people here, either, though those people would be the very ancestors of each of the novel’s characters (besides Miss Kilman and Rezia herself). Crucially, the unnamed hills and uncharted rivers of this “ancient shape” (Woolf 24) create the sense of a pristine and untouched land, a land, therefore, without history. Here we see that empire both structures the approach of viewing history—in its creation of this pre-colonial or colonized (exotic, untamed, available, dark, historyless) vs. imperial (civilized, named, light, with borders and history) dichotomy that determines every word of description and implication in this image—and creates history itself: the Romans, in the act of viewing, create Britain, create the hills and rivers which they now have license to name, facilitate the land’s induction into historical existence.  

Though it is coded in this language of British imperialism, because it comes in this novel of the British Empire at a moment of transition and upheaval, the image is at the same time a reminder of the ephemerality of imperial power. It perhaps provides a way of understanding this at a pivotal moment; standing as a hallmark and reminder that before this great British empire, the largest in history, England too was a colony, and before that in a pre-colonial state. Here, amidst empire that creates its own version of the world, that pre-colonial state may only be expressed impactfully through racialized and exoticist language and ideas. This reminder, almost coming to Rezia from outside of herself as she stands at the fountain thinking about her husband’s plight, is not only on Rezia’s mind on this late day of British imperial power which Woolf depicts. Septimus’s “revelations” which immediately follow Rezia’s vision are “men must not cut down trees” and “there is a God” (Woolf 24). These revelations are the result of the connection Septimus feels with the trees and with the entire world around him during the episode he experiences prior to Rezia’s reflections. However, following this depiction of pre-Roman Britain closely, they evoke post-conquest Britain bereft of forests and newly Christian, and, in turn, Britain’s own imperial missionary pushes.  

Cohen compares Rezia’s vision to her recent memories of her early experiences with London as more of a tourist. I would compare this vision to Clarissa’s memories of Bourton, emphasizing that all of Rezia’s visions and memories are complicated by, and deeply intertwined with, her nationality and foreignness. In doing so, I am drawing from Helen Southworth, who compares Rezia and Clarissa’s sense of nostalgia in general. Southworth figures Mrs. Dalloway and its London and Bourton as “an exploration of the tension between two Englands, an old insular one, nostalgically reconstructed by Clarissa, and a new racially and socially hybrid one, continually intruding on this outdated fantasy” (Southworth 107). For Ashley Nadeau (and me), Elizabeth Dalloway’s racialization is one of these intrusions. The Mongol Empire, at its height, was the largest empire in world history at the time, now second only to the British Empire of the early 19th century until 1914. Therefore, when Woolf’s narrator suggests that it was “some Mongol [who] had been wrecked on the coast of Norfolk… had mixed with the Dalloway ladies, perhaps, a hundred years ago” (Woolf 122-123) who gave Elizabeth her racialized looks, this is not only (as Nadeau says) a suggestion of a long history of cultural contact between Britain and foreign nations, and what Urmila Seshagiri describes as race “[underpinning] experimental modernism’s… self-conscious historicity and aesthetic radicalism” (Seshagiri 11), it is also Woolf associating Elizabeth “with a global power of the past” (Nadeau 27), indeed the “global power of the past,” second only to Britain up until the decade of the novel and lasting about as long at its height of power. According to the conceptions of orientalism of the time, Woolf could have chosen from a great many terms for East Asian peoples to describe Elizabeth Dalloway’s racialized looks. Indeed, her description goes hand in hand with To the Lighthouse’s Lily Briscoe and her “little Chinese eyes” (Woolf 17) (and Elizabeth’s eyes are described as “Chinese” (Woolf 123)), whose racialized feature is the primary or archetypical physical fixation of European orientalism. But, in Mrs. Dalloway, history is shaped by empire, and so this vague “hundred years ago”—though centuries after the end of the Mongol Empire—because it is beyond living memory, almost seems to necessitate relation to empire or a once imperial people.  

Memory and history revolve around imperial touchstones in this imperial world. The novel’s oldest living memory comes from Helena Parry during the party scene. Helena’s age is emphasized by Peter Walsh’s earlier assuredness that she was dead by now. In providing this misdirection earlier, Woolf enables the reader to receive the memories upon which she ruminates as more akin to the historical references throughout the novel than the much more relatively recent memories of its middle-aged characters which go back only as far as Bourton in the 1890s. For Helena Parry, 

at the mention of India, or even Ceylon, her eyes (only one was glass) slowly deepened, became blue, beheld, not human beings—she had no tender memories, no proud illusions about Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies—it was orchids she saw, and mountain passes and herself carried on the backs of coolies in the ’sixties over solitary peaks; or descending to uproot orchids (startling blossoms, never beheld before) which she painted in water-colour; an indomitable Englishwoman, fretful if disturbed by the War, say, which dropped a bomb at her very door, from her deep meditation over orchids and her own figure journeying in the ’sixties in India (Woolf 178). 

Here, Helena, old and fragile with one prosthetic eye, becomes the woman’s British empire; “she [has] no tender memories, no proud illusions about Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies” (Woolf 178), but her careful imperial work is in picking and painting colonized flowers which she is brought to on the backs of colonized subjects. The war, then, disturbs her meditation on these golden days of empire. Where Clarissa and Peter ruminate on their youthful enjoyment of the spoils of imperial wealth at home, Helena Parry’s fond memories are of her direct involvement in the colonized lands themselves, contrasting Peter’s unhappiness both in England and India in this later stage of empire. Postwar, the colonies no longer hold this idealistic promise so easily upheld on the backs of the colonized. This is Woolf’s quintessential picture of the British Empire’s heyday in the novel. In this most recent historical reference, this time to the British Empire itself, empire creates the world: there is a colonialist sense that Helena creates the “startling blossoms, never beheld before” (Woolf 178) (never beheld by who?) which she then literally recreates by painting them. As imperial time and old Miss Parry’s memories are disturbed by the war and then disturbed again by Peter Walsh’s blunt certainty in recalling “she was dead now” (Woolf 162), Helena becomes more a symbol of the empire than a woman and, in this last scene so concerned with aging and death, her memories become history. Even Peter Walsh’s assumption comes from the attitude he expresses in thinking about her that “it seemed so fitting… that old Miss Parry should turn to glass… She belonged to a different age, but… would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable… life” (Woolf 162). With her coming to be symbolic of the empire, Peter’s description recalls the imperial monuments that structure much of the space of the novel. Peter and Helena have both been colonial voyagers in the same places, which reflects why he would hold on to her as symbolic of this life they both led in the colonies and always at the heart of empire. It is Peter’s nostalgia and the comparison between their experiences of empire in its heyday and through its decline that makes Helena’s later recollection into history. 

While their colonial experiences in India bring together Peter and Helena’s memories, it is the differences of national identity and foreignness that suggest a look at Clarissa and Rezia’s sense of nostalgia side by side. In looking at Clarissa and Rezia’s nostalgia/memory, I wish to build upon Helen Southworth’s excellent and brief analysis in her study of Woolf’s treatment of foreignness, expanding it and bringing in the additional context of Rezia’s earlier vision. Clarissa Dalloway, a woman whose “brand of nostalgia cannot survive the onslaught of change taking place in post World War One England” (Southworth 110), returns again and again to her memories of the idyllic imperial English space of Bourton, to help her understand the modernist unfolding of the present. She shows resistance to the change rapidly taking place within Britain and, Southworth notes, is “[reluctant] to come to terms with the foreign” (Brown 108). I don’t accept Southworth’s view of Clarissa as so entirely stuck, with her attitude definitely changing towards the novel’s end, and with her defiant love of life and fluid sense of temporality in mind. But her resistance to the foreign is an important concept. Rezia, on the other hand, transplanted in imperial Britain due to the war, experiences much less linear moments of memory, challenging senses of British imperial superiority, where Clarissa’s memories simply recall a simpler and brighter youth in a more stable empire. 

Rezia’s visions complicate Clarissa’s. The dual implications of her imagining an early Britain free from the subjugation of the Roman Empire through the eyes of the conquerors lend more meaning to this sense of boundarylessness in the vision. Similarly, Southworth notes Rezia’s vision after Dr. Holmes’s tonic, in which she remembers “[running] through some cornfield—where could it have been?” (Woolf 150), ranging between Italy and London, suggesting “an erasure of boundaries” (Southworth 112), which I connect directly to her vision of Britain “at midnight, when all boundaries are lost” (Woolf 24). Rome (connected to Italy) and Britain overlap first in her vision of pre-conquest Britain. As an immigrant assimilated into Britain through marriage to one of its veterans (a societal place of incredible nationalistic meaning) and the taking of the name “Mrs. Smith” (Southworth calls her, in name, “the most English of Englishwomen” (Southworth 111)), Rezia’s history is usurped by that of Britain, her peace of mind by her husband’s whom the English imperial machine has destroyed. Yet Rezia resists Clarissa’s brand of nostalgia, which means nothing to her as a working class child of an innkeeper from a nation long since uninvolved in imperial expansion. Yet we see the endurance of imperial history in her thoughts of the Romans. Southworth notes Rezia as a character lacking much personal history, having been subsumed by the empire in name, and she also lacks the deep past spent in imperial lands that the other characters have. It’s of note that the novel’s crucial character who spent her earlier years outside of the empire is also one for whom there is little to be said of her past. Her very nationality challenges the British Empire’s artificial monopoly over history, noting that, from their own imperial perspective (where empire creates history), it was these Roman conquerors who created England in the first place. So Southworth concludes her look at Rezia’s vision after Dr. Holmes’s tonic by stating that “Rezia’s refusal of containment runs counter to the homogeneity of hegemonic nation-state discourses” (Southworth 112), to which I would add that while Rezia’s visions cannot be said to directly challenge imperial power over history, they challenge it when put in direct comparison to Clarissa who lingers in memories of imperial Bourton while refusing to engage with the entire matter of empire or the world at large, current or past; and the dual lenses of her vision of “ancient” Britain and the “erasure of boundaries” (Southworth 112) in her memories complicate it.  

The Romans, Mongols, and “coolies” of Mrs. Dalloway’s history serve as a place for Woolf to comment on the nature of the relationship between history, empire, and memory in the post-WWI moment of the novel’s conception. They highlight and contrast the vague sense of history which the English possess and frame the present for them and their empire within its historical context. But within these false stories and the fading empire’s monopoly over history, what of the future? Mrs. Dalloway, as much as it bends time, is a novel of the present and the place that memory plays within the present. Its focus on the present stems from that confusion and uncertainty about the future that the decline of empire and the disruption of war evoke. Post-war, with time all bent, it is mainly Septimus who has a sense of the future in his revelations. There’s something about the future that Clarissa accepts and embraces after hearing of Septimus’s suicide and looking out of her window to see the old lady across the way. With everybody at her party reminiscing about the past and Peter and Sally having taken up imperial positions that cast them as disappointments next to Clarissa’s memories of them, Clarissa watches the old woman go to bed and embraces not only the present and her party and life, but the future and aging as necessary parts of life. With the past monopolized by empire and the future a crumbling concept in the face of imperial decline, Clarissa’s embrace of life represents a new way of looking at the future from her viewpoint, always free of nostalgia for the signs of monarchy, finding meaning and comfort, instead, in the true everyday details of life. 

Works Cited 

Brown, Paul Tolliver. “The Spatiotemporal Topography of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway:  Capturing Britain’s Transition to Relative Modernity.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol.  38, no. 4, 2015, pp. 20-38. 

Cohen, Scott. “The Empire from the Street: Virginia Woolf, Wembley, and Imperial Monuments.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 50, no. 1, 2004, pp. 85-109. 

Nadeau, Ashley. “Exploring Women: Virginia Woolf’s Imperial Revisions from The Voyage Out to Mrs. Dalloway.” Modern Language Studies, vol. 44, no. 1, 2014, pp. 14-35. 

Seshagiri, Urmila. Race and the Modernist Imagination. Cornell University Press, 2010. 

Southworth, Helen. “‘Mixed Virginia:’ Reconciling the ‘Stigma of Nationality’ and the Sting of  Nostalgia in Virginia Woolf’s Later Fiction.” Woolf Studies Annual, vol. 11, 2005, pp. 93-132. 

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Harcourt Inc., 1925. 

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1927.