The Shape of Modernism

At the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway takes a well-known walk through London, encountering—along with many other Londoners—the grey car of (possibly) royalty that proceeds through Westminster to Buckingham Palace. Throughout the novel, the symbolism attached to the grey car demarcates it as a signifying landmark in the identity and identification of Clarissa, connecting her to both images of the landscape and ideologies of the nation. As the grey car passes a men’s club, the club is described as a still life that summons images of nation: “The white busts and the little tables in the background covered with copies of the Tatler and syphons of soda water seemed to approve; seemed to indicate the flowing corn and the manor houses of England” (18). It is as if the siphons and Tatlers not only approve of the royal car but approve of it and access it specifically, I argue, via English pastoral images. ¹ Later in the novel, Peter tells us that Clarissa for him was always “recalling some field or English harvest” (153). Here, Clarissa is associated, at least for Peter, with the English pastoral countryside. In fact, he says that “he saw her most often in the country, not in London” (153). This passage is surprising in its correlation of Clarissa—such a well-known Londoner—with the English countryside, but in conjunction with the earlier passage on the grey car, it also serves to connect and extend Clarissa’s identity to the images of pastoral land and then to the nation as these same images of pastoral England are conjured by the royal grey car. ² Clarissa’s identity then becomes collapsed not only with a kind of pastoral geographical identity but with an idealized national identity as well. There is a familiar trajectory here in the tracing of how women and women’s bodies become figureheads for nationalism, this time via geographical imagery. I argue that the novel’s depictions of the physical, geographical, and national bodies as well fail to provide alternative identifications for women outside of patriarchy and imperialism.