and only partially subject to individual control. Communication in Mrs. Dalloway is closely akin to coincidence; it is the process of bringing two unrelated things into brief proximity and then releasing them. This brush with the unknown, lit up by brief sparks of recognition, is one piece of a huge, indifferent pattern made up of many such pieces; the individual can never control the pattern, but can only participate in it or artistically replicate it by cultivating a receptiveness to the unknown undulled by habit. Alternatively, the individual can, like Septimus, dedicate himself to a passive resistance against the authoritarian forces that violate the privacy of the individual.
When Woolf discusses coercive forms of authority, disguised as duty to the empire, to God, to one's family or even a loved one, her narrative, sharpened by anger, slips into caricature. The royal motorcar with drawn blinds that speaks with a 'pistol shot'; the envious Miss Kilman in her green mackintosh with a prayer book; Sir William Bradshaw and Dr. Holmes, who preach proportion in the name of health; and finally Love that demands change, accommodation, surrender in deceptively sugared tones-all are treated as 'obscurely evil… capable of some indescribable outrage-forcing your soul, that was it' (Clarissa's words describing Bradshaw). Woolf depicts compulsory patriotism, piety, health, and romanticism as all under the sway of two 'goddesses,' Proportion and her more formidable sister, Conversion, who narcissistically demand conformity. Conversion is said to conceal herself 'under some plausible disguise; some venerable name; love, duty, self sacrifice,' but her 'lust is to override opposition, to stamp indelibly in the sanctuaries of others the image of herself.' It is this hypocritical exercise of power behind a mask of concern that pushes Septimus to his reluctant suicide, his Pyrrhic attempt to preserve 'a thing… that mattered.'
Similarly, Clarissa defended herself against the invasiveness of love by refusing to marry Peter Walsh; 'with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into,' whereas she and Richard give each other 'a little licence, a little independence.' Clarissa is firm in her belief that 'there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife -801- a gulf; and that one must respect.' Peter's signature, as a potentially invasive man, is the pocket knife he often toys with, whereas the love of women is different, contained: when Sally Seton kisses Clarissa, Clarissa likens it to a wrapped gift. 'And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it-a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked… she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through.'
Having been given this 'diamond,' this love, by Sally Seton years ago, Clarissa herself has become a diamond, a multifaceted radiance that she can artistically assemble to produce both «terror» and 'ecstasy.' Implicit in the image of the diamond is the privilege of class and wealth, and a certain cold hardness, but the diamond also figures Clarissa's ability to assemble multiple facets into a dazzling unity; she is herself a kind of party, made up of many parts. Her radiance comes not from youthful beauty or apparel, but from her refusal to sort and label, to say of others or herself, 'I am this, I am that.' Clarissa intuitively declines to force others into categories they may not fit, with a social politeness underwritten and authorized by the agonized isolation of the double who differs so markedly from her in class and gender.
What draws Clarissa and Septimus unexpectedly close, despite the fact that they have never seen each other, is their joint respect for individual privacy coupled with a joy in communication. For Septimus, a mad poet- prophet, written words best exemplify the balance between the interconnecting, sensual beauty of language and its elusive, potentially deceptive meaning. So tears run down Septimus's face at the exquisite beauty of smoke words he cannot decipher; he declares himself a prophet of beauty-'beauty, that was the truth now'-and at the same time asserts that 'the world itself is without meaning,' that 'the message hidden in the beauty of words… is loathing, hatred, despair.' For Clarissa the double valence of privacy and contact is expressed through her parties. Richard and Peter both criticize her parties, suggesting she gives them out of snobbishness, but she claims that 'both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life. 'That's what I do it for, she said, speaking aloud, to life… They're an offering.' The narrator probes, 'What did it mean to her, this thing she called life?' And she explains that she brings people together fortuitously, without obligation or pressure, metonymically expressing their continuity with one another:
Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater, and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continu-802- ously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?
Although social decorum is not invasive, neither is it inherently vitalizing. Instead, vitality is generated and expressed through improvisation, experimentation, a variation or revision of inherited forms. Peter Walsh replenishes his excitement with life when, shaking off habit, he impulsively follows a woman in a fever of heightened perception and invention: 'it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought-making oneself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more.' The 'something more' that Peter produces is life. Peter never speaks to the woman; he recognizes the ephemerality of his construction, and when it ends he lets it go. What makes Peter's pursuit of the unknown woman different from Holmes's pursuit of Septimus (and from Peter's own earlier suit to Clarissa) is simply this willingness to let go-of the moment and of the woman, whose path he hasn't tried to change at all.
In order to fashion a book that balances the familiar with the unexpected, one that prompts its readers to gather grains of information that might, belatedly, flower into serendipitous meaning, Woolf narrows her temporal focus and prefers the principle of association and juxtaposition to the logic of cause and effect. Like Joyce's Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway takes place on a single June day, in 1923 instead of 1904. Unlike Ulysses, however, in Mrs. Dalloway the narrator never peels away from the story in gleeful parodies, setting up independent exchanges with the reader; instead, the narrator passes from character to character, from place to place, gathering the pollen of feeling and sensation from many sources, leaving the reader, 'like a bee with honey, laden with the moment.' The method of shifting the narrative focus from character to character is compatible with Peter's view that a respect for privacy, for the unknowable, makes life (or books) like 'an unknown garden, full of turns and corners, surprising, yes; really it took one's breath away, these moments.' It is also a way of instanti ating one of Clarissa's theories of identity, designed to explain 'the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people, not being known,' the dissatisfaction so apparent in Jacob's Room and The Years. Clarissa's idea is that the boundaries of individual, autonomous existence are illusory; the individual is randomly distributed across a moment and a place, and might even survive -803- unseen. While sitting on a bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, Clarissa thinks that
she felt herself everywhere; not 'here, here, here'; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter-even trees, or barns.
The organization of the novel proceeds along a 'spider's thread of attachment' that almost invisibly interweaves people and things. After different bystanders have puzzled over the skywriting, the narrative skips-with apparent randomness-from the Smiths to Maisie Johnson to Mrs. Dempster. A closer examination shows that the narrative sews these women together to show how each is implicit in the others; each represents a different stage of married life for women. Lucrezia Smith, who married and left her home in Italy when she was nineteen, is feeling homesick and isolated when Maisie Johnson asks the Smiths for directions to Regent's Park tube station, and suddenly the perspective shifts to Maisie. Maisie, unmarried and fresh from Edinburgh, recoils from the couple's strangeness, and is seized by a spasm of homesickness that echoes Rezia's. She is nineteen, the age Rezia was when she left home to marry Septimus. Watching Maisie, though, is Mrs. Dempster, an older version of her who deplores Maisie's hopeful ignorance: 'That girl… don't know a thing yet… Get married, she thought, and then you'll know.' She finds herself wanting to warn Maisie and receive from her a kiss of pity for the hardness of married life: 'What hadn't she given to it? Roses; figure; her feet too… But, she implored, pity. Pity, for the loss of roses.'
Threads of similarity, perceived only by those attuned to the artistry of chance (and the chance of artistry), lead the reader through a series of glancing encounters between people. The beauty of such encounters, which both reveal and deny affinity, is epitomized by the old lady that Clarissa can sometimes see through her window. 'Somehow one respected that-that old woman looking out of the window, quite unconscious that she was being
