AS AN OUTSIDER, Virginia Woolf eschewed labels that attempted to relegate her to tidy boxes. The label “feminist” should die, the British novelist wrote in Three Guineas, an essay published in 1938 that married equal opportunities and pay for women with how a society might prevent fascism and war.
Likewise, despite her disdain for war, she would not claim herself a “pacifist.” The only label she allowed for herself was “outsider,” and perhaps because of that, many of her novels are concerned with outsiders. But it wasn’t just outsider status that fascinated her: It was the way patriarchal structures punished outsiders for failing to conform to and live within their confines, most notably those associated with war.
Woolf’s intellectual and social concerns form the subtext of many of her novels. While Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway has not traditionally been labeled an anti-war novel, it reveals a rich theology of hospitality, an antidote to war and the moral injury that results from the ways that war wastes human life. Outsiders hold the key to this theology in the way they form their peculiar values despite the patriarchal structure’s insistence that they are frivolous, cowardly, or only after personal gain.
A kind of liturgy
The novel’s protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, is accused by some characters of being a snob and throwing parties to benefit her husband Richard’s career. Other characters condemn her as a frivolous woman, categorizing her parties as trivial. Clarissa considers the real reasons for her desire to throw parties and has a difficult time articulating them, even to herself.
Woolf writes: “[W]hat did it mean to [Clarissa], this thing she called life? Oh it was very queer. Here was So-and-So in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously 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? An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift.”
This is partly what makes Clarissa an outsider, that her parties are offerings to life, this strange thing she loves. Her gift as a hostess allows her to preside over her parties the way a clergyperson might preside over communion. They are a kind of liturgy, a participation in common celebration and an offering of the gift of life itself. In this, Clarissa creates a theology of hospitality that is sacramental in nature.
The other, more obvious, outsider that Woolf explores within the novel is the World War I veteran Septimus Smith. He not only suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder but also from moral injury. While notions surrounding PTSD were not fully formed in this era after World War I, when doctors referred to it as “shell shock,” Woolf’s sense of the ways war atrocities could shatter a person’s connection to their very personhood seems to have anticipated today’s understanding of moral injury.
A society that values war
First defined near the turn of the 21st century, moral injury suggests that certain acts committed by a soldier under orders, acts the soldier failed to thwart, or betrayals of the stated purpose of war can be so morally egregious to the soldier that they defy the very underpinnings of their deeply held beliefs and sense of self. This can cause irreparable psychological harm. While Clarissa’s outsider status did not bar her from participating in her society at large, Septimus’ did. Woolf writes that Septimus insists that he “had committed an appalling crime and been condemned to death by human nature.”
According to his doctor, Sir William Bradshaw, Septimus had lost all sense of “proportion.” Proportion is Bradshaw’s articulation of the indelible requirement of those living in civilized patriarchal society, a requirement that equates to upholding authority and acquiescing to one’s responsibilities within that society, no matter what. This includes those who, in service of the patriarchal value of war, do what society asks of them and fight, but upon return cannot figure out a way back into the society.
Lurking beneath Bradshaw’s philosophy of proportion is a “goddess of conversion” at whose altar he, perhaps unknowingly, worships. He believes that people can be molded to fit and obey the established order. This goddess might well be called the goddess of war as she “is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance,” Woolf writes. This goddess camouflages herself behind “love, duty, self-sacrifice.”
When a person recognizes the goddess for what she really is—violence—and loses his or her sense of proportion, Bradshaw insists that the person be shut away from the larger society to rest and regain that sense. Ultimately, Bradshaw determines that Septimus should be sent to a home with other shell-shocked veterans. Those deemed out of proportion should not be heeded or considered, only fixed.
Unable to stand against Bradshaw’s attempt to force proportion on him, Septimus commits suicide. He could never submit himself to the prescribed remedy, reflecting, “Once you fall ... human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.”
Dr. Holmes, who treated Septimus before Bradshaw, sees Septimus’ suicide as proof that he is a coward, the most damning critique of a man in a patriarchal society that values war. It implies that Septimus did not have the fortitude to carry out his God-given responsibilities to his family or society. To Dr. Holmes, a representation of the unreflective blindness of patriarchal obedience, Septimus was a lost cause, a moral reprobate incapable of even the minimum duties required of him—which equate to simply pulling himself together. After all, according to Holmes, there was nothing wrong with Septimus except a bad case of the nerves.
A way to suppress war
Reading Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway today and considering the hospitality ethic in the novel reveals how the private life and its values can offer a theology of hospitality, a kind of antidote to patriarchal structures that value war and warmongering. Those conversant in the virtues of private life, such as hospitality, as opposed to the values associated with patriarchal public life—competition, jealousy, grabbing positions of power and holding on to them—subvert war culture with little fanfare.
Woolf argues as much in Three Guineas. She suggests that the cultivation of private virtues of poverty, chastity, derision (to counteract fame), and “freedom from unreal loyalties” can counteract public patriarchal values. She might as well have included in her list of virtues the hospitality ethic practiced by Clarissa Dalloway.
Private virtues practiced publicly become the overarching values of the society rather than being relegated only to home. While this might seem idealistic and simple, the response of those opposed to the public practice of hospitality should remind us that practicing private virtues as offerings for the love of life and our common humanity will often draw public ire rather than admiration. Because we are steeped in the values of public life that revolve around the maintenance of power, private virtues that publicly subvert power are judged harshly, seen as unrealistic or frivolous, and rejected as cowardly. They are only considered valuable in private.
Clarissa’s ultimate act of hospitality has little to do with party planning, but it’s cultivated by her love of life. When she learns of Septimus’ suicide, Clarissa steals away from her party. She creates physical distance from the public who derided her for her parties. She doesn’t judge the outsider Septimus for his inability to regain proportion. As she reflects on Septimus’ death, she realizes the suffering required for her to benefit from values that send people to war: “Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness ... She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success.”
Clarissa acknowledges her complicity in the values that caused Septimus to commit suicide. In this admission we see the ways that the practice of hospitality can shape us toward empathy and compassion. By first acknowledging our complicity, we might better practice the virtues we’ve cultivated that, without flourish, suppress war.
Jennifer Ochstein is a Midwestern writer and professor. Her reviews, essays, and poetry have appeared in America magazine, Brevity, and other publications.
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