In which Ms. Woolf gives Suicide a seat at the table.
From Mrs. Dalloway:
“What business had the Bradshaw’s to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party – the Bradshaws talked of death. He had killed himself – but how? Always her body went through it first; when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party!
She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally) they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”
Virginia Woolf’s meditation on the social problem of the appropriateness of discussing suicide in Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway has spent the day arranging for the party, which is unfolding at the moment of these two paragraphs. A soldier back from The Great War has committed suicide. This death, discussed by her party guests, puts her off. How can it be discussed in the midst of gaety, of social connection?
That’s the thing, isn’t it, the barbarity of suicide, the difficulty of necessary social communication of the event itself. How do we articulate an incomprehensible action to each other? Or an action that might be closer than we’d wish to express … fear of suicide’s contagion, the name of the act becomes hissed in whispers, like that of a cancer diagnosis of a friend.
There will always be that line giving pause, “But he had flung it away.” No melodrama here, just Woolf presenting the puzzle of how to include a stoppage in with the continuation of society life.
