by Chey

Created on: November 27, 2009

Nature is a character that stands out as a vast difference in the writing styles of Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Though the husband and wife are both modernists and wonderful novelists in their own right, their respect and views of the natural world in their writing are very dissimilar.

In one realm, Mrs. Dalloway is a novel that plays down the importance of nature in every day life, and in fact the non-industrialized world only plays a part on the sidelines of the characters' lives. Nature is not something to fear, but rather merely a decoration, or even occasionally a hindrance to the goals of the expanding technological world in the early twentieth century.

Nature only makes slight appearances in Mrs. Dalloway in the form of the flowers Clarissa fetches first thing in the morning, or perhaps the roses that her loving but nervous husband brings her after luncheon. The natural world even barely invades the flashbacks Clarissa has of Bourton, when there is a meeting of the young at the lake for a late night boating trip, or the gardens.

In town, there is mention of a garden/park with a fountain where both Clarissa and Septimus dally for a while, but again, though nature can always be considered a character in a story, here it is a quiet passive persona just watching the story, and not really participating. In the instances that the two fountains (the one at Bourton and the one in town) are mentioned in fact, they are only used as meeting places or even just as land marks. 'I am going to walk to the fountain and back', at one point Rezia says, and in another instance it is Peter who sends Clarissa a summons to the Bourton fountain to inquire (a nice word for his conversation?) of her relationship with Richard, and send her away. Nature is ignored, and its importance in every day life seems so small, yet it is what bathes the characters, what feeds them and offers them comforts every day.

In their industrialization of the world, the characters in the novel have become detached from the natural order of things (not just nature itself), and even death and illness (innate to the cycle of life) is passive. It's understandable in such a lonely superficial life, that the depression of death and disease would overcome the characters if given the chance, but the down-play of such things can become appalling after a while. 'I'll give it you!' he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer's area railings. It takes less than a sentence to put action to the suicide of one of the main characters, Septimus Smith, and there's bare a mention of it after the event and clean-up. Throughout the novel there are also fleeting sentences about Clarissa's former sickness, and the diseases that have struck other characters. Perhaps it was Virginia Woolf's own fear of death, disease or senility that led to her passive mention of these occurrences in her novel. In that way, it may have been the slight fear (must you not fear first to overcome?) of that area in nature that allowed her to mention these depressing things in her writing at all.

I find that with the presence of the more industrialized, all it brings is sadness, detachment, and loneliness. All of the characters have their moments of happiness and amusement in their own worlds, but all of them notice there is a longing for something missing, and it is perhaps a good conclusion that nature must play an integral part in the human condition.

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