Vanessa Redgrave's Mrs. Dalloway: Revolutionary or recluse?

Frome, Susan

At first glance it seems as though Vanessa Redgrave has taken a strange, new departure in choosing to play Clarissa Dalloway in the 1998 film, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Is it possible that she has been somehow reduced to portraying a pale, fragile figure barely able to get out of bed in order to waft diaphanously across the park to the nearby florist? Superficially the answer would seem to be-yes.

In the film as in the novel we learn that Clarissa is a sophisticated woman in her late fifties and married to a Member of Parliament. They live in an elegant London town house where she gives lovely parties as her raison d'etre. The time is soon after World War I, June 1923. Through the use of flashbacks, we discover that Clarissa was an attractive, lively young lady (Natascha McElhone), who was drawn to a wild romance with Peter Walsh (Alan Cox), an adventurer, and also to a loving relationship with Sally Seton (Lena Headley), a girlhood friend. She visibly enjoyed fun and games with her friends, watching Sally run naked through hallways, gliding on moonlit boat trips with young men while listening to Peter's eager imaginings of future explorations. But because of a conflicting conservative side to her personality, Clarissa chose to marry Richard Dalloway, a substantial, young candidate for Parliament. She thus beomes Mrs. Dalloway, who thirty years later, appears to be weak, physically and psychologically, uninvolved in the real world, and rather fey. The character as realised by Virginia Woolf in the book has been described as "an embodiment of vapidity . . . created to disclose the moral degeneration of society" (Moody 483).

This is not the kind of role that we have come to associate with Ms. Redgrave. She has often created independent, strong-willed, courageous women on the stage and screen. Running the gamut from Isadora Duncan through The Trojan Women, Mary Queen of Scots, the impetuous Nina in The Seagull, and most notably, Julia, her Oscar-winning potrayal of a woman who gave her life confronting Nazism, we can readily see the kinds of characters she has been drawn to. Even her dying Mrs. Wilcox in Howard's End is still spunky and resolute. Ms. Redgrave has graced the stage with equally passionate Shakespearean heroinns from Rosalind in As You Like It to Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, as well as Ibsen's defiant leading ladies, Ellida (The Lady of Sea), and Mrs. Alving (Ghosts). As recently as 1997 she chose the off-beat, controversial character of Oscar Wilde's mother in the movie Wilde.

Ms. Redgrave's fervent approach to acting and her social and political views have much to do with these character choices. In her Autobiography (1994), she speaks passionately about her philosophy of acting which dictates the kinds of women she chooses to play. In talking about her first role at Stratford-Upon-Avon as Rosalind (1961), she describes how she was forced by her director to go "with the immediacy of the moment," letting all "mental control and calculation" vanish, throwing herself "into the moment of Rosalind's life" (102). From that day forth her technique called for lively, complex roles.

At the same time, her social and political views radiate the same kind of urgency. By the time she began her acting career, her background included the tenor of the Battle of Britain and the influence of a father who was involved in the socialist People's Convention of 1940. She subsequently joined the Workers Revolutionary Party and has since been described as a "near-legendary revolutionary" (Glaister T8). There is no wonder that she prefers playing women who represent these qualities, and also insists on stories that deal with these issues and afford her ample opportunity to utilize her acting method.

Moreover, by extension, she-as the central character-not only takes on the issues within, say, a given play, she infuses each role with her own contemporaneous feelings as well. For instance, in 1986 in a revival of Ibsen's Ghosts, she gives her opinion on why it was such a great success:

Above all it was the spirit of the times in which the "new thinking" proclaimed by Gorbachev stirred our audiences and made them consider aspects of our own society in a new light. . . . Mrs. Alving's horror at lies "creeping like ghosts behind the words in newspapers" had an immediacy for the audience as well as for me. (Redgrave 292)

In playing Olga in The Three Sisters in 1990, she describes similar feelings:

As I played in The Three Sisters and spoke Olga's Lines "Our sorrows will turn into happiness for those that come after us. Peace and happiness will come to the earth. They will think kindly of us and they will thank us," I cried for and with all those who will not see happiness again: for the suffering of those who are alive, for "man's inhumanity to man."

. . We want peace and only need to know the truth, and we will go on insisting on the truth so that we can ensure that all oppressed peoples have justice and a real human life. (331-32)

Clearly Ms. Redgrave feels the drama and passion that is the stuff of theatre and film and finds the same drama and passion in real-life circumstances as well. So, again, why choose to portray Clarissa Dalloway? There is no obvious martyr here, no recognizable sacrifice being made for a great cause.

However, by taking a closer look at the film we can find spiritedness and other deeper aspects underlying this character. Though she says in the voice-over narration that she has been sickly and has to have a bedroom of her own (doctor's orders for an uninterrupted sleep), we come in on her excitement and delight about her evening party. She eagerly goes on her morning errand to the florist's to order the all-important flowers for the event. It's a lovely June day and she is full of admiration for it. Later, back at the town house, her former boyfriend of long ago, Peter Walsh, suddenly arrives to see her. He has returned to London from his rather unsuccessful ventures in India, and is actually trying to arrange a divorce for a lady he met there so that they can then marry. It is obvious that Clarissa has mixed feelings about all this, but mainly she is re-awakened by seeing him again. Peter's visit brings back more youthful memories, as she now carefully dresses for the soiree. And it is at the party that she goes through many different, contradictory feelings. A prominent doctor regales the company with a sad story about a patient, a young, shell-shocked soldier, who, because the doctor wanted to send him off to an institution, killed himself by jumping out of his window onto the spiked iron railing below. Clarissa has actually caught sight of this same soldier from the florist's window; at that time she sympathized with him as he seemed to go through an "attack" on the sidewalk. But at her party she is appalled that this supercilious physician should disrupt her guests and spoil their evening. She seeks consolation alone in another room while ruminating on all the events of the day. We come to realize that she, too, is contemplating suicide as she looks down from her window on a similar railing. Needless to say, this scene requires a consumate actor to express visually so much inner turmoil; fortunately Ms. Redgrave is well up to it.

Yet, there are some ideas that even she and the sensitive, perceptive screenwriter, Eileen Atkins, and the director, Marleen Gorris, couldn't quite bring to light about Clarissa, which would have made her characterization even richer. According to Lee Edwards in her essay, "War and Roses: The Politics of Mrs. Dalloway" (the novel), the main character was defined by her love of life and her capacity to preserve this attitude in the face of war, death, sickness, age, and the demands of her own ego. Mrs. Dalloway inspires us to "be as decent as we possibly can" and do "good for the sake of goodness" (Edwards 110) even though the world is full of incomprehensible disasters. "Where a choice must be made, we can endorse the heart rather than the brain, choose roses and not war" (Ibid). Furthermore, in Ms. Edward's view "the perfect hostess has a history and a heritage both honorable and . . . political" (Ill). She is a bridge between politics and feelings as she attempts to enhance both with a certain beauty and joy. Nonetheless, even though these perceptions were not filmically dramatized, at the end of the movie, after she has chosen to continue her life with renewed zest, she returns to her friends and family in the salon, smiling and announcing: "Here I am-at last!" We can conclude, then, that although Clarissa Dalloway may not be a strong protecter of the weak or a victorious leader against evil forces of the world, she can represent an important heroism of the home front. If Septimus, the soldier, has the courage to determine his own fate through death, so should she have the courage to determine her own life through the choice of giving to others in the small ways open to women of that period. What are we fighting for when war is necessary? Surely it must come down to defending a way of life, a belief system in which the freedom to choose one's own path is fundamental.

Ms. Redgrave may even have known women like Mrs. Dalloway from an earlier generation; this may have been an incentive to do the movie. But whether it was or not, it is through the film and the character that she is able to bring these forgotten women of society to a nobility of life once again. And that is the kind of worthy work we have come to expect from Vanessa Redgrave. So upon deeper reflection we find ourselves back on track, forging ahead with her as she continues to explore and reveal endless facets of feminine heroism.

Susan Frome

Works Cited

Edwards; Le R. "War and Roses: The Politics of Mrs. Dalloway Major Literary Characters: Clarissa Dalloway. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1990.

Glaister, Dan. The Guardian (London) 7 April 1997: T8.

Green, Blake. Newsday 21 September 1995: B03.

Moody, A.D. as quoted in Contemporary Authors Vol. 130. Ed. Susan M. Trosky. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1990.

Redgrave, Vanessa. Vanessa Redgrave: An Autobiography. New York: Random, 1994.

Talbot, Mary. Daily News (New York) 18 September 1995: 29.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, 1925.

Editor's Note: Susan Frome writes as film reviewer for The Waterbury Observer and The Country and Abroad.

Copyright Literature/Film Quarterly 2000
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