IdleGlory | He had to be a genius or nothing, and since he couldn’t be creative he turned to bohemianism, eccentricity, social versatility, conquests. – Allen Ginsberg

Explorations of the Vagous Spaces:
Psychology and Interior Design in Mrs. Dalloway
by Elizabeth Sarobhasa, 2011

Of the oldest free-standing residences within Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway’s fictional city , the homes and dwellings of London architectural “structures (share with another) the metropolis… (that is located) between the individual, and the super-individual contents of life.” (The Metropolis and Mental Life, Simmel) The occupation of these spaces as homes and public forums only share a common function: as a dialogue between their function and representations.

As the domestic occupation of the third spaces within each dwelling: personal, private and publicized rooms are an exchange of internal validation and different means of satisfaction in conversations between the characters and their recollections.

Universal formulas of exchange and return preform an unstable coexistence between many of the characters throughout the novel, resembling “each (interactions with relationships and recollection as “crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life.” (The Metropolis and Mental Life, Simmel)

However, each explorations of these replacements of the familiar neighborhoods and mental processing results in the eventual return to the familiar and comfortable: the dwelling of the physical location of the bodies at rest, revisionist-creation memories and the cognitive mind.

Throughout history, the different methods of reproducing man-made dwellings creates a displacement of the initial presence of the object. This is the ziggurat: a structure defined by our response to the “mechanical reproduction… of the concept of authenticity.” (Richter, Benjamin, 1234) As an hierarchical structure that defines value by production, the accuracy of each building’s external framework is dependent on the architect’s ideas, transcribed to ink or granite and paper, ingredients located within a navigable environment, and tireless physical labourers.

However, the sprawling neighbourhoods and landscape of London were based on centuries of political upheaval and physical conflict before applied to minimal changes as adornment, a representation of the constant tug between older traditions, as like “old Bloombury house.. often full of fine panelling, which (they).. paper over.” (Woolf, 77)

Between these various periods of natural disasters and reconstruction, the facade of each dwelling’s stonework or public building’ stone walls undergoes a transformation of reassigning newer methods based upon and atop older, per-existing ideas. It is because of these constant “revisions… (of) the changes imposed by (various homeowners) that they were [not] content to leave (these facade and ideas) alone.” (Platt, 1)

Notwithstanding the also undergoing constant flux of population, the inhabited content of the structures, and each succeeding owner’s revisions, these buildings from an architectural perspective were “the appearance of settled habitations… assembled for the conference of gods above (their) world,” (Woolf, 188) and retained their original purpose as a man-made creation within the tumultuous natural landscape of the urban environment.

“Health is largely a matter in our own control,” (Woolf, 78) and that those who interchange between inherited property, such as Septimus, also interchange their rationalize-processing in flux of appearances of stability. That these internal changes requires occurrences of habitations, is a curious exercise of an attitude towards life, similar to the looking glass and cracked mirror, reflecting “(a) million times.. and always with the same imperceptible contraction,” (Woolf, 31) on the other hand, the irreplaceability of each gaze is the result of a relic of the past and older traditions.

Uniting each variable, into the social algorithm, is a formulaic approach is similar to the methods that Clarissa executes for her party. As she organizes each guest and her dwelling in preparation, she creates, through her talent for exaggeration, a microcosm of the rigid social boundaries of London within her memory and physical home: the dwelling that houses these guests in revised and impermanent presence.

Within her memories, the guests and the inhabitants of London occupy “ a metropolis (that) goes back to one of the large developmental tendencies of social life as such, to one of the few tendencies for which an approximately universal formula can be discovered. The earliest phase of social formations found in historical as well as in contemporary social structures is this: a relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles. However, this circle is closely coherent and allows its individual members only a narrow field for the development of unique qualities and free, self-responsible movements.” (Metropolis, Simmel)

Each of the guests invited is required to transfer conversations from one individual to another, in subject-matter related to their career and family in the public sphere and the result is to continue travelling in a close space at Clarissa’s party, “wandering aimlessly… (and) standing in a bunch at the corner.” (Woolf, 142) The limitations of the guests, and characters, of Mrs. Dalloway, fail in recognizing that their compromises to the social hierarchy is a pattern, and takes shape in the outside-reality from their mindset as a as physical boundary that binds the pathways of walking. Comfort is all a matter of seeking input.

In conclusion, “the function of the metropolis to provide the arena (is) for… struggle and its reconciliation,” (Metropolis, Simmel) while each explorations of these replacements of the familiar locations and mental processing results… in the eventual return to the familiar and comfortable: the dwelling of the physical location of the bodies at rest, revisionist-creation memories and the cognitive mind.