10.15160/1826-803X/1607
Alla luce dell’incidenza che i due conflitti mondiali hanno sull’intero macrotesto della Woolf, intendo qui illustrare come in Mrs Dalloway (1925) le strategie formali usate dalla scrittrice rappresentino gli effetti della guerra da un lato, e dall’altro fungano da forme di rimedio alla distruzione che narrano. Questo secondo testo sperimentale presenta una dinamica estremamente equilibrata fra le diverse funzioni attribuite alle strategie formali: mentre l’annichilimento viene tematizzato e mimato da una prosa spezzata e parentetica fondata su dicotomie portanti, la stessa prosa ricuce la frammentazione in unità tramite un’organizzazione formale che sfrutta quelle stesse opposizioni dicotomiche. Ciò che emerge è la possibilità di contrastare gli effetti devastanti della guerra, di segno maschile, con una modalità femminile di (ri)costruzione che interpreta la scrittura come forma di ordito analoga alla tessitura ad ago e ferro, nel romanzo entrambe narrate e narranti.
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<I>Knitting against the war: Virginia Woolf’s building-up of forms</I>
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<I>Knitting against the war: Virginia Woolf’s building-up of forms</I>
https://annali.unife.it/lettere/article/download/1607/1446
                              SAVINA STEVANATO


                Knitting against the war:
          Virginia Woolf’s building-up of forms


                                                     O German mother dreaming by the fire,
                                                While you are knitting socks to send your son
                                                        His face is trodden deeper in the mud
                                                           (S. Sassoon, Glory of Women 1919)


                                                                        Knitting and waiting
                                                                  Through hours like years –
                                                                      Not with loud grieving
                                                                      Nor sighing nor tears –
                                                                   In their hands the needles
                                                                            Flash like spears.
                                                                      Every thread a sorrow,
                                                                   Every strand a prayer […]
                                                                   There are women knitting
                                                                               Everywhere…
                                                              (C.F. Smith, The Knitters 1915)


Both World Wars play a crucial role in Virginia Woolf’s fictional and non-fictional writ-
ings. Her macrotext variously testifies to the war on the level of content, by thematizing
it, and on the formal level by mimicking the phenomenological bursting caused by the
conflict. In this paper I intend to illustrate how Woolf’s formal strategies convey the ef-
fects of war and how, at the same time, they are also intended as a remedial alternative
to the destruction they narrate and epitomize. My analytical focus will be on Woolf’s
second experimental novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925), in which she creates an even balance
between narrated annihilation and narrating restoration, i.e. between content and form.
The latter compensates for the former’s destruction: the formal level contrasts with the
thematized deadly experience by exploiting the novel’s fecund dichotomy based on polar
Knitting against the war                                                        AOFL XII (2017), 2, 99-118



opposites, such as life vs death, part vs whole, light vs darkness, health vs madness, sur-
face vs depth, high/up vs low/down, female vs male.
    Whilst on the one hand Woolf translates the war’s fragmented reality into a similarly
broken and parenthetical prose, on the other she manages to weave that fragmentation
back into unity through specific formal devices that will be analysed shortly. In this nov-
el, Woolf deals explicitly with the war and, more implicitly, with the possibility of op-
posing it through writing. It is through writing that she relates parts to form a pattern,
and this building-up device can be considered the artistic counterpart to another unify-
ing and typically female activity that the novel also thematizes: knitting and sewing.
                                                     *
From The Voyage Out (1915) onwards, Woolf’s writings make clear references to both
World Wars1. The First World War, in particular, represented a fundamental historical
reference point for modernist writers and also the climax of the fin-de-siècle crisis. It de-
finitively revealed that the world had radically changed from what was previously
known, and that the related nineteenth-century social value systems had finally col-
lapsed.
    In 1923, looking back, Lawrence and Woolf wrote respectively: «It was in 1915 the old
world ended» (Lawrence 1950, 243); «on or about December, 1910, human character
changed […] And so the smashing and the crashing began. Thus it is that we hear all
round us […], the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction […]. Signs of
this are everywhere apparent. Grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated» (Woolf 1966,
333f.). The year before, in The Waste Land, Eliot had likewise talked of destruction and
war when referring to: «a heap of broken images», «fragments shored against […] ru-
ins», and a crowd flowing «over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had
undone so many» (Eliot 1934, lines 22, 431, 62f.). With the war, the old world of social,
economical, political, religious and scientific certainties was completely smashed to piec-
es, literally and figuratively. Besides, for the first time in human history a war was in-
dustrialized, fought through technological machine guns causing mass slaughters that no


1 In Jacob’s Room (1922) Jacob dies fighting as a soldier; in To The Lighthouse (1927) the middle section re-
fers to the war by narrating objectual destruction and, incidentally and in parentheses, also Andrew Ram-
say’s death («[…] the thud of something falling. [A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were
blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous]. At that
season […]», WOOLF 1992b, 145); The Waves (1931) is characterized by military metaphors (cf. LEE 1991); in
The Years (1937) the focus on death is related to the impending war which is also the main theme of Three
Guineas (1938), the long essay in which Woolf adopts a feminist and antiwar position; finally, in Between
the Acts (1941) the planes in battle formation zoom menacingly through the airspace above Pointz Hall. Cf.
also the 1940 essay Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid (WOOLF 1967, 173-77).
Stevanato                                                                      AOFL XII (2017), 2, 100-118


civilian or soldier could be prepared to face. The use of gas, bombs, air raids revealed
technology’s highly dehumanizing and destructive potential2. The horror experienced by
the soldiers who survived WW1 caused extremely severe forms of physical and psycho-
logical trauma, generally described as shell shock.


While men were at war killing, destroying and dying, women were at home both taking
up male jobs such as working in munitions factories to help the country win the war or
farming the land, whilst also continuing to carry out traditionally female activities.
Among these was knitting/sewing, as amply attested in female First World War litera-
ture. Knitting became a symbol of women’s endurance and resistance in the face of the
pain and familial losses caused by the conflict. Both male and female writers widely em-
ployed this image from different perspectives3. Woolf also used the image repeatedly in
her writings, making it both refer to the ordinary activity and symbolize writing. The
symbolic meaning depends on the fact that knitting, sewing and similar activities all im-
ply creating or following patterns4. References to this image abound in Woolf’s macro-
text and the recurrence of this trope establishes an intertextual isotopy that strings her
novels together until her last book, Between the Acts, where, in keeping with their shak-
en faith in life, the female characters are no longer able to make enduring patterns, be
they ordinary or artistic, and Isa finally «let her sewing drop» (Woolf 1992c, 128).


Mrs Dalloway is notably connected to both The Voyage Out and the short story «Mrs
Dalloway in Bond Street». The former introduces the character of Mrs Dalloway, the lat-
ter provides the core idea of the novel and also serves as a working draft. Here, explicit
references to the war are made through mothers mourning their young sons’ deaths
since «[t]housands of young men had died that things might go on» (Woolf 1985a, 152f.).
The novel took two years to write (1922-1924) and its working title was «The Hours».



2   Over 16 million people died.
3 Among female authors, cf. Rose Macaulay’s Many Sisters to Many Brothers (1915) and Jessie Pope’s
Socks (1915), respectively: «In a trench you are sitting, while I’m knitting / A hopeless sock that never gets
done – / Well, here’s luck, my dear; – and you’ve got it, no fear; / But for me…a war is poor fun» (MACAU-
LAY 1915); «Shining pins that dart and click / In the fireside’s sheltered peace / Check the thoughts that
muster thick – / 20 plain and then decrease […] / Wonder if he’s fighting now, / What he’s done an’ where
he’s been; / He’ll come out on top somehow, – / Slip 1, knit 2, purl 14» (POPE 1915, 21).
4 Cf. SIM (2010). A very famous quotation from To the Lighthouse illustrates how female knitting opposes
male destruction and pessimism since it relates to hope, protection and restoration: contradicting her hus-
band’s prediction that the weather «won’t be fine», Mrs Ramsay states that «it will be fine», while knit-
ting the «reddish brown stocking» (WOOLF 1992b, 8).
Knitting against the war                                                       AOFL XII (2017), 2, 101-118



    The war experience brought about a generalized and acute sense of loss and precari-
ousness, which fed Woolf’s own keen sensitivity to bereavement and separation. Hence,
the topic of war closely matches one of her most generative themes, which tackles both
death and madness, and is a major macrotextual feature.
    In a 1922 entry in her diary, Woolf wrote of the novel: «Mrs Dalloway has branched
into a book; and I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide: the world seen by the
sane and the insane side by side», and «Mrs Dalloway seeing the truth, Septimus Smith
the insane truth» (Woolf 1981, 207). The following year, the diary testifies to a develop-
ment of the pairing: «I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity» (Woolf 1981,
248)5. She achieved this by employing two main characters who perfectly incarnate a di-
chotomous dynamic. This narrative and compositional device has a dual focus but, at the
same time, the two characters are absolutely complementary. As Woolf wrote in a 1925
letter, failure to make readers understand that «Septimus and Mrs Dalloway should be
entirely dependent on each other» (Woolf 1977, 189) would mean that the novel itself
was a failure. But she succeeded in conveying their great interdependence.


On one single June day Mrs Dalloway’s and Septimus Smith’s lives intersect abstractly
and implicitly. They live and walk in the same city, they share space and time, and are
also connected through other characters: Mrs Dalloway’s former admirer Peter Walsh
bumps into the couple Rezia-Septimus in the park, and Dr Bradshaw, in whose office
Septimus commits suicide, goes to Clarissa’s party where he narrates the event.
    In keeping with these two characters’ interdependence, party(life) and war(death) al-
ternate with each other: «The War was over […] she […] was going […] to give her par-
ty» (Woolf 1992a, 4f.)6 until, at the end of the novel, death enters the party as an unex-
pected guest: «A young man (that is was Sir William is telling Mr. Dalloway) had killed
himself. He had been in the army. Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party,
here’s death, she thought» (201). Despite her sense of death and attraction to darkness,


5 In June 1923 in her diary, Woolf defined the writing of the novel as «the devil of a struggle. The design is
so queer & so masterful» (WOOLF 1981, 249), and «character is dissipated into shreds now […] I insubstan-
tiate willfully […] distrusting reality – its cheapness. But to get further. Have I the power of conveying the
true reality?» (248). The following August, she added that it was one of her «most tantalising & refractory
of books» (262). Not only did she want to make a compact whole out of separate parts, she also meant to
convey the simultaneous workings of consciousness through the sequential linearity of the verbal code. As
Quentin Bell argued, in Mrs Dalloway Woolf wanted «to make literature ‘radial’ rather than ‘linear’»
(BELL 1972, 98).
6 All quotations from Mrs Dalloway are drawn from this edition and page numbers are provided in paren-
theses after quotations in the text and notes.
Stevanato                                                                    AOFL XII (2017), 2, 102-118


she finally sides with life. The positive/constructive and negative/destructive sides of the
novel hinge on Clarissa, who ends up accommodating and representing both content and
form, male destruction and female construction, war/death and knitting/writing.
                                                        *
Septimus Warren Smith has the war inscribed in his name. He is a war veteran suffering
from shell shock. Breaking, fragmentation, destruction and death are mainly conveyed
through Septimus’s madness7. Explicit references to the war precede his entrance into
the plot8 and lexical items belonging to the relevant semantic fields recur throughout the
novel (bones, dead, smoke, flames, horror, endurance). Right from the outset everybody
in the streets of London is made to think about the war, also recalled by the loud sound
the Royal car produces when passing through. Blocking the traffic, it makes all the pe-
destrians stop and look at it, sharing the same feelings: «strangers looked at each other
and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire» (19); «poor women waiting to see the
Queen go past – poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War» (21); «the
mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of the world» (63). Criticism of the
war is initially voiced through brief statements, but it can be easily and continuously in-
ferred by its traumatic and devastating effects on Septimus.
    He has survived the war, but the experience and the loss of his comrade Evans
shocked him to the extent of driving him mad. He feels guilty for having survived and
recollects the traumatic events so intensely as to estrange himself from reality. The war
experience has also destroyed his perception of a chronological hierarchy of past and
present which, in Septimus’s mind, mix as the past haunts and deforms the present. The
veteran Septimus returns home full of horror and loses his lucidity, his love for writing
and his poetic aspirations, his wife’s love and, finally, his own life. After the war, life
makes no sense:
       Septimus was one of the first to volunteer […]. There in the trenches […] he devel-
       oped manliness; […] when Evans was killed […he] congratulated himself upon feel-
       ing very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him […]. The last shells
       missed him. He watched them explode with indifference […] now that it was all
       over […] he had, especially in the evenings, these sudden thunder-claps of fear. He
       could not feel […] something failed him […]. There were moments of waking in the

7 The war is also indirectly referenced by other characters: Peter repeats the phrase «it was smashed to
atoms» (59) and Miss Kilman provides a perspective on the German side.
8 «[…] it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs Foxcroft […] because
that nice boy was killed […] or Lady Bexborough […] John, her favourite, killed» (WOOLF 1992a, 4f.); «This
late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sor-
rows; courage and endurance […]. Think, for example, of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough,
opening the bazaar» (10).
Knitting against the war                                            AOFL XII (2017), 2, 103-118


      early morning. The bed was falling; he was falling […]. He asked Lucrezia to marry
      him […] it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning. (94-97)


   Septimus sees Evans in other men walking along the streets of London and the fact
that «he did not feel. He had not cared when Evans was killed» (99) is a «crime» (105) to
be expiated. He also hears voices talking to him and is haunted by a sense of falling
downwards: «he could hardly walk. He lay on the sofa and made her hold his hand to
prevent him from falling down, down, he cried, into the flames! and saw faces laughing
at him, calling him horrible disgusting names, from the walls, and hands pointing round
the screen […] he began to talk aloud, answering people […] getting very excited and
making her write things down. Perfect nonsense it was; about death» (73). It is Rezia
who writes his thoughts down for him because he has lost the capacity to do so: «That
man, his friend who was killed, Evans, had come […] He was singing […]. She wrote it
down» (154). The feeling of «eternal suffering» is increased by that of «eternal loneli-
ness» (27) because he cannot express or communicate to others his traumatic feelings. At
the beginning of the novel, when we do not yet know him, Septimus is reported to have
said «I will kill myself» (17), but as the novel develops he feels that the whole world is
inciting him to do so: «he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself,
kill yourself, for our sakes […]. Communication is health […] happiness» (101f.). Being
unable to communicate, either orally or in written form, and feeling an extreme loneli-
ness, he decides to throw himself out of a window. Thus, he finally responds to the irre-
sistible lure of the downwards fall that has haunted him throughout the novel, and also
surrenders to the feeling of division and separation which robs reality of sense, and
which the clock strokes keep on repeating all over London: «Shredding and slicing, di-
viding and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day» (112).
                                              *
Whereas Septimus’s sense of fragmentation ends up in nothingness and although Claris-
sa shares some traits with him, she manages to restore a sense of unity by establishing
relationships between what he perceives merely as inexorably fragmented parts.
   Both are attracted by darkness, but she eventually escapes: «there was in the depths
of her heart an awful fear […] She had escaped. But that young man had killed himself»
(203). Like Septimus, she also feels guilty for surviving the dead («It was her punishment
to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness», 203),
but in the end she embraces life, detaching herself from Septimus: «She felt somehow
very like him […]. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on
Stevanato                                                              AOFL XII (2017), 2, 104-118


living […] she must go back» (204). Contrasting with Septimus’s plunge downwards, she
goes back to her guests «[l]olloping on the waves […] she seemed […] to be; to exist; to
sum it all up in the moment as she passed» (190). She finally manages to skim the watery
surface avoiding the depths of annihilation that Septimus has yielded to.
   According to Woolf’s initial design, Clarissa should have killed herself, but in the end
the author decided that this task would be accomplished by her alter-ego Septimus.
Clarissa has also been seriously ill, and the connection between her illness and the
strokes of the clock from St. Margaret’s church telling the hour points explicitly back-
wards to her past remembrances, and implicitly forwards to the end of the novel (the ap-
proaching party) and to the end of life (for Septimus both ends coincide): «She has been
ill, and the sound expressed languor and suffering. It was her heart […] and the sudden
loudness of the final stroke tolled for death» (54). Both are also haunted by the passing of
time and implied death. Nevertheless, while Septimus is no longer able to distinguish be-
tween past and present, as the former, related to the war, invades and distorts the latter,
Clarissa keeps them separate. This is why she can provide forms of relations and bonds,
whilst he cannot. And though she clearly shares with him a sense of the individual lone-
liness of human beings, she reacts differently. While he sees no potential for meaning,
she does. Her feminine centripetal ability to unite parts and people prevails through ac-
tivities that include connecting people by means of a party and also knit-
ting/sewing/mending. This is closely connected to her transcendental disposition, which
the novel describes in the following terms:
      did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely […]; did she resent it; or did
      it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow
      in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived […]
      being part […] of the trees at home; of the house there […]; part of the people she
      had never met; (9f.)


      she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’ […] but everywhere. She waved
      her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that […] even trees, or barns. It
      ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to
      believe […] that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momen-
      tary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the un-
      seen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even
      haunting certain places, after death. (167)


   Clarissa is herself a central and gravitational pivot with people conglomerating
«round her» «network»-like (84), and her own different selves assembling, in the
world’s eyes at least, into one: «That was her self when some effort […] drew the parts
Knitting against the war                                                     AOFL XII (2017), 2, 105-118



together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the
world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and
made a meeting-point» (40). Unlike the post-war Septimus but very like Woolf, Clarissa
knows how to transform plurality into unity, keeping different people, places, times and
her own separate selves together: «she felt if only they could be brought together; so she
did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create» (134). This unifying ability is im-
mediately, and in my opinion not coincidentally, followed by her decision to mend her
dress and to write: «She would mend it […] would take her silks, her scissors, her […]
thimble, of course, down into the drawing-room, for she must also write» (41). This is an
implicit but noteworthy hint at the connection stressed in the novel between sewing and
writing as mending, and thus remedial, activities.
                                                    *
Shifting the focus from content to form, we see how the dichotomic relationship between
Clarissa and Septimus informs the whole novel, and how a bursting and centrifugal plu-
rality branches out from it. Form is also dichotomic in that it is on the one hand out-
wardly disconnected and on the other genuinely connected at a deeper structural level.
We should begin by considering the centrifugal formal feature.
     The Clarissa-Septimus dichotomy produces a variety of motifs and sub-motifs that
can be summarized by keywords as follows:
                             Mrs Dalloway                    Septimus
                      recovered health          illness
                      life                      death
                      party                     war
                      sense of plenitude        sense of vacuum
                      non-rational thinking rational thinking
                      window to look from       window to throw himself out of9
                      upwards                   downwards
                      connection/relation       fragmentation/separation10



9 Windows are a major recurring motif in Woolf’s macrotext. The dichotomic relationship between Claris-
sa and Septimus is peculiarly marked by the presence of windows: the initial «open window» she was
standing at as a young girl in Bourton matches the final window that Septimus throws himself from and
also that from which, during her party, she observes and is observed by an old woman, pushing her back
to life and away from deadly thoughts.
10Some relevant textual references concern, for instance, the fact that while the royal car passing through
the London streets makes Mrs Dalloway think of the dead caused by the war in a communal sense, it
makes Septimus isolate himself from reality and others; she believes that «no mathematical instrument
[…] could register the vibration» (19), while he thinks that «one must be scientific, above all scientific»
Stevanato                                                                    AOFL XII (2017), 2, 106-118


   Against the background of the main opposition between Clarissa-and/vs-Septimus,
the novel’s form conveys fragmentation and its reference to war by splintering the plot,
its spatial and chronological references, the narrating voice and the narrative strategy.
   Despite the chrono-spatial unity (London on a June day) and the novel’s three main
polarizing elements (the clocks’ strokes everybody hears, the plane’s smoke words eve-
rybody watches, the royal car everybody sees and whose roaring everybody hears), the
plot explodes into a multiplicity of places and times related to the minds and memories
of individual characters. This fragmentation is also conveyed by the use of multiple
viewpoints mimicked by one narrating voice that splits into many, following the charac-
ters’ spatial and mental meanderings. This happens, for example, in the park when Sep-
timus, Rezia and Peter cross each other’s paths without knowing one another and their
thoughts are taken up by the narrator by ramifying the narrative focus:
       A man in grey was actually walking towards them. it was Evans! But no mud was
       on him; no wounds; he was not changed. I must tell the whole world, Septimus
       cried, raising his hand (as the dead man in the grey suit came nearer), […] ‘But I am
       so unhappy, Septimus,’ said Rezia, trying to make him sit down. […]. He was talk-
       ing […] this man must notice him. He was looking at them. ‘I will tell you the time,’
       said Septimus […], smiling mysteriously at the dead man in the grey suit […]. And
       that is being young, Peter Walsh thought as he passed them. (76f.)


   This multiplication also implies that the same referent is given different meanings: the
dead man in a grey suit is both Septimus’s imaginary Evans and the real Peter who
walks by and comments on the couple.
   The confusing plurality on the level of content also results from the fact that the nar-
ration is broken up and parenthetical, often lacking a logical progression between parts
which are juxtaposed without being explicitly related. Parentheses may enclose events as
well as thoughts. In the following quotation, Clarissa’s thought is given without paren-
theses while events are described parenthetically: «Richard […] did things for them-
selves, whereas she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not
for themselves […]; perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand)
for no one was ever for a second taken in» (10). The contrary also occurs, with thought
in parentheses and reality not: «‘Who can – what can,’ asked Mrs Dalloway (thinking it
was outrageous to be interrupted at eleven o’clock […])» (43); when Septimus decides to
kill himself: «(for she was with him). Holmes and Bradshaw liked that sort of thing. (He


(24); she figuratively surfaces from the depth like a mermaid (190), while he plunges into them as believes
he «went under the sea» (75).
Knitting against the war                                                      AOFL XII (2017), 2, 107-118



sat on the sill.) But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life
was good» (163f.). Parentheses may equally convey a character’s thoughts within the
strain of thoughts of another, as in the following example regarding Septimus (outside
parentheses) and Rezia (in parentheses): «I have been dead, and yet am now alive, but let
me rest still, he begged (he was talking to himself again – it was awful, awful!)» (75). A
further example concerns Peter and the mixing of his thoughts about Clarissa with his
actions described in parentheses and interrupting the thoughts: «She belonged to a dif-
ferent age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon,
stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on […] this interminable
– (he felt for a copper to buy a paper and read about Surrey and Yorkshire; he had held
out that copper millions of times – Surrey was all out once more) – this interminable
life» (178).
     Such atomization similarly concerns minor characters and events, and is also suggest-
ed by the use of numerous deictics whose referents are often delayed. Recurrent personal
pronouns may precede their nominal reference so that it is never clear who is really talk-
ing or doing something, or what is being done or happening. This deferral is often ac-
companied by chronological and spatial fragmentation since we are not given precise co-
ordinates and have to piece information together as the reading proceeds11.


If form conveys a fragmented plurality which thus mimics the effects of war, it is also
able to provide union and oppose fragmentation. We have already discussed the peculiar
status of both the single narrative voice and the chrono-spatial unity. The novel’s unity
is further indicated by its circularity: it begins and ends with Mrs Dalloway, enclosed be-
tween her surname given in the incipit, «Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers
herself» (3), and her name appearing at the very end, «[it] is Clarissa, he said. For there
she was» (213). The use of the reflexive pronoun and cleft sentences highlights identity,
life and continuation in contrast with Septimus’s war experience and his suicide.
     The whole novel is tightly woven through paradigmatic connections based on pat-
terns of recurrence and variation, just as a knitted fabric is. Both knitting/sewing and
writing are presented as female activities: the former practiced by Mrs Dalloway, Rezia
and the nurse in the park; the latter, practiced by Septimus before the war, is now taken

11Despite the chronological information given by the clocks on the precise hours of the June day, if we
want to identify the precise dates both of the present of narration in London and of the past events in
Bourton, we must gather all the scattered information throughout the novel in order to reconstruct the
precise dates. Other references to time lapses are provided incidentally («[t]hose five years – 1918 to 1923
–», 78).
Stevanato                                                                   AOFL XII (2017), 2, 108-118


up by Rezia though she has no ability or interest in it and does it only to note down what
her husband wants her to as he is no longer able to write.
     Like a woven pattern, the novel is built on recurring crossings between formal com-
ponents. It is worth noting that Woolf sensitizes the reader to formal strategies based on
the concept of crossing by first thematizing them as, for instance, road crossings (Claris-
sa, Peter, Rezia, Septimus are all described while waiting to cross or crossing the road).
This implicitly allows the reader to shift their attention from content-related crossings to
formal crossings. Focusing on the latter entails considering the formal hinges that allow
for the construction of the formal network. These are unifying as they allow the charac-
ters to experience similar events simultaneously (such as loud sounds recalling the war:
the violent noise, like a pistol shot, from a motor car; the strikes of Big Ben and other
clocks booming the hours all day long; the zooming of an airplane over their heads).
Therefore, the main hinges are:
     – Time. The clocks striking the hours provide a shared temporal framework for all of
the characters, uniting them despite their mnemonic forays into their different past expe-
riences: «It was precisely twelve o’clock; twelve by Big Ben; whose stroke was wafted
over the northern part of London […] twelve o’clock struck as Clarissa Dalloway laid her
green dress on her bed, and the Warren Smiths walked down Harley Street» (103). Rele-
vant phrases and expressions echo each other throughout the novel («the leaden circles
dissolved in the air» is used over twenty times, and «irrevocable» also recurs insistent-
ly)12.
     – Space. London is the spatial hinge with its many places (the park, the streets,
Westminster, the Strand) which the characters traverse either on foot or by bus. Both the
plane in the sky and the car along the streets accentuate the spatial unity as they repre-
sent centralizing and collective elements: all the pedestrians look simultaneously at them
and hear their zooming and booming, trying to make out the plane’s smoke words in the
sky and to understand if the car has a royal figure in it.
     – Characters. Some characters work as catalysts and unifiers: the child Elise Mitchell,
for instance, bumps into Rezia while running in the park and the scene is observed by
Peter who is also there: «scudded off again full tilt into a lady’s legs. Peter Walsh
laughed out. But Lucrezia Warren Smith was saying to herself, It’s wicked […] having
left Septimus […] to talk to himself, to talk to a dead man, on the seat over there; when
the child ran full tilt into her […] The child ran straight back to its nurse […] who put


12
 From this centripetal time references irradiate a wealth of centrifugal, chronological and psychological
meanderings.
Knitting against the war                                            AOFL XII (2017), 2, 109-118



down her knitting, and the kind-looking man gave her his watch» (71). The child allows
Woolf to weave the characters’ different viewpoints together: Peter’s being seen as a
«kind-looking man» by Rezia and, probably, as a «dead man» by Septimus who sees
Evans in him.
   – Formulae/expressions. There are some specific features that link present and past
events and memories, and the characters among themselves either through similarity or
difference, thus establishing isotopies. The principal ones are:
         – the «squeak of the hinges» that connect the June London day with a day in the
past in Bourton;
         – windows (the ominous window of Septimus’s suicide, the open window in Bour-
ton where a young Clarissa felt something awful was about to happen);
         – sounds (besides the plane’s zooming, the car’s booming and the clocks’ chiming,
there are also the beggar’s song and the ambulance’s siren);
         – water, depths and downward plunges. The squeak of the hinges brings Clarissa
back to the past and she «plunged at Bourton» (3), which is the same word Woolf makes
her use to refer to Septimus when she hears of his suicide and wonders: «had he plunged
holding his treasure?» (202). The attraction towards downward movement and watery
depths is shared by many characters: Clarissa wears a «silver-green mermaid’s dress»
(190); Peter thinks that «our soul, […], our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies
among obscurities […] and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she
shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need
to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping» (176); Peter also perceives Clarissa’s centripe-
tal power in watery terms: «it was her street […]; cabs were rushing round the corner,
like water round the piers of a bridge, drawn together, it seemed to him because they
bore people together going to her party» (180); Septimus sees Rezia like a «lily, drowned,
under water» (97), and he also feels he is drowning and falling himself: «The bed was
falling, he was falling» (95); «He was drowned, he used to say […]. He would look over
the edge of the sofa down into the sea […] he was falling down, down into the flames»
(154);
         – other recurrent expressions are: «the yellow curtain with all the birds of Paradise
blew out» (184, 186) which also marks point-of-view shifts (from Richard to Clarissa and
from Clarissa to Ellie); «fear no more the heat of the sun / nor the furious winter’s
rages» (10) repeated either completely or partially both by Septimus and Clarissa as both
know Shakespeare’s Cymbeline; «horror» referred to Masie Johnson, Septimus and
Clarissa.
Stevanato                                                                      AOFL XII (2017), 2, 110-118




     Within this macroframe of formal similarities, one specific analogy is that established
between Clarissa and Septimus, which relates them in almost identical terms. A brief
overview of just some of the many formal crossings between them may be of help:
                  Mrs Dalloway                                               Septimus
«a touch of the bird about her» (4);                      «sparrow[s] perched […] in Greek» (26)
«little face, beaked like a bird’s» (11)                  «aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed»
                                                          (15)
«something awful was about to happen» (3)                 «something tremendous about to happen»
                                                          (75)
«It rasped her, though, to have stirring about «rasped his spine deliciously» (24)
in her this brutal monster! […] down […] the
soul […] at any moment the brute would be
stirring […] which, especially since her illness,
had power to make her feel scraped, hurt in her
spine» (13, down and brute semantically recall
Septimus’s downwardness and negativity)
«cabs […], like water […] drawn together» «this gradual drawing together of everything
(180, here an implicit echo of Septimus’s refer- to one centre» (16)13
ences to watery depths is at work)
«There was an emptiness about the heart of
life» (33), «It was something central» (34),
«some effort […] drew the parts together, she
alone knew how […] composed […] into one
centre» (40)
«A shock of delight» (203)                                «deferred effects of shell shock» (201)


     Therefore, whilst on the one hand Woolf keeps Clarissa and Septimus separate on the
level of content where fragmentation prevails, on the other she manages to create a
strong connection between them and the level of form turns out to be a tightly-knit
whole.
                                                      *




13For Clarissa and Septimus the meaning of centre is simultaneously similar and different. She perceives it
as related to both plenitude/life and emptiness/death, while he only feels that «self-annihilation is the only
possible way to embrace that center which evades one as long as one is alive» (MILLER 1982, 197).
Knitting against the war                                           AOFL XII (2017), 2, 111-118



Clarissa returns to life through her relational power to unite people at her party, as
Woolf does, creating formal relationships that constitute a whole countering any form of
fragmentation. They are both knitters of patterns. The writer’s pattern is verbal and the
formal level of this novel testifies to art’s healing power: by narrating destruction and
death, the verbal form also restores fragments to unity, which is the novel itself. The
highly relational network Woolf creates induces the reader to make a mnemonic and
simultaneous synthesis of all the parts that defies separation and ending. It is writing
that guarantees this totality. In 31 May 1933, Woolf wrote in her diary: «I thought […]
something […] about the synthesis of my being: how only writing composes it: how
nothing makes a whole unless I am writing» (Woolf 1983, 161).
   Woolf intersperses the novel with both implicit and explicit hints at the unifying po-
tential of words and it is worth considering the motif of writing in its various inflections,
which also have a metanarrative meaning and relate to knitting.
   A first form of thematized writing pertains to Septimus. Words, in particular literary
words, oppose death since they keep it at a safe distance. Septimus’s own would-be liter-
ary words do so: «those writings, about war; about Shakespeare; about great discoveries;
how there is no death» (153). The war experience destroys his literary aspirations since,
when he comes home, both his spoken and his written words are fragmented and as bro-
ken as his mind and consciousness: «Burn them! he cried. Now for his writings; how the
dead sing behind rhododendron bushes; odes to Time; conversations with Shakespeare;
Evans, Evans, Evans – his messages from the dead; do not cut down trees; tell the Prime
Minister. Universal love: the meaning of the world» (162). Before the war he was able to
assemble poetic «hard, white, imperishable words» (76), reminiscent of Clarissa’s ability
to provide the world around her and herself with union and solidity (« assembling that
diamond shape, that single person», 41), and the plane’s white words.


Unsurprisingly, a second form of writing is that of the plane above London. Previously a
symbol of war, it has now become harmless because it writes white-smoke letters adver-
tising sweets. The positive value that the plane develops as a metonymic symbol of writ-
ing    and    transcendence      implies    the    opposition     words/upwards/sky        vs
bombs/downwards/depths. This positivity increases through a lexical analogy based on
«soar» and relating the plane to religion, in that both are reassuring: «that aeroplane […]
soared and shot […] till it was […] an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol […] of man’s
soul» (30), and a man standing on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral reflects on how the sa-
cred place is welcoming and reassuring since it offers company and answers to «that
Stevanato                                                                  AOFL XII (2017), 2, 112-118


plaguy spirit of truth seeking […]» (30), so he enters it and defines «a cross, the symbol
of something which has soared beyond seeking and questing and knocking of words to-
gether and has become all spirit» (31). This lexical crossing establishes a connection be-
tween the writing aeroplane and the cross as remedial symbols (both, incidentally, also
have a similar form), and consolidates the redeeming value of writing as a framework
that unites fragments. Consequently, by means of a network of relational similarities, the
plane eventually comes to symbolize union instead of destruction, thus contrasting war
and deadly bombs dropped downwards with lively words blown upwards. On the level
of content, its writing flight unites the plurality of people who try to put together the let-
ters it writes. On the formal level, it works as a Leitmotiv that connects different and op-
posite semantic areas such as female/male, death/life, bombs/words. Indeed, it coagulates
Mrs Dalloway (deciphering its words above), Septimus (as initially echoing a warplane),
religion and Woolf’s own writing14. Being both negative and positive, the plane is a mark
of the dichotomic structure of the novel, of its components’ interdependence and of the
unity opposing their separateness.
     At the same time, the plane also symbolizes Woolf’s own writing: its white-smoke
words disappear as hers do (given the temporal and sequential nature of the verbal code),
and they are difficult to make out as hers are. In the novel, «building up» is a positive
action related to an upward movement that implies interacting features such as the sky,
the plane, writing, delight/ecstasy and the female gender: «And now, curving up and up,
straight up, like something mounting in ecstasy, in pure delight, out from behind poured
white smoke looping, writing a T, an O, an F» (31); «What is this terror? what is this ec-
stasy? […] It is Clarissa» (213, my italics). This generates a cluster of significance that re-
lates the female dimension to creation.
     The change undergone by the plane from a male symbol of war and destruction to a
female one of life and creation, results from the fact that, in the novel, the ability to keep
together and relate parts through networks of relations is female: Clarissa, with her par-
ty, unites people, their present and hers, their past memories and hers; Rezia orders Sep-
timus’s fragmented words into written ones. Both also sew, mend and create, showing a
typically female patterning ability to weave threads into wholes. Clarissa mends her
green silk dress: «Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle […] collected the
green folds together» (43); Rezia sews hats and Septimus admires her with «her needle
flashing straight» (157), and when the needle breaks, the prose does so too, mimicking


14 Woolf’s macrotext is extensively chacterized by the generative dichotomy air/above/surface-life vs wa-
ter/below/depth-death.
Knitting against the war                                                     AOFL XII (2017), 2, 113-118



the breaking and implicitly relating the needle to a pen: «Hat, child, Brighton, needle.
She built it up, first one thing than another, she built it up sewing» (160). The recurrent
use of the verb build up in relation to female activities consolidates the idea of a female
generative ability which is simultaneously a metanarrative hint about Woolf’s writing.
The motif is strengthened by other scattered references to knitting female figures, as
when, in Regent’s Park, the «grey nurse resumed her knitting […] the elderly nurse knit-
ted over the sleeping baby» (62-64), or in «the village street where the women stand
knitting» (63)15.
     Woolf’s highly patterned writing depends on the many relational crossings she em-
ploys, building them on similarities, analogies, repetition-and-variation formulae.
     Almost at the end of the novel, there is a revealing example that illustrates Woolf’s
verbal knitting16. Through Peter’s point of view, we are given a comment on the passing
of an ambulance which, we know, is that sent for Septimus: «the ambulance sped to the
hospital, having picked up instantly […] some poor devil […] knocked over perhaps a
minute or so ago at one of these crossings […] it crossed the Tottenham Court Road,
chiming constantly» (165-6, my italics). The word ‘crossing’ means and is itself a con-
glomeration. On the one hand, it explicitly contains a spatial reference to road crossing
which is, in turn, made to cross a temporal reference, since the word ‘crossed’ is linked
to the word ‘chiming’, also hitherto referring to the chronological strokes of the clocks
and the inevitable movement towards death. On the other, it also suggests a metanarra-
tive reference to the novel’s form, based on the relational and crossing-like nature of
Woolf’s words that create crossroads of meanings encompassing death, space and time.
As the novel itself states, this allows Woolf’s literary words to provide the reader with
«a moment in which things came together; this ambulance; and life and death» (166).
     This confirms: a. that Woolf intended her writing to be a framework of formal cross-
ings providing relationships and therefore sense; b. the remedial role of Woolf’s formal
crossings previously illustrated by the analogy between the novel’s crossing isotopy and
the religious cross.




15 The sense of pattern also belongs to the male dimension but nothingness tends to prevail. Both Septimus
and Peter experience this and in similar ways. The former feels: «the leaves being connected by millions of
fibres with his own body […]. The sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of
the pattern» (24); the latter dreams that «myriads of things merged in one thing» but also of being blown
«to nothingness with the rest» and men and women being swept «into complete annihilation» (63).
16For a reflection on writing as a sort of «memory-work», a «tapestry of memory […] woven on the basis
of the experience of [both voluntary and involuntary] recurrence», cf. MILLER (1982, 8).
Stevanato                                                          AOFL XII (2017), 2, 114-118


   As we have already seen, although death enters Mrs Dalloway’s party and she also
feels attracted by its «embrace» (202) which preserves from the corruption of life, she at
last decides that «[s]he must assemble» (204). As she had already assembled threads by
sewing, she assembles both herself back to life and people together. She knows how to
relate parts, splinters, fragments, things and people. And this is also what Woolf does, by
writing as well as by knitting.
   Thematized knitting/sewing functions as a kind of metanarrative comment on
Woolf’s own writing. The novel itself is a knitted whole where the narrative threads cor-
respond to the many chronological chimes and spatial threads that run, respectively,
through the air and the streets of London, intersecting with each other, from the present
of a June day in 1923 and the past of the characters. Woolf manages to weave them all
together as Clarissa does both with her sewing and her party. The novel embodies the
sewing and the party by being itself a pattern of reciprocally related knitted threads.
Creating union is what both Woolf and Clarissa do through their ability to relate parts in
opposition to the annihilation of war and death.
   The interdependence Woolf intended to create between Clarissa and Septimus may
finally be further interpreted in the light of the knitting metaphor. On the one hand they
represent two complementary ways of reading reality, with one being the exact reverse
of the other: Septimus the fragmentary and impressionist way related to the multiplicity
of reality, Clarissa the unifying and ordering way that re-composes plurality into unity.
As in knitting, where reverse and front are simultaneously the same and different, Sep-
timus is the reverse, showing the stitches and knots in the depths of the fabric, Clarissa is
the front, allowing the overall design to be seen smoothly on the surface. Through their
interdependence, the novel also represents two levels of reading and, at the same time,
the reader’s task which entails experiencing confusion and ordering the parts to make
sense out of it.
   Keeping to the knitting metaphor, at a higher level it is Woolf who holds the needles,
Septimus and Clarissa, together to compose a whole.
   After a nervous collapse in January 1912, Woolf wrote to Leonard: «I now feel very
clear, calm, and move slowly, like one of the great big animals at the zoo. Knitting is the
saving of life» (Woolf 1975, 491). Both knitting and writing involve the «delight to put
the severed parts together» which coincides with the revelation of a «hidden pattern»
and with the awareness that «[i]t is only by putting it into words that [she] make[s] it
whole» (Woolf 1985b, 72). It is interesting that, in the same year, Vanessa Bell captured a
significant image of this in her Virginia Woolf, where the writer is portrayed while knit-
Knitting against the war                                        AOFL XII (2017), 2, 115-118



ting. I wish to end my paper with this visual image of Woolf, in which the writer and the
knitter coincide: two related forms of patterning that represent Woolf’s antidotes to
death and war.




                   Virginia Woolf by Vanessa Bell (née Stephen) oil on board, 1912
                   Reproduced courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery of London
                 © NPG 5933 – Mkey 8084




Savina Stevanato
Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia
Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati
Città Venezia
stevanat@unive.it
Stevanato                                                        AOFL XII (2017), 2, 116-118


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Q. Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, New York.

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K. DeMeester, Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, «Modern Fiction
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T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems, Orlando-New York.

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P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford.

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D. Goldman (ed.), Women and the War World 1: the Written Response, Basingstoke-
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S.R. Grayzel, Women and the First War World, Edinburgh.

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M. Hussey (ed.), Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth, New York.

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D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (1923), London.

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J. Lee, «This hideous shaping and moulding». War and The Waves, in M. Hussey (ed.),
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J.H. Miller, Fiction and Repetition. Seven English Novels, Oxford.

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J. Pope, Jessie Pope’s War Poems, London.
Knitting against the war                                         AOFL XII (2017), 2, 117-118


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V. Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. by S. Dick, London.

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V. Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. by J. Schulkind, London.
Stevanato                              AOFL XII (2017), 2, 118-118


WOOLF 1992a
V. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, London.

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V. Woolf, Between the Acts, London.
