Mrs. Dalloway, Dawson & So-Called Living

Finding mindfulness and meaning in fiction

I’m going to take you through several streams of thought in this essay. We’re going to travel in time and space—from a Pittsburgh suburb to a quaint beach town in North Carolina and finally to Westminster, London one hundred years ago. So we’re not stuck in one day like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, although you might find some sense of deja vu and recognize familiar emotional strains. First, though, a word about Virginia Woolf…. Much has been said and is said about the way she captured the ceaseless working of human thought. E.M. Forster said that Woolf was uniquely talented in her ability to capture of the process of thinking.¹ I think (excuse the pun) it can sometimes be difficult for newcomers to her writing. The fashionable philosopher Charlotte Casiraghi² suggested reading a Virginia Woolf novel as you would read poetry: don’t be afraid to pick it up in different places, put it down for awhile and come back to it. Just appreciate the beauty of the words and, most importantly, don’t be afraid of Virginia Woolf.³ There is a wonderful podcast episode from the New York Times Book Review that celebrated, this year, the centennial of Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, in which Joumana Khatib, a New York Times Book Review editor, recalls Forster’s essay (written in the wake of Woolf’s death) and succinctly describes her writing as giving “acute pleasure in new ways and [pushing] the light of the English language a little further against darkness.”⁴ Emphasis on the language is, for me, the core reason why Casiraghi’s suggestion resonates so well with me. Thoughts arise from our emotions—our pain, our frustration and fear, anger and doubt. They generate stories, which are just streams of thought, and the stories that turn around in our minds drive us to act, often quite foolishly. Woolf put this process down in poetic, beautiful style, making it tactile, something we can understand and relate to. Her words make thought and feeling tangible. MJ Franklin, in cohesion with Casiraghi’s description of Woolf’s writing as poetic, calls it “rhythmic and intentional.” It has a “cadence,” he says. He personally opts to read the words out loud because doing so makes him physically feel what the characters are feeling. It is that process of the words coming out of his lungs that gives him a special experience in reading Virginia Woolf. (Franklin is the host of the podcast and also a New York Times Book Review editor.) I personally like to listen to the words of Virginia Woolf. I have her books in my Audible account and I love hearing the words spoken by fine British actors like Juliet Stevenson and Finty Williams. Occasionally, in listening, my mind will wander, something that also happens to Laura Thompson, as she admits to in the podcast. It is the consequence of reading poetry, the cadence rolling in your mind, the rhythm carrying the words into flight. That’s why, as Casiraghi indicated, you can find yourself jumping in and out of the novels, and while that can be frustrating if you’re fixed on a novel being a linear experience, if you treat it as poetry and just relax, and learn to forgive yourself for lapses of attention, because you can always come back to it at any point, you can find yourself learning to be more mindful, more present, and more alive. “Go for vibes,” said Khatib in the podcast. Emotions are messy and some things will pass you by, but that’s ok. You’ll feel it when you feel it.

The end of that podcast provides a great segue into the meat of what I want to talk about in this essay. In their conversation, Khatib, Thompson, and Franklin pivot to exchanging ideas about subsequent writings relevant to Mrs. Dalloway. This got me thinking more about why Mrs. Dalloway is still relevant one hundred years later. I mean, in a way, it’s a no-duh, right? Human emotion and human thought are always relevant. Much has changed technologically and geopolitically since Virginia Woolf’s time, but we all know too well the things that never change—ego and pain, and the perpetuation of conflict both on the level of nations and in the domestic sphere, for instance. Moreover, there are the same sexual tensions, the same inequalities between the sexes, the power struggles, the misogyny, and even questions (unbelievable) as to whether a woman should have the right to choose whether to see her own damn pregnancy all the way through. What happens to a woman when she ceases to be Clarissa and becomes Mrs. Dalloway? In 2025, she still has the right to vote and her property is her own, but in these topsy turvy times it would be a mistake to take any rights for granted, given all the nefarious forces hellbent on snatching them back. Another way this novel still hits home is that its central character is a middle-aged woman. That was unusual in Virginia’s time, but in our own times, we have people living longer and, therefore, ever increasing aged populations. The 50s woman today is someone fairly comfortable in the digital realm; she was born in the 70s, grew up in the 80s, came of age in the 90s. She has a Substack. She “tweets” either on X or Bluesky, if she even goes for that sort o thing at all. She is most certainly on Instagram, and perhaps even Threads. She could be arried, divorced, widowed, or fixedly single, but that was always true. It’s the perception or reception of those statuses that tends to vary. Cat ladies, in general, are perpetually scorned, but attitudes about spinsterhood are shifting. I have no head for statistics, but everything points to the current decade being exceptional for high numbers of “single by choice” people across multiple generations.⁵ Dating is not only risky but dangerous and many of us just find plenty of other things to do. And yet the truism that the more things change, the more they remain the same, essentially stands. Mrs. Dalloway was confused and so are we.

As far as generations go, my birth year puts me in that strange group known as the Xennial. We are sandwiched by the latchkey kids (we were latchkey too, many of us) and the kids who are buried in student debt (we are buried in it too, most of us). We are more educated than any prior generation, but we are also less employed, and chronically underemployed, and frustratingly overqualified for whatever employment we are able to gain. We have less savings, less sex, and in some cases, less rights. Less safety too, perhaps, but then safety has always been rather precarious. There’s small comfort, I suppose, in that we’re all in this earthly experiment together. There are more of us at the bottom than in the middle, and a barely perceptible fraction at the top. It must be lonely up there in the tower. Who am I kidding? It’s lonely down here too, even amid the masses. We are all alone in the crowd, too busy scrolling to look up and talk to each other. We expose more, but we also hide more. We put on disguises and do lots of pretending. There’s an excellent Substack article about that very thing, the pretense of the pretense of the Silent Suburbanites, by

The New Unhinged

.⁶

I have no segue for it, so I’ll just throw it down: I’m in the middle of season two of Dawson’s Creek. It was a show I watched on the WB Network as a New Adult in the late 90s/early 2000s. Presently, I’m rewatching it with my mother, who is on it for the first time. The novelty of a show about introspective teenagers who use big words appealed to me in my 20s—because I was an introspective, introverted weirdo who used big words. I’m close to 50 now, but the show has not lost an ounce of its attractiveness. Kevin Williamson, indeed, put together a show in five seasons that stands the test of time because, like the novels of Virginia Woolf, it’s about human feelings. Dawson is a great kid, an awesome kid really, who is struggling to navigate his reality. He doesn’t quite fit in the world. He divides his thoughts between fantasy (he loves film, especially Spielberg ones) and a confusing reality where his parents are less mature than he is and have more disturbing problems than he does. How they managed to raise him into the delightful wunderkind that he is may be one of the unsolvable mysterious of the show. Dawson doesn’t give himself nearly enough credit. He knows more than most of the other characters—about how to be in love, for instance—but because the world is so much more screwed up than he is, he feels utterly clueless in it. Why don’t people just follow their hearts, he seems to wonder. Why is the world run by egos and people are controlled by their fears? He studies film to understand human nature. He looks into the formula of the story to solve the mystery of romance. He compares notes on aesthetics and plot devices to better understand human behavior.

On another 90s show (sadly one that did not fly as Dawson’s Creek did) the actor Claire Danes gave expression to the teenager Angela Chase. My So-Called Life only ran for one season, but don’t be quick to judge. Failure is not always the fault of the subject, and sometimes success is unmerited. Good shows flop sometimes, and bad shows exceed expectations on a regular basis. The creator Winnie Holzman has had success stories too; she was a writer on The Wonder Years and she wrote ten episodes of Thirtysomething. She also wrote the screenplay for the musical Wicked (2024). Holzman wanted to write a TV show about a teenager who was far from perfect, but also not absolutely bad. She gave nuance to her characters—people doing good and bad, people being both good and bad. She also wanted to avoid the temptation to use sexual exploitation as a ratings grab.⁷ Just portray the teenager as she is. Show the parents as they are. Write the relationships authentically, as they evolve or devolve. This was not meant to be Beverly Hills 90210. Holzman set the scene as a suburb of Pittsburgh, not even the more enticing Philadelphia. The parents are not lawyers. They are just small business owners, running a printing business. The high school is a dump. Angela is not pursuing excellence. She is not captain of the squad. She is not even on a squad, but she does as well as she can. She seems to just want to understand things, to find meaning and make sense of the nonsensical. She pays attention in class and earnestly seeks the answers to big life questions in the assignments. She likes English and enjoys the books assigned in class. She wants to understand Anne Frank and to know what is Kafkaesque. “Metamorphosis”⁸ was one of the episodes that impressed me most. Much like Virginia Woolf, that episode emphasizes interiority and how it differs from or even defies exterior reality. For example, you might dislike your surroundings or, like the bug in the Kafka book, despise the way someone treats you, but your feelings (of love, perhaps) or thoughts (fear of the alternative) motivate you to stay in an unsatisfying situation. In the episode, Angela does battle with a zit on her face. Meanwhile, there’s a poll making the rounds in the school hallways, objectifying the girls and rating them according to sex appeal. We see Angela and her classmates battling with self-esteem issues and self-consciousness. The best part is at the close, when Angela’s VoiceOver muses about all of us living in a prison for the “crime” of hating ourselves. “Sometimes it seems like we’re all living in some kind of prison and the crime is how much we hate ourselves. It’s good to get really dressed up once in a while and admit the truth—that when you really look closely, people are so strange and so complicated that they’re actually….beautiful.”⁹

My So-Called Life was a show that I watched as a teenager. As a fellow underdog, I rooted for Angela to rise above mediocrity. Watching it again at age 48, I found myself engaged with it on a more holistic level. I’m not a teenager who wants my avatar to achieve the heights that terrify me. I am an adult who finally knows what is important. I think somehow we always know on some level what is important, but most of us are not in touch with that part of us that knows, and even those of us who might sometimes sense the higher consciousness…well, I guess we’re inconsistent. We falter and fall back into the absurd. The key, I think, is awareness. It is in learning to be in touch with our feelings and thoughts. From that higher place, we must inevitably make better decisions, ones that are in tune with our vibrations. Alas, do not be afraid of Virginia Woolf!

NOTES

*Picture credit: Photo by Buse Çolak from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/virginia-woolf-book-with-coffee-on-fabric-29647366/

1. https://yalereview.org/article/forster-the-novels-of-virginia-woolf

2.

3.

4. “Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ at 100.” The Book Review, The New York Times. June 27, 2025.

5. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-americans-are-choosing-to-stay-single/ [archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250703223009/https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-americans-are-choosing-to-stay-single/ ]

6. Suburbageddon

7. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/moment-tvs-teen-revolution-truly-began-235443548.html [ archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20250720230238/https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/moment-tvs-teen-revolution-truly-began-235443548.html ]

8. https://90sflashback.wordpress.com/2019/09/21/my-so-called-life-5-the-zit-metamorphoses/ [ archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20221202172211/https://90sflashback.wordpress.com/2019/09/21/my-so-called-life-5-the-zit-metamorphoses/ ]

9. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0654964/?ref_=ttep_ep_5