Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
The Prime Minister
The prime minister in Mrs. Dalloway embodies England’s old values and hierarchical
social system, which are in decline. When Peter Walsh wants to insult Clarissa and
suggest she will sell out and become a society hostess, he says she will marry a prime
minister. When Lady Bruton, a champion of English tradition, wants to compliment
Hugh, she calls him “My Prime Minister.” The prime minister is a figure from the old
establishment, which Clarissa and Septimus are struggling against. Mrs. Dalloway takes
place after World War I, a time when the English looked desperately for meaning in the
old symbols but found the symbols hollow. When the conservative prime minister finally
arrives at Clarissa’s party, his appearance is unimpressive. The old pyramidal social
system that benefited the very rich before the war is now decaying, and the symbols of
its greatness have become pathetic.
Peter Walsh’s Pocketknife and Other Weapons
Peter Walsh plays constantly with his pocketknife, and the opening, closing, and fiddling
with the knife suggest his flightiness and inability to make decisions. He cannot decide
what he feels and doesn’t know whether he abhors English tradition and wants to fight
it, or whether he accepts English civilization just as it is. The pocketknife reveals Peter’s
defensiveness. He is armed with the knife, in a sense, when he pays an unexpected
visit to Clarissa, while she herself is armed with her sewing scissors. Their weapons
make them equal competitors. Knives and weapons are also phallic symbols, hinting at
sexuality and power. Peter cannot define his own identity, and his constant fidgeting
with the knife suggests how uncomfortable he is with his masculinity. Characters fall into
two groups: those who are armed and those who are not. Ellie Henderson, for example,
is “weaponless,” because she is poor and has not been trained for any career. Her
ambiguous relationship with her friend Edith also puts her at a disadvantage in society,
leaving her even less able to defend herself. Septimus, psychologically crippled by the
literal weapons of war, commits suicide by impaling himself on a metal fence, showing
the danger lurking behind man-made boundaries.
The Old Woman in the Window
The old woman in the window across from Clarissa’s house represents the privacy of
the soul and the loneliness that goes with it, both of which will increase as Clarissa
grows older. Clarissa sees the future in the old woman: She herself will grow old and
become more and more alone, since that is the nature of life. As Clarissa grows older,
she reflects more but communicates less. Instead, she keeps her feelings locked inside
the private rooms of her own soul, just as the old woman rattles alone around the rooms
of her house. Nevertheless, the old woman also represents serenity and the purity of
the soul. Clarissa respects the woman’s private reflections and thinks beauty lies in this
act of preserving one’s interior life and independence. Before Septimus jumps out the
window, he sees an old man descending the staircase outside, and this old man is a
parallel figure to the old woman. Though Clarissa and Septimus ultimately choose to
preserve their private lives in opposite ways, their view of loneliness, privacy, and
communication resonates within these similar images.
The Old Woman Singing an Ancient Song
Opposite the Regent’s Park Tube station, an old woman sings an ancient song that
celebrates life, endurance, and continuity. She is oblivious to everyone around her as
she sings, beyond caring what the world thinks. The narrator explains that no matter
what happens in the world, the old woman will still be there, even in “ten million years,”
and that the song has soaked “through the knotted roots of infinite ages.” Roots,
intertwined and hidden beneath the earth, suggest the deepest parts of people’s souls,
and this woman’s song touches everyone who hears it in some way. Peter hears the
song first and compares the old woman to a rusty pump. He doesn’t catch her
triumphant message and feels only pity for her, giving her a coin before stepping into a
taxi. Rezia, however, finds strength in the old woman’s words, and the song makes her
feel as though all will be okay in her life. Women in the novel, who have to view
patriarchal English society from the outside, are generally more attuned to nature and
the messages of voices outside the mainstream. Rezia, therefore, is able to see the old
woman for the life force she is, instead of simply a nuisance or a tragic figure to be dealt
with, ignored, or pitied.

two novels now, the British playwright and novelist Fay Weldon has created a remarkable
assembly of women, rampant against a field of the exasperating parents they rebelled against but
learned too well from, and the husbands and lovers whom they allow to make their lives a kind
of unbearable yet marvelous madhouse. Their vintage is pre- liberation, but the fact that Weldon
women are often passive victims of their femaleness is never the defining element of their
characters: they are insistently, even riotously, alive.

"Down Among the Women" (1972; Warner paperback, $1.25) spans 20 years in the lives of three
generations of women whose identities keep getting submerged in their relationships with a
memorable gallery of men. Weldon men are usually less sympathetic than women, sometimes
even grotesque, but only because their own characters have been so forced into the obsessive
anxiety for achievement that they can see women only as tools toward success.

The main characters of "Female Friends" are three women, now in their forties, who became
friends as children during the evacuation of wartime London. In a simultaneous unreeling of past
and present, we watch them go about their lives with a great deal of pain, guilt, self-deception,
self-irony and considerable grandeur.

Shy Chloe, married to tortured, pretentious scriptwriter Oliver, presides over a household of
children some her own and others the various discards of her friends, dead and alive. Most of
them have the same father, who is not Oliver. Chloe is long bored with Oliver, who treats her
contemptuously, yet she is terribly dependent on him. When she half- maneuvers the French
"maid," a young psychologist, to replace her in his dreaded physical affections, her friends are
horrified. Chloe prides herself--sometimes--on her orderly, martyred existence. The rest of the
time she is searching for a way out of it.

Marjorie is a dowdy, brilliant B. B. C. director. Her mother, the gorgeous Helen, dropped her off
in the English countryside as an evacuee in 1941, and has never quite gotten around to collecting
her. Now, some 30 years later, Helen lies dying in a London hospital and Marjorie is convulsed
with guilt at the condition of her health.

Grace, who stamped her foot and wished that Hitler would win the war if that would avoid
having an evacuated child take shelter in her Grace-centered suburban home, lives today with a
super-cool young filmmaker after a hideous marriage to an icy, now-dead millionaire whose
death she feels responsible for. She has abandoned her son--to Chloe--and devotes herself to
pleasure, remembering her own self-sacrificing mother with a shudder.

These women, dear friends, gossip unforgivably about one another, are exasperated by one
another's dependencies, find endless, carping fault with the others' too-easy acceptance of
humiliation, inflict devastating criticism upon one another for their respective willingness to be
used by men. And they love one another, for they see mirrored in their friends' inadequacies their
own unending struggles for self-esteem and autonomy. Eerily, we love them too as, horribly
flawed, they bumble through the delightful hell that Weldon has embroidered for our edification
and entertainment.

There is a major fault. Weldon is not always in control of her material, not always certain of her
own perspective: we can feel her vacillate sometimes between empathy and irritation, like one of
her own characters, uncertain whether these sometimes infuriating people don't, perhaps, deserve
to suffer as a result of their devotion to their particular demons. At its worst, this wavering
perspective could lead to a misreading of the novel--to interpretations of man-hating on one
hand, or anti-feminism on the other.

The narrative itself, delicately managed in many layers, is terse, clean and so witty as often to be
epigrammatic. Sometimes the dialogue is telescoped into script form, a non- intrusive device
which admirably matches the pace and the structure of the plotting. And so much does the
language glitter that it's possible, I guess, to read all of this as surface dazzle, brilliant gossip
about love, friendship, death. But be not so deceived. This, in a way that snaps national, racial
and class barriers for millions of women around the world, is the way it is.