For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over twenty—one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

Basic Set Up

This paragraph is from the first chapter of Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway herself is rushing out to run some errands around London.

In the Romantic period, novelists were besotted by the natural world. They couldn't get enough of birdies and bees and butterflies. By the era of the Modernists, however, writers had become alienated from the natural world. They were thoroughly citified.

Some writers of the modern age whine about this separation from the natural. Others, like Woolf, couldn't get enough of city life. You can see her enthusiasm for all things big, gritty, and bustling in this quote—being surrounded by people and hustle is a jubilation-inducing act of love.

Mrs. Dalloway is on exactly zero people's list of Books That Are Uplifting. This is a sad novel about the loneliness of age, the process of losing love, the horrors of war, the horrors of doctors, and suicidal tendencies.

But it does have one total soft spot: this book loves London. It can't get enough London. Mrs. Dalloway pretty much gushes about how cool London is.

And this gushing isn't London-specific; it's metropolis specific. When Woolf writes about "the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead," the sights and sounds and smells of all big cities are evoked.

This could be New York, or Paris, or Moscow. It could be San Francisco, or Dublin, or Madrid. What's important is that there is a throng and crush of people vying for life… and it's awesome. This isn't Dickens' London, or Sinclair's Chicago: we're not made miserable by the idea of the city and yearning to rush off to the countryside for some R&R. The city is as splendid as any babbling brook, in Woolf's humble opinion.

And why? Because the city is a seething mass of humanity. The people playing in those brass bands aren't important—they aren't princes of Denmark—but they're still noteworthy. Those sandwich men aren't kings… but they're making Clarissa Dalloway's life richer. Clarissa herself isn't a queen. She's a plain ol' housewife.

The Modernists were dour about most things, but they were pretty uplifting when it came to considering ordinary people as worthy of characterization as nobility and heroes.