Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Woolf’s Transformation of Providential Form
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to his faith in proportion. In his eff ort to convert others, Bradshaw is a force against life:
he “forbade childbirth” (84) and “feasts most subtly on the human will” (85). At her party
Clarissa thinks that he is “obscurely evil…capable of some indescribable outrage—forcing
your soul…they make life intolerable, men like that” (157). Th e capstone of Bradshaw’s role
as a force against life is, of course, his condemnation to death of Septimus.
Septimus embodies the spirit, not the letter, of Christianity. He regards himself as a
universal Messiah, unattached to a specifi c religion, and desiring not to convert and judge
others but simply to share his message of love and peace. And in his respect for trees he is
a force for life. Bradshaw embodies the letter of Christianity, the dogmatic perversion of
Christ’s teachings, demanding that people convert to his religious views and condemning
nonconformists to death. By equating Bradshaw, in Septimus’s view, with “human
nature,” Woolf intimates the prevalence of the hypocrisy of Christianity. She sees Christianity
as having strayed far from striving towards the love and peace that Christ originally
preached and which Septimus too preaches.
Th e confrontation between Bradshaw and Septimus occurs, as already noted, “in the
middle of the novel.” Woolf repeatedly stresses that it occurs at the middle of the day, noon: “It
was precisely twelve o’clock; twelve by Big Ben.… Twelve was the hour of their appointment”
(80). During this appointment, as Septimus is evaluated by Bradshaw for apparent madness,
he tells himself, “Once you fall…human nature is on you” (83). Septimus regards Bradshaw as
“remorseless” and a “torturer” (83), while Bradshaw patronizingly prescribes “milk in bed” for
a patient who to him is one of many deluded “prophetic Christs.” While Christianity teaches
that once you fall—that is, once you sin—the judgment of Christ is upon you, in this case the
role of judger and judged are reversed: human nature here judges the Christ fi gure.
Th e structuring of Mrs. Dalloway around a noon scene exemplifi es what Alastair Fowler
discusses as the Christian literary tradition of Providential form. Th is form involves the
structuring of a literary work around what Fowler calls a “numerological centre,” one concerning
Christ’s judgment. Fowler explains that this structure emerged in the Middle Ages,
when “the theological tradition of Biblical exegesis…taught the habit of regarding the most
serious literature as numerically constructed, and of giving special attention to the centre
verses of chapters, in the search for types of Christ” (66). Th is prioritization of a work’s
centre was prompted by the biblical book of Malachi, which describes how precisely at
noon (the centre of the day) the “sun of righteousness” appears (4.2). Christian readers in
the Middle Ages regarded this “sun of righteousness” as an emblem of Christ-come-in-judgment.
Fowler observes Providential form throughout Elizabethan and Baroque poetry. He
notes, for instance, the presence of angels and a rising sun in the numerically central stanza
of Donne’s “Nuptial Song,” as well as the Messiah’s returning ascent to Heaven, after defeating
Satan and his band, at the centre of Paradise Lost (Fowler 72, 116-17). 1
Douglas Brooks extends Fowler’s observations by observing Providential form in eighteenth-century
British novels, including Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Woolf’s diary and
Common Reader essays demonstrate her deep familiarity with the British literary canon, and
convey her particular fondness for the writing of, among others, Donne and Defoe. Her essay
“Defoe” in Th e Common Reader predates Mrs. Dalloway by several years. Robinson Crusoe
may have off ered Woolf the model for the providential structure of Mrs. Dalloway, and certainly
she might have observed it in many other British literary works. I suggest that Woolf
appropriated the Providential form from writers who used it to advance Christianity. Th is