An “Elegy Played among the Traffic”:

Motor-Cars in Mrs. Dalloway

When an old man plays a penny whistle outside a public house, hoping to solicit change from passersby, Septimus Smith, raised on the English pastoral, hears the street music as “a shepherd boy’s piping”: “This boy’s elegy is played among the traffic, thought Septimus” (103). Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s elegy, is also “played among the traffic”—indeed, traffic becomes a leitmotif throughout the novel as her characters find themselves repeatedly waiting at crossings for lights to change. It is the perils of London traffic that reminds Clarissa of the precariousness of life: “She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day” (11). Peter’s momentary imagining of Septimus’s death—“some one . . . knocked over perhaps a minute or so ago at one of these crossings, as might happen to oneself” (229)—confirms Clarissa’s impression of London traffic as both a literal and metaphoric threat to human vulnerability.

Only nationalism has the power to halt traffic. First it is the mysterious motor car which blocks traffic long enough to create intense speculation among those on the streets of London and provoke a wave of nationalism. Later, it is the procession of soldiers marching to place a wreath on the empty tomb: “The traffic respected it; vans were stopped” (76).

Each focal character in Mrs. Dalloway has a different aesthetic response to otherwise incessant “street uproar” (18). While Clarissa recognizes its dangers, traffic—“the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans” (5)—is also paradoxically part of “what she loved” about “life; London; this moment of June” (5). Richard shares Clarissa’s sense of menace, although (ever the politician) he is particularly incensed at the dangers the traffic poses to the very young: “. . . [I]t did make his blood boil to see little creatures of five or six crossing Piccadilly alone. The police ought to have stopped the traffic at once” (75). His own child, now grown, seems to share her mother’s ambivalence as Elizabeth boards an omnibus that suddenly transforms itself into a pillaging buccaneer (205). Her mentor, Miss Kilman, has a darker view as she feels herself first “[b]eaten up, broken up by the assault of carriages, the brutality of vans” (194) but is ultimately relieved: “In the midst of the traffic, there was the habitation of God” (202).

The incorrigible Peter Walsh’s response to the prevalence of the motor-car in modern London is characteristically self-centered: “And there he was, this fortunate man, himself, reflected in the plate-glass window of a motor-car manufacturer in Victoria Street” (72). Even thoughts of Clarissa divert him only temporarily from his preoccupation with himself: “Clarissa had gown hard, he thought; and a trifle sentimental into the bargain, he suspected, looking at the great motor-cars capable of doing—how many miles on how many gallons? For he had a turn for mechanics” (73).

Throughout this novel haunted by the damage World War I has caused to British society, the traffic becomes the vital sign of a living city: “Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets” (82).