Surveillance and Paranoia in a New Public

The first time I read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, in the spring of 2023, I admit that I don't think I quite understood it.

Wanting another shot at it, I attended a seminar to learn more about the classic tale of Woolf’s famous hostess. Luckily, the edition that the seminar read was the beautiful Norton Annotated edition with introduction and extensive annotations by Merve Emre, a favorite critic of mine.

Emre's annotations really helped me keep track of what was going on, as well as where we were, physically, in London.

Obviously tons of essays and reviews have been written on Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway, and there will be a slew more this spring/year for the book’s 100th anniversary. I'm not an expert, but I did want to get down a few notes from this particular re-read and seminar, if for no one else than my future self.

The invention of public (space)

One of the scenes that we focused on in the seminar was the sky-writing scene. In it, a variety of Londoners, from a variety of stations of life, stop their day to look up at an airplane writing something with smoke in the air. These Londoners do not know each other, and yet they have now had a shared experience.

Certainly London, as a city, had existed before the 1920s, but this particular experience of display/reading on a mass stage required flying airplanes to be cheap enough to make advertising via sky writing worth it to some entrepreneur. Sky writing is, in this sense, an early example of real-time mass media.

It’s nice to have more water-cooler moments, a la The Office! But this also means that the public spaces of this dense city become more of a public stage, where everyone is observed; we might even say surveilled. There is now, moreso than before, a public that one must appear in, must behave correctly in, must subject themselves to a particular and new gaze.

Emre quotes a bit from Woolf's now-published diaries in her introduction. This bit stuck out to me:

To me, this sounds like a fear of this new, inquisitive public. Its surveillance of bodies, perhaps enforcing all fires be — or appear — “regular.”

“Suppose they had heard him?” Septimus in public

Septimus, a traumatized World War I veteran, is first mentioned in this line: “Septimus Warren Smith, who found himself unable to pass, heard him.” Ostensibly this is referring to his inability to get around traffic caused by the appearance of a fancy car, but I see it as a nod and wink to Septimus’s inability to pass the scrutiny of this public gaze, due to his mental health issues, something that even his foreign wife Rezia (Lucrezia) understands. We see this just a page later:

People must see. They transform into “people” once Septimus does something irregular. Suppose they had heard him? Failure must be concealed — another way of saying “passing.” Even Rezia, a foreigner, picks up on this.

Later, Rezia directs a woman asking for directions, Marie Johnson, away “lest she should see Septimus.” There is a paranoia here. A belief that Septimus, and thus Rezia herself, is “suspicious” to others. She feels that Septimus, and thus herself, are guilty of something (taking up space in public?). That they are exposed to something that they weren’t before Septimus was suicidal.

Despite Rezia’s efforts, Johnson still observes that “both seemed queer” and “that young man on the seat had given her quite a turn. Something was up, she knew… Horror! horror! she wanted to cry.” (That Septimus may be a homosexual obviously comes into play with the word choice of “queer.” I’m not interested in what the word meant at what time in what context, partially because I interpret the word as covering the observable mannerisms of disability and/or homosexuality, both of which would be red flags for deviance to this watchful public.)

Given that Woolf herself suffered from mental health issues, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch that Woolf was, at least in part, writing from personal experience. From Anne Fernald’s introduction to the Norton Critical Edition, I learned that Woolf’s husband Leonard was exempted from service in World War I due to “a serious physical tremor, a disability which made holding a rifle unsafe.”

The invention of publicity

In The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World, Jennifer Rothman argues that the right to privacy, as a legal concept, started in part due to technological advances in photography, namely the smaller, easier-to-use Kodak camera, which debuted in 1888. I think Rothman is worth quoting at length here.

Rothman goes on to explain how the courts were caught unaware and unable to properly handle invasions of privacy. She cites cases like that of actress Marion Manola, who objected to being photographed in her costume, which included tights, to promote her show, and court cases like Schuyler v. Curtis (1895). Manola seemed to have understood, with good foresight, what was happening:

Manola seems to already be describing what I’d call differing publics, something danah boyd, in her 2014 book It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, calls context collapse. From Wikipedia:

Manola understood that a photograph of her in costume would be much more vulnerable to context collapse, and she even gives us an example of such an unintended audience: her young daughter.

I argue that these are more examples of new problems facing members of this "new" society, appearing in this new "public" with its new media and surveillance.

The luxury of having your symptoms in private

Shame from other members of the public can cause a certain type of fear and pain to disabled people and their loved ones (Rezia), whether they’re actually photographed or not, but it can also quickly lead to police intervention and arrest. As Katie Tastrom writes in 2024’s A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice:

Here again is that crucial distinction between “public” and “private” making all the difference. I argue that before the new media of photography, before increased urban density of the turn of the century, most people who would observe the behaviors and symptoms of a disabled person would have known them for years and understood if any danger was present. Now, these same symptoms can easily cause a stranger to call a police force made up of more strangers backed by the power of the state.

Of course homeless/houseless people do not have the luxury of having their symptoms in private.

What does this mean for disabled people? (Ugly Laws)

One of the things I think about when I'm out and about in any (American) city is "ugly laws."

That disabled people (or to use Mrs. Dalloway’s Dr. Bradshaw's word, “disproportional” people?) were outlawed from appearing in public, in America, in some areas up until the 1970s, is a fact that feels both predictable and uniquely outrageous to me.

Was their supposed crime primarily an aesthetic one? Was their presence in public society (rather than safely contained on the stage of a freak show) simply too painful for able-bodied people to contemplate, or even be reminded of? Maybe cities already understood themselves as brands that understood that they needed to attract young people and rich companies to get and keep their tax base high… (see How to Kill a City by P.E. Moskowitz).

This need for cities to keep up aesthetic appearances and the resulting laws are yet another force against those with irregular fires erected at roughly the same time as Mrs. Dalloway is set, this one powered by surveillance conducted by law enforcement as well as presumably able-bodied (or sufficiently passing) citizens. This is the paranoia Rezia felt while with Septimus in public.

This type of regime, on top of everything else, prevents disabled people from finding each other, banding together, and forming community. (It's little wonder that disability activism in the US got its spark in a radically inclusive setting: Camp Jened, and that I only learned about it through the wonderful Netflix documentary Crip Camp. If only Septimus had had access to something like that...)

The invention of normal

We can use disability history to push this even further. As disability activist and scholar Marta Russel argues, citing Lennard Davis, the very definition of “normal” had only recently been altered to its current meaning when Woolf was writing.

It’s not difficult to map this then-new re-defined binary of normal/abnormal to Woolf’s terms regular/irregular or Dr. Bradshaw’s proportional/disproportional.

Taming the world and the self at the freak show

We can also map the popularity of freak shows to this era. Wikipedia informs: “During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, freak shows were at their height of popularity; the period 1840s through to the 1940s saw the organized for-profit exhibition of people with physical, mental, or behavioral rarities.”

Rosemarie Garland Thomson has a brilliant chapter on American freak shows in her book Extraordinary Bodies.

I won’t attempt to summarize it here, but one bit I found particularly interesting was where she argues that one of the appeals of the freak show was allowing paying customers to exercise and hone their ability to classify bodies, to tame the world and self.

Even “ableds” have to pass in the new public

In the novel, Woolf hints that there was something special in the childhoods and adolescences of Clarissa, Sally, and Peter; that they were a bit more sensitive and artistic than the other characters (like Mr. Richard Dalloway) were at that age. Septimus is described as a poet, or at least a future poet, before leaving his hometown for the city.

If we can expand our definition of those with irregular fires to also include these sensitive, artistic people, we can ask if they also need to pass in this new public, and if so how they do it, and at what cost.

Clarissa marries the dull, conservative Richard Dalloway. Sally marries rich and has "five enormous boys” (my favorite line in the book). Peter went to India, and now, back in London, seems quite lost. Septimus's failure to pass leads to the most tragic and violent result (Rezia, a foreigner with few connections in England, can't quite pull off the role of supportive/protective spouse like Richard, with his resources and social position, can).

Expanding our tolerance for all fires

I once went to hear author Sally Rooney speak, back when she was promoting her second novel, Normal People. In answering a question from the audience about the title of that book, she talked about how one of her goals in her work generally was to expand the definition of "normal." Expand the circle, rather than pressure and contort ourselves to fit into it. Dismantle the last remaining vestiges of the freak show stage. No one is a stranger in the hands of the maker.

Letting more fires, “regular” or otherwise, burn, even — especially — in public, sounds like a pretty worthy goal to me.