Early in Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, Rezia Warren Smith implores her shell-shocked husband, Septimus, to look. Six paragraphs in a row begin with the command “look.” Critics of modernism have been preoccupied with looking in the sense of perception (e.g. connecting literary experiments to those in the visual arts, exploring representations of time in narrative), but equally important to Woolf is the problem of attention. Shell-shocked and hallucinating in a London park, Septimus is unable to redirect his attention to the sights around him (children playing cricket, a few sheep), but the passage also calls out to us, the reader. What are we being asked to look at? And how might we look differently? In witnessing Septimus and Rezia's distress, we are to notice the ongoing effects of World War I; in recent years, critics have been prolific in detailing those traces in the text. Today, I will focus less on war and war trauma than on another of the novel’s enduring effects: its powerful attachment to beauty. After all, Mrs. Dalloway begins with flowers and ends with a vision of a beautiful woman. This paper argues that Mrs. Dalloway responds to an early 20th century crisis in attention by teaching us how to focus in a world of overwhelming distraction. In so doing, it reminds us how paying attention to beauty can, in itself, be a form of resistance and a strategy for survival. The presence of death may strike us with a shock at a party, but the fact of beauty may equally stun us into remembering why we live.

Anne E. Fernald is Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Fordham University in New York City. She is the editor of the Cambridge University Press Mrs. Dalloway (2014) the Norton Critical Edition of Mrs. Dalloway (2021), and the Oxford Handbook to Virginia Woolf (2021). She is one of the editors of The Norton Reader, a widely used anthology of essays. She was co-editor of Modernism/modernity 2019-23. She is the author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (2006) as well as articles and reviews on Woolf and feminist modernism. She is currently at work on a collective biography of eight modernist women writers.