I’m in my Mrs Dalloway era. I can’t remember when I first learned about Virginia Woolf, but I do remember Kew Garden was the first of her works I read. Then I read A Room Of One’s Own, and then To The Lighthouse in 2020 and Orlando in 2021. I was blown away by Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness (a literary technique that attempts to present the disparate thoughts and feelings of a character as they occur), which I later learned was more specific than that.
I remember too being vividly struck by Woolf’s descriptions in To The Lighthouse of Lily as being “oriental” and having “Chinese eyes”. But nowhere in any online reviews (bookstagram or goodreads) could I find anyone else who had picked this up and specifically commented on it. In my research for another essay, I did find references in literary criticism, but suffice to say for now that I don’t necessarily find this offensive; more that I wish to point this out to readers of Woolf to ensure that her work is read in context.
In any case, I have been immersing myself in the world of Mrs Dalloway lately. In view of a proshot of the Metropolitan Opera’s The Hours being streamed in a local cinema, I read Mrs Dalloway and watched the 1997 adaptation, watched the opera, read Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours and watched Stephen Daldry’s Oscar-winning adaptation from 2002, and then read Daisy & Woolf by Michelle Cahill. I just got my gorgeous copy of The Annotated Mrs Dalloway, edited with an introduction by Merve Emre. And most recently, I’ve been reading Emily France’s Daughter Dalloway, which was published in March earlier this year.
[*this is the spoiler warning for the above novels, but also a content warning for mental illness, depression, ptsd, death by suicide, racism, and homophobia. please proceed with care.]
The starting point is Mrs Dalloway, of course. The novel details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class woman married to a member of Parliament in post-First World War England. Clarissa may be getting ready to host a party that evening (“She said she would buy the flowers herself”), but her interiority is based around her reminiscence on the fact that she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic Peter Walsh, and she “had not the option” to romantically be with a woman, Sally Seton.
Although Clarissa looms large, the novel is structured so that a second character of equal importance to Clarissa is Septimus Warren Smith, a First World War veteran suffering from shell-shock, now known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He spends his day in the park with his Italian-born wife Lucrezia, where Peter observes them. Later, after he is prescribed involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital, he dies by suicide by jumping out of a window, which Clarissa hears about at her party and (arguably) comes to admire him.
In fact, this was not the first entrance of Clarissa. She first appears in Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, about a young English woman Rachel Vinrace who boards a ship sailing to the fictitious South American colony of Santa Marina.[1] The Dalloways were one of Rachel’s fellow passengers, who boarded in Lisbon after they had gallivanted around Europe to “broad[en] Mr Dalloway’s mind.” A perfectly snobbish, upper-class Englishwoman, Clarissa disembarked from the ship without suspecting that Dick had kissed Rachel one night while she had been in bed seasick.
While Woolf was refining her narrative writing techniques in Jacob’s Room, she worked on two short stories entitled “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street” and the unfinished “The Prime Minister,” which would form the basis of Mrs Dalloway. Woolf decided to set the novel on a single day with a character walking around town, like James Joyces’ Ulysses. She had called the tome an “underbred novel, by an egotistical, self taught working man,” but Woolf was really trying to achieve something similar to Joyce, “to record the atoms as they fall upon the mind, the order in which they fall, an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.”[2]
With that in mind, she sketched eight chapters, to be set over the course of a single day (at this point, the novel was called The Hours, from which Cunningham’s novel draws its name). Woolf’s writing in stream-of-consciousness was in fact a complex process. Part of it was her “tunnelling” process, which she used to dig deeper into the thoughts of her characters, and to dig into their past. As she wrote in her diaries, “I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humor, depth… The idea is that the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment.”
The tunnel is therefore both physical reality, but also metaphor in Woolf’s writing; “the tunnel metaphor and its application are spatial, temporal, aesthetic, interpersonal and culturally aware.”[3] This is why the city comes alive in Woolf’s deft hands. London with all its bustle and ordinariness and movement is realistically evoked in a way that reflects the city through a modernist lens.
Woolf adeptly unites the interiority of characters with perfectly ordinary external objects and other characters to create a “whole life, a complete life.”[4] In her 1924 essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,”[5] Woolf discussed the “common meeting-place” between the writer and her reader. She wrote, “both in life and in literature, it is necessary to have some means of bridging the gulf between the hostess and her unknown guest on the one hand, the writer and his unknown reader on the other.”
Thus, the reader and the writer practice the art of “character-reading“, observing and speculating about people. Woolf wrote that, “the writer must get into touch with his reader by putting before him something which he recognises, which therefore stimulates his imagination, and makes him willing to cooperate in the far more difficult business of intimacy.” Rather than using linear plotlines for realistic depictions of narrative, Woolf shows glimpses of different characters’ impressions of Mrs Dalloway, whose character is an empty space to be filled in by the reader.
While the novel is called Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith is just as, if not more, important. They connect through their paths walking around London, but they also represent two extremes. As Woolf wrote in her diaries, “I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.” But of course, nothing in Woolf’s writing is so simple or binary.
I adore Woolf for her portrayal of “the slipperiness of the soul”; her understanding that no self is ever empty of contradictions, and no self is ever capable of being fully known. Like all of her novels, Mrs Dalloway is very much a series of meditations on time passing, interiority, and change, and they play with empty spaces, both physically and in the characters’ interior lives.
Woolf’s writing can therefore be described as putting the reader into the shoes of a flâneur, or into the eyes of someone who is people-watching, but unobtrusively, understanding that it is not possible to understand the complete self, even in a fleeting moment. In other words, no plot just vibes.
Classics often give birth to retellings, to stories of reinterpretation, revision, reconsideration. Since I have Bloomsday on my mind, I’m reminded of Kerri Maher’s The Paris Bookseller, which I read last year ahead of 16 June, the day when Leopold Bloom walks around Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Maher’s approach is to tell the “behind-the-scenes” story of the lesbian woman Sylvia Beach who owned her own bookshop on the Left Bank in Paris and got the novel published. I don’t always have great expectations of these retellings, but I am intrigued by their possibilities when executed well. So over the past 6 months, I have thoroughly enjoyed the ways in which Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway continues to inspire us today.
Cunningham focuses on the stories of a life in a single day but of three women, separated by physical time but linked by their feelings of unfulfillment, repression, and self-destruction. His central thesis seems to be that despite the difference in time and place, the experience of repression in these three women’s lives is not dissimilar, a rather sad indictment of the so-called progress of feminism. But Cunningham manages to retain the fluidity of time and self as in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, while carrying forward queer-coded themes (although that it is written by a man is interesting to say the least, and perhaps goes some way to explaining the very white feminist lens of the novel).[6]
The three women are burdened by the weight of expectation—Virginia Woolf while writing Mrs Dalloway; a housewife named Laura Brown reading Mrs Dalloway, who has a young son named Richard; and a lesbian named Clarissa Vaughan nicknamed “Clarissa Dalloway” by Richard, now dying of AIDS in the 90s. That the characters are a writer, a reader, and a character does not seem an accident, and in fact calls back to Woolf’s own “character-reading.”
Clarissa’s storyline most closely mirrors that of Mrs Dalloway’s, in that she is throwing a party for her friend Richard, who has received a literary prize for his poetry. But what is particularly striking to me is that both Mrs Dalloway herself and Clarissa are yearning for a summer of bygone days, of their youth, when the die of their lives seems to have been cast. Peter Walsh is the one that got away, and it is his return from India that propels the beginning of the novel, but when Clarissa recalls the moment when the uninhibited and carefree Sally kissed her on the lips and offered her a flower at Bourton, she calls it the “most exquisite moment of her whole life.”
Entrapment seems to be the recurring theme of the novel. Woolf is constrained by the social conventions of the time she is living in and thus married Leonard Woolf despite not having feelings of sexual intimacy with him. (I would also point out that she suffered from child abuse by her half-brother George Duckworth, which may have contributed to her mental illness.) Laura too feels trapped in the heteronormative dream that is suburban Los Angeles complete with a husband who went to war, two kids, and a house baking a cake for said husband, and contemplates suicide. When she kisses her neighbour Kitty after she tells Laura that she has a tumor in her uterus, recalling that “exquisite moment” Clarissa describes in Mrs Dalloway, the reader is led to presume that she’s a lesbian. And Clarissa seems to be on the outs with her long-term partner Sally, but still pines for the one that got away, Richard, and whose imminent death seems to have evoked a crisis in Clarissa.
(Richard’s ending recalls Septimus’ fate, of course. The film is, I guess, morbid in a sense—it opens with Woolf’s death by suicide, and Richard pushes himself out of the window as Septimus does in Mrs Dalloway wherein both hear voices in their minds. Laura, while she seems to have escaped her marriage, is alone when she is revealed to be Richard’s mother and meets Clarissa at her apartment. But I don’t think you can escape the theme of mortality in anything related to Woolf.)
Woolf herself seems to have had some lesbian subtext in how she framed her view of writing in her essay A Room Of One’s Own. (Woolf had her own love affair with Vita Sackville-West and wrote a whole novel out of it, Orlando, which was based on, inspired by, and dedicated to Sackville-West, plus her cat was named Sappho; it does not get more sapphic than this.) Woolf writes,
‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together…’ … Now if Chloe likes Olivia and they share a laboratory, which of itself will make their friendship more varied and lasting because it will be less personal; if Mary Carmichael knows how to write, and I was beginning to enjoy some quality in her style; if she has a room to herself, of which I am not quite sure; if she has five hundred a year of her own—but that remains to be proved—then I think that something of great importance has happened.
For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been. It is all half lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caves where one goes with a candle peering up and down, not knowing where one is stepping.[7]
I note that Woolf’s commentary on the sexual and colonial attitudes of men is exclusionary of Black women (we will return to this)—she writes, “it is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negr*ss without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.”
To return to The Hours for a moment though, that each of these three women’s arcs are punctuated by a climactic kiss with another woman is also not without reason. Woolf kisses her sister Vanessa on the lips (which is historically accurate), at first “chastely” but later “it feels like most delicious and forbidden of pleasures”. Laura kisses Kitty in the most explicit statement of lesbian repression, but it is uninterrupted apart from her son who witnesses it, unlike Clarissa’s “exquisite moment” with Sally, which was interrupted by Peter and Richard. But Clarissa kisses Sally without true feeling. Perhaps Clarissa’s kiss is anti-climactic in that it is so ordinary, it is almost insignificant, and yet even with apparently greater societal acceptance, she is still so unhappy and unfulfilled. When Cunningham portrays Woolf’s process of crafting Clarissa’s relationship with Sally, he is really portraying gender norms;
Clarissa Dalloway, in her first youth, will love another girl… She will come to her senses, as young women do and marry a suitable man.
Cahill, on the other hand, is less concerned with tracing the similarities of women’s stories, than with filling in the void of the lesser characters of the story, namely Daisy Simmons, though the queer-coded themes are explicitly present as well. Again, Daisy barely rates a mention in most online reviews. But Cahill has taken it upon herself in Daisy and Woolf to take on the task of Jean Rhys’ postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, which describes the background to Mr. Rochester’s marriage from the point-of-view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress.[8]
Daisy is mentioned a grand total of 12 times and once in parentheses in reference to her being the wife of a Major in the Indian Army, but otherwise always in reference to Peter Walsh, and more specifically as the object of his desire. Daisy is Anglo-Indian and the narrator Mina (like Cahill, one could call this auto-fiction) is writing into the canon, by way of letters (the epistolary genre of course being the most significant historical archive of women’s voices):
I need to give Daisy a voice and a body. Daisy is the character whose story I hope to write, the woman whom Virginia Woolf had scarcely sketched as naïve, vulnerable and wanton, giving it away too easily, pretty and young, all dressed in white.
This is a fraught task, of course. It is difficult to parse Woolf’s descriptions of “Indian women” as “silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops”; Daisy herself is “vain”, “dark” and suggestively promiscuous (she is pursuing divorce after all). Clarissa describes her own daughter Elizabeth, who also barely rates a mention, as having eyes that are “fine, Chinese, oriental.” Is this Clarissa? Is this Woolf’s voice? Cahill’s narrator observes,
The whole book bears the scratching of Peter’s idealised passions, sublimated on to Daisy and Clarissa, and there’s Virginia having it materialise all the same, so that it is hard to know if she sympathises with his awkward ways or if she holds Peter in contempt.
Emre notes this too in her Annotations, saying,
By “Indian women,” Clarissa means the women of India, who will reappear on p. 214 in the letters Peter Walsh receives from Hugh Whitbread, associating India with “baboons chatter[ing] and coolies beat[ing] their wives.” Woolf’s invocation of “Indian women” has prompted a fascinating debate among critics on the limitations of Woolf’s feminist and anti-imperialist thought. Is the narrator insufficiently attentive to the subjecthood of nonwhite, non-English women—those “silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops”? Or does the narrator criticize the snobbery of the English by pointing out that, for governing-class men and women, the women of India only signify as objects of desire? Is Woolf’s representation of otherness a “failure” of imagination or does it raise the “possibility” of critique? [9]
Mina, a writer from Sydney, moves to Tavistock Square (No. 52 is the address of Septimus in Mrs Dalloway), in the Bloomsbury district of London, where Woolf lived with her husband Leonard, and where they established Hogarth Press. Mina herself is a mother, who has left her son behind in Sydney with his father, and the mother and son barely have a relationship with each other. Or as the epigraph to the novel reinterprets Woolf’s phrase, “a woman writing thinks back through her mothers.” Mina too is queer-coded; perhaps my only (gentle) critique of the novel is that Daisy’s foray into a lesbian relationship with Septimus’ wife Lucrezia and running off to Italy is simply too easy, even if it could have happened.
But it is still obvious that marginalised characters like Daisy have long been silenced, pushed to the periphery by virtue of their gender, race, and class, in this instance in colonial India. Both the fictional Daisy and Mina experience racism, oppression, and exploitation. Edward Said’s Orientalism is relevant here, in terms of how two cultures unequal in power observe each other, and how the contribution of women to the creation of Orientalist knowledge disrupts the predominant discourse of masculine Orientalism. It is this kind of orientalism, an assumed exoticism born of colonialism, which Mina and Cahill, as a writer of colour, seek to conquer.
In doing so, the novel takes back the narrative from Woolf. Don’t forget, Woolf herself donned blackface and beard to impersonate an Abyssinian prince as part of an alleged diplomatic mission that wrangled an official tour of the pride of the Royal Navy, the HMS Dreadnought, as an elaborate prank.[10] Mina observes that Woolf champions white women;
she argues brilliantly against their subjection in A Room of One’s Own and in Three Guineas, but she uses her genius to slay Daisy Simmons.
Emre points out Peter’s genealogy of being part of the governance of colonial India,
Compare Peter’s love of “civilisation” with his dislike of “India, and empire, and army.” England must be cleansed of its affiliation with its colonies before he can take pride in its people: “the doctors and men of business”; the rich, showy woman whose hall he glimpses and approves. Peter’s semi-acknowledgment of the racism that animates his sentimentality makes him a shade more self-conscious than a character like Mr. Bowley. But this awareness is relegated to a parenthetical here. It yields no thought or feeling strong enough to trouble Peter just before he falls asleep.[11]
And I was intrigued to discover Woolf’s connections to China.[12] Julian Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woolf and son of Vanessa Bell, travelled to Wuhan in 1935 to teach English at the university. There he discovered China’s own literary salon. Following the earlier cultural revolution, Chen Yuan, Dean at Wuhan University, and Xu Zhimo, who had studied at Cambridge University in the 1920s, along with Hu Shi and several other friends had begun to meet regularly for discussions, calling this salon The Crescent Moon after Tagore’s book of prose poems titled The Crescent Moon.
This circle included Ling Shuhua, who had graduated from Yanjing University in July 1924 and had been dubbed ‘the Chinese Katherine Mansfield’, for her new style of writing, which was “less plot-driven and continued her focus on the psychological lives of women and children.”[13] Julian and Shuhua began both a literary and literal affair, which Julian regularly wrote to Vanessa and Virginia about. Cahill brings Shuhua’s story into the novel through Mina (who perhaps deliberately misnames her as Shuhua Ling),
There were misreadings of Shuhua Ling’s work. The stories she wrote about women’s lives and about domestic repression were adapted into memoir. Her feminist rage was described as strange and charming by Virginia Woolf, by Vita Sackville-West, and by English critics. From the beginning of this Bloomsbury-China exchange Julian and Vanessa Bell discussed Ling’s stories in letters they wrote to each other, comparing them ever so slightly in a patronising way to English styles.[14]
There are no easy answers of course. As Mina observes,
There’s Woolf, letting it happen.[15] She uses racial scorn to blame India for his sexist whims and fantasies with everywoman, ‘even the poorest, happiness from a pretty face, downright misery at the sight of a frump.’
Though the beginning seems almost overwhelming in what could be perceived as the narrator’s political correctness, what becomes more apparent is the narrator’s impressive self-awareness and what she implicates herself in. She questions who is silenced by the narrator herself, and whether the cycle of oppression can be broken at all, by fiction.
But what about Radhika, the servant girl, the nanny; have I fixed and limited her? How does she speak if she is illiterate? […] Is it ever possible to tell stories which are not in some way partial, appropriating?
I stumbled on Daughter Dalloway by accident, wanting to find something to read in time for Dalloway Day (and as a sort of celebration of Bloomsday). It almost seemed like commercial historical fiction, based on the cover at least, and I’ll be honest, my expectations were not that high. But I was wrong, and more than happy to be proved wrong, and this was truly such a gorgeous tribute to Mrs Dalloway and its themes. Essentially, the story picks up in 1952 with forty-six-year-old Elizabeth Dalloway. She feels she has failed at everything in life, including hosting parties and having children, and especially living up to her perfect mother—the elegant socialite Mrs. Dalloway, who never arrived for her very own party at the end of the 1923 Season, and hasn’t been heard from since.
Elizabeth has given up ever finding out what really happened that summer until she comes across a WWI medal inscribed with a mysterious message from her mother to a soldier, Septimus Warren Smith. Elizabeth sets out to find a member of his family in the hopes she will finally learn her mother’s fate. Her journey takes her across London as she pieces together that last summer of 1923 when Elizabeth was a seventeen-year-old girl who escaped her mother’s watchful eye and rebelled against the staid social rules of prewar England. A girl determined to do it all differently than her mother, a girl who didn’t yet feel like a failure. (The blurb describes this as a retelling, but this is more like an extension of the novel plus a bit of filling in plot where Woolf refused to; it also compares France to Marie Benedict, which underestimates France.)
Putting aside the fact that Frances does not address Elizabeth’s “Chinese” eyes, she does say in her author’s note that,
In the original Mrs. Dalloway, the primary word Virginia Woolf uses to describe Elizabeth is “inscrutable.” And she is. She plays the briefest of parts in the original; we see barely a snapshot of her at age seventeen shopping with her history tutor… Elizabeth is the heir to her mother’s story; she is a member of the next generation of women who will confront new social expectations and face the timeless challenges of consciousness. As I wrote, I came to believe Elizabeth is described as inscrutable because she is a puzzle Woolf invites us to solve.
But for an adult debut, this novel is truly an ode to Woolf that lives up to the challenge. Switching between 1923 and 1952, and between Elizabeth’s pov and Octavia’s pov, the fictional sister of Septimus, their storylines criss-cross in similar ways to Clarissa’s and Septimus’, which is a throughline in this novel too. The intertextual references didn’t feel over the top at all, probably because it wasn’t just references to buying flowers, and I would not be surprised if the author has read The Hours as well. Because there are so many references to that summer of 1923, in the same way that Clarissa Vaughan is stuck in her memories of that summer with Richard, and how that summer seemed to be the vital point in time when the course of the rest of their lives was set. And just like Clarissa, Elizabeth is burdened by the weight of expectation (and she believes, her mother’s expectations), and trapped by what ifs.
Compare Woolf’s description of Clarissa’s kiss with Sally,
But this question of love (she thought putting her coat away), this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?
And France’s description of what the kiss meant to Clarissa,
And it was love, wasn’t it? Did I love Sally Seton? Or did I love being who she thought me to be—a writer, a philosopher. That I was someone. Really someone. And then there was the moon. I remember it. She and I went walking on the terrace, under that moon. We passed a stone urn with flowers in it. She stopped, picked a flower. And kissed me.
The reference to James Joyce and Woolf writing their novels was chef’s kiss,
“It’s just that I’ve spent the past year working out the plot of my new novel,” he said desperately. “And now I’m not sure it even matters any longer! I came up with a roaring twist about a man plunging over the Cliffs of Dover.” He pulled a cigarette from his breast pocket. He put it between his lips without lighting it. “It’s already passé and I haven’t even gotten it down on paper yet.” “Harold,” William said. “Give it a rest, eh? For one night at least.” Harold locked eyes with Elizabeth. Lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper. “James Joyce. The bastard follows every single thought a character has,” he said. He was so close to her. Much too close. “And the entirety of the story happens in one single day. It’s an unrelenting stream. A stream of— consciousness . And word has it Woolf is about to break the entire form of the novel wide open. The mind. She’s going to crack open the mind of a woman. And that’s the story. The whole of it. The mind! My career is dead before it ever really began. Plot is dead! Story is dead! Just when I think I’ve mastered it.” You’re a madman. An absolute raving lunatic. Elizabeth looked at Calvin for help. He was still strumming his ukulele. She looked at William. “Joyce,” William explained. “James Joyce. He wrote Ulysses . He’s become Harold’s nemesis. And he’s in terror about Virginia Woolf. What she’s working on now. Word has it, it’s another novel that happens in just one day. About a woman. One woman.” “Too right,” Harold said, searching his pockets now. “It’s me that should plunge over the Cliffs of Dover.” “Nonsense,” William continued. “I think it’s rubbish, these books. It’s only old people who live their whole lives in one single day. Because by and large, each day is the same as the last by that point, isn’t it? The die is cast.” William had a hand on the back of Elizabeth’s chair. “I, for one, don’t live in one day. I live in summers,” he said. “In summers like this one.”
Most of all, though, I was so moved by France’s depiction of mental illness (more so than Cunningham’s, I daresay), which covers shell-shock, depression, and post-natal depression. Sometimes the fictional treatment of mental illness is simply melodrama (see Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Hanya Yanigihara’s A Little Life), and other times it is relentlessly stereotypical and damaging (Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library—I could write a whole essay on this but it would damage *my* mental health quite frankly, but I recommend starting with this discussion of The Bell Jar and The Midnight Library).
Maybe it’s the work I’m doing right now in real life, which involves dealing with a lot of mental health and trauma issues, but while I am a Dalloway flower girl, I truly empathise with Septimus a lot more (and he seems to always be forgotten). I was so struck by the line, “You see, his body survived the war. But his mind didn’t. He went mad.” And then Clarissa writes a suicide note to her daughter, saying,
The night I heard of a veteran who had thrown himself from a window. A patient of Dr. Bradshaw’s. A young man named Septimus Warren Smith, who had survived the war but threw himself to his death. I understood then as I never had before— That the battle is in the mind. The greatest war of all. It’s in a place no one can see. The longest war. At first I was buoyed by it, self-knowledge, the battle would not claim me. But that feeling vanished. So quickly. It was not enough to keep the voices at bay. The awful thoughts returned and I knew—I wasn’t going to win. I was going to lose just as Septimus had. It felt intimate to me, the loss we were to share. I never met him, but it seemed as though I’d fought beside him somehow.
Somehow I didn’t expect Clarissa’s life to have the same ending as Woolf’s, probably because I am quite careful to avoid reading Clarissa as completely autobiographical. And yet it makes perfect sense when you consider these lines from Mrs Dalloway that show the effect that the news of Septimus’ death has on Clarissa:
Somehow it was her disaster — her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress.
And I’m not too shy to say I was in tears over these lines (again, it hits close to home),
I wanted to steer you down the right path. A path that prevented the voices from arriving. But the truth is—I don’t know the path myself. I don’t know the way. Solve the riddle. Of how to do it all. I think that is what a woman is supposed to be. All. Do what you must. To swim. To keep the voices at bay. And have this summer. Have your summer. I will be, I am sure, a fog settling among the trees at Bourton. You must think of me there. Like that. A bit of mist hovering over the lake.
But the novel also gave me more empathy for Clarissa, who is easily dismissed on account of her apparently frivolous parties,
Mama must have known it. That he wouldn’t get a proper burial. No one would treat him as if he’d died in battle—not the military, not the public. Dr. Bradshaw least of all. Mama would have felt it, the sorrow of this soldier’s family. She would have nearly drowned in empathy. In her ability to sense feelings from miles off. She was kind. Above all, she was kind. She left a little something for the soldier’s family. “Keep things in proportion.”
At the time I first read Mrs Dalloway earlier this year, the tv adaptation of Fleishman is in Trouble had just come out. I still haven’t watched it, but I did read the novel a couple of years ago and was intrigued by the depiction of the New York City rat race from the perspective of the rich but apparently not rich enough. Whatever you think about women with bigger houses who should be happier than you but aren’t, it is not a feeling specific to the times we live in, as Brandon Taylor often points out in reference to Edith Wharton and other “marriage novel” writers.
At the end of the day, the running thread through all of these different time periods and characters and contexts from these novels and adaptations is the idea of expectations and conformity, specifically in reference to gender and sexual orientation, and how these pass down from generation to generation, mother to daughter. And in a line so evocative of Rilke’s beauty and terror, Mrs Dalloway ends, “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? … What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement?”
[1] There’s no space for discussion here, but Woolf was clearly interested in Britain’s economic control of Argentina vís-a-vís Mr Vinrace. See Patricia Novillo-Corvalan (2017) ‘Empire and Commerce in Latin America: Historicising Woolf’s The Voyage Out’ Woolf Studies Annual 23, pp. 33-60.
[2] Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ in The Common Reader (Hogarth Press, 1919).
[3] Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism: Postmodern feminist readings of Woolf, West, and Barnes (Indiana University Press, 1995) 16.
[4] Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’.
[5] Virginia Woolf, Mr and Mrs Bennett (Hogarth Press, 1924).
[6] Perhaps I am too quick to criticise. There are certainly ways in which to queer Cunningham’s writing as feminine and thus disrupt heteronormative conceptions of time and life itself. See Chris Steyaert (2015) ‘Three Women. A Kiss. A Life. On the Queer Writing of Time in Organization’ Gender, Work and Organization 22:2, pp. 163-178.
[7] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Hogarth Press, 1929).
[8] Rochester renames his wife Bertha, like a slave-owner naming his human chattel, to distance himself from her madness, and to distance her from her own heritage. In an interview between the author and Amplify Bookstore, Cahill notes that she was reading Rhys’ letters at the time of writing her novel.
[9] P. 16. Emre also references Supriya Chaudhuri’s essay ‘Reading Woolf in India,’ in which she describes Woolf as critiquing her failure to transcend her own racism, as well as the impossibility of separating her individual prejudices from the structural legacies of the British Empire, whose doom she foreshadows in both Mrs Dalloway and The Waves.
[10] Matthew Wills, ‘When Virginia Woolf Wore Blackface‘ (13 May 2017, Webpage) <https://daily.jstor.org/when-virginia-woolf-wore-blackface/>.
[11] Pp. 81-82. I have a strong disliking for Peter (sorry Clarissa). A page before, he literally stalks a woman. Emre writes, “While one could read Peter’s pursuit of this strange woman as his foray into “character-reading,” there is something seedy, something vain, suspicious, possessive, and unwanted, about how he practices it—following a woman to her home, imagining himself a colonizing “buccaneer” “landed as he was last night from India.” The manuscript of “The Hours” makes Peter out to be more obviously entitled than he appears in the final draft… Character-reading has its politics. Not everyone pursues it sympathetically, respectfully, or with Woolf’s commitment to lighting the extraordinary spirit of ordinary people’s lives. “For he controlled her,” Peter thinks of his mystery woman in the manuscript of “The Hours.” His version of character-reading is uneasy and exploitative, a practice of surveillance, stalking, and imaginative domination more akin to his service in India than to the creation of fiction as Woolf theorized it.”
[12] Woolf had extensive ties to China too; Leonard served as a colonial civil servant in Ceylon; her mother was born in India; her aunt the photographer Margaret Cameron was born there too. There were ties to the British East India Company. Her great-great-grandfather, Chevalier Pierre Ambrose Antoine de L’Etang, a French aristocrat who loved Marie Antoinette, had fled the guillotine to become a horse trainer in Pondicherry.
[13] Sasha Su-Ling Welland, A Thousand Miles of Dreams, p. 149.
[14] Cahill’s footnote references a letter to Shuhua Ling, in which Woolf writes, “Now I write to say that I like it very much. I think it has great charm… I find a charm in the very unlikeness. I find the similes strange and poetical…” Vita Sackville-West, meanwhile, describes Ling’s writing as “charmed” five times and praises its quaintness and simplicity in her introduction to Ancient Melodies (Hogarth, 1953).
[15] A further thought; if feminism is queer (per Mimi Marinucci), then both can suffer from bias in reference to class, race, and other forms of oppression, even as the multiplicity of queer feminism can work towards reducing the essentialism of feminism.
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