GOLDSMITHS COLLEGEDEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURESMA IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURESAUTUMN TERMTEXTUAL LIAISONS II: READINGS AND REWRITINGSCAROLE SWEENEY

VIRGINIA WOOLF:THE WRITER OF MRS DALLOWAY AND THE CHARACTER OF THE HOURS

Tziamali Elisavet

33031669

Friday 13th January 2006

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A) INTRODUCTION

p. 3

B) OH, WRITER WHERE ARE YOU?

p. 8

C) MRS. WOOLF, IT’S YOU!

p. 16

D) EPILOGUE

p. 20

E) BIBLIOGRAPHY

p. 21

A) INTRODUCTION

‘No one has a life worthy of consideration about which one cannot tell a story’Hannah

Arendt

2

Hannah Arendt’s words are, I believe, most adequate

to describe Virginia Woolf as a writer; they seem to

capture her fascination with what most people see as

‘ordinary life’. For Woolf, there is no such thing; her

perceptiveness combined with an admirable talent of

entering her characters’ minds from different angles

enabled her to write about everyday lives consisting only

of work, meals and sleep and yet make them seem

ravishing. Her experiences as a woman of letters,

journalist and member of Bloomsbury, early feminist and

devoted modernist would be more than enough to provide

her with material for her writing; and they did so, as

far as her academic writings (reviews, essays) are

concerned. Nevertheless, the main source for her novels

and short stories were her experiences as Virginia:

Virginia Stephens at the beginning, Virginia Woolf after

her marriage; Virginia living in an overwhelming London,

Virginia living in the unbearable quietness of the

countryside; sane Virginia, insane Virginia.

As Foucault points out, in a novel narrated in the

first person, neither the first person pronoun, nor the

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present indicative refer exactly either to the writer or

to the moment in which he writes, but rather to an alter

ego whose distance from the author varies, often changing

in the course of the work. (1979: 152) Thus in every

first person narration we must attempt to distinguish

between the point of view of the one who has already

lived through the experiences recorded and has had the

time to reflect upon them and the point of view of the

one undergoing the experiences at the time. Paul

Ricoeur’s work on narrative identity enables us to see

the relation of narrative to the mechanisms of the

formation of subjectivity. He argued that we can only

talk about ourselves in terms of narrative and the

narratives we tell relate to the biographical and the

historical. We can re-describe our past experiences,

bringing to light connections between agents, actors,

circumstances, motives or objects by drawing connections

between the events retold and events that have occurred

since, or by bringing to light untold details of past

events.

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On the other hand, it is really difficult- if not

unfeasible- for someone to be able to narrate the whole

story of his life. ‘The story can only be narrated from

the posthumous perspective of someone who does not

participate in the events […] the design of our life

cannot be seen with our own eyes. It is always another

who sees it’. (Cavarero, 1997: 2-3) This is where the

separation between biography and autobiography takes

place. It is not only the fact that in the latter the

author is the protagonist of the narration; it is also

the idea that someone cannot see the design of his life,

as Cavarero argues. Writers allow time to pass before

they go back and examine an experience under the light of

maturity or the objectiveness of distance. It is as if,

each time, someone were captured in the present of the

action that cuts off the temporal series of before and

after. But now the discontinuous times of that happening

come together in a story. (Cavarero, 1997: 18)

Virginia Woolf, in addition to her short stories and

novels, had diaries and letters published and her

biographies written by Bell (19720), Rose (1978), Gordon

5

(1984) and Lee (1996) to provide critics and readers with

a vibrant portrait of her daily life and her work in

progress. She herself in a way had written her

autobiography through her diaries. But it is what she

chose to write in her novels that interest this essay and

more specifically how she portrayed herself in Mrs

Dalloway, how she had carefully crossed the boundaries

existing in fiction between author and character and

illuminated a dark part of her life, namely the

depression and serious nervous breakdowns she suffered

from.

In the first part of my essay, by following closely

the text of Mrs Dalloway and comparing it with Woolf’s diary

and biographies, I am planning to draw a parallel between

Woolf’s personality and life and her two main characters.

I believe that Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren

Smith are the doubles of Virginia Woolf, through which

the writer reveals her ideas, makes her voice heard,

attacks society’s structures and exposes herself to the

public.

6

In the second part I have chosen to examine how

Michael Cunningham in his novel The Hours, by updating Mrs

Dalloway, brings back to life Woolf when he makes her a

fictional character, hence providing us with a different

kind of biography. I examine the way he uses actual

quotations from her diaries and letters in order to be as

accurate as possible in his portrait of her but he also

draws on the text of Mrs Dalloway to recreate Woolf’s

thoughts, feelings and experiences. Cunningham

transgresses the already blurred frontiers of authorship,

imitation, homage and intertextuality by binding his

novel so tightly to Woolf’s that makes every attempt for

categorization seem not only complicated but, up to a

certain point, meaningless.

7

‘I like how I dig beautiful caves behind my characters: I think this is

exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the

caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment.’

Virginia

Woolf, Diary

B) OH, WRITER WHERE ARE YOU?

If we need a model for Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, that modelwould be both closer and more distant… But how can we link the author withthe double of the double of one of her characters?

(Ferrer,1990:12)

Ferrer poses a question that is of great importance in

the analysis of Mrs Dalloway and in the discussion of this

essay. At first sight, the answer may seem obvious.

Woolf’s nervous breakdowns and her suicide attempts were

well known so that after her death they dominated the

discussions about her life and work, sometimes at the

8

expense of her literary genius. Mrs Dalloway occupies a

central position in these discussions, mostly because of

the character of Septimus Warren Smith. Critics easily

connected the young man suffering from shell shock after

World War I with its creator. E. M Forster wrote about

Mrs Dalloway: ‘It is a civilized book and it was written

from personal experience. In her work, as in her private

problems, she was always civilized and sane on the

subject of madness. She pared the edges off this

particular malady and robbed it of the evil magic it has

acquired through timid or careless thinking; here is one

of the gifts we have to thank her for’. (1941: 25)

Although in 1923, when she writes Mrs Dalloway she has

recovered from the nervous breakdown of 1913 and her

suicide attempt in 19041 seems to be a distant past,

Virginia Woolf’s Diary makes it clear that she was still

giving a painful fight trying to exorcise her daemons.

The following passage is among the most characteristic:

‘…the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squirt so badly that I can

hardly face spending next week at it’. (p.57)

1 Virginia, after her father’s death, threw herself out of a window.Note that this is the way Septimus commits suicide in Mrs Dalloway.

9

Septimus may be Clarissa’s double in the novel but

it serves as Virginia’s Woolf double in real life, her

protest against irresponsible or arrogant doctors,

against society that is so eager to marginalize people

with mental illness and against politicians that drug

countries into catastrophic wars. In Virginia Woolf’s own

fictional case-study of Septimus, sufferer and society

share responsibility, though doctors blame him alone,

particularly his resistance to their definition of

normality. (Gordon, 1984: 61) Her own words confirm

Gordon’s remarks: ‘In this book I have almost too many

ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and

insanity; I want to criticize the social system and to

show it at work, at its most intense’ (Woolf, 1975: 57).

It is a huge amount of effort that Virginia Woolf had to

put in order to write the parts of Septimus’ madness, to

portray with such detail the hallucinations that

tormented him, to describe both the unbearable physical

terror and the feelings of alienation, despair and

mistrust that this person experience. I quote a few

10

extracts from Mrs Dalloway where these feelings become

apparent:

…and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his

eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to

burst into flames, terrified him. (p.16)

Scientifically speaking, the flesh was melted off the world. His body was

macerated until only the nerve fibres were left. (p.74)

Once you stumble, Septimus wrote on the back of a postcard, human nature

is on you. Holmes is on you. (p.101)

Although in her early forties when writing the

novel, Woolf was troubled by the decision imposed to her

by doctors that she should not have children, a decision

reflected in the portrait of Dr. Bradshaw who forbade

childbirth. She is openly taking the part of Septimus

every time that he is confronted with the doctors, the

madman against his adversaries. This manifestation of

personal sympathy on the part of the author, accompanied

with what Bradshaw notes on Septimus ‘he was attaching

meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious symptom

to be noted on his card.’ (Mrs Dalloway p.105) make us

understand that the text of Mrs Dalloway, itself a tissue

11

of symbols, is implicated along Septimus. (Ferrer,

1990:28) Virginia Woolf had been treated during her

nervous breakdowns with rest cures that demanded

isolation, complete bed rest for at least six weeks, rich

diet and enforced weight gain and last but not least,

complete absence of intellectual activity. This was a

very difficult and even maddening treatment for Woolf.

(Showalter, 1992: xli) Roger Poole in his enlightening

biography The Unknown Virginia Woolf 2challenges the label of

‘madness’ that follows Woolf, by relating the years of

her collapses to various distressing events that

happened to her. He also examines closely her marriage to

Leonard Woolf and my analysis of the similarities between

Virginia’s and Clarissa’s characters is based on the

information found in his book.

Septimus ego has collapsed into psychosis. He no

longer retains Clarissa’s power to ‘collect the whole of

her at one point’. Virginia Woolf conceived of Mrs Dalloway

as a pattern in which every scene would build up the idea

2 Poole, R. The Unknown Virginia Woolf Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1978

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of Clarissa’s character. Since Clarissa Dalloway, in

subtle ways, is founded upon Woolf’s sense of her own

consciousness, we would have a kind of psychic self-

portrait except for Woolf’s intense aesthetic wariness.

That wariness is implicitly presented as a study in a

woman’s developments, rather than a great woman writer’s

unfolding. (Bloom, 1990: 1) Woolf initially wanted to

write about the single day in the life of a woman who

would commit suicide. But then she created the character

of Septimus:

‘Mrs Dalloway has branched into a book; and I adumbrate here a study of

insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side.

Septimus Smith? Is that a good name? (Diary p. 52)

As the book found its way, the narrative voice is

fractured, wavering, multiple […] In terms of feminist

theory, Woolf denies the unified subject which supports

all discourse and is necessarily masculine […] the

narrative consciousness in her writing has stopped

judging, interpreting and explaining. It has no single

identity or position. It is not in Kristeva’s terms a

‘thetic’ subject. (Minow-Pinkey, 1987:58-9) Her

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characters are now what Bergson describes: ‘We tend to

grasp our inner states as living things, constantly

becoming, as states not amenable to measure, which

permeate one another and of which the succession in

duration has nothing in common with juxtaposition in

homogeneous space. But the moments at which we thus grasp

ourselves are rare, and that is just we are rarely free’

(2001: 231). This state of becoming was important for

Woolf herself, always seeking different, unexploited to

follow in her art and life.

In Mrs Dalloway the attic is the space where Clarissa

rejects all men, even Richard. ‘The sheets were clean,

tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side.

Narrower and narrower her bed would be’ (p. 34). The

sexual implications of her withdrawal to the attic are

complex. It is naturalistically motivated by her illness

but both Clarissa and Richard use this as an excuse.

‘Richard insisted that after her illness she must sleep

undisturbed and really she preferred to read the Retreat

from Moscow’ (p.34). These descriptions are allusions to

Virginia’s Woolf relationship with Leonard Woolf and her

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inability of establishing normal conjugal relationships.3

Virginia’s sexual molestation from her brothers when she

was a child had a negative impact on her sexuality. On

the other hand, when falling in love with women, there is

a sense of integrity and purity that becomes impossible

in a relationship with a man because it always results in

domination and violation by the latter. (Minkow-Pinkey

p.69)

Yet she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a

girl, to a woman confessing […] she did undoubtedly then feel the way men

felt. (p.34)

The culmination of these experiences with women is the

kiss with Sally Seton described as

‘the most exquisite moment of her whole life. Sally stopped; picked a flower;

kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down!’

(p. 38)

Woolf seems to have also internalised the popular idea of

the time that menopause was linked with depression,

madness and even suicide. Clarissa is deeply affected by

this medicalisation of menopause. She feels that she has

become invisible, she has ceased to exist. There are3 See Poole The Unknown Virginia Woolf chapters 3, 7&17

15

moments when she feels ‘shrivelled, aged, breastless’ (MD

p.33)

In Clarissa Dalloway Virginia Woolf donated her love for

life, her fascination with the vivacity of the city, the

idea of a fluid self who has however the ability to pull

itself together. To Septimus Smith Woolf placed her

personal daemons of insanity in an attempt to analyze

them and at the same time criticize the social system

that refuses to confront them.

C) MRS. WOOLF, IT’S YOU!

Good writers always begin by being great readers Maylin Scott

Woolf’s voice demanded to be heard; it claimed its

share in the literary canon, which for ages had been a

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white male heterosexual Western construction addressing

itself to the same readership. Michael Cunningham puts

his fictional Virginia Woolf think that ‘men may

congratulate themselves for writing truly and

passionately about the movements of nations; they may

consider war and the search for God to be literature’s

only subjects; but if men’s standing in the world could

be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English

literature would be dramatically changed.’ (The Hours p.

83). After becoming a canonical writer, the time came for

Woolf to be what she created; a fictional character, one

created by the pen of a white male Westerner.

Writers are increasingly being inspired by the work

and the life of their favourite authors. Writing is a

lonely and maddening process. Curiosity, a sense of

kinship and a little vicarious living must surely be at

the root of the intimate exploration of another author’s

life. Writing these fictional biographies can have

enormous creative advantages over writing a traditional

biography. There is no need to cover an entire life-

novelists can pick and choose their episodes, play with

17

timelines, create conversations from scratch and enter

into their subjects’ mind. (Scott, 2001:1) Borrowing the

names and key traits of the characters of Mrs Dalloway,

Cunningham interweaves versions of the two plots of the

Virginia Woolf novel with imagined scenes of Woolf

herself writing the book. Though we know that his Woolf

is a fictional character, his citing from a number of

sources such as the biographies written by her husband

and her nephew and her own diaries, make us believe that

the result is not far from the truth.

The Hours is one of those narratives that depend upon

another. It expects from the readers to note the path of

an earlier novel. However, Cunningham’s protagonists blur

the roles apparently assigned to them. Richard for

example, is a character who, in my opinion, stands for

three persons. It is Septimus in a way, because he is the

one who commits suicide with the same way Septimus did-

although AIDS has replaced the theme of madness- and

furthermore, he is the poet, the visionary sacrificed. He

is also Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s love whom she could never

marry and they broke each other’s heart in the end of a

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summer. And last but not least, is Virginia Woolf because

he is a writer and what he says is what Virginia

believed. His thirst to capture every moment and then

find the words to describe it is one of Virginia’s Woolf

greater preoccupations as a writer.

‘Oh, pride, pride. I was wrong. It defeated me. It simply proved

insurmountable. There was so much, oh, far too much for me. I mean there’s

the weather, there’s the water and the land, there are the animals, and the

buildings, and the past and the future, there’s space, there’s history. There’s

this thread or something caught between my teeth, there’s the old woman

across the way, did you notice she switched the donkey and the squirrel on

her windowsill? And of course, there’s time. And place’. (The Hours p.66).

Cunningham chose to open his novel describing Virginia’s

Woolf suicide in 1941, at the age of fifty nine. He uses

her suicide note but he has to capture her movements,

thoughts and feelings as she heads towards her death. It

is admirable how his description sounds so Woolfean

without being imitation. It is, someone can claim, how

Woolf would describe it if she could write about it.

She glances upriver at the fisherman, who is wearing a red jacket ad who

does not see her. The yellow surface of the river (more yellow than brown

19

when seen this close) murkily reflects the sky. Here, then, is the last moment of

true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on

opaque water. (p.5)

Her relationship with Leonard, her fear of servants, her

longing to return to London, the whole process of writing

Mrs Dalloway are narrated in third person. Cunningham, the

omniscient narrator, is as if he was in her head and

could read her inner thoughts. He obviously studied her

diaries and her novels but it certainly takes an amount

of the talent that Woolf had to enter the ‘beautiful

caves of the mind’ and bring out fragments of the real

self.

D) EPILOGUE

I mentioned in the introduction that it is meaningless to

try to categorize novels like The Hours or be troubled by

20

the fact that terms such as intertextuality, imitation,

homage and originality partly fail to characterize them

accurately. Michael Cunningham very consciously chose to

follow the steps of Mrs Dalloway, put extracts from the

novel into his book and above all to make Virginia Woolf

one of the three female protagonists. His portrait is

close to the real Woolf for two reasons: Firstly, because

his admiration for her in combination with his talent as

a writer enables him to adopt Woolf’s literary voice and

thus make his Virginia sound like Virginia Woolf must

have sounded. Secondly, because Woolf herself allowed

this process of recreation partly through her diaries and

letters and partly through her exposition in her novels.

If Michael Cunningham’s Virginia Woolf seems to think

what those acquainted with her work expect her to think,

is because Woolf’s fictional characters, characters like

Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, are representations

of her mentality and soul.

E) BIBLIOGRAPHY

21

Bassnett, S. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction Oxford:

Blackwell, 1993

Bergson, H. Time and Free Will New York: Dover Publications

Inc., 2001

Bloom, H. (ed.) Major Literary Characters: Clarissa Dalloway New

York& Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1990

Cavarero, A. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. London,

Routledge, 2000

Cunningham, M. The Hours London: Fourth Estate, 1999

Dalsimer, K. Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer New Haven& London:

Yale University Press, 2001

Ferrer, D. Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language London:

Routledge, 1990

Forster, E. M. Virginia Woolf (1941) in Bloom, H. (ed.) Major

Literary Characters: Clarissa Dalloway Philadelphia: Chelsea House

Publishers, 1990

Foucault, M. What Is an Author? In Textual Strategies:

Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism ed. by

Haran, J. London: Hethuen, 1979

Gordon, L. Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1984

22

McNeile, A. (ed.) The Common Reader I: Virginia Woolf Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1984

Mepham, J. Virginia Woolf: A Literary Life London: Macmillan Press,

1991

Minow-Pinkey M. Virginia Woolf & The Problem of the Subject New

Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1987

Poole, R. The Unknown Virginia Woolf Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1978

Ricoeur, P. (transl. by Blamey, K and Pellauer, D.) Time

and Narrative Chicago and London: University of Chicago

Press, 1995

Snaith, A. Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations London:

Macmillan Press, 2000

Woolf, V. Mrs Dalloway London: Penguin Classics, 2000

Woolf, V. A Writer’s Diary (ed. by Woolf, L.) London: The

Hogarth Press, 1953

INTERNET SOURCES

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randomhouse.ca/readmag/volume5issue1/articles/novellives.

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