A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism

Rewriting Mrs Dalloway

M. Latham

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137490803
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This new book examines how a range of authors today perpetuate Virginia Woolf's literary legacy, by creating new forms adapted to their new ages and audiences. Addressing questions about the current penchant for refashioning our canon in order to update, this book will be valuable reading for both students and scholars of Woolf.

1

‘The Dressing-rooms, the Workshops, the Sculleries, the Bubbling Cauldrons’

Since 1925, Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway has proved to exert a continuous appeal for generation after generation of readers and writers.¹ It is a widely read and a much admired novel and a fertile territory from which other texts have sprouted. Mrs Dalloway has elicited numerous creative responses from authors who have dialogued with it and reproduced its essence in their works. Before focusing on ways in which it gave birth to numerous works on the contemporary literary scene, it is necessary to understand how it came into being; before exploring specific cases of how writers recycle Mrs Dalloway, carry on its innovative features and popularise them in their fiction, this chapter looks at the Mrs Dalloway cycle² in which Woolf’s memorable idiosyncratic prose attributes originate. Indeed, in order to gauge how and why other authors in the wake of Woolf rewrote this particular text and incorporated it in their works – either homages (see Chapter 2), parodic enterprises (see Chapter 3) or by and large neomodernist contemporary writings which contain and continue the Woolfian aura (see Chapters 4 and 5) – it is important to first observe Woolf’s own ways and means of creating her novel. It is consequently essential to focus on the production of Mrs Dalloway in order to comprehend the reproduction of Woolf’s Dalloway-esque signature by her literary heirs.

The authors I shall be examining in the following chapters all reproduce Woolf’s ‘signature’,³ ‘style’,⁴ Dalloway-esque ‘voice’,⁵ ‘formula’⁶ or ‘Dallowayisms’.⁷ Hence the importance of finding the origins of this Dalloway-esque voice which reverberates in contemporary novels, tracing the contours of the signature which is duplicated or forged by present-day authors, and identifying the ingredients of Woolf’s formula that is used by twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers to produce postmodernist and neomodernist fiction today while perpetuating, preserving, continuing and eternalising the Woolfian legacy. Examining the text in statu nascendi allows a better understanding of Woolf’s emerging brand of modernism, of the ‘fabrication’ of the characteristics of her Dalloway-esque prose, and enables us to locate the Dallowayisms in the folds of her material in the making. This heuristic approach takes into account the author’s trials, emendations and improvements. The Dallowayisms, nebulous and tentative at first, then more and more confirmed, are methodically structured and ordered to compose the fabric of the Woolfian text. My contention is that this very fabric, progressively and meticulously woven by Woolf in Mrs Dalloway, is nowadays used to fashion a certain contemporary literary fiction.

In order to see what the texture of the Dalloway-esque fabric consists of, I therefore set out to follow Mrs Dalloway’s itinerary and the coming into being of an innovative, original design which is intended to house Woolf’s copious, proliferating ideas: ‘In this book, I have almost too many ideas’ (Diary 2: 248). Mrs Dalloway is the culmination of an accumulation of technical experimentation, thoughts, plans and self-directions about its content and design, adjustments and refinements of methods tried out during the composition of the novel. I shall give a brief account of the genesis of Mrs Dalloway by chronologically following the dynamic process of creation of the text from the birth of a few key Dallowayisms until they are sifted, consolidated, stabilised and expanded in the published version. For this, I have explored the writer’s previous drafts of the published novel in parallel with her notebooks – which provide an insight into how the writer is groping to find a method and is grappling with shaping her material – as well as her private papers, such as her letters and diaries – which contain valuable information about the conscious intentions concerning her writing in progress.

The Mrs Dalloway cycle begins with two stories that gave birth to the novel, namely ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ and ‘The Prime Minister’, composed between 14 April and 21 October 1922, which constitute Mrs Dalloway’s first textual layer. Woolf recycled and rewrote portions of the two short stories and added them as the first sections of her novel on 20 October 1924. However, as soon as 6 October 1922, she started thinking about creating connections and fusions between these stories originally conceived as separate chapters. The novel gave birth to other Dalloway-esque stories after its publication in May 1925. The ‘corridor’,⁸ which led to Woolf’s next novel, To the Lighthouse, consisted of ‘Ancestors’, ‘The New Dress’, ‘The Man Who Loved his Kind’, ‘Together and Apart’, ‘The Introduction’, ‘Happiness’, ‘A Simple Melody’ and ‘Summing Up’ in which Woolf wanted to further investigate ‘the party consciousness, the frock consciousness’ (Diary 3: 12).

Woolf’s thoughts and plans were first jotted down in a notebook containing mainly the holograph version of her previous novel, Jacob’s Room, labelled ‘Books of scraps of J’s R & first version of The Hours’ (dated 12 March 1922), to be found at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.⁹ Another notebook at the Berg Collection includes Woolf’s preparatory notes, plans for her novel, her speculations on its title and musings on the nature of her characters, dated from 9 November 1922 to 2 August 1923. These comments, along with passages from her diary and notes written directly on the verso of her pages in the holograph draft ‘The Hours’ enabled me to follow her progress, her specific preoccupations at different stages of composition and draw a chronology of her work in progress. Besides, ‘The Hours’: The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs Dalloway, transcribed and edited by Helen Wussow,¹⁰ composed of three notebooks containing in total 467 folio pages,¹¹ displays the dynamism as well as the temporal and spatial dimensions of the Dalloway-esque material during the process of composition between 27 June 1922 and 9 October 1924.

The extant material has allowed me to trace the emergence of the well-defined Dalloway-esque formula and detect the anchorage and the sedimentation of permanent Dallowayisms. Woolf first dreams up these ingredients and formulates them in her notebooks or diary, then creates, combines, refines, polishes up or perfects them in successive waves of rewriting. By probing into different layers of material conceived at different stages of the creative process, I shall demonstrate that her Dalloway-esque prose gradually becomes more complex, robust and assured.

I shall devote particular attention to specific elements that are borrowed by subsequent writers, such as the chronotope (London, a ‘mere frame for [Clarissa’s] musings’ [Chatman 275] and the circadian structure of the novel¹² with its passing hours endowed with Dalloway-esque elasticity); themes and motifs that steadily impose themselves and dominate the novel; the networks of repetitive images that compose the dense texture of the novel and give rhythm to the prose; the creation of connectors and transitions between fragments – thoughts, characters, scenes, episodes – ; the emphasis on the consciousness and the complex inner life with its lengthy, lingering memories and sharp, illuminating moments of being. As the novel progresses, we can note the affirmation of a distinguishable Dalloway-esque narrative voice that espouses different experiences, plunges in the characters’ minds and emerges before inhabiting a different consciousness. Woolf combines spiritual and physical action but gives more prominence to the minutia of the mind as opposed to the details of the external world. According to her philosophy expressed in her essays, the accent must fall on recording the ordinariness of the daily experience, with its ‘myriad impressions’ (‘Modern Fiction’ 160). Through successive rewritings, Woolf works towards incorporating all these innovative ideas while conferring her novel balance and abbreviation at a linguistic, stylistic, thematic and structural level.

Digging veins of gold¹³

In the following pages I shall chronologically trace the genesis and evolution, after waves of writing and rewriting, of a series of essential Dallowayisms. With the help of Woolf’s own comments that accompany her creative process, and examples that illustrate different stages of composition, I shall follow the organic and dynamic movement of the growing material of the novel that little by little ‘secreted a house’¹⁴ to espouse and contain it. While ‘forg[ing] ahead, stoop[ing] and grop[ing]’ (Diary 2: 292), Woolf discovered a ‘queer’ and ‘masterful’ design in which she fit and expanded treasured gold nuggets of Dallowayisms.

The Mrs Dalloway cycle starts with the composition of ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ (written between April and August 1922 and published in July 1923 in Dial) and ‘The Prime Minister’ (written between 28 August and 21 October 1922), rewritten portions of which are eventually absorbed in ‘The Hours’ beginning with October 1924. The main Dallowayisms germinate in these short stories, which can be considered as a ‘quarry’ that contains ore of Dallowayisms and a ‘workshop’ in which the author is forging, polishing and perfecting them: Woolf is ‘using the shorter form to explore themes and techniques of character presentation, dialogue, and construction that would also appear in Mrs Dalloway’ (Baldwin 4). Many ideas and Dalloway-esque devices, taken from ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, refined and combined with subsequent ones from ‘The Prime Minister’, then all poured into and refashioned in ‘The Hours’, finally appear in the published version of Mrs Dalloway.

The ‘prominent ingredients’ (Evans 88) of the Dalloway-esque formula, the visible and recognisable threads of the Dalloway-esque fabric, are already conceived in the first short story: Mrs Dalloway progresses through the streets of London on an errand, musing about past and present, about her husband and her daughter, about the lingering effects of war, the passage of time, ageing and mortality.¹⁵ The refrain ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ confers a liturgical rhythm to her memories and has a soothing influence on her. The narrative voice adheres very closely to Clarissa’s thoughts and memories, piercing through several temporal layers and incorporating fragments of the exterior action.

The character of Clarissa, previously created as early as 1908 in Woolf’s drafts of her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), has a different personality¹⁶ in ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’. She is frequently thinking of many young men’s deaths on her way to the glove shop in Bond Street. Death, mourning and sufferance caused by war are also expressed through two intertextual haunting fragments: Shelley’s ‘From the contagion of the world’s slow stain’ and Shakespeare’s ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’. The obsessive invocations of death through literary splinters, which also encompass connotations of salvation, ultimately convey the message that life must go on despite war and death. The futility of small actions (such as buying gloves) ensures that life prevails: ‘Thousands of young men had died that things must go on’ (159). Intertextuality reinforces the binary theme of life and death and acts as a leitmotif tying together folds of the Dalloway-esque fabric, thus giving solidity to the prose.

In this short story Woolf initiates her future Dalloway-esque narrative artistry, as she conceives a fluid concatenation of points of view: for example, while walking through Bond Street, Clarissa is looking at Jimmy Dawes while Scrope Purvis is looking at her. Minor characters such as Jimmy Dawes or Scrope Purvis spark off different narrative perspectives. Clarissa is seen and described both by other characters, from their points of view, as the narrator infiltrates their thoughts (‘A charming woman, poised, eager, strangely white-haired for her pink cheeks, so Scrope Purvis, C.B., saw her as he hurried to his office’ [152]), and from outside, by the narrator (in the third paragraph the character is referred to as ‘Mrs Dalloway’). Clarissa observes people and other people observe her: this intersection of points of view is developed on a larger scale in the novel.

The temporal reminders which support the whole circadian structure of Mrs Dalloway are initiated in the short story, further expanded in ‘The Hours’ and solidly anchored in Mrs Dalloway:

Big Ben struck the tenth; struck the eleventh stroke. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. (‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ 152)

There! It boomed out. Out it boomed. First a warning; musical, then the hour; irrevocable. (‘The Hours’, Notebook Two of the British Museum Manuscript of Mrs Dalloway, Wussow 254)¹⁷

There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. (Mrs Dalloway 4)

The booming explosion of the sound (resonating in ‘The Hours’) and the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Legacies
• Chapter: 1 ‘The Dressing-rooms, the Workshops, the Sculleries, the Bubbling Cauldrons’
• Chapter: 2 Ventriloquists: Between Debt and Homage
• Chapter: 3 Parodic Games: Textual Assassinations and Canonical Resurrection
• Chapter: 4 Virginia Woolf’s Neomodernist Heirs: Nostalgic Innovators
• Chapter: 5 The Artful Ornament of Ordinariness
• Conclusion: New Kids on the Virginia Woolf Block
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index