One thing you discover when you decide to revisit an author's works is, well, a lot. I got the idea recently to return to the novels of Virginia Woolf, after having read them higgledy-piggledy over several decades. I felt it important to experience them in light of what I've learned since I first encountered them in college, in the 1970s, when I knew pretty much nothing about literature in general, but also the novel in particular; modernism; feminist lit; queer lit; and pretty much any category in which Woolf's works fit.
One thing I discovered is I was less keen on some of the works than when I encountered them initially, and not just the early-early ones. I found myself thinking at times, This is distressingly prolix. I wondered if it wasn't a drawback of owning your own press, and publishing solely with it, that there was no editor to say, Cut! There were passages where I thought, Someone needed to tell her; time to get on with it.
But then there were the mid-career gems––Jacob's Room; Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse; and Orlando––novels that, except for the latter, are models of economy and effectiveness. I taught Mrs. Dalloway (1925) for decades, and after reading Woolf's oeuvre I came away thinking it's still the best in the bunch. What interested me this time around, putting it in the chronological arc of the work, is the way Woolf returned to Clarissa and Richard after introducing them in her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915).
Even in her debut novel, before modernism became modernism; before Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930), Woolf was interested in presenting shifting––conflicting––perspectives about Clarissa and her husband, Richard, which is to say rejecting the pre-modern notion of a monolith, a hero or villain, never mind truth about an individual. Voyage Out is what you'd imagine it to be, a novel about nautical travel, from England to South America. Woolf features a passenger list modeled after the people in her life. They're on board for the whole experience, though at one point the ship docks and here come two additions to the group, Clarissa and Richard, and in no time the fur starts to fly about them. Rachel Vinrace, the novel's protagonist, is taken with Clarissa. But the others peg her and her spouse along a spectrum of traits, including interesting, bemusing, pompous, conceited, vapid, shallow, and clueless––basically as many perspectives as there are people on board.
It's difficult to determine what the author thought of her own characters, hiding as she did behind the scrim of multiple perspectives; until you realize that in fact is the point. To complicate matters, about a decade after Voyage, and after having published two other novels, Woolf decided to give the couple a novel of their own. We find them at home in London, and from the first word of the novel we realize it will be a referendum on not just a single character but the modern woman.
"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." The form of address, Mrs., has been in use at least since the 1600s, and the fact that Woolf leads off with it presents an lot of questions, ones posed decades before the sixties and the feminist interrogations of its meaning. You wonder the more you read, is it defining? Limiting? Empowering? And what does it mean that Mrs. Dalloway will get the flowers herself? Is Clarissa liberated to carry out such a mundane task, rather than let the hired help do it? Is it the end of old-school privilege? Or is she perturbed that the work hasn't been done? Is she being helpful––or hurtful; snotty and short-tempered? That is, the book opens with indeterminacy, a slipperiness that will only grow as we meet the other characters in her world––Clarissa's old friend and flame, Peter Walsh; another old friend––and flame––Sally Seton; Clarissa's husband, Richard; her daughter, Elizabeth; Elizabeth's friend, Doris Kilman; the Bruton's––and on and on. Every character has a different take on Clarissa, some kindly, some nostalgic, some appreciative and some dismissive.
Conversely, Clarissa has her take on each of them, perspectives that have morphed over time and are largely determined by events beyond any character's control. The beauty of that kind of complexity, and the frustration of it, is the complete inability to locate a clear version of truth about Clarissa; people generally; genders; and life. So many things can be said about all of them. Still it's hard not to wonder, So is Clarissa a hero or villainess? A model of feminist strength––and queer desire––or a sellout? A shallow housewife who thinks only about her role as hostess, or a woman who has learned to make the best of the options that society––and history––have afforded her. Is she flaunting social norms, or appealing to them?
It's such a fascinating nexus of problems, ones I appreciate more each time I read the novel, especially when you consider the fare we're stuck with today, much of it trapped within the bubble of identity politics, which tends to categorize characters in two groups, victim and oppressor; never mind the comic-book-style reduction of characters as heroes and villains. Woolf would have none of that, even though she was keenly aware that simplification was the stuff of literary representation for centuries.
The point being there is no one thing but an amalgam. Woolf's thinking prefigured the postmodern turn against Truth with a capital T. What makes Clarissa heroic, if it's OK to use that word, is her manifold nature that inspires so many views of her. There were rare versions of that kind of female character going back to Penelope in The Odyssey; though with Clarissa complexity, and interest, are supercharged.
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