I'M NOT AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, JUST A BIT WARY

Mrs Dalloway in a hat

                 

I’ve been trying again to read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.  I’ve tried before and I gave it up as a bad job, but this time I got to the end of it.  It confirmed, what I already knew, that Virginia Woolf and I are not destined to be soul mates.

 

Mrs Dalloway has a reputation for being something of a walking novel. In Flaneuse Lauren Elkin says, ‘Mrs Dalloway is perhaps the greatest flaneuse of twentieth-century literature.’  She was wise to put in ‘perhaps,’ I’d say.  

 

True, Mrs Dalloway does do a bit of walking - she goes out to buy flowers because the servants are too busy preparing for her party (really - 'What a lark.   What a plunge!'),  but it’s a very short walk; she’s home by 11 am, apparently walking for an hour at most, and John Sutherland has pretty convincingly argued that she takes a taxi home.

 

But there’s a interesting line in the book.

“I love walking in London," said Mrs Dalloway. "Really it’s better than walking in the country!"

The line is unchanged from the way it appeared in the original short story version of the opening section, published in The Dial, in 1923, titled ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street.’

I do wonder if this was an unusual or even a startling or subversive thing for a woman (or anybody) to think and say in 1923 (short story) or 1925 (novel).

 

We do know that Woolf had read, or had tried to read, Joyce’s Ulysses  (1922-ish), but she didn’t rate it because it was written by a ‘a self-taught working man’ – self taught at University College Dublin.

 

         And I suppose it’s possible that Woolf was aware that Baudelaire described the flâneur in his essayThe Painter of Modern Life (1863), but I think it’s highly improbable that Mrs. Dalloway was.

 

Fortunately, there is some fabulous unintentional humor in the novel, which had me shorting Guinness through my nose

Mrs. Dalloway is not the only walker in the book. Her daughter walks too, to the Army and Navy Stores along with her one-time nanny Miss Kilman, who is a communist, a committed Christian, and commentators seem to insist that she’s a lesbian, hence perhaps the name -- Woolf was such a subtle writer.

 

         The hilarity comes when Woolf describes Kilman’s conversion, which came while out walking some time earlier.  ‘Bitter and churning Miss Kilman had turned into a church two years three months ago.’

         Walking can be a great source of metamorphosis.

Liz Taylor, acting