BECOMING–VIRGINIA WOOLF: CORPOREAL AFFECTS IN THE HOURS

BETTY XIE Directed by Stephen Daldry and adapted from Michael — Cunningham’s novel, The Hours (2002) interweaves a day The Hours (2002) of three seemingly unrelated women’s lives from differ- ent times in history and locations. Connecting the three parallel narrative planes is Virginia Woolf; she is one of the female protagonists and is, of course, the voice behind her novel Mrs. Dalloway. Beginning and end- ing with Woolf’s suicide, the film thematizes Virginia Woolf’s desire in between facing life and choosing death, a struggle shared by the other two female protagonists, Clarissa Vaughan and Laura Brown. The film’s portrayal of Woolf and Nicole Kidman’s performance for the role have provoked many critical and popular debates on whether or not it did justice to this milestone modern writer and feminist thinker. In this essay, I shift away from understanding Woolf as an “authentic” historical figure or an icon constructed by and circulated in cul- tural texts. By applying Barbara Kennedy’s interpreta- tion of Gilles Deleuze’s theory on “becoming-woman,” I examine Woolf as a queer body with no fixed subjec- tivity. Devising the notion “becoming-Woolf” to ana- 5 lyze the three female protagonists’ experiences in The Hours, I argue that the corporeal presence of Virginia Woolf foregrounds the characters’ desire. This desire is A fourth year student majoring in Cinema Studies and Asia Pacifc Studies, Bety is keenly interested produced by and communicated through unspeakable in topics including transnatonal Chinese cinemas, affects, rather than subjective emotion. corporeality in flm and star studies. She had previously published her writng in the Innis Review and The Innis Herald. Paralleled with her academic LITERATURE REVIEW: ON VIRGINIA WOOLF curiosity is her passion in flmmaking. Her frst fcton short Girlfriends (2013) was screened Upon the release of The Hours in late 2002, scholars, film at the 2013 Toronto Reel Asian Internatonal critics and “Woolfians” have fervidly debated the film’s Film Festval. Currently, she is directng and co- producing the documentary The Home Promised.

ALEXANDRA MCCALLA 63 representation of this iconic figure (Lee, Virginia Woolf’s, 56-57). Specifically, spec- a queer image-sign fails to highlight the function of human bodies as sites through tators are drawn to or disgusted by the ways in which Woolf’s corporeal presence is which characters confirm their material, organic existence in The Hours. Throughout physically constructed by the transformation of actress Nicole Kidman, and textually the film, unsatisfied with their mundane lives, the three female protagonists—Vir- deconstructed through the enactment of Woolf’s infamous suicide. Woolf’s biogra- ginia Woolf, Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughan—communicate their desire through pher Hermione Lee finds that “the death scene is grotesquely prettified”, a moment three kisses with women in close relationships with them. For Woolf, this kiss takes of “sentimental expressiveness [that is] in strong contrast to Woolf’s own fction”. For place when her sister Vanessa Bell bids farewell to her after paying a brief visit to her some “Woolfans”, the acts of drowning Woolf twice is irritant enough. Kidman’s pros- suburban home in Richmond. Film critic Roger Ebert pinpoints the three homosexual thetic nose as an attempt to assimilate Woolf’s demeanor further upsets fans for its kissing scenes as cues that suggest the characters are “three versions of Mrs. Dallo- inauthenticity (Lee, Virginia Woolf’s 60). Some, however, embrace Kidman’s realization way” who “illuminate mysterious of sex, duty and love,” a textual analysis that is pre- of Woolf, how she conjures something of Woolf’s presence. Mesmerized by Kidman’s cisely predicated on understanding Woolf as a queer symbol. Nevertheless, this anal- almost unrecognizable face, flm critic David Ansen hails the subtleties of her fgure ysis does not account for the ineffable affects the acts of kissing themselves display. movements in asserting Woolf’s importance as the “presiding spirit” of the narrative. There exists, however tenuous, an unspeakable nuance reflected by the sudden, almost Underneath these competing responses is the shared emphasis on scrutinizing aggressive, kiss between Virginia and Vanessa. The first line that Virginia speaks after the body of Virginia Woolf in the film as the blood and flesh of the historical figure. the kiss—“Say something Vanessa, didn’t you think I seem better?”— implies Virgin- Such an emphasis, however, neglects that the proliferations and circulations of the ia’s desperation for her sister’s affirmation of her health, but also suggests that her representations of Woolf in media and arts have already transcended her existential desire cannot be fully articulated in words. It is only through touching bodies that she, significance from being Virginia Woolf the author, the feminist or the modern thinker, as well as Laura and Clarissa, finds an outlet to release such desire. to Virginia Woolf the cultural icon. Reviewing the consistent fascination towards In order to fully extrapolate on a film in which characters experience the limits Woolf from Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf to Man Ray’s pho- of language and use their bodies to communicate, I introduce Gilles Deleuze’s theory tographs of Woolf, literary scholar Brenda Silver argues that Woolf’s iconic status is on “becoming-woman,” contextualized in Barbara Kennedy’s explication on the aes- indistinguishable from that of a star like Marilyn Monroe (128-130). Furthermore, the thetics of sensation. Based on the Nietzschean ontology that human bodies inhabit abundant theoretical literature that foreground Woolf as an example of transgressing no fixed identities but “a multiplicity of changing desires, sensations and instincts,” the boundaries of dominant ideas, culture and authority, have appropriated her as not Deleuze’s theory defines the “process of desire” as “becoming”: movements of par- merely a feminist, but a queer icon (Silver 81-83). Virginia Woolf, therefore, ceases to be ticles in the assemblage of bodies to produce molecular forces for the materiality of an unchangeable figure. Instead, she is inscribed as a symbol with open-ended mean- affects (Kennedy 88-89). For Kennedy, Deleuzian “becoming” melds the understanding ings that continued to be produced and reproduced by high and low culture (Silver of our physical and metaphysical existence with “desubjectivied affects, not subjec- 6-13). Though Silver does not discuss the cinematic representation of Woolf in The tified stages towards any positioning of an autonomous subject or agent” (93). Here, Hours, her thesis gestures towards a more constructive approach for analyzing the desubjectivity does not deny the existence of subject-positions. Rather, it implies that film. Rather than bearing the obligation of a biopic to faithfully depict Woolf, her body subjectivities are produced through “pre-verbal intensities” of “becoming,” before and her private life, The Hours is yet another text that contributes to the meaning-pro- the formulation of the self through linguistic structures (Kennedy 89). By extension, duction for Woolf as a sign. “becoming-woman” does not assume woman’s bodily essence or highlight gendered subjectivity. Rather, it is “tracking of woman as a ‘function’ of a series of processes FROM WOOLF AS A SIGN TO WOOLF AS A BODY which have no referent to transcendent entities or agency”. Located in the “realm of the While I adopt Silver’s proposal to consider the meanings of Virginia Woolf as fluid pre-personal, the affective,” “Becoming-woman” calls for attention towards elements rather than fixed and recognize Woolf’s queer significance, I also intend to move women are made in relation to, beyond identity and subjectivity (Kennedy 94-95). beyond Silver’s semiotic paradigm. Reading Woolf’s corporeal presence as merely Such theorization of “desubjectivied affects” for “becoming-woman” advances the

64 CAMÉRA STYLO ALEXANDRA MCCALLA 65 study of corporeality in film. On the one hand, it underlines the distinction between and figure movements constantly betray her, subtly reflecting a sense of self-denial emotion and affect. As Kennedy explicates, whereas emotion always requires the own- and sadness. ership by a bounded subjectivity, affect, insofar that it is involved in the functioning Her realization of her inability to occupy the subjectivity of Mrs. Dalloway pushes of pre-verbal desire, is not “ownable by an individual agent,” suspending the structure her to an emotional breakdown when her friend and Richard’s past lover, Louis Waters, of action-reaction processes of linguistic signification (100-101). On the other hand, unexpectedly appears at her apartment. In this scene, linguistic speech recedes behind “becoming” appropriates the importance of bodies in cinema. Bodies are “fields for body movements that deliver the unspeakable affects that characters experience the production of the process of desire…fluid and mutable, constituting life through through themselves and in communication with spectators. When Louis points out ‘becoming’” (Kennedy 98). Aside from human bodies, images, sound, and other ele- the illogicality in Richard’s book and reminds Clarissa about their past together, the ments in cinema are like bodies. They function in motion, defining each other through film employs a series of close-ups to frame Clarissa’s hands repeatedly cracking and movements and forming the larger body—the containment of any given film (Kennedy handling eggs into a bowl. The successive images of her body in contact with raw food 102). Hence, the cinematic experience is inherently affective. erupts organic affects that foreshadow her breakdown. I specify affect, not emotion, In light of the paradigm of “becoming-woman,” I argue that in The Hours, the since Clarissa is incapable of not only articulating such sensation but also accepting it three female protagonists undergo struggles, not between confronting and escaping as originating from herself. Once she starts crying for no apparent reason, she observes their lives, but between inhabiting a subject-position and submitting themselves to her own body’s reaction to the physical presence of Louis and admits, “I don’t know “desubjectivifed affects.” All of them attempt to occupy the subjectivity of Virginia what’s happening…I seem to be unraveling.” Clearly, neither she nor we as the spec- Woolf, and yet all experience utter disappointment in failing to do so. In the next tators can provide an explanation for her sudden outbreak. However saturating the section of the essay, I examine each protagonist’s experience as processes of “becom- mise-en-scène are affects further infused by her dramatic figure movements as she ing-Woolf.” This notion legitimizes the presence of Virginia Woolf not as a sign but as kneels down inside the kitchen and retreats from the façade of that calm, elegant Cla- a body, and not as the simulated body of the historical figure but as a cinematic body: rissa Vaughan, the perfect hostess of the party—the image of Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, stimulating the movements of narrative, character and affects. the character that Richard bestowed upon her. Whereas Clarissa Vaughan envisions the subject-position of Mrs. Clarissa Dal- BECOMING-WOOLF loway, or Virginia Woolf, as a channel to her nostalgic past, Laura Brown idealizes For both Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughan, the subject-position of Virginia Woolf that subject-position as a solution to her suffocating present. A devoted reader of Mrs. is one that they imagined and constructed from Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Consistently Dalloway from the beginning of the film, Laura finds solace in Woolf’s lines through using Woolf’s voiceover narration from the novel to transition and conjoin different the hours of facing a serene family life that she is supposed to lovingly embrace but temporalities of the plot, the film suggests that the subjectivity of Woolf as the author secretly detests. Her obsession with Mrs. Dalloway, and its important status in her of Mrs. Dalloway is indistinguishable from that of the fictional character Clarissa Dal- life, is most apparent when she reads the novel before attempting to commit suicide. loway. In the case of Clarissa Vaughan, juxtaposing a close-up of Woolf reading the first The film intercuts between close-ups of Virginia Woolf, contemplating the plot for line of the novel, “Mrs. Dalloway says she will get the flowers herself” and a close-up Mrs. Dalloway in her room, and close-ups of Laura Brown, reading the same novel to of Clarissa reiterating the same line, the film establishes striking parallels between strengthen her determination to committing suicide in the hotel room. Such juxta- Clarissa Vaughan’s and Clarissa Dalloway’s respective particular days, preparing for position suggests that the corporeal presence of Woolf transverses spatial, temporal, a party. Trapped by the past memories of her young romance with an award winning and visual frames in exerting influence on Laura. As Woolf decides that she will not poet dying from AIDS, Richard Brown, Clarissa is haunted by the subjectivity of Mrs. kill a particular character (presumably Mrs. Dalloway) in Mrs. Dalloway, Laura also Clarissa Dalloway, a nickname that Richard calls her and uses to position her in his fic- wakes from the urge to kill herself. In that crucial moment of choosing between life tion. While calmly buying flowers and preparing food for Richard’s party showcase her and death, the film’s surrealistic treatment of the mise-en-scène in relation to Lau- efforts in trying to fit the role that Richard sets for her, her uneasy facial expressions ra’s body implies her decision is not simply made with ethical considerations for her

66 CAMÉRA STYLO ALEXANDRA MCCALLA 67 family. In an aerial shot of the hotel room, Laura, lying in the middle of a bed with her ting up the writing board and lighting up a cigarette etc. It is by valuing her material pregnant stomach unclothed, is inundated by waves abruptly and violently surging up surroundings that Virginia unswervingly states her wish for returning to London after from both sides, as if they were going to swallow her. This fantastical invasion of water Leonard chases behind her to the train station: visually echoes the drowning of Woolf at the beginning of the film. It implies that If I were thinking clearly, Leonard, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, Laura is immersing herself into the subjectivity of not Mrs. Dalloway, but of Woolf, in the deep dark. And that only I can know, only I can understand my own condition. the voice of her omnipresent guide. By dramatising Laura’s supposedly psychologi- You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, cal immersion as a physically sensible experience, the scene translates the platitude I live with it too. This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not of affects that are interwoven into the act of immersion. These affects are nurtured the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs but the violent jolt of the Capital. That is my to a degree of excess by the melancholy sound waves of background music by Philip choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter Glass. Like Clarissa Vaughan, Laura Brown is unravelled by indescribable desire in her of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity. kitchen scene, as she suddenly breaks out from the imagined waves, sits upright on the Here, Virginia codifies her subject-position. Every “I” is a resounding insistence bed and cries for her inability to end her life. of her agency to inhabit her idealized subjectivity— an independent female poet cul- Seeking to step into Woolf’s subjectivity and subsequently being undone by that tivated by the “violent jolt of the Capital”—the precise image that abundant litera- same desire, Clarissa and Laura both undergo “becoming-Woolf.” As I have demon- tures have stereotyped her as. Fulfilling Woolf’s wish, Leonard agrees to move back strated with examples from The Hours, “becoming-Woolf” functions not at the emo- to London with her. The film’s (in)famous enactments of her suicide, however, prob- tional, but at the affective level, converging the psychological and the physical realms lematize a straightforward reading that Woolf’s desire is thus settled. To provide fruit- into one production field for desire. Eventually, both Clarissa and Laura accept that ful insights into the film’s treatment of Woolf’s death and dead body, I must ponder their desire, organically vibrated through their bodily affects. The issue of desire seriously one of the seemingly superfluous criticisms against the film—why drown cannot be overcome by performing the role of Mrs. Dalloway. The sensation of being Virginia Woolf twice? unravelled, thus, is in itself an integral part to “becoming-Woolf.” Their desire, that In the first sequence that the film stages her suicide, not unlike Clarissa and which suspends and surpasses any linguistic structure, does not submerge into the Laura, Virginia, experiences difficulties to enunciate her desire in words. “You see, subjectivity of Virginia Woolf, not because Woolf’s subject-position does not exist or I can’t even write this properly,” she states in her last letter to Leonard. Yet unlike is culturally constructed and imagined, but because that position itself is in constant Clarissa and Laura who come to accept that their desire is ineffable and continue to go contestations with the same kind of “desubjectivied affects.” Unfolding one day from on with their lives, when Virginia feels certain that she can longer sanely occupy her Virginia Woolf’s private life, the film suggests that Virginia Woolf herself stands at the own subject-position, she chooses death, annihilating the existence of her body. In a forefront for the struggle in and through “becoming-Woolf.” series of montage shots, detailing the procedures of drowning herself and explicitly Lingering in-between sanity and insanity, fictional and real, and emotions and capturing Woolf’s full body under water, the film foregrounds the cruel occurrence of affects, Virginia Woolf is lost in the deadening, suburban life in Richmond. Looked her death. For Woolf, out of “becoming-Woolf” is not the embrace of “desubjectified after by her husband Leonard, doctors, and servants due to her history of black-outs affects,” for once she departs from the role of Virginia Woolf, be it idealized or con- and depression, Woolf resists others informing her wellbeing and by extension her structed by herself, her subjectivity is vacant with no substitute. consciousness. Her one day in the film is a day to search for ways to hold onto her own If the first suicide scene is to encapsulate the processes through which Virginia subjectivity. She negotiates for a substantiated grasp of her own existence, not purely Woolf is undone by her own deadly desire, the second suicide scene reasserts the very through her intellectual engagement with her writing, but more importantly, through presence of her body. Alongside voiceover remarks by Woolf, “Always to look life in the the affective aura nurtured by the physical setting of her tangible surroundings. It is face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to in unleashing such an aura to spectators that the film painstakingly depicts Virginia’s put it away…,” the film repeats a long shot of Woolf approaching the center of a river minute routines before she starts writing in her own room—picking the right pen, set- from the first suicide sequence. However, without further portraying her suicide or

68 CAMÉRA STYLO ALEXANDRA MCCALLA 69 cutting to shots to feature her dead body, the scene slowly fades out to credits with her For film scholar Maria Leavenworth, in this passage, Woolf imposes a hierarchy on head still surfaced on the water, looking afar. This ending scene does not highlight the the novel and film adaptation of Anna Karenina, highlighting that the text of the novel extinction of Woolf’s body, but rather implies its lingering affects, affects that would contains the core meaning of thought processes for the film to more or less translate continue to influence beyond the containment of the diegesis. In this light, to “kill” (503-504). Leavenworth thus embarks on an intertextual analysis of the film The Hours Virginia Woolf twice, is to enable spectators to face her death textually and then, “to in relation with Michael Cunningham’s original novel, drawing a dichotomy between put it away,” realizing that the film does not signify an end for the body of Virginia Woolf’s modernist ideas and the film’s postmodern traits. Nevertheless, in light of Woolf living in the discourses of our culture. Kennedy’s theorization of bodies in film, Woolf’s wonder at the cinematic representa- tion of Anna Karenina’s corporeality, “emphasis…upon her teeth, her pearls, and her CONCLUSION: VIRGINIA WOOLF ON CINEMA velvet,” should not be hastily dismissed. Indeed, in the next paragraph of the same Therefore, through the depiction, exploration, and restoration of Woolf’s corporeal article, Woolf continues to conjecture on the unique potentials that cinema exhibits: presence, The Hours as a film text contributes to the larger, ongoing meaning-produc- Is there any characteristic which thought processes that can be rendered visible with- tion for Virginia Woolf. Specifically, it approaches Woolf as a queer body in “becom- out the help of words? It has speed and slowness: dartlike directness and vaporous cir- ings.” In this final section, I point towards ways in which the analytic framework cumlocutions. But it has, also, especially in moments of emotion, the picture-making “becoming-Woolf” adds new dimensions to the queerness of Woolf’s body beyond the power, the need to lift its burden to another bearer: to let an image run side by side film’s narrative. along with it. (“On Cinema”) This “realm of the pre-personal, the affective” that Deleuzian “becoming” evokes, According to Woolf, the “picture making power” of cinema should transcend lan- wherein subjectivity and body are not separated entities for the unfolding of desire guage and render that which is thought of to that which can be seen, with rhythm, (Kennedy 94), is admittedly at loggerheads with the modernist baggage that Virginia intensity, and emotion. This speculation precisely taps into the aesthetics that Ken- Woolf brings along. “Becoming-Woolf” is almost an oxymoron: while “becoming” nedy extrapolates from Deleuzian “becoming,” that visual images and other elements bets on the bodies for “constituting life” (Kennedy 98), Virginia Woolf is often deemed in films are “bodies in assemblage”, interacting and colliding with each other to bear as a spokesperson for the mind, within which the stream of consciousness grounds desire, produce sensation and exert affects (100-102). Although Woolf employs the humans’ existential significance. Upon a glance, The Hours seems to present no excep- word “emotion” instead of “affect” to describe visual impacts, her curiosity about the tion in this avenue. A re-reading of Woolf’s speech at the train station scene is suffice. peculiarity of cinema that “let image run side by side along with” indicates an under- As she eloquently asserts that having the right to have “some say in the matter of her standing of pure imagery and the detection of a quality that is not owned by any par- own prescription…defines her humanity,” Woolf emphasizes the categorical impor- ticular agent. Woolf’s meditation on cinema, coalesced with Kennedy’s theorization tance of individualism and agency, indeed, of individualism as agency—an intellectual on filmic bodies, nicely frames intertwined presentations of the three female bodies capacity that is keenly associated with her modernist label. in The Hours. Filled with desire and influenced by affects, these bodies operate in a Yet by connecting Deleuze and Kennedy’s film theories with Woolf’s early specu- polyphonic, intertextual structure with the same plot. Woolf’s theoretical speculation lations on cinematic specificity, I dare to destabilize the modernist “cage” on Woolf’s on corporeality in cinema punctures the entrenched assumption that Woolf strictly significance. Writing in 1926, when cinema was still considered to be a new-born art speaks to the significance of subjectivity, the mind, and stream of consciousness. The form, Woolf vividly describes her cinematic experience: jarring demarcation between Woolf ’s modernist stance and the postmodern represen- tation of her body in The Hours is transgressed by no one but Woolf herself, thereby The eye says: ‘‘Here is Anna Karenina.’’ A voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing further concreting Woolf’s status in contemporary culture as a queer body. pearls comes before us. But the brain says: “That is no more Anna Karenina than My study of Virginia Woolf’s corporeal presence in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours it is Queen Victoria.” For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of has incorporated both textual analyses and theoretical gestures, both of which shed her mind—her charm, her passion, her despair. All the emphasis is laid by the cinema upon her teeth, her pearls, and her velvet. (“On Cinema”) new light on the existing literatures about Woolf, the film and more broadly, cine-

70 CAMÉRA STYLO ALEXANDRA MCCALLA 71 matic bodies. By outlining the three female protagonists’ “becoming-Woolf” experi- ence, I have demonstrated that Virginia Woolf simultaneously resists the flattening of being an image-sign and asserts itself as a body that exhibits “desubjectived affects.” By examining the film in conjunction with Barbara Kennedy’s interpretation of Gilles Deleuze’s theory on “becoming” and Virginia Woolf’s meditation on cinematic spec- ificity, I put forward ways in which the film contributes to the meaning of Woolf as a queer body that challenges categories of sexes, body/mind duality, and modern/ postmodern dichotomy. Ultimately, The Hours is a testimony to the belief that Gilles Deleuze, Barbara Kennedy, and Virginia Woolf celebrate—that corporeal affects, along with sensation and desire that cannot be readily expressed in words, matter in cinema.

Works Cited

Ansen, David. “Mrs. Dalloway’s Close-Up.” News Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on week Dec 09 2002: 79-. ProQuest. Web. 25 Biography. Princeton, N.J: Princeton Mar. 2013 . University Press, 2005. Print.

Ebert, Roger. “Review: The Hours,” Roger Ebert. 27 ---.“Ways of Dying.” The Guardian. 8 Feb. 2003. Dec. 2002. Web. 10 Apr. 2013. Web. 10 Apr. 2013.

Kennedy, Barbara M. Deleuze and Cinema: The Silver, Brenda R. Virginia Woolf Icon. Chicago: Aesthetcs of Sensaton. Edinburgh: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Print Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Print. Woolf, Virginia. “On Cinema.” Woolf Online. 10 May. 1926. Web. 10 Apr. 2013. Leavenworth, Maria L. “’A Life as Potent and Dangerous as Literature Itself’: Intermediated Moves from Mrs Dalloway to The Hours.” Journal of Popular Culture, 43.3 (2010): 503- 523. Print.

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