Emptiness About the Heart of Life": a Reformed Approach to Virginia Woolf's Mrs
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Volume 39 Number 3 Article 2 March 2011 "Emptiness About the Heart of Life": A Reformed Approach to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham's The Hours Mary Dengler Dordt College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege Part of the Christianity Commons, and the Modern Literature Commons Recommended Citation Dengler, Mary (2011) ""Emptiness About the Heart of Life": A Reformed Approach to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham's The Hours," Pro Rege: Vol. 39: No. 3, 10 - 18. Available at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege/vol39/iss3/2 This Feature Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University Publications at Digital Collections @ Dordt. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pro Rege by an authorized administrator of Digital Collections @ Dordt. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Editor’s Note: Dr. Mary Dengler presented this paper at the Calvinism for the 21st Century Conference, at Dordt College, April 2010. “An Emptiness About the Heart of Life”: A Reformed Approach to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours answers that question. He tells us not to leave the arts and sciences “in the hands of unbelievers” but instead to consider it our task to know God in all his works,” to “fathom with all the energy of [our] intellect, things terrestrial as well as things celes- tial,” to “open to view both the order of creation and the ‘common grace’ of the God [we] adore” in “nature,” the “production of human industry,” and “the life [and history] of mankind” ( Calvinism and Science” 125). We are called, then, to fathom Virginia Woolf’s modern classic Mrs. Dalloway1 and Michael Cunningham’s postmodern derivative work, The Hours,2 as examples of common grace. Guided by Mary J. Dengler by biblical norms,3 we accept the truths and aes- thetic brilliance of these works as “gifts of grace” (Kuyper, “Calvinism and Art” 155), while we resist and question the works’ moral and philosophical assumptions. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Cunningham’s Postmodernism accepts no textual interpreta- The Hours (1998)4 succeed as gifts of grace by de- tion as authoritative and no moral view as cor- picting one aspect of reality—the human struggle rect. In a culture that relies on opinion to resolve between certainty and doubt and the causes of that issues, how do Christians resolve biblical/cultural struggle. Writers who give us this “reality,” says tensions when reading fiction? Abraham Kuyper Woolf, are “good human beings…even if they show every variety of human depravity” (A Room of One’s Dr. Mary J. Dengler is Professor of English and Co-Director Own 109); they are good if they write with “integ- 5 of the Kuyper Scholars Program at Dordt College. rity” (72) about the human condition. Woolf says 10 Pro Rege—March 2011 it is the writer’s “business to find [reality] and… that…” (385). communicate it to the rest of us” for its “[cataract- The common subject is “life itself,” its mys- removing] operation…on the senses” that allows tery/ambiguity, represented in the insignificant us to see “more intensely afterwards” (110). Both but complex Mrs. Brown, of Woolf’s essay “Mr. writers do just that: they show us the contradictory Bennet and Mrs. Brown.” According to Quentin internal world of characters enthralled with life, Bell, this essay comes “as near as [Woolf] came perplexed at its mystery, disquieted at their own to an aesthetic manifesto” (2.104). In it she gives choices, and anxious to perform a redemptive act the “business” of the Georgian novelists6: “to look before life’s end. Together, they give us a clearer past the…preaching and moralizing of Wells and perception of what Woolf calls “Mrs. Brown,” or Galsworthy…and approach that central mystery, “life itself” (“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” 212). Mrs. Brown herself ” (104-105). That central mys- They show us what Clarissa Dalloway calls “an tery, as Woolf presents it, agrees with what existen- emptiness about the heart of life” (Mrs. Dalloway tialists Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger 31). explain as humanity’s inability to grasp or define That perception grows if we read Woolf’s life except in retrospect and therefore of living in Mrs. Dalloway and Cunningham’s The Hours to- ambivalence and anxiety, certain only of death. The gether, along with Woolf biographies and Woolf’s splendor of an unexpected early intimacy, followed non-fiction. Reading contextually, we enter what by a life that fails to match that splendor, points to Schliermacher posited, and Dilthey coined, the ambivalence in Woolf, who blamed gender identity “hermeneutic circle,” of moving from parts to and inequity in her critical writings. whole and whole to parts (Murfin/Ray 155). Doing Woolf’s feminist theory blames cultural ineq- so illuminates the whole. And even though we uity for much of the dissatisfaction that plagues can’t enter the “horizon,” or “range of vision,” of women—and by inference her characters. Woolf’s another time as if it were fixed, writes Gadamer, we fiction and non-fiction introduce ideas developed can fuse our horizon with the horizons of Woolf by later feminist schools. First, Woolf resists phal- and Cunningham (269-73) for the interaction and lo-centrism through silence (Murfin/Ray 172, 122) impact of the two “contexts” (297). Cunningham’s when character Clarissa Dalloway mentally es- interpretation of Woolf’s life and text according to capes Peter Walsh’s criticism by remembering Sally late twentieth-century sex/gender theories chang- Seton’s kiss. Second, Woolf introduces “semiotic” es the focus of Woolf’s work. or “unifying and fluid” language, as opposed to This paper contends that re-reading Woolf’s classifying or “symbolic” male language (127), in Mrs. Dalloway from a horizon broadened by her stream-of-conscious narrator, who connects Cunningham’s work changes the focus from characters’ thoughts and increases the ambiguity Septimus Smith’s suicide and Clarissa Dalloway’s of each moment’s perception. Third, she connects party to a pivotal moment in their youth: Clarissa’s “women’s bodies and writing” (123), using the kiss with Sally Seton and Septimus’ affection with window (symbolic of female sexual anatomy and his officer Evans. For both characters, that same- absorbing perception) as the lens through which sex intimacy paradoxically fills the hours that fol- Clarissa Dalloway and her androgynous counter- low with anxiety-producing emptiness and deter- part, Septimus Smith, absorb reality, as opposed mines their need to compensate for life’s failure. to the clock, Big Ben (symbolic of male anatomy This change of focus results from a “dialogue” and analytical perception), whose striking divides between readers and texts over a common “sub- the day with reminders of time’s and life’s passing. ject” (Phillips 3). In that dialogue, Christian read- Fourth, she focuses on fashion, “madness, disease, ers distinguish Cunningham’s assumptions from and the demonic” (124), in Clarissa Dalloway’s their own by turning to God’s Word, which, as comfort in clothes/Bond Street and in Septimus Gadamer explains, is perfect and complete, unlike Smith’s hallucinations—prophesying a new reli- the human word, which “never possesses complete gion, in which all things are alive in God. Most self-presence but is dispersed into thinking this or apparently, she introduces “gynocentrism,” or fe- Pro Rege—March 2011 11 male writing—“the way women across the ages Christian assumption that God’s creation of hu- have perceived themselves and imagined reality” mans “in his…image” differentiated “male and (124), focusing her narrative on one day in the life female” (Gen. 1:27) in more than anatomical ways. of Clarissa Dalloway. Some infer a maleness and femaleness in God’s Woolf also introduces gender fiction and theo- nature to explain the two genders. Others infer in- ry, developed by later theorists, to address another herent neutral capacities of self-consciousness and ambiguity—gender identity. Woolf’s character de- reason as God’s image but culturally constructed pictions suggest gender as a “learned behavior, a norms for maleness and femaleness. Karl Barth product of culture and its institutions,” not “some- explains that each human being is totally “man or thing natural or innate”; “heterosexuality and ho- woman” and “man and woman,” reflecting the dif- mosexuality” as “social constructs”; and sexuality ferentiation and unity of the Trinity (195). Jűrgen as “a continuum, not a fixed set of binary opposi- Moltmann explains humanity’s likeness to God tions” (Murfin/Ray 139). In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf (God’s plurality and unity) in the “sexual differ- develops a gender and sexual continuum, depicting entiation and community of human beings” (220); the most androgynous characters as the most sen- for Moltmann the human analogy of God consists sitive and creative, for example Septimus Smith’s in “the community of man and wife, which corre- anguish in recalling his lost love even as he envi- sponds to the fellowship of God with the Trinity” sions a new religion, and Clarissa Dalloway’s mem- (220). For both theologians, the sexes and genders ory of Sally’s kiss even as she plans a salvific party. are distinct in nature and unified in marriage, 7 To validate that continuum, Woolf imagines, in not a compendium. Woolf’s assumption of greater A Room of One’s Own, the writer’s imagination an- freedom in writing as “man womanly” or a “wom- drogynously, as an invisible river uniting a man and an manly” suggests cultural conditioning, cultural woman from opposite sides of a street, a union that defiance, insight, or an empowering contradic- removes the “strain” of seeing “one sex as distinct tion.