[Vwoolf] Cunningham Essay, NYTBR, Dec.27, 2020

[Pat Laurence]

I just read Cunningham's piece in NYTBR, part of his introduction to
Virago's new edition of *Mrs. Dalloway.* He credits Woolf's "revolutionary
novel" that revolves around the day in the life of a woman, "a masterpiece
created out of the humblest narrative materials" (like Joyce's
*Ulysses, *unmentioned).
It is also structured (as many critics have noted) around both Mrs.
Dalloway's party and the death of Septimus. “What a lark! What a plunge!”
announces Mrs. Dalloway on the first page of the novel. While one agrees,
Cunningham neglects an important layer in the novel that Woolf noted in her
*Diary:* “I want to criticize the social system, & to show it at work” (D
2, 243-44). In the character of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf shadows the society
ladies she knew, like Sybil Colefax and Lady Ottoline Morrell whose lives
were shaped by giving parties. They were women who like Clarissa “could
feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her
roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?)." She worried instead about the
flowers, the silver, her dress, and most importantly, the “art” of the
guest list. With damaged soldiers like Septimus in the background, Woolf's
critiques the “party consciousness" against a shadowy war background. She
digs "tunnels behind her characters,"  but, it is important to note that
Mrs. Dalloway is presented not only a socialite and a woman with a
vivacious, youthful past as "Clarissa," but also a woman of the
upper-class who has and is allowed a rich narrative and expansive inner
life in the novel with a sympathy and identification with the story of the
sad,  Septimus who suffers from PTSD.  She overhears this story from one of
her party guests, Dr.  William Bradshaw, the psychiatrist, and he, as part
of the social system, is critiqued as well as the practice of psychiatry,
and England's post-war treatment of such soldiers. Cunningham's assertion
that Mrs. Dalloway is "seldom discussed "as one of the great novels of
World War I," is belied by the extensive scholarship on the novel and the
war by critics and editors: Ann Fernald, Karen Levenback, Mark Hussey,
Chapman & Manson, Barbars Lounsberry, Nancy Bazin and others--who would be
more suited to write such an Introduction. The question is why Woolf
scholars are often marginalized.
Pat Laurence

*Elizabeth Bowen, A Literary Life*
 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783030264147__;!!KGKeukY!koYajUHCMYGM4WpuJU2IXDehgh8YeLlzqr3cXvRw2xDXX3h0SO4xnRrUKy4PmPNSogk$ 
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