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

[Elaine Pigeon]

Thank you for your commentary. Now I won’t have to read the article. I have never been a fan of Cunningham’s The Hours. I wonder too why Virago didn’t have a woman write the intro. I suppose it’s a matter of marketing. Pity.

Elaine Pigeon, PhD
Concordia University

> On Dec 27, 2020, at 11:58 AM, Pat Laurence via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:
> 
> 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!hoC0ORzRV5NN00GMzodUw_xprlq3O8WcqKW5dpI71nkafmF96MoE7AAdwAmk1hBTBWY$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783030264147__;!!KGKeukY!koYajUHCMYGM4WpuJU2IXDehgh8YeLlzqr3cXvRw2xDXX3h0SO4xnRrUKy4PmPNSogk$>
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