Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Exquisite Moments and the Temporality of the Kiss in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours

2010; Ohio State University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nar.0.0043

1538-974X

Kate Haffey,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

Exquisite Moments and the Temporality of the Kiss in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours Kate Haffey (bio) More than thirty years after it occurred, Clarissa Dalloway still remembers the kiss between herself and Sally Seton as "the most exquisite moment of her whole life" (Woolf 35). In scholarship on Mrs. Dalloway, this moment has most commonly been read as evidence of a repressed lesbian identity or dismissed as representing the innocence of childhood friendship. More recently, however, the kiss between Sally and Clarissa has sparked conversation among queer theorists regarding its relationship to temporality. These theorists, specifically Kathryn Bond Stockton and Annamarie Jagose, tend to focus on the kiss between Clarissa and Sally as a moment that temporarily interrupts her inevitable movement towards marriage and reproduction. This is a moment that is out of sync with the dominant narratives about heterosexual development. And though some feminist critics attempt to see this kiss as representing a somewhat conventional phase in the development towards mature adulthood, these queer theorists have focused on the radical disjunction between this moment and the heterosexual future that follows it. This moment is thus an "erotic pause," part of the novel's tendency to create pockets where time functions in a different manner (Stockton 302). This moment may have little result on the plot of the novel, as we know from the beginning the shape that Clarissa's life has taken, but it is nonetheless insistent in its importance—"the most exquisite moment of her whole life." Another queer theorist, Judith Halberstam, follows this "exquisite moment" into a different novel: Michael Cunningham's rewriting of Mrs. Dalloway: The Hours. Her brief reading of this text focuses on Cunningham's use of the kiss as the moment where multiple temporalities brush up against one another (3). [End Page 137] Perhaps this kiss has drawn the attention of queer theorists interested in temporality because it seems to upset or rupture the forward flow of time in narrative. It is a moment that recurs for Clarissa throughout the text, a moment that the text marks as significant, but one that seems to be outside the cause and effect logic of narrative. Such issues are beginning to become of interest within the emerging discourse of Queer Temporality.1 Though Queer Temporality has yet to turn directly to consider the question of narrative temporality, theorists like Stockton, Jagose, and Halberstam consider the way in which cultural narratives are based on a sense of time that directly correlates to heterosexuality. For example, within narrative, time often moves according to the progression through a set of normal life stages from childhood through adolescence to marriage and reproduction (Halberstam 4). In such a framework, a single kiss can hold little significance. And yet, Mrs. Dalloway repeatedly insists on the significance of this moment. For this reason, I think it is important to investigate the moment of the kiss specifically as a moment, a moment that is counter to the normal flow of time in narrative. Though a number of Woolf critics have tried to assimilate Clarissa's and Sally's kiss to a conventional stage in Clarissa's development toward adulthood, the moment of the kiss ultimately deviates from the temporal movement toward marriage. Instead, the kiss, as constructed in Woolf's text, offers strange and unpredictable forms of temporality. In this essay, I would like to read those forms of temporality that emerge from Woolf's representations of this kiss. In my reading, Eve Sedgwick's concept of the "queer moment" will be of particular use in understanding the significance of the "exquisite" moments that Mrs. Dalloway depicts. In building on the work of Sedgwick and other queer theorists, I would first like to reexamine the kiss and its significance for our understanding of Woolf's narrative project. I would then like to turn my discussion to what might be the most detailed analysis of the Clarissa-Sally kiss: Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours. Cunningham's novel offers three readings of this kiss, readings that represent three related insights about temporality based on Woolf's representation. My reading of Cunningham's novel will serve to further theorize these exquisite moments as well as...