"A Direction of One's Own": Alienation in Mrs. Dalloway and Sula
2006; Saint Louis University; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1945-6182
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
ResumoBefore Toni Morrison became the goddess of contemporary literature, she was Chloe Ardellia Wofford, graduate student at Cornell who, in 1955, completed master's thesis exploring manifestations of alienation in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Therein, Morrison defines alienation, with its attendant isolation, as the defining literary theme of the twentieth century, and explores the two authors' differing treatments of in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and two of Faulkner's novels (Treatment 1). She begins by theorizing that Woolf's characters only become self-aware when isolated, and that Faulkner's characters never attain in isolation (2-3). Ultimately, she determines that while Faulkner and Woolf seek the same ends, the to the questions of death, life, time and morality, they disagree on what pattern of existence most conducive to honesty and self-knowledge (39). Morrison privileges Faulkner's emphasis on communal connection by reading his position as the antithesis to Woolf's (4), and, after all, her later writings clearly reveal the value she places on community. Alienation, writes Morrison, is not Faulkner's answer to the problems of modern life (3), and hardly seems to be hers either. (1) Although Morrison has doubtlessly revised many of the opinions she expressed in her thesis, she continues to tout the dangers of isolation. (2) This apparent rejection of Woolf's preferred strategy for attaining does not, however, mean that Woolf exerts less influence on Morrison's work than does Faulkner, although the lack of critical commentary to that effect might suggest as much. (3) Although fewer scholars have addressed the topic, Morrison's fiction similarly explores some of Woolf's key themes in ways that allow her characters successfully to navigate the problems of modernity that her thesis identifies. In fact, biographical and theoretical connections suggest that Morrison's work might even have stronger ties to Woolf than to Faulkner. (4) At any rate, such relationship seems most textually evident between Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Morrison's Sula. Though the two novels differ in many respects, at base, they share strikingly similar plots. Mrs. Dalloway's main action reveals much through its depiction of Clarissa Dalloway's interaction with friends and family throughout day filled primarily with preparations for the party she gives at the novel's conclusion. In the background, one subplot details the last day in the life of Septimus Warren Smith, World War I veteran suffering from the symptoms of post-traumatic stress that ultimately lead to his suicide, and another deals with Clarissa's girlhood romance with Peter Walsh and friendship with Sally Seton. At the party, Clarissa learns of Septimus's suicide from his doctor, Bradshaw, and feels an uncanny connection to him and his tragic end. In Sula, Morrison utilizes time differently; rather than relying, as Woolf does, on memory to keep the narrative action in the present, Morrison follows her title character for several years. She tells the story of Sula's life, though, in Woolf fashion, by outlining Sula's relationships with her one great love and only true friend, and, much like Clarissa's connection to Septimus, Sula shares deep revelatory bond with Shadrack, veteran of the first world war who exists in state of altered reality quite similar to the one that traps Septimus. By noting such likenesses, I do not mean to suggest that Morrison simply retells Woolf's narrative in an African American context; in fact, she does precisely the opposite. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., speaks to such revisions in The Signifying Monkey when he suggests that African American writers often rewrite western texts with a compelling sense of difference (xxii). In his study of Mrs. Dalloway and alienation, Jeremy Hawthorn determines that while the novel can present the unsatisfactoriness of alienation, includes no real solution to it (94). …
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