Perhaps I'm missing something, but the cover story of a recent issue of "T, the New York Times Style Magazine," contains a rather prominent misuse of Virginia Woolf's fiction.
The magazine runs an annual issue on "The Greats" and the lead article this time around is about Nick Cave, an African-American artist known for colorful, eclectic works of art. Megan O'Grady wrote the piece and in it, she describes Cave as having "a Dalloway-like genius for bringing people from different walks of life to the table in experiences of shared good will."
The editors apparently considered that depiction so seminal that they pulled it out of the text and displayed it in bold type at the top of one page.
There is no explanation in the text as to what or whom Ms O'Grady was referring to when she used the word "Dalloway," so (subject to correction) I think it is fair to assume she meant Virginia's Woolf's great party-giver, Clarissa, from the novel "Mrs. Dalloway."
Clarissa does, indeed, have a determination to bring people together.
"... what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh it was very queer. Here was so-and-so in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater, someone else, say in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it."
But while the people invited to Clarissa's parties may have come from different walks of life in one sense (they have different occupations), they are far from different in more significant ways. All are from a single stratum of society, the British upper middle class.
Woolf herself did not object to the British class system and in some important respects her writings served to reinforce it. For instance, in her lengthy essay "Three Guineas," she concerned herself exclusively with the prospects of "the daughters of educated men." And her famous supposedly feminist essay "A Room of Ones Own" concerns women who somehow would have recourse to an annual unearned income of 500 pounds sterling, a very large sum at the time the work was written.
(Woolf, hailed as a feminist icon, at one point (in "Three Guineas") said she wanted to burn the word.)
But back to Mrs. Dalloway. Although Clarissa treated her servants and other working class individuals (such as the flower shop attendant) well in a sort of noblesse oblige fashion, she didn't mix with them or their class socially.
More significantly, perhaps, was her failure to succeed in bringing the people she did mix with together "in experiences of shared good will" (as Ms O'Grady put it.) In fact, far from it.
How do we know that?
After completing "Mrs. Dalloway," Woolf wrote eight short stories about Clarissa's party. In each and every one, she related how various people invited to the party and introduced to each other on the view that they would surely hit it off as a result of some shared interest or experience, failed miserably to do so.
Hopefully, as Ms O'Grady states, Nick Cave is a lot better at that, but if so, his model is most definitely not Clarissa Dalloway. She was well-intentioned, but not a success.
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