Opacity and tedium conspire to confound those readers who style themselves after bulldozers (myself very much included). The time it takes one to slog through this little wisp of a novel, perhaps due to its extreme soporific effects, condemns writers of the leisure class and every critic (likely also of the leisure class) who, via High Modernism, extols their graces.
Indeed, Woolf must have buried her tongue deeply in her cheek when she named her protagonist "Mrs. Dalloway," for the lady dallies away not only the single day whose dalliances the novel delineates, but, as Peter Walsh (an ex-lover) and Sally Seton (an old friend) (both pseudo-character foils, mooted by the novel's end by their own inanities) incise, (and as the "heroine" knows, but ultimately couldn't care less) Clarissa Dalloway has frittered away her entire life.
But that is what the leisure class does. Woolf chooses words in the way that Clarissa Dalloway chooses flowers, and for the same purpose: to fill up otherwise empty vessels and mask vapidity via decor. And of course, to entertain herself. However else could she pass the time?
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Virginia Woolf isn't exactly High Modern. You could say that she doesn't aspire to transcend the intellectualism in which she was immersed. She was complacent, lazy. She was also female. In being embraced by feminist criticism of many kinds, Ms. Woolf is resigned to be an artefact--a mere predecessor of our contemporary pop attitudes. And that is what Mrs. Dalloway is--a novel for the unadventuresome (bourgeoise) female whose concerns still scarcely reach beyond the domestic. Is this more a comment on Woolf's progressive thinking (to be en vogue sixty-five years after her death) or to our own backwardness? Regardless, you betray your anti-feminist tendancies. Some critics might suggest sending you to a camp for political re-education. Instead, I suggest spreading the word that Woolf should be weighed against her contemporaries by the same measures. I imagine that were the handicap in her favour removed, she would command increasingly less discussion in literature survey courses every passing semester. Stream-of-consciousness was not only not her invention, it wasn't even her forte. Leave it to the Second World War to do something productive in wiping clean the English literary scene of such precious pretenders.
Thank, Prof.
In my defense, I began by writing that Woolf kept the more femme aspects of High Modernism while disposing of the intellectual nitty-gritty by which we recognize the male moderns, but I didn't want to flaunt my misogynism; it seemed rather uncouth.
As much as we may be called anti-feminist, I think real anti-feminism is that which admits bad writing into the canon strictly on the gender ticket.
I'll put in down in the quote book: "World War Two: bad for Jews, good for literature."
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