Pride month and Dalloway Day
In Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway the lead protagonist Clarissa
Dalloway is described by a previous suitor, Peter Walsh, as “the perfect
hostess.” It is, as I think most readers of the book would agree, an apt
description, for throughout the fictional day in June Woolf created, Clarissa’s
is the character whose openness to celebration drives the social element and expresses
lamentation for the death of “that young man”—her vision of Septimus Smith, the
person who symbolizes so many war dead. The fact that the novel, in typical
lyrical fashion, takes place in summer appears to me as another of its
important life positive features. Obviously the tragic aspect of death is
called up—in relation both to war horrors and to the symbolic individual
portrayed there as dying—but the social importance of creating peace takes
precedence. Hence, one might add, the emphasis on the party that Clarissa aims
for at the outset of the book and hosts at its conclusion. Polyphonic novels
(almost all novels to some extent, but especially satiric ones) stress
celebration by invoking what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as “carnival”, the
discourse of everyday life and especially the life of the popular festival as
opposed to that of officialdom, especially dictatorial officialdom.
But Dalloway Day as a single day
coincides with June, the beginning of summer and now the month when many of the
world’s cities celebrate gay pride or just pride in loving as one chooses, that
hard won right which Modernist art and the art of today work to present and
preserve.
So, happy Dalloway Day to all and
happy pride years! May we continue to present and preserve in peace….!
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