The Kids Don't Stand a Chance

This semester I have been teaching a "Literature and Film" course, and overall it has been reasonably successful. The students are generally quite bright and engaged, and on the whole they have proven willing to delve headlong into a number of substantial challenges I have thrown their way (or at least what seem like challenges to me). We've read Faulkner (As I Lay Dying), Calvino (selections from Mr. Palomar), short fiction by Flannery O'Connor and Guy de Maupassant, film theory by Bazin and Eisenstein, and we have watched a number of films -- Bicycle Thieves, A Day in the Country (hence the Maupassant), and most recently Rear Window. And of course we have read literary analysis and critical work related to these works (for example, Robin Wood on Hitchcock).

But maybe it's because it's late in the semester, but our latest selection has pretty much stumped everyone. No one seems able to get behind Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The students have found it impenetrable, boring, and obscure, and even when I explained how Woolf was employing stream of consciousness and, to some extent, why (turn of the century modern fiction as an approximation of Bergsonian philosophy, coming to grips with Einstein and Heisenberg, and above all Freud, all that jazz), they were nodding dully but pretty much unimpressed.

I guess I could have seen this coming. For today's American 20 year old, the book has certain strikes against it. For one thing, I don't know that contemporary students (especially in America) are taught about World War I, and the dramatic extent to which it radically undermined so many previous sureties about Western civilization. Mechanized warfare, the constant bombardment and seeing one's fellows literally blown to bits right next to you, was a new psychological experience, and Mrs. Dalloway is exploring this ("shell shock," as PTSD was known back then) in the tragic character of Septimus Warren Smith.

But even more than this, the Great War shifted the frame on certain age-old bedrocks of British culture -- the legitimacy of the class structure above all, given that it was overwhelmingly the lower and middle classes who fought to defend Britain against the Germans. What was their reward? Besides this, the old British preference for conformity was beginning to crack, not only because the Brits had fought alongside the "brasher" Yanks, but because when the boys returned, society didn't know what to do with them, a crisis for a culture in which previously everyone "knew their place." As Woolf shows, this even extended to the questioning of traditional gender roles.

It is difficult to ask young American students to appreciate this seismic shift, since they are in many senses well beyond modernity. War is a constant droning background for them, one that has more than likely directly affected some of their friends. Nothing like the British class structure exists in this country; here those extreme divisions are so insistently mapped onto racial difference and immigration status that the concept of class usually gets occluded. And even something as simple as the book's focus on cultural Britishness -- the concern with colonial India, the fascination with Lords and Ladies of which Peter Walsh is so skeptical, the primacy of manners and politeness -- must seem rather "foreign," given contemporary American culture's tendency to breed reflexive incuriosity about the rest of the world and how they live.

What certainly does make sense, or should, I think, is Woolf's portrait of Clarissa Dalloway as someone who is what we would now call a "trophy wife." She was once impetuous and creative and daring, but she gradually gave all that up for the ironclad veneer of respectability. Woolf clearly wants us to consider Clarissa to be an ambivalent figure, a class- and history-bound portrait of a woman squandered. She has become a professional pleaser, an entertainer, someone whose personality is now defined by being sincerely insincere. But as the end of the book makes clear, she actually does create happiness of a shallow sort. She is a necessary functionary of a power structure, her value not to be taken lightly. For London, New York, Washington, any seat of cultural and political power, Clarissa Dalloways are quite necessary.

But then, Clarissa's character is tinged with regret. What if she had followed foolish passion and married Peter instead? What if she had thrown all respectability to the wind and secured a "Boston Marriage" with Sally? I think this, even more than the flowing prose and ideosyncratic Britishisms, is what makes Mrs. Dalloway feel so inaccessible to the students in my class, poised as they are at the very beginning of their adult lives. They are only now starting to do the very things they will live to regret later!

But I love the novel. I love its prose, which flows effortlessly like water, its serpentine sentences and imperceptible melding of different perspectives. Woolf thoroughly captures the restless, wandering mind, beset with mundane tasks but always elsewhere, projecting into impossible futures, slip-sliding ineluctably back into the hopelessly irretrievable past.