Screening Woolf by Ingersoll Earl G.;

Author:Ingersoll, Earl G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Continuing Difficulty Representing Clarissa’s “Darkness”

In a clear sense, this “moment” is the film’s rendition of what the novel’s Clarissa recalls after she returns in the later morning from her shopping for flowers and explores what seems almost her trope of the small room in the attic with its narrow, “single” bed, growing ever narrower as the years go by, reminiscent of a magic bed in a nightmarish fantasy, or Grimm’s fairy tale, eventually consuming the woman it holds. As a visual medium, the film can take viewers past the “master” bedroom Clarissa once shared with Richard before she became ill and he reassigned her to the small room in the attic where her rest would be undisturbed by his late-night returns from working at Parliament—or so he says.[21] The film then invites the viewer to climb the stairs behind Clarissa to the room itself, a room appropriate to the nun she has just been troped as, either by the narrator or by Clarissa herself.

What follows is a passage of interior monologue as important to the consciousness of Mrs. Dalloway as the “wedge-shaped core of darkness” passage will be to Mrs. Ramsay in the next novel. Alone on those “sheets . . . clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side,” she cannot “dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 46). It is interesting that Woolf characterizes this “virginity” as a state unchanged by “childbirth,” when one might expect it to remain unchanged by sexual intercourse, unless Elizabeth was the product of parthenogenesis.

This famous passage, ending with the startling trope of “a match burning in a crocus” (47), represents Clarissa’s probing, and even more courageously Woolf’s probing, of the etiology of this “virginity.” (Because Woolf could not offer Mrs. Dalloway the given name “Virginia,” she had to settle for the closest equivalent, “Clarissa.”) Clarissa focuses upon what she sees as a sequence of moments—“for example on the river beneath the woods at Clieveden—when, through some contraction of this cold spirit, she had failed him. And then again at Constantinople, and again and again” (46). Presumably the “him” is Richard, since she recalls a sequence of “again and again,” one “again” being Constantinople, where her male companion would more likely be Richard as her husband than Peter as her suitor. Sensing some “lack” (à la Lacan, perhaps), she rules out “beauty” and “mind” in favor of “something central which permeated; something warm which broke up the surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together” (46).

The remainder of this crucial passage is more difficult to follow because of the trickiness in Clarissa’s grammar of representing her perceptions about that “something,” which turns out in her case to be the nothing, the “lack” she is admirably honest in confronting head on. Clarissa’s consciousness stresses the move into her lower depths with the text’s italicized that that presumably takes as its antecedent the “something warm . .

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