Alyaa Hassoon Alwan 1, Zohreh Taebi 2 *, Rajabali Askarzadeh3
1 MA of English Language and Literature, Ferdowsi university of Mashhad, 2 Assistant Professor in English Literature, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, 3Assistant Professor in English Literature, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad
Abstract
Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison are two of the most significant literary figures whose works are mainly concerned with women and their mental status. Since the earliest days of feminism in the 19th century, women and their struggles in different facets of life, including their legal rights, their social and domestic status, and their mental state have been the focus of many writers. This study intends to use the concept of “Moments of Being” by Virginia Woolf in order to analyze Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Moments of being are the moments in people’s lives when they feel a sense of reality, which can be the result of a shock. In contrast, there are some moments of non-being during which people are obsessed with their everyday routine and there is no sense of reality. People’s lives are mostly comprised of moments of non-being, although every now and then, something triggers people’s mind and they experience a moment of being. Thus, this study will explore how the protagonists of both these novels experience moments of being in their everyday life and take refuge in them. It will be concluded that regardless of their completely different backgrounds, modern women, as portrayed in these two novels, suffer from the same submissive pressures and consequently use their memories as a way to escape their past.
Key Words: Flashback, Inner Voice, Memory, Moments of Being
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- Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
Tony Morrison (1931- ) is a distinguished American writer; she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988 and the Noble Prize for literature in 1993. She started her career as a novelist with The Bluest Eye; the success of her first novel paved the way for a series of other novels written by her. her most celebrated work is Beloved. Morrison’s novels are usually about the experience of African-American women and specifically former slaves. She has been admired for her “vast cultural knowledge” and “the richness in her novels” and an extraordinary talent for telling “compelling narratives” (Mckay 21). Beloved tells the story of a former slave, named Sethe, who is hunted by the ghost and memory of a daughter she has murdered in her previous life of slavery, called Beloved. The story happens years after the tragedy, but Sethe does not seem to be free from her past life and her affectionate-driven yet brutal deed. The novel narrates the complexities of Sethe’s state of mind and her internal world and ends with her recovering from the chains of her memories.
The theme of a woman being captivated by her memory is seen in the works of another eminent woman writer, Virginia Woolf (1882-1942). Woolf is known as one of the forerunners of modernism and is esteemed for her “stylistic innovations” (Fernald 129), most notable of which is the technique of stream of consciousness. Her most famous novels include: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves. Woolf is also known as a feminist; it is because of the attitudes she expressed in articles like “A Room of One’s Own”. She was concerned with the conditions of women in her contemporary society, especially their rights in marriage and education. She also voiced the inner conflicts of women and portrayed their state of mind in her novels including Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway narrates the events of one single day in the life of a woman named Clarissa whose mind constantly moves between two worlds: the real world around her and the world of her past life. As she prepares to host a party for the night, she relives her memories from her younger days and questions the choices she has made which have led her to her current life.
Morrison and Woolf are two literary figures whose works are mainly concerned with women and their mental status. Since the earliest days of feminism in the 19th century, women and their struggles in different facet of life, including their legal rights, their social and domestic status and their mental state have been the focus of many movements (e.g. the Three Waves of Feminism), non-fiction books (e.g. Beauvoir The Second Sex, Frieden The Feminine Mystique, and Millet Sexual Politics), and literary works (e.g. Chopin The Awakening, Plath The Bell Jar, and Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale). Although women have come a long way in their path of resisting the suppression of patriarchal conventions and achieving equality in different walks of life, they still have more obstacles to overcome and more issues to address. The experience of women from different backgrounds and their emotional and mental conflicts is one of the issues that has attracted global attention (e.g. Association for Women’s Rights in Development; International Women’s Health Coalition; Womankind Worldwide; Women’s learning partnership). That is why a study that investigates how two women writers of different backgrounds use a similar technique to explore the inner worlds of their female protagonist is significant.
Wolfe focuses on the themes of marriage and sexuality and believes Mrs. Dalloway to be a philosophical text that “effectively dramatizes the insoluble challenges posed to its contemporary readers by the broad social transformation—which I term the “crisis of intimacy”—through which they lived” (35). Wicke interestingly looks at how Woolf describes market and the activity of going to the market in this novel and argues that modernism has changed our view about market and marketing. Henke examines the ideology latent in Woolf’s works, including Mrs. Dalloway, and states that “Woolf decries the kind of authoritarian power that incites nations to war, makes autocrats of husbands and fathers, and forces individuals into rigid patterns of social conformity. By dislocating traditional form, she subtly incorporates into avant-grade fiction an impassioned, radical ideology” (125).
Despite this large body of critical work, there has not been an attempt to link the experience of the protagonists of these two novels from a psychoanalytical outlook. The current study aims to fill up this gap by tracing the flow of mental life of the two protagonists.
The study draws on Woolf’s idea of Moments of Being. Moments of Being is the name of an autobiographical book that was published after Woolf’s death. In this collection of autobiographical essays, Woolf talks about Moments of Being; she refers to them as “a revelation of some order . . . a token of some real thing behind appearances” (72). Therefore, Moments of Being are the moments in people’s lives when they feel a sense of reality; these moments can come about as a result of a shock. In contrast, there are Moments of non-Being in which people are pre-occupied with their everyday routine and there is no sense of reality. People’s lives are mostly comprised of Moments of non-Being, although every now and then something triggers people’s mind and they experience a moment of being. This study will explore how the protagonists of both novels experience Moments of Being in their everyday life and take refuge in them. It also aims to examine thematic and structural use of time and memory and to provide a detailed investigation of these two novels regarding the reflection of time and memory in their different sociocultural contexts and psychological preoccupations of their female protagonists.
1.2 Towards Theoretical Framework
A term first used by Woolf, Moments of Being refer to “experiences of rupture which destabilize consciousness and thereby escape it” which are “from the realm of reflexive comprehension” (Toth par. 11). According to Gillies, Moments of Being are “…brief moments [that] appear to arrest the flow of time, but they also bring about a conflation of times as each individual moment is related to previous moments that are resurrected” (109). The study draws on Woolf’s idea of Moments of Being. Moments of Being is the name of an autobiographical book that was published after Woolf’s death. In this collection of autobiographical essays, Woolf talks about Moments of Being; she refers to them as “a revelation of some order . . . a token of some real thing behind appearances” (72). Therefore, Moments of Being are the moments in people’s lives when they feel a sense of reality; these moments can come about as a result of a shock. In contrast, there are Moments of non-Being in which people are pre-occupied with their everyday routine and there is no sense of reality. People’s lives are mostly comprised of Moments of non-Being, although every now and then something triggers people’s mind and they experience a moment of being. This study will explore how the protagonists of both novels experience Moments of Being in their everyday life and take refuge in them. It also aims to examine thematic and structural use of time and memory and to provide a detailed investigation of these two novels regarding the reflection of time and memory in their different sociocultural contexts and psychological preoccupations of their female protagonists.
- Relevant Studies
As one of this study’s primary sources, Morrison’s Beloved tells the story of woman named Sethe. Sethe, a former slave, lives in a haunted house with her daughter Denver. The house is haunted by the ghost of Sethe’s deceased daughter, who has died more than 18 years ago when she was only a toddler. The arrival of Paul D., another former slave from Sethe’s past life, scares the ghost away. Just as they start to live as a happy family, a young woman, about 19-20 years old, mysteriously appears in their lives. She calls herself Beloved and claims she has no memory of her past. It is revealed throughout the story that Sethe has murdered her baby daughter when she had been on the run from her owners in an attempt not to let her be a slave too. Sethe believes Beloved is her murdered daughter so she makes sacrifices for Beloved to atone for her sin. The excess of Sethe’s attempts to satisfy Beloved makes her other daughter Denver worried. She asks the women of community for help. In a state of confusion, Sethe attacks a white man, who reminds her of her former owner, and is brought down by the women. Beloved disappears and Paul D., who had left her in the course of the novel, returns to her.
Mrs. Dalloway as the second primary source of this article is the story of an upper-middle class English housewife named Clarissa Dalloway. They story happens in one day of her life. Clarissa is going to give a party that night and as she walks around London, making preparations and arrangements for her party, she reflects on her life, past to present. She is haunted by the memories of her youth, when she was friends with Sally and Peter. Clarissa was in love with Sally and Peter in love with Clarissa; however, Clarissa chose Richard as her husband, a decision that drove Peter away. Clarissa’s obsession with past revolves around the choices she has made and how her life would be different if she had taken the other path. Her dissatisfaction with her current life adds to the burden. Clarissa’s story is paralleled with the story of Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran of the Great War, who suffers from mental disorder due to the shock of the war. Septimus spends his day in a park with his wife, hallucinating about the friends he has lost in the war. At the end of the day, he commits suicide. Clarissa hears about him and his tragic end at her party from one of her guests and at the end admires his effort.
Critics have studied Morrison’s Beloved and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway from different perspectives. Zauditu-Selassie focuses on Morrison’s use of memory and how she uses this trope to “relocate ancestral images and recollect African spiritual ideas” (23). Russell talks about the concept of time in Beloved and believes that there is no “notion of separate epochs” in the novel because [the character] “Beloved carries a past that is not (directly) her own into a present in which her own existence is extremely tenuous” (33). Weissberg mentions how in Beloved memories actually occupy a physical space: “Places of the past occupy both concrete and abstract space in the novel. They simultaneously exist in landscapes captured in memory and in the locations of the present” (115).
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Smith-Wright examines the reasons Morrison uses ghosts in her novel; she believes Morrison’s ghosts are there “to develop mythic explorations of ways for culturally disenfranchised Black characters both to acknowledge their heritage and to forge a more satisfying connection with their communities” (146). Xu argues that Morrison depicts a “New History” in Beloved, “the true history of the American black people that was once veiled by the American white’s mainstream society” (100). Martinez believes Beloved is mainly about love, a kind of love that does not have a “western name” (1), the love of a mother who is willing to murder her children so that they would not live as slaves. Mrs. Dalloway has been the subject of a lot of critical books and articles too. DeMeester focuses on Septimus and how Woolf has successfully portrayed his mental disorder which in turn is the result of the trauma of World War I. Smith argues that the direct relation between grief and madness is evident in Woolf’s works, including Mrs. Dalloway. Colleta sees Mrs. Dalloway as a satirical work and believes there is a kind of humor in the novel that originates from “the satiric observations of an informed and mocking narrator and relies on the collusion between that narrator and the reader” (46). Other secondary sources regarding the notion of Moments of Being include:
Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Annotated and with an introduction by Jeanne Schulkind. Harcourt Bracejovanovich Publishers, 1972.
In this collection of autobiographical essays, which was published posthumously, Woolf talks about Moment of Being and Moments of non-Being; she does not define the term per se but clarifies it with examples from her personal life. To her, Moments of Being are those moments, embedded among numerous Moments of non-Being, when one feels a sense of reality that is triggered by external stimuli. She believes these moments are the source of an artist’s creativity. This study uses her idea of Moments of Being as one of its theoretical frameworks.
Toth, Naomi. “Disturbing Epiphany: Rereading Virginia Woolf’s ‘Moments of Being’.” Études Britanniques Contemporaines [En Ligne], 2014. Journals Open Edition, doi: 10.4000/ebc.1182
In this article, Toth introduces Woolf’s concept of Moments of Being and compares it with Joyce’s epiphany. She explores the role of Moments of Being in Woolf’s creative career including its relation with meaning and pattern. Her interpretation of Woolf’s idea is beneficial to this study.
Moss, Katie Reece. “The Power of Timelessness and the Contemporary Influence of Modern Thought.”
Dissertation. Georgia State University, 2008.
Moss uses theories of time, memory, and evolution to analyze a selected number of literary works including Morrison’s Beloved and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. She also talks about Moments of Being and explores this concept in Woolf’s works. Chapters 4 and 6 in which Moss studies Woolf and Morrison’s works are beneficial to this research.
- Discussion
This study uses Virginia Woolf’s idea of Moments of Being to examine the role of time in forming the identity of the female protagonists of Tony Morrison’s Beloved and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The study will use this theory to show how the mental states of these women are affected by their past and how their ideas of identity cannot be complete without their memories. Thus, this research has benefitted from Woolf’s Moments of Being idea to focus on the manifestation of time, its effects and the influence of the past memory on characters’ desires and behaviors. Since the obsession about the past is one of the main themes of both mentioned novels, the present research tries to provide a detailed examination of memory in these two novels.
In the analysis of the difference between depiction of time and memory in these two novels and the significance of the mentioned difference, the research has focused on the different backgrounds of the two protagonists and will try to explain the different nature of each woman’s state of mind. The reason why the research examines the differences first is that at first glance these women seem essentially different; however, the researcher believes no matter how different these two protagonists are, what they go through is significantly similar. This belief bridges the second question to the third, the similarities between these two characters. Regarding the similarities between depiction of time and memory in the novels and the significance of the mentioned similarities, the research has explored the qualities these women share using Woolf’s idea of Moments of Being. The research has thus benefitted from the ideas explicitly expressed by the two characters to show how they choose their past as a refuge from the burdens of the present. The last point to be discussed is related to the effects of memory on the identity of female characters in these two novels; hence, this research concludes that these two characters are reclusive, isolated, and introverted and both suffer from detachment from their community because of the different identity they have formed for themselves.
- Conclusion
This article analyzed Beloved and Mrs. Dalloway as two of the most noteworthy literary works through Woolf’s theory of “Moments of Beings”. It was argued that since the earliest days of feminism in the 19th century, women and their struggles in different facets of life have been the focus of many writers. It was said that Moments of being are the moments in people’s lives when they feel a sense of reality. Finally, this study explored how the protagonists of both these novels underwent moments of being in their everyday life and took refuge in them. It was settled that regardless of their entirely diverse backgrounds, modern women, as described in these two novels, suffer from the same subservient burdens and accordingly use their memories as a way to escape their past.
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