Rewriting Woolf@quot;s Mrs.Dalloway: Homage, Sexual Identity, and the Single-Day Novel by Cunningham, Lippincott, and Lanchester

Three Women. A Kiss. A Life. On the Queer Writing of Time in Organization

“…The reinvention of genre to re‐think gender is what Virginia Woolf brings to life for us in several of her works, especially Mrs. Dalloway . Even if To the Lighthouse is often cited as her finest novel (Schiff, ), Mrs. Dalloway is considered generative and inventive as a novel that takes place over the course of one day. Her inventive engagement with the genre of the one‐day novel is closely related to giving insight into the ordinary hours and prosaic time of living, ‘conveying the experience of being alive’ (Schiff, , p. 379).…”

“…Even if To the Lighthouse is often cited as her finest novel (Schiff, ), Mrs. Dalloway is considered generative and inventive as a novel that takes place over the course of one day. Her inventive engagement with the genre of the one‐day novel is closely related to giving insight into the ordinary hours and prosaic time of living, ‘conveying the experience of being alive’ (Schiff, , p. 379). Furthermore, the genre of the one‐day novel connects the experience of one day with that of one's whole life.…”

“…Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is ‘about what it feels to be alive — to be a self passing through the moments and hours of a day’ (Schiff, , p. 364). As Cunningham (, p. xx) comments, ‘Woolf was then and remains today unparalleled in her ability to convey the sensations and complexities of the experience known as being alive.…”

“…Thus Woolf is not interested in the being of her characters, but in their becoming through interconnections. Woolf's modernist writing remains very genuine for understanding the fluidity and multiplicity of life becoming, a concept that Cunningham continues, imitates, paraphrases, and partially transforms by ‘extending and improvising on Woolf's exploration of the fragmentation, complexity, and multiple nature of the self’ (Schiff, , p. 371).…”

“…This allows us to consider Young's next question — can we ‘recognize Cunningham's novels as speaking to contemporary notions of sexuality as polymorphous’ (Young, , p. 19) — and his suggestion that ‘Cunningham's novels demand a re‐evaluation of the fiction termed assimilative’ (p. 21). Cunningham himself sees The Hours as ‘about three women of ambivalent sexuality’ (Wroe, ) and suggests that ‘strict demarcations between queer and straight are problematic and that sexual orientation is complex and fluid’ (Schiff, , p. 368).…”