Queer Temporalities in Virginia Woolf
One of my earliest encounters with queer fiction, occurring around the time I was still to understand my own relationship with queerness, was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I distinctly remember reading ‘the most exquisite moment of (Clarissa Dalloway’s) whole life’ (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 38) when she shares a kiss with her friend Sally Seton and resonating with the illicitness of that queer moment. There was something encapsulating about the text as a whole that I could not quite put my finger on. Not long after, I read another of Woolf’s queer classics, Orlando, the story of a person who lives for three hundred years and just so happens to transform from a man to a woman along the way. Again, this text struck a chord for me that I could not pinpoint, but I knew that somehow it resonated with me.
It has been years since I read these books for the first time; with the benefit of experience gained from the passing of time, I was drawn back to them for the purposes of this essay and realised how much my understanding of them had grown, how much more they resonated with me. Woolf’s deconstruction of gender binaries and heteronormative society, as well as her exploration of queer temporalities, felt far clearer in both novels than they had in the past, perhaps due to the development of my understanding of queerness and how it relates to my own sense of self. This, I discovered, was the crux of Woolf’s work – in reading her fictional portrayal of queer temporalities, I, too, encountered it in my own life, returning cyclically to the same texts, the reading of her works being a personal queer moment in my life. Thus, it seems fitting to employ her work to indicate the portrayal of time in queer fiction. In this essay, I will explore how Woolf presents the distinction and the overlap between heteronormative and queer temporalities, the imposition of heteronormative institutions in the shaping of modern life and the inextricable links between time and selfhood by focussing on her novels Mrs Dalloway and Orlando.
However, it may first be worth exploring exactly what queer time means and how it differs from typical heteronormative time. Pooja Mittal Biswas describes this latter as a system of ‘socially accepted chronologies’ (43), a way of viewing time as ‘linear, monodirectional and deterministic’ (51). In essence, queer theorists see straight time as an uninterrupted line leading from childhood to maturity, engaging with the heteronormative institutions of marriage, reproduction and labour, ending ultimately in death. Queer time, meanwhile, is regarded by Melanie Micir as ‘an oppositional stance against the normative temporal fabric of modern life’ (353), deconstructing these institutions and recognising the social construction of this heteronormative temporality. As is often the case in queer theory, there is no one way of interpreting queer time: Judith Halberstam emphasises its anti-capitalist nature (21), while Elizabeth Freeman’s ideas of erotohistoriography and temporal drag specify the simultaneity of the past, present and future and prioritise pleasure and sexual feeling as a means of understanding time. Turning to literary interpretations, Kate Haffey compares the dichotomy between straight and queer time to ideas of narrative and lyric time respectively (38).
Queer time, then, is born out of straight time. The presence of queer temporalities is abundantly clear in both texts: Mrs Dalloway begins with an immediate dive into Clarissa’s past as she recalls her youth at Bourton, with her thoughts moving swiftly to her relationship with Peter Walsh, which then continues to hang over the rest of the novel. This opening is indicative of this book’s temporality – the entire histories of the characters exist with them in the present moment, whether it comes in the form of Peter and Clarissa sitting ‘on the terrace, in the moonlight’ (46) in Bourton while they sit together in Clarissa’s house in London, or of Septimus seeing his deceased friend Evans at every turn. This idea is highlighted when Clarissa imagines herself as ‘a child, throwing bread to the ducks… and at the same time a grown woman’ (46) at an existential point when she questions what she has made of her life; here we see the conflation of past and present, as well as the deconstruction of the ‘adult/youth binary’ that Halberstam suggests is vital to ideas of queer temporality (14).
Orlando’s concept of time is structured slightly differently: beginning in the sixteenth century, we follow Orlando as a youth still engaged in the normativity of straight time. As we watch their life progress, however, meeting the androgynous Sasha and the Archduchess Harriet, Orlando begins to distance themself from this linear timeframe. They enter into several coma-like states, including the one in which their gender transition takes place, as well as experiencing time at different rates, where ‘he would go out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man of fifty-five’ (60). Indeed, this queer passage of time is so normalised by the narrative voice of the text that unless it is specified, the reader hardly notices time passing Orlando by, until it is mentioned offhand that they met Sasha ‘hundreds of years ago’ (98). By the end of the novel, this non-linear relationship to time seems to have more of an effect on the protagonist, who begins to see their entire life all at once: they see an ‘apparition of… a girl in Russian trousers’ in a department store, ‘ice blocks… on the Thames’ in place of omnibuses, and ‘visions of the Persian mountains’ in the centre of London (198-199). Thus, in both Mrs Dalloway and Orlando, different times conflate as the characters ‘synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system’ (Woolf, Orlando, 199).
Having sketched out basic summaries of the fluctuating temporalities in Woolf’s work, it is also important to consider the presence of heterosexual time within the texts, and the relationship between the two. Haffey draws a link between Woolf’s writing and Eve Sedgwick’s concept of the ‘queer moment’, one which transcends the time in which it takes place with a ‘tendency to recur or repeat’ giving the Clarissa-Sally kiss as an example (40). Straight time, then, seems to constantly disrupt and interrupt queer moments as they take place in the novels. Though there are several forms of heteronormative interruptions seen in these texts – Lucrezia ‘always interrupting’ (27) to ask Septimus what the time is, and the arrival of Dr Holmes which sets his death in motion in Mrs Dalloway, as well as Orlando’s continual returns to London society over the centuries - this can be seen most clearly in the refrain of chiming clocks. Big Ben appears throughout Mrs Dalloway to remind the characters of the looming party, described as ‘a warning’ and ‘irrevocable’ (4), while important moments in Orlando’s life, such as the discovery of Sasha’s deception or the beginning of the nineteenth century, coincide with the ‘stroke of midnight’ (145). Indeed, in moments of crisis this chiming is described as aggressive, with Orlando being ‘violently assaulted’ by the present towards the end of the novel (200) Through this symbolic motif, the heteronormative ‘time on the clock’ intrudes into the minds of the protagonists, reminding them of the restrictive linear temporality that they are forced to return to. This image also gains a particularly morbid tone: in Mrs Dalloway, ‘the sudden loudness of the final stroke tolled for death that surprised in the midst of life’ (54), reminding Clarissa of ‘her horror of death’ (167). The finality of this tolling, then, acts as a reminder of the inevitable end of what Halberstam describes as the last of ‘those paradigmatic markers of life experience… death’ (14).
Furthermore, the institutions of heterosexuality which form the foundations of straight time also interpose themselves into the lives of Woolf’s characters. Orlando, having escaped the snares of cisheteronormativity for a long spell, feels pressured by the increasing scrutiny of nineteenth-century society to conform to the institutions of marriage and childbirth, physically manifesting itself in the form of ‘a ring of quivering sensibility about the second finger of the left hand’ (155). As soon as they are defeated into submission by the ‘indomitable spirit of the age’ following her albeit abnormal marriage to Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, time becomes monotonous, to the extent that the biographical narrator is forced to ‘recite the calendar… until she has done’ (175). We are able to see first-hand as time resets back into the linear default, and can see a similar effect with the listing of days of the week when Orlando rejoins London society (122-123). Thus, the text oscillates between straight time and queer time, with Orlando dipping in and out of both as required.
On the other hand, these intrusions are seemingly reversed in Mrs Dalloway. In discussing the ‘exquisite moment’ of the lesbian kiss, critics suggests that this queer moment ‘temporarily interrupts her inevitable movement toward marriage and reproduction’ (Haffey, 31), and thus it is queerness that disrupts heteronormativity, and not the other way round. However, Haffey seems to disagree with this interpretation, stating that ‘the kiss is a moment in which we linger, celebrating not the possibility of a scripted future but the soaring hope of the moment itself (62); thus, the continuing queer moment is not seen as an interruption, but a constant feeling that Clarissa has in spite of and in opposition to her status as a married woman and a mother – in essence, to her characterisation as ‘Mrs Richard Dalloway’ (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 11). Try as she might to repress or forget these feelings, due to the nature of queer time, her past emotions can be brought forward in time to the present moment, so that she can rekindle that ‘kind of ecstasy’ (37) through the simple action of doing her hair. In this way, we are made to think that it is the queer that is interruptive, when in reality the queer has been and always is present for Clarissa.
It is important to note the importance of queerness within Woolf’s queer temporalities. Though they share the same moniker, queer time does not always have to be inherently ‘queer’, with Halberstam indicating that we can ‘detach queerness from sexual identity’ when discussing antinormative topics (13). However, for Woolf, queerness is essential for queer time. Mittal Biswas states that ‘the de-sequencing of time and the deconstruction of the heteronormative gender binary are interconnected’ (45), and Micir does not prioritise the one over the other, suggesting that Orlando’s ‘queerness is located as much in its exaggerated temporal structure as in its protagonist’s gender change’ (353). Whether it’s Clarissa’s sapphic history or Orlando’s gender fluidity, Woolf portrays the blurring of past/present, male/female and gay/straight binaries as all part of the same process. Furthermore, owing to the cyclical nature of queer time and its tendency to repeat itself, this process is repeated time and time again, from Orlando changing frequently between breeches and skirts to Clarissa’s thoughts constantly drifting back to the queer ecstasy she once felt. In this way, the state of being simultaneously non-normative and queer is essential for Woolf’s temporalities.
Perhaps the reason that this queerness is so important for Woolf’s sense of time in these novels is because of the link between temporality and selfhood in the texts. Typical of modernist writing, Woolf’s characters struggle to come to terms with their senses of self throughout the stories, and it is often implied that their selves stem from their pasts and the experiences they have gained. Both texts depict the formation of self as a series of fragments drawn together to form a composite whole. Clarissa’s formation of self is an act of will, a piecing together of ‘different… incompatible’ (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 40) parts: she is simultaneously ‘the woman who was that very night to give a party… Clarissa Dalloway… (and) herself’, distinguishing between each of these. Furthermore, she describes this composite self as ‘one diamond, one woman’ (40), having just described the queer moment that defined her life as ‘a diamond, something infinitely precious’ on the previous page (39); Woolf’s repetition of this image to represent both selfhood and queerness connotes their inextricability in Clarissa. Similarly, Orlando ends with the eponymous protagonist identifying each of the many different selves she carries within themself: ‘the Courtier… the Ambassador… the Fine Lady… the Patroness of Letters’ to name but a few. Indeed, the narrator specifies that ‘a person may well have as many thousand’ selves (202) , all of which are ‘“built up” over time’ and constantly changing (Micir, 353). It is only when they reconcile all parts of their history in the present moment that Orlando is able to become ‘one and entire’, and consequently present ‘a larger surface to the shock of time’ (209).
This effect is heightened when looking at the structure of the novel: each chapter in Orlando is wildly different, centring a different time period and fundamentally a different protagonist in each, so that for the reader, as for Orlando, it is hard to conflate the boy who falls in love with Sasha in London with the woman who travels with the Turkish nomads and with the wife of Shelmerdine. The same can be said for Clarissa, since we are introduced to her both in the present as an ostensibly heterosexual wife, mother and hostess, which both she and the reader struggle to reconcile with her queer past. Thus, selfhood is here both inextricably and almost inexplicably linked with queerness, such that it seems almost impossible to conflate such diametric opposites. This, then, is the root of Woolf’s temporalities: in reconciling such contrasting selves into one composite self, temporal and gendered binaries are blurred allowing for fluidity of both selfhood and temporality. One could even argue that the binary between straight time and queer time becomes blurred – Clarissa and Orlando inhabit seem to inhabit both simultaneously, as do the other characters in these texts, so that while time continues to move in a linear fashion, past selves, queer moments and the potentiality of both replay over and over again in the present time.
In conclusion, queer temporality in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Orlando is complex: the present moment is constantly haunted by repetitions of the past, blurring distinctions between the two such that the course of a day contains entire lifetimes, and entire lifetimes stretch on for centuries. Straight time is often seen as a violent, disruptive force bursting in on the fluidity of queerness, though it becomes clear upon examination that straight time and queer time seem to exist simultaneously, another example of an imaginary binary. Above all, Woolf emphasises the queerness of queer time, which is intimately linked with ideas of selfhood. Finally, I hope that, having allowed some more time to pass, I am able to return to Woolf’s works in the future with an even greater understanding of queerness and queer temporality, and continue to appreciate Mrs Dalloway and Orlando as my life’s very own queer moments.
Works Cited:
Freeman, Elizabeth. ‘Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography’ in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press: 2010, pp.95-135.
Haffey, Kate. ‘Exquisite Moments and the Temporality of the Kiss in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours’ in Literary Modernism, Queer Temporality: Eddies in Time. Springer International Publishing: 2019, pp.31-66.
Halberstam, J. Jack. ‘Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies’ in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York University Press: 2005, pp.12-43.
Micir, Melanie. ‘Queer Woolf’ in A Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Jessica Berman. John Wiley and Sons Ltd.: 2016, pp.347-358.
Mittal Biswas, Pooja. ‘Queering Time: The Temporal Body as Queer Chronotope in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’. Anglia, vol. 138, no. 1, pp.38-61.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. Penguin Classics: 2000.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Vintage: 2004.
