Time in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours:
Queer and Crip; Straight, Twisted, and Bent

I don’t fuck much with the past
But I fuck plenty with the future

– Patti Smith, “Babelogue”

The words of Patti Smith, the rock poet-icon, sound cynically daring, conjuring some MacBethian witch with a crystal ball stirring a steaming cauldron, messing with the future. But read again, through the fun-house lens of queer theory and disability theory, with queer time and crip time on the brain, her words seem oddly naïve, strangely hopeful – with their evident belief that tomorrow will come, that the hours will continue to follow, one on another, Big Ben or some other clock striking, and that the future will be right there, to be fucked with.

Reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours together offers an interesting take on the subject of time. Each work stretches, bends, and explodes time in its particular way. Mrs. Dalloway, a pillar of the post-World War I modernist project, stands time and perspective and voice on their respective heads. We’re left reeling, unsure where we are, and, if we’re inside someone’s head, whose it might be. Cunningham in The Hours offers us a great ping-pong volley through the decades. (It’s just too bad that Woolf can’t keep it going from the great beyond.) Cunningham picks up and elaborates on such Woolfian motifs and themes as flowers and birds, but his great switch-up is giving his Clarissa life as a gay woman – a lesbian with a child, no less! For if the figure of the Child, according to Lee Edelman, is what propels us into the future (what he calls “Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism”), and if in the past, gay people couldn’t even dream of such regeneration, by the time Cunningham is writing in 1998 it is a reality. Not only does his Clarissa have a child, but her relationship with her daughter, Julia, is more real, more believable, than the few stiff mentions Woolf gives us of her Clarissa’s Elizabeth. Cunningham, in a rushing gulp of words, tells us of Julia: “She is impossibly beautiful. She goes to movies Clarissa’s never heard of, suffers fits of sullenness and elation. She wears six rings on her left hand, none of them the one Clarissa gave her for her eighteenth birthday. She wears a silver ring in her nose” (Cunningham 156). Whereas Woolf’s Clarissa seems somehow at a remove from her daughter, primly admonishing herself, “one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth” (Woolf 6), while Peter judges her to be “a queer-looking girl” who “probably … doesn’t get on with Clarissa” (Woolf 84) and whose own father doesn’t initially recognize her in the book’s final scene (Woolf 295).

It is easy to discern the influence of the AIDS crisis on the development of the idea of queer time. If all around you are dying ­– slowly, painfully, and without any hope held out of cure (and thus of “curative time”) – and if children are not a widely accepted reality in your community, it becomes logical to refuse the future, to spit on it, to mash it under your heel, saying as Edelman does, “Fuck the social order and the Child; fuck … the future”– quite a different notion than Smith’s derring-do announcement that she intends to fuck with the future. In the words of the mawkish but nevertheless on-point 1996 musical Rent, which dealt with the AIDS crisis: “No day but today.” And without living, individual, historical children (as opposed to the construct of the Child) to anchor the queer community in the lived, historical present, why not embrace the bathhouse and the pier? As Edelman notes: “the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust.” So no matter that the exciting now quickly turns into the nihilism of a turned-away-from future.

But today, with AIDS having receded from center stage and progeny very much a lived reality for gay people, the seductions of queer time seem less obvious. (Writer Jesse Green, in his memoir, The Velveteen Father: An Unexpected Journey to Parenthood, describes how he never thought children were a possibility for him as a gay man and how his vision of his own future changes as that possibility becomes real.) But in marked contrast to queer time, which seems like an idea whose moment has come and gone, crip time, in all its multivalent, multifaceted permutations – interrupted, erupting, disruptive, intermittent, delayed, slowed, manic, panicked, stuttering, diffuse – holds persuasive sway. While crip time may have had its origins in the idea of slowness (Kafer 26) – the late meeting start times and buses delayed to admit a person in a wheelchair – it seems open to wider interpretation: there is the repetition of obsessive-compulsive disorder or Tourette’s Syndrome, the speed of mania, the idea of time going backward (not at all what it’s supposed to do – as seen in Eva Feder Kittay’s discussion of her daughter, Sesha), the notion of being “out of time” or having “lost time” mentioned by those who have been in mental institutions, hospitals, and intensive care units (the medical profession even has a name for the ICU phenomenon: “ICU delirium,” said to be brought about by the absence of clocks and light). Alison Kafer discusses “diagnosis and undiagnosis as strange temporalities,” as well as the time of anticipation (thinking about bodily needs before they occur) and the “constant glance back” (Kafer 37-38). All these variations stand in contradistinction to normative time, the conventional notion of time as a sort of manifest destiny, a temporal territory that is ours for the taking – it marches on, we take our place in the parade; no escape, no playing.

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Lee Edelman wants to suggest a “refusal … of history as linear narrative … in which meaning succeeds in revealing itself – as itself – through time,” and both Woolf and Cunningham engage in this refusal: They play with their narratives, do tricky things with time, and allow their characters to escape – or at the very least, to make the attempt.

Woolf and Cunningham toy constantly with time. Clarissa and Septimus are each haunted by the past, by something and someone from the past, something uncanny in the Freudian sense, something that doesn’t belong to the present. For Clarissa, it’s Sally Seton and the kiss that, for her, echoes through the ages, that “might have turned [the world] upside down” (Woolf 52). For Septimus, it’s the war and the lost Evans, who appears and reappears, again and again. For Clarissa and Septimus, time has stopped, frozen – the two lost friends (love objects?), one still living, one dead, never leave them. (And even when Sally reappears late in Mrs. Dalloway, she isn’t truly her old self; she bears none of her old power. It’s her memory, and the memory of that kiss, that follows Clarissa.)

Time is always happening in both books; it bends and twists, but it’s never very far from the surface. In The Hours, the contemporary Clarissa has this exchange with her dying friend, Richard, about their own undying kiss:

“You kissed me beside a pond.”

“Ten thousand years ago.”

“It’s still happening.”

“In a sense, yes.”

“In reality. It’s happening in that present. This is happening in this present” (Cunningham 66).

When it’s all too much, all this time, the two writers allow their characters some surcease, some escape. Septimus’ escape in Mrs. Dalloway is successful – he evades time, the ticking clock; the uncannily reoccurring presence of Evans, his lost friend. He escapes Holmes and the normativity offered as the objective by the medical profession. Most of all he escapes the “rest,” the isolation, prescribed by the doctors as the route to the normative, cured life: “That was it: to be alone forever” (Woolf 220), he thinks, horrified, just before he dies. No wonder he flings himself from the sill onto Mrs. Filmer’s railings! The reader (or at least, this reader) cannot see his act as anything but rational.

Yet while Septimus is seen as mad, Clarissa isn’t presented in any clear way as insane. We are meant, I think, to see her as sane ­– an upper-class woman, thinking her thoughts, buying her flowers, preparing for her party. Yet as her mind dips and swivels through time, perambulates and meanders back to the past and forward again, a reader (at least this one) might wonder about her performance of sanity. Is she, indeed, sane? Or is this, quite simply, what sanity looks like? Is she given more leeway than poor old doppelganger Septimus by virtue of her class and gender? She doesn’t have to operate in the public sphere, to go to war, to witness unbearable acts; she operates in the privacy of her private world. She is a liminal figure, betwixt and between, outside temporality, neither clearly sane nor clearly insane. (One of the great virtues of Mrs. Dalloway is that it doesn’t engage in obvious name-calling or categorizing: Although Rezia talks vaguely of something being wrong with her husband, “shell shock” is mentioned only once in the book – and even then, not in reference to Septimus. The Hours is similarly subtle: Although Richard mentions AIDS a single time and HIV is mentioned once, the vast majority of mentions are of “the virus.”)

In The Hours, two of the escapes are unrealized: Mrs. Woolf’s attempt to go to London and Mrs. Brown’s trip to the hotel. Although Mrs. Brown returns home from her illicit hotel sojourn (novel-reading returns to its sordid origins as a locus of female pleasure) to celebrate Daddy’s birthday with little Richie, tantalizing reference is made later in the book to a suicide attempt, and death is clearly on her mind during this escape (“It is possible to die. Laura thinks, suddenly, of how she – how anyone – can make a choice like that. … Hotel rooms are where people do things like that, aren’t they? [Cunningham 151]). And although Virginia doesn’t make it to London, to “the possibility of walking down a street into another street, and another after that. … all that London implies about freedom, about kisses, about the possibilities of art and the sly dark glitter of madness” (Cunningham 167), she does eventually make her fully realized stones-in-her-pocket escape, out of time, beyond time. A conventional reading might offer a reaction of woe to such a “tragic” escape, but through the lens of crip time, another perspective is possible. Alison Kafer cites Judith Halberstam’s observation that “‘we create longevity as the most desirable future, applaud the pursuit of long life (under any circumstances), and pathologize modes of living that show little or no concern for longevity’” (Kafer 40). Seen in this way, perhaps the so-called escape route need not be viewed as a melancholic road.

Theories of crip time also suggest alternate ways of thinking about Clarissa Dalloway’s flower-buying, party-throwing existence and those of her comrades in both Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours. According to Alison Kafer, these theories refuse “the regimentation of economic imperatives across the terrain of one’s body, or one’s time … [challenging] the normative modalities that define time, such as productivity, accomplishment, and efficiency, [urging] us toward something different” (Kafer 40). In The Hours, the character of Richard, the prize-winning writer, is seen as “productive,” although we are given to understand that both he and various critics have found fault with his work over the years; and Sally, Clarissa’s partner, has her conventionally productive job as a television producer. But Mrs. Brown with her cake and the contemporary Clarissa, with her flowers and her party, echo the upper-class, female occupations and preoccupations of Mrs. Dalloway’s world. It is perhaps easier in a post-modern, post-feminist world to view the little jobs and committee work of Peter Walsh and Richard Dalloway as something less than marvelous, certainly less than heroic, but in times past this “men’s work” was the stuff of the public sphere, the stuff that counted (and in some quarters is still seen this way). Septimus has gone out into the male public sphere, has fought in a war, and dies as a result. Richard, although he hasn’t attained the heights of “genius” that he once sought for himself, has ventured out into his own public sphere and produced, yet through the window of death he too goes.

Viewed through the lens of crip time, a lens that does not valorize productivity and accomplishment, perhaps flowers and parties and cakes, in and of themselves, are enough. Cunningham, especially in the Mrs. Brown section of The Hours, seems to be suggesting exactly this. But enough for what? Enough to illuminate our moments, our hours – of terror, of ecstasy, of extraordinary excitement, to borrow Woolf’s words. As Cunningham says, “we hope, more than anything, for more” (Cunningham 225). And although we do get the occasional “hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined” (Cunningham 224), mostly what we get is just enough to make a life ­– flowers, parties, cakes, the memory of a kiss. Enough.

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Works Cited.

Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke UP: 2004.

Green, Jesse. The Velveteen Father: An Unexpected Journey to Parenthood. New York:     Villard/Random House, 1999.

Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2013.

Kittay, Eva Feder. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1925.