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Dr Stacey Patton's avatar

I’m well aware of the standard critical reading of Mrs Dalloway, including its critique of bourgeois shallowness, its handling of mental health and trauma, and its postwar alienation rendered through experimental style. Believe it or not, I didn’t just “miss the point” because I couldn’t handle European Modernism.

It’s precisely because I understand what Woolf was doing that I find it so worth critiquing. Her formal innovations were groundbreaking, but they were also made possible by leisure, education, and social position that she never fundamentally interrogates on the level of her own complicity. It’s one thing to satirize or critique bourgeois society from within it; it’s another to mistake that partial critique for radical or inclusive analysis.

You’re right that Mrs Dalloway critiques bourgeois superficiality, but it doesn’t meaningfully step outside it. The entire novel is predicated on rendering the minute interiorities of its privileged subjects as deserving of microscopic attention, while those on the true margins are ghosts in the narrative. Even Septimus, the novel’s most tragic figure, is used to intensify Clarissa’s revelation about death and meaning, reinforcing the centrality of her consciousness.

This isn’t a “bad writing” argument. It’s an argument about canon formation. Woolf’s technique gets enshrined as the apex of interior psychological realism while the equally complex interior lives in, say, BIPOC or colonized contexts were historically ignored, dismissed as “local color,” or treated as inaccessible if they refused to translate themselves for white audiences.

My frustration is not that Woolf’s writing is “hard.” It’s that the academy often refuses to hold the same nuanced critical lens to how her difficulty operates, for whom it was written, and whose subjectivity it universalizes.

It’s telling that you interpret this critique as simply not “understanding” the novel. Trust, I am not intellectually stunted. I understand it just fine. I’m asking us to stop pretending that its self-conscious critique of bourgeois norms absolves it of participation in those very structures.

Anyway, thanks for weighing in. But I’d invite you to consider that calling disagreement “missing the point” is a way of shutting down exactly the kind of critical engagement literature is supposed to invite. Please sit with your use of "understanding" and "missing the point," especially when you are engaging a Black thinker.

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Celina Bojko's avatar

Well, first off, I do not think that you are intellectually stunted or that Woolf is a too difficult read for you. Woolf is difficult to read, I struggled to follow her works when I was in high school and even when I first revisited her works as an adult. Your essay is completely silent on Woolf's critical themes - you can't then blame your readers for pointing out that you may have missed the point. Why do you skip over these themes in your essay, if I may ask?

I agree that that BIPOC and colonized experiences were historically dismissed (this is not a problem purely of the past, as this routine undermining persists in the present day), but you are putting all this weight and responsibility on one particular writer, who you then mischaracterize and distort. Your puritanical requirements of complete class and racial awareness, critique, and self critique from a 20th century literary type is hard to grasp. The things you say about Woolf can be applied to any and every upper class European authors - and surprise, most writers and artists tend to be rich and privileged. As you have denounced in your essay, art and academia require leisure time, something most working class and poor cannot access.

Anyway, I agree it is important critique and question the Western canon. Woolf, despite her critiques of the bourgeoisie and different structures of oppression in her time, is not a champion of the poor or any marginalized group. Some writers are more political and militant, Woolf is not. Your takedown is just misdirected in my opinion.

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Celina Bojko's avatar

I'm not giving myself credit for saying you are not "intellectually stunted" - you implied that I considered you "intellectually stunted", this is language you used. You accuse those who disagree with you as being condescending and patronizing, when you yourself display condescension to them.

Your essay is very different from your arguments in the comments - your essay is just repeating that VW is privileged and white, unrelatable to marginalized people, and that her writing is bland.

Your analysis is not puritanical because you "notice that Wolf didn't interrogate herself", its puritanical because you take this one assumption of yours to discredit her work and boil it down to some white privileged bourgeois writing without value.

I do not think of the privilege of artists as a neutral fact - it is something I myself am deeply critical of. If readers revere VW and dismiss BIPOC literature because of their eurocentric biases, of course that is an issue.

The main issue I have with your essay, is that you put the weight of systemic and structural biases on the shoulders of a single individual - and that's not to say we can't critique individuals. Your critique however dismisses the substance of her work and thus misses the mark.

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Callie Palmer's avatar

I. Love. This. I'm one of the white kids. My dissociation happened in a 200 level Shakespeare class when I went back to college to start up an English degree after dropping out to finish drinking 12 or so years earlier. Two weeks into the semester, and I thought my eyes would get stuck from being rolled back in my head. Thanks be to the gods I was making up an F in Alex Kuo's Creative Writing/Poetry class. I asked him what I should do - feeling some kind of shame for not loving The Fucking Bard - and he told me to switch majors to American Studies. That did the trick. Then I got to read everything BUT old white people. Now I am an old white people, and still no regrets.

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Genni Knight's avatar

Oh thank goodness - I was afraid to admit that I don't understand the Shakespeare hype. Also not a fan.

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Chara's avatar

This is so funny. I love Virginia Wolfe.

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Dr Stacey Patton's avatar

Please, love. Do tell me WHY.

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Chara's avatar

There were some years where I experienced the same kind of despair and emotional fog, so I related to her quote well.

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Dr Stacey Patton's avatar

I definitely respect that even though I find her absolutely insufferable. Glad you got through the fog, love.

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Chara's avatar

Thank you! That kind of depression can be. I got tired of my own self. 😂

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kim tapio's avatar

Holy fuck. wowowow.

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Tara Warne Griggs's avatar

OMFG thank you! Also one of the white kids. I hated Woolf and cough Dickinson. I thought they were vapid .

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Deena Bowman's avatar

Thank you! I made through many an English literature class with Cliff Notes and feeling like an idiot.

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The Rainbow Zee's avatar

THANK YOU. As the white kid who loved English and got my major in English Lit/Creative writing. Seriously, Dr Stacey you are my Yoda. With the exception of Shakespeare, I just didn't get it. I liked poetry. But AP English was awful. College was awful.

Now I have books that speak to me. Often, they are YA books, queer books, books by non-white authors. If I had access to books that young adults do now...

I just want to cry from relief that it wasn't me.

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Dr Stacey Patton's avatar

It wasn't you, love. It wasn't you. It was HER. It was Virginia Woolf.

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YourBonusMom's avatar

I love this. I’m white, and grew up middle class with parents who grew up working class and attended college on the GI bill and athletic scholarships in the 60s. I attended the kind of fancy mostly white liberal arts college in the 80s where white girls spent hours mooning over Virginia Woolf…and I never “got it” either because even though I was white and educated I didn’t belong to that social class with generational wealth and privilege like my classmates who went to prep school. I did see the movie Orlando with Tilda Swinton back in the day and LOVED it, but when I read the book I wasn’t impressed…probably the only situation ever where I thought the film was better than the book…because the film eliminated a lot of the excess verbiage and Swinton delivered a performance that WAS political and gender queer. Thanks for the validation…40 years late is better than never LOL.

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Dr Stacey Patton's avatar

Your testimony is so validating to me. Thank you.

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Allyson's avatar

Never got a genuine emotion from VE. I thought I was weird.

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Tee Tomlinson's avatar

Gawdamb all the yes! I managed to avoid Woolf in HS and College and after watching The Hours and Orlando I am sure I didn't miss out on anything. Unseasoned isn't strong enough a description. It is like watching flat white paint dry.

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Carol Thomas's avatar

I didn’t manage to avoid VW but “watching flat white paint dry” is an excellent description of being trapped in her required reading.

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CJ - Dancing on My Own Grave's avatar

Omg - thank you for this! Being taught to emulate Virginia Woolf was only a microfraction of an improvement over being taught to emulate Hemingway, Conrad, or Melville. Pretty sure Woolf silenced more voices than she liberated. It’s high time to set things right. Thank you for raising the bar!

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Define Nice - Liz Getty's avatar

Gosh darn-it, I know I’m not supposed to like something just because it reinforces my own opinions and beliefs, but this nailed the Woolf. I’m particularly upset with her reinsertion into the conversation with “all fours”.

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Dr Stacey Patton's avatar

You were validated, love! You were right the whole time.

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Annie Beach's avatar

Whew. Dr. Patton, your essay freed me emotionally. As a child experiencing abuse, even while reading this shit in high school, I was so shocked how everyone loved her writing. There was nothing in her writing that made me care for any of her characters. They had no idea what suffering was! And to lament for 300+ pages.... how do you not even make me care about anyone you write about! The clincher for me was Orlando. You just change genders with some lightening bolts and one evening!! Thanks for erasing all people who need to go through years of transition to feel accepted as their own internal consciousness understands. FU Virginia Woolf. Thank you so so much for this essay.

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Dr Stacey Patton's avatar

Your first sentence made me smile so hard. I know exactly how you feel. And to be able to wrap words around the disconnect is so freeing.

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Kevin Satterfield's avatar

Read “To the Lighthouse” as assigned reading in college. I got nothing out of it except mind numbing boredom. Had the same feeling watching the movie “The English Patient.”

Now the book “Manchild in the Promised Land” spoke to me. I read it (no surprise) in an African American literature class.

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Karen Edwards's avatar

OMG, I feel like such a weirdo when I admit to people that I hate The English Patient! And you have explained exactly why (because I'm another of the white kids who was all "huh?" about VW, possibly because I grew up a farm kid and there is zero intergenerational wealth going on there).

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Kevin Satterfield's avatar

Commonality is a beautiful thing😊

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Lucy's avatar
Jul 1Edited

The original novel that inspired The English Patient is 100 times more interesting than the movie!!! Give it a try..... I promise, it's better!!

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Rickey Ruiz's avatar

Like many of us reading your posts , I believe we hate Woolf, not all though. For me, I grew up in east lost Angeles, in the barrio, poor kid-Chicano. By the time I had to read ‘to the lighthouse ‘ in h.s. AP class , there was no connection to her . My instructor told me if I didn’t know Woolf, i would never know or understand the ‘real’ world…ya, whatever…I read it, did my thing and graduated. The real world for me was joining the military after h.s. ..not sure how Woolf has helped me ..guess what? I read so much more on my own time ..regardless, another powerful entry and love reading the comments

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Dr Stacey Patton's avatar

I have accepted that some teachers can't teach you anything. And that is the lesson!

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Rickey Ruiz's avatar

Yuuup! That’s where I’m at as well

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Kellie Montgomery's avatar

I checked out after reading 2-3 of these. I couldn’t connect or relate to any of her characters or feel any connection to how detached from the reality of most people they all were. You did better than me getting through all of them that you did. Lol

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