다시 쓰는 『댈러웨이 부인』

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours can not but be understood in its relationship with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. His novel deconstructs, restructures, and reedits various stories and characteristic images of Woolf’s novel and her biographical life. His repetition, however, does not stop just on the level of its content. In his novel, he revisions Woolfian aesthetic itself.
Now Woolf is usually considered as a major modernist and her novel, especially Mrs. Dalloway, shows a perfect structure of modernist aesthetic. Like many other modernists, Woolf is deeply influenced by the Paterian Impressionism. Walter Pater has insisted that there is no solid reality in the world besides our impressions and, thus, the best virtue of any human being is a susceptibility to his numerous and atomic impressions. In Mrs. Dalloway, characters reveal this virtue strongly: Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith are perceptive recipients of showering impressions. And the crux of Clarissa’s power is her ability to build up these impressions, which are frequently unstable, chaotic and even contradictory to each other.
In Cunningham’s novel, Clarissa Vaughan, Laura Brown, Virginia Woolf and Richard Brown struggle repetitively to compose some kind of order and beauty out of their ordinary and haphazard lives. And they fail to achieve a perfect structure of beauty. Cunningham, however, is suggesting a more inclusive and generous aesthetic through their failures: Life itself is a perfect beauty despite its seemingly chaotic appearances. In the last party of the novel, four people simply celebrate their being alive..

Related posts