Looking into Virginia Woolfe s Mrs. Dalloway and Li-Young Lee s The City In Which I Love You
In Mrs. Dalloway, though the novel does not go and discuss Clarissa Dalloway s relationships straightforwardly, the main character s reflections and pondering on how her life has gone and how her relationship with those persons has developed her, her stream-of-consciousness thinking provide readers with enough material to consider on their own. And although Clarissa does not go and deliberately review her relationships with the various persons that mean something to her, the reader is able to do this for her and eventually see how these relationships define her as a person and also how she is able to subconsciously define her relationship with these people. The novel is then able to present the differing aspects and levels of love present in Mrs. Dalloway s life. In a way, Mrs. Dalloway seems to be presenting readers with contrasts among different loves and giving distinctions that somehow explain how and why these loves are different and why they make her feel the way she does.
While readers do get to see these distinctions, it is important to note, however, that Mrs. Dalloway does not make the distinctions deliberately she merely slowly reveals these facts through her recollections and through her musings. It is as if she does not know that these levels of love exist within her and it is also as though she is able to reconcile them with one another so as to avoid any internal struggles that might tear her affections apart.
Lee s poem The City In Which I Love You , on the other hand also tackles love but in a more direct specific way. Although, this poem, too, works on recollections of love, the persona in the poem now discusses a singular love that is being remembered. The poem does not embed the memory of the loved one with other recollections as was done in Mrs. Dalloway , instead it associates other memories with the memory of this loved one. Now, although, Lee does go on and put the search for the loved in the center of the poem, he also uses it as a springboard to bring up other memories, other images that the poem s persona has attached to the search for this loved which is unlike the method used in Mrs. Dalloway .
Going on to discuss how Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf was able to present to its readers different aspects and differing levels of love, one must first sift and go through how each loved one was presented in Clarissa s recollections. Depending on how Clarissa presented that character in her musings, one would be able judge just how much that person meant to her. And it is exactly through these musings that readers would be able to go and see the aspects of love being discussed. For example, the relationship that Clarissa Dalloway has with the people who go to her party as with the contrast between her relationship with her husband Richard and with the relationship she shared with her old friend Sally Seton is a good place to start to look for those aspects. The two relationships mentioned above, through Clarissa s recollections and thoughts, provide us something of a calm, reflection on how love exists in the relationships. Readers, through the insights given by Clarissa s musings, can also see how the contrast between these two types of love are able to give Clarissa distinctly different feelings.
If a reader would want to see a more passionate, perhaps, more powerful exhibit of love, a reader could choose to focus Clarissa s recollection of her relationship with Sally Seton and how it had made her feel. Even if her feelings are based on memories from their younger years, the things that Clarissa feels just from these recollections are still power and are still very vivid. These shows and proves just how strong the love she had for Sally was. It is proof that it was more than just a phase or a product of adolescence. For example, when describing the kiss that they shared, Clarissa says
then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life ( ). Sally stopped picked a flower kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down The others disappeared there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it--a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up. (Woolfe)
This excerpt is quite a departure from the earlier parts of the novel where Clarissa presented her musing in a less emotional language. The previous sections of the novel, even when they discussed people who are supposed to be the center of Clarissa s life like her husband and daughter did not produce such powerful statements. For example, whenever she d discuss her husband, she would only discuss him in a matter-of-fact manner such as she says much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves (Woolfe) or when she says no vulgar jealousy could separate her from Richard (Woolfe). There seems to be a glaring lack of any strong outburst of emotion for Richard, her husband. But later on, when Clarissa meets Sally again, one can still find evidences of the great love that Clarissa keeps because when they met again after a long time Clarissa goes It was Sally Seton Sally Seton after all these years (Woolfe), again showing and proving just how much Sally Seton meant to Clarissa. Now, perhaps, this would be the relationship that could draw a parallel to the relationship that the persona in Li-Young Lee s The City In Which I Love You had with the missing beloved because, as will be shown later on, clearly there was great love in the persona s words.
But before going on to that poem, one must first mark the difference between the level of Clarissa s regard for her relationship to her husband Richard and for her regard for the relationship she had with Sally Seton. Clarissa and Richard Dalloway may not exactly have the epitome of a perfect marriage with regard to the more romantic notions of marriage where romantic, passionate love is an essential part. But it does seem that her marriage to Richard Dalloway is a marriage made out of good, proper, practical reasoning rather than some great, overwhelming love. However, readers should not take it as though the relationship had not been with its own special brand of affection and timid love because the couple seems to be able to regard each other warmly and with affection. The relationship might not have had the quality to it that possesses passion enough to make them, in modern words, crazy about each other but it was still enough to keep them together and it was also enough to bring them together to have a daughter. But one example of a passage that is at once reassuring of her regard for her husband and at the same time alarming because it shows exactly her regard for her husband is in one instance when Clarissa thinks of Richard where she thinks of him with gratitude a strange sort of gratitude must one repay in daily life to servants, yes, to dogs and canaries, above all to Richard her husband, who was the foundation of it (Woolfe). In this excerpt alone, one can already see how her regard for her husband, Richard, though full of thankfulness and fondness, is not all together what one would think of as what should be for a husband. Clarissa, maybe subconsciously, acknowledges that she does not esteem him too highly, merely putting him in the same general grouping as servants and pets. Richard, for his part though, may also feel that he does love Clarissa, and it may be the truth, but then again, it not that sort of love that inspires that great emotion either because he himself is unable to declare his love to her as when he debates with himself as to whether or not he could tell her again that he loved her because the time comes when it cant be said ones too shy to say it (Woolfe) or so he believed. But Richard Dalloway was almost there anyway, almost to the point wherein he could have told Clarissa that he loved her, but in the end he could not bring himself to say he loved her not in so many words and he had not said I love you but he held her hand. Happiness is this, is this, he thought (Woolfe).
From just these two examples, readers can already see the contrasts of love that exist within Clarissa Dalloway s world and how she has been divided into two Clarissas. She has her stable, acceptable Victorian marriage and she has her memories of a great love from another time. Her Victorian marriage has made her who she is the love that she has chosen has defined her as being Mrs. Richard Dalloway (Woolfe) while the love that she has left behind her has also taken with it the woman named Clarissa. For modern readers, this is something that might baffle the more romantic sensibilities that have been reborn in this generation and that is exactly why the novel is able to bring out questions and ideas about love and how it affects one s life and living.
Now, in Li-Young Lee s The City In Which I Love You one is able to find a type of love or an idea of love that is more familiar to this generation s notions of love. As was said earlier, the persona puts the idea of love, or of the loved one, as a central piece in the poem, with other recollections triggered only by musings on this love. The idea here is that the persona s love is what pushed on the poem, unlike in Mrs. Dalloway wherein the idea of love and the musings on the loved ones are only brought about by random recollections and circumstances. Take for example the part where in the persona says
I called to you, and my voice pursued you, even backward to that other city in which I saw a woman squat in the street beside a body, and fan with a handkerchief flies from its face. That woman was not me. And the corpse lying there, lying there so still it seemed with great effort, as though his whole being was concentrating on the hole in his forehead, so still I expected hed sit up any minute and laugh out loud (Lee)
Here, the reader can see one example of how acts of calling out to the loved one brings about other images, other recollections, thus reinforcing the central role that the loved one has in the persona s life.
This poem also depicts love as a thing that is so necessary, so important that it manifests its self in physical and emotional need, again, very much unlike the intellectualized depiction of love in Mrs. Dalloway .
Im vexed to love you, your body the shape of returns, your hair a torso of light, your heat I must have, your opening Id eat, each moment of that soft-finned fruit, inverted fountain in which I dont see me. My tongue remembers your wounded flavor. The vein in my neck adores you. (Lee)
Here, the persona makes the deliberate acknowledgement for the need for the loved one. The persona identifies the need as physical it is not some passing flittering idea triggered by another event because it is just there all its own and needing nothing else to ignite it. Lee s poem is an open acknowledgment for the need for love, for the missing beloved that is being searched for. It also openly recognizes the search for love that the persona goes through and also the realization that the love being searched for is nowhere to be found.
Where are you in the cities in which I love you, the cities daily risen to work and to money, to the magnificent miles and the gold coasts Morning comes to this city vacant of you. Pages and windows flare, and you are not there. Someone sweeps his portion of sidewalk, wakens the drunk, slumped like laundry, and you are gone. You are not in the wind which someone notes in the margins of a book. You are gone out of the small fires in abandoned lots where human figures huddle, each aspiring to its own ghost (Lee)
The City In Which I Love You can, perhaps, be viewed as existing on the opposite end from where Mrs. Dalloway is. While Mrs. Dalloway tackles love as merely one other thing that exists in the mind of a person, the poem sees it as something more a need, perhaps, as palpable as hunger. The poem provides a good counterpoint to the rather timid approach to love that was presented by Clarissa because, here, the persona seems to exist because there is the search for the beloved. If Clarissa wasdefined because she chose that love which robbed her of her identity, the persona here is a person whose very identity is defined by love and the search for the lover.
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