"A direction of one's own": alienation in Mrs. Dalloway and Sula.(Toni Morrison's evaluation of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf's novels)

Before Toni Morrison became the goddess of contemporary literature, she was Chloe Ardellia Wofford, a graduate student at Cornell who, in 1955, completed a master's thesis exploring manifestations of alienation in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Therein, Morrison defines alienation, with its attendant isolation, as the defining literary theme of the twentieth century, and explores the two authors' differing treatments of it in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and two of Faulkner's novels ("Treatment" 1). She begins by theorizing that Woolf's characters only become self-aware when isolated, and that Faulkner's characters can never attain self-knowledge in isolation (2-3). Ultimately, she determines that while Faulkner and Woolf seek the same ends, the "answer to the questions of death, life, time and morality," they disagree on "what pattern of existence is most conducive to honesty and self-knowledge" (39).

Morrison privileges Faulkner's emphasis on communal connection by reading his position as the "antithesis" to Woolf's (4), and, after all, her later writings clearly reveal the value she places on community. Alienation, writes Morrison, "is not Faulkner's answer" to the problems of modern life (3), and it hardly seems to be hers either. (1) Although Morrison has doubtlessly revised many of the opinions she expressed in her thesis, she continues to tout the dangers of isolation. (2) This apparent rejection of Woolf's preferred strategy for attaining self-knowledge does not, however, mean that Woolf exerts less influence on Morrison's work than does Faulkner, although the lack of critical commentary to that effect might suggest as much. (3)

Although fewer scholars have addressed the topic, Morrison's fiction similarly explores some of Woolf's key themes in ways that allow her characters successfully to navigate the problems of modernity that her thesis identifies. In fact, biographical and theoretical connections suggest that Morrison's work might even have stronger ties to Woolf than to Faulkner. (4) At any rate, such a relationship seems most textually evident between Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Morrison's Sula. Though the two novels differ in many respects, at base, they share strikingly similar plots. Mrs. Dalloway's main action reveals much through its depiction of Clarissa Dalloway's interaction with friends and family throughout a day filled primarily with preparations for the party she gives at the novel's conclusion. In the background, one subplot details the last day in the life of Septimus Warren Smith, a World War I veteran suffering from the symptoms of post-traumatic stress that ultimately lead to his suicide, and another deals with Clarissa's girlhood romance with Peter Walsh and friendship with Sally Seton. At the party, Clarissa learns of Septimus's suicide from his doctor, Bradshaw, and feels an uncanny connection to him and his tragic end. In Sula, Morrison utilizes time differently; rather than relying, as Woolf does, on memory to keep the narrative action in the present, Morrison follows her title character for several years. She tells the story of Sula's life, though, in Woolf fashion, by outlining Sula's relationships with her one great love and only true friend, and, much like Clarissa's connection to Septimus, Sula shares a deep revelatory bond with Shadrack, a veteran of the first world war who exists in a state of altered reality quite similar to the one that traps Septimus.

By noting such likenesses, I do not mean to suggest that Morrison simply retells Woolf's narrative in an African American context; in fact, she does precisely the opposite. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., speaks to such revisions in The Signifying Monkey when he suggests that African American writers often rewrite western texts with "a compelling sense of difference" (xxii). In his study of Mrs. Dalloway and alienation, Jeremy Hawthorn determines that while the novel "can present the unsatisfactoriness" of alienation, it "includes no real solution to it" (94). (5) In Sula, however, Morrison gets around such limitations via the revolutionary sense of revision that Gates references: she resolves in her fiction the same problems inherent in alienation for Woolf's characters that her graduate thesis addresses. An examination of the resonant connections between the two novels and the specific ways that Morrison reworks the theme of alienation in a similar narrative setting leads to a greater understanding of both texts; Morrison perhaps encourages such connections, despite her protestations about the anxiety of influence (McKay 151-52).

Morrison begins her thesis chapter on Woolf by quoting a diary entry that Woolf dated October 25, 1920: "Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss ... its unhappiness is everywhere" ("Treatment" 5). Early in Sula Morrison pointedly utilizes a similar cement walkway as a metaphor when the military hospital releases Shadrack because there "was clearly a demand for space":

 
   When he stepped out of the hospital 
   door the grounds overwhelmed him: 
   the cropped shrubbery, the edged 
   lawns, the undeviating walks. 
   Shadrack looked at the cement stretches: 
   each one leading clearheadedly to 
   some presumably desirable destination. 
   There were no fences, no warnings, 
   no obstacles at all between concrete 
   and green grass, so one could 
   easily ignore the tidy sweep of stone 
   and cut out in another direction--a 
   direction of one's own. (10) 

Shadrack declines to take the path defined by the sidewalk. Instead, he takes off in what Morrison describes as "a direction of one's own," a deliberately placed phrase that necessarily calls to mind Woolf's A Room of One's Own. In much the same fashion, Morrison's novel disregards the limitations of alienation that characterize Mrs. Dalloway; Morrison defies the inherent tragedy of life as Woolf represents it, builds a sidewalk of her own over that rhetorical abyss by posing alternatives to such alienation. And though Woolf surely never anticipated becoming a foremother to an African American novelist, she alludes to such a possibility in A Room of One's Own when she writes, "For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately. And I must also consider her--this unknown woman--as the descendant of all those other women whose circumstances I have been glancing at and see what she inherits of their characteristics and restrictions" (80). Although Woolf actually speaks of Mary Carmichael, she could just as ...