Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is set in a single city on a single day: London on 13 June 1923. But while Bloomsday on 16 June is the occasion of riotous celebrations in Dublin and around the world, the day of Mrs Dalloway’s party is ignored. I think Dallowday is a date worth celebrating – it should be the occasion of readings, exhibitions, performances and revelry. Why is Leopold Bloom more important than Clarissa Dalloway? How did Dublin get to own a single day in literary history, and London miss out?
Mrs Dalloway is both a modernist masterpiece and one of the great novels about London. Many London tours already offer Dalloway walks, following the paths of Clarissa, her daughter Elizabeth, her former suitor Peter Walsh, and her suicidal double Septimus Smith. London (along with New York) is the place where Dalloway scholars come to work. The large notebooks containing Woolf’s handwritten draft of “The Hours” – her working title for Mrs Dalloway – are in the British Library, which would be the perfect venue for an exhibit and a conference. London is also crowded with places, artefacts, images and souvenirs of the novel, from postcards at the National Portrait Gallery to teas at Dalloway Terrace in Bloomsbury.
A Dallowday in London seems so natural and obvious that we have to wonder why it hasn’t happened. After all, Woolf has hordes of devoted readers and fans. This summer there are Woolf festivals around the world, from next week’s Virginia Woolf Conference in Leeds, to a gathering in Seoul in August.
Is Ulysses really more widely read than Mrs Dalloway? I doubt it. There may be more people who pretend to have read Ulysses; it’s a notoriously difficult book which elevates everyday male experience to myth and epic. Conversely, some male readers may fear they lose literary status by admitting they have read Mrs Dalloway, a novel by a woman about a day in the life of a woman, with an emphatically feminine title.
Woolf mocked such gendered stereotypes in A Room of One’s Own: “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in the drawing room.” In Mrs Dalloway, her aims were significant and large, well beyond the superficial concerns of the drawing room. She aspired to “give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & show it at work, at its most intense”. She succeeded, creating an influential novel that is a study of aging and change, but also a radiant tribute to survival and joy, to “life; London; this moment of June”. Nonetheless, some critics have dismissed Woolf. That was certainly the message I received when I first studied Mrs Dalloway as an undergraduate in the 1960s: “VW: more intellectually limited than James Joyce,” my lecture notes read. I didn’t agree, but I wrote it down.
Perhaps Woolf hasn’t been adopted by her own city because she was vague about the exact date of Mrs Dalloway’s party, identifying it only as a Wednesday “in the middle of June”. Looking at the 1923 calendar, the critic Harvena Richter noted that 13 June is the most likely date. In his edition of Mrs Dalloway for the Oxford World’s Classics, David Bradshaw, finding a discrepancy in Woolf’s reference to a cricket game on that day, argued that the date of the party is an imaginary rather than a real Wednesday. Academics can argue over this fine point for ever.
In any case, authorial self-promotion, a writer’s aura and civic support do much more to make a literary day a major cultural event than wide readership or critical prestige. Looking at the history of Bloomsday offers some clues. Joyce himself had high expectations for 16 June. In 1924, he lamented that the timing needed attention: “Will anybody remember this date?” he wrote. Joyce’s French publisher Adrienne Monnier took the hint, and held a “Déjeuner Ulysse” in Paris in 1929 to honour the book. Then on 16 June 1954, a group of Dublin writers and literati, including Flann O’Brien and the poet Patrick Kavanagh, planned a drive around the city to the main scenes of the novel, dressed up as the male characters. They intended to end their tour in the red-light district Joyce called Nighttown, but by late afternoon were so drunk that they abandoned the circuit, and settled down in the Bailey, a literary pub in the city centre. As Bloomsday caught on, it acquired rituals and costumes – a breakfast of kidneys and liver; a lunch of gorgonzola sandwiches and burgundy; lashings of Guinness all day; marathon 36-hour readings; costumes of bowler hats, straw boaters and little round spectacles like the ones Joyce wears in photographs; singing and music; and above all, a boisterous pub crawl.
Today Bloomsday is a magnet for tourists and a boost to the Dublin economy. As one travel site advertises: “It’s a great time to visit Dublin whether you’ve managed to read Ulysses or not.” The Joyce scholar Michael Groden calls Bloomsday the biggest holiday in Ireland, even bigger than St Patrick’s Day. Other cities have caught on: in 2012, the county and borough councils of Sligo launched Yeats Day on the poet’s birthday, which also happens to be 13 June. In 2015, Literature Wales and the Welsh government announced the first International Dylan Thomas Day, held in Swansea, where the university holds Dylan Thomas manuscripts, on 14 May: the date of the first staged reading of Under Milk Wood in New York in 1953. Again, a pub crawl features.
Indeed, I suspect that the absence of a pub crawl has been the major drawback to the institution of Dallowday. Mrs Dalloway’s party in Westminster is a sedate and sober affair. It’s more about the guest list (the prime minister!), the decor (new chair covers!) and the Imperial Tokay, than the wild escapades of Nighttown. A feminine party, in short. I don’t think there’s a pub in the entire book. Women didn’t go to them in the 1920s; Woolf was not celebrated for her heroic drinking. Clarissa Dalloway and her friends do not slip off for nightcaps or dance on the tables like Zelda Fitzgerald.
But surely there are ways to spice up Mrs Dalloway’s party in the 21st century. Perhaps an inventive skywriter. Celebrants dressed up in long Woolfian cardies. Teas and themed dinners in cafes and restaurants, talks at bookshops and libraries, film festivals and plays, pub quizzes and Dalloway cocktails.
For contemporary authors writing a single-day novel today, I’d advise choosing a specific day, a specific city, and getting some serious drinking into the plot. Meanwhile, let’s put Dallowday on the London summer calendar. Doesn’t Virginia Woolf deserve a day of her own?