Refusing Butler's Binary: Bisexuality and Performative Melancholia in Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract

In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler argued a woman “accomplishes” normative femininity by rejecting same-sex pleasure. Butler further argues that normative femininity is maintained by emulating, without fully embodying, cultural ideals of femininity. Yet two questions remain: Given the theoretical framework that Butler articulated, what happens to the bisexual subject who forecloses neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality? If masculinity and femininity are, as Butler suggested, not only accomplishments, but also cultural ideals, what happens to the subject who fails to properly emulate these cultural ideals? Following Clare Hemming's suggestion that bisexual readings can be an “enlightening analytical tool or starting point for knowledge” within the broader history of sexuality, this article argues that in Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf explores precisely this tension between desire and socially sanctioned femininity through her depiction of three female characters: Sally Seton, Clarissa Dalloway, and Clarissa's rival Doris Kilman. Whereas Sally effectively forecloses her same-sex desire, fully “accomplishing” heterosexuality and consolidating normative femininity, Clarissa perceives her bisexuality as a “failure” to fully foreclose homosexual desire and feels that she has lost normative femininity. Clarissa's loss is further exacerbated by her daughter's friendship with Doris. Rather than read this loss of femininity as mere “gender anxiety” (as Butler might), however, this article returns to the idea of femininity as cultural ideal and argues that Clarissa and Doris exhibit performative melancholia, a melancholia where the subject experiences normative gender performativity as a lost ideal. It is this perceived loss of femininity that ultimately motivates much of Clarissa's behavior, including her rivalry with Doris.

Keywords:

• Virginia Woolf
• Mrs. Dalloway
• bisexuality
• melancholia
• femininity
• gender performativity
• female rivalry

Notes

1. In her reading of The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse, Patricia Smith (1997) theorized something similar, which she terms “lesbian panic”: “the disruptive action or reaction that occurs when a character—or, conceivably, an author—is either unable or unwilling to confront or reveal her own lesbianism or lesbian desire” (p. 2).

2. Woolf's relationship with psychoanalysis is complex. Elizabeth Abel (1989) argued that although Woolf was aware of Freud's work and knew many of the same people, she may have avoided reading it because she saw him as a rival who also sought to explore the depths of the human psyche (p. 14). More recently, Nicole Ward Jouve (2000) divided psychoanalytic readings of Woolf into three categories: those that address her mental illness, those that discuss her attitudes toward Freud, and those that posit concepts similar or alternative to psychoanalysis. Makiko Minow-Pinkney (2007) argued that Woolf avoided psychoanalytic treatment for her mental illness because of “Virginia and Leonard's belief in the mythic linking of artistic genius and insanity” (p. 60). Minow-Pinkney showed how, in her letters, Woolf claims that madness grants her “the power to see the same truth more intensely and completely than through sanity” (p. 62).

3. Freud (1975b) allowed that melancholia could stem from the loss of an object or an ideal, defining melancholia as “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one's country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (p. 243). Given melancholia's longer duration and its symptomology, which often includes masochism and/or suicide, this distinction between gender anxiety and performative melancholia is more than a semantic one. Renata Salecl (2004) argued that “the source of anxiety for the subject is not the lack, but rather the absence of the lack, i.e. that where there is supposed to be lack, some object is present” (p. 23). Thus, whereas melancholia stems from lack, anxiety results from the subject's confrontation with some unexpected, horrible object where the subject expected lack.

4. In a very different way, Mark Spilka (1980) also read the novel through the lens of melancholia. He argued that “It is the death of romantic love which Clarissa mourns in mourning Peter Walsh, and she is quite relieved to be rid of it” (p. 67).

5. It is worth noting that, just as not all queer theorists embrace psychoanalysis, not all bisexual theorists embrace psychoanalytic discourse. For example, Clare Hemmings (2002) specifically criticized Butler's (1997) use of psychoanalytic models and argued that “Butler requires bisexuality as psychoanalytic ground to facilitate her own model of gender performativity, and cannot acknowledge a gendered bisexual subject as a possibility” (pp. 9–10). Through reading Mrs. Dalloway, this article attempts to show how attention to bisexual subjectivity complicates Butler's models of performativity and melancholia.

6. Mariam Fraser's Identity without Selfhood (1999) is a notable exception to this trajectory within bisexual theory. Fraser convincingly argued that “although sexuality is understood to be one of the principal ways through which a relation to the self is established, it may not always be central” (p. 23). Fraser's study focuses on how in posthumous studies on Simone de Beauvoir, critics have focused on other aspects of her identity to (often purposely) efface bisexual aspects of her life. Even so, Fraser is quick to admit that while “(bi)sexuality does not always author the self, or at least aspects of it, in the way that lesbianism and heterosexuality are frequently perceived to do” (p. 24), “bisexuality in not always an identity without selfhood” (p. 2).

7. For a related article on queer theory's simultaneous avoidance of and silent reliance on bisexuality, see Stacey Young (2004). See also Marjorie Garber (2000).

8. For a full overview of lesbian readings of Woolf's novels, see Swanson (2007, pp. 190–208).

9. Suzanne Raitt's (1993) comes close to discussing bisexuality, arguing that Woolf and Sackville-West “were and were not lesbian” because their experience exceeded standard definitions of lesbianism (pp. 167–168). Raitt also observed that their relationship “was not disruptive of marriage. There was no simple way in which, for them, unconventional sexual behaviour was inevitably either socially or politically subversive” (p. 5).

10. Woolf's language here also prefigures Jacques Lacan's theorization of jouissance.

11. Although Lillian Faderman (1991) and Terry Castle (1993) are often read as oppositional theorists of lesbian historiography with the former advocating Foucauldian social constructionism and the latter espousing an essentialist, identitarian position, Klein's (1978) distinction between emotional and sexual forms of intimacy illuminates both perspectives: Whereas Faderman focuses on emotional forms of lesbian intimacy, Castle focuses on sexual forms of lesbian intimacy. In this sense, Klein's work shows how bisexual theory can be, as Hemmings (2002) suggested, an “enlightening analytical tool or starting point for knowledge” within the broader history of sexuality.

12. Although I read the novel through the lens of historical bisexuality, a compelling case for transitional bisexuality could be made for Sally and possibly for Clarissa as well. Sally might also be read as sequentially bisexual.

13. Freud (1957a) noted the capacity to turn masochistic impulses outward as sadistic rage. Using Freud's earlier model where sadism was primary and masochism secondary, Judith Butler (1997) discussed a similar turning outward of melancholic rage as a strategy of survival.

14. Miss Kilman's age appears to be indeterminate within the novel; however, she is plausibly older than Elizabeth and younger than Clarissa.