In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ERIKA SPOHRER Seeing Stars: Commodity Stardom in Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway EVEN THE MOST DEDICATED CRITICS would have a hard time claiming that Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is a novel primarily about the movies—and they would have an even harder time claiming that it is about movie stars. Woolf does refer to the thennascent medium of film occasionally throughout the novel, but she does so almost incidentally, as a way of subtly describing characters, modernity, and the conversation at Clarissa Dalloway's party.1 In her introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel, Elaine Showalter notes these thematic references to the cinema, claiming that "the cinema is one of the postwar developments that has altered the relation between the classes, and acted as a leveller. Everyone goes to the cinema, whereas the traditional entertainments of the music hall and the opera drew very different groups" (xxi). Showalter's introduction also comments on the novel's formal connection to the cinema, as does Lia Hotchkiss's more extended analysis. And recently critics have begun to explore the issue of film adaptation in relation to Mrs. OaIh' way, noting either identity construction in each or the changes Woolf's text undergoes as director Marken Gorris brings it to the screen.2 Their analyses, while they indeed connect Mrs. Dalloway to the cinema (as do those of Hotchkiss and Showalter) have little to do with the cinema Arizona Quarterly Volume 61, Number 2, Summer 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 114 Erika Spohrer as a theme within the novel. And perhaps rightly so, for the sparse mention of the cinema in the text that Woolf writes does not declare film its primary theme. Movie stars get even less textual and critical attention; Woolf mentions only music hall "star" Harry Titcomb; the movie star plays no role in her text. What, then, do we make of Michael Cunningham's The Hours, the 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that, among other things, rewrites Woolf's 1923 London into New York City at "the end of the twentieth century" (9), a context laden with the forces of fame and movie stardom ?3 In Cunningham's text, Queens become actresses, the London streets become movie sets, Imperialist activists become degraded movie stars. By thus populating his contemporary American novel with celebrities , what commentary does Cunningham make about the United States in the late twentieth century? Further, and, for the sake of modernism the more crucial question, what does Cunningham's rewrite say about WooIf's text and context? While these questions lead in a variety of directions, "celebrity," which I shall define as a system wherein an individual achieves notoriety (fame) that exceeds her or his professional visibility, crucially links them; it points to a central concern of The Hours while at the same time encouraging us to read Mrs. Dalloway as a tale as much about stardom as it is about shell-shock, snobbery, and stream-of-consciousness. More specifically, Cunningham's exploration of stars as commodities suggests that celebrities attain importance as cultural currency; in his late twentieth-century novel, stars are commodities that determine cultural value for the people with and through whom they circulate, both by conferring distinction on events and by providing the static medium through which others may gauge their cultural sophistication. The public political figure performs a similar function in Mrs. Dalloway , although in Woolf's text that public figure also represents a coherent force that ensures social stability. More subtly, though, by reading Woolf's novel against Cunningham's—or, more accurately, through Cunningham's—we perceive that Woolf's text constructs the political figure as celebrity and in the end registers a decisive shift in the very nature of that subjectivity. For Woolf's characters who relate to celebrity in some way, and for Cunningham's novel inter- and extra-textually , "there is no more powerful force in the world . . . than fame" (Cunningham 176). Seeing Stars "5 'the hours' and the celebrity as commodity Since the publication of Richard Dyer's book Stars in 1979, a body of criticism on stardom, fame, and...

pdf

Share