I do believe that it is possible that a single work of art is capable of covering the enormity of human life in one day. In fact, I believe that a single word can keep a person awaiting a hope, a dream for decades.
Using Ms. Virginia Woolf’s style of writing, stream of consciousness, allowed Mr. Cunningham to write in depth, to expose the superficial to write the characters in a more intensified way. The exposure gave the characters room to be natural in processing their thoughts, making some sense of their world. For instance, on page 192 Mrs. Brown has picked Ritchie up from the sitter and they are on their way home, “Mommy, I love you…I love you too baby, …she can hear the flannelled nervousness lodged now in her throat, the effort she must make to sound natural.” Most scenes or realities about mothers would never depict a mother making an “effort to sound natural”. Most mothers are seen as perfect. I think this was bold and different, but true to Mrs. Brown’s character, it is a peak into the character’s most intimate thoughts into her ill-ease with her child, her lack of nurturing skills, as well as awkwardness in being someone’s “wife”. Thinking of the psychological level one is able to see past that one moment into Mrs. Brown’s being and understand that this is a part of who she is not just a moment she was caught up in time, but a real glimpse into her agitation with mothering and being a “wife”.
Sometimes intimacies are almost too privately valuable to share, but Mr. Cunningham makes this book work sharing loads of intimacies through these three women that otherwise would have died on the say “cutting board floor” had he not used a psychological realm to share them in. A second intimacy is again Mrs. Brown who kisses Kitty in the sweetest and most intimate way, but then we find out that Kitty is the one who pulls away first. What an intimate thing to know about Laura, she would take risks, her family, her position as that “wife”, and that very friendship is on the line here and Laura accepts the “Laura is the odd one, the foreigner, the one who can’t be trusted. Laura and Kitty agree, silently, that this is true.”
Mrs. Brown is currently reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway who is in a heterosexual marriage, “…yet her most passionate memory is of a kiss shared thirty years earlier with a woman.” It seems that Mrs. Brown is moving towards lessening constraints on herself as a woman, but there are yet anxiety driven intimacies that continue to stress life as one may want to live it. Because Mrs. Brown has used Mrs. Dalloway as a source of strength to begin to move away from convention and to find some beauty even in her romance with death, she is using her to experience some shavings of life.
Mrs. Brown is locked into an asphyxiating marriage; symbols are used such as water, which allows a story to be told without the use of words. Here we find water, the source of life, cleansing, and the center of regeneration. In this part of the story Mrs. Brown is immerged in water, from which she awakens and decides to live. To be immersed in water then to re-emerge without having been dissolved in the water is to return to the well-spring of life, to regain fresh strength, or to die a symbolic death. Again, this is intimate to peer into a rented room and watch a woman caress her unborn, sit her method of death out (pills), and have her read her way into life at the same time as Mrs. Woolf has written her death out and is walking into a body of water to end her life, it is too intimate to watch. But I believe this little delicious delicacies of intimacy are what makes the book so astounding.
Through the characters speaking to me, the reader, their internal struggles, loves, fears, anger, and confusion, I am allowed to taste (like the base of a good soup) the base of their lives, the things that matter most to them. The captivation for me has been being a living (be)ing exposed to the deepest intimacy of other people’s lives. The term (be)ing is important here to me because (be) to exist, to live now means my mind has not been on lock down while reading, but it has absorbed the undercurrent of life and death from my reading. Therefore, as I am being alive while reading, I am also becoming a part of Mr. Cunningham’s story. I know weird huh! So, I find the book is capable of capturing more than the vastness of its characters lives in one day, I find it also capable of captivating me and changing my own life in one day.
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