Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

By placing a marginal character in the classic modern novel, Mrs Dalloway, at its centre, Michelle Cahill's metafictional Daisy & Woolf underlines the fraught nature of race, identity and migration

- Akankshya Abismruta

Dalloway Day, an annual event, was celebrated on June 11, marking the 100th anniversary, this year, of Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs Dalloway. But as everyone holds forth about the centenary (the book was published on May 14, 1925, though Dalloway Day celebrations are held in mid-June, when the central event of the novel, Mrs Dalloway's party, takes place), few question Woolf's colonial gaze. Indeed, the Eurasian character left in the margins has rarely been addressed. Far away from the colonial metropole, Daisy, Peter Walsh's Anglo-Indian lover awaits news from him in India. When Woolf mentions her in passing, it is with an air of racial superiority even as her protagonist, Clarissa, suffers from low self-esteem.

"Oh if she [Mrs. Dalloway] could have had her life over again!... She [Mrs Dalloway] had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them... this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway."