Review: Daisy & Woolf by Michelle Cahill

Hindustan Times

16 hours ago

Dalloway Day, an annual event, was celebrated on June 11, marking the 100th anniversary, this year, of Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs Dalloway. Published by Hogarth Press, that the author set up with her husband Leonard in their basement at Hogarth House in Richmond, London, the novel challenged the Victorian idea of a plot. A luminary text, that has been adapted to films and plays, it is set to soon have its own biography published by Manchester University Press. 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 would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough, with a skin like crumpled leather and beautiful eyes… slow and stately; rather large; interested in politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified, very sincere… 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.'
The passage establishes Woolf's protagonist as someone without an inherent sense of self. In her fifties, when she is no longer pressed by the duties of being a wife and a mother, Clarissa Dalloway finds herself wanting to be more than her social identity as wife of a conservative MP with her silks and scissors preparing to throw a party on a fine evening in 1923. As she walks across London, she has opinions on everyone but it's not the same as participating in luncheons hosted by Mrs Bruton where they discuss politics. From Hugh Whitbread and Peter Walsh to Sally Seton and Miss Killman, everyone is scrutinised, even Septimus Smith's wife, Lucrezia, 'a little woman, with large eyes in sallow pointed face; an Italian girl.' Everyone, but not 53-year-old Peter Walsh's 24-year-old Anglo-Indian lover, Daisy, wife of a major, mother of two in India. She describes Indian women at large as 'silly, pretty, flimsy, nincompoops.'
The stream of consciousness narrative, whose film parallel would ideally comprise one long single shot somehow narrated from the perspective of different characters, makes the reader wonder: Was Daisy merely a tool to explore the complex relationship that Peter and Clarissa shared in their youth? For Peter looks at Daisy as someone who'd boost his ego, '…of course, she would give him everything…everything he wanted!' which Clarissa had bruised. He describes, in his insecurity, the women he loved over the years as 'vulgar, trivial, commonplace' and has thought before that 'Daisy would look ordinary beside Clarissa.' Clarissa's presence in his life is further underlined by the impactful lines at the end of the text: 'It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.'
The contemporary reader is bound to ask: With Clarissa's overbearing presence, what was Daisy doing in Peter's life? Compensating for the void left behind by Clarissa? When Woolf dug her characters from within, showcasing their perception of each other, why was Daisy left voiceless far away in India? Her mixed race mentioned but not explored.
A century later, enter Michelle Cahill with Daisy & Woolf. An Australian of Anglo-Indian heritage, the author provides a glimpse of Daisy's life along with the difficulties and blockages that come with it by introducing a mixed-race immigrant protagonist, Mina, who is writing Daisy's story. Woolf is evoked in the novel's epigraph with a quote from A Room of One's Own: 'A woman writing thinks back through her mothers.' While the book revolves around motherhood quite a bit, the epigraph works like a double-edged sword: it showcases gratitude for the feminist writers who have paved the way for the telling of Daisy's story while also challenging their silence that has rendered voiceless this character at the margins.
In this metafiction set in 2017, Cahill presents the dilemmas of race and migration through Mina's reimagination, in the novel that she is writing, of Daisy journeying to London to meet Peter Walsh. Mina writes, 'Muslims and refugees were being restricted by Trump's immigration ban; Theresa May was advocating an early Brexit deal, with Scotland calling for talks on a second referendum. All over the world people of colour felt vulnerable while crossing borders.' As the storyteller of Daisy's life, she narrates harrowing experiences of being Anglo-Indians from East Africa and of her brother's mental illness, a result of being bullied at school for being brown skinned. It's as if Mina, and Cahill herself, is attempting to fill an intersectional gap in the canon.
Instead of writing a straight postcolonial response like Jean Rhys does for Bertha Mason in Wide Sargasso Sea, Cahill makes her work partly epistolary. Between Mina's meditation on racism and writing and her travels across India, China, London, and New York to find the nuances of Woolf's life, Daisy tells her story through letters and diary entries. Alongside, Mina writes, 'Mrs Woolf had kept Daisy stunted, and on purpose it seems. Her intent was always to centre Clarissa Dalloway, setting her in flight. Drifting and timeless, she is a hallmark achievement: Clarissa, the stream of Virginia Woolf's consciousness.' Daisy too addresses the absorbing nature of Clarissa's presence, which makes you wonder if she will ever see herself as Clarissa's equal or if she will succumb to class and racial hierarchies. She writes, '…although you [Walsh] hint at… an air of disappointment about Clarissa, it is impossible for me to imagine a woman more absorbing?'
Cahill's Daisy has the decisive power to leave her husband and son behind to board a ship for London with her daughter and Radhika, a servant girl from Bihar. She reflects on her experiences as an Anglo-Indian in India by chronicling her life story and through the course of a journey lasting months from Calcutta to London, she comes face-to-face with the plague, loses her child to death, which changes her romantic obsession into something much stronger, a determination to chart out her life irrespective of Peter Walsh. She engages with the suffragettes, befriends Lucrezia — the other peripheral character in Mrs Dalloway — and makes a living in Italy, which can be interpreted as tragic for the former wife of an officer in the Indian army or as empowering for an immigrant woman in an alien land.
Interestingly, Cahill leaves Daisy's servant girl behind. Radhika disappears, quite literally, from Daisy's life implying that not all stories can be accommodated when the writer chooses to focus on one character. However, this absence is observed and mourned by Daisy, who was held together by her support in the lowest times — a treatment that's better than Woolf's treatment of Daisy.
Throughout the novel, Cahill keeps fictional characters and real-life figures in conversation with each other. Daisy & Woolf is meta not only for its story-within-a-story structure but also for the many references to Woolf's diaries and letters to interpret her psychology at the time. Daisy is also travelling to London at a time when Woolf is writing Mrs Dalloway. Characters from Woolf's story and suffragette figures such as Sylvia Pankhurst are masterfully incorporated into Daisy's narrative. All of it creates a dialogue between the worlds of Mina, Virginia and Daisy while also exploring grief, death, motherhood, alienation, sexuality and mental illness.
The prose of both these novels is distinctive. But while Mrs Dalloway glides, Daisy & Woolf startles by intentionally hitting the brakes on multiple occasions. In the end, this novel, that breathes life into an incidental character, encourages readers to examine the colonial gaze of a celebrated 20th century high Modernist, while also realising that race, identity and migration are as fraught today as they ever were.
Akankshya Abismruta is an independent writer.