Abstract
Descending to war-time Earth, Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince encounters a cryptic talking fox: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” This paper imagines Art finding truth in what society shamefully dismisses. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) enacts post WWI London’s chaos as the titular character creates a party celebrating traditional authorities that the dada-esque letters strewn by a plane buzzing over Regent’s Park threaten to drain of meaning. As Clarissa parades her Prime Minister through her gala, no one sees the man ridiculously “all rigged up in gold lace” to hide his ordinariness. Cresting her era’s disruptions in “a silver-green mermaid’s dress,” Clarissa cavorts as a freak, newly off her pandemic bed. Not until she awakens to WWI soldier Septimus’ shell-shocked, pandemic driven suicide as his choice to escape the arrogance of doctors’ “proportion and conversion” does Mrs. Dalloway defy the P.M.’s sleeping hollowness. Almost a century after Woolf’s novel, Ian McEwan’s Saturday imagines one day in London on the eve of the Iraq War. A disquieted but resolute Tony Blair’s face cloned Warhol-style on multiple television screens in a store front interrupts neurosurgeon Henry Perowne in midst of creating a family party. Perowne, blinded by privilege like Clarissa, chooses life when his party is crashed by a societal misfit suffering a genetic brain disorder. Yesterday’s wars invisibilities have transformed into monsters we incarcerate in cages, institutions, and ill-paid labor. How does Art both ask “whose perception” in representing our anxieties and expand boundaries of narrative essence via the marginalized?
Presenters
Rebecca Warburton BoylanLecturer, Humanities and Human Rights Committees, English, Georgetown University and Howard University, District of Columbia, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
Freak, Pandemic, Privilege, Marginalized, Incarcerated, Mermaid, Performative
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