Refusing Butler's Binary: Bisexuality and Performative Melancholia in Mrs. Dalloway

摘要

In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler argued a woman “accomplishes” normative femininity by rejecting same-sex pleasure. Butler further argues that normative femininity is maintained by emulating, without fully embodying, cultural ideals of femininity. Yet two questions remain: Given the theoretical framework that Butler articulated, what happens to the bisexual subject who forecloses neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality? If masculinity and femininity are, as Butler suggested, not only accomplishments, but also cultural ideals, what happens to the subject who fails to properly emulate these cultural ideals? Following Clare Hemming's suggestion that bisexual readings can be an “enlightening analytical tool or starting point for knowledge” within the broader history of sexuality, this article argues that in Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf explores precisely this tension between desire and socially sanctioned femininity through her depiction of three female characters: Sally Seton, Clarissa Dalloway, and Clarissa's rival Doris Kilman. Whereas Sally effectively forecloses her same-sex desire, fully “accomplishing” heterosexuality and consolidating normative femininity, Clarissa perceives her bisexuality as a “failure” to fully foreclose homosexual desire and feels that she has lost normative femininity. Clarissa's loss is further exacerbated by her daughter's friendship with Doris. Rather than read this loss of femininity as mere “gender anxiety” (as Butler might), however, this article returns to the idea of femininity as cultural ideal and argues that Clarissa and Doris exhibit performative melancholia, a melancholia where the subject experiences normative gender performativity as a lost ideal. It is this perceived loss of femininity that ultimately motivates much of Clarissa's behavior, including her rivalry with Doris.