“People Must Marry”: Queer Temporality in Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield

Throughout the first section of To the Lighthouse (1927), Mrs. Ramsay is preoccupied with playing the role of matchmaker for the various guests at her house. Over the course of the day, the idea that “people must marry” becomes almost a mantra for her, repeated in several different instances. Lily Briscoe, for example, remembers Mrs. Ramsay “insist[ing] that she must, Minta must, they all must marry” (49). And when Mrs. Ramsay sees Lily walking alongside William Bankes, she is quick to see a possible match: “Ah, but was that not Lily Briscoe strolling along with William Bankes? She focused her short-sighted eyes upon the backs of a retreating couple. Yes, indeed it was. Did that not mean that they would marry? Yes, it must! What an admirable idea! They must marry!” (71). What is notable about Mrs. Ramsay’s statements is not so much her desire to forge romantic unions between her friends and acquaintances but rather her construction of marriage as a mandate, as something all people “must” do.

Indeed, in the first section of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay acts as a force that pushes forward this marriage agenda. Even Paul Rayley, after he has proposed to his future wife Minta, thinks: “He would go straight to Mrs. Ramsay, because he felt somehow that she was the person who had made him do it” (78). In her insistence that “people must marry” (and, later, that “people must have children”), Mrs. Ramsay seeks to place the other characters in the novel on their proper narrative track. She seems to conceive of life as a series of stages that individuals move through toward a predetermined endpoint. Happiness is predicated on moving through these stages properly and arriving at the finish line. She even tells Lily “there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman…an unmarried woman had missed the best of life” (49).

Mrs. Ramsey, of course, is not as simple as I portray her here. While she literally does urge multiple characters to marry, she is not merely an uncritical purveyor of this idea. She recognizes that she “was driven on, too quickly she knew, almost as if it were an escape for her too, to say that people must marry; people must have children” (60). And later in the text: “Slowly it came into [Mrs. Ramsay’s] head, why is it then that one wants people to marry? What was the value, the meaning of things?” (122). Despite the fact that Mrs. Ramsay is critical of her own desires to usher those around her into marriage, she nevertheless serves as the figure who represents this mandate quite explicitly to Lily Briscoe. In the final section of To the Lighthouse, after Mrs. Ramsay has died and Lily attempts to remember her, one of the images that enters her mind is Mrs. Ramsay at the end of a hall exclaiming this mandate: “Mockingly she seemed to see her there at the end of the corridor of years saying, of all incongruous things, “Marry, marry!” (174).

Mrs. Ramsay’s command to marry is not just the enforcement of a particular life path, but it is also an attempt to control the way that time progresses. However, this is a form of normative temporality that the novel ultimately rejects. Drawing from the work of Judith Halberstam, this paper will explore the queer temporalities at work in the fiction of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. My analysis is informed by the writings of queer theorists who, over the past fifteen years, have directed significant critical attention to issues of time. Specifically, their work has shown the various ways in which sexuality and temporality are enmeshed, from the life schedules deemed healthy for child-rearing to the bildungsroman structure that charts the passing of time as a progression from childhood through adolescence to mature heterosexual adulthood. Queer temporality stands in clear opposition to these normative time frames.

Because Virginia Woolf’s work often eschews these types of normative time frames, her fiction offers an ideal space to consider the workings of queer temporality. Likewise, in the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, normative temporalities are constructed in order to be questioned, interrupted, or dismantled. This paper will thus sketch out a starting place for analyzing the specific workings of queer narrative temporality in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Katherine Mansfield’s “At the Bay.” As I’ve referenced, my title is drawn from Mrs. Ramsay’s insistence in To the Lighthouse that “people must marry; people must have children” (60). In both Woolf’s novel and Mansfield’s story, the seeming inevitability of marriage and reproduction functions as a starting point through which each author develops her own unique configuration of queer time.

When I speak of queer time, I am relying on a definition culled from the work of Judith Halberstam. In the spring of 2007, GLQ released a special issue dedicated to “Queer Temporalities” that included a roundtable discussion among some of its most prominent scholars. In the midst of the back and forth between these scholars, Judith Halberstam put forth a definition of queer time that mirrored claims she had made a few years earlier in her book In a Queer Time and Place. She writes: “Queer time for me is the dark nightclub, the perverse turn away from the narrative coherence of adolescence—early adulthood—marriage—reproduction—child rearing—retirement—death” (182). Halberstam’s definition locates us in a bar, a queer space seemingly outside the institutions of marriage and the family. She sees the bar as embodying a particular temporality, a space where time flows independently of those conventional milestones that make sense of a life. Halberstam’s definition presents queer time as an alternate timeframe for individuals, as the space occupied by those who eschew the idea that one must grow into a particular kind of mature adult.

But Halberstam’s imagining of queer time as “the perverse turn away” from particular types of “narrative coherence” also takes it beyond the realm of life stories and into the realm of narrative structures. If queer time can be defined as a turning away from narrative coherence, then we must begin to bring into the conversation those structures upon which narrative coherence relies. Halberstam points us to a few. For example, the movement through “adolescence—early adulthood—marriage—reproduction—child rearing—retirement—death,” a bildungsroman-like narrative, has often defined just what counts as a life, both within literature and outside of it. Beyond this, however, we might think of a number of other structures that make narratives coherent: the chronological movement of time, the sequencing of events, and the progression through conventional narrative stages (exposition, rising action, falling action, climax, resolution) in which meaning comes into focus in a conclusion.

If part of what defines queer temporality is a turning away from narrative coherence, then modernism in general, known for its tendency to think against the grain of dominant narrative conventions, becomes a fertile ground for its examination. Indeed, Woolf herself discusses this aspect of modernism in her essays. In “Modern Fiction,” for example, she imagines modernist literature as literature that turns away from much of what has defined fiction up to that point. She describes how the author has been subservient to “some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest” and speaks of the need for narrative to lay stress differently (149). “The Moderns,” as Woolf calls them, place their emphasis “upon something hitherto ignored” and as such “a different outline of form becomes necessary” (152). The result of this shift in emphasis, according to Woolf, is often narrative incoherence. “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall,” she says, “let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance” (150). Modernist literature is in some ways a literature of incoherence, a literature that continually breaks the rules that make narrative cohere. For Woolf, in “Modern Fiction,” there is a significant connection between coherence and convention. Texts become incoherent when they break convention, when they rearrange or ignore the patterns of accepted narrative.

It is notable, perhaps, that much of Woolf’s fiction turns away from exactly the type of narrative coherence that Halberstam specifically mentions. Though Woolf sometimes sets up a bildungsroman-like structure or shows characters organizing their own experiences through such structures, these conventions often serve as the frameworks from which her central characters turn away. Let’s return to my earlier reading of To The Lighthouse but consider the marriage mandate from Lily’s perspective. Mrs. Ramsey’s “mania” for marriage, as Lily calls it, is pitted against the “enormous exultation” that Lily feels when she realizes she “need never marry anybody” (175–76). In laying Mrs. Ramsay’s view of a proper life trajectory next to Lily’s, we can see that marriage holds a central place for both women. They both see it as a mandate, a near inevitability (Lily, for example, calls marriage a “universal law”). But their views of the institution differ. For Mrs. Ramsay, to not marry is to fail, to miss out on “the best of life” (49). But for Lily, to not marry is to escape, to be “saved” (102), to find she had achieved “exemption from the universal law” (50). Mrs. Ramsay’s view here permits only one configuration of time, a normative one. One succeeds or fails within a temporality that permits only one outcome. For Lily, however, who has moved from Mrs. Ramsay’s “must” to her own rejection of that mandate (she “need not” marry), new spatial and temporal relations now seem possible.

This new view is seen quite clearly toward the end of the novel when Lily demonstrates the inextricable connection between social conventions and aesthetic ones. In the same moment that she realizes she “need never marry,” she also decides that she will move the tree to the middle of her painting and recalls her friend William Bankes’s shock at her aesthetic choices, including “her neglect of the significance of mother and son” (176). Lily’s art, like Woolf’s literature and like Woolf’s description of “modern fiction,” deviates from social and aesthetic conventions, showing readers the expected convention and then defiantly turning away from it, sometimes in shocking ways.

Elsewhere in the novel, Woolf shows us other characters who organize their experience through the normative temporalities that Halberstam describes. As Paul Rayley walks back to the Ramsays after proposing to his future wife, the scene is described thus:

The lights coming out suddenly one by one seemed like things that were going to happen to him—his marriage, his children, his house; and again he thought, as they came out on to the high road, which was shaded with high bushes, how they would retreat into solitude together, and walk on and on, he always leading her, and she pressing close to his side (as she did now). (78)

Paul Rayley imagines his life through those paradigmatic markers that Halberstam mentions: “marriage—reproduction—child rearing” and so on. This is the life that Mrs. Ramsey wants for him, the life that she wants for Lily. But this is also the temporality that Woolf is consistently interrupting, not only through characters like Lily who reject such paths as the only viable ones, but through her very narrative method, a method that focuses almost exclusively on moments that have little effect on plot, a method in which progressive movement through life stages takes a backseat to a past that interpenetrates the present.

While Woolf’s narrative project probably comes the closest to embodying Halberstam’s definition of “queer time,” she is far from the only modernist writer whose work operates along such lines. In Katherine Mansfield we find the same understanding of marriage and reproduction as something that “must” be done, as a mandate issued by some higher authority. In Mansfield’s “At the Bay,” a short story published in 1922, five years before To The Lighthouse, Mansfield depicts characters struggling against these normative lives that are laid out for them. One character, in particular, who seems to embody this struggle is Linda, a wife and young mother of four. In a private moment, Linda thinks: “Yes, that was her real grudge against life.…It was all very well to say it was the common lot of women to bear children. It wasn’t true. She, for one, could prove that wrong. She was broken, made weak, her courage was gone, through child-bearing” (19). To talk about child-bearing as “the common lot of women” is to imagine it as compulsory and inevitable. And yet, though Linda has already participated in this female rite of passage, she attempts to rail against its universality. When Linda considers her “real grudge against life,” she is also thinking not only of the obligation to bear children, but also of her duties in marriage. When contemplating her responsibilities to her husband, she thinks: “Her whole time was spent in rescuing him, and restoring him, and calming him down, and listening to his story. And what was left of her time was spent in the dread of having children” (19).

What is noteworthy in this passage is not only the objections Linda registers to marriage and reproduction but also that she constructs these objections in the language of temporality. She talks about being a wife and a mother in the language of time spent: “Her whole time was spent” (19). Even her claim that “what was left of her time was spent in the dread of having children” imagines child bearing in a temporal frame. Indeed, “dread” is about a relation to the future. We dread those things in the future that we don’t want to happen but that we fear will. For Linda, the future is inextricably connected to the seemingly inescapable, and desperately feared, act of childbirth.

However, Linda contrasts this temporality with an alternate, desired temporality. She thinks:

If only one had time to look at these flowers long enough, time to get over the sense of novelty and strangeness, time to know them! But as soon as one paused to part the petals, to discover the under-side of the leaf, along came Life and one was swept away. And lying in her cane chair, Linda felt so light; she felt like a leaf. Along came Life like a wind and she was seized and shaken; she had to go. Oh dear, would it always be so? Was there no escape? (18)

There are two temporalities at play in this passage. The first is the temporality of marriage and reproduction, which is referred to here as “Life.” In Linda’s construction, “Life” is an active force that sweeps her away, that seizes and shakes her and gives her no choice: “[S] he had to go.” “Life” is a force that stops her from lingering in the moment and pushes her forward through the predetermined sequence laid out for her. “Life” here means a particular type of life, a normative life, the one in which, as she has said, all her time is spent either in the act of rescuing her husband or in “the dread of having children.” Indeed, in various contexts, the word “life” often serves as euphemism for reproductive sexuality. The other temporality at play here is harder to name. It seems to be a protracted moment, a lingering pause, where one could perhaps “part the petals” or “discover the underside of the leaf.” This temporality that points to the undiscovered, the unknown, and to that which is not predetermined or inevitable.

But this passage I’ve been considering ends with a question. Linda asks, “Was there no escape?” Like Lily in To the Lighthouse who sought to “urge her own exemption from the universal law,” Linda thinks of the temporality of marriage and reproduction as something that needs to be escaped, but she questions if such an escape is even possible. At this point in the short story, however, the question opens onto what we might call, following Eve Sedgwick, a queer moment, a moment from the past that emerges to interrupt the present in a strange way. After questioning whether there was “no escape,” the narrative places the reader into a scene from Linda’s past in which “she sat on the veranda of their Tasmanian home, leaning against her father’s knee” (18). And he promises her:

‘As soon as you and I are old enough, Linny, we’ll cut off somewhere, we’ll escape. Two boys together. I have a fancy I’d like to sail up a river in China.’ Linda saw that river, very wide, covered in little rafts and boats. She saw the yellow hats of the boatman and she heard their high, thin voices as they called. (18)

Linda’s father dreams of escaping with her to sail up a river in China, but in order to do so, he imagines her as a boy. It is almost as if such a fantasy would be impossible if she remained a girl. Beyond this, her father’s construction of time in his statement is also rather odd. He pictures a future in which he and Linda will both be “old enough” to escape, thus stating that in this moment he imagines himself and Linda as two young boys, brothers perhaps, dreaming of a capacious future in which many things are possible. For example, Linda’s father fantasizes of “sailing up” the river, moving against, not with, a current. And the river is described as “very wide,” suggesting that movement along the river could be done in a variety of directions.

But the dream of this particular future is very quickly interrupted in Linda’s memory:

But just then a very broad young man with bright ginger hair walked slowly past their house, and slowly, solemnly even, uncovered. Linda’s father pulled her ear teasingly, in the way he had.

“Linny’s beau,’ he whispered.

“Oh, papa, fancy being married to Stanley Burnell.”

Well, she was married to him. (18)

This moment between Linda and her father ends abruptly when Stanley Burnell, Linda’s future husband, walks by. With Stanley’s interruption into their private musings, the two snap back into their inevitable futures. Linda can no longer be imagined as the boy with whom her father will adventure but is instead a girl who will grow into a woman and is already a future wife. Stanley’s “very broad” body takes up the space occupied a few moments before by “the very wide river” and brings a very different future into focus.

Linda’s dream of escape is foreclosed the moment her future husband arrives on the scene. There is a yearning toward a different temporality, but the gateway to such an escape is located in the past, cut off from Linda’s present. In this sense, Mansfield’s configuration of queer time seems perhaps more pessimistic than Woolf’s, which depicts Lily Briscoe rearranging her canvas and her future from what conventions would dictate. And yet, what we see in both authors is an attempt to think against the grain of temporalities that seek to reproduce the future over and over in predictable ways. Both texts imagine a world in which marriage and reproduction is not an inevitable end point, where the future is not always decided in advance. And it is perhaps in this way that we can make out, as Woolf would say of Mansfield’s influence on her, “the queerest sense of echo” between the two authors (D2: 61).