Paying Homage to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: Revision and Reversion in Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg

Abstract

This article examines Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg (2017), a novel which pays homage to Virginia Woolf’s canonical work of literary modernism, Mrs Dalloway (1925). Yet the Johannesburg of Melrose’s novel is devoid of the transforming cosmopolitanism that characterizes Woolf’s London and which allows for new social relations to be imagined across historically entrenched boundaries. While the implicit comparison between Woolf’s post-war London and post-apartheid Johannesburg finds the latter considerably wanting, Melrose’s novel also reminds us of the limits of Woolf’s fictional imagination, which are, perhaps, most overtly marked by her representation of the servant class. I argue that Johannesburg engages, at one level, in an act of extended literary redress by privileging the perspectives of domestic workers in Johannesburg who continue, after apartheid, to labour in homes and for families that are not their own. At the same time, however, the novel maintains its appeal to a ‘postimperial’ metropolitan gaze by adopting white characters unable to extract themselves from a range of reactive phobias about Johannesburg. The novel, I conclude, thus finds itself caught between the contradictory impulses of revision and reversion; between redressing the representational conventions which entrench historical inequalities and regressing into the tropes which perpetuate our difference and separation.