Abstract
This chapter applies Eve Sedgwick’s concept of the “queer moment” to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to analyze a kiss between the title character and her childhood friend, Sally Seton. More than thirty years after it has occurred, Clarissa Dalloway still remembers this kiss as “the most exquisite moment of her whole life.” Using the work of queer theorists, this chapter argues that the kiss disrupts normative narratives of development, like the bildungsroman. The chapter moves from Mrs. Dalloway to Michael Cunningham’s reenvisioning of this kiss in The Hours. Cunningham’s text is filled with queer kisses, all of which present strange and complicated temporalities. Together these two texts offer a way to consider the kiss as a “queer moment” with the possibility to disrupt narrative continuity.
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Haffey, K. (2019). Exquisite Moments and the Temporality of the Kiss in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours. In: Literary Modernism, Queer Temporality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17301-2_2
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