A wealthy housewife longs to go wild, in a brilliant riff on Virginia Woolf

By Deborah Pike, University of Notre Dame Australia

A storm is brewing, both literal and metaphoric, in “the suburbs of the east”. In a burst of poetic and darkly humorous prose, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead unleashes the turbulent interior life of its protagonist, Winona Dalloway, onto the page.

Darling’s Mrs Dalloway appears 100 years later than Virginia Woolf’s original, which takes place in June 1923. At 35, she’s a good 16 years younger than Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, and she lives in Sydney (seemingly in Queens Park, Rose Bay or Vaucluse). She is a writer of “Romantic Fiction”, mother of two boys and married to a wealthy professional.

Like Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, her stream-of-consciousness narration immerses us in the present and past and back again, over the course of one day.

There is a dinner party that evening and of course, flowers to be bought. The importance is not so much the events of the day, but the texture of Winona’s experience and the rendering of her exquisite, excruciating, at times jolting and jubilant self.

Glamorous suburban ennui

The day begins. Breathless, Winona awakes from a dream of being underwater and gazes at the red sky – some sort of warning. She tries to make the most of the “stolen hours” before the “Small Ones” awake. She writes, pleased, that her wordsmithing superpower can “resettle the upturned order of the world”.

But there will be no settling, no domesticating of this woman. She sees herself as a “Zebra, walking down New South Head Road during rush hour”. At odds with her lot as an urban housewife, she lists the ways she has failed at domestication: a finicky eater, the need for independence, a tendency to panic. Lists become another way she orders her own upturned world.

Winona muses upon Nora, the heroine of her latest novel – clearly a reference to Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. In Ibsen’s play, Nora’s husband Torvald patronises and oppresses her, however unwittingly; Nora rallies against him, bored and unfulfilled, yearning for freedom and opportunity.

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