Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

146 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
for a full minute, drifting with the current. As director Stephen Daldry stated, “When you
see those shots in the fi lm, it is Nicole Kidman” (2). “When you see those shots in the fi lm,
it is Nicole Kidman” may seem like a laughably obvious statement for the director to make
(is this not the sine qua non of an actor performing a role?), but the comments of Daldry,
Hare, and Cunningham seem to be trying to describe what they see as a qualitatively
diff erent screen performance. Here, acting is distinguished from imitation, not merely a
copying of voice, posture, or action but instead a more authentic kind of transformation
through bodily performance, as demonstrated by the bodily discipline required to enact
this transformation. Of course, critical acclaim for cinematic performances is often based
on the perception of verisimilitude, the capacity to bring the character to life. What makes
this instance interesting is the combination of the insistently artifi cial (the latex nose) with
the emphasis on actual embodiment (teaching oneself to write with the other hand) in
these positive appraisals of Kidman so that the prosthetic and the “natural” body together
seem to create a kind of authenticity without contradiction.
At the same time, however, the supposedly enhanced authenticity of Kidman’s performance
co-exists with an insistence on the presence of the star. It requires the boundary
between star and character to be fi rmly demarcated. Far from “disappear[ing] so completely
on screen,” as one critic (Scott) enthused, both pro and anti-Kidman camps in fact
never lose sight of Kidman in her impersonation of Woolf. 2 When Hare contends that in
this role Kidman was “liberated from her own prettiness” and Cunningham asks rhetorically
“wouldn’t Virginia Woolf love being played by someone so beautiful?” (Blackwelder),
viewers are being asked to remember that Kidman is a beauty in order to appreciate her
performance. If we were to see only Woolf, we would no longer be appreciating the performance
of Woolf. And as both Hare and Cunningham imply, the key signifi er here is beauty,
with its always-already implied opposite, ugliness. Th e meanings of Kidman-as-Woolf,
then, rely on the cultural connotations of both Kidman and Woolf to create a complex
homonym in which the perceived clashes between movie-star beauty and female literary
genius operate to ensure Kidman-as-Woolf remains an object of appeal/fascination.
Th e positive reception of Kidman’s performance, moreover, is not unusual due to the
all too predictable admiration for a beautiful woman who is prepared to be grotesquely
transformed on screen (witness similar acclaim—and Oscar success—for Charlize Th eron
as Aileen Wuornos in Monster or Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry in
recent years). A signifi cant part of this acclaim comes from an actress’s willingness to be
ugly in public. Th e cultural obsession with beautiful women is perhaps only surpassed by
a fascination with beautiful women transformed into ugly women because there is something
unresolvable about the nature of female beauty at stake here: is it a given, a natural
quality, only embodied by rare, exceptional women (stars)? Or is such beauty inherently
inauthentic, a quality manufactured by stars, as a means of becoming exceptional?
Criticism of the perceived “ugliness” of Kidman-as-Woolf is not, however, simply due
to a preference for the glamorous Kidman rather than the serious actress but rather derives
from a critical objection to the distortion of the historical fi gure of Woolf that results. Th e
acclaimed cinematic transformations of Th eron, Swank, and Kidman, after all, were each
cases where actresses put aside their image of celebrity glamour in order to impersonate
women who were perceived as monstrous in some way, their physical ugliness signifying
some kind of failed femininity. Th is confl ation of ugliness with failed femininity is ap-