Woolf’s Feminist Views in Evidence in Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf has been greatly
successful in portraying different kinds of female experiences in Mrs. Dalloway. Women in her novel are clearly distinguished from each other. Thus
Sally Seton, Mrs. Dalloway, Doris Kilman and Elizabeth are all sharply
different from one another but all have the essential womanliness.
In the novel the social circle of
Clarissa Dalloway has been portrayed as a power system. Clarissa is rich and
well-connected with society, being married to Member of Parliament living in
the heart of Westminster and inviting the Prime Minister to her party. She is
in one sense part of this power system; in another sense she is reduced by this
system to a position of unimportant. She is not included in the private
gatherings of those who exercise power. Lady Bruton does not invite her to lunch
and sees her as having held back her husband Richard Dalloway’s career and
prevented him from being promoted to the cabinet. Clarissa’s own identity is
submerged in that of her husband.
Clarissa believes strongly in the
privacy of the human soul. This belief leads her to distrust all those
solutions to the problem of loneliness or unhappiness which in anyway endanger
that privacy. Her profound concern for the privacy of the soul is a complicated
feature of her character. This concern is at once her genius, and, to a certain
extent, the cause of her failure philosophically, recognition of the uniqueness
of each human soul represented for Virginia Woolf, the highest good.
Through the portrayal of Lucrezia
Virginia Woolf gets an opportunity to describe a foreign woman’s reactions to
the city of London. She was optimistic before coming to London but now she
finds herself lonely and miserable because her husband had refused to give her
a child and also her husband has lost his sanity. Lady Bruton, the main target
of Woolf’s satire is depicted, as an egotistical, self-centred, conceited and
complacent society lady who feels proud of her ancient descent, her country,
social status and style of her living. Doris Kilman, a social caricature and a
satire portrait of a religious type, is one of those who use love and religion
to acquire power. Sally Seton is an unconventional unorthodox kind of person
who even as a young girl had shown her defiance of the established code of
conduct. Lady Bradshaw is also a target of satire. She is described as a woman
who keeps herself busy with attending dinner parties, occasionally opening a
bazaar, showing an interest in child welfare and pursuing her hobby of
photography.
To sum up, Virginia Woolf was a
woman and in her novels she gives us the woman’s point of view. Her picture of
life does not include sordidness and vice, brutality and criminality.
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