Feminism In Mrs. Dalloway

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Mrs. Dalloway is a high modernist canonical novel, written in the high-mimetic mode, which subordinates the shocking experience of the World War I to subjective interests, putting at work Virginia Woolf’s newly found method of tunneling caves behind each character which ultimately connect in the present moment (Showalter page?). Mrs. Dalloway is an impressionistic novel which transforms streams of consciousness into consciences and is interested in the subjective responses to reality, providing the reader with an empathetic deixis and feminine empathy that give sense to casual encounters (Zirra, lecture).
As the title suggests, at the centre of the novel lies Clarissa Dalloway, with Septimus as her pale and suicidal double. Her individual and powerful consciousness which slips to other characters throughout the novel as if in a relay race, together with her throwing a party which assembles all the characters, suggests the structure of the novel which can be said to be a “dialectic of communion and individuation” (Fleishman, 81). Clarissa herself has both a public and a private self and through her stream of consciousness we get to know her domestic defeats, the magnitude she applies to them as well as the feminine and feminist sensibility in the context of a …show more content…

She continually oscillates between immediate perceptions, impressions of the outer world, the love of life she feels in London, though she is depressed, and flashbacks which draw her back in the past to Bourton and make her think what life could have been like, if she had made other decisions. The very title of the text, Mrs. Dalloway, suggests the protagonist’s identity: a wife. Along with renouncing at her name, Clarissa also sacrifices her personal

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