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Feminism In Mrs Dalloway By Viriginia Woolf

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MRS. DALLOWAY BY VIRGINIA WOOLF

This novel written by Woolf in 1925 portrays a lot of issues, including feminism. Woolf herself was known as one of the early feminist writer. Many scholars and literary critiques still debating on the feminism issue in the story. The author herself went through traumatic experiences during her childhood, such as the loss of her mother and being sexually abused by her stepbrothers. That was why she got inspired to write about women and their strengths in order to survive in modern society. Woolf dedicated her major novels to analyze the patriarchal English society. Different types of women are portrayed in various contexts. She opened women’s eyes on their inferior status and provided them with a female tradition …show more content…

Dalloway was published in 1925. The writer tends to write about a lot of themes and feminism is one of the most underlying topics in it which details the roles of women at the time period and their dim significance. The story is about a day in which Clarissa Dalloway held a party and the novel tells about the preparation and the outcome of it. During this, she reflects on her life and feels even though most of them are ordinarily plain and trivial, Woolf wanted to show through this point that women lifestyle at that time are mostly trivial because of the constraints. A very subtle but feminist tone can be felt right from the beginning. Clarissa goes out to buy the flowers for her party and she suddenly comes to think about Peter Walsh, whom she nearly married. Considering her memories of dialogue between herself and Peter, we can draw the conclusion that although he loved her and she is fond of him, she did not shared mutual feelings with him which can be explained with the fact that Peter had a lot of more important matters to deal with and her dream to marry a wealthy man. Clarissa continues to think about the possibility to have been married to Peter throughout the day, because she has the feeling that her life would have been different if she was not married to Richard. Still, the most intensely emotional and romantic memories of her was with Sally Saton, but it was not an accepted thing to have an affectionate feeling with the same sex, therefore that is why it was …show more content…

Her identity is inflected by ideologies of gender and other social constructs. For this reason, the fact that the process of identity creation is not a one-time event, but new social arrangements provide the means to shape new identities. Identity is a continuous creative practice, and is shaped not through language alone, but through a set of other factors like gender, ideology and body. For instance, the interactions between language and gender on the one hand, and feminist theory on the other, are of tremendous significance in this study. Earlier varieties of feminism reduced the question of identity to an ontological first principle by taking an essential difference between women and men as axiomatic. But more recent scholarship, like that of Judith Butler, views identity as a construct. And when it comes to the social construction of identity, language is of first significance. All women are oppressed by the overriding force of language; therefore, language is responsible for male dominance in society. Clarissa’s identity needs to be constructed socially through language, but this very language is patriarchal. Although Clarissa attempts to resist it, she is unable to fit into its predetermined structures. Butler highlights the fact that language mediates between the individual and wider cultural hegemony. She suggests that selfhood is manufactured through

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