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Virginia Woolf

The 20^th century brought a new style into literature which was modernism, and Virginia Woolf was very influenced by that, she also pioneered the stream of consciousness narrative technique which was very typical for her. Woolf was also an experimenter with psychological and emotional motives of characters. She was a foremost feminist and a very significant figure during the beginning of the 20^th century, however, as Plan and Seller states in their book A History of Feminism Literary Criticism, some thought she was “overly genteel, far too ladylike to be taken seriously, part of effete Bloomsbury, and even those who praised her, like David
Daiches, agreed her art was ‘limited.’”
Nonetheless, Woolf is considered to be a feminist and feminist themes are dominant in her books, her focus on the topic even arose after the World War II. She is also an author of critical essays about feminism, for instance, the very influential A Room of One’s Own. Bhaskar A. Shukla suggests in her book called Virginia Woolf –
An Introduction that Woolf focused mainly on women and that “she developed innovative literary techniques in order to reveal women’s experience and she attempted to find an alternative to the male-dominated views of reality.” Woolf is also the author of a quote: “As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking,” which is from her novel Orlando, that applies also to the British society of early 20^th century, when women were still very oppressed not taken seriously and were not able to work in higher occupations. She wanted to point out sexism and criticize the patriarchy through her writing.
The beginning of the century was a breaking point for the feminist movement, the word feminism itself was more frequent in society then and women started the fight for suffragette and for the right to earn the living in general. Plain and Sellers also state that during this period “female writers were attacking patriarchal attitudes, cultural misogyny and the ingrained belittlement of women,” and it was not only Virginia Woolf who was concerned with this topic, but also Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Simone de Beauvoir.
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is one of Woolf’s best-known novels, which is very experimental in the style of writing. The novel tells a story about Clarissa Dalloway who is attempting to organize a party but the story focuses also on events from
Clarissa’s life, which is depicted in a form of a mosaic portrait; random visions from the past and present put together. As James Schiff states in Rewriting Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, “the novel is about what it feels like to be alive—to be a self-passing through the moments and hours of a day,” it also deals with a question of searching for self and with the ambiguity of sexual identity and desire. The period when the novel was published gone through a shift in public attitudes towards sexual orientation, hence it was more acceptable to criticize patriarchy and to be more sexually open than before. Nonetheless, the novel also focuses on the London’s society and people’s behaviour.

For Woolf herself as well as for Mrs. Dalloway the importance of independence is vital. The author also depicts Clarissa’s loneliness and agony, which can be understood as a result of her sexual repression and submission to the social norms. “It was not beauty; it was not mind. It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman or of woman together.” This refers to what Clarissa lacks, and that is her sexual lack of interest to men and her denial to realize her affection towards Sally.

Clarissa feels frustrated, she cannot forget the love for Peter nor the passionate kiss she shared with her friend Sally; “The most exquisite moment of her whole life. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down!” These moments with Sally evoked notion of female desire in her and she started questioning monogamy and heterosexuality. With the romantic friendship Clarissa-Sally Woolf reacts to the prejudicing society in which lesbian relationship was a taboo and she also tries to criticize the patriarchy. Nonetheless, Woolf also illustrates the importance of independence in the relationship with Clarissa’s friend Peter Walsh, with whom she has been in love with since she was young. She claims that if she had married him, he would have suffocated her and restricted her soul, and at the beginning of the story she gives reasons for rejecting him and marrying Richard; “For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him (where was he this morning, for instance? Some committee, she never asked what.) But with Peter everything had to be shared, everything gone into”. That is to say, Clarissa rejected Peter in the past and married Richard mainly because what she craved was freedom to do anything she wanted.
The motif of homosexuality is not only apparent in the relationship between Clarissa and Sally, but also between Miss Kilman and Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth. “Miss Kilman could not let her go! This youth that was so beautiful, this girl, whom she genuinely loved,” this quote depicts
Miss Kilman’s burst of emotions and homosexual desires for Elizabeth. As an unmarried working woman, Miss Kilman is seeking human connection, however, unsure of her homosexual feelings she is unable to express herself and is rather repressed. Nonetheless, Woolf pulls out of the depths of Miss Kilman’s subconscious focus on what would otherwise be a meaningle
physical gesture: “Her large hand opened and shut on the table,” this slight movement of Miss Kilman’s hand holds a significant meaning. Her repression manifests itself physically, perhaps in a different era she could have grabbed
Elizabeth’s hand – as the confines of societal convention. Elaine Fulton suggests in her article Mrs. Dalloway: Sexuality in post-war London that Woolf uses Miss Kilman’s hand “to indicate her homosexuality as the focus on Miss Kilman’s hands is depicted as one of her masculine traits.”
The focus on feminism and sexuality was major, however, Woolf also tried to concentrate on society, especially on the English upper middle class which is represented by the Dalloways and their friends. She is criticizing the superficial way of living which at the same time has a wider significance in the fact that many of the characters are people who are the leaders of their society. For example, the character of Hugh Whitebread who works at the Court and represents what is most detestable in the English middle class. He, as Soumia Bouzid claims in The Use of Stream of Consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, “has read nothing, thought nothing.” Even the life of Clarissa Dalloway is rather shallow and meaningless as Woolf depicts her in: “half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves, but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.” Mrs. Dalloway is not only the representative of her social environment, she is somewhat different from the others, although the fact of living among them has made her adopt the superficial view of life of a society hostess and what she admires is the mere surface of life in that society and described in this passage of the novel: “In the people’s eyes, in the swings, tramps and trudge; in the below and the uproar; the carriages, motorcars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich man, brass bands, barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life, London, this moment of June.”
The themes of feminism and homosexuality are strong throughout the whole novel, mostly because both of the themes were part of Woolf’s life as well and it affected both her life and her writing. Woolf portrayed her female characters in conflict with society. The gender roles in the first part of 20^th century demanded certain firmness, although Woolf pushed the boundaries when writing about marriage life, relationships, and love.

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