Gender Roles in Mrs. Dalloway

As I read Mrs. Dalloway, I remember being irritated with Clarissa at various instances where she lay around the house, talking of parties, criticizing Miss Kilman, not seeming to care that there was a difference between Albanians and Armenians, and not bothering to educate herself in the slightest. I was a little upset that Woolf would choose to portray her main female character in such a useless way. To make things worse, the only working-class, educated woman depicted in the novel is Miss Kilman, who is satirized and shown to be somewhat hypocritical and annoying. I was disappointed in the unambitious women of the book, however I was not surprised considering Woolf was writing in the 1920s. As the book goes on though, it becomes clear that Woolf is offering a very legitimate critique of the constraints placed on women of this era.

A main theme in Mrs. Dalloway is that you can’t pretend to fully understand anyone and there’s much more to a person below the surface. While many people see Clarissa as “the perfect hostess:” kind of fake and restrained and meaningless, she actually struggles with very real problems and has incredibly complex thoughts and emotions. To her, Clarissa’s parties aren’t just an excuse for rich people to dress up, enjoy fancy food, and act fake together. They’re a way to bring people together and celebrate relationships and culture and life. I’m still not super into the whole housewife “hostess” image, but by depicting her in this manner I think Woolf is making the point that just because a woman such as Clarissa is uneducated and economically dependent on her husband does not mean she is of lower value than him. Even though her type of work may be different from Richard’s, Clarissa is still doing important work that has meaning to her and makes her a more independent character.

Another clue that Virginia Woolf is criticizing gender stereotypes in Mrs. Dalloway is through Septimus and her portrayal of hyper-masculinity promoted during the world wars and the dangerous effects that can have. Septimus’s time in the war resulted in his inability to feel upon returning home, to the extent that he was unable to grieve for the death of his closest friend, a fact that he is almost proud of. Not displaying emotion makes him more masculine, but because he becomes concerned about his lack of feeling, he is seen as weak and cowardly by the doctors who are used to previous generations of warfare that didn’t involve nearly as many mentally scarred veterans. There is simply a societal expectation that men will be impossibly tough and unphased by battle and death, and this is what Woolf critiques by showing Septimus’s struggle for understanding and peace, that ends up resulting in his death.

While I was originally unimpressed with the female characters in Mrs. Dalloway and the depiction of working women, I think Woolf does a good job of establishing that a person’s worth is not defined by the money they make or the facts they know, but by the relationships they have with other people. This combined with Septimus’s story and the reflection on masculine ideals and the danger they can create, made me appreciate Woolf’s writing in regards to gender in Mrs. Dalloway.

Is it over yet?

The reaction to The Mezzanine  from our class has been quite positive. For being such a strange format of storytelling, Baker manages to make Howie funny, relatable, unique, and somewhat charming.

      While The Mezzanine was a thought-provoking experience in appreciating the small wonders of an industrial consumer society, the reason it is able to be so humorous and intriguing is because it is different and new to us as a writing style. The idea that someone could write a book based merely on objects they encountered, instead of events or social interactions, is appealing because we've never read it before, we want to see if it's possible to enjoy such a thing. I laughed out loud the first time reading about Howie's concern for straw construction, because it's not something I've ever thought about. It's funny that someone should care so much about straws. It's funny to realize that I too greatly appreciate straws and am always excited when an occasion arises that justifies me using one. Encountering such a rant in The Mezzanine is both familiar and quite new, because while similar thoughts may exist in my mind, the idea that someone would write those thoughts down is unexpected. However once you get over the discovery of shared interest and appreciation for common place things, the newness of the format begins to lose its excitement. It's like the old brands of bubble gum that start out stronger and tastier than the new ones, but lose their flavor in a matter of minutes. Once I got into the rhythm of how Howie thinks (or writes- as we established this is not a stream of consciousness  narrative), I began to dread the appearance of a footnote that marked the beginning of yet another tangent on things I didn't particularly care about. While Baker does an excellent job of revealing what's special about painfully ordinary objects, I did not appreciate hearing what was extraordinary about every single object. After hearing about straws, staplers, escalator railings, urinals, clean backgrounds, vending machines, shoelaces, milk cartons, and countless other items, the uniqueness of examining something in such close detail became rather tiring and I was rather unenthusiastic.

      I don't mean to say I didn't enjoy The Mezzanine. I did, it's just not the sort of thing I'd like to read again. It's the sort of book I wish had been about half as long as it was. While intriguing and full of delightful and witty surprise tangents, I missed the old-fashioned idea of a plot, and I especially missed real-time dialogue and the ability to be emotionally in tune with a character. To me this book was more like a writing experiment to see if such a strange genre of book could actually be readable (and I would say yes, it is a successful book), rather than art (although his way of over-explaining things and rejoicing in the normality of life is certainly masterfully pieced together). But we all know art is a matter of taste. So if The Mezzanine was in an art museum, I'd say it's sitting in the gallery along with the weirdly-shaped silverware and twisted tables labeled as "contemporary art;" a section I briefly walk through, laugh at the strangeness of, and leave feeling both humored that forks are behind the same glass as impressionist paintings, and a little unsatisfied that I didn't visit the Ancient Art of the Americas exhibit instead.