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.
It is interesting that Woolf constructs such an un-worldly, sheltered protagonist to focus on--when she herself was a highly educated, cultured woman who lived a very public life, writing, lecturing, publishing, and often on the topic of feminism and women's creativity. Clarissa is rather unlike Woolf in this way. And the setting of the 1920s isn't an excuse, either--this is the period of the "New Woman," a time of unprecedented social and political freedom (hard-won) for women. There are references to Sally and her ideas about women's suffrage back in the Bourton days (which upsets Hugh, of course), and Clarissa seems to have flirted briefly with such unconventional views. But Woolf makes her a thoroughly domestic person--unlike, for instance, Lady Bruton, who is all into politics and likes to have political men over for lunch to help her write letters to the Times. And Kilman is a feminist, of a sort--part of her desire to "save" Elizabeth has to do with wanting her to have broader horizons than her mother's.
ReplyDeleteBut you're right, I think, that Woolf picks such an unlikely feminist heroine in order to explore the idea that even a woman living under such apparently circumscribed conditions will have a deep and rich and complicated inner life, whether she knows what the equator is or not. Woolf challenges us to take these parties seriously as a kind of creative (and, yes, "sacred") act that brings people together and makes life happen. There's more to the "perfect hostess" than meets the eye.