Women in Virginia Woolf through Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
22 mayo, 2013 by Bego
Argument:
Clarissa Dalloway is preparing a banquet. Everything has to go perfectly, appropriate topics, perfect dresses, great dinner, the most important guests … While it deals with an old love appears. Now they are fifties, after thirty years without seeing, Clarissa reconnects with Peter Walsh, a man who could not forget Clarissa after she abandon him by Richard. As Peter spends the day thinking about his own life, in what might have been if he had married Clarissa, and begins to reject it because he can not stand to see the lost time. Clarissa turns its eyes on what always was and never saw: A snob.
The women in the novel:
The woman in the work, unlike previous authors, not confined to the home environment and knowledge of society is not limited to information through books, reading and study, but that is already part of it, knowing actively, through their own experience and directly. They are women with access to the political and social life of the time. In this way, politics will and doesn’t feel this world as exclusive to men:
«They stayed for hours and hours chatting in her bedroom on the top floor of the house, talking about life, about how they were going to reform the world. They intended to found a society to abolish private property, and actually came to write.» (Wuthering Heights, Page 39)
The female characters, choose to work for pleasure, are no longer an obligation resulting from poverty and economic need. Aspiration is related to the development of personality and independence.
On prototype high-class woman, described in the novel, Clarissa Dalloway personified, has more social freedoms, political and cultural, more individual freedoms in general, allowing you to make a critical reflection of their life and their decisions. However, prevailing social conventions just about everything else. We can see symbolized in the party prepares for the work, on which the plot turns, and finally carried out, being as fundamental values aesthetics and social prestige.