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Mrs. Dalloway and the Social System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Alex Zwerdling
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Abstract

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wanted, as she says, “to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.” Her critical attention is focused not on individuals but on the values of a particular class at a particular historical moment. Her novel examines the governing class’s control over English society in the period immediately following the First World War, showing how coercive the ideal of stoical fortitude nurtured during the War had become by the time it was over. The dominant faith in the value of self-control creates an atmosphere of emotional austerity that in one way or another affects the behavior of all the characters in the novel. It inhibits the natural expression of feeling in those who live by the governing-class code and turns the more rebellious members of the society into unstable emotional exhibitionists.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 92 , Issue 1 , January 1977 , pp. 69 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977

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References

Notes

1 Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1972), p. 57.

2 Among the many studies of the novel, only two seem to me to deal seriously with Woolf 's social criticism: Ralph Samuelson, “The Theme of Mrs. Dalloway,” Chicago Review, 11 (1958), 57–76; and A. D. Moody, “The Unmasking of Clarissa Dalloway,” Review of English Literature, 3 (1962), 67–79. See also Moody's Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963). pp. 19–28.

3 ?. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1942), p. 8; Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her Works, trans. Jean Stewart (London : Hogarth, 1965), pp. 71–72.

4 Woolf, A Writer's Diary, p. 188; Woolf, “The Novels of George Meredith,” The Common Reader: Second Series (London: Hogarth, 1932), p. 234.

5 Night and Day (London: Hogarth, 1930), p. 279; Mrs. Dalloway, Uniform Ed. (London: Hogarth, 1968), p. 120.

6 Jacob's Room (London: Hogarth, 1929), p. 173.

7 See also her story “The Man Who Loved His Kind,” Mrs Dalloway s Party: A Short Story Sequence, ed. Stella McNichol (London: Hogarth, 1973), pp. 29–36.

8 “The Pastons and Chaucer,” The Common Reader (London: Hogarth, 1925), p. 31.

9 Howards End (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), p. 172, Ch. xix.

10 “The Intellectual Aristocracy,” in Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G. M. Trevelyan, ed. J. H. Plumb (London: Longmans, Green, 1955), p. 244.

11 Bernard Blackstone, Virginia Woolf: A Commentary (London: Hogarth, 1949), p. 98.

12 A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (London: Hogarth, 1973), p. 48.

13 Quoted in Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (London: Hogarth, 1972), n, 258; see also pp. 30–31 of the same volume for Bell's account of Bloomsbury reaction to the War.

14 The Years (London: Hogarth, 1972), p. 320.

15 “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street,” Mrs Dalloway's Party, p. 28.

16 Compare the assessment of the interwar governments in Charles Loch Mowat's Britain between the Wars 1918–1940 (London: Methuen, 1962): “adequate discharge of routine duties, complacency, the failure of imagination and will” (p. 144).

17 Jean O. Love, e.g., writes that the party is an “indiscriminate mingling and, finally, fusion into a single whole of persons from different social strata” in her Worlds in Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970), p. 158.

18 The Common Reader: Second Series, pp. 214–17. For other treatments of this idea in her work, see “Street Haunting” and “Three Pictures,” in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London: Hogarth, 1942), pp. 19–29, 14–17; “Lady Dorothy Nevill,” in The Common Reader, pp. 24854; and the account of the excursion to Whitechapel in Flush: A Biography (London: Hogarth, 1968), pp. 89–92.

19 See A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 194–95.

20 Between the Acts (London: Hogarth, 1969), p. 190.

21 MS Notebook dated Nov. 9, 1922-Aug. 2, 1923, p. 12, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

22 MS Notebook dated Nov. 9. 1922-Aug. 2. 1923, p. 4.

23 See, e.g., J. K. Johnstone, The Bloomsbury Group: A Study of ?. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and Their Circle (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1954), pp. 340–41.

24 “Virginia Woolf ‘s All Souls’ Day: The Omniscient Narrator in Mrs. Dalloway,” in The Shaken Realist: Essays in Modern Literature in Honor of Frederick J. Hoffman, ed. Melvin J. Friedman and John B. Vickery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1970), p. 113.

25 Quoted in Wallace Hildick. Word for Word: A Study ol'Authors' Alterations with Exercises (London: Faber & Faber, 1965), p. 185, from the British Museum MS of Mrs. Dalloway.

26 MS Notebook dated Nov. 9, 1922-Aug. 2, 1923, p. 2.

27 Isabel Gamble, “The Secret Sharer in Mrs. Dalloway,” Accent, 16(1956), 251.

28 Alice van Buren Kelley, The Novels of Virginia Woolf: Fact and Vision (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 104.

29 “The Novels of ?. M. Forster,” The Death of the Moth, p. 106.

30 To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth, 1930), p. 99.