Mrs Dalloway - AO3

Woolf Biography

• Born in 1888 in London – father was a famous author and mountaineer and her mother a well-known model.

• Her family hosted many of the most influential members of Victorian literary society – Woolf was cynical of their narrowmindedness and pomposity

• Woolf and her sister weren't allowed to go to Cambridge like their brothers but had to steal an education of their father's study. They still allowed her to pursue a life in the arts

• First mental breakdown caused by mother's death and sexual abuse by her half-brother, George Duckworth

• Member of the Bloomsbury group alongside E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Leonard Woolf

• She and Leonard Woolf married in 1912 and bought a printing press, which they named 'The Hogarth Press' and published books from their dining room, printing her radical novels and political essays when nobody else would and produced the first full English edition of Freud's works

• Met Vita Sackville-West in December 1922 and grew closer through attending a series of dinner parties together in London. Sackville-West became the Hogarth Press' best-selling author

• Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse in March 1941 after feeling the outbreak of another bout of mental illness

Woolf’s works

• 'The Death of the Moth' contains her observations as she sat in her study and watched a moth trapped by a pane of glass – profound thoughts

• Emerson - "In the work of a writer of genius we rediscover our own neglected thoughts'

• In 'On Being Ill' Woolf lamented how seldom writers stoop to describe illness, an oversight that seemed characteristic of the snobbery against the everyday in literature

• In 'Oxford Street Tide' she celebrates the vulgarity of this shopping street – unafraid to embrace what others deemed 'trivial'

• Encouraged genderbending (e.g. in 'Orlando', a portrait of her lover Vita). "It is fatal to be a man or woman, plain and simple. One must be woman-manly or man-womanly"

• In 'Three Guineas' Woolf argues that we will only ever end war by rethinking the habit of pitting sex against sex and claiming superiority over one another

• Recognised that women's oppression was largely down to money – women didn't have freedom because they didn't control their own income

• 'A Room of One's Own' demanded that women needed dignity, equal rights to education, an income of 500 pounds a year and a room of one's own to stand on an equal footing to men

• In 'To The Lighthouse', mundane moments like a dinner party or losing a necklace trigger psychological revelations in the minds of the Ramsay's (a fictionalised version of Woolf's family growing up)

  • In the 'Time Passes' section of this book, 10 years are condensed into 20 pages

• In 'The Waves', there is little distinction between the narratives of the six main characters. Woolf experiments with collective consciousness, at times collapsing the six voices into one

• Victorian novels focused on external details; Woolf envisioned a new form of expression that focused instead on how it feels inside to know ourselves and other people

Women

First Wave Feminism

• The First Wave feminism movement had been increasing in activism since the 19^th century and focused on equal rights of voting and employment

  • The 1910s saw the extreme militancy of the suffragettes project the movement to the public, culminating in the 1918 ‘Representation of the Peoples act’ which gave property owning women over 30 the right to vote

• Flappers; a group of young women who rebelled against traditional social norms – open about their sexuality, living a life akin to men

  • Concern to older feminists who saw their pleasure-seeking taboo-breaking ways as a disregard for their hard work

  • Struggle for freedom was moving away from public life and into personal life – the ideas of duty for the moral good, due to disillusionment, were debunked – many young people saw morality as lying in ones self and their own life not a cause

• the Sex Disqualification Removal Act: [2]

  • legal impediments to gainful employment imposed on women were removed. They could join most professions (except the Church and the stock exchange), they could take degrees at university.

  • However, the dependency of most women on the male breadwinner continued for the most part, and there were few women at the very top of society

• 1928; women were given electoral freedom with men – legislation brought equality in inheritance rights and unemployment benefits

  • Matrimonial Causes Act 1923 had made divorce easier

  • Contraception had been made easier by the Marie Stopes mail order service

• A third of unmarried women were moving into paid employment in medicine, education and industry

  • Mass employment had made women a consumer power – the fashion industry began expanding rapidly

    • Shorter hemlines, trousers and sportswear became a marker of freedom

The New Woman

• Wollstonecraft raised the ‘Woman Question’ – urged upper-class women to obtain a proper education and profession in order to make themselves financially independent

• The new woman was intelligent, educated, emancipated, independent and self sufficient

  • ‘The New Woman was a very fin-de-siecle phenomenon. Contemporary with the new socialism, the new imperialism, the new fiction and the new journalism, she was part of cultural novelties which manifested itself in the 1880s and 1890s.’ Sally Ledger

• The New Woman arose at the same time as society was becoming more liberal with the young, disillusioned by the horrors of war, moving away from typical structures of society

• The female authors criticised conventional Victorian marriage, especially the condition of marriage which tolerated marital rape, compulsory motherhood, and the double standard of sexual morality

  • Women fought against the Victorian perception of woman as the ‘angel in the house’

• The emphasis on the pursual of new sensation during the fin de siècle pushed women to new experiences

• Rise of the New Woman, addressing as it did the double-standards inherent in Victorian marriages, which insisted on impeccable sexual virtue on the part of the wife but not on that of the husband

• The new women in novels ‘faced the terrible suffering which came from venereal disease and which was a result both of their own sexual ignorance and of the past sexual excesses of their husbands...served...to show why existing marriage was impossible and why masculine sexual privilege and female sexual ignorance had to stop’ Barbara Caine

Rest Cure

• ‘Rest Cure’ as concocted by the American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell.

• Bed-rest, intensive feeding, sensory deprivation and isolation from family ensured a forced dependency on the god-like doctor.

• The paternalism of Mitchell’s discourse is evident in his recommendation to Gilman, his patient, that she “live as domestic a life as possible. Have [her] child with [her] all the time…Lie down after each meal. Have but two hours’ intellectual life. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as [she] live[s].” The stifling roles of motherhood and wife were prescribed as well as a mind-numbing passivity.  

• Likewise, Woolf resented the mild rest cure that her doctor, Savage, forced on her following her father’s death: “I have never spent such a wretched 8 months in my life,” she wrote to her intimate friend Viola Dickinson, “and yet that tyrannical and as I think, shortsighted Savage wants yet another two…Really a doctor is worse than a husband.”

• It is clear that Woolf saw the doctors as colluding in a patriarchal system which, like marriage, aimed to control female identity. Women were confined by their maternal female bodies (note the nineteenth century term ‘confinement’), marriage and physically by the rest cure: a deadly nexus of entrapment.  

Shellshock

• First identified in relation to soldiers undergoing bombardement in the trenches during WW1 (we now understand it to be PTSD)

• Symptoms include the ‘thousand-yard stare’ (the blank, unfocused gaze of people experiencing dissociation due to acute stress or traumatic events); tremors; sensory overload; inability to speak; tinnitus

• Concept was general and poorly defined pre-WW2

• In recent decades (especially following the 2003 Iraq war), shell shock has been linked to biological brain damages, such as concussions and micro-tearing of the brain tissue

• Treatment was brutal and almost always failed. Some doctors would give electric shocks to soldiers in hopes that it would ‘shock them’ back to their normal, heroic, pre-war selves; others would use general anaesthesia (ether and chloroform)

• Bonikowski - "Mrs Dalloway also makes ‘the encounter between the shell-shocked soldier and civilians, especially women, [… into] an allegory of the revelation of a traumatic knowledge about the nature of the home, self, and civilization"

Empire

• Throughout the 19^th century, the British Empire had expanded into many country, including India, Canada, Australia and South Africa, allowing it to become the largest empire of its time

• The Illustrated London News promoted the dogma of British supremacy: 'our spirit rules the world'

• Post WW1 – despite the allies technically winning, many UK citizens no longer saw how England could be deemed as the greatest Empire, given they had suffered 880,000 deaths

• The conservative party (which Richard works for) is suggested to be outdated and traditional. The Labour party (who are voted in for the first time in 1924 – Ramsay Macdonald) begin to have a rising voter basis/ influence

• In 1922 – The Irish Free State government was proclaimed and the last English troops left Dublin

• “Newspapers such as the Times in June 1923, were full of “news from India”, sure to agitate someone with [Lady Burton’s] values” – Alex Zwerdling

• “The British Empire was at least as much about the replication of sameness and dissimilarities originating from overseas” – David Cannadine – suggests that the subjects exposed to Empire know their place in society, not only domestically, but also globally

• Lloyd George was the Prime Minister when Woolf was writing Mrs Dalloway:

  • He was very concerned with re-establishing peace and order

  • This is emphasised by the continued, rhythmic chiming of Big Ben – creates a “type of social hypnosis” Melissa Wharton-Smith

Modernism

• Modernist writing – use of stream of consciousness, internal monologue, distortions in time and multiple or shifting perspectives

• Stream of consciousness , fragmentation of time - breaks free from the grammatical and structural confines of earlier literature / ‘uses elliptical metaphorical language to represent fragmented, inchoate sensory and cognitive data as these flow and flit in the mind’²

  • Though this technique rejects Romantic and Realist elements, it does still emphasise a more faithful depiction of the mind’s inner workings (which could be attributed to the conversations started by Freud’s works)

• Woolf began writing 'Mrs Dalloway' while reading 'Ulysses

Philosophy and politics

• Satre believed that in a 'godless world' one had to create their own purpose or religion, something that Clarissa's passion for parties and connecting people seems to fulfil

• Morris was a social activist who questioned Conservative policies on public welfare in the late nineteenth century

• Henri Bergson argued that time is not a fixed sequence but a subjective experience he called ‘duration’.

  • He distinguished between ‘clock time’ and ‘lived time’ – both being fluid and shaped by personal perception.

  • This theory of memory suggests that past and present coexist in consciousness, influencing emotions and decisions.

Religion

Challenges to institutionalised religion before the 20th century:

• The Enlightenment - Increased philosophical speculation led to the validity of religion being questioned

• Nietzsche - The Gay Science (1882)

•  "God is dead...and we have killed him" 

•  "The belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable", everything that was "built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it", including "the whole [...] European morality", is bound to "collapse"

Cultural crisis after WW1:

• Many questioned the existence of a benevolent God after such widespread destruction and suffering

• Loss of faith in religious institutions, as the war also highlighted the failure of the Church in preventing or stopping global conflict

• Opposition to modernism from the Church

• Pope Pius X opposed modernist ideas by reaffirming traditional teachings. He saw modernism as a threat to the faith and excommunicated several modernist thinkers

• Scientific developments

• Charles Darwin's theory of Evolution

• Einstein's theory of Relativity

• Secularism

• Rapid developments in science and technology at the end of the 19th/start of the 20th century were able to offer explanations for phenomena that were once attributed to divine or religious causes

• Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim postulated that the modernisation of society would include a decline in levels of formal religiosity

• Decline in Church attendance

• In some Western countries, church attendance began to decline as more people sought answers outside traditional religious institutions

• Cultural Shifts

• The rise of consumerism, mass media, and popular culture in the early 1900s shifted people’s focus away from religious values. As cities grew and new entertainment forms like cinema and radio emerged, many began to find fulfilment in secular pursuits rather than religious devotion