“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” : a study on the distinctiveness of Virginia Woolf’s feminism

Abstract

Virginia Woolf was born in the late nineteenth century to Leslie Stephen; an intellectual man of strong Victorian morals. She lived at a time when the England she knew was shifting to a new, Modern age. At the same time, aspiring writers were in search for an innovative style, and the first feminist movements were established. In an attempt to represent life in her fiction, Woolf presents a new vision of the world, one that the former male governed society did not attend to; a world presented from a distinct female perspective. However, the feminist echoes of her work are often seen in relation to feminist literary theory or compared to other feminist works but rarely attributed to Woolf’s own beliefs and experiences as a woman. Writing this dissertation about the distinctiveness of Woolf’s feminism is the only means by which I could challenge the scepticism or the misinterpretations that categorise Woolf’s feminism as a form of literary or political theory. Throughout this dissertation I intend to explain, justify and clarify the nature of Woolf’s feminism. Woolf does not glorify women at the expense of diminishing men. Although she is aware of gender difference she treats men and women equally because in their opposite characteristics they are able to live together in harmony whether physically, psychologically, metaphorically or spiritually. This androgynous vision as expressed in A Room of One’s Own and portrayed in style as well as content in Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando: A Biography (novels that I shall be referring to in this dissertation), might have exerted their influence on the work of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud among other prominent psychological studies on the male and female in everyone of us, in the same way that the language and structure associated to feminist qualities, inspired the work of prominent feminist theorists such as Hélène Cixous, who brought forward the notion of ‘ecriture femine’, and Julia Kristeva. For this reason, I believe that the present reader must take into consideration the improvements done within the feminist sector since Woolf’s time (an age when feminism was still finding its roots) in order to acknowledge and appreciate the distinctiveness of Woolf’s feminism, as I shall be doing throughout this dissertation.