Mrs.%20Dalloway:%20Portrait%20of%20the%20Artist%20as%20a%20Middle-aged%20Woman

1
Mrs. Dalloway Portrait of the Artist as a
Middle-aged Woman

• By Jacob Littleton
• Twentieth Century Literature 41(1995) 36-

2
Main Concept

• Novelist Virginia Woolf portrays a middle-aged
  woman who has transcended the mundane quality of
  her life by finding joy in everyday objects and
  maintaining this attitude as a form of personal
  faith. The heroine, Clarissa, can also be
  considered an artist in the way she attempts to
  enhance the existence of her fellows by holding
  parties that allow her guests to behave in ways
  which she has predetermined.

3
Clarissas artistry is the essential key to
understanding her character, and the depiction of
that character is the novels key event.

• Clarissa is a nonbeliever- she rejects societys
  common props against the void Walshs passion,
  Kilmans religion, Bradshaws Proportion.
• Her delight is free of self-interest or
  discrimination.
• -- subvert the masculine grammar of subject
  and object, unifying and protecting both in a
  single field.

4
Clarissa creates a faith based on the unit of
heightened awareness of existence

• Human interaction and communication form a
  network by which individuals merge into one
  another through experience, imagination, and
  memory.
• The value of existences is not individual but
  collective in Clarissas skeptical mind this
  collective experience takes the place of love
  and religion, and other potential rocks against
  the void, in which she places no faith.
• --- She sees a way for her to act to
  strengthen collective being through her parties.
  Her parties are her art.
  

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The artists role is to create and express the
truths that she or he apprehends in the world
the artist is Woolfs high priest of
consciousness.

• Clarissas parties project the truth she sees
  onto a ritual physical structure freed in many
  ways from the forms and concerns of everyday
  life.
• The party marks a place of special awareness of
  friendship and connection, for it is a
  celebration of these aspects of humanity in
  common culture as well as in Clarissas more
  developed scheme of live.

6
The individuals social position

• Clarissas isolation, the fact of death in her
  life, is caused by a social order which requires
  the subjugation of the private self, for Clarissa
  the real self, to the individuals social
  position.
• Mrs. Dalloway is fixed in a social position
  her femininity, in a patriarchal culture,
  subsumed by her identity as Richards wife.
• It is significant that Septimus is the other
  character for whom Woolf brings up this
  dichotomy.

7
Conclusion

• Woolfs presentation of Clarissa Dalloway is
  itself subversive on many levels. By creating a
  viable heroine with many intellectual attributes
  ascribed solely to men, Woolf destabilizes gender
  boundaries Clarissas talents derive, moreover,
  from her social femininity, presenting an
  alternative to male-identified utilitarian
  ideology.