Virginia Woolf's View of Social System in Mrs Dalloway


Ali GÜNES* 

While at work on Mrs Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary entry of 19 June 1923: 'in this book, I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity. I want to criticise the social system, and show it at work, at its most intense'. Woolf's remarks about her intentions in writing Mrs Dalloway have been constantly and deliberately neglected by her critics. They argue that she was not interested in the political, social and economical issues of her own time, as in a typical traditional novel, but in private consciousness - the subjective world of her characters in Mrs Dalloway, as well as in her other novels. According to E. M. Forster, for example, 'improving the world she would not consider'. Moreover, Jean Guiguet asserts that 'the mechanical relations between individuals, such as are imposed by the social structure, dominated by concepts of class and money...are not her problem'. They are right in the sense that we cannot neglect completely the point that most of the characters in her novels are caught up in their own private consciousness, since they desire to create a room of their own in the face of the harsh reality that they experience in the external world. Hence her characters constantly isolate themselves from each other and form a world of subjectivity, yet Woolf, as her husband Leonard Woolf writes, 'was intensely interested in things, people, and events, and...highly sensitive to the atmosphere which surrounded her, whether it was personal, social, or historical'. Woolf's views certainly do not imply a turning away from the political and social issues of her own time. When her characters psychologically gain more freedom and become bolder in their minds, they turn to politics to question the status quo and the social code that controls them. However, the way Woolf deals with these issues is different from a traditional writer. She reveals her views of political, economical and social issues artistically in her works without any authorial interpretation as in a typical traditional novel, yet she suggests this aesthetically and leaves judgement to her readers. Woolf's short stories, essays, letters, diaries and novels are full of such criticism. In her first novel The Voyage Out (1915), for example, Woolf deals through her representation of Richard Dalloway and St. John Hirst with the world of patriarchal politics and culture that operates on a 'divide' and 'rule' principle, in which masculine modes of authority and knowledge separate and categorize all human beings. Not only are women defined as different from and so inferior to men, they are, by this means, silenced and controlled in both the public and private spheres. Moreover, Woolf shows us in the same novel that this type of politics causes 'the misery of the poor' in society. When she meets 'the first child...with its poor, hungry, dirty little face' in the street, Clarissa Dalloway wants 'to stop all the painting and writings and music until this kind of thing exists no longer'. In Night and Day (1919), Woolf again criticizes the patriarchal culture and family which enslave women. In her last two novels The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941), she is deeply entrapped by her concern with World War II, which causes agony, 'scraps, orts and fragments' in the consciousnesses of individuals in society. 
Unlike Forster and Guiguet, I will focus upon Woolf's social vision in Mrs Dalloway - the complex sense of how historical forces and social institutions influence the behaviour of individuals in society. My argument is based on three interacting views in the novel. First, Woolf sees and represents the world of politics and much of culture both as masculine, for imposing male power, and as an irrational and brutal organism, which crushes and destroys the qualities of the private world - love, sympathy, warm relations and art. Her conventional male characters such as Richard Dalloway, Dr Holmes and Sir William Bradshow express the cultural values which perpetuate the dominance and power of patriarchy in society: in particular, they are the upholders of what Richard Dalloway calls 'our detestable social system', embodied in a sense of knowledge, dominance and power of patriarchy as possession and order. Paradoxically, however, Richard Dalloway, Holmes and Bradshow insist on keeping the 'continuity' of this 'detestable social system' (p. 104), so that Septimus Waren Smith, like other boys, goes to France to save England and its social order. However, the horrible and shocking experience of war, in which his close friend Evans dies, traumatizes Septimus, leading him to reject the traditional meaning of war and social order. This rejection, Holmes and Bradshow think, threatens the social status quo of the British Empire, because it may influence others to refuse to die for their country. As representatives of the social and political forces of the community, therefore, Holmes and Bradshow want to cure Septimus of his suffering by sending him to a mental house in the country, where he will conform to the norms of society: simply Septimus will be constructed by the existing ideology as the man he was before the war - the man who was willing to die to preserve the community's social order (p. 87). 
Secondly, I will argue that Woolf rejects this kind of ideology through the views of her fictional characters. Shell-shocked, war veteran Septimus, for example, refuses the orders of Holmes and Bradshow, as well as their cure, thinking that this kind of treatment will limit and isolate him by preventing him from communicating with and educating not only those who have never experienced the cruelty of war, but also those in power. Eventually he denies society and himself by committing suicide. Septimus finds the meaning of life and real communication in death. Woolf represents his death artistically as an act of defiance against the imposition of society and power over individuals. Finally, I will suggest that there is a conflict between social values and human desire for a better life, tension between fixed identity and an unstable self in Mrs Dalloway, yet Woolf, like Shelley, strives to reconcile and achieve unity and common perception in life. Although they never see each other, Clarissa Dalloway shares a common consciousness and fate with Septimus, both victimized by war and by patriarchal values. As Elaine Showalter asserts, they were each oppressed under the images of manhood and womanhood in Victorian society, and the Great War was 'a crisis of masculinity and trial of the Victorian masculine ideal'. Like Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927), Clarissa embraces repression and recommits herself to life by giving a party at the end of the novel. Although she is horrified by the news of Septimus's death and isolates herself in her attic room through the middle of her party, Clarissa grasps the meaning behind Septimus's death in a moment of illumination and returns to the party with the intention of bringing diverse people together and of creating beauty and harmony. Through her representation of Clarissa Dalloway and of the party, Woolf not only reaffirms life in the face of the meaninglessness of war and death, but she also redefines gender.
Mrs Dalloway provides us with many examples as to Woolf's furious argument with authority and patriarchy. Her dissatisfaction with the social system, which is solely based on power and exploitation, is closely linked to her feminist perception, because this power, as she writes in her novels and argues in her essays, is entirely identified with men. At the very beginning of Mrs Dalloway, Woolf suggests a connection between the symbolic network of power and the construction of identity, leading us at once to a view that the novel cannot be read as a novel that only explores the private consciousness, but also the complex ways in which the power holds over the mind of the individuals. While in the flower shop to buy flowers for her party in the evening, Clarissa Dalloway and Miss Pym hear the violent sound of 'a motor car' outside, and all passers-by fix their eyes upon it. The motor car carries 'the very greatest importance' of the authority - the Prince of Wales, the Queen and the Prime Minister, who stand for English society:
There could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand's breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first time and last, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time (pp. 14, 16).

The motorcar, which carries British dignitaries, makes a great impact upon the psyche of the crowd. Immediately a communal consciousness is formed when all people, regardless of sex or social status, turn to look at the 'greatness' and nobility within the motorcar. They think of 'the dead; of the flag; of the Empire' (p. 18). What Woolf represents through the symbol of the 'greatness' within the motorcar is that culture constructs us as 'great' and ordinary in a fixed way.
Moreover, Woolf uses the image of an aeroplane to represent the height of power and politics. For her, the aeroplane is associated with masculinity, war and aggression. In The Years, for example, Woolf represents the effect of an air raid by aeroplane in the 1917 section. Her characters, Eleanor, Sara, Peggy, Renny, Nicholas and Maggie are suddenly shattered by the sound of 'the siren' as the signal of an air raid while they are having dinner. Their dinner and conversation are interrupted, and then they wait for a bomb to fall. In order to escape the possible fall of a bomb, they take shelter in a cave where they feel crippled and constrained. However, what is important is that the psychological intimidation focused round the image of the aeroplane continues to haunt these characters in old age in the 'Present Day' section of the novel. Eleanor and Peggy, for example, pass Abercorn Terrace in a taxi on the way to a family party. Eleanor recalls the war and the air raid by fixing her eyes upon 'the usual evening paper's blurred picture of a fat man gesticulating'. She hates the man's apparent feeling of superiority and throws away the paper. '"You see", Eleanor interrupted, "it means the end of everything we cared for". "Freedom?" said Peggy perfunctorily. "Yes", said Eleanor. "Freedom and Justice"'. As the text suggests, the aeroplane becomes an image of the military, war and oppression.
In my view, Woolf represents the aeroplane in the same way as part of the dominant social order of Britain in 1923. As the narrator informs us, for example, the aeroplane crosses from West to East over London on 'a mission of great importance' and drops 'dead down' (p. 20). Hence Mr Bentley as a man thinks that it is 'a symbol...of man's soul; of his determination' (pp. 26-7). Clearly the image of the aeroplane is related to Woolf's argument with the culture and politics of patriarchy. It causes worry and anxiety in the consciousness of the crowd, so that 'every one looked up. Dropping dead down, the aeroplane soared straight up, curved in a loop, raced, sank, rose, and whatever it did...people were standing and looking up into the sky' (p. 20). Although the war ended seven years ago, the aeroplane still intimidates individuals psychologically by bringing back the trauma of the war to the consciousness of people, particularly to the consciousness of shell-shocked Septimus while sitting in Regent's Park.
Septimus, like most of his peers, goes to France during the first World War to safeguard England, the expansion of British power and the continuity of English history, because fighting in the war is both historically and culturally supposed as the duty of men. At her lunch party, for example, Millicent Bruton becomes submissively proud of her family when looking at the picture on the wall; 'meaning that her family, of military men, administrators, admirals, had been men of action, who had done their duty; and Richard's first duty was to his country' (p. 99). Like these men in the picture, Septimus was full of ambition, idealism and 'love of England' (p. 47), and thus 'he was one of the first to volunteer'; he develops 'manliness' and is 'promoted' after serving with great distinction in the war (p. 77). When his friend Evans is killed, Septimus congratulates himself 'upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime. He had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive' (p. 78). Yet the pleasure of congratulation lasts but a very short time, and then Septimus is filled with the 'appalling fear...that he could not feel' (p. 79). A panic encompasses him. He starts to consider himself as guilty due to the fact that he was silent and did not care 'when Evans was killed; that was worst;...and was so pocked and marked with vice that women shuddered when they saw him in the street' (p. 81). The feeling of guilt outrages him and makes Septimus suffer psychologically. He does not feel well, yet his Italian wife Rezia and Dr Holmes do not understand the propound meaning behind his suffering and consider his situation a normal one. The repetition of some words such as 'dropping dead down', 'the war was over' and 'the war' put him into struggle and keep alive his terrible experience of the war, in which the vision of Evans constantly haunts him in his fantasy: 'the War was over, and now the dead, now Evans himself' (p. 63) or 'a voice spoke from behind the screen. Evans was speaking. The dead were with him. "Evans, Evans!" he cried' (p. 83). Septimus oscillates in his vision due to his feelings of guilt and thus yearns for a world laden with 'exquisitive beauty', harmony and peace (p. 21). In his flashbacks, in fact, he desires to bring Evans back to life: 'how there is no crime...how there is no death' (pp. 23-4). Like Orlando, therefore, Septimus finds himself at odds with the masculine view of war and considers this view primitive. Killing people seems to him futile, inadequate and limited as well as cruel and repugnant. For him, what remains from the war and killing is shattered feelings and psychology as well as misery, terror and fear in society.
Not only Septimus, whose life has been psychologically altered, but other characters as well are also disturbed by the codes of the social system in Mrs Dalloway. For example, Peter Walsh, who has returned from India where he went after his love for Clarissa was rejected, is walking through Regent's Park after leaving Clarissa's house. He dozes and dreams, yet he cannot see much difference in British society though the war ended seven years ago: 'It was awful, he cried, awful, awful!. Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day' (p. 58). Moreover, when he sees boys in uniform, training and carrying guns full of an expression of duty, gratitude and fidelity on their faces, Peter renounces the purpose for which they are being trained. Then he exclaims at once: 'I can't keep up with them'; he feels pity for them, because they are innocent and 'don't know the troubles of the flesh yet' (p. 47). It is not their real relation to life, yet the boys are shown that it is the best way of protecting England and of keeping its history and culture alive. In other words, as Louis Althusser, French Marxist philosopher, puts forward in his essay 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' (1968), it is 'not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live'. The existing ideology is in both real and imaginary relation to the world - real in that it is the way people really live their relationship to society which governs their conditions of existence, but imaginary in that it prevents individuals from a full understanding of these conditions of existence and the ways in which people are socially and culturally constructed within them. The boys, as Peter sees, 'do not know' their conditions of existence, yet they are under the control of ideology and behave in accordance with the codes of the social system. Still Peter wants to respect these boys for other reasons. In addition, Septimus's wife Rezia is a war victim in another way. She does not experience directly the horror of the war, and thus she does not understand her husband's real suffering. However, the way in which he behaves and what he says about killing himself trouble and torture her: 'it is wicked. Why should I suffer? she was asking, as she walked down the road path. No; I can't stand it any longer, she was saying, having left Septimus, who wasn't Septimus any longer, to say hard, cruel, wicked things, to talk to himself, to talk to a dead man, on the seat over there, when the child ran full into her' (p. 59).
In her works, Woolf fights and writes against tyranny, war and authority as well as the egotism of masculinity. In Three Guineas (1938), for example, she despises war, which is only for the satisfaction of men's desires. For her, 'war is...an abomination, a barbarity; war must be stopped. For now at last we are looking at the same picture; we are seeing with you the same dead bodies, the same ruined houses'. War and patriarchal politics, as Woolf represents from a feminist point of view, are means by which men try to satisfy their own sex instinct by killing and dominating others. In her essay 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid' (1940), she asks us to feel, see and think about the roots of war, authority and male aggression as well as of women's oppression in ways that help us to understand and redefine the nature of war. From her first novel to the last, in fact, she seeks to explore and clarify the connection between private and public violence, between the domestic and public effect of the patriarchal society, between male supremacy and female subordination and between conventions and the aesthetic. Hence Joan Bennett writes that war is a form of human agony that often haunts Woolf's novels. In 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid', Woolf terms the root of authority and aggression 'subconscious Hitlerism':
The subconscious Hitlerism...is the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave. Even in the darkness we can see that made visible. We can see shop windows blazing; and women gazing; painted women; dressed-up women; women with crimson lips and crimson fingernails. They are slaves who are trying to enslave. If we could free ourselves from slavery we should free men from tyranny. Hitlers are bred by slaves'. 

For Woolf, it is this 'subconscious Hitlerism' that causes violence and threatens peace and liberty, yet her position in the fight against 'subconscious Hitlerism' is complex. She associates 'subconscious Hitlerism' with historical and cultural processes, because it has been 'fostered and cherished by education and tradition' for centuries. In Woolf's view, our upbringing and education breeds militarism and makes violence inevitable. Hence she argues that men and women must help each other to 'switch off' man's 'fighting instinct' for 'subconscious Hitlerism'; women must 'compensate the man for the loss of his gun' by creating 'more honourable activities for those who try to conquer in themselves their fighting instinct'. For Woolf, one way this can be achieved is that women must leave their exclusive right of 'childbearing' and mothering and 'give [men] access to creative feelings. We must make them happy... We must bring [them] out of prison into the open air'. By this perception, she redefines the meaning of gender and turns upside down existing social and cultural values, which encourage aggression and militancy. In 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid', Woolf also thinks of the 'fight' against 'subconscious Hitlerism' more broadly in a way that is linked to her feminism, pacifism and artistic view of writing:
There is another way of fighting for freedom without arms; we can fight with the mind. We can make ideas that will help the young Englishman who is fighting up in the sky to defeat the enemy...'I will not cease from mental fight,' Blake wrote. Mental fight means 'thinking against the current, not with it'. 

This quotation is of importance in two ways. First, Woolf's 'mental fight' against the male fighting instinct encourages a communal impulse and awareness in which both men and women unite for the battle to make men see another social order. Woolf emphasizes the need for a communal feeling against the horror of a war of destructive capacity unprecedented in history. Her attempt to prompt a common thinking derives from the view that both men fighting abroad and women at home are suppressed under the tyranny of fascism and patriarchy. Although the current thought 'flows fast and furious...from the loudspeakers and politicians', telling us 'that we are a free people, fighting to defend freedom', Woolf, having consulted her own experience, finds that 'it is not true that we are free. We are both prisoners tonight - he boxed up in his machine with a gun handy; we lying in the dark with a gas-mask handy'. For both men and women, the enemy is the same: '"Hitler!" the loudspeakers cry with one voice. Who is Hitler? What is he? Aggressiveness, tyranny, the insane love of power made manifest... Destroy that, and you will be free'. 
In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf rejects any form of dominance, dictatorship or tyranny over another. In the novel, therefore, the key conflict is between those who try to continue this 'dominion' and 'leadership' and those who resist it: Holmes and Bradshow on one side and Septimus at the other. Woolf represents Septimus as a threat to the Establishment of the British Empire. He recalls the horror of the war while everyone else is trying to forget it. That he remembers the war and its horror leads him to refuse its traditional meaning and to criticicize the values of the social system which encourage the war. In her first impression of the novel, Woolf writes that 'he must somehow see through human nature - see its hypocrisy, & insincerity, its power to recover from every wound, incapable of taking any final impression. His sense of that this is not worth having'. Hence the ultimate goals of Dr Holmes and Bradshow are to cure Septimus of his suffering and resistance to the standards of society in the hope that eventually he will conform to them: that is, he needs to be constructed by the existing ideology as he was. According to Dr Holmes, Septimus has nothing seriously wrong with him, but he needs to 'take an interest in things outside himself' (p. 21). Holmes desires 'to make [Septimus] notice real things, go to a music hall, play cricket - that was the very game' (pp. 21, 24). However, he does not understand thoroughly the root of Septimus's tragedy as well as the psychological effect of the trauma he experienced in the war. On the other hand, the solution of Sir William Bradshow to Septimus's illness is more radical than Holmes. Woolf portrays Bradshow as a real representative of British Establishment. He 'was master of power, which the patient was not' (p. 90): he is 'a resolute champion' of power and brilliant career 'on the cream of English society for fifty-five years' (pp. 91-2). For Septimus, Bradshow suggests 'rest' in the country where he must be secluded in a lunatic asylum: he believes that Septimus must not communicate with others, yet he must have a 'rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages' until he becomes a man as he used to be before the war, however unhappy (p. 89). In fact, Bradshow does not care whether Septimus will recover or not, but he favours a society which idealizes 'proportion', by which he desires to uphold authority and make individuals submit to it:
Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William's goddess, was required by Sir William...Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade child-birth, penalized despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion...(p. 89).

The purpose of Sir William Bradshow is to keep 'the good of society' by constructing people as subjects (p. 91). Society interferes with the liberty of individuals, dictates how they should behave and live. It does not allow free individual expression by forcing them into rigid and fixed roles with unfulfillable expectation. The ideology, which Holmes and Bradshow favour, is inimical to life itself, because their role in society is to make people measure up to certain standards. 
Holmes and Bradshow thus strive to use Septimus as a means to fulfil their purposes of keeping their authority intact. He feels their power heavily on his shoulder:
Human nature...was on him - the repulsive brute, with the blood-red nostrils. Holmes was on him. Dr Holmes came quite regularly everyday. Once you stumble, Septimus wrote on the back of a postcard, human nature is on you. Holmes is on you. Their only chance was to escape, without letting Holmes know; to Italy - anywhere, anywhere, away from Dr Holmes (pp. 82-3).

Similarly, when Bradshow starts to attend him, Septimus feels the same 'repulsive' force upon him: 'once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshow are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness... Human nature is remorseless' (p. 87). When she sees Bradshow at her party, therefore, Clarissa thinks that he is 'a great doctor... a man absolutely at the head of his profession, very powerful' (p. 162), yet her view of him is satirical, because she dislikes him and his 'profession': 'what she felt was, one wouldn't like Sir William to see one unhappy. No; not that man' (p. 162). Having heard of Septimus's death through Bradshow, she assures herself that he is 'capable of some indescribable outrage - forcing your soul, that was it - if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him, like that, with his power... Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that' (pp. 163-4). Clarissa feels that it is Bradshow whose 'profession' forced the 'soul' of Septimus, leading him to death.
As to the imposition of society, Catherine Belsey argues that our identity, in the traditional sense, is 'ideologically and discursively constructed, rooted in a specific historical situation and operating in conjunction with a particular social formation. In other words, she argues that what seems obvious and natural is not necessarily so, but that, on the contrary, the "obvious" and the "natural" are not given but produced in a specific society by the ways in which that society talks and thinks about itself and its experience'. Hence we cannot think of ideology and identity as separate elements that exist independently in a free-floating realm of ideas. Moreover, Louis Althusser suggests a more complex way of working and radical analysis of social relations in society. In 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', Althusser's ideas have been influential in the area of cultural studies, where his particular label of structural Marxism has brought about a radical rethinking of all social institutions, and the place of the human subject within their structures. According to Althusser, ideological practices are supported and reproduced in the institutions of our society, which he terms 'Ideological State Apparatuses' (ISAs), such as the educational system, the family, the law, the media and the arts. These institutions help to represent and reproduce the myths and beliefs necessary to enable people to work within the existing social formation, yet they are different from the 'Repressive State Apparatuses', which work by the force of the police, the penal system and the army whose existence guarantees the existing state of production. Althusser argues that the ultimate goal of all ideologies is the subject (individual in society), and it is the role of all ideologies to construct people as subjects:
I say: the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but at the same time and immediately I add that the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology in so far as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of 'constituting' concrete individuals as subjects. 

The quotation suggests that all ideologies strive to constitute individuals or identity as autonomous and fixed as in the humanist sense, without subjectivity or consciousness, which is the source of their beliefs and actions. That these individuals are unique and irreplaceable is 'the elementary ideological effect'. 
However, Woolf represents most of her characters in Mrs Dalloway as rebelling against the construction of ideology. For example, Clarissa hates any intrusion into 'the privacy of soul', into her individuality and privacy. She favours freedom without restraint upon her movement or demand upon her time for her activity in life. She thus accepts Richard Dalloway as husband, who offers her 'a little independence':
In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. (Where was he this morning, for instance? Some committee, she never asked what). But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced (p. 9).

Clarissa is married to 'a Prime Minister' and stands at the top as 'the perfect hostess' (p. 9), yet her marriage is distant, enabling her to free herself and to escape from the conventions of a society that wants women to submit to their husbands passionately. Yet a marriage to Peter, she assumes, would have ruined her life by limiting her both physically and psychologically; it would have forced her to submit to Peter's wishes and passion. She finds him vulgar, trivial and commonplace, as well as egotistical and rigid, always talking about himself: 'why always take, never give?' (p. 149). Moreover, Doris Kilman is another character rebellious against authority. She comes from German ancestry. Doris Kilman is sacked from her teaching position in England, because 'she would not pretend that the Germans were all villains' (p. 110). Her career is ruined, and she earns her living by occasional tutorial courses in London, rather than accepting what the Germans have done in the war. Society and power in Germany compel her to lead a degrading and isolated life, which causes her to feel bitter against any form of force whatever. She cannot control 'the hot and turbulent feelings which boiled and surged in her' (p. 111). Doris Kilman then finds relief in music and religion, yet her assuagement is transient, because 'the hot and painful feelings boiled within her' by flowing underneath (p. 111). She hates Clarissa and bears a violent grudge against the world which has scorned her and sneered at her, and her hatred is mitigated only by her love for the Dalloway's daughter, Elizabeth, to whom she teaches history: 'if she could grasp her, if she could clasp her, if she could make her hers absolutely and for ever and then die; that was all she wanted...she could not stand it. The thick fingers curled inwards' (p. 117). Doris Kilman's lesbian relation with Elizabeth might be considered a reaction against a society where there are still rigid conventions about sexual relations. Thus her fantasy remains in her mind only. Doris Kilman is alone and isolated in life, yet she is free without submitting herself to authority and power. 
Unlike Clarissa Dalloway and Doris Kilman, Septimus pays a heavy price for rejecting the deep-rooted political establishment of Britain: he commits suicide in the face of the unbearable intrusion of Holmes and Bradshow. Septimus denies their treatment and orders as well as the way of life which they try to impose upon him. When Dr Holmes tries force Rezia and her husband to live separately, Septimus not only feels again 'the brute with the red nostrils' on him, but he also imagines a place where there will be no 'Holmes', 'Bradshow', or talking of 'proportion' (p. 131). He finds his road to this kind of place in death. Although 'he did not want to die' and 'life was good' for him, he cannot stand any longer what Holmes and Bradshow endeavour to accomplish with him. Septimus fails to make them conceive the meaning behind his suffering and illness. Eventually he throws himself through a window and is 'horribly mangled' (p. 133).
By employing Septimus's death as a narrative strategy in Mrs Dalloway, I think, Woolf creates a fictional world in which authority and power may be challenged, changed or mocked. She frees him radically from the grasp of Holmes and Bradshow and preserves his inviolable self against their intrusion. In addition, Woolf's vision of death suggests a representation of a transcendent experience beyond the bounds of all limitations, impositions, self, time and the world. Septimus preserves his own drop of life and communication in death: 'Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death' (p. 163). Woolf suggests an artistic view through the death of Septimus. She not only shows us that the basis of the existing ideology and power relations of her own culture are crumbling, but she also dissolves the conception of character bound by the external forms of life, because ideology fixes individuals firmly in the world of power relationships. Woolf thus challenges the traditional view of self when Septimus creates his own meaning rather than the one which he has been forced to take. 
Septimus dies, yet life does not stop; 'they went on living...they would grow old' (p. 163). The continuity of this narrative view explicitly challenges the conventional narrative, which expresses the end. Mrs Dalloway does not end with the view that the chief character is born, grows and dies, as in Jane Austen's novels, but with death as only halfway through one's development. In the novel, Woolf keeps the continuity through her representation of Clarissa as an artist and of the party as a social gathering. She gives the bitterness of the war, anxieties and suicide which hover upon life, yet Woolf endows Clarissa with a passion in which she views life as fascinating and delightful: she loves 'live' (p. 6). Having heard of the news of Septimus's death in the middle of her party through Bradshow, Clarissa is shocked and feels that her party is ruined. She then retreats to and isolates herself at once in her little attic room where 'there was an emptiness about the heart of life' (p. 29): 'she went on, into the little room... There was nobody. The party's splendour fell to the floor' (pp. 162-3). However, suddenly Clarissa sees an old lady opposite her room going to bed and hears the laughing and shouting of people in the drawing-room. She comes to realize her party's deeper meaning for life in a moment of illumination. Thus, Clarissa imaginatively recreates Septimus's suicide and clearly understands him through a gradual process of self-discovery. This understanding brings an emotional change and psychic awareness, which unites Clarissa and Septimus in the same goal. She remembers the line of a song in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, which was also repeated by Septimus, 'Fear no more the heat of the sun' which had caught her eye as she was passing Hatchard's shop in the morning (pp. 10, 165). Clarissa thus comes to perceive death as inevitable, yet it must not be feared, because it ends the burdens and misery of the external world: life must 'be lived to the end' serenely and continuously (p. 164).
Indeed, Woolf represents Clarissa from the very beginning of Mrs Dalloway in a way that she is in love with life in an 'age that loosened screws and made the whole apparatus of the mind rattle and jingle'. Clarissa enjoys practically everything around her; she takes pleasure from 'tulips' in Hyde Park, 'a child in a perambulator' (70). When the novel opens, Clarissa walks towards Bond Street to buy the flowers for her party. The fresh morning fascinates her, and then she exclaims at once: 'what a morning - fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge!' (p. 5). The exclamations 'what a morning' and 'what a plunge' are clearly linked to the inner voice of Clarissa, her feeling and perception. Once Clarissa walks further, physical objects such as the flowing traffic and the streets of London elevate her feeling: 'In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwiches men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs... was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June' (p. 6). London is not a waste land for Clarissa but a place where she herself can experience life fully. In her works, Woolf strives to represent life as it is or as it is lived: 'life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent's Park, was enough' (p. 71). In her short story An Unwritten Novel (1920), she also writes of life: 'Life's what you see in people's eyes; life's what they learn, and, having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of it - what? That life's like that, it seems'. For Woolf, life is not fixed and definable as in traditional sense, but very spontaneous, 'very far from being "like this"' as she puts in her essay 'Modern Fiction' (1919). 
In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa, like Woolf herself, prefers 'simply life' without judgement and hierarchical relations, which is, she thinks, a threat to the privacy of soul (p. 108). Her enjoyment of life is clearly linked to the process of sensual and emotional experience, suggesting a view of fluidity as opposed to the Edwardian world view. In 'Modern Fiction', Woolf attacks the Edwardian writers H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, who, she believes, seek everything in solid facts and thus create 'enormous labour of providing the solidity, the likeness to life'. This view of life, she thinks, overshadows a more complex conception of life, and then she asks 'Is life like this?'. In 'The Narrow Bridge of Art' (1927), Woolf also accuses modernist writers of putting too much emphasis on their personal views, and thus of forgetting 'a large and important part of life consists in our emotions toward such things as roses and nightingales, the dawn, the sunset...' In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf represents Clarissa as yearning for values based not upon hierarchical relations and power but upon self-interest and individual experience, because hierarchical relation and authority are threat to the privacy of soul. When her first hatred for Doris Kilman flares up, for example, Clarissa is relieved by her experience at the florist's shop, 'as if this beauty, this scent, this colour...were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up' (p. 14). Clarissa loves life only, and thus she, unlike Holmes and Bradshow, hates separation and conversion: 'Had she ever tried to convert anyone herself? Did she not wish everyone merely to be themselves?' (p. 112). Woolf's view of life undermines the ideology built up upon Bradshow's 'Proportion' and 'Conversion', whose 'inter-personal imperialism dehumanizes and objectifies the Other to block out any disturbing sympathy or sense of likeness which might impede conquest'. But Clarissa loves life, which is based upon a sense of wholeness and pleasure in the experience of daily life: 'But everyone remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab' (p. 10). Like Woolf herself, what Clarissa yearns for in life is to evade the division and imposition of dominance, which causes pain and inadequacy of experience: simply, she longs for a common civilization and life where there will be no parting and dominance. 
It is the party through which Woolf enables Clarissa to achieve her communal perception of life. The party unites isolated, fragmented and diverse people as a community outside of their class, status and position. It makes them aware of friendship and connection, because it is a celebration of these aspects of humanity in common culture, as well as in Clarissa's more developed scheme of life. This communal view relieves individuals of the loneliness of their existence when they blend their memories and imagination together without being limited to their isolated selves. Hence most of Woolf's characters in the party struggle to find their own ways to some sort of shared experience: that is, the value of experience is not individual but collective. Woolf thus represents Clarissa's party as resisting the social divisions and categorization created by patriarchal society and culture as 'an offering...to combine, to create' (p. 109). The repressive social system still continues though there have been great changes, and Septimus commits suicide, yet Clarissa manages to bring together 'the Prime Minister', doctors and administrators as well as ordinary people (p. 152-3). They shatter the barriers between them and talk freely to each other. Their memories and imaginations combine them in a common experience. Hugh Whitbread thinks that 'he might eat cake with a Duchess... probably did spend a good deal of time in that agreeable occupation' (p. 153). Clarissa sees 'the Primer Minister' as walking among the guests as an ordinary man; she also observes that Sally, Peter and Richard seem pleased with all those people who attend the party. 
Woolf's view of common life rejects the values of hierarchy and authoritarianism located in social relations of society. In her communal perception, she enables us to see social marginalization and separation not as natural, but as the product of an unequal authoritarian social system. By her communal view of life, Woolf desires a 'new' society, which rejects the perpetuation of gender and social division, seeking instead alternative forms of social relations. This utopian dream she points out in Three Guineas brings men and women to work together for the same cause. She explains that such a cause 'was no claim of women's rights only... it was deeper; it was a claim for the rights of all - all men and women - to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty' - an egalitarian view of life. In Mrs Dalloway, Septimus and Clarissa want to 'change the world', 'to renew society' and 'to reform the world' (pp. 23-4, 31), in which there will be no tyranny of authority and no dictator who would impose a certain way of life but harmony, beauty and unity in life.




* Yrd. Doç. Dr., Kafkas University, Faculty of Science and Letters, Department of English Language and Literature, Kars.
A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Leonard Woolf (London: The Hogarth Press, 1975), p. 57.
E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), p. 8. 
Jean Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her Works, trans. by Jean Steward (London: The Hogarth Press, 1965), pp. 71-2. See also following critics: J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 176; James Naremore, The World Without a Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 240-8. 
Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1970), p. 27. 
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (London: Triad Grafton, 1988), pp. 65, 40-1.
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, ed. by Frank Kermode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 172-3.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Granada, 1980), p. 104. Further references to this edition will appear in the text.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (London: Virago, 1982), p. 71. 
Woolf, The Years (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 232-39.
Ibid., p. 265.
Ibid., p. 266 
Louis Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), p. 155. 
Woolf, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, ed. by Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 165.
Joan Bennett, Virginia Woolf as a Novelist, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 70. 
Woolf, 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid', in Collected Essays, vol. 4 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1967), p. 174. 
Ibid., p. 175.
Ibid., p. 175.
Ibid., pp. 175-6.
Ibid., pp. 173-4.
Ibid., p. 174.
Ibdi., p. 174.
Virginia Woolf, notebook dated 9 November 1922-2 August 1923, 12, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 
Here I use the word "subject" in postmodernist sense, since the traditional view of identity is based on an empiricist-idealist interpretation of the world. That is, man is the origion and source of meaning, of action and of history. Thus, identity is considered as fixed and stable, yet postmodernism questions this perception, and identity is not given but socially constructed within the network of language as subject. 
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 3.
Althusser, p. 160. 
Ibid., p. 161.
For an argument about the symbolic function of the sun in Mrs Dalloway, see Marilyn Schauer Samuels, 'The Symbolic Function of The Sun in Mrs Dalloway', Modern Fiction Studies, 18 (1972), 387-399. 
Woolf, The Years, p. 261. 
The Complete Shorter Ficiton of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Susan Dick (London: Triad Grafton Books, 1989), p. 112.
Woolf, 'Modern Fiction', in The Common Reader: First Series (London: The Hogarth Press, 1948), p. 189.
Ibid., p. 188.
Ibid., p. 189.
Woolf, ' The Narrow Bridge of Art', in Colleccted Essays, vol. 2 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1967), p. 225.
Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and The Mother-Daughter Relationship (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), p. 78. 
Woolf, Three Guineas, ed. by Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 303.


ÖZET
Bu makale İngiliz modernist yazarlarından Virginia Woolf'un Mrs Dalloway adlı romanındaki toplumsal dünya görüşünü incelemektedir. Yazar, romanında karahterlerinin dünya görüşlerini, imajlarını ve mücadelelerini kullanarak tarihsel güçlerin ve sosyal kurumların bireyin toplumsal davranışlarını nasıl etkilediğini irdelemektedir. Makalede tartısılan fikirler romanda geçen grift ilişkiler üzerinde odaklaşmaktadır. Yazar bir kadın gözüyle toplumu, siyaseti ve kültürü ataerkil bir oluşum olarak görür ve bu oluşumun ataerkil gücü kullanarak insanoğluna özgü olan sevgi, sempati, sıcak iliskiler ve sanat gibi bazı hasletleri yok ettiğini ileri sürer.