Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2003

Thesis Director

Ruth Hoberman

Abstract

This thesis examines how socio-historical influences shape the protagonists of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925)-- Rachel Vinrace and Clarissa Dalloway. During the writing of these two novels, attitudes about roles for women before and after World War I shifted as pre-war domestic strife was replaced by a post-war push to return to normalcy. Throughout the period, imperialist ideology demanded that women conform to traditional gender roles by marrying and reproducing. Woolf depicts this pressure as it affects her two protagonists.

In The Voyage Out, the British Empire's imposing presence is exhibited through the setting of the fictional colony, Santa Marina; in Mrs. Dalloway, it is felt through the prime minister's car and through the capital city of London itself. In both books, Richard Dalloway plays the dual role of statesmen and sexual initiator, influencing the decisions of both protagonists in their response to marriage. Woolf illustrates how Rachel and Clarissa are shaped by their relationships with Dalloway and by their imperial environment.

Woolf also exposes the violation of self provoked by marriage symbolically though a "mermaid-like" dress which illuminates the loss of identity caused by Rachel and Clarissa's assimilation into cultural dictates. Concurrently, her writing may also reveal her own personal struggles as she considered whether to marry Leonard Woolf during the writing of The Voyage Out, and as she reflected on her twelve year marriage in Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf therefore, as observer and participant, provides insight into the way in which social institutions such as marriage are internalised.

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