Class and Gender Relations in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse

• Main Authors: Hung Min-yueh, 洪敏月
• Other Authors: Liou Liang-ya
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/84678166736820551746

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 外國語文學系研究所 === 90 === As a writer with keen perception of the social issues of her day, Virginia Woolf scrutinizes and criticizes her society in her fiction. In her two renowned novels, To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, she depicts a British society which is not only classist but sexist as well. In the society, lower classes suffer wretched condition of life, while upper classes complacently lead an extravagant living. In the same society, women are regarded as the inferior sex, relegated to the private domain to perform domestic service to men, while men freely seek self-fulfillment in the public sphere. Drawing on Louis Althusser's theory of ideology, I argue in this thesis that people in the novels tend to accept the oppressive social order, because they internalize the dominant ideologies of their society that naturalize and rationalize the existing class and gender hierarchies. These ideologies make people accept the status quo by constituting their subjectivity through the operation of "ideological state apparatuses" like the school and the family. Given the existence of cultural rebels in Woolf's novels, who continually challenge the dominant values of their society, I also contend that it is possible to struggle against such ideological conditioning. In the first chapter, I maintain that Woolf is a writer who is deeply aware of the mechanism of how "the invisible presences" (Woolf's term for ideological forces) shape a person's identity. The second and third chapters focus on the class and gender relations in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. While in both books Woolf depicts a social order permeated with traditional Victorian class and gender ideologies, in the latter novel she also presents the order as undergoing a gradual transformation into a more modern one, where women don't have to accept marriage and domesticity as their final destiny and where lower-class people are no longer the silent and invisible members of their society.