A Feminist Approach to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.doc

A Feminist Approach to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway “[W]hat is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill” (Woolf 155). Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), the renowned British writer, declares these words in a paper read to the Women’s Service League. Indeed, throughout her life, she is seeking the definition of “what is a woman” in her own way, and both her life and works bear distinct marks of feminism. In her concern for women’s existence in the patriarchal society, she portraits a list of female characters in her fiction, speaks out her views on women and women’s writing in her non-fictional works, and stands as a conscientious feminist. Clarissa Dalloway, the heroine of Woolf’s masterpiece Mrs Dalloway, is one of her most famous female characters. From a feminist approach, this paper will give a brief analysis to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. The term “feminism” is originated from the Latin word “femina”, which means woman. As far as its derivative meaning is concerned, it is obvious that this word best suggests the long-term existence of inequality between males and females and involves women’s unswervingly fight against men’s prejudice against women. Feminism is a perspective that views gender as “one of the most important bases of the structure and organization of the social world (Sapiro 417). By claiming that women are oppressed by patriarchy (the belief that women are innately inferior to men) economically, politically, socially, and psychologically, feminist critics seek to question the complacent certainties of such a patriarchal culture, to promote a belief in sexual equality, and to “eradicate sexist domination in transforming society” (Selden 121). Feminism has undergone three waves of feminist criticism in its history, with Virgina Woolf as one of the spokeswomen of the first wave. She did more than what a