Browsing by Subject "Mrs Dalloway"

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    Community, exposed singularity and death in Mrs Dalloway.
    (Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones., 2024) López Sánchez-Vizcaíno, María Jesús
    This essay brings Virginia Woolf and Jean-Luc Nancy into dialogue, focusing on their similar critique of essentialized models of community and evocation of forms of being-with that derive from the experiences of singularity and death. It identifies two forms of community in Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925). The first one corresponds to Nancy’s conception of the immanent community, built upon essence and fusion, and in which death is provided with an ideological meaning. In Woolf’s novel, this communitarian logic traverses the official, ritualistic way in which England has sublimated the death and loss caused by the First World War, and the repressive conventions and the authoritarian spirit of the governing classes. An alternative kind of community, however, is suggested in Mrs Dalloway, one that can be identified with Nancy’s conception of the inoperative community: a community of singular beings who share their finitude, exposure and death. Blanchot’s ideas on the transient community of lovers and Butler’s theorization of a ‘we’ based upon common vulnerability and loss also shed light on this novel’s concern with antisocial bonds between characters that escape traditional forms of affiliation.
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    (Im)perfect celebrations by intergenerational hostesses: Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
    (Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2020) Cortés Vieco, Francisco José
    Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf nourished a peculiar stream of parallel foreignness and kinship with each other as coetaneous writers. This article explores the likenesses and dialogues between Mansfield‟s story “The Garden Party” and Woolf‟s Mrs. Dalloway to detect and depict how bourgeois women, like Laura Sheridan and Clarissa Dalloway, albeit from two different generations, are indoctrinated by social etiquette, class consciousness and the prevailing archetype of domestic femininity inherited from Victorian times. Integrated into their compulsory roles as angelic daughters and wives, Laura and Clarissa gladly perform the role of the hostess to organise (im)perfect parties at home until death knocks at the door. Paradoxically that uninvited guest precipitates escapades of self-discovery and mental emancipation, leading to transient or enduring transformations in the lives of these two women.