Negative Dialectics in Mrs Dalloway

Abstract

ABSTRACT Critics have interpreted Clarissa Dalloway as an ontologically complete character who can be divided into private and public sides: the former is thought and kept to herself while the latter presents an exterior view of her to the members of the British elite with whom she associates. I take issue with this private/public split, however, and argue that, even in her thoughts, Clarissa never finds a permanent reprieve from the Victorian gender norms that are impressed upon her because her interiority is defined by the dialectical movement between her Victorian and anti-Victorian persuasions. I further contend that Woolf never provides a resolution to this dialectic, making it negative rather than affirmative, and thus reveals how she more generally felt about interwar women: as indefinitely between gaining full ownership of the newly won “rooms of their own” and forfeiting them in favour of a return to traditional Victorian mores.