Post-war Spatial Production in Mrs Dalloway

Abstract

The present study examines Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway as a cartographic work mapping the intricacies of post-war experience in London. The novel, telescoping all of its action into one single day and foregrounding mobility and space, captures the pervasive effects of the Great War and its ramifications on the individuals and on society, and this spatially-oriented literary analysis of it investigates the diverse yet relational processes of spatial production. To this end, the physical spaces, dominant discourses and the characters’ negotiation of their lived spaces will be addressed by referring to the spatial theories of scholars such as Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja. Mrs Dalloway, as a critical textual space, charts the convergence of the private and the public, the lived and the imagined, the past and the present, and thereby contests the dominant spatial discourses as defined and prescribed by the social system.