Queering the Market: ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, Mrs Dalloway and ‘The Hours’

Abstract

With their focus on shopping and consumption, the interrelated texts of Woolf’s short story ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, Mrs Dalloway and ‘The Hours’ in many ways encapsulate Woolf’s ambivalence about consumerism, capitalism and commodity culture. Shopping in these texts is a self-consciously performed activity that puts into question the heteronormative expectations that women’s participation in the market economy seems to endorse. The narratives explore the subversive potential of women entering the marketplace with money to buy, and hence to satisfy their own consumer desires, and indeed to satisfy desires that are potentially at odds with social and sexual norms. The gift economy in operation in these texts is key to signalling a libidinal economy that seems resistant to heterosexual imper-atives. There is a sense that the interaction of gift and market economies has the potential both to disrupt capitalist market systems and to destabilise dominant heteropatriarchal social structures. The gifts considered and actually given in these texts have the effect of queering the market — of disrupting the seemingly secure notions of gendered identity and sexuality, and of opening up several other possibilities. This applies not only to the gifts exchanged between women, which often have a utopian quality, but also those given within what can be considered to be a masculine economy of ‘pseudo-gifts’ given with a specific, calculated purpose.