Gendered perspectives within the space of Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs Dalloway”

UDC 821.161.1-1

https://doi.org/10.20339/PhS.3-22.119      

Komutstsi Ludmila V.,

Doctor of Philology, Associate Professor,

Professor of the Theory and Practice of Translation Department

Sevastopol State University

e-mail: ltataru@yandex.ru  

Rudenko Natalia S.,

Candidate of Philology, Associate Professor,

Head of the Theory and Practice of Translation Department

Sevastopol State University
e-mail: runa79@yandex.ru

Gender aspects of Virginia Woolf’s writings have become an immensely expanded field of interdisciplinary research in the West. In Russia, however, they remain quite little known. The article focuses on the gender-spatial division of space in Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs Dalloway”. Drawing from a number of Marxist philosophical and literary conceptions of modernist space and, mostly, from the literary narrative methodology, the authors present a model of interrelations between the narrative social and personal spaces from the perspectives of the two protagonists and of the collective character, that is, various minor characters sharing post-Edwardian societal norms. Literary narrative approach makes it possible to characterize the modernist traits of Virginia Woolf’s novel which she shared with the contemporary writers and her individual, specifically Woolfian literary inventions. One of them consists in a specific use of free indirect discourse imitating the perceptions of the two gender-opposite realities, namely, the “material” reality of the actual story world and the mental reality of the subjective experiences from the protagonists’ pasts. The other is Woolf’s innovative contribution to feminist writing. It may be described as a representation of the female “modernist body” via the female protagonist’s stream-of-consciousness saturated with meaningful gaps. The obtained results include specifying Woolf’s gender principle of structuring her narrative space and the alternations of the female protagonist’s two bodies, which are her gender body “for others” and her mental “modernist” body freed from social limitations.

Keywords: modernist space, V. Woolf, “Mrs Dalloway”, narrative technique, gender body, modernist body.

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