Utopia and Selection in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’
Abstract
Olga A. Dzhumaylo. (Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation).
The paper develops the author’s interpretation of the garden imagery in the novel Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, which was suggested before. Apart from antique and biblical allusions found in fictional representation of London Regent’s Park, where characters of the novel find themselves, there should be also distinguished two up-to-date intellectual contexts. The first one is connected with the discussions of 1910-1920 on selection and eugenics and demonstrates fragility of ‘Self’ of fictional Septimus Smith (and in a similar way of Woolf herself), who appears to be ‘an unhealthy garden species’. The second one brings forth antiwar context of the novel, considering Septimus as a war veteran suffering from shell-shock and representing the whole generation of a broken young men (tree imagery), whose misfortune was the effect of the work of ‘state gardeners’ (a cabinet imagery in the novel).
Key words: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, utopia, selection, eugenics, garden, Regent’s Park.
DOI: 10.18522/1995-0640-2016-4-12-19
References
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References
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Alexander J. The Venture of Form in the Novels of Virginia Woolf. Kennicat Press, 1974. P. 101 – 104.
Hillis Miller J. Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels. Blackwell, 1982.
Jones G. Social Hygiene in Twentieth Century Britain. London, 1986.
Rabbitts P. Regent’s Park. Gloustershire: Amberley Publishing, 2013.
Sassoon S. Diaries 1923-1923 / Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London, 1985.
Scott B.K. In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and a Modernist Uses of Nature. Charlottesville, 2012.
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Wert V.W. The Early Life of Septimus Smith // Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Fall 2012). Pp. 71-89.
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