Rethinking privacy and publicity: Reading the spatial reflections of gender through Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract

This article deciphers socio-spatial characteristics of the London scene in the early twentieth century. Analyzing excerpts from Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a novel written by one of the prominent modernist and feminist writers, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), the literary space analysis aims to ascertain how the narrative elucidates the relation between assigned gender roles and spatial practices of the protagonist Clarissa Dalloway. Revealing the abundance of socio-spatial information hidden in literary fiction, the three-partite spatial analysis that examines Mrs. Dalloway’s living environment within the contexts of private (domestic) space, public space, and ‘internal’ space highlights new layers of textual meaning. Thus, the study exposes the spatial hints of Woolf that guide readers to understand the confined social position of a high society lady. Touching upon controversial issues that nurtured the private-public dichotomy, the study broadens the discussion of gendered space, discussing Woolfian space as a challenge to patriarchal codes. Excerpts examined throughout the article reveal that the author's critique on unequal power relations between men and women reveals itself in spatial portrayals in the novel. Therefore, scrutinizing Mrs. Dalloway allows rediscovering, reinvestigating, and rethinking privacy and publicity in the early twentieth century through modern fiction.

Keywords

• feminist modernism
• gender and space
• literary space analysis
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Virginia Woolf

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