The Home and the Self: Constructing Identities in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando

Since the construction of a character includes a multitude of aspects, a variety of topics was considered and analyzed in the work. The first several pages differentiated between the personal and social identity, with the first one being salient in privacy and without an observer and the second one prone to activate in the presence of others, focusing on the notion of roles and social expectations introduced by Erving Goffman and his exploration of the front and the back regions. Following this identity analysis, the very notion of the self and the investigation of the possibility of the multitude of selves was investigated in order to shed light on the construction of Woolf’s characters and the many roles they occupied and how these roles correlated to their person. The approach used in this analysis was to treat the characters with supporting claims from academic papers in the fields of not only literary criticism, but also sociology and psychology. This allowed for an interdisciplinary reading which relied on literary texts and enabled a profound, multifaceted character analysis because characters necessarily represent the spirit of the age and the intentions of their author. Therefore, it was needed to deal with the representation of the ideal woman in Woolf’s period. This woman was then investigated in the light of issues she could have relating to privacy in her home, as her primary lieu of being. Following these observations, a definition of home was given in order to present this entity as not only a physical one, but a social, political, psychological, geographical idea which has great influence upon the creation of identity and personality. After home was analyzed and seen through the prism of Woolf’s main characters, they were posited in the context of being women and under the constant male gaze of the society, which encompassed its surveillance as well. Given the complexities of this topic, this analysis, or rather, representation, offers only a simplified and short insight into Woolf’s heroines and women characters of the early 20th century. Since a more thorough and extensive analysis is needed in order to offer a detailed and insightful conclusion, this thesis will only dare to conclude that women characters in Woolf’s texts were constructed meticulously and dared to challenge the normalized representations of women and their worldviews. It should be noted that this transgression of the norm, as with other Woolf’s critiques, is rather subtle and that Orlando and especially Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay cannot be perceived as embodiments of a radical women’s movement. The beauty with Woolf’s characters and writings lies in the fact that it is possible to observe shadows of these intentions in characters’ thoughts as they struggle to cope with their personal affinities and expectations imposed through societal practices. Woolf’s social status should also be considered as a crucial part in the construction of these representations, since she also explores how her class relates to her writings, aware that she is necessarily biased and privileged in a sense that she can afford to investigate these topics, unattainable to many of her contemporaries. Woolf’s home and Woolf’s characters are therefore affected by her middle-class surrounding and, through the very choice of representing these exact motifs, are as transgressive as they are the norm since they fall in the scope of the expected