Life and the Literary Subject in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

This thesis investigates ways that Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway, explores the effects of modernity on the human subject. Using the controlling theme of construction and deconstruction, the thesis investigates Woolf's view of subjectivity from ontological, linguistic, and political perspectives. Linguistic symbolic order and British social structures both have roots in patriarchy-both strive to define and contro1. Mrs. Dalloway resists such control with both its innovative literary form and its social criticism. Chapter 1 investigates the binaries of social and essential that Woolf assumes are part of human existence, and it demonstrates how Woolf collapses these binaries in the symbolically constructed lives of her characters. Chapter 2 describes the fundamental duality of language. Language has the ability to order a chaotic material existence, yet it is unable to describe emotion and underlying reality. In order to reconcile this duality, Woolf crafts an impressionistic prose that adheres to a loose structure that allows "reality" to shine through. Chapter 3 presents the literary subject as shaped by cultural narratives and inscription on the body by power. Woolf has her characters use these shared narratives to envision and "write" personal realities. The success of the personal narratives in creating agency depends in part on gender and class