At War with Mothers, Male Ego and their Words: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

This paper concerns the analysis of the female identity in the Western world at the beginning of the  twentieth century as constructed in the works of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing. Focusing the attention  on the collapse of Western societies during the two World Wars, this study highlights the crisis of  traditional patriarchal structures and the resulting emerging of new literary perspectives opposed to this  system. Woolf and Lessing scrutinized the deep impact of social fragmentations on women’s identity by  unveiling the failure of the patriarchal dominant society. Specifically, an attentive reading of the two  novels Mrs Dalloway (1925) and The Golden Notebook (1962), is offered as an example of the de construction of a dominant patriarchal language. The entire analysis is founded on the postulate that  European women constituted for centuries a subculture developed under the shadow of patriarchy, and  that in this context the portrayals offered by Woolf and Lessing should be considered as a significant  achievement for women writing. On the basis of these examinations, it is concluded that the fragmented  female identity drawn by the two authors represents the attempt to dismantle the overwhelming presence  of a predominant patriarchal perspective during the two war times in Western societies.This paper concerns the analysis of the female identity in the Western world at the beginning of the  twentieth century as constructed in the works of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing. Focusing the attention  on the collapse of Western societies during the two World Wars, this study highlights the crisis of  traditional patriarchal structures and the resulting emerging of new literary perspectives opposed to this  system. Woolf and Lessing scrutinized the deep impact of social fragmentations on women’s identity by  unveiling the failure of the patriarchal dominant society. Specifically, an attentive reading of the two  novels Mrs Dalloway (1925) and The Golden Notebook (1962), is offered as an example of the de construction of a dominant patriarchal language. The entire analysis is founded on the postulate that  European women constituted for centuries a subculture developed under the shadow of patriarchy, and  that in this context the portrayals offered by Woolf and Lessing should be considered as a significant  achievement for women writing. On the basis of these examinations, it is concluded that the fragmented  female identity drawn by the two authors represents the attempt to dismantle the overwhelming presence  of a predominant patriarchal perspective during the two war times in Western societies