"Moments of being" Elizabeth Dalloway: A study of Virginia Woolf's daughter figures.

This thesis traces the trajectory of a number of Virginia Woolf's daughter figures in their struggle to achieve selfhood. The four chapters of this project thus examine Woolf's early daughter figures, Phyllis and Rosamond, title characters of a 1906 work of short fiction; Rachel Vinrace, the heroine of the 1915 novel The Voyage Out; Elizabeth Dalloway, the daughter of the central figure of Woolf's 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway, and, finally, the various daughter figures of the 1937 novel, The Years: Eleanor, Delia and Rose Pargiter, Kitty Malone, and Peggy Pargiter. The thesis is structured around my close readings of these texts, and is informed by psychoanalytic and feminist theory. The central focus of this project is a study of Elizabeth Dalloway, who I read as Woolf's pre-eminent daughter figure, as this character alone transcends the fixed gender roles which limit each of the other daughter figures studied in this project. I look to Woolf's concept of "moments of being" to explain this character's vision of a future outside of the marriage plot and domestic existence in which her fictional predecessors and successors are inescapably inscribed. My examination of the motifs that recur in each of the texts, particularly images of silence and self-abnegation and of the strained mother-daughter relationship, allows me to analyse the author's revision of the developmental stories of her daughter figures over the course of her career. Moreover, Virginia Woolf's narrative strategies, most particularly the question of closure in Mrs Dalloway, as well as the representation of female characters who defy the standards of conventional femininity, provide insight into Elizabeth Dalloway's position as a figure of affirmation, emancipation and potentiality