Only Connect: An Intertextual Study Of Mrs. Dalloway And The Middle Ground

In spite of living in different times and worshipping disparate aesthetics, Virginia Woolf and Margaret Drabble, as two highly-esteemed women writers in English literary heritage, seem to have reached a consensus in the in-depth exploration of split perspectives of mid-aged women in Mrs. Dalloway and The Middle Ground respectively. Drabble's deliberate contrivance of a modern hostess Kate Armstrong and her Woolfian party in the context of contemporary England has undoubtedly drawn inspiration from Woolf's classic protagonist Clarissa Dalloway and has made a parody of her. In The Middle Ground, Drabble has also inherited her predecessor's stream-of-consciousness writing features and fashioned them into her own style by dint of the juxtaposition of multiple interior monologues to highlight the subjectivity and spatiality of narrative. In addition to the intertextual relationship between Mrs. Dalloway and The Middle Ground, nostalgia with past literary works respectively should further shorten the disparity between the two works, for both Woolf and Drabble have been highly literary and allusive writers, their pleasing perverseness lies in their employment of the past and literature.The intricate connection between the two novels has been observed and discussed by a few critics both at home and abroad, but has not been systematically analyzed yet. For this reason, this thesis attempts to carry out an intertextual study of Mrs. Dalloway and The Middle Ground within the framework Julia Kristeva's intertextuality theory and with the inspiration of E. M. Forster's renowned epigraph"Only Connect"as the thematic thread. Furthermore, it is divided into three chapters in correspondence with the intertextual relationship between them with respect to characters, structures and writing techniques in hope of filling in the blanks.