From Opposition To Symbiosis: Analysis Of Dualities In Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

As one of the most prominent representatives of modernists, Virginia Woolf has long been at the center of literary criticism. Critics have studied Woolf and her works from the perspective of feminism, modernism or psychoanalysis, and many scholars have studied her writing techniques. Among all the studies, the study of dualities in Woolf s works has always drawn the attention of critics. Published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway is perhaps Woolf s best known work in which some binary oppositions are clearly shown.Binary opposition is one of the most salient features of Western culture and philosophy, and it helps us to shape the entire world-views and to mark differences in an otherwise unorganized universe. From a young age we subconsciously conform to binary oppositions without even knowing them, and even as adults we continue to create these oppositions in our minds with everything we are presented with. This occurs because people have the tendency to assign values to each of the pairs, creating a type of hidden hierarchy within society. Some of the binary oppositions, such as man/woman, life/death, external self/internal self and sanity/insanity are deeply explored in Woolf s Mrs Dalloway. Due to the limitation of the writer's knowledge and time, this thesis just tentatively analyzes the first three, leaving out the last one.Chapter One discusses the basic duality that has affected our society today-that of male vs. female, because Western philosophy and literary thoughts are and have always been caught up in this endless series of hierarchical binary oppositions that always in the end come back to the fundamental "couple" of male/female. When one examines the male and female pair on its own, one will immediately nurture the idea of gender roles. We tend to see the female as fragile, emotional, and the protector of children whereas the male is strong, powerful, and the ruler of the house. Through her representation of male and female characters in Mrs Dalloway, Woolf deals with the world of patriarchal politics and culture in which masculine modes of authority and knowledge separate and categorize all human beings. Through her conventional male characters, Woolf reveals the cultural values which perpetuate the dominance and power of patriarchy in society, while the female characters are oppressed by the patriarchal hegemony in different kinds of forms. However, all the characters, male as well as female, strive to seek a dynamic balance to keep the marriage together and the society stable.Chapter Two analyzes the duality of life and death which has always been at the centre of people's concern and the fear of death as well as the desire to live has baffled many people. The relationship between life and death is a central theme in Woolf's writing. For Virginia Woolf, death creates meaning in life, and without death there would be nothing to cherish and nothing to live for, whereas life is a sense of alienation and a journey in search of meaning. When the characters fail to communicate in life, death becomes an attempt to achieve real communication as indicated in the novel. As the beginning and the end, life and death form a painful circle of which no one can jump out. Death threats people as the end of life, but it also attracts people as the end of alienation and the solution to the troubles of life. Thus Woolf succeeds in transcending the boundary between life and death by revealing the fact that life is not always positive while death negative: life sometimes means struggle and trouble, and death suggests rest and communication.Chapter Three deals with the characters' conscious life which is popular among modernist writers. Analyzing the fragmented self is one of the characteristics of modernist writing, as Woolf does in Mrs Dalloway. She attempts to explore her characters' inner consciousness as well as the external self. As an influential philosopher of Woolf's contemporary, Henri Bergson writes a great deal about the dichotomy of the self, and his theory helps us understand the complexity of the internal and helps emphasize Woolf's belief that the internal is indispensable in our life. However, Woolf also acknowledges the importance and the necessity of the external world in a distinctive way. To live and thrive, one needs the symbiosis of the external and internal aspects of the self. Although the internal is probably more important to her than the external, they must work together and coexist within each of us in order to achieve the cohesive, complete self.Three chapters as well as a brief introduction and a conclusion contribute to the analysis of dualities in Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway. By revealing the dualities of man and woman, life and death, the internal self and the external self, Woolf shows that, in each pair of duality, the two sides are not always in opposite positions, they exist interdependently and complementarily to each other. Only when a dynamic balance is achieved, can they coexist with each other.