The Consumer Culture In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is one of her most representative works. The story happens within one day with the beginning of the female character’s determination of buying a flower. It sets the tone of the description of consumption. In fact, the consumer culture and consumerism has received scholarly attention in a few main forms over the past couple of decades. Thus, studying the consumer culture in this novel can provide a different way to analyze its motif and meaning. This thesis will mainly use Thorstein Veblen’s term "conspicuous consumption" in his The Theory of the Leisure Class and Ceorg Lukacs’ explanation of "reification" in his History and Class Consciousness to probe into those consumption phenomena in this novel from economic and social aspects and also discuss the influence of consumption on female customers.The main body of the present research is divided into the following three parts:The first part begins with the research of consumption on the leisure class such as Clarissa, lady Bruton and Sir William who are the major characters described in this novel. Actually they constitute the major part of customers in Britain in the 1920s. In this novel their conspicuous consumption is very noticeable for their luxurious parties and pecuniary standard of living can be taken as the best examples. By use of Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption, this thesis presents the fact of their way of consumption. The function of conspicuous consumption is just to maintain their social status and consolidate their power.The part that follows tends to study the phenomena of reification. In this novel, it is the reifying of social relations to the degree that the essence of social relations is replaced by the relations between traded goods. In Mrs Dalloway, set in the capitalist market, people’s attention on commodities obscures those exploitative relations between people like Sir William and Septimus and also between nations such as Britain and India. Setting her protagonists in this consumer society, Woolf more or less shows out her critical contemplation on consumption. But she has her limitation to dig out the nature of these relations which are concealed in the form of commodities. This thesis endeavors to employ Lukacs’theory of reification to find out the truth of exploitation in capitalist social system to individuals and to other nations in Mrs Dalloway through consumption.Then the next part will mainly focus on the analysis of female customers in the consumption society. Nearly every female character in Mrs Dalloway is customers. Woolf, the author of this novel, is also a woman who has deep feelings for shopping. She purposely portrays two paralleled female characters in the market in Mrs Dalloway. Clarissa regains herself through shopping while Kilman loses herself in face of commodities. In light of their different class attributes, they display themselves in different ways. Thus, to figure out the reason behind their behaviors is very significant.Finally, this thesis concludes the facts behind those consumption phenonmena such as its function, the essence of social relation behind it, and the reason for differenct reaction to it; then extends the discussion on Woolf’s attitude towards consumption. She is ambivalent because indeed she has sympathy for the suffering of the poor, but not with much satire on the upper class which she belongs to.