A Study Of Discipline And Anti-Discipline In Mrs Dalloway

As a mature and well-accepted masterpiece of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Mrs Dalloway (1925) has long been considered as a representative work to show Woolf s talent as a modern writer. In the novel, Woolf not only realizes her original intention to criticize the social system at the most intense, but also vividly unfolds the living conditions and mental states of modern western people under power relations, which fully demonstrate her sensitivity to and deep concern with social system and power operations. Many scholars have studied the theme of social criticism in Mrs Dalloway and most of them focus on the macro level, while fewer scholars have systematically studied the power relations from the micro angle. This thesis directs to approach Mrs Dalloway from the perspective of discipline which is the micro-physics of power put forward by Michel Foucault (1926-1984), so as to disclose the living status of modern western people under discipline and their fate to be disciplined.Since the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, discipline, as a more "humane" means, has become the general formula of domination for the western ruling class to realize its ruling power. Besides, with the emergence of the Panopticon, the panoptic mechanism facilitated and provided powerful guarantee for the implementation of disciplinary power and later with the wide spread of the panoptic mechanisms throughout the whole social body, a disciplinary society was formed. Therefore, modern western people inevitably live in a disciplinary society. As a woman writer who deeply concerns herself with both modern people’s living conditions and power operations, in Mrs Dalloway, Woolf reveals discipline from different perspectives and on different levels, which fully and explicitly shows her sensitivity to and alertness for politics and power relations. Woolf warns modern people that disciplinary power has already successfully penetrated into various aspects of society and become a common phenomenon. While people gradually become more and more obedient under discipline, they also become more and more dependent on it and finally turn out to be puppets of it. Thereby they are doomed to be disciplined.In Mrs Dalloway, discipline is mainly manifested in politics, patriarchal society and technology. Woolf has truly and keenly revealed the phenomena of discipline through those "docile" individuals and formidable authorities in each area. Meanwhile, with he particular sensitivity and alertness, Woolf notices the predicaments imposed by the mysterious disciplinary power and discloses the severe consequences of discipline through those predicaments confronting her characters. Finally, as a social critic who is well positioned to challenge power relations, Woolf also decidedly proposes several possible ways of anti-discipline through her characters. However, Woolf s characters anti-disciplines all end with failure, through which Woolf intends to draw people’s attention to the fact that in this disciplinary society no one can escape from disciplinary power. Even so, their anti-discipline awareness is still progressive which demonstrates not only Woolf’s sensitivity to power relations and her courage to challenge power, but alsc her helplessness on knowing that people are too weak in the face of the formidable disciplinary power and thereby they are fated to be disciplined.