Redeeming Fragmented Self:Trauma Writing In Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf is one of the most renowned female English writers in the early 20th century.As a literary critic and representative of the stream-of-consciousness writing technique,her works break through the boundary of traditional narrative and focus on the inner feeling of individuals.Mrs.Dalloway,published in 1925,is deemed as one of her most accomplished novels.The setting of the novel is postwar England.It depicts an ordinary day in the life of Mrs.Dalloway,an upper-class hostess and traces the life of Septimus Smith,the shell-shocked war veteran.The novel reflects the struggle of postwar life in London and exposes the cruelty of war and the havoc it has wrecked on civilians.This thesis approaches the novel from the perspective of trauma theory.After analyzing the trauma of both the shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Smith and the female protagonist Mrs.Dalloway,the thesis moves on to explore the personal trauma of Virginia Woolf and the impact of WWI on Woolf.Analyzing Mrs.Dalloway under the framework of trauma theory,this thesis is to show that Virginia Woolf's writing of Mrs.Dalloway is a tentative attempt to deal with her personal trauma in the context of historical events following WWI.She sees that the historical causes of the traumatizing war—together with the reaction to such trauma—are consubstantial to a patriarchal society.The thesis argues that the trauma of fictional characters in the novel is an artistic representation of Woolf's personal trauma.For Woolf,writing is healing,and the redeeming of her fragmented self.Meanwhile,the novel decries the oppression of women in the patriarchal society and denounces the ruling class which tries to downplay the war trauma so as to consolidate its domination.