Postcolonial Investigation Into Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), an experimental novelist, critic and essayist of the 20th century, has been classified as a major modernist writer, whose great achievements in the innovative fictional techniques no one can deny. During the first three decades after her death, it was believed that Virginia Woolf merely concentrated on creating her own spiritual world. With the appearance of enormous unpublished material of Woolf's writings, the political and social elements in her life and works have begun to be recognized and understood since 1980s.Virgina Woolf's famous novel Mrs. Dalloway was published in 1925. Through introducing Mrs. Dalloway's one day life, it vividly depicts the living conditions of British people after the First World War, especially the upper class. It exposes the malpractice of the British Empire and shows sympathy for the lower-class people. Actually Mrs. Dalloway is a realistic and critical interpretation of political life in Britain particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. Therefore, this novel is closely related to the imperialist politics.This thesis analyzes the political elements of this novel from a postcolonial perspective. It consists of six parts, including four chapters between the introduction and the conclusion.Chapter One gives a brief introduction to the postcolonial theory, mainly including Edward Said's two works, Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, and Gayatri C. Spivak's postcolonial feminism. Said's Orientalism is pointed directly to the Western Empire. We can clearly perceive his insight into the inequality between the Orient and the Occident and his attack on power politics and cultural hegemonism. In Culture and Imperialism, the author refers to all the areas possessing postcoloniality in Asia, Africa and Australia, including China, the semicolonial and semifeudal country. The main idea of Spivak's postcolonial criticism is to reveal the covering and distortion of the image of women in the Third World by colonialism and male-centered power discourse. This chapter is the theoretical basis of this thesis.Chapter Two examines the relationship between the British Empire and its colonies by analyzing the superiority of the imperialists and the image of Indian women in British eyes. The inborn sense of cultural superiority of Englishmen, represented by Peter, Lady Bruton and others, makes them believe that they are more civilized than Indians, so they always think they should control the fate of India. Then the chapter explores the fate of Indian women, represented by Daisy, who are oppressed by both patriarchy and imperialism so that they have no right to speak for themselves and are reduced to an imaginary image, serving as a foil of the powerful empire.Chapter Three tries to expose the oppressive nature of imperialism by analyzing the patriarchal oppression on women and the damage of imperialist war. Both of them are the product of the imperialism, so they reflect that the nature of the imperialism is oppression and aggression. Through analyzing the image of Clarissa, Septimus's wife and Lady Bradshaw, this chapter explores the patriarchal oppression on women. By analyzing the madness of Septimus, it exposes the damage of imperialist war.Chapter Four analyzes the domestic and exotic crisis of the empire by analyzing the aging and failure of some representatives of imperialism including Peter, Lady Bruton and Miss Parry, and further predicts the disillusionment with the British Empire. This chapter analyzes the troubled condition of the British government in India through Peter's failure, and then it reveals the decay of the empire through the aging of the representatives of the old establishments.On the whole, Mrs. Dalloway not only reveals the British Empire's oppression on its colonies, but also predicts the disillusionment with the empire. This thesis tries to analyze this novel from the postcolonial perspective in order to give a new angle of reading Woolf for the domestic Woolf investigation.