Blurring boundaries: Issues of gender, madness, and identity in Libby Larsen's opera 'Mrs. Dalloway'

Virginia Woolf permeates our culture. Her name and image are claimed and sometimes disclaimed by feminists, modernists, realists, intellectuals, and popular culture. Composer Libby Larsen, however, is the first to set Woolf's works operatically with Mrs. Dalloway (1992).;Although Mrs. Dalloway is not Larsen's most frequently performed opera, its subject matter and musical content offer a wealth of cross-disciplinary avenues for scholars to explore. Literature by such scholars as Mezei, Bowlby, Blanchard, and Ferrer focus on issues such as Woolf's challenging a traditional male literary discourse, coherence through "free indirect discourse," social issues as gender and madness, and Woolf's personal life experiences paralleling her characters and ideas in her novels. In this thesis, I address these issues to further investigate Woolf's portrayals of gender, madness, and identity within Mrs. Dalloway. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).