Mrs Dalloway By Virginia Woolf (Virginia Woolf, Mrs.

Dalloway, (1925)
Society, class and gender
Virginia Woolf offers interesting analysis of social pressure, social class and gender in
Mrs. Dalloway. Understanding Woolf’s message about society demands a certain
amount of sensitivity and decoding on behalf of her reader. Her social criticism in the
text can be easily overlooked because she keeps it subtle and implicit, hidden in the
patterns and courses of her characters’ trains of thoughts. Yet upon such close reading,
the essential importance of conflict between the individual and society in Woolf’s work
becomes clear. While Mrs. Dalloway critiques the mental consequences of socialization,
self-restraint, and the subsequent regret. In fact, “Mrs. Dalloway is in large measure an
examination of a single class and its control over English society” (Zwerdling 70), but
the single scene in which Clarissa meets with Ms. Kilman provides an interesting
insight into her view of the lower classes. Ms. Kilman, a self-made woman who
survives using her own knowledge, judges Mrs. Dalloway’s easy life as the wife to a
prominent politician.