3.2.2 Dawning of feminism 19

4. Conclusion 20

5. Reference 20

 1. Introduction

    Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928).Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, thought to have been what is now termed bipolar disorder, and committed suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.

    Mrs Dalloway was published on 14 May. 1925. It is a novel written by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post–First World War England. Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister", the novel addresses Clarissa's preparations for a party she will host that evening. With an interior perspective, the story travels forwards and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure. In Mrs Dalloway, all of the action, aside from the flashbacks, takes place on a day in June. It is an example of stream of consciousness storytelling: every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character. 

    This thesis would focus on two main characters, one is Mrs.Dalloway and another is Rezia. Mrs.Dalloway was created as a fifty-year-old socialite lady, who was just recovered from serious illness. In her age, she had her own self-knowledge and self-orientation. Her husband--Mr.Dalloway was a senato, and they had a daughter called Elizabeth. Although Mrs.Dalloway was over fifty years old, she still held the love for her friend and old suitor Peter Welsh, who had just fell in love with a young lady in his fifties.The charm of Mrs.Dalloway was that she could accept herself and hug her own life though she did know she was not perfect, and the changes of her inner world revealed her awakening of feminism.

    Rezia was created as a twenty-four-year-old Italian girl who married a discharged soldier called Septimus who lost his sense after the world war, and she went to England for her husband’s sake. She suffered from the deep loneliness because of her husband’s “mental illness”. ,源Z自+751=文)论(文]网[www.751com.cn Her husband--Septimus, a veteran of World War I who was injured in trench warfare and then suffered from shell shock. Before the war, he was a lover of Shakespeare, but after the war, especially after the death of his friend Evans, he lost the ability of feeling and his inner peace, he was sure that he would be punished by humanity forever, so he had serious mental illness.Therefore, things were hard for Rezia, for she had to take care of her husband to avoid his suicide. The contrastive characterization of Rezia and Mrs.Dalloway revealed that the women should get rid of their traditional role in marriage and society and fight for their own lives.

    Admired first in the era of New Criticism as a supreme formalist writer, Woolf has since been recognized as one of the foundational feminist writers of the twentieth century and as a writer whose works are dynamically engaged with the political, philosophical, historical and materialist issues of her time.And feminism in her master piece Mrs.Dalloway has also been presented,which also has been analyzed by many scholars from different perspectives but not from the loneliness that emerged from the characters. In this novel, Woolf compresses the plots into one day while revealing the major character’s whole life experience. While, the endless loneliness run through the whole novel,the whole life of Mrs.Dalloway.  《达洛卫夫人》中女性角色孤独感及其对女性主义觉醒的促进作用(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_52317.html