Mrs Dalloway As a War Machine. An Introduction

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to show why and how Virginia Woolf’s novel is a powerful agency of social intervention which disrupts our programmed capacity to read and to look. Manuel Asensi discusses four elements of the context in which it was written. The period of writing and publishing, between 1922 and 1925, a time of avant-gardisms; the influence of the Bloomsbury group; the outbreak of the First World War, which situated this pacifist group in a marginal position; and the biological condition of Woolf, being not only a woman, but one who suffered from a psychological disorder. Secondly, the article proposes an analysis of the novel’s characters in three groups; those who delimit the territory; others who represent lines of escape and, finally, Clarissa, who finds herself somewhere in between. A difficult position, since she does not know where she belongs; at the same time that she is both inside and outside of the order.