The Concept of Self in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Meditating on the self represented a permanent challenge and need to Virginia Woolf in both life and art. Analysed from this perspective, the characters that animate the world she imagines/remembers are to be seen as reflections/representations of her own search for selfhood, a quest for self-understanding in fact, for it is through writing that Woolf frees herself and keeps a sense of proportions in drawing the boundary between real and unreal, sanity and insanity, life and death. Motto: “Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.” (Samuel Butler) Life and Virginia Woolf co-create a space, Caramagno (qtd. in Fand: 77-78) asserts, in which the self (with its subjectivities, the inner world) and the world beyond the self (the outer, objective world) can exist and where, in fact, they must meet. It is this space of the written discourse that the present paper approaches, with a focus on the parallel and contrastive analysis of the major characters in Mrs Dalloway. The very act of writing represents at times an attempt to escape the real world, or at other times a sort of coming to terms with herself, with her past, memories, longings, fears. Thus, to Woolf writing became a therapy, a means of exploring the existential labyrinth, a way of finding some equilibrium between swings of mood, an exploration of her inner states in the hope of finding a way out of this labyrinth (Fand: 44). “It is this writing that gives me my proportions”, writes Woolf in her diary, pointing out the fact that the written word is her own way of defeating madness which she defines (through the perspective of Sir William Bradshaw, one of Woolf’s voices in Mrs Dalloway) as “not having a sense of proportions” (MD, 107). Her discourses are to be seen as a way of representing herself to herself and to her public as well (Fand, 47). Present in her works as a literary strategy and value, the self is at the heart of Virginia Woolf’s exploration of the characters’ and her own patterns of thought, we, the readers, being offered a glimpse at the interior labyrinth. The novel becomes a way of re-thinking life, of experimenting, of exploring time, space, memory and consciousness, the very concept of self (private and public), with an impact on the creation of identity.