Romancing the Feminine: Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse

Abstract

In Mrs Dalloway, the traces remain of the female collectivity of authorship of Jacob’s Room. In the opening sections, the consciousness of Mrs Dalloway is linked with that of a series of other women (nearly all mothers) through the image of the rose, which functions frequently in Woolf’s writing as an image of female sexuality and creativity. These women have little in common save their possession of this image/emblem, which is given a distinctive stamp, nonetheless, in connexion with each. Mrs Dalloway’s roses are viewed by her in terms which anticipate our knowledge of her narrow bed and ‘tight stretched’ sheets — ‘how fresh, like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays, the roses looked’.¹ The roses of the prostitute ‘Shawled Moll Pratt’ are in contrast equated with ‘the price of a pot of beer’ (MD, p. 23), while working-class Mrs Dempster craves ‘the kiss of pity’ from a young girl in compensation for her loss of attractiveness and sensuality:

For it’s been a hard life, thought Mrs Dempster. What hadn’t she given to it? Roses; figure; her feet too. (She drew the knobbed lumps beneath her skirt.)