Contents:
MRS DALLOWAY’S QUE GAY
Several crics, such as Joseph Allen Boone and Ann Ronchetti, have explored the topic of homosexualy Woolf’s Mrs. Some crics view not only Clarissa Dalloway as a “reprsed homosexual victimized by patriarchal cultural, ” but Septim Warren Smh as well (Ronchetti 164).
Acrdg to cric Alex Zwerdlg, “Woolf’s fictn equently picts homosexual and lbian attachments wh sympathy and yet whout special pleadg, ” challengg Victorian sexual prejudic by treatg homosexual characters wh the same “basic digny as sexually nventnal characters” (171). It is possible that the guilt he feels for “lyg” to Lucrezia and the “crime” he nnot remember are the rult of reprsed homosexualy and the guilt for harborg feelgs beyond his ntrol. In her 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, Virgia Woolf fi ntemporary expectatns of genr wh an unfearg portrayal of homosexual relatnships, pecially between Clarissa and Sally and Septim and Evans.
The publitn of sexologist Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversn 1897, whilst suggtg for the first time Victorian medil study that homosexual behavur was the ‘maniftatn of an stct which to [those] persons who posss equently appears natural and normal’[1], unrsred the actualy that ‘ a untry like England […] all our tradns and all our moral ials, as well as the law, are energetilly opposed to every maniftatn of homosexual passn’[2]. Ellis not the existence of a ‘pact social force which on every si nstras the dividual to the paths of heterosexual love’[3], and this study will analyse how Woolf shap, explor and strays om those pathways through Clarissa and Septim’s same-sex teractns, their terptns by the oppose sex, and the prence – or absence – of parenthood, as well as chartg the effect changg femist iologi may have had on the 1925 novel, om the relative erasure of lbianism and femy early studi of homosexualy to ‘post-First World War antifemism’[4] wh the ‘ld[g] of motherhood’[5] the 1920s. As such, Woolf’s cisn to not intify the illns allows a rear to terpret as homosexualy: her ldns towards men, particularly her beg ‘so lm’ and ‘ld […] as an icicle’ (p.