Keep Out the War: Neo-Marxist Perspectives on Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway

This study is an analysis of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway as a critique of the bourgeois ideological structures in post-World War I England. The study proposes that the fragmentation and emptiness that characterize the lives of the characters are not merely personal or psychological, but are materially produced by the contradictions of late capitalist society and the ideological exhaustion of its cultural forms. The majority of the novel's readings have centered on Clarissa Dalloway's individual crisis, the juxtaposition of her life with Septimus Smith's insanity, or the novel's modernist experimentation. These readings do not offer an understanding of the material and ideological conditions that generate the moral and psychological dilemmas faced by the bourgeois subject. This study has posed three questions, how Mrs Dalloway represents the manner in which bourgeois economic and ideological structures shape and distort consciousness? In what forms does the novel's vision of fragmentation echo the ideological contradictions generated by capitalist society? Why does the novel portray bourgeois culture as empty and self-destructive? Hence, the Neo-Marxist approach is used as an analytical tool. The main theorists examined in this study are Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser and Theodor Adorno. Gramsci reveals that the bourgeois authority is maintained through the cultural hegemony rather than through the brute force (Gramsci 12). Althusser reflects on the role of ideological state apparatuses in shaping consciousness (Althusser 85). Adorno exposes how bourgeois culture generates its own negation (Adorno 98). The textual analysis of the novel indicates that Clarissa's investment in bourgeois values of respectability, parties and social order makes her a figure of compromised consciousness. Septimus Smith is a war veteran suffering from shell shock. He stands for the return of all that bourgeois society has repressed. The conclusion is that Woolf depicts bourgeois culture as a system that produces its own destruction, leaving a void and the impossibility of authentic human connection.