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A Glimpse of the Great Mother in Mrs. Dalloway
In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf may be criticizing a male society that has been placed over top of what could have been an originally female-centered egalitarian society. In this story of matriarchy hidden behind patriarchy we see paganism versus civilization, cyclical time versus linear time, and true reality versus the appearances of reality. In each of these opposites, we see the female aspects hidden behind or even beneath the male aspects of life.
Woolf gives us a surface world based on the appearances of reality. It is a story of how one group of people lives their lives within a social world. The story underneath the surface is one of human beings constantly questioning a reality that doesn’t always feel comfortable to them.
Her critique of that society is based on the mixing of an ancient perhaps mythological idea of mother rule, and the masculine worldview they currently live in. The constant shifts between these worlds show the possibility that what modern society has created is killing all of us.
The older matriarchal but egalitarian world was based on a life lived in respect rather than fear. In this world we won’t see life destroyed by life in the way that Clarissa sees her “own sister killed by a falling tree…a girl on the verge of life,” (78) felled before her time. Human beings lived with an…
