New Historicism Literary Criticism Fiction

¶ … seeds of gender equality, however elusive such a thing may continue to be, were surely planted by the frustration of women confined to the roles crafted by longstanding patriarchy. Herein, women inclined toward any level of independent thought or transcendent desire were stunted by the obligations of sociological appropriateness. Women were strictly daughters, wives and mothers. Certainly, in a world were men pontificated abstractly, while affording little time for emotional intimacy with family, women were the cross-bearers of domestic responsibility and the perpetuation of love. There was little time or space beyond that in which a woman could propose to be herself, thinking and acting upon her own desires. Virginia Woolf's work invited a new perspective of the individual woman both in times of male-dominated stagnancy and self-guided metamorphosis. One of Woolf's first watershed devices was the very simple assertion of a female protagonist, or as is the case in some of her most significant works, multiple female protagonists, whose willful uniqueness highlighted an otherwise dull and superficial universe. But more importantly, she approached her heroines from an inside out perspective. It is consistently the mind and its inner-workings that Woolf provides focus on when designing the female role-models littering her literature. That time and space, which women overcome by the burdens of patriarchal society found so elusive, was plenteous and well utilized within the confines of the mind. In "Mrs. Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse," Woolf contrasts two pairs of women who, while serving as archetypal antitheses on an outwardly societal level, were remarkably similar in their tenacious pursuit of individualism within their respective theatres. To the left, Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Killman have chosen consciously and outwardly to live by their own rules, thus defining them as individuals while, across the spectrum, Mrs. Ramsey and Clarissa Dalloway are very much subjects to the demands of society but inclined to express their individualism without violating the regulations incurred thereof. Woolf uses these variously strong and proud women to illustrate that, through exertion of a well-defined and independent personality, there are many ways to succeed in establishing individualism.