Shopping and Social Inequality in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

Introduction: Shopping as Social Critique in Mrs. Dalloway

Although published nearly ninety years ago, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway continues to fascinate literary critics with the subtleties of its plot, themes, motifs, and the complexity of its characters. Literary scholars and students have investigated various aspects of the novel, Woolf's literary genre, and the role of women in British society in the early twentieth century as reflected in Mrs. Dalloway. Some of the themes explored in the novel include privacy, disillusionment with the British Empire, women's rights, female sexuality, and social inequality. In the last few decades, scholars have begun to pay greater attention to the question of "market" and consumer culture as critiqued by Woolf. This line of inquiry has offered students of Woolf's work a new venue for discussion, analysis, and understanding of Mrs. Dalloway.

Indeed, one of the interesting features of the novel is its use of "shopping" as an activity that tells broader stories about society and the characters involved. Closer reading of the novel and recent scholarly analysis suggests that Clarissa Dalloway, the main protagonist, and Doris Kilman (Miss Kilman), a woman whom Clarissa despises, represent Woolf's conflicting views on consumer culture. The shopping excursions of these two women in Mrs. Dalloway reflect these conflicting views.

Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that her intention in Mrs. Dalloway was, as she put it, "to give life and death, sanity and insanity: I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most intense" (cited in Rachman 4). She struggled with bipolarity and attempted to express that experience in the novel. She also held a complicated view on many social issues, including mass consumerism. Woolf was an upper-middle-class woman who appreciated the market as an integral feature of modernity, but she became increasingly critical of mass consumerism later in her life. She sought to convey this complicated and conflicted perspective through the characters of Clarissa Dalloway and Miss Kilman. The two women despise each other, though it is narrated that Clarissa only "hates the idea" of Miss Kilman (Woolf 14). Clarissa enjoys consumerism through shopping, maintaining an elegant appearance, and throwing parties, while Miss Kilman is a victim of mass consumerism's callousness. By presenting these two characters — polar opposites of each other — Woolf expresses her bipolarity and her conflicted view on the value of the market economy.

According to Wicke, Bloomsbury — the area of London where the story takes place — represents modernity as Woolf understood it. "Bloomsbury," she argues, "can be seen as an invented community, in intention almost a utopia of and for consumption . . . indubitably associated with socioeconomics" (6). Wicke draws a parallel between the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes and the literary imagery of Woolf, both viewing the market as an "aesthetic phenomenon." Wicke contends that Mrs. Dalloway "is a head-on collision with class and its minute determinants. In addition, though, it can be read as an extraordinary rendition of the micro-complications of 'the market,' a market shot through with desire, memory, global history and national tradition, sex, loss, and shopping" (13).

Bloomsbury, Modernity, and the Market

Shopping for Woolf is no small matter. It is a reflection of economics and social realities, and its significance is underscored by the fact that shopping is among the primary activities in the novel. Almost everyone goes shopping, but their excursions reveal differences in social status throughout Bloomsbury.

The importance of shopping is emphasized in the opening pages of the novel, where Clarissa Dalloway declares that she "would buy the flowers herself" (Woolf 3). She notes that the servants might be busy with other activities — which are certainly important — but buying flowers is a leisure activity she enjoys doing herself. As soon as she embarks on her excursion, Clarissa recalls how, as an eighteen-year-old, she used to converse with Peter Walsh in the pristine morning air of Bourton, her girlhood home. Shopping brings pleasant flashbacks from the past. While enjoyment is an integral part of shopping, she also views it as a venue through which to express her status in society. She goes out to buy flowers and gloves — consumer goods that upper-middle-class women could afford and saw as symbols of their difference from lower-class women.

As Wicke explains, "Clarissa Dalloway has a privileged relation to the metropolitan market because of her status within consumption." She further elaborates: "Clarissa tentatively and tenuously reverses the disenchantment of the world characteristic of modernity by the generosity of her gendered acts of consumption, where consumption is reformulated as the nature of the gift" (18). It might be argued, then, that the market, shopping, and consumerism are legitimized through the character of Clarissa Dalloway.

Clarissa Dalloway's Shopping Excursion

Paradoxically, however, the shopping excursion also brings death to Clarissa's mind. The idea of death has haunted her since childhood. Her pleasant flashbacks are interrupted by the thought of it: "Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other" (Woolf 11). These thoughts come and go, reminding the reader of the intermittency of her life and her enjoyment. It should also be noted that "death" is used in multiple senses throughout the novel — sometimes referring to actual physical death, and at other times to the end of something important such as love. Later, in her reflections on Sally Seton and their mutual attraction, Clarissa uses the metaphor of death to describe her inability to sustain that relationship, as she truly loved Sally and, in her truest self, was a lesbian.

Clarissa's attitude toward shopping and her experience on the excursion represent only one side of Woolf's analysis and critique of the market. As Simpson argues, Woolf often contended that women's right to earn money was liberating. It allowed women to express themselves, brought changed perceptions of the world, and freed them from the "need to charm and allure men." In that sense, Woolf supported the capitalist market as a force empowering women. At the same time, "participation in capitalist market economies also signals a complicity in a patriarchal system, a system that Woolf sees as tyrannous and as operating in a way similar to a European Fascist state. She describes middle-class women's engagement with capitalist economics as being caught 'between the devil and the deep blue sea'" (Simpson 19).

Woolf also emphasized that "the exchange of commodities in a capitalist economy and the exchange of women in a patriarchal sexual economy are interrelated" (Simpson 19). One can thus perceive the shallowness of upper-middle-class women who spend extravagantly — shopping not for the sake of consumption but for the purpose of demonstrating their elitism. More importantly, there is a cruel dimension of the capitalist economy that treats women like Miss Kilman as though she is a non-entity, a non-person.

In his discussion of Miss Kilman's purchase of a petticoat, Abbott offers an extensive analysis of the significance of shopping. He notes that, in her writings, "Woolf reveals a fascination/repulsion with shopping and with the potential power of consumerism over the individual" (196). He also observes that while department store spaces in Mrs. Dalloway offered female consumers seemingly limitless opportunities for pleasure, even Clarissa Dalloway begins to feel an aversion to shopping because of the "massness" of public places. Shopping also functions as a pressure exerted by upper-middle-class society, forcing women to appear elegant and fashionable and compelling them to sacrifice some of their freedom and independence. With the exception of Miss Kilman, who needs to buy a petticoat out of necessity, no other character in the novel is in genuine need of purchasing anything. Clarissa, her daughter Elizabeth, and others shop for luxury and to demonstrate their "superior" social status. The irony is that Clarissa's shopping excursion reinforces her "superior" position while simultaneously limiting her independence and freedom.

Conclusion: Woolf's Conflicted View of Consumer Society

This focused analysis of the theme of shopping does not, of course, mean that everything in Mrs. Dalloway revolves around consumerism and shopping. The novel addresses numerous other issues and critiques the social injustices of British society in the 1920s. The analysis of shopping is important on two grounds, however. First, shopping is often regarded as a trivial matter — an activity everyone engages in to buy necessities or spend leisure time. But Woolf demonstrates that shopping can reveal the complexities of social inequality and that it is inextricably linked to politics, culture, social stratification, and gender. Second, Woolf suggests that consumerism is not the root of all evil. Consumer society offers women opportunities to reclaim their position as fully-fledged citizens, to empower themselves, and to express their opinions freely. At the same time, consumerism is cruel and serves as a tool of patriarchal oppression.