<i>Mrs. Dalloway</i> como máquina de guerra. Una introducción

• Main Author: Manuel Asensi Pérez
• Format: Article
• Language: Catalan
• Published: Universitat de Barcelona; Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 2004-01-01
• Series: Lectora: Revista de Dones i Textualitat
• Online Access: http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/lectora/article/view/7084

The purpose of this article is to show why and how Virginia Woolf´s novel is a powerful agency of social intervention which disrupts our programmed capacity to read and to look. Manuel Asensi discusses four elements of the context in which it was written; The period of writing and publishing, between 1922 and 1925, a time of vanguardisms; the influence of the Bloomsbury group; the outbreak of the First World War, which situated this pacifist group in a marginal position; and the biological condition of Woolf, being not only a woman, but one who suffered from a psychological disorder. Secondly, the article proposes an analysis of the novel´s characters in three groups; those who delimit the territory; others who represent lines of escape and, finally, Clarissa, who finds herself somewhere in between. A difficult position, since she does not know where she belongs; at the same time he is both inside an outside of the order.