Utopia and Selection in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’

Abstract

The paper develops the author’s interpretation of the garden imagery in the novel Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, which was suggested before. Apart from antique and biblical allusions found in fictional representation of London Regent’s Park, where characters of the novel find themselves, there should be also distinguished two up-to-date intellectual contexts. The first one is connected with the discussions of 1910-1920 on selection and eugenics and demonstrates fragility of ‘Self’ of fictional Septimus Smith (and in a similar way of Woolf herself), who appears to be ‘an unhealthy garden species’. The second one brings forth antiwar context of the novel, considering Septimus as a war veteran suffering from shell-shock and representing the whole generation of a broken young men (tree imagery), whose misfortune was the effect of the work of ‘state gardeners’ (a cabinet imagery in the novel).

Keywords

• Virginia Woolf
• Mrs Dalloway
• utopia
• selection
• eugenics
• garden
• Regent’s Park