Materialism In Mrs Dalloway

The Latin-derived term horror vacui translates to “fear of emptiness.” Within literature, the utilization of horror vacui elucidates the human desire to maintain a grasp on the material world in times of adversity or turbulence. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, this fear of existential emptiness is manifested into the characters’ own materialist strategies to cope with it. Whether it be through the accumulation of memories and social clout, physical tokens from the past, or knowledge and exquisite treasures, the characters of these three novels find their own distinct ways to fill the vacui, or void, they feel within themselves. The elderly Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, after whom Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway is named, constantly struggles to balance her internal desires with the material world to which she is bound. The high-society housewife of a Parliamentarian, …show more content…
Equally under threat in the novel is the emotional well-being of Duncan, a young candle factory worker with a sordid past. Formerly imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs for what Waters’s alludes to was an attempted suicide, Duncan re-enters society completely unsure of his place in it. As he tells Fraser, his old cellmate, when the two reconnect years later, “When I came out, everything was different. Everything was changed” (Waters, 2006, p. 98). Devoid of friends upon his release, with the exception of his sister Vivian and Mr. Mundy, a former Wormwood Scrubs prison guard with whom he boards, Duncan’s emptiness stems from a lack of life purpose. His self-worth has been reduced so much throughout the course of his life, whether that be by his disappointed father’s coldness or brother-in-law’s homophobic insults, that he constantly finds himself guessing the motives and feelings of the people who are around