Mrs. Dalloway And To The Lighthouse: An Analysis

Pocket Knives and Sympathy: An Analysis of Modernist Male Anxieties Modernism is rife with experimentation and the challenging of norms as a way to experience the new world that is emerging post-war and post-Victorian Era. The majority of modernist authors wrote modernist novels to experiment with new forms and challenge the old ways of the traditional novel. Virginia Woolf experimented with form, but most importantly she used her novels as a platform to challenge the gender system that was in place. Both of her extremely influential novels Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse contains a central male character that represents the patriarchy and the old ways in which men of the 20th century are set in. Woolf crafts these two novels displaying …show more content…
Dalloway. Peter Walsh’s anxieties may be similar to Mr. Ramsay’s anxieties, yet they are wholly different. Peter’s anxieties stem partly from his frustrations of his relationship with Clarissa Dalloway. After experiencing rejection of his proposal for marriage to Clarissa, Peter has been unable to find another woman to marry. In the novel during times of high emotion for Peter, he takes his pocket knife out of his pocket and plays with the blade, or he fingers the pocket knife in his pocket. These images are violent and phallic and are interpreted as one or the other or both. When speaking with Clarissa after not seeing her for several years, “he took out his knife quite openly” (Woolf 44). When frustrated, Peter removes himself emotionally from the situation and uses the pocket knife as a placeholder and conduit for his sexual frustrations and violent thoughts. Readers may believe that this is an isolated incident with Clarissa and not a look into the bigger picture of Peter’s inability to sanction the emergence of modern women and promote their growth. During second incident, Peter watches a young woman he does not know from across the street. After spotting the young woman and “stealthily fingering his pocket-knife” (Woolf 52-53), he begins to follow the woman. He crafts a fantasy of this woman, attempting to make her into the woman he wants, which is an angel. Peter begins to imagine that …show more content…
Dalloway, the war was an agent in both of these novels, as it physically changed the characters and their resolve. Clarissa survived the influenza epidemic after the war which weakened her person, yet her resolve remained strong. Seemingly having arisen from the ashes of her sickness, Clarissa became a modern woman after the war and the pandemic. These two novels follow the same stream of political and social thought. Virginia Woolf believes in the modern woman, which is the reason for the large amount of strong, self-sufficient women in the texts. The male characters in the text that harvest their anger, anxieties and frustrations towards women are eventually thwarted in the texts as the women succeed in their initial goals without the help or deterrent of male negativity. Clarissa Dalloway hosts a successful dinner party, and Lily Briscoe finishes her painting. Woolf’s perspective towards these particular endings for Mrs. Dalloway and Ms. Briscoe is to reassure the reader of the overall outcome of women in the future, female success in life and society without the inhibition of male anxiety attempting to bring them down. In To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Mr. Ramsay and Peter Walsh depend on women to provide them with every need, reaction or emotion wanted, however with the war’s impact, the new modern woman emerging, and the world itself changing, the anxieties shown by these men are an indicator of an inability and a