International Colloquium
30 Oct - 1 Nov 2009
Institute of Romance Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

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Hossein Sabouri (University of Tabriz, Iran)
"The Concept of the Abject in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway"

   Concern for women’s rights goes back to the Enlightment tradition when the liberal, egalitararin and reformist ideas of that period began to be extended from the bourgeoisie, peasants and urban laborers to women as well. Later on, new waves of feminism appeared.
    A psychoanalyst and feminist theorist of language and literature, Julia Kristeva is for the third wave’s feminism which seeks to reconceive of identity and difference and their relationship. Reading Kristeva , one sees that traditional notion of a stable , autonomous and unified subject is replaced by a more fluid and multiple notion of the subject; that is , subject in process or subject on trial. In a similar way, a well-known novelist Virginia Woolf ‘s major preoccupation in her fiction is the conception of subject constructed through relationships. Her depiction of female characters completely reveals this conception of subject. I, in her view, is always depicted in relation to other and the endless and interwoven interactions of I/You or self/other construct socio-cultural identity of self. Her novel Mrs. Dalloway plays subtly with the problem of an identity which is multiple and singular, both public and private.
      Clarissa’s intention overlaps with that of Kristeva who is concerned with representations of difference which allow each single individual to express their individuality without being marginalized in a given society. In fact Clarissa, armed with the abject of death, desires to abolish phallocentric and patriarchal laws to which she is prey, to return to the wholeness of the chora.
     This paper aims to apply the key concept of abject to shed light on Virginia Woolf‘s Mrs. Dalloway who shows resistance against marginalization which is women’s fate in patriarchal cultures.

 

Key Words: abject, semiotic, chora, marginalization, maternal, paternal.