GENDERED GEOGRAPHIES OF POWER

This paper poses a parallel analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, two novels set in London around the First World War that complement one another with regard to representation of women in the city. In focus are Woolf’s and Rhys’s heroines who belong different social classes. With a view to producing a fuller picture of the London strata of the time, the essay concentrates on a dual front: it examines the position the protagonists enjoy in respect to their gender as well as in respect to their social status. While Rhys’s Anna is a young woman from a distant colony, that is an outsider with no permanent residence in London, Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, however seemingly privileged, is greatly disadvantaged by her restricted experience of the metropolis. The essay argues that in these two novels London is a source of double marginalisation – a city unjust to the colonial subjects but unjust to women of all strata. As a theoretical background, the essay uses the concept of gendered geographies of power, which are supposed to help us reveal how different power structures affect the cityscape on both macro and micro level.