Making a World of Her Own: Affect and Womanhood in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

Abstract:[T]his essay reads how Woolf’s writing allows female subjects— who predominately live and are shaped by upper-middle-class Western society—to confront their representations as women, offering them spaces and moments in which to express themselves while dismantling the anxiety they feel attached to constructed feminine ideals. This confrontation of the feminine self in Woolf’s writing gives a possible answer to her ongoing questions of the unsolved problem of women and writing discussed in her polemic A Room of One’s Own (1929)—the ability to think and live differently to normative rhythms of idealized femininity.