At War with Mothers, Male Ego and their Words: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
Abstract
This paper concerns the analysis of the female identity in the Western world at the beginning of the twentieth century as constructed in the works of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing. Focusing the attention on the collapse of Western societies during the two World Wars, this study highlights the crisis of traditional patriarchal structures and the resulting emerging of new literary perspectives opposed to this system. Woolf and Lessing scrutinized the deep impact of social fragmentations on women’s identity by unveiling the failure of the patriarchal dominant society. Specifically, an attentive reading of the two novels Mrs Dalloway (1925) and The Golden Notebook (1962), is offered as an example of the de construction of a dominant patriarchal language. The entire analysis is founded on the postulate that European women constituted for centuries a subculture developed under the shadow of patriarchy, and that in this context the portrayals offered by Woolf and Lessing should be considered as a significant achievement for women writing. On the basis of these examinations, it is concluded that the fragmented female identity drawn by the two authors represents the attempt to dismantle the overwhelming presence of a predominant patriarchal perspective during the two war times in Western societies.
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References
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