earticle

영어

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) problematizes bourgeois housewifery as a condition that puts a married woman like Clarissa Dalloway into a contradictory position in which she is at once a beneficiary of bourgeois institutions and its victim. While housewifery binds her, because she is also dependent on the dominant order and inseparable from it, she is simultaneously an accomplice and a critic. I call this ambivalent condition “bourgeois dissidence,” a concept that Raymond Williams develops to describe the writers’ ambivalent position in the inceptive period of modernism and the avant-garde, which is bourgeois but dissident, and dissident but bourgeois. This dual position is one of the key characteristics of modernists as they strived to counter the orthodox and invent the new. As such, their works contain the potential to develop into politics of wide spectrum— from fascism to communism, from aesthetic conservativism to artistically innovative progressivism, and from solipsism to realism. Clarissa, too, as a modernist figure, occupies this double position in which she is a bourgeois but dissident and a dissident but a bourgeois. Her seeming doubleness contains, like modernism does, the potential to turn into new art, new position, and new politics.