Portrayal of the 20th century woman as seen through Edith and Clarissa in Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract

The late 19th and early 20th centuries in western society saw a fascinating change in the field of arts. Poets and authors shifted the attention to the newly emerging industrial world. This work will be an in-depth study of the effect of the choices made by the protagonists Clarissa Dalloway and Edith Hope in the novels Mrs. Dalloway and Hotel du Lac respectively. These two characters might seem to be similar with similar backgrounds, are close in age, and also belong to similar classes in society. However, the choices they had made in the past caught up with them. Both these women consider the circumstances of their condition in society and try to understand what could have happened if they had made different choices. The stream-of-consciousness narrative helps portray the isolation and despair. This study will take guidance from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, in the discussion regarding women facing the pressures of social expectations and having to behave in a specific manner. The two novels portray the struggles the protagonists face to create a place for themselves in their domestic and social spheres and ‘be a woman.’ This study is divided into four chapters, which will explain how the two authors portray similar concepts in completely different manners.