Clash of Cultures

Dylan Richards

Throughout history, old and new often clash. The transition can range from a mere inconvenience to matters that people kill each other over. I remember my parents becoming very annoyed when they had to switch from VCR to DVD because Blockbuster stopped renting out VCR cassettes. This, however, pales in comparison to the hundred or so deaths caused by the riots and the subsequent change of government in Egypt over the course of this last month. Although I’m sure somebody was unfortunate enough to die over the change from VCR to DVD. Many paradigm shifts can be seen in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and the clash between an old way of life and a new one can easily be seen.

As Stephen Kern says in The Culture of Time and Space, “The traditional world was rooted in conventions that dictated how an individual should experience his own self, other people, and objects in the world….as the entire world was ordered in discrete and mutually exclusive forms: solid/porous, opaque/transparent, inside/outside, public/private, city/country, noble/common, countryman/foreigner, framed/open, actor/audience, ego/object, and space/time.” (209-210) While little in Mrs. Dalloway is explicitly revealed, the reader can see that the distinction between the old way of life and the new one is clashing. Take for example when a car backfires on Bard street. Mrs. Dalloway comes to the conclusion that it is most likely the Queen in the car, and metaphorically this represents the change in the social stratum that happened around this time. Lower classes on the street mix with middle/upper class like Mrs. Dalloway who at that moment mix with the highest of the nobility.

Mrs. Dalloway’s relationship with her husband and her friend Sally Seton further show the difference between old and new. Mrs. Dalloway says, “…she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet.” (Woolf, 30) Mrs. Dalloway is either still a virgin which means that her marriage was never consummated, or she may feel that her virginity is tied to being in love with her husband, which the reader finds out is not the case. Like the older concept of marriage, love had little to do with upper class marriages. Mrs. Dalloway then realizes that she had been in love, but not with a man. She had been in love with a friend of hers, Sally Seton. This love may have been platonic, but most likely it was homosexual in nature. This represents a newer viewpoint on love, but because Mrs. Dalloway still must deal with older conventions on love and marriage, she hides her true feelings.

The world in which Mrs. Dalloway inhabits is one which changes between the old social norms and new ones. Modern technology, but in particular World War One, changed how people interacted and felt about others and ushered in the modern world. Mrs. Dalloway exhibits the change in culture, both wanting to be free of old conventions but at the same time trapped in them.

Kern, Stephen. "The Nature of Time." The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc. 1925