Freedom
and Alienation of Women as Seen in The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway
“Mrs
Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” She is presented
as a vibrant woman with a jolly spirit, enthused over every little
task which constitutes her day. She is agreeable with anyone she
meets.
Laura
is trapped in a life of a perfect hostess. A perfect hostess
prescribed by Farnham & Lundberg’s book Modern
Woman: The Lost Sex,
published in 1942; from which stem the abhorrent word ‘femininity’.
It is abhorrent in today’s society because back then, in the 50s,
it stood for an obedient housewife who raises children, does the
housework ever so cheerfully, completely disinterested in any field
of knowledge, let alone one in which she could be politically active.
Due to the prosperity of the 1950’s, men were massively employed
and their definition of happiness was to have an obedient wife who
rears their children. When Laura’s husband came home, she greeted
him with a birthday cake, and during the supper he described the
scene as complete happiness; “this”, an obedient and cheerful
wife, beautified for the sole purpose of pleasuring his senses, calm
and modest, with his children – in this case – his son. A son who
grew up to be a poet, as Laura left her husband and kids after her
deliverance of the second child. She escaped to Canada in order to
work. She escaped the mundanity of her life in order to develop at
some profession. That mundanity is fatal due to the fact that every
obligation they have to fulfill does not require any sort of adult
brain usage. Inevitably, depression comes forth and takes hold of the
“perfect hostess” which leads her to suicidal thoughts or plans
for an escape which are both present in the movie, with the addition
of an attempt of suicide.
Betty
Friedan ran a scientific study in which she examined the life of 28
women, trying to find at least one who felt fulfilled as a full time
housewife. She found none. What she did find was the following:
“Sixteen
out of the 28 were in analysis or analytical psychotherapy. Eighteen
were taking tranquilizers; several had tried suicide; and some had
been hospitalized for varying periods, for depression or vaguely
diagnosed psychotic states. (You’d be surprised at the number of
these happy suburban wives who simply go berserk one night, and run
shrieking through the street without any clothes on,’ said the
local doctor, not a psychiatrist, who had been called in, in such
emergencies) ... Twelve were engaged in extramarital affairs in fact
or in fantasy.”
The
question is, as she puts it: “What made these women go home again?”
By and large, it was the propaganda. But how did it work? It was set
up first and foremost in the education system. Through high school
and college, women were taught how to be feminine, they were made to
believe that their sole purpose in this world is to support their
husbands and bear children. It included a panoply of colourful
choices, for example, choosing the blinds, or furnishing their
kitchen which was made, again, the centre of their lives; which was
the goal of the propagators of ‘femininity’. The only outdoor
activity those women had was going shopping or chauffeuring their
children or going to a social event in the role of their husband’s
companion. In socializing with other women, they would talk about the
problems with their children, and what is far more significant, how
to make their husbands happier. At that time, men were the movers of
the economy, and in order to make them as efficient as possible, they
needed a stable, happy, secure, cosy home. All these qualities of a
home are provided by the “feminine” perfect housewife.
Intrinsically, this makes the woman a commodity, a tool for building
and sustaining the current economic political system which was, and
still is, capitalism. Capitalism depends on the reproduction of the
relations of production. The relations of production are the
processes of buying and selling. The way to reproduce these relations
is by means of propaganda which includes advertising and built in
propagation in all ideological state apparatuses (education, family,
church, media...). Women were kept convinced that every attempt or
even thought of independence or self actualization in a profession is
a threat to their “femininity”. The most single important goal of
a girl was to get married, and live a life of a housewife. That is
what Laura succeeded in doing. In the movie, we do not see a
particular desire for a profession, but there emerges something far
greater, a pivotal motive for any action; freedom. This sentiment, a
feeling, is provoked by her reading of Mrs Dalloway. Virginia has the
same problem; a desire for freedom. Clarissa has the socially defined
freedom, but lacks the feeling of “living in the moment”.
Supposedly, you are alive as much as your senses can take in and your
mind can gather that of the beautiful.
“Suppose
any of the gentlemen had seen?” Sally running along the passage
naked. Suppose men had seen her free. What would they make of it?
Would they resent it, hate it, or be afraid of it? Why is it that
fearlessness strikes utmost fear? Why do men fear free women, and
women fear, what? The cost of freedom or men’s retribution? Sally
Seton was a “free spirit”, a witty, energetic girl who would
always go about making her way. She kissed Clarissa on the terrace,
giving her the most exquisite moment of her whole life. Then, this
moment of happiness, Clarissa’s moment of happiness, was
interrupted by a man.
If
women fit into the role set by patriarchy, they are unavoidably
alienated. Alienation is divergence from the true self.
If
Virginia Wolf wrote this novel for which none superlative or praise is
enough, she could not have been in any circumstance or definition
alienated from herself. She loved London; she missed it in the
country where she was bored to death; later suffocated by that same
lack of vibrancy only a city can enable. Nature by itself is not
enough; not merely enough. We need
people around us. We need communication, exchange of emotions. And
lastlsy, and foremost, we need friends. We breathe friendship.
Romance is just an afrodiziac.
What
makes companionship possible is nature; we have to be ourselves; we
have to be authentic in order to have and experience joy of contact.
Virginia had no one to talk to; had no one share her feelings with.
As shown in the movie, she did not love her husband to that end of
happiness. He was merely her supporter, but trapped in convention. He
was regulating Virginia’s behaviour as prescribed by her
psychiatrists. For what purpose was she kept strain? Evidently for
her to be “normal”, not to deviate from the majority, and that
majority has never been healthy. Otherwise, the world would be in
order.
In
order to make someone liable to convention, they have to blackmail
them with acceptance and label every natural and authentic trait or
move or behaviour as unacceptable. Capitalist patriarchy achieves it
most effectively. Everything is subdued to profit, and all things
holy become profane, an all things profane become holy. Every value
of a thriving, highly developed civilization and culture is turned
upside down, and is perverted into fuel for sustaining capitalism.
They
say that humans are creatures of habit. Virginia Woolf summarized the
whole human existence with just one sentence: “Rigid, the skeleton
of habit alone upholds the human frame.” When women get accustomed
and habituated to serving their men, either father or husband, they
do not know any better. Perhaps, they may have dreams of some kind of
freedom, but most of them quelch those dreams at every step. Maybe
they know that those dreams are unattainable. Even today, when a
significant number of women make up the workforce, their obligation
still lies in the home, more exactly in the kitchen and the laundry
room, and in the more sunny and a bit more traditional parts of the
world beneath the clothes hanger, handling clothespins.
In
order for the natural, free social group to exist, which would and
must be characterized as matriarchy, men would have to be obedient
and hold to true values, while women would have to be just and
spiritually stronger than men. All jobs that require intellect are
better done by women, and of course all jobs that require physical
labour are better done by men. However, there is one pivotal problem
that ties the hands of all women. It is the following:
“The
Woman
does not exist
They
do not have their own past, history, religion: they do not have, as
proletarians do, solidarity in work and interest. Among them, there
is not even that spacial mixture which forms from the American
blackmen, Jews from the ghetto, workers from St. Danny, or the
Renault factory, a community. They live scattered among men, tied
down with the home, the work, economic interests, the social position
in relation to certain men, - father or husband – a lot firmer than
to other women. Bourgeois
women are in solidarity with burgeois men, not with proletarian
women; white women whith white men, not with black women.
(De Bovoar 1982: 15, kurziv A. Z.)”
Men
are viewed as the primary product of nature, the providers and
owners. The woman is defined solely as the man’s opposite, the
other end of the binary. Men have to be masculine, and women have to
be feminine. Masculinity is generally concieved in terms of strength,
rigidity, emotionless, and by all means tearless. Beer and
cigarettes, whiskey and cigars are their credo.Their life is measured
out in financial achievements, sport trofies, and amongst them the
number of women they had sex with. Men must be respected, and women
subdued. That is just a faint description of the illness of this
patriarchal society.
A free
and independent woman is a major threat to this world order, because
if they unite under one banner, matriarchy could gleam a bit through
the window. Having the battle being decided by guns, since the
discovery of gunpowder, women could easily overthrow the “movers
and shakers” of this world. But only if united, and strong in
numbers. There are more women on Earth than men, in any case. Antifa
is promising, but hope is all we have for now.
Back
to the novel, a war veteran kills himself. Septimus Warren Smith was
delusional, paranoid, depressed, and deeply sad. He was trying to
extract self-related meaning from every event, and from every person
he saw. Lucrezia was miserable; stuck with him until he ended their
agony. War it seems is the main product of capitalism, while the
United States’ industry is made up, in the largest part, of weapon
manufacturing. Why produce something if it will not be used. Selling
and buying of weapons is the biggest trade in the world, and the
country’s military power is the sole determinant of her value.
Septimus
thought that it might be possible “that the world itself is without
meaning.” A world lead by men. Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf?
She dug out the impossible depths of the human soul and psyche, she
saw through every veil that hid any secret of the human mind and
heart, the ones found in her environment. She conquered life, and
killed death. Her words remain to sunder the ever remaining status
quo, like thunder splits the tree apart. Mrs. Dalloway did her best
to beautify and perfect the shallow, arbitrary, soulless existence
and frame of behaviour and customs, and the structure of those highly
esteemed personalities, to the point of what? Same old, same old...
Uselessness. Hollowed out emptiness. Convention is malicious. Michel
Focault says that freedom needs to be practiced. Freedom guarantees
freedom; nothing else.
To
emerge victorious from any battle, one must fight; not plea to the
enemy that they change their minds, or heaven forbid, raise their
consciousness. No woman’s sacrifice will ever suffice.
