About Women and their struggle..

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.