Personal Meaning and Landscape in Mrs. Dalloway: An Ecocritical Study

This research paper applies an ecocritical perspective to Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway and studies how nature has been used to describe personal feelings of the characters, both major and minor in the context of industrialization and post-World War 1 era in London. Through the ecocritical lens, this paper explores how Woolf links natural elements like flowers, trees and sky with her writing techniques of the stream of consciousness and inner monologue to echo the psychological self of different characters. The ideas presented by the theorist Richard Kerridge, that of a possible ‘poetic engagement’ of literature with the natural world in an industrialized era, and Britain’s nature as a common self-referent have been taken as the framework for this research. The major research questions are: How does Woolf use nature to describe the emotional states of different characters? What role does nature play in the process of pain and healing of the characters? Why does Woolf feel the need to incorporate nature imagery while describing her character’s innermost thoughts? The paper carries out a close textual analysis of the novel, focusing on all the statements that link nature with the characters’ emotions, and draws to a conclusion claiming that this recurrence of nature in Mrs. Dalloway is a deliberate act on the author’s part to at least figuratively preserve nature in a time period that has destroyed as well as pushed nature into the background.