The Scars of Capitalism in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and ‘Kew Gardens’

Abstract

This paper discusses the scars of capitalism in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and ‘Kew Gardens’. Following one day of the character’s life, the discussion will investigate how the novel and the short story introduce the capitalist ideology that dictates the character’s everyday life and how the characters, in different ways and to certain extents, react to it. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf depicts capitalism as an oppressive system that can be very rewarding to those who submit to its ideals and, at the same time, very catastrophic to those who try to confront it or question its validity. In ‘Kew Gardens’, the characters, affected by the looming war, try to come to terms with the meaningless materiality, the hollowness, and insecurity that capitalism produces; In both texts, capitalism is introduced as a tyrannous system that uses everything in the characters’ everyday life as suppressive tools to enforce its values and maintain its continuity.