Keywords
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, Care Ethics, Ecofeminism, Vulnerability
Abstract
This paper offers an ecofeminist reading of Mrs. Dalloway that centers vulnerability as a unifying ethical concept through which Virginia Woolf interrogates care, selfhood, and the human relationship to the natural world. While existing scholarship has examined Woolf’s use of nature in relation to aging, loss, trauma, and sexuality, I argue that these themes are bound together by a shared condition of ontological vulnerability. Drawing on ecofeminist theory and care ethics, the paper contends that Woolf challenges inherited Cartesian dualisms that separate rationality from nature and mind from body, revealing how such separations distort ethical perception and impede care.
Through close readings of central characters, the paper traces a spectrum between excessive rational detachment and total immersion in the natural. Figures such as Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw exemplify the ethical failures of a rigid commitment to rational mastery, while Septimus Smith illustrates the dangers of losing selfhood through total enmeshment. Against these extremes, Clarissa Dalloway emerges as Woolf’s model of ethical balance. Her negotiated position between civilization and nature enables a form of care that is neither dominating nor dissolving, but relational and sustaining.
Ultimately, the paper argues that, by reading nature as a metonymy for care, Woolf connects each character’s ethical capacities to their relationship with vulnerability. I argue that Mrs. Dalloway anticipates key ecofeminist insights by framing a "good life" as relational, situated, and sustained through interdependence.
Issue and Volume
19.1
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Landgraf, Olivia L.
(2026)
"Brains and Hearts: Virginia Woolf’s Natural, Incomparable Care in Mrs. Dalloway,"
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism: Vol. 19:
Iss.
1, Article 3.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/criterion/vol19/iss1/3