Clothes and fashion as a zone of encounter between the character and the city: Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway”

Abstract

This paper deals with the motifs of clothing and fashion in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, with the aim of pointing out that these frequently used motifs of Woolf’s should be seen as one of the points where the character and the city – two significant participants in her novels – meet. Acknowledging the standpoints of Milina Ivanović Barišić, who understands fashion as both a sign of social status and an expression of personal identity; R. S. Koppen, who reads clothes as a sign of both a personal style and interpersonal (class/ gender) relations (in Virginia Woolf’s case especially); Asta Andrésdóttir, who has a similar view on clothing based on Woolf’s novels; and McGaw and Vance, who consider the emotional relationship between urban dwellers and their cities, this paper analyses the clothing and fashion styles of two representative female characters in Mrs Dalloway – Clarissa Dalloway and Doris Kilman. Conclusions are then derived as to the way in which the two contrasting styles reveal the social identity and personal characters of each of the heroines, and as to what kind of individual emotional relationship with the city their fashion choices may suggest.