碩士論文
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures College of Liberal Arts
National Taiwan University Master Thesis
吳爾芙《戴洛維夫人》與愛特伍《可吃的女人》中的 吃與性別政治
Eating and Gender Politics in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman
蔡宛倩 Wan-Chien Tsai
指導教授：劉亮雅 博士 Advisor: Liang-Ya Liou, Ph.D.
中華民國 105 年 1 月 January 2016
This thesis serves to commemorate my days of constant strolls between my room and the kitchen during my M.A. studies. Hovering between pans and papers and adding spice to my thesis, I know that the feast of words could not be completed without the fundamental ingredients, namely help and love provided by many people.
Firstly, I am greatly indebted to my advisor, Professor Liang-ya Liou, whose Modernists’ Aesthetics and Politics class inspired me to heartily dig in food themes in literature. I am grateful for her patient guidance, constructive suggestions, and full confidence in me throughout my thesis writing, which motivated me to take heart and move on. I also like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Professor Yu-hsiu Liu and Professor Tsung-huei Huang, whose dedication to psychoanalytic and feminist studies not only fills me with awe and respect but supplies my thesis with a profound
knowledge base. I appreciate their insightful advice and in-depth questions on my thesis. Additionally, I am much obliged to Professor Chin-yuan Hu, my beloved mentor from college, who guided me to the beauty of literature and enlightened me on the life philosophy of preparing to be unprepared during my pursuit of dream. Thanks to her continuous encouragement, I can now savor the fruits of my research.
Besides, I am thankful to my classmates—Sunny Tsai, Jay Lin, Ian Kao, Alice Shih, Debbie Zhang, Byron Ko, Kim Li, Sasha Lin, Annie Cheng, Christina Chin, and Joe Jin— for the warming friendship they offered me. I also owe to Ruby You, Regine Ma, Betty Kuo, Anne Liu, and Fiona Tsai, who have been my role models to look up to and discuss with. Special thanks go to my classmates Sunny Tsai and Jay Lin, who filled my study days with joy and offered timely help during my thesis writing. I also
bittersweet writing experience with me. Lastly, I like to thank my beloved
family—my brother, who has been someone to look up to, and my parents, who are always so considerate and supportive of whatever I choose to do. Without their love and support, I could not overcome all the obstacles and finish my studies in the Graduate Program in Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. This thesis is dedicated to them.
Food and eating are essential elements in works of Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood, two significant female writers of the twentieth century. Both utilize eating disorders to intervene in the discursive construction of a healthy gendered body and to problematize the mainstream values of body proportions and body management. By delving into eating politics in Woolf’s and Atwood’s novels, this thesis addresses the problematics of gender and sees if eating or not eating serves as effective bodily resistance to sexist oppression. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach including psychoanalytic, sociologist, and feminist accounts of orality, eating and body, and their relation to self-formation and social order, this thesis investigates how one’s eating politics reflects social normalization of a gendered body and explores the potential and pitfalls of eating disorders as a means of self-empowerment in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman. In addition to an Irigarayian reading of the political meaning in bodily textuality, the thesis addresses the double bind between self-assertion and self-destruction seen on disorderly eaters.
Through comparing diverse eating politics and the respective critiques of social hierarchy and patriarchal commodification in postwar London and in Canadian consumer society in the 1960s, the thesis further attempts to envision a survival agenda in Mrs. Dalloway and The Edible Woman.
Key Words: Mrs. Dalloway, The Edible Woman, Food and Eating, Compulsive Eating, Anorexia Nervosa, Oral Aggression, Gender
飲食在維吉尼亞・吳爾芙與瑪格麗特・愛特伍的作品中佔有舉足輕重的地 位。兩位二十世紀重要的女作家皆將飲食隱喻成社會與個人的中介，並藉由書寫 飲食疾患(eating disorders)來批判當代社會所建構所謂健康、符合性別觀感的身體 印象，進而審問均衡體態以及健身等主流價值如何規訓當代人對於身體的感知。
藉由檢視吳爾芙及愛特伍小說裡的飲食政治，本篇論文旨在揭露當代性別權力關 係以及審視飲食疾患者能否成功透過飲食抵制性別壓迫。本篇論文採跨領域研究 手法，融精神分析、社會學、女性主義論述為一家，透過前述各家對於口腔期、
飲食與身體體態，以及飲食、體態如何影響人格養成和反映社會秩序等論述為理 論框架，進而探究吳爾芙《戴洛維夫人》與愛特伍《可吃的女人》中的飲食與性 別政治。論文探討飲食政治如何反映性別身體社會化、常規化的過程；另一方面 也討論飲食疾患(eating disorders)能否視為一種的顛覆父權的有效手段，同時揭露 飲食疾患者在此一過程中可能面對的潛在危險。除了採伊蕊格萊式觀點將病態的 身體看作富政治性、具抗議正面意義的文本閱讀，本篇論文進一步檢視飲食疾患 者在抗議的同時將自己陷於自我毀滅、進退維谷的窘境。透過比較兩本小說中不 同的飲食策略以及兩位作者對於社會階級及父權剝削的批判，本篇論文試圖進一 步提出一套飲食之道，以利書中角色於一次大戰後的倫敦及六〇年代的加拿大消 費社會中得以生存。
關鍵字：《戴洛維夫人》、《可吃的女人》、飲食、狂食症、厭食症、口慾攻擊、性
別
Acknowledgements……….i
English Abstract…..………... iii
Chinese Abstract..……….iv
Introduction………...……….………1
Chapter One: Bodies Beyond Gender Dichotomy: Female Corpulence and Male Anorexia in Mrs. Dalloway…….……….. 21
The Proportional Regimen and the Elite Parties in Postwar London The Corpulent Body of the Low-Class Doris Kilman The Anorexic Inclination of the Shell-Shocked Septimus Warren Smith Proportion and Conversion—The Power Nexus in the Postwar London Chapter Two: To Eat or Not to Eat: Oral Aggression and Anorexia Nervosa in The Edible Woman………..………61
Eating Metaphors in the Marriage Game Reconsidering Marian’s Eating Disorder: Anorexia Nervosa as Complicity and Resistance Oral Aggression between the Sexes Conclusion………..………...105
Works Cited…..….………...113
Introduction
Woolf’s and Atwood’s Eating and Gender Politics
Food and eating are recurrent themes in Virginia Woolf’s and Margaret Atwood’s works. With a view to representing socio-political forces on the body, Woolf and Atwood thematize food and eating as the intermediary between society and individuals and use eating and eating disorders as tropes to problematize gender and social relations. While in A Room of One’s Own (1929) the difference between meals served at men’s and women’s colleges indicates gender inequalities, in Mrs.
Dalloway, the elite’s proportional regimen and lower-class characters’ eating anxieties are juxtaposed to address problems of class and gender difference.
According to Allie Glenny, Woolf’s use of food and eating imagery reveals “the process both of seeing the world through our own, female, lenses and, more actively, of righting a skewed world which had purged the sensual and elevated the rational”
(xii). Whereas Woolf’s attention to food and eating manifests “an act of female liberation” (Glenny xii), Atwood’s examination of eating disorders and bodily forms furthers the feminist agenda to uncover all forms of victimhood. In The Edible Woman, eating becomes a metaphor of power denoting the relation between the eater and the eaten. As no one is set free from the power nexus, women as well as men take turns playing hunters and preys, turning to anorexia nervosa and oral aggression in the marriage market. The focus on food and eating and their effects on the body not only declares defiance to intellectual indifference to materiality but draws a thread of kinship between the two: while Woolf is one of the pioneers that address the
indispensable role of food and eating in literature, Atwood takes up the subject matter to examine eating passions and aberrations of Canadians.1 Exploring the works of Woolf and Atwood with an eye on eating metaphors, one is able to discern the feminist resonance and determine the feasibility of representing social and gender relations in eating and food imagery.
While both Woolf and Atwood confront eating disorders in their novels, they relate the subject matter to the problematics of gender differently. For Woolf, eating disorders reveal outcasts’ struggle with the prescriptive gender roles that assign to men combativeness and to women slenderness in the 1920s Britain. Whereas in most of her novels men are privileged to enjoy eating and women are alienated from their bodily needs, Mrs. Dalloway reverses the principle to deal with male anorexia and female compulsive eating. Born in Canada and exposed to the great body of British literature, Atwood, however, shifts from Woolf’s focus on war-induced eating
disorders onto female anorexia nervosa and deals with women’s difficulties in gaining autonomy of their bodies under the pressures of male gaze and mass media in the 1960s. According to Sarah Sceats, in Atwood’s novels “food and eating are especially used in relation to the politics of oppression and individual freedom and responsibility”
(4). As Atwood draws on Woolf to compare writing to “walking through a dark room,
1 Woolf expresses her discontent with novelists’ lack of attention to food. As she writes in A Room of One’s Own (1929): “It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine. Here however, I shall take the liberty to defy that convention […]” (12-13). Decades later, Atwood declares that she will “investigate the eating aberrations of the eating aberrations of Canadians through their literature, and […] examine the literature itself with an eye to the consuming passions, or lack of them” in The CanLit Foodbook (qtd. in Bevan 51). While The CanLit Foodbook (1987) testifies to Atwood’s interests in food consumption in Canadian literature, her novels like The Edible Woman (1969), Lady Oracle (1976), and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) are replete with food, eating, and body issues.
holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room,” her novels about eating disorders not only illuminate victimization by patriarchal forces but suggest that eating disorders serve as a means of power reversal (Negotiating with the Dead xxiii). Inspecting eating politics in Woolf’s and Atwood’s works gives one insight into disparate concerns and feminist agendas.
This thesis attempts to investigate how one’s ways of eating reflect social valorization of a useful body and see if one’s eating politics enables one to either survive, adapt to, or subvert the gender relations and social norms by reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1965).
Despite different temporal and spatial elements, Mrs. Dalloway and The Edible Woman depict the characters’ eating disorders and their attempt to empower
themselves by transforming food and eating from the machinery of normalization to means of self-definition within a patriarchal framework. In Mrs. Dalloway, as the imperial regime exerts control over the unfit and lowly and enforces a proportional regimen on the elite, schisms arise between upper and lower classes as shown in different forms of eating practices. In 1920s London, the upper class throws parties to sustain imperial male control on gender roles and to standardize bodily proportion while individuals falling outside gender norms and social ranks turn to addictive eating or loss of appetite. The Edible Woman takes place in 1950s and 1960s Canadian consumer society, where women endowed with economic freedom still suffer from commodification in the visual-oriented culture and role-engulfment in marital life. In the portrayal of women’s sexual role crisis, Atwood suggests anorexia nervosa and oral aggression as possible ways for women to get out of the predicament
of being consumed in the social and economic realm. To put it simply, Mrs. Dalloway and The Edible Woman explore the potential of eating disorders to resist the dominant,
“normal” ways of consumption in the patriarchal culture.
Both Woolf and Atwood see eating and body as sites of normalization and self-expression; however, their central foci and interventionist agendas differ. In Mrs.
Dalloway, eating and gender politics are closely related to social hierarchy. As the upper-middle class upholds the proportional regimen and uses it to convert people, eating and body disorders become tropes to interrogate and deconstruct the consensus on notions of sanity, morality, and normality. Whereas in Mrs. Dalloway the
governing class holds meal parties to relate eating to its fundamental sense as a sharing activity, in The Edible Woman the relationship between eating and gender is complicated by the rise of individual choices in the society pivoting on consumption and commodification. Although Atwood’s central critique is patriarchal exploitation of woman’s body, she denounces stereotypical gender dichotomy and deals with both sexes’ objectification of the other sex during dining occasions. Three female
characters’ eating politics shed light on three disparate attitudes toward the traditional female roles in marital life: whether they are submissive, hesitant, or resistant to it, no one seems to withdraw from the marriage game without harm. Unlike Woolf, who represents the disorderly eaters as the “anomalous” that incarnates a critique of the brutalizing gender and eating politics of British Empire, Atwood attends to women’s proneness to eating disorders by portraying the heroine’s suffering and recovery from anorexia and delineating the potential inside the disorderly body to resist patriarchal values. In short, whereas Woolf examines eating and body image disorders derived
from the stigmatizing stare of the dominant sexist culture, Atwood explores the disorderly bodies from within to represent the psychopathology of the society.
Putting the two novels with disparate periods and foci together, this thesis seeks to compare Woolf’s and Atwood’s representations of consumption habits, gender norms, and social order and to explore how eating disorders are delineated as
adaptation or resistance to sexist oppressions on body. Based on these objectives, the thesis aims to answer the following questions:
! How can one’s eating politics and body image be related to, complicit with, or challenge gender politics and social appropriation of the body in the patriarchal culture in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Atwood’s The Edible Woman?
! In what way are food and eating central to the two novels in structuring the fictional worlds, delineating the socio-political forces on bodies, and reflecting gender politics?
! How does the gender role prescribe one’s ways of eating and appearance, and how does one adjust or empower oneself via food and eating in the two novels? Despite socio-political changes and increasing tolerance for
individual choices from 1923 postwar London to 1960s Toronto consumer society, why do eating disorders still exist and how do they help the eater express what s/he fails to say?
Through the questions listed above, this thesis claims that an examination of gender politics would not be completed without a scrutiny of themes of food and eating in the novels at issue. The thesis will demystify eating metaphors and explore
how eating disorders play a role in the two novels. Finally, by delving into eating and gender politics in Mrs. Dalloway and The Edible Woman, the thesis also examines whether the differences between the two novels imply a progression, regression, or stagnation in gender relations.
Literature Review
Before addressing the methodology of the thesis, this section briefly reviews criticisms related to the topic. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1923) and Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1969) have been fervently discussed by critics from angles of new-criticism, psychoanalysis, feminism and so on. In light of sociological approach that highlights eating and food as the intermediary between the society and the individuals, I will review relevant criticisms on social system, the traumatized body, and food consumption in Mrs. Dalloway, and criticisms on these three aspects as well as on eating disorders in The Edible Woman.
One strand of literary criticism probes into social system and the traumatized victims in Mrs. Dalloway. Alex Zwerdling’s “Mrs. Dalloway and the Social System,”
one of the leading readings of social control on the individuals, suggests that Mrs.
Dalloway is a critique of the anesthesia and class conflicts after WWI. Kathy J.
Phillips’s study of sex, money, and war in Mrs. Dalloway is even more critical of British Empire as it refutes Zwerdling’s argument that Clarissa is an exception to the callous governing class but sees every individual as the product moulded by the patriarchal society. Likewise, Deborah Guth, in her analysis of Clarissa’s final moment of vision of Septimus’s suicide, perceives Clarissa’s onlooker’s stance as
self-evasive and self-deceptive. While some critics examine the social system mainly from the side of the ruling class, others probe into the outcasts beset and traumatized by the social system. In “Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,”
Karen DeMeester examines Woolf’s characterization of the shell-shocked Septimus and the community’s resistance to communication and concludes that modernist narrative style succeeds in depicting disorders and traumatization but fails to bring about recovery. Shifting the focus from the shell-shocked onto female victims in the novel, Masami Usui cites Woolf’s take on gendered perspectives of war and analyzes women’s deprivation of history, education, financial support, and means of expression in the wartime.
Another strand of literary criticism deals with eating and food imagery in Mrs.
Dalloway. Many associate themes of eating and eating distresses with Woolf’s attachment for and repulsion of food in life. Scrutinizing Woolf’s presumable
madness, Stephen Trombley examines Woolf’s psychic history, The Waves, and Mrs.
Dalloway to ascribe characters’ eating problems to male aggression and medical oppression in her real life. Patricia Moran associates fictional eating distress and disembodiment with Woolf’s discomfort with female body. According to her, as hunger encodes problematic relation with maternal power and female creativity in Mrs. Dalloway, the voracious bodies of Doris Kilman and goddesses of Proportion and Conversion not only denote female engulfment but become sites of abjection.
Allie Glenny examines Woolf’s eating problems in life and attributes characters’
disorderly eating, disembodiment, and alienation from their body to Woolf’s anorexic use in Mrs. Dalloway.
Some relate food themes to Woolf’s biographical history, whereas others examine symbolic aspects of diet and body in relation to social shaping. Harriet Blodgett traces food themes in Woolf’s novels and contends that in Mrs. Dalloway food imagery becomes more functional in terms of characterization, social critique, and presentation of female social skill. While Blodgett affirms Clarissa’s party as a manifestation of female social skill, Christopher Ames interprets the party as a successful revelation of Clarissa’s true self as an artist combining the separateness of selves. Diane McGee sees the lack of attention to the party meals as an emphasis on Clarissa’s role as a hostess rather than the food provider, and praises the dinner party as Clarissa’s success in social realm. Molly Hoff’s “A Feast of Words in Mrs.
Dalloway” interprets Lady Bruton’s luncheon as an allusion to Horace’s and Plato’s satires on pretentious rhetoric and suggests a similar falsehood and deception in the luncheon party. Teresa Fulker’s “Virginia Woolf’s Daily Drama of the Body” turns from food and eating to the individual body and explores the class dynamics through the embodiment of Clarissa’s and Kilman’s body.
While studies on food and eating in Mrs. Dalloway are comparatively few, critics have dealt with themes of eating and not eating in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman from various aspects. Sharon Wilson discusses Marian’s fear of eating, being eaten, and ways of empowerment in light of Grimm’s “The Robber
Bridegroom.” Emma Parker, in her analysis of eating politics in Atwood’s novels, points out the cannibalistic nature of relationship between two sexes in relation to the anthropological studies of cannibalism. Gloria Onley, in the same vein, illuminates role-engulfment and lovers’ oscillation between love, aggression, and domination in
The Edible Woman.
While some probe into the cannibal symbolization in the heterosexual relationship, others put more emphasis on Marian’s anorexia nervosa. Elspeth Cameron reads the novel as an anorexic’s memoir by thoroughly examining textual evidence that characterizes anorexic submissiveness, dependence, and body/mind separation, while Barbara Hill Rigney deems Marian’s anorexia as an expression of aversion of female roles and desire for autonomy. Likewise, Susanne Skubal
demonstrates Marian’s anorexia as a narrative of negation not only of the edibles, but of marriage, and maternity. Touching on both cannibalism and anorexia, Sarah Sceats points out the predatory nature of appetite, cites foodstuffs associated with Marian’s gradual self-starvation, and maintains that the peculiarly symbolic anorexia should cause Marian no harm. On the other hand, regarding anorexia as a strategy to show acquiescence to and rebellion against culturally constructed femininity, Tracy Brain attends to the pains and dangers the anorexic body experiences to suggest risks Marian might meet. Exploring the powerlessness and empowerment of women in The Edible Woman, Theodore Sheckels adopts Michel Foucault’s ideas of power and resistance and Kenneth Boulding’s model of power relations to point out women’s predicaments in economic and social realms.
Although there are studies centering on the social system, food consumption, and the traumatized, abject body in Mrs. Dalloway, an integrated inquiry into the
interrelationship among social power, food and eating, and the individual body has yet to surface. In criticisms of The Edible Woman, while scholars address problems of eating disorders and bodily (de)formation in relation to gender politics, there is scant
attention to the double bind of anorexia between self-destruction and self-definition and the bipolarity of love and hatred in the cannibalistic heterosexual relationship in the novel. Moreover, questions remain unsolved as to why attempts of cannibalization should exist in love relationship, and why gender aggression should be characterized as oral in The Edible Woman. While there is room to be desired in studies of eating (disorders) in Mrs. Dalloway and intricacies to be solved in The Edible Woman, in general, the signification and significance of food consumption have been obscured or inadequately dealt with in studies of both novels.
Methodology and Contribution
To deepen the discussions on the functions of food and eating in relation to the tension between society and individuals, this thesis seeks to examine how disorderly eating—compulsive eating, self-starvation, or symbolic cannibalism—reflects the incorporation of or resistance to social normalization of the gendered body in Mrs.
Dalloway and The Edible Woman. Drawing on sociologists’ interpretations of food consumption, this section explicates how the thesis’s analytical framework is formed.
Next, it introduces feminist and medical discourses as well as psychoanalytic theory on oral stage to address disparate eating disorders found in the two novels.
To begin with, sociological perspectives of food and eating as an interpretative scheme linking the individuals and culture frame the analytical basis for the thesis.
Briefly speaking, sociologists address the functional meanings of consumption in association with social order and individual’s actions, values, and identities. While Roland Barthes points out the signifying value of food and notes that food is “a
system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior” (29), Mary Douglas regards food as a social component encoding “degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, and boundaries and transactions” (“Deciphering a Meal” 61). Later, Pasi Falk furthers Douglas’s notion of food and the
interrelationship between the social and the physical body2 to maintain that
consumption is a mediator linking the self and the society. As mouth is the in-between site of the outside and the inside, he sees eating as a representation-related behavior moulded by the social orders (11). As eating disorders denote individuals’
problematic relationship with food and the society, sociological approaches to the consumption-individual-society nexus shed light on the three aspects indispensable in the discussion of eating disorders. Accordingly, in light of sociological approaches, the thesis deals with Mrs. Dalloway and The Edible Woman from three angles: the devouring social system, individual eating/culinary practices, and the signification and functions of food and eating.
With the sociological aspects framing the textual analysis, the central theme—eating disorders—requires other theoretical support. As the two novels address disparate eating disorders in relation to different social concerns, I take an interdisciplinary approach integrating accounts of orality, eating and body, and their relation to self-formation and social order to deal with different eating disorders. To be specific, the following introduces my application of Susie Orbach’s, Luce
Irigaray’s, and Susan Bordo’s approach to female eating disorders and medical
2 In the famous essay “The Two Bodies,” Mary Douglas deals with the interrelationship between the social and the physical body, arguing that “[t]he social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical experience of body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of society. There is a continual exchange of meanings between the two kinds of bodily experience so that each reinforces the categories of the other” (64).
descriptions of male anorexia. Finally, it lays out Sigmund Freud’s theorization of oral stage and aggressive instincts to explicate cannibalism. The purpose of an interdisciplinary research is to address the particularity and multifaceted dimensions of each eating disorder and to examine and compare the similarities and differences in disorderly eaters’ predicaments.
In Fat is a Feminist Issue (1978), Susie Orbach scrutinizes the forces and problems behind women’s corpulence and compulsive eating. Departing from public reception of fat as a deviance or defect, Orbach perceives fat as a “social disease”
rooted in the “social inequality of women” (22). Although Orbach contends that underlying compulsive eating are problematic mother-daughter relationship and the unsatisfying gender role in family,3 she maintains that “[b]ody size means different things to different women” (58). Overall, she regards fat as an expression of rebellion against powerlessness of women and suggests that certain interests be found in being fat, including the desires to desexualize oneself, to be recognized in job field, to express anger, or to make up for emotional lack. As Orbach argues that compulsive eating and corpulence provide the eaters with an insulated world and a less
threatening issue to worry about than other possible problems, she nevertheless points out the self-destructive danger and the conflicting cycle of compulsive eating/dieting.
By applying Orbach’s points of female obesity to my reading of Mrs. Dalloway, I can examine Doris Kilman’s troubled relationship to eating and body and see if Miss Kilman’s cycle of compulsive eating/dieting implies a scheme similar to Marian’s
3 According to Orbach, the relegation to the social roles of wife and mother requires that a woman distance her body from her own self. At early age of a woman, food and nurturance is usually withheld by the mother to ensure a proper feminization of the daughter; turning to a nurturer herself, a woman tends to receive contradictory messages about food and eating that it is good for others and bad for themselves. For detailed illustration, please refer to note 19 on page 40-41.
anorexic obsession with slenderness and culturally constructed femininity in The Edible Woman.
While Orbach illuminates the potential and dangers of female compulsive eating, Luce Irigaray’s interpretation of hysteria as well as Susan Bordo’s rethinking of the anorexic physicality offers insight into the paradox of anorexic protest. Noting
women’s victimized state as commodities for exchange in patriarchal culture, Irigaray perceives anorexic attempts and the symptomatic body as women’s expressions of protest. According to her, anorexia nervosa is far from being a diet gone out of control but is instead a feminist assertion of defiance to the patriarchal ideals of femininity. In
“Women-Mothers, the Silent Substratum of the Social Order,” Irigaray compares women to the edibles served to satisfy others’ needs yet suggests women’s potential to rewrite their passive role as nurturers by voicing their desire for food.4 Observing both positive and negative effects of anorexia, Bordo, like Irigaray, argues that anorexics embody resistance to cultural norms yet puts more emphasis on the risks and downsides embedded in the bodily protest. In “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity,” she asserts that the anorexic pathologies paradoxically collude with the patriarchal ideal of slenderness, “reproducing rather than transforming precisely that which is being protested” (99). Irigaray’s explanation of anorexia nervosa serves as an entry point to interpret the political meaning in bodily textuality; however, Susan Bordo’s readings of the slender body shed light on the double bind between self-assertion and self-destruction seen on the anorexic body. Drawing on both
4 As Irigaray attends to women’s passive state in patriarchy, her food imagery is used to describe the deprivation of women’s desire in patriarchal culture. Please refer to page 87 to see my elaboration of Irigaray’s ideas in “Women-Mothers, the Silent Substratum of the Social Order.”
feminists’ insights into female anorexia, I argue that Marian’s anorexia in The Edible Woman is an act both complicit in and resistant to culturally constructed femininity.
While scholars illuminate feminist connotations in female eating disorders, Septimus’s anorexic inclination in Mrs. Dalloway poses an inquiry to the issue of gender. In Males with Eating Disorders, scientific data suggest that the etiology of male anorexia is similar to that of women in terms of eating habits, weight loss, and sexual functioning, just in different degrees. Yet, medical literature shows higher proportion of men with homosexual conflicts or sexual aversion either preceding the onset (Herzog 44) or occurring in the aftermath of eating disorders (Burns 176).5 In terms of literary approach, in “Anorexia and Modernism, or How I learned to Diet in All Directions,” Mark Anderson scrutinizes male anorexics in modernist texts and contends that both anorexia and modernism are strategies of “self-denial and
self-negation that seek to establish a primal unity uncontaminated by the ‘filth’ of the other: sexual differentiation, social hierarchy and power relations, temporality and
‘history’” (37). Leslie Heywood echoes with Anderson’s observation of male anorexic’s rejection of world and further argues that the modernist artist is the paradigm for the anorexic “to stand apart from the common crowd” in pursuit of
“individualism” (61). Applying medical descriptions as well as modernist readings of male anorexia, I am able to analyze the motives and causes underlying Septimus’s anorexia and moreover compare the two authors’ feminist agendas behind Septimus’s and Marian’s anorexic protest in different patriarchal societies.
5 There is a consensus on the role of sexuality in the etiology of eating disorders in men. A. H. Crisp finds that conflicting gender identity or sexual orientation precipitates an eating disorder in many males (qtd. in Herzog 43). Similarly, M. K. Hasan and R. W. Tibbetts notes a “notable lack of assertive masculinity or identification” and a “fear of manhood” exhibited in male anorexic (qtd. in Herzog 43).
Distinct from the fat/slender body and compulsive/anorexic eating, symbolic cannibalism in The Edible Woman marks an absolutely different disorderly structure, whose manifestation is less of physical symptoms than of the aggressiveness toward the outer world. In Civilization and Its Discontent (1930) Sigmund Freud’s notion of the inclination to aggression as an instinctual disposition in human indirectly hints at oral aggression as a possible defense against attacks (81). In Three Essays of Sexuality (1905), Freud points out that the oral is the earliest pregenital organization of the libido in which “the sexual aim consists in the incorporation of the object—the prototype of a process […] in the form of identification” (198). Later he refers to the bipolar essence of oral satisfaction: “As the first of these [sexual] aims we recognize the phase of incorporating or devouring—a type of love which is consistent with abolishing the object’s separate existence and which may therefore be described as ambivalent” (“Instincts and Vicissitudes” 138). As love derives from ego’s pursuit for pleasure and hate from ego’s reaction to unpleasure caused by objects, one might regress to the preliminary stage when love can “hardly […] be distinguished from hate in its attitude towards the object” (ibid. 139). Drawing on Freud’s linking of oral and sexual desire and the ambivalent attitudes toward the sexual objects at oral stage, I explore the regression of love to hatred and the cannibalistic nature of the
hetero-sexual relationship in The Edible Woman and discuss if Marian effectively claims the ownership of her body through eating the cake woman made of her own image.
Based on sociological framework, this thesis examines the interrelationship between society and individuals’ eating practices in Mrs. Dalloway and The Edible
Woman and sees if food and eating are successfully transformed from the means of discipline into an expression of rebellion. By applying Orbach’s, Irigaray’s, and Bordo’s reading of female disorders, I compare the causes as well as the
symptomology of Miss Kilman’s compulsive eating and Marian’s anorexia. In light of modernist and medical descriptions of male anorexia, I explore the gender politics behind the male anorexia in Mrs. Dalloway. Drawing on Freudian interpretation of a mixture of feelings of love and hate reinforced by the regression of the love to the preliminary cannibalistic stage, I am able to uncover the oral aggression inherent in human or romantic relationships. In conclusion, through interdisciplinary approaches to compare and contrast various eating disorders, I seek to uncover the fundamental problem behind every eating disorder and to envision a possible survival agenda in Mrs. Dalloway and The Edible Woman.
Chapter Division
Introduction: Woolf’s and Atwood’s Eating and Gender Politics
The introduction elaborates on the intertwined relationship between eating and gender politics and clarifies my choice of comparing Mrs. Dalloway and The Edible Woman. Besides providing a brief literature review and methodological and
theoretical frameworks, it outlines how Woolf and Atwood use eating disorders to problematize social and gender relations and how the two authors’ foci and
interventionist agendas are similar to or different from each other in the two novels.
Ch. 1 Bodies Beyond Gender Dichotomy: Female Corpulence and Male Anorexia
in Mrs. Dalloway
In the first chapter, I deal with female compulsive eating and male anorexia in Mrs. Dalloway. This chapter begins with an overview of the eating culture dominated by upper-middle class and turns to examine lower-class characters’ eating practices.
In section one, I focus on Clarissa’s evening party and Lady Bruton’s luncheon with a view to interrogating imperial regimen, which consolidates social hierarchy and gender dichotomy. In contrast to the jovial parties and conservative regimen held by the upper class, in section two, I deal with Doris Kilman’s obsession with food and flesh as well as her gains and losses due to compulsive eating in light of Susie
Orbach’s theory of fatness. By juxtaposing the corpulent Kilman vis-à-vis the slender Clarissa, the fat female body becomes the site of examination of class and gender difference. Whereas the afternoon tea enables Miss Kilman to empower herself and to instil feminist thinking in her pupil, Elizabeth, the self-empowerment is undermined by harsher self-discipline and religious asceticism afterwards. In section three, I argue that Septimus is a hunger artist in pursuit of unworldly food and truth. In addition to examining signs of Septimus’s anorexic inclination, I also look into his doctors’—Sir Bradshaw’s and Doctor Holms’s—regimens to explain how the dominant sense of proportion negates Septimus’s pleasure in eating. As Septimus’s eating habits and homosexual crisis fit in the medical descriptions of male anorexia, his negation of body justifies the modernist interpretation of anorexia as a refusal to be assimilated into the community contaminated by the sordidity of human nature. As Miss Kilman’s compulsive eating and Septimus’s anorexic inclination are conceived to be anomalous to the prescriptive notions of what is deemed moral and sane, this chapter will discuss
if such eating politics enable them to survive the postwar London, in which the dominant eating society worships Proportion and Conversion.
Ch. 2: To Eat or Not to Eat: Oral Aggression and Anorexia Nervosa in The Edible Woman
In chapter two, I examine the consuming and cannibalistic nature of heterosexual relationship in 1950s and 1960s Canada and see if Marian empowers herself through anorexia nervosa and/or symbolic cannibalism in The Edible Woman. The chapter is divided into three sections. In section one, I examine problems of gender roles in marriage market by applying Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Luce Irigaray’s “Women on the Market.” Taking the feminist critique of patriarchy as a point of departure, this section looks into how Atwood uses eating metaphors to represent the marriage game and how men and women’s eating politics sustain or subvert the rigid gender roles in the novel. In section two, I probe into the double bind featured in Marian’s anorexia nervosa. I first adopt Luce Irigaray’s explanation of hysteria and anorexia nervosa to suggest the political meaning in bodily textuality.
Next, drawing on Susan Bordo’s reading of the slender body, I unravel bodies as sites susceptible to normalization. Seeing food as something symbolizing woman’s state, I point out how foodstuff as need becomes the machinery of normalization, and how the abnormal intake of food indicates body’s desire. In section three, I examine how the aggression towards and tyranny over the other sex is presented through symbolic cannibalism. Adopting Sigmund Freud’s interpretations of economy of libido and instincts and how they relate to the cannibalistic stage, I explore the ambivalence of
heterosexual relationship in which lovers oscillates between love and aggression, demonstrating an object-relation similar to that of oral stage in The Edible Woman.
Finally, I scrutinize the transformation in Marian’s relation to food and see if Marian’s making and eating of the cake can be read as a power reversal in the patriarchal culture.
Conclusion: Food, Eating Order, and Gender Norms Reconsidered
By comparing diverse eating politics and the respective critiques of social and gender hierarchy in Mrs. Dalloway and The Edible Woman, the conclusion
problematizes the prescriptive notions of order and gender norms underlying the issue of eating disorders. If Woolf’s representations of the patriarchal culture’s
stigmatization of female corpulence and male anorexia attest to her manifesto of a writer’s duty as looking within the “luminous halo,” representing “whatever aberration or complexity it may display” (“Modern Fiction” 2089), Atwood’s examination of anorexia nervosa and oral aggression shows her challenge to the
“perversions of the notion of equality”6 long taken for granted in the existing gender relations (Second Words 396). In their works, although eating disorders help
characters challenge the dominant discourses on the gendered body, both Woolf and Atwood seem unable to naïvely advocate eating disorders but suggest that the key to
6 In “Amnesty International: An Address” (1981) in Second Words, Atwood writes about a writer’s responsibility to the society and deals with concepts of equality. To Atwood, a writer is an observer who speaks politically to uncover inequalities and problematize the undersides of a seemingly equal system. She cites Procrustes in Greek myth to elaborate her so-called “perversions of the notion of equality” (396). In the myth, Procrustes was an equalizer, who aims to make all human beings the same size. According to Atwood, “if they [human beings] were too small he stretched them, if they were too tall he cut off their feet or their heads” (396). As she keeps on, the “Procrustes today are international operators, not confined to any one ideology or religion” (396). As the world is full of perversions of the notion of equality, Atwood thinks that it is writers’ duties to utter the unspeakable sufferings and to imagine a better world that bring about hope to real life.
final empowerment lies in eaters’ reconsideration of their relationship with their bodies and the society. Moreover, as eating disorders epitomize the psychopathology of the society, the remedy for individual pain lies in collective reflection over the regimen that people feed on and take for granted. With different interventionist
agendas, both Woolf and Atwood elevate food and eating—the trivialities of everyday life—to a means of critique to interrogate the mainstream values from the margin, presenting a feast of words that nurtures respect and invites readers to ruminate over the prescriptive notions of “sanity,” “morality,” and “normality.”
Chapter One
Bodies Beyond Gender Dichotomy:
Female Corpulence and Male Anorexia in Mrs. Dalloway
There is no “natural” norm; there are only cultural forms of body, which do or do not conform to social norms.
Elizabeth Grosz, The Volatile Bodies7
Mrs. Dalloway portrays the power relations between the upper class and
lower-middle class in postwar London through discrepant eating practices and gender behaviors. With dining occasions—Lady Bruton’s luncheon, Miss Kilman’s afternoon tea, and Clarissa Dalloway’s dinner party—framing the novel, Virginia Woolf
represents characters’ day-long experiences as a “daily drama of the body,”8 in which a variety of eating habits and bodily forms are accentuated. Whereas the governing class’s parties uphold the proportional regimen that restricts gender roles and bodily shape, the “anomalous” others overturn such gender politics by means of different eating styles and body presentations. Woolf indicates her intention to write Mrs.
Dalloway: “I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most intense” (A Writer’s Diary 248). A
7 Elizabeth Grosz, “The Body as Inscriptive Surface,” The Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994) 143.
8 The phrase “the daily drama of the body” is directly quoted from Woolf’s essay of “On Being Ill.”
According to her, the mind cannot function independently of the body, “[b]ut of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it;
its noble plans; how the mind has civilized the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the
philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected” (10).
scrutiny into food, eating, and body brings to light the underside of the proportional regimen Woolf wants to criticize. Perceiving eating and body as the entry point to investigate and problematize the mainstream values, this chapter examines how the governing class’s and the lower-class’s politics/practices and body appearance consolidate, contrast, or conflict with gender norms and social mores in Mrs.
Dalloway.
The Proportional Regimen and the Elite Parties in Postwar London
Featuring British social life on one particular day in the middle of June, 1923 London, Mrs. Dalloway pivots on the charming parties held by the upper-middle class.
Whereas the progression of the day proceeds with Mrs. Dalloway’s preparation for the evening party, the life of a Briton is affected by a political decision made during Lady Bruton’s luncheon. Although the First World War consumes the combatants and inflicts pain on their families, there seems to be not much change in the life of the governing class. While the upper class notices differences before and after the War in terms of population, commodity culture, and people’s mindset for the future, they still maintain the party ritual to connect people and sustain domestic order. Whereas high society throws parties to glorify Britain, all walks of life are encouraged to show their patriotic passion for the nation. By scrutinizing the British regime and the
upper-middle class parties with an eye for eating metaphors, this section probes into the social hierarchy and gender politics in postwar Britain.
In 1923, when the country is in the power of an irresistible return of militaristic patriarchy, citizens abide by the proportional regimen along the class line,
consolidating the social hierarchy and gender demarcation. On London streets five years after the war, upon hearing the backfiring explosion of the motor car
presumably carrying the Royalty, ladies stop their purchases, men of robust physique stand straight in salute, and the poor gather at the gates of Buckingham Palace thrilled to see the Royalty passing (MD 21, 22). As the greatness casts “the pale light of the immortal presence,” such immortality can be only achieved with the sacrifice of those who are “ready to attend their Sovereign, if need be, to the cannon’s mouth, as their ancestors had done before them” (MD 21emphasis added). The oral imagery of the artillery symbolizes the destructive power of war and hints at the inevitable sacrifice in the name of defeating the Empire’s enemies. Despite the fact that the First World War has claimed countless lives and left people like Mrs. Foxcroft eating her heart out on learning her boy killed, going to war has been praised as an act of heroism to date.
Like the shell-shocked Septimus, who was “one of the first to volunteer” to go to war, many inexperienced men follow in his footsteps without second thoughts (MD 95).
From wartime to postwar, Great Britain has recruited common men and imposed on them masculine ideals to be combative and uncomplaining in the battle while
privileging those on the upper echelon to prosper and indulge in the glories of Empire by throwing parties. The patriarchal power of the state is incarnated in a proportional regimen, which dictates how citizens should act and assigns to them different duties to sustain the order of the Empire hierarchically. It exploits the commoners as the country’s warriors; meanwhile, it enables the high class to cultivate their taste.
Whereas military service aggravates gender role separation, the proportional regimen widens the chasm between classes.
In complicity with the imperial regime are those who restore rigid class and gender differences in the name of proportion in their eating communities.9 From the aristocrats such as Lady Bruton to upper-middle class like Clarissa and Hugh, Mayfair, regardless of those afflicted by the late age’s War experience, basks in the joviality of throwing parties. The two prominent parties—Clarissa’s dinner party and Lady Bruton’s luncheon—manifest female achievements in the social realm as women not only turn themselves from commanders/food providers of the household to hostesses to the public but also fulfill their desire for socializing or wielding influence on politics. Yet, from the look of the two parties’ settings, objectives, and the composition of members, we can say that they remain patriarchal products that discriminate against the inferior and oppress the anomalous-looking individuals.
Clarissa Dalloway’s party demonstrates female creativity; however, it reveals her snobbish character at the same time. Born and bred to be a hostess, Clarissa plays her role as a politician’s wife by throwing parties. Having lived in Westminister for over twenty years, she feels herself “being part of it” as one of the “courtiers once in the time of the Georges [and is] going “that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party” (MD 7). Resonant with religious connotation as an “offering for the sake of offering” (MD 135), Clarissa’s party is claimed to be altruistic as it provides an
9 The term “eating community” derives from Pasi Falk’s contention that “[t]he primitive society is in a fundamental sense an ‘eating community’” (20). In The Consuming Body, Falk traces the ontogenic and cultural development of the modern individual self in relation to orality. According to him, the primitive society “can hardly be reduced to a ‘communion’ or a common shared ritual meal, yet the rituals involving not only (eating) meal but also other activities concerning food, function as the integrative mechanism of the society” (20). While civilization marginalizes the ritual meal and
transforms the pre-modern eating community (communion) into a communicative modern society, Falk finds the function of the mouth reduced to the individual level and boundaries in primitive parties dissolve as modern exchange and consumption come into play. Even though Mrs. Dalloway is
contextualized in the consumption society in postwar London, I still apply the term “eating community”
to emphasize citizens’ advocacy of the proportional regimen and the high class’s restoration of communion parties.
opportunity for people to socialize with one another. Many critics acknowledge her party as a “means to human synthesis,” and a “self-fulfilling creation” (Glenny 121,122) to “outran[k] men’s ratiocinations” (Blodgett 49). To some extent, Clarissa fulfills her role as a nurturer in the social realm by elevating domestic triviality to public festivity, ensuring the preparation, process, and the aftermath of the party.
However, in the eyes of Clarissa’s friends, she becomes the representative of English snobbery. Seeing Clarissa repeating “how delightful to see you” when receiving guests, Peter is critical of her effusive and insincere manner (MD 184). Likewise, Sally suspects that Clarissa has turned into a snob as she cannot see Clarissa around but finds Clarissa attending to those of importance all the time (MD 209).
Although Clarissa’s aim as a party-giver is to combine and to expand, her party appeals mostly to the dignitaries, or, the governing class that advocates Darwinian male control.10 While Clarissa exclaims: “why should I ask all the dull women in London to my parties” (MD 131), her attitude toward the influential is starkly
different. Clarissa seems unwilling to invite Ellie Henderson, a commonplace cousin, to the party (MD 186), whereas she repeatedly reminds Hugh Whitbread of her party and feels that the Prime Minister has been good to come (MD 191). Like what Peter has scorned her in the youth, Clarissa becomes a “perfect hostess” to the Prime Minister, the upper-class Bradshaw couple, and dignitaries like Lady Bruton (MD 9).
While Makiko Minow-Pinkney argues that “Clarissa accepts the role prescribed by the paternal law” for the maternal is often repressed in the text (100), I maintain that
10 I coin the phrase “Darwinian male control” for the use to illustrate the patriarchal rule based on social Darwinism in Mrs. Dalloway. And the ideas of Social Darwinism will be explicated in note 12.
Clarissa accepts her female roles as she remains subordinate to her husband and assists him in his political career by attending to figures of authority.
Not only does the hostess submit to the paternal law but many of her guests are assigned to imperial duty or endorse imperial values. For example, Lady Bruton, who has “the thought of Empire always at hand,” exchanges news and imperial agenda with Peter Walsh and the Prime Minister (MD 198). Peter Walsh, despite being a socialist in his youth, becomes a colonial administrator in India. Even Aunt Helena Parry, who is unwilling to see British intrusion, seems to appreciate her experience in India and Burma as a botanist due to the tie between Britain and the colonized11 (MD 196). Although Aunt Parry seems very much on the side of the colonized, she can
“not resist recalling what Charles Darwin ha[s] said about her little book on the orchids of Burma” upon chatting with Peter (MD 196-97). Whereas Diane McGee perceives Clarissa’s party “political” as it reflects the values of the British Empire (131), I find that the party gathers those who dedicate themselves to the perpetuation of imperial stability in a way implying the ideology of Social Darwinism.12 The most
11 The passage in Mrs. Dalloway are as follows: “For at the mention of India, or even Ceylon, her [Aunt Helena Parry’s] eyes (only one was glass) slowly deepened, became blue, beheld, not human beings—she had no tender memories, no proud illusions about Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies—it was orchids she saw, and mountain passes, and herself carried on the backs of coolies in the ‘sixties over solitary peaks; or descending to uproot orchids (starting blossoms, never beheld before) which she painted in watercolor; an indomitable Englishwoman, fretful if disturbed by the war, say, which dropped a bomb at her very door, from her deep meditation over orchids and her own figure journeying in the ‘sixties in India …” (MD 196 emphasis added).
12 Social Darwinism is the application of Charles Darwin’s biological ideas of natural selection to society. While there are various subcategories within Social Darwinism, ideas of External Social Darwinism best illuminates the notion of “proper” proportion in this thesis. Differing form Herbert Spencer’s idea of internal competition between individuals within the laissez-faire England, External Social Darwinists like Karl Pearson thought the existence of struggle was not between individuals but between tribes and nations. He asserted that Britain could not succeed in that struggle unless the class differences were eliminated. To achieve a homogenous country, Pearson endorsed Francis Galton’s ideas of “eugenics” and meanwhile discouraged the reproduction of the “unfit.” According to him in Grammar of Science, “[n]o degenerate and feeble stock will ever be converted into healthy and sound stock by the accumulated effects of education, good laws, and sanitary surrounds”(qtd. in Semmel 48).
Besides, Pearson positively perceived wars as a kind of selection and that “mankind will no longer progress” if wars cease (qtd. in Semmel 41). Seemingly, the claim for human solidarity and national
prominent example is Sir William Bradshaw, who worships proportion and believes that his regimen and rest cure not only “prosper[] himself but ma[ke] England prosper”
(MD 110).
Sir William … secluded her [Britain’s] lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their view until they, too, shared his sense of proportion—his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were women (she embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out of seven at home with her son). (MD 110)
In the party, it is unnecessary for Sir Bradshaw to propagandize a sense of proportion as the attendees have already internalized it and even held a share in sustaining the present proportionality. In his clinic, however, he practices Darwinian therapies,13 shutting people up. As Woolf writes, “[Sir Bradshaw] swooped; he devoured” (MD 113). The violence involved in the oral imagery signifies not only Sir William’s iron will to convert people but his aggression towards those who do not or cannot be assimilated into his sense of proportion. Moreover, the “proper” proportion also has to do with gender demarcation. Men should look up to Sir William Bradshaw as model, whereas women should follow Lady Bradshaw to share “a common femininity, a common pride in the illustrious qualities of husbands” (MD 201). Not knowing it is the devouring nature of Bradshaw’s proportional regimen that precipitates Septimus’
survival are only masks for the imperial enterprise. In the same vein, the notion of proportion in Mrs.
Dalloway denotes the tyranny of the upper class, which is privileged to define what “proper”
proportion should be. In the novel, the brutality of “proportion” is demonstrated in Sir William Bradshaw’s psychiatric treatment as well as in Lady Bruton’s Emigration Plan whose real aim is to shift the “unfit” to Canada and to prosper the upper class she herself belongs to.
13 In Elaine Showalter’s study of The Female Malady, she traces the psychiatric history in England and briefly categorizes three historical phases: psychiatric Victorianism (1830-1870), psychiatric
Darwinism (1870-1920), and psychiatric modernism (1920-1980). After 1870, Showalter notes an emerging psychiatric Darwinism follow “Darwin’s theories of inheritance, evolution, and degeneration”
to view “insanity as the product of organic defect, poor heredity, and an evil environment” (18).
ruin, Clarissa feels something wrong about Sir Bradshaw; despite that she, like Richard, “didn’t like his taste, didn’t like his smell,” she convinces herself that Sir Bradshaw is “extraordinarily able” (MD 201). From being unable to question to acquiescing in the dominant discourse on proportion, Clarissa as well as many others is gradually incorporated into Sir Bradshaw’s circle and colludes in the conspiracy against the inferior. Unknowingly, by receiving those who endorse imperial values and impose oppression on the weak, the party fortifies Darwinian male control and indirectly rules out the “unfit.”
Proportion as the imperial credo not only permeates through the party in terms of political ideology but is instilled in people in the form of decent bodily shape.
According to Jeremy Tambling, “[t]he obsession with order, or Proportion, includes Mrs. Dalloway’s strong class and probably sexual dislike of Miss Kilman” (63).
While Clarissa might have no chance to know Septimus, her treatment of Doris Kilman, one of the very few she knows from the “degradingly poor” (MD 136), reveals her ambivalence and hostility towards the poor and the “anomalous” others.
All day long, Clarissa remains beset with Miss Kilman, the corpulent history governess whom her daughter has an attachment for. Although Clarissa recognizes that it is “the idea of [Miss Kilman]” that one hates, she nevertheless scorns Kilman for her unfeminine appearance in the mackintosh, perspiring, swelling (MD 14).
Presumably, due to Miss Kilman’s corpulent physicality, scarcely any decent cloth fits her. However, people tend to associate her unattractive appearance with the lack of bourgeois cultivation. In addition to the slovenly dressing, Clarissa taunts Miss Kilman for her uncultivated taste (MD 14). While Clarissa loves roses, “Miss Kilman
squashe[s] the flowers all in a bunch, and ha[s]n’t any small talk” (MD 144). To this extent, the issue of proportion seems to conflate factors of physicality and social hierarchy. As Fulker notes, Miss Kilman’s rough appearance symbolizes her social inferiority (21-22). While Miss Kilman’s “disproportionate” shape denotes physically unfitness, her working-class status is perceived unsuitable for attending the party.
Deliberately ruling out the lowly and “odious” Miss Kilman from her party, Clarissa colludes in the sustenance of “proportion.” With reiterated cry to Elizabeth:
“Remember the party! Remember our party to-night” in the presence of Miss Kilman (MD 139 emphasis added), Clarissa uses her party to stress class difference and to reclaim her domination of her daughter, Elizabeth, who, in spite of Miss Kilman’s exhortation that “she must not let parties absorb her,” still attends the party due to social etiquette (MD 145). As Alex Zwerdling asserts, “Clarissa’s integration is horizontal, not vertical” (151). By stressing a sense of proportion embedded in class and gender differences, the party marks Clarissa’s triumph over Kilman and delimits Kilman’s access to the Dalloways.
Whereas Clarissa’s dinner party excludes the unsophisticated, “anomalous”
individuals whose tastes differ from that of the upper class, Lady Bruton’s luncheon is an exclusive masculine meeting grounded in gender dichotomy. According to Allie Glenny, “Lady Bruton’s principles as a hostess are ones of selection and partiality”
(MD 124). As Lady Bruton’s real intention behind the luncheon is to request a decent letter that proposes the Emigration Plan to the Times, her guests are those who can put thoughts into logical wording, namely, men.
Resonant with the hostess’s misogynist mindset, Lady Bruton’s luncheon party reveals gender polarization and male supremacy. As it turns out, the more masculine and ambitious Lady Bruton appears, the more submissive she is to the superiority of men over women. Descended from a military family, Lady Bruton is “a strong martial woman,” who “could have worn the helmet and shot the arrow” (MD 120, 198).
Having “the reputation of being more interested in politics than people; of talking like a man” (MD 117), Lady Bruton, as Minow-Pinkney notes, is “a physically powerful, emphatically phallic woman,” who has an ambitious proposal for emigration policy (103). Yet, however ambitious and confident Lady Bruton appears, she is frustrated by words and associates her difficulties with inborn limitation: “no woman stood to the laws of the universe; knew how to put things; knew what was said; so that if Richard advised her, and Hugh wrote for her, she was sure of being somehow right”
(MD 121). “Debarred by her sex” (MD 198), Lady Bruton internalizes patriarchal values and holds misogynist attitude towards women who become obstacles to their husbands. Lady Bruton’s view of husbands and wives displays an essentialist
dichotomy between men and women as the dominant and the subordinate, assigned to public and private spheres respectively. In her opinion, women should assist their husbands in the pursuit of career and therefore she believes “[i]t might have been better if Richard had married a woman with less charm, who would have helped him more in his work” (MD 197). For the same reason, Lady Bruton would never ask Clarissa to lunch for a woman will never come in handy to her imperial agenda (MD 34). Instead, Lady Bruton sets up the luncheon as “grand deception” and “profound illusion” to ask Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread to come “on false pretense, to
