Joyce’s novel Essay

The novels Mrs. D aloneoway and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, written by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce respectively, argon tales of persons who are challenged by the society in which they live. The lineaments tralatitiously handed down to men and women let elements of restraint for patchy of the characters within the stories. While convention dictates the actions that the characters should perform, the readers get the pattern that the authors are in opposition to these traditions.Throughout the twenty-four hour period spent with Mrs. Dalloway and her friends, situations farm in which characters become critical of others choices in a way that depicts the ideas of the bank clerk or author. Likewise, in the experiences of Stephen Dedalus and the other characters of Joyces novel, one chances that they often trust to perform actions alien to the stereotypical roles of their genders. In these novels, therefore, we find that there is no apparent desire within characte rs for males or females to inherit traditional gendered roles.In fact, we discover a desire to occupy a multi-gendered identity. This is important because it gestures at an identity separate from societal construction of gender. Hermione Lee relates that Virginia Woolf sought a combination of sensibility and tenacity in her work (xvii). This suggests a a care(p) mixing of feminine and masculine qualities with which she imbues several of her characters in Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa Dalloway has become a woman who ostensibly fits perfectly within the role societally configured for her gender.She is the married woman of a statesman and the mother of a beautiful daughter. She maintains fine parties and does the traditional female jobs of overseeing the servants, visiting the sick, and other things. Yet, Woolf appears immediately to intimate to the reader the undesirability of all this tradition to Clarissa herself, as she is seen at the outset of the novel going on an errand that should normally maintain been reserved for her servants. Her desire for independence is asserted in the first sentence, Mrs. Dalloway said she would vitiate the flowers herself (Woolf 1).Though this rebellion is a minuscular one and is buried in the guise of womanly work (going to buy flowers), the commercial aspect of it places her in the position of a business person, full as the errand frees her from the confines of the home. On this walk she thinks of Peter Walsh, a man with whom she once shared her passions for literature and freedom. Her thoughts and desires snuff it through conventions that dictate the subservience of women. She considers marriage in a way that seems alien to its constitution, as she imbues her role in it with the type of independence that one does not usually find in the traditional view of marriage.She explains that her decision against marrying Peter was made because In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living tog ether day in day out in the same dwelling house which Richard gave her, and she him (Woolf 5). This demonstrates the end to which she desires not to be subsumed by her husband as women often are in marriages. Continuing, she thinks, When it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him Peter or they would amaze been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced (6). This tells what she considers her support would have been bid with Peter.She seeks to add a portion of masculinity to her role by retentivity something of herself and continuing to show herself to the worlda right that is usually disposed(p) without reservation to married men, but tacitly withheld from women of that time. Clarissa continues to demonstrate her inner tendencies to throw off the traditional gender role and to fulfill her political and occupational dreams. During that time in England, womens occupations were limited to household-related chores. She considers othe r women who had lived non-traditional lives, and longs to have her life to live again so she could make different choices.The first of those choices would have granted her an occupation that would defy her gender. The narrator assures us that Clarissa Dalloway would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately rather large interested in politics like a man with a country house really dignified, very sincere (Woolf 8). The use of the phrase like a man is telling, in that it highlights the extent to which Mrs. Dalloway longs to be released from the confines of her sex. She wants to be endow with the possibilities that attend a man. Also telling is her desire to be very sincere (8).Sincerity is not a trait that has been traditionally accorded to women, as they were encouraged to keep their thoughts to themselves (or perhaps not to have any at all). Therefore, a woman with any ideas or opinions can be considered to have been somewhat forced into insincerity by their very act of c ommand to the will of their husband and in their pretence at never having anything to posit beyond remarks about the running of the household. Clarissas urge to speak in truth demonstrates her desire to combine traditionally masculine qualities with her feminine ones.