The Gardens in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Ecofeminism

This paper aims at reexamining Woolf’s feminism through an ecofeminist lens focusing on the natural images in the public and private gardens in Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as the modern pastoral elegy engages in mourning the deaths from war and everyday life. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf opposes the oppressive civilization which destroys our natural environment by offering a nostalgic vision of damaged trees and flowers. Woolf denies Cartesian dualism in connecting sanity and insanity that Clarissa and Septimus represent respectively,choosing rather to obscure the division between nature and culture. Trees in Mrs. Dalloway represent the nexus between human and non-human beings and epitomize their interdependence within one ecosystem. Woolf illustrates an holistic ecosystem through Septimus’ revelation,“Men must not cut down trees” and Clarissa’s transcendental theory. A reconsideration of Mrs. Dalloway as thus linked with ecofeminism provides an opening to an environmental ethics in conjunction with Woolf’s feminism.