|
I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense. Virginia Woolfs provocative statement about her intentions in writing Mrs. Dalloway has regularly been ignored by the critics, since it highlights an aspect of her literary interests very different from the traditional picture of the poetic novelist concerned with examining states of reverie and vision and with following the intricate pathways of individual consciousness. But Virginia Woolf was a realistic as well as a poetic novelist, a satirist and social critic as well as a visionary: literary critics cavalier dismissal of Woolfs social vision will not withstand scrutiny. In her novels, Woolf is deeply engaged by the questions of how individuals are shaped by their social environments, how historical forces impinge on peoples lives, how class, wealth, and gender help to determine peoples fates. Most of her novels are rooted in a realistically rendered social setting and in a precise historical time. Woolfs focus on society has not been generally recognized because of her intense antipathy to propaganda in art. The pictures of reformers in her novels are usually satiric or sharply critical. Even when Woolf is fundamentally sympathetic to their causes, she portrays people anxious to reform their society and possessed of a message or program as arrogant or dishonest, unaware of how their political ideas serve their own psychological needs. Woolf detested what she called preaching in fiction, too, and criticized novelist D. H. Lawrence for working by this method. | 
