THE HOME FRONT AS WOUND: CIVILIAN FEMALE WITNESSING IN VIRGINIA WOOLF'S MRS DALLOWAY

Abstract

Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) is conventionally read as a modernist experiment in stream-of-consciousness narration and the representation of subjective time. This paper proposes a revisionary reading that repositions the novel within the field of First World War literature, arguing that Clarissa Dalloway occupies a critically neglected subject position: the civilian female witness who neither fought nor nursed, yet carries the war's invisible wound. Drawing on Elaine Scarry's theory of wounding in The Body in Pain (1985), this paper contends that war's destruction of language is not confined to the battlefield but extends into the domestic and social spaces Clarissa inhabits in post-war London. Through close readings of Clarissa's opening movement through the city, her interior response to Septimus Warren Smith's shell shock, and her act of silent witnessing at the novel's close, this paper demonstrates that Woolf formally encodes civilian female trauma through narrative ellipsis, fragmented interiority, and strategic silence. Clarissa's inability to articulate her grief is not a personal failing but a structural consequence of a culture that denies civilian women a legitimate language for war loss. Mrs Dalloway thus emerges as a feminist counter-narrative to dominant masculine war discourse, one that insists on the war's reach into bodies and minds that official memory chose to overlook.