Society vs. Individuality

Have you ever noticed how impossible it is to find a place in central London where you can truly find yourself alone? Society can sometimes feel like overbearing, watching everything you do at all times, and holding certain expectations for every single person. This isn’t exclusive to modern times. Clarissa Dalloway experiences this in 1925 in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa is extremely self-conscious. Her life is public; she is under constant pressure to always be well composed and normal. Her normal behavior is one that she had to formulate for herself. In our day and age, we get an idea of what ‘normal’ behavior is through television and marketing, but Clarissa’s comes from public outings.

This fake normality that women have to hold in Clarissa’s time is both unhealthy and a promoter of negative feelings towards oneself. People are not taught to admire themselves, but rather to judge themselves every time they do something that doesn’t fit society. The fake nature of Clarissa’s also leads to some self-hatred where Clarissa feels like a, “frivolous [and] empty-minded; a mere silly chatterbox” (Woolfe 37). No one is allowed to really be himself or herself, which leads to a whole mess of negative feelings.

Society’s watchful eye and expectations not only hurt women in the book, but also men. Peter Walsh has his own struggles with keeping up these expectations. His struggles really come to life when he’s in Trafalgar square and he gets a feeling of indifference when he realizes that nobody there knows who he is and simply cannot judge him. He can live like “an unguarded flame, bow and bend” to what he really wants in life (Woolfe 45).

Society must stop expecting individuals to be satisfied with a life of normalcy, but rather a life that is true to oneself.