The hated Ms. Kilman

The Panel Presentation my group gave this week focused around a paper titled Equating Performance with Identity: The Failure of Clarissa Dalloway’s Victorian “Self” in Virginia Wool’s Mrs. Dalloway. Kind of a long title, but it was an interesting and thought provoking paper. Most of it focused around Clarissa Dalloway herself and her role as the perfect hostess, but a section of the paper also focuses on her daughter Elizabeth. More specifically it talks about Elizabeth’s life choices and how they compare to Clarissa, but it does by comparing her choices of role model between her mother, Mrs. Dalloway, and Ms. Kilman.

Ms. Kilman was a very interesting character to me, and one I wish we had looked at a little more in class discussions. The general sense I seemed to be getting from people was that they didn’t like Ms. Kilman very much, but I actually found myself empathizing with her quite a lot. What she represented in the paper however was Elizabeth’s desire to find a profession herself, as opposed to resigning herself to the same role her mother represents. Eventually Elizabeth seems to side with her mother as far as that she decides to attend her mother’s party as opposed to staying with Ms. Kilman and as a result chooses the perfect hostess roll over that of a profession.

If one were to assume that this is how Woolf meant it to be interpreted this presents an interesting view on Woolf’s own view of how a woman might define her sense of identity. Feminism was an important idea to Woolf and she wrote and extremely influential essay on the matter titled A Room of One’s Own. In it she states, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”, and more broadly she talks about the idea that women need similar support to that which a husband traditionally acquired from his wife if they are to have a fruitful career. What I find so striking here though is that there’s really no clear bias as to which root Woolf seems to feel is the better one.  Despite being an outspoken feminist and someone who had a lot to say about what women needed for their careers her novel doesn’t present a particularly pleasant idea of what the professional woman is like. Ms. Kilman certainly isn’t the happiest character in the book.

There wasn’t a great deal of discussion in my class about the extent to which Woolf’s own life is reflected in her novel, but I’ve always enjoyed trying to get to know the author a little better. After every good novel I’ve read I’ve always wanted to sit down with the author and just talk with them and get to know them a little better. Anyways, maybe this could provide a certain insight for the curious author into who Virginia Woolf was.