Mrs.Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway is a novel about a particular day in history, on a day in june 1923-five years after the first world war. Woolf develops a major character, Peter Walsh, who has been out of England since the war and through his gaze comes the commentary on the transformation that has taken place during these years. Characters like Lady Bruton, Miss Perry and Peter himself are identified with British imperialist Mission but the truth was the empire was crumbling down fast. As a class to which the Dalloways belong is marked by extreme self-indulgence. The party at the end of the novel reveals the "power without its substance. When the Prime Minister enters the party, he is described to be looking as an ordinary man.

Solidity, inability to communicate feelings, rigidity are some of the central concepts of Mrs. Dalloway and these aspects are applied to the governing class in the novel. The people belonging to the governing class seem to be inflexible and irresponsive in their nature which make them incapable of reacting at the important and critical events of their time and lives. The most important contemporary event of the European history was the World War, though the war changed millions of lives but only one character seems to be affected by it-Septimus Smith. Woolf is suggesting that the governing class is trying to undermine and negate the importance and pains of war and wants to forget it as a subject of past. This callousness is evident in Richard's fleeting comment on the war victims,

                                     thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them

                                     shoveled together, already half-forgotten.

The characters in Mrs. Dalloway who fail to restrain their emotions (Septimus Smith, Dorris Kilman) are all in trouble and seen as threatening forces to the order of society.When such people become too distressing, they are dealt with by agents of authority like Sir William Bradshaw, who were held in charge to control these "unsocial impulses."

This sense of living in a cocoon protects the class from the disturbing facts and the feeling comes back in the treatment of it's servants. Service is assumed as a natural order by the governing class. The entire system is based on the power and wealth of one class and drudgery of the other, ignored by master and servant alike.

The relationship between the master and the servant is same as the difference between all the classes in the novel. Clarissa's party is strictly class demarcated. Nobody other than upper middle class could enter it. Clarissa justifies and defends her party as an attempt to unify everybody but it is important to note here that all the guests who have been invited belong to a particular class, that is upper middle class. 

Clarissa's sympathy towards Septimus marks a contrast to the way her set treats an outsider of the class. His death shatters her and touches her deeply and profoundly. It is in a steep contrast to the way the governing class treats such "threatening forces." They turns the individual into a "case", as Bradshaw does in mentioning Septimus. This trait of transforming the human beings into categories is one of the marks of governing class mentality. These skills to compartmentalize are used to maintain oder and to retain power.Septimus is seen as threat, not because he reminds the war whereas everybody else is trying to forget it but because of his criticism of the indifferent passivity. The tone of the passage concerning Bradshaw is different from the rest of the text not because Woolf is trying to explain the painful experience of how the mental derangement treated instead she is trying to suggests that the "treatment" itself is a symptom of a disease in the social system. Bradshaw's  habit of command is seen as the real problem. 

Like Septimus, Kilman is also a war victim who is dismissed from teaching position because she refuses to accept all Germans as villains. The degrading poverty and isolation embitters her, making her despise herself and the society she inhabits. Like Septimus even she can not control "the hot and turbulent feelings which boiled and surged her."

Virginia Woolf is sharply critical of the governing class in the novel. Some of the references in the novel describe the real time events that were happening at that point in time, which the first readers must have recognized. But the crticism never comes directly, its through the internal monologues of the characters that we observe a critique of the contemporary society.