ABSTRACT
In the realm of culture, however, masculine values prevail and deflect the vision of the woman novelist, in setting a duality into the female narrative, turned Janus-like toward the responses of both self and other. The interconnections of female development, historical progress, and narrative structure are captured in Freud's image of a pre-Oedipal world underlying the individual and cultural origins we conventionally assign the names Oedipus and Athens. In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf encapsulates an image of the brusque and painful turn that, whenever it occurs, abruptly terminates the earliest stage of female development and defines the moment of acculturation as a moment of obstruction. The moment of exclusive female connection is shattered by masculine intervention, a rupture signaled typographically by Woolf's characteristic dash. The similarities between the fictional and psychoanalytic narratives clarify the structure of Woolf's submerged developmental plot and the power of Freud's submerged demonstration of the loss implicit in female development.
