Societal and Self-Imposed Isolation in The Modern Novel
In the context of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Plath’s The Bell Jar, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men
--
In the early modern period, women were, and to a certain extent still are, pressured to decide between two states of being: either living trapped in a society that rejects female autonomy, or living in isolated freedom apart from this society. In Mrs. Dalloway and The Bell Jar, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath each respectively present an argument that women who either conform to or rebel against society both experience self-isolation. Esther Greenwood’s and Mrs. Dalloway’s fates reflect this double bind felt by women.
Interestingly, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck raise a similar subject in Of Mice and Men and The Sound and the Fury; they both investigate how women remain isolated from society, whether they conform or diverge from its expectations. Although women are alienated in the works of both male and female authors, male authors often write female characters as being permanently alienated from society, while female authors depict women characters as experiencing a temporary period of self-alienation, after which they gain a truer understanding of self.
Though Steinbeck and Faulkner do not give their female characters an internal narrative voice like Woolf and Plath, these four modern novelists all depict the alienation of their female characters. However, while the female authors Woolf and Plath present Clarissa and Esther as temporarily isolated from themselves, the male authors Steinbeck and Faulkner present Caddy and Curley’s wife, their respective female characters, as permanently isolated from society.
Woolf and Plath focus on the self-alienation of their female protagonists, portraying their journey as they escape from their self-induced traps. Both Clarissa and Esther move from self-alienation to self-actualization. In Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa is able to live relatively independent from her husband and her family as a wealthy British aristocrat. She appears to enjoy her life and her house, as well as her husband Richard who she calls “the foundation” of both (Woolf 29). The thing that brings Mrs. Dalloway the greatest joy is her ability to host “her parties” (Woolf 121) and embracing her social “gift” of “knowing people” (Woolf 9). She savors these hobbies and is independent in how she chooses to express her creativity through this social art. The implication that she can care about “her roses” and find joy in the other domestic frivolities featured at her parties suggests that she still exercises agency from the larger constraints of her society (Woolf 120).
Although this type of autonomy seems like something that might offer her joy, Clarissa still feels isolated from herself. Certain lines from the beginning of the book seem to suggest she feels a sense of contentment with herself and her life, such as how she claims to embrace the present “this, here, now, in front of her” (Woolfe 9). However, the time that Clarissa spends pouring over her recollections of the Bourton estate and her youth suggest, as she voices later, that she is “desperately unhappy” with her present life (Woolfe 120). Despite her freedom and independence to choose what to do with her life, she still feels this sense of self-alienation. Upon opening a window in her house earlier in the novel, she refers to wind that comes in as “chill and sharp and yet… solemn” and starts “feeling as she did…that something awful was about to happen” (79). The juxtaposition between the interior and exterior worlds create an immediate sense of separation between Clarissa’s home life and the open beauty of the outside world.
This isolation and separation causes her great loneliness, which Clarissa’s old love Peter Walsh inspires when he asks her, “Are you happy, Clarissa? Does Richard — ” (Woolf 47). Before he was interrupted, the question that Peter was going to ask Clarissa was, “Does Richard make you happy?”; this question plagues Clarissa as she prepares for her party. When the reader learns at the beginning of the novel that Clarissa “had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone,” it is clear that she is not “happy;” Clarissa is a woman burdened by the weight of her own mortality, with no one to share it with but her fragmented past and present self (Woolf 8).
By the end of the novel, however, Clarissa dispels her self-isolation. At her party, she empathizes with Septimus, the shell-shocked war veteran who “killed himself,” a man who Clarissa never met (Woolf 186). Although Septimus wanted to live, and did not want to “throw it[his life] away” like Clarissa assumes, she is liberated by this idea; suddenly, she describes how the sky appears “new to her,” and repeats her mantra “Fear no more the heat on the sun,” a reminder to herself to embrace each day that she is given, and to live with joy (Woolf 186). Embracing her mortality in the present, Clarissa reconciles her past and present self, and ends her cycle of self-alienation.
Like Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Esther Greenwood in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar experiences severe self-alienation as a result of her depression. Esther is a top-student and acclaimed undergraduate writer who falls into a state of depression, which she cannot trace back to a singular source. The Cold War society that Esther lives in, substantiates Rosi Smith, a historian and published author “led to the creation of an ideology of cultural containment, enforcing prescriptive roles on women within an American suburban, conservative, and conformist setting” — conditions that exacerbated the intensity of Esther’s isolation. Entering into her period of depression, she wonders to herself: “I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired” (Plath 30). Esther’s self-generated interrogation of her motives undermines her previous personal ambition. When her boss asks what she intended to do with her English degree after graduating, she answers, “‘I don’t really know,’” which causes her to feel “a deep shock…because the minute [she] said it, [she] knew it was true” (Plath 32). Esther’s internal divide between her distant past self and unfamiliar self in the present drive her to attempt suicide multiple times, but each time, she falls short. Hospitalized for her actions, she endures inadequate medical and psychiatric treatment — including electric shock therapy — for major depressive cases like hers.
Eventually, Esther emerges from the depths of her depression and her isolation by grasping onto her identity after her friend Joan commits suicide. Looking at her friend’s grave, Esther “took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of [her] heart, repeating “I am, I am, I am” (Plath 243). After recovering from the depth of her isolation, she is released from the hospital, and she is “born twice — patched, retreaded and approved for the road”( Plath 244). She is, at the final moment of the novel, free from the bell-jar that once isolated her. In this manner, Woolf and Plath portray Clarissa and Esther as prototypes of the new modern woman — feminine figures that confront the gendered limitations of the old world — as women that have the potential to self-actualize, and escape their period of self-isolation. Though they still remain subject to structured society, Esther and Clarissa have freed themselves from the trap of self-isolation.
In male authors’ work, however, this societal isolation for women is permanent. Both Curley’s wife and Caddy fall from societal standards into death or social depravity. Faulkner portrays Caddy Compson, the primary female figure in The Sound and The Fury as isolated from society due to her rejection of the traditional Southern value of female purity and innocence. Historian Ren Denton provides the historical context for Faulkner’s story about the decline of the South:
As the nation moved toward modernization after the Civil War, the South was left in a state of defeat and decline. Like the region itself, old Aristocratic planter families were left destitute and defeated. The image of decaying splendor continued to typify portrayals of the South well into the twentieth century. (“Understanding Faulkner’s South”)
As such, Faulkner presents the declining society of the old South and its obsession with innocence and female purity. Benjy’s iterative statement about his sister, that “Caddy smelled like trees” symbolizes the Southern value of innocence; when Benjy notices that Caddy begins to wear perfume that disguises this natural smell, he realizes that his sister has changed and is becoming a young woman with her own desires (Faulkner 31). As such, Caddy’s family members pay close attention to any signs of sexual deviancy she may portray and enact harsh judgement towards her if she transgresses the bounds of Southern propriety. This is seen early on in the novel during Benjy’s narrative section, where Quentin slaps Caddy for taking off her wet dress outdoors (12), and is upset with her for wearing a “prissy” dress at the age of fourteen that caught the attention of teenage boys (Faulkner 26). She becomes pregnant out of wedlock, causing her family to reject and banish her, even after she attempts to get married to someone she doesn’t love to cover up her societal transgression (Faulkner 59, 61).
For a woman of her time, refusing to enter a strict relationship with a man was an expression of her freedom, and this freedom and independence is what leads to Caddy’s banishment — which marks what Dilsey calls “de beginnin, en… de endin” of the Compson family’s downfall (Faulkner 185). By exercising forbidden acts of freedom Caddy is punished at a societal level as her family banishes her, rendering her permanently isolated from her larger society. Caddy’s unspoken story remains silenced; just as she is the only Compson sibling without a narrative section in The Sound and The Fury, none of her family members see or speak about her after she is driven out of their town. The sole Compson sister is forced to live her life apart from her family.
The real tragedy, however, is Caddy’s societal position as she is trapped between her desire to express her individuality and her society’s deep-rooted and repressive values. Her importance is reduced to her female chastity, which, since she hasn’t upheld this Southern ideal, causes her family and society to view her as vile and unworthy. Banished from her family and from her child, Caddy is fated to never gain her own voice due to her societal isolation.
The opposite side of the double bind that Steinbeck presents in Of Mice and Men is that a woman can be married and therefore included in society, but must give up the freedom that one gains from independence. The first time Steinbeck introduces Curley’s wife, he mentions that although she was young, she felt compelled to marry Curley and commit herself to a relationship; she sought agency apart from her immediate family and can only imagine doing so through marriage (Steinbeck 88). On an initial reading, it appears that Curley’s wife was so enamored with the idea of marriage that she was compelled to leave her immediate family as a young woman. As she explains to Lennie at the end of the novel, however, she used her marriage to to escape the confines of her immediate family that didn’t support her dreams of acting “in the movies;” she wants to exercise independence in the outside world, an aspiration that she shares with Lennie at the end of the novel (Steinbeck 88). And yet, because she has integrated herself into society through marriage, she reluctantly waits around “lookin’ for Curley,” as he traditionally should be center of her affections (Steinbeck 55). Yet Curley is rarely around for his wife, and like many of the ranch workers, she has no one on the ranch to confide in.
The last action that Curley’s wife takes before she is murdered is to reveal her individuality, first by dressing and acting the way she desires and then by revealing her personal aspirations to Lennie, who she believed to be her friend. In the last chapter of the novella, when her husband goes into town to visit a brothel, Curley’s wife comes around the bunkroom with “her face…heavily made up [with] her lips slightly parted”, and with a sense of liberation states to the men: “I ain’t giving you no trouble. Think I don’t like to talk to somebody ever’ once in a while?” (Steinbeck 77). This over-sexualization of this young woman who is genuinely expressing loneliness — as she is the only woman on the ranch — speaks to how difficult it is for Curley’s wife to find community and respite from her social isolation.
When she approaches Lennie in the barn, near moments from her death, she expresses the extent of her societal alienation. She tells him, “I never get to talk to nobody. I get awful lonely,” and begs Lennie to talk to her: “’Why can’t I talk to you? . . . Wha’s the matter with me?’ ‘Ain’t I got a right to talk to nobody. Whatta they think I am, anyways?” (Steinbeck 83). These fleeting moments of ontological revelation are the last moments of freedom that Curley’s wife has. By the time she begins to self-actualize in sharing her personal ambitions, she has offered Lennie the chance to “stroke her hair” as he likes petting soft items, and in doing so, she unknowingly has placed herself in danger (Steinbeck 90). Tragically, her moment of self-actualization comes to an end, as Lennie — unaware of his strength — grabs and latches onto Curley’s wife’s hair, and suffocates her while trying to keep her quiet when she yells out in pain (Steinbeck 91). With her story untold, she dies unnamed and unrecognized by her society — whose standards she attempted to follow.
These male authors show an impressive insight into the double bind faced by women and emphasize the extent to which society universally alienates women — regardless of whether they conform to or reject its influence. The true tragedy of these tragic women is not their physical death or banishment, but the death of their aspirations for freedom.
Woolf, Plath, Faulkner and Steinbeck all recognize and portray the advent of female alienation that feminist scholars still discuss to this day. However, the male authors of The Sound and the Fury and Of Mice and Men trap female characters while female authors liberate them in Mrs. Dalloway, and The Bell Jar. Too often, women fall victim to societal expectations that insist they give up their personal lives in order to start and maintain a family. Too often, this societal pressure forces women to feel isolated from their communities and from their own selves. To transcend the darker realities that surround these characters, one can turn their attention to the present day, where contemporary women are equipped with the vocabulary to discuss and argue the things that modern novelists could only illustrate in fiction.
Now, for every Curley’s wife or Mrs. Dalloway who cannot transcend their domestic roles, for every Caddie or Esther that seeks to escape the pointed judgements of female purity, there is a growing number of women who are ready to help characters like these to step out and embrace the world.
Works Cited
Denton, Ren. “Understanding Faulkner’s South.” Teaching Faulkner. Digital Yoknapatawpha, 2003.faulkner.drupal.shanti.virginia.edu/sites/default/files/documents/DY_The_Sound_and_the_Fury.pdf.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury (1929). Norton, 1993.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar (1963). Harper Perennial, 2009.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Mariner, 1990.
Smith, Rosi. “Seeing Through The Bell Jar: Distorted Female Identity in Cold War America.” Aspeers Journal for European American Studies, 2008, pp. 34–54. http://www.aspeers.com/2008/smith.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men (1937). Penguin, 1993.
