ABSTRACT
This paper shows how the concept of hospitality plays a vital role in female self-reliance in the twentieth century Britain. The case study is Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, which portrays Clarissa Dalloway, who is torn between her privileged public role as a society hostess and her inferior status as a wife. This conflict becomes vivid in heroine’s manipulations of the spheres, the public and the private. Although the art of admitting guests, hostessship, takes place in the private sphere of the house, Clarissa Dalloway shows that the public sphere is much more involved in this space than the private one. This paper demonstrates how Woolf criticizes the suffrage movements, which dedicate most of their attention to the public sphere, while the real battlefield is the private realm of the home. This social critique is masked under divergent hospitality of Clarissa Dalloway, who is a professional hostess that represents the imperial and patriarchal society, but who is also a rebel. Divergent hospitality thus becomes a sign for a much more troublesome phenomenon in women’s lives in twentieth century Britain, which is female subjugation masked under the notion of liberation.
Keywords: Hostessship, Hospitality, Female self-reliance, Private sphere, Public sphere.