Gender formations and queer identities in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and in later revisions of the text

Abstract

In Mrs Dalloway (1925) Virginia Woolf presents Clarissa as a complex main character, who is highly fragmented and unstable in terms of gender identity and sexuality. In the same line, revisions of this text in later years are significantly characterized by portraying characters with fluid and non-fixed identities as well. Therefore, my study will focus on the analysis of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and three of its later adaptations; namely, Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (1999), Stephen Daldry’s film The Hours (2002) and Robin Lippincott’s novel Mr. Dalloway (1999). I attempt to contribute to the state of the question by adopting the approach of queer theory and, thus, by analysing characters as queer identities/subjects. More precisely, in this study I intend to shed more light on the formation and cultural construction of identities in the aforementioned texts, especially focusing on gender and sexuality. Additionally, the present study intends to challenge the traditional belief in a hierarchical relationship between an ‘original’ text and its adaptations.