Religious belief in a secular age: Literary modernism and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract

This article explores Virginia Woolf's conflicted relationship with Christianity, namely, her avowed atheism and hostility to religious dogma, yet her openness to mystical experience and her use of the language of Christian mysticism in her writing. In particular, Woolf's critique of secularism in her novel Mrs. Dalloway remains open at some level to Christian beliefs and values. Woolf's stream-of-consciousness technique reveals the soul as a “sacred” space or “sanctuary,” and her allusions to Christ in the character of Septimus Smith, and less obviously Clarissa Dalloway, suggest yearning for answers to human suffering in a “godless” world. In the end, however, the modernist effort to “sacralize” human goodness does not resolve deeper theological issues at stake in the novel, which Christianity locates in the doctrine of the fall and God's redemptive work in Christ.