An Essay on Dean Swift's Character

While reading Virginia Woolf’s “The Introduction” and “The New Dress”, there are interesting dynamics among female characters. This none better seen than in the introduction between Lily Everit and Mrs. Dalloway, for there arte certain descriptions and actions taken by both characters that establish an opposition to another. On one hand we have Lily Everit who seems to be an intellectual, young “different” woman and Mrs. Dalloway who is an older woman set in her ways. These two conflict with one another for the pursuits of woman in the past (Mrs. Dalloway) and those of the present (Lily Everit) are not one. Where Everit wants to show her essay on the “character of Dean Swift” she is afraid to do so, for fear here peers and a male society in general would judge her. An example of this can be seem with the lines, “Lily Everit instinctively hid that essay of hers, so ashamed was she now, so bewildered too, and on tiptoe nevertheless to adjust her focus and get into right proportions (the old having been shamefully wrong)”(Par.2.Intro.). There is also a kind of distinction between men and women in both works, there is a continual reference to Shakespeare, this one thought being a kind of symbolization of male dominance, “Tags of Shakespeare, lines from books she had read ages ago suddenly came to her when she was in agony, and she repeated them over and over again. “Flies trying to crawl,” she repeated” (Par.5.New Drs.). So in all basic terms, one feels that when a feminist critics literature, the search for the dynamitic relationships of female characters and there counterparts as well as the female “other”. This being the character in the novel who conflicts with that story’s society.