This, to a certain extent, determines the interleaving of the formal experiments of modernism and domestic transformation
Portraying two societal hostess-figures who give successful parties, Mrs. DaLlorway and To the Lighthouse contain Woolf's contemplation on the "servant problem". As will be shown, domestic servants and domestic labour haunt the narratives of these novels. It is Lucy who is seen engaging
herself with cleaning the drawing room for the evening party and Mrs. Walker who washes the dishes in the basement kitchen for Clarissa Dalloway. It is Mildred who spends three days preparing Mrs. Ramsay's celebrated Boeuf en Daube which brings her dinner party to the triumphant moment. Arrd the cleaning woman, Mrs. McNab, whose labour maintains the empty house while the Mrs. Ramsays are away, is ascribed to an independent narrative space in “Time Passes” of To the Lighthouse.
What is at issue in this chapter then is how foregrounding domestic servants and domestic labour in both Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse interconnect with Woolf's experimentation with the novelistic narratives. Such combination of sociopolitical vision and literary experimentation, it contends, is achieved through drawing attention to the kitchen, a domestic space architecturally hidden in the Victorian house. In the way she encapsulates the social convention of the nineteenth century in the social space of the drawing room.
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