Conventions dealing with Space in Emma and Mrs. Dalloway

As a woman, there are only a few spaces that I cannot enter – the men’s bathroom, for example. As a twenty year old, the only spaces I am not ‘legally’ allowed to occupy are the ones where a person must be twenty-one or older – a liquor store, for example. Otherwise the world is an endless source of opportunity, waiting for me to explore all of its diverse spaces. However, it has not always been this way – especially for women. There was a time, not too long ago, where spaces were regulated. These regulations did not necessarily derive from a government act. A majority of them were conventions developed over time in a particular society/culture. In Jane Austen’s Emma and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, we catch a brief glimpse of how these conventions regulated society and influenced the people in that society.

It is perfectly normal in today’s modern world for a woman to come and go as she pleases. However for the women in Jane Austen’s novels, there were different societal rules a woman of class had to follow. At one incident in the novel after the party at Mr. and Mrs. Weston’s, Emma finds herself in a somewhat “awkward” situation. It has just begun to snow, and Mr. Woodhouse is quite impatient to get home before the snow worsens. In all the hustle and bustle, Emma and Mr. Elton are forced to share a carriage. Austen describes how the door is “lawfully” shut. The use of the world “lawfully” seems to indicate that Emma is totally aware of the precarious situation she is in. No one had noticed that she was alone in the carriage with a man she is not related to (also without a female chaperon). So if she were to make a fuss about it now, then that would draw unnecessary attention to the situation. Mr. Elton and Emma have just broken a cardinal rule! A woman and a man, who are not married, are never allowed to be together alone. It would ruin Emma’s reputation.

Another example we can draw from Emma is when she goes to drop off Harriet at the Martin’s farm. As well as having conventions that regulate interactions between the opposite sexes, there are also certain conventions that apply to the mixing/socializing of the social classes. We can see this particularly well as Emma attempts to convince Harriet that marrying Martin would not be beneficial, “It would have grieved me to lose your [Harriet’s] acquaintance, which must have been the consequence of your marrying Mr. Martin.”  Martin comes from the working class, and Emma would find it improper to have associations with anyone even acquainted with the Martin family.

On the other hand in novels such as Mrs. Dalloway the conventions that ruled Emma’s social life have been altered or totally forgotten all together. The first encounter we have with Mrs. Dalloway is of her walking by herself to a flower shop. At the very beginning of the novel one of the most important rules of Emma’s society has already been broken. Another example of the differences between Emma and Mrs. Dalloway is that when Peter Walsh comes to visit Clarissa, he rushes up to her bedroom and talks with her as she mends her dress! This event alone describes how flexible the social conventions of Mrs. Dalloway’s time period have become. There seems to be almost no space that is off limits. At the same time Clarissa lives in Westminster. This is an area near London that is generally reserved for the upper middle class, upper class, and royalty. Even though spaces no longer restrict communication between men and women, they certainly do restrict the interaction between social classes.

Even though the above comparisons between the modern world and two variations of older generations are really only applicable to western society, they are still relevant and accurate descriptions of how our society has changed over time. It is interesting to reflect on how much society and its conventions about space have altered. 

-Katherina Delgado

Austen, Jane. Emma. 2009. Public Domain Books. Ebook. 

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. Mariner Books. Print.