Clarissa and the Coolies' Wives: Mrs. Dalloway Figuring Transnational Feminism

This essay argues that India plays a crucial role in Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. The name "India" functions there as a double catachresis that ultimately brings together the "problem" of India with the ethical and political issues at the heart of the novel. Woolf's invocation of Indian women, in particular, ultimately points toward the importance of the absent encounter with the other woman as ethical remainder, suggesting that any question of feminist ethics is, necessarily, a question of transnational feminist ethics.