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Lu Xun And Mrs Dalloway Essay

Decent Essays

Both Lu Xun and Virginia Woolf explore alienation as manifested in the growing emotional distance between people. In Lu Xun’s short story Hometown, the narrator finds himself unable to meaningfully connect with old friends and acquaintances in his hometown, from which he has been away for over twenty years. Similarly, Mrs. Dalloway by Woolf features characters with rich inner lives who nevertheless fail to express their feelings with others. Despite the similarity in symptoms, however, the two authors portray the causes and implications of alienation in disparate ways. While Lu Xun attributes alienation to a kind of spiritual poverty or mediocrity that can be fought against, Woolf provides a more nuanced view where alienation results from people attempting to rise above mediocrity in the first place and is thus almost inescapable. These differing portrayals are reflected in the solutions prescribed: Lu Xun recommends resistance, whereas Woolf suggests a cheerful acceptance of the bittersweet tension between the pain of isolation and the …show more content…

Lu Xun calls us to take arms against the spiritual poverty that afflicts society and causes alienation. His prescription is hope. At the end of Hometown, the narrator succeeds in establishing an (albeit indirect) connection with Runtu, whose “superstitious idol-worship” the narrator realizes is no different from his own idol of “hope” (99) expressed in a different way. For Lu Xun, hope is a form of resistance against the spiritual poverty the characters experience. Even something as simple as hope–for the next generation to have a “new life”–can suffice to create a spiritual foundation for the characters. Only with such a foundation for their own lives can they then communicate on meaningful terms with one another. Lu Xun envisions a world where people are united in a collective hope (100). By resisting the spiritual poverty of society through hope, alienation can be

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