Discuss the Role of Sally Seton in Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs. Dalloway'.

Sally Seton offers Clarissa the promise of emancipation from gender normativity and the roles that accompany it. Sally rejects certain “feminine” roles and adopts some that are “masculine”, ultimately highlighting the disparity between sex and gender. Contemporaneous ideas of femininity were closely linked to sexuality. Since women were sexually subservient to men, this included heteronormativity. Sally becomes a construct symbolising this promise of liberation in Clarissa’s fallible memory but also symbolises the impossibility of the individual achieving true emancipation as she ultimately submits to the societal role forced upon her as a woman and becomes Lady Rosseter. Sally rejects gender normativity in her own behaviour and in doing so, portrays nonconformity as a possibility to Clarissa. The ‘New Woman’ was a popular literary trope of the 1920s, for example, Jordan in Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (published in the same year as Mrs. Dalloway), and Woolf continues this tradition in her characterisation of Sally. The ‘New Woman’ embodies women’s movement away from conventional norms in the early 20th Century. B. June West defines the New Woman as ‘taking over the [male] ways of behaviour’ and Sally exhibits masculine mannerisms. Sally’s ‘abandonment’ allows her to ‘say anything [or] do anything’; ‘abandonment’ expresses Sally’s carefree personality but also her active disregard of gender normativity. Clarissa’s first impression of Sally is of her ‘smoking a cigarette’; West rightly describes smoking as an emblem of the New Woman adopting male behaviours, particularly in the 1920s. Sally pursues traditionally masculine pursuits such as ‘smok[ing] cigars’, which takes smoking to a hypermasculine extreme, and ‘bicyc[ling]’, yet she is also depicted as feminine. She has a ‘way with flowers’ and ‘picked hollyhocks, dahlias’. ‘Hollyhocks’ symbolise fertility, the pinnacle of feminine virtue; ‘dahlias’, however, symbolise difference and so hint at the nonconventional aspects of her personality, most notably her masculine traits. The comma between the two flowers depicts the thin barrier between Sally’s femininity and masculinity and creates an image of harmony between the two, which challenges the idea that they are opposite and mutually exclusive. This illustrates the duality of Sally’s character; though she is a New Woman, she is not “manly” as 20th Century artists and academics, including West, often depicted the New Woman. She has a ‘beautiful voice’, a stereotype assigned to women, which makes her words sound like ‘a caress’. This nurturing, gentle image aligns with conventional feminine beauty. Through Sally’s character, Woolf presents a harmonious merging of gender roles in an individual as possible and contrary to being ugly, as contemporaneous negative stereotypes of the New Woman would suggest, capable of creating a kind of ‘charm’.