Mrs. Dalloway, The Minor Characters, Hugh Whitbread And...

In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf crafts the minor characters, Hugh Whitbread and Miss Kilman, to symbolize the stereotypes of the different social classes. Hugh Whitbread functions as the embodiment of British aristocratic traditions and ideals while Miss Kilman embodies the lower class. Woolf characterizes Whitbread as a pompous man who is always well dressed, and characters such as Sally Seton observes that Hugh â€Å"represented all that was most detestable in British middle-class life...He was a perfect specimen of the public school type, she said. No country but England could have produced him...Hugh was the greatest snob—the most obsequious† (73). Woolf utilizes Whitbread as a figure for the upper class’ worst characteristics by being hypocritical, vain, and snobbish, but Woolf also highlights the negative qualities of the lower class through Miss Kilman. In a reflection about Miss Kilman, Clarissa notes how â€Å"insensitive was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat...making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were† (14). Woolf writes Miss Kilman as the representative of the poor’s hatred for the upper class because she resents and envies their freedom from struggles and hardships. Steinbeck similarly examines the poor’s resentment of the upper class through the interactions between the migrant farmers and the upper class. Steinbeck captures the ire of the migrants at the wastefulness and selfishness of the upper class by showing that â€Å"in theShow MoreRelatedThe Hours - Film Analysis12007 Words   |  49 Pagesnovel (229-30), and his central intertext taken from fiction, Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway. By entitling his novel The Hours -- one of the titles Woolf considered for her novel in its early stages (Hussey 172)--he shows his indebtedness as a postmodernist writer to one of the principal texts of the modernist canon. In The Hours, all three narrative strands are in one way or the other connected to Mrs. Dalloway: the sections entitled Mrs. Woolf follow the author Virginia Woolf through a single day in 1923