To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf 1. Discuss the representation of social class, marriage and/or gender in the novel.

A feminist reading practice is able to foreground Virginia Woolfs extraordinarily insightful representations of male and female gender in her experimental novel To the Lighthouse (1927). The reader is firstly absorbed by the radical narrative and temporal structure of the novel, which has two episodes, an evening and a morning ten years apart and set ,physically, at least, in the holiday house in the Orkneys in the north of Scotland, where the Ramsay family stay each summer with invited guests. The two episodes are separated by an interlude, Time Passes, which focuses those ten years of history into tiny parentheses, interspersed within the Time Passes section which ostensibly deals with the abandoned and decaying holiday house, its once annually visiting family now long absent and reduced by death. The reader experiences a different sense of time in reading the novel. Thoughts lasting a second take pages to narrate, reflections and memories are given many pages of narrative between the starting and completing of a simple domestic task. Human consciousness becomes the main stage of the novels action, with some moments of realisation and awareness taking on the status of great revelations or epiphanies. Gender relationships are represented within these narrative features of the novel: memories, intense illuminations, long passages of thought and reflection, but gender is also represented in the moments of revealing dialogue and social comedy of Mrs Ramsay, her family and her guests in her elaborate dinner, staged in the evening of The Window section. Contrasting attitudes to men are represented by the attitudes of Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. Mrs Ramsay is protective towards men , if of the upper classes and within her family, but she is capable of disdain for the uncouth manners of the working class Charles Tansley. That disdain, however, is soon transformed to a patronizing protectiveness. Her need to protect and control men, especially, is the first theme, susceptible of a feminist reading, which emerges in the novel. Mrs Ramsays central belief about men is contained in her early reflection: Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance: finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe betied the girl- pray heaven it was none of her daughters!- who did not feel the worth of it This worshipful attitude of Mrs Ramsay towards men for their important public roles as philosophers, writers and rulers is coupled with a delight in the trusting, chivalrous attitude to women which Mrs Ramsay usually experiences. Further realism is added by the comic touch of determination that her daughters do not deviate from the conforming path of being flattered by men and valuing it. It is she in particular who experiences mens adoration for her beauty. This representation is not as utterly conventional as it seems ,however, because Mrs Ramsay also has an intuitive knowledge that there is a fecundity, richness and vitality to the feminine, in contrast to the fatal sterility of the male. This revelation comes to Mrs Ramsay while she is clasping her son as she knits a brown stocking another seemingly trivial moment - and has an almost transcendent, spiritual experience of female power, superior to the masculine spirit: Mrs Ramsay, who had been

sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm, ... seemed ... to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive...burning and illuminating ... and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare. The mysterious feminine power and energy seen as rain, animation, a fountain and spray is brilliantly contrasted with the simile, for mans fatal sterility, like a beak of brass barren and bare . Here, the heavy alliteration on the b sound intensifies the negativity of barren bareness. The possibility of a different attitude to men is suggested in the thoughts of her daughters Prue, Nancy and Rose at the dinner party. The daughters could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps, a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds, a mute questioning of deference and chivalry. This is an ironic juxtaposition against Mrs Ramsays earlier prayer her daughters are conventional. Although deeply respectful of their mother and slightly fearful as she was formidable to behold the daughters dare to imagine a different life, but are unable to voice it, in another example of subtle female oppression. Mr Ramsay embodies the contradiction towards women that lies within the traditional patriarchal view. He is contemptuous of womens ignorance, for instance when Mrs Ramsay queries his view on the weather forecast which might affect the journey to the lighthouse, he thinks: the extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of womens minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered and shivered This intertextual reference to Tennysons The Charge of the Light Brigade highlights his ludicrous, childish sense of anger in being opposed, but the text continues: But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might. His need for Mrs Ramsays nurturing is equally strong, though. The masculine stereotype that women must be well-dressed, have no holes in their stockings is the trivial thought of William Bankes which escalates in his mind to a sweeping , condemnatory generalisation about women: ..there was Minta in front of them with a hole in her stocking. How that little round hole of pink heel seemed to flaunt itself before them! How William Bankes deplored it, without, so far as she could remember, saying anything about it! It meant to him the annihilation of womanhood... Woolf positions the reader to feel contempt for the narrow sexism and absurd generalising tendency in the stereotyping ( male ) mind in episodes such as this. Another, different perspective on gender is supplied by Lily Briscoe, the female artist who is devoted to her profession as a painter and who deviates from the Victorian ideal of womanhood that Mrs Ramsay represents because she is not interested in marriage or in providing comfort and sympathy for the male characters. Lilys art is a symbol for her ability as an independent woman to achieve her identity without partnership with and submission to a man. However, she is like the Ramsays, a member of the privileged upper class with financial support from her socially prominent parents to fund a life devoted to the intellect and creativity. Virginia Woolf represents the social and economic privilege of her female characters, uncritically. Lily and Mrs Ramsay are projections from the autobiographical experience of Woolf within a privileged social and intellectual elite, and are seemingly immune from irony or serious questioning in their transformation in fiction. Lilys protofeminist sense that women are complete whereas men are lacking in something is conveyed in a typically, seemingly random moment: Do you write many letters, Mr Tansley? asked Mrs

Ramsay, pitying him too, Lily supposed; for that was true of Mrs Ramsay she pitied men always as if they lacked something women never, as if they had something. Despite this insight, which shows Lilys identification with the complete(ness) and wholeness of women, Lily is affected by Tansleys sexist remark: He was really, Lily Briscoe thought, in spite of his eyes, but then look at his nose , look at his hands the most uncharming human being she had ever met. Then why did she mind what he said? Women cant write, Women cant paint what did that matter coming from him, since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he said it? . Lily hears this during the first section of the novel, The Window. Later, in the third section of the novel, Lily recalls Tansleys crude remark again and uses it as motivation in her work. Lily is constructed as being detached from the grief of the bereaved Mr Ramsay in the novels third section but this is achieved without reducing the readers empathy with her. Woolf presents Lily as mocking herself for failing to conform to any feminine ideal by not sympathising with Mr Ramsay in his grief: There issued from him such a groan that any other woman in the whole world would have done something, said something all except myself, thought Lily, girding at herself bitterly, who am not a woman, but a peevish, ill-tempered, dried up old maid, presumably. The capacity for self-mockery and self-awareness is appealing in her character. However, the final emotional tone constructed for Lily is elevated and heroic. Lilys independence and achievement of selfhood through art is placed climactically in the novels final sentence. Her triumphant final application of a stroke of paint to her painting gives her a sense of sudden intensity, as she expresses in the novels last line, Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. The reader is left at the end of the novel with this vision of independence, feminine completeness without men, spiritual transcendence through art - Woolfs own vision, perhaps. Thus, the representation of gender in To the Lighthouse culminates in a quietly triumphant moment of female vision, conveyed through the experience of the proto-feminist Lily. Her experience is juxtaposed against that of Mrs Ramsay, in many ways an ideal of Victorian womanhood, a loving, nurturing and protecting maternal figure, who is also highly conscious of the role she plays and the tyranny of control which is an aspect of her kind of feminine ideal. Her death midway through the novel symbolically leaves the fictional space for Lily to succeed her. Different perspectives on gender, in comic and ironic modes, are provided by a variety of male characters, and by Mrs Ramsays daughters. Collectively, through brilliant characterisation and narrative structure, a complex representation of gender is achieved.