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To the Lighthouse : Androgynous Vision and Women's Consciousness

This paper aims to shed a new light from the feminine perspective on the life and desire of feminine characters who exist as merely private and anonymous beings. In the novel, To the Lighthouse (1927), Virginia Woolf shows the artificiality and destructiveness of the sexual role imposed upon men and women in the Victorian period through the marital state of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. From the multiple inner points of view, Woolf stresses that the Ramsays are not fixed characters with unique qualities. She also gives salience to the fact that each of them lives as a domestic angel or a male careerist while both are losing their own selves bound by an ideal social vision. As a result, the English society imposing the strict sexual role works itself as a mechanism suppressing the inner mind. Thus, the androgynous vision that Lily Briscoe embodies rejects the sacrificial and passive femininity and aspires for the true relationship freed from the artificial gender identity.