Virginia Woolf is an outstanding and unique novelist who portrays the inner self of the human mind rather than the happenings in the external life. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse deals with the conflict between the feminine and masculine values which is universal in nature. The women in the fiction represent both extremes of femininity. There are two women characters Mrs. Ramsay a stereotypical...Read more 2571
To the Lighthouse
To the Lighthouse (1927) is widely considered one of the most important works of the twentieth century.
With this ambitious novel, Woolf established herself as one of the leading writers of modernism. The novel develops innovative literary techniques to reveal women’s experience and to provide an alternative to male-dominated views of reality. On the surface, the novel tells the story of the Ramsay family and the guests who come to stay with them at their vacation home on the Hebrides Islands in Scotland. At its heart, however, the novel is a meditation on time and how humans reckon with its relentless passage.
The novel was written and published during one of the most dense and impressive periods of development in English literary history. The modernist period gave rise to many groundbreaking and enduring masterworks, such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. This was also a period of rapid intellectual achievement, and Woolf’s emphasis on consciousness and a character’s inner lives is consistent with the scientific and psychological ideas posited at the time. As Sigmund Freud explored theories of consciousness and subconsciousness, Virgina Woolf wrote a novel that focuses not on the events of the external world but on the richness and complexity of mental interiority.
THE WAR IN TO THE LIGHTHOUSE Geovana Chiari UFSCar – Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos Abstract This article is an attempt to elucidate the references to war in To the lighthouse, in a historical perspective by trying to convey how the novel miniaturizes a historical moment for Europe. Yet in a modest way, Virginia Woolf incorporates war into her novel, not in an overt historical or political...Read more 2035
Mr. Ramsay becomes a character that represents change in Virginia Woolf“s novel, To the Lighthouse. With the changes his character experiences, Woolf is able to express the movement away from traditional patriarchal ideals that were in place in Victorian England. In many respects, he is the antagonist in the novel. Through his character, Woolf probes how men and women approach life during a...Read more 1800
To The Lighthouse Assignment Texts often explore the ways characters are in conflict with themselves, others or society. Discuss this idea with close reference to Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Texts often explore different forms of conflict – within a character or between characters, between a character and society – in order to raise important ideological questions about a particular...Read more 1353
Can art be permanent or express permanence? How do each character’s creative power and artistic works address the fleeting and permanence? “Nothing stays, all changes, but not words, not paint” In her novel To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf examines the power of human creativity through the character of Lily Briscoe. Lily is a struggling young artist, who resists convention in order to...Read more 1104
To the Lighthouse Summary: Part 1: The Window The novel starts in the Ramsays’ summer home. Mr Ramsay tells to the family that will take them to the Lighthouse on the next day but it wasn’t possible due to bad weather. This makes a certain tension between James the son of the family and his father because he really wants to get to the Lighthouse. In this part Lily Briscoe attempts to...Read more 1025
Pause, reflect, and the reader may see at once the opposing yet relative perceptions made between life, love, marriage and death in Virginia Woolf‘s To the Lighthouse. In this novel, Woolf seems to capture perfectly the very essence of life, while conveying life’s significance as communicated to the reader in light tones of consciousness arranged with the play of visual imagery. That...Read more 948
Virginia Woolf’s Answer to “Women Can’t Paint, Women Can’t Write” in To the Lighthouse By Daniela Munca1 Abstract This essay addresses Virginia Woolf’s personal stand in her answer to “women can’t paint, women can’t write”, a reflection on the Victorian prejudice of the role of women in the family and society shared by both her parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen. By bridging a...Read more 704
Formulation of an Artist As one of the earliest and most influential feminist writers of the last century, Virginia Woolf has offered her readers many different topics of interest such as discrimination, social exclusion and roles of gender in a Enlgish society. Woolf was born on the 25th of January, 1882 to a notable historian, author and critic and her mother renowned beauty. Woolf, one of the...Read more 688
In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse the immense complexities that define one’s identity and self worth are presented. In world of rigid social structure, the conventional expectations of society construe and distort independent identity. Mr. Ramsey, Mrs. Ramsey, and Lily Briscoe each experience these external pressures that shape their values in different ways. Mr. Ramsey focuses on the...Read more 678
Virginia Woolf‘s novel To The Lighthouse suggests that life’s meaning lies in the discovery of a power which destroys time. Mrs. Woolf’s book presents two different concepts of time. One is the time of man’s world; the record of human events. It can be measured by clock and calendar and its passing brings change, decay, and death. The other is that time of a world apart...Read more 673