Typologies of Womanhood In To The Lighthouse

Year 2015, Volume: 1 Issue: 1, 113 - 129, 01.06.2015

Sedef Güzelyurt

Abstract

Virginia Woolf is the most prominent representative of the modern novel and she has contributed greatly to the development of the modern novel both in theory and in practice. Woolf searches for a technique in order to express “the stream of consciousness”, that’s why she is considered to be a major innovator in English literature. She experiments with this revolutionary concept, which attempts to explore the consciousness of characters by accumulating many details from their own environment. Her masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, serves as an excellent sample of Woolf’s literary theory and her experimental techniques. The consciousness of the characters is not blatantly described as in the naturalist style but filtered through showing the way the characters are thinking and interpreting events. Mrs. Ramsay is described through the technique of “interior monologue”, her inner conflict and her external conflict become clear when she talks to herself. This article will analyze this style by searching for Mrs. Ramsay’s everlasting dominance, her excellent motherhood and her being different from traditional women though having all these traditional roles as a woman who serves as a kind of hope for the birth of a new woman. Her hope and her ideal is Lily who is born as a new woman with a new point of view. The typologies of womanhood and the relationship between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily together with their differences and similarities will be discussed. The death of Mrs. Ramsay gives birth to Lily who is both the ideal of Woolf and Mrs. Ramsay together. This article will analyze the death of traditional, submissive women together with the birth of new woman by taking into consideration the development related to women right at the end of the nineteenth century

Keywords

Dominance, New Woman, Traditional