Virginia Woolf's Androgyny Feminist Theory Reflected In Her Novels

Virginia Woolf,the same as Simone de Beauvoir, is one of the most significant feminist working and writing throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A Room of One's Own, published in 1929, is considered to be her main contribution to feminist theory. In mentioning Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf once confessed that she tried to express various thoughts when she was writing it. This thesis aims to explore it from a feminist perspective. To the Lighthouse(1927) and Orlando(1928) are two masterpieces of her feminist novels. In To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay doesn't manage to break the tradition, and finally fails to go to"the lighthouse". In Orlando, Woolf explains her"androgyny"theory, which she later formally put forward in the well known A Room of One's Own.This thesis is composed of six parts, whereas it chooses three novels which were published in the 1920's, close to the time in which A Room of One's Own was published, and it aims to find the reflection of her androgynous theory in the three novels.First, in Introduction, a brief introduction is done to recent researches on Virginia Woolf's feminist thoughts, especially androgynous thoughts both at home and abroad in the twentieth century.Chapter One focuses on the influences Woolf's background and the famous Bloomsbury group have on building up her feminist thoughts.Chapter Two describes the two characters of Clarissa and Sally in Mrs. Dalloway to prove the advantages of"new woman"Sally has compared with traditional woman Clarissa. Being a"new woman", Sally has men's virtues of rational, brave and independent together with women's virtues of understanding and kind. She is willing to learn, she welcomes new notion and dares to challenge the tradition. All her virtues endow her power to create perfect life. Sally leads a successful life compared with Clarissa who struggles in the deep misery during her middle age. Sally keeps a smooth relationship with the other sex to lead her glorious life. Sally's life reflects Woolf's androgynous thought.Chapter Three discusses Woolf's To the Lighthouse written in 1927. This thesis chooses Mrs. Ramsay as its subject of study instead of Lily who finally reached the lighthouse, just to avoid repetitions of the similarities in Lily and Sally. But this once again proved Woolf's positive attitude towards androgynous images. On the contrary, this thesis chooses Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay as the subject of its research. Mr. Ramsay with pure masculinity and Mrs. Ramsay with pure femininity form a binary opposition. This extreme opposition brings about the vanishing of one side. In this novel, Woolf presents a counterevidence to prove the disaster a pure sex head should bring to the mankind.Chapter Four's research is based on Woolf's androgynous novel Orlando----A Biography. This is one of Woolf's best beloved works. In the novel, woolf puts forward her androgynous thoughts through a legend in which Orlando changed from a man to a woman and lived for more than three centuries. After the magical change, female Orlando keeps the experiences and thoughts of both sexes, and switches her gender identity between the two sexes freely by means of changing her clothes. In virtue of this unique experience, she completes her poem The Oak which she had been writing for three centuries, and finally builds her warm family to fulfill her beautiful life. The figuring of Orlando gives Woolf a more explicit profile to her later androgynous thoughts. She emphasizes the significance of thinking in both sexes'mode for writers. And more importantly, she puts forward an ideal solution to deal with the relationship between both sexes.Base on the analysis above, this thesis has come to a conclusion: According to Woolf, feminism should seek a balance between the two sexes instead of have one of the two win over the other. Everybody should bare both women's and men's heads in mind with a man who could think from a woman's perspective while a woman who could also think from a man's perspective, and the two heads cooperate tacitly and live harmoniously together. In this connection, Woolf's novels give an explicit explanation to her theory.