Female Consciousness In To The Lighthouse

Feminist criticism came into being as one trend of literary criticism with the development of the Second Feminism Wave in the 1960s. Though feminist critics disagree on what feminist criticism is, some common concerns in their approaches make them fall into the category of feminist criticism: they believe that women as a group are suppressed by men as a group and so political factors are involved in feminist literary criticism which aims at waking up female readers' or writers' consciousness of their disadvantageous or inferior status in a society where the patriarchal ideology dominated since long ago. Feminist critics before the middle of the 1970s concentrated on studying women images in male writers' works with a purpose to uncover women's oppressed situation or distorted images; since 1975, critical interest has turned to writings of women writers, thus forming in Anglo-American feminist criticism in particular a woman-centered trend.Virginia Woolf, an important female writer, critic and essayist since her days has attracted much attention in feminist criticism. The period. Living in an age which was undergoing the First Feminism Wave, she wrote many essays to call for awakened women's consciousness. Among them, A Room of One's Own, Professions for Women and Three Guineas are directly concerned about women's educational, legal, economic, social and political status. Woolf also joined some women's organizations in the early decades of the 20th century to fight for women's rights.Her feminism is also embodied in her novels, in which she devotes a major part to characterizing female figures and toportraying their exclusive experience in the deep psyche.This thesis analyzes the two major female characters, Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, in one of her greatest novels To the Lighthouse from the feminist criticism point of view. Female characters living in the early 20th century were raised and cultured in the Victorian values or a patriarchal ideology, in which most women still had no means to make a living; therefore they had to take up marriage as their profession. However, women underwent a series of changes with the society of that time. Women's movement for equal political rights unavoidably exerted influence on their life. The significance of these female characters lies in their struggle against their status quo and in a tradition of rebellion against women's traditional roles and virtues.There are six parts in this thesis.Part One is an introduction to feminist criticism. Since feminist criticism has a close relationship with feminism, an effort is made to explore their key connections so as to emphasize the meaningfulness of taking feminist criticism as a tool.Part Two (Chapter One) studies the development of Virginia Woolf's feminism. In this part, efforts are made to look for the sources of Woolf's feminism in her life experience as a woman as well as her reading of other women writers.Part Three (Chapter Two) deals with Woolf's specific concernwith women's experience and her unconventional technique in To the Lighthouse, in which Woolf intends to portray the ever overlooked or distorted experience of life of women from her feminist viewpoint.Part Four (Chapter Three) and Part Five (Chapter Four) study the two major female characters Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe in thelight of Woolf 's modernist techniques. When we go deep into their consciousness or even unconsciousness to learn about women of the early 20th century, we find that women's values were changing. The older generation represented by Mrs. Ramsay are waking up though still bound somehow while the younger generation of women represented by Lily Briscoe has less bondage from the conventional ideology. Both of them have female consciousness that is essential for women's emancipation. The younger generation act more freely without fearing being reproached "unfeminine".Part Six (Chapter Five) analyzes the relations between the two generations of women. We find that there is a tradition of rebellion a...