| Virginia Woolf is a well-known writer. Her contributions to modern literature mainly lie in her works of stream of consciousness and her critic essays such as To the Lighthouse and Women and Fiction. However, Virginia Woolf is more famous as a feminist writer. Many of her works are permeated with feminist thoughts and spirit such as A Room of One's Own, Orlando: A Biography, and etc. The most controversial and important feminist thought of Woolf is nothing but her idea of androgyny, which is not first put forward by her, but is very early utilized in the areas of psychology and literature by her. This essay is to discuss Woolf's idea of androgyny in detail and analyze the idea from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Woolf puts forward and illustrates the idea of androgyny in her A Room of One's Own and creates an androgynous character in Orlando: A Biography. She believes that the most comfortable and harmonious state of a person, especially of a writer is androgyny. However, there are very diversified views to and comments on her idea of androgyny. More seriously, different opinions towards Woolf are even used as one of the classifying standards of feminist theories, from which we can see how important Woolf and her idea of androgyny are in literature, feminist literature in particular. Having said that, what is androgyny? What is the relationship between androgyny and feminist literature? In what way can the idea of androgyny be used by feminists? Are there any theoretical backgrounds to support this idea? Most importantly, is the idea of androgyny a realistic one, or just an ideal that cannot be realized? All of these questions are to be discussed in this thesis.
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