Vision Of Life: A Study Of Female Beauty In Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf is a famous British woman writer of twentieth century. Her semi-biographical novel To the Lighthouse is written to memorize her parents and is viewed as a classic of modernist novels for its profound thinking and high literary value. It succeeds to display the family life of the Ramsays and probes into many subjects including love, beauty, marriage, life, death, femininity and so on. This thesis studies the beauty of the female characters to reveal Woolf s profound thinking on beauty which is related to arts and life, so as to provide a new perspective to approach this novel.Beauty has double characteristics both in appearance and in immanence. However, influenced by nature, history, culture and society, the beauty of women is limited in the description of their beautiful appearances in many literary works dominated by the male discourse, which is in fact degradation and annihilation of female beauty with double characteristics. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf depicts the beauty of women from the viewpoint of women themselves, which revives the double characteristics of female beauty and endows it with significance. This thesis focuses on the beauty of three female characters of this novel:Mrs. Ramsay, Minta Doyle and Lily Briscoe. It probes into the distinctive features of three kinds of beauty and argues that Mrs. Ramsay has the beauty of multidimensional characteristics composed of knowledge and wisdom, light and stillness; Minta Doyle displays rebellious characteristics of wildness and rashness in her beauty; and the beauty of Lily Briscoe is shown in inconsistency and particularity which in fact reflects Woolf's reflection on love, art, emptiness of life in a deeper sense. The beauty in three different forms manifest Woolf's feminist ideas from different perspectives. Through the study of the beauty of female characters in To the Lighthouse, we can have a better understanding of Virginia Woolf and her works, in which she expresses her independent, innovative, and philosophical feminist thinking.