A Study On The War In Virginia Woolf's Novels

Virginia Woolf,as a composer who was profoundly influenced by the First World War,wrote the war directly or indirectly in her various works.The novels Jacob 's Room,Mrs.Dalloway and To the Lighthouse were all published after the First World War and they were more or less stamped by the First World War.This thesis concentrates on the subject of the war in these three novels.This thesis investigates the aftermaths and roots of the war as well as the ways to maintain a peaceful world that are implied in Woolf's three novels.As for aftermaths,the war does harm to individual human beings and human society.One aspect is that the war causes incurable damage to human beings both in physiology and psychology.The physiological harm is chiefly represented by soldiers who lose their precious life while the psychological hurt is exemplified by the surviving soldiers' trauma resulted from shell shock and the women's spiritual torments of losing their husbands and sons in the war.The other aspect is that the war makes devastation to human society.The houses that can provide sanctuary for human beings are devastated by the war,and the potential inheritors of historical achievements are also slaughtered by the war.Meanwhile,the ecological environment is also influenced by the war.As for roots,the war is stimulated by the will to dominate and enslave others,and the colonial expansion and invasion.For one thing,in the patriarchal society men have a desire to command and oppress women by keeping women away from the public space where the normalized school education and the well-paid employment are only accessible to men,and also to control and suppress non-elite men.Such will of domination and enslavement strengthens men's wish to rule other nations through wars.For another thing,the drastic imperialistic awareness that both nobles from the upper-class and ordinary people thoughtlessly worship their empire and culture and display an intense sense of racial superiority impels the practice of colonial expansion and invasion by the war.As for ways to maintain a peaceful world,the first method is to construct an equal and syncretic relationship between men and women to smooth men's inclination to manage and subjugate others.Men and women need to be equally treated by properly deconstructing men's central status and improving women's rights in education and employment and men and women also need to respect each other to create a harmonious relationship between man and man.The second approach is that everyone is encouraged to establish a harmonious and balanced spiritual world to soften man's desire to invade and conquer other nations.Everyone needs to be philanthropic with a heart full of love and sympathy and balance intuition and rationality as well as human nature and social moralities to shape a harmonious relationship between man and himself.In conclusion,through the study of the war's aftermaths and roots and the ways to maintain a peaceful world implied in Jacob's Room,Mrs.Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,Woolf and these three novels will be better-understood from a comprehensive perspective.