The women in To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,7, Bielefeld University, course: Modernism, language: English, abstract: Virginia Woolf's novel To The Light House is a piece of literature which belongs to the literary genre of modernism. The characters struggle to bring meaning and order to the chaos of their lives. Woolf chose an anonymous narrator who speaks in the third person and describes the characters and actions subjectively, giving us insight into the characters' feelings. The narrative switches constantly from the perceptions of one character to those of the next. The tone is poetic, rhythmic and imaginative. The novel takes place during the years immediately preceding and following World War I on the Isle of Skye, in the Hebrides (a group of islands west of Scotland).
In my term paper I will focus on the two central women in the story. I want to show that Virginia Woolf created two totally different characters but with a very interesting and complex connection and that Lily is a brilliant example of modernism. The first one is Mrs Ramsay, a woman still belonging to the Victorian age, the second, Lily Briscoe, a so called "New woman". I want to compare Mrs Ramsay and Lily by presenting similarities and differences. I will look on different aspects and reveal the attitude or the behaviour of the women towards them. This is possible because of the stream-of-consciousness-technique which Virginia Woolf chose for her novel. In this way it is possible for us to get to know the most privet thoughts of the characters. Additionally, with Lily we find some theories of feminism of those days.
The novel is divided into three sections, "The Window," "Time Passes," and "The Lighthouse". The first and the last part each cover a day. The middle part covers ten year of war. Mrs Ramsay dies in this time span, which is why the focus in the last part is on Lily, whereas the first part focuses more on Mrs Ramsay.
To get an impression of the context of the novel, I commence with a short description of Modernism.