<p>This essay focuses on the character of Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf's <em>To the Lighthouse. </em>From a gender perspective it discusses Lily's striving to exceed her socially constructed position as a woman by attempting to be an artist. At the beginning of the twentieth century women were supposed to be housewives rather than artists. This ideology of femininity held women back from achieving anything outside the home, and forced women to attempt to escape their femininity in order to pursue their dreams. This essay discusses Lily's efforts to escape her femininity by attempting to transcend her body and by striving to achieve an androgynous mind.</p>

This essay focuses on the character of Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. From a gender perspective it discusses Lily's striving to exceed her socially constructed position as a woman by attempting to be an artist. At the beginning of the twentieth century women were supposed to be housewives rather than artists. This ideology of femininity held women back from achieving anything outside the home, and forced women to attempt to escape their femininity in order to pursue their dreams. This essay discusses Lily's efforts to escape her femininity by attempting to transcend her body and by striving to achieve an androgynous mind.

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Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades / Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciada en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / [...] Basically, I am going to answer these questions on the light of one proposal that came up during the seminar sessions. I believe that through the different temporalities of the characters, the section “Time Passes” may acquire a different meaning in the novel. This section is the one which brings to light the differences among the times lived by the characters; therefore, I propose that the temporalities exposed in this section surpass the boundaries given by the structure of the novel. In this way, the time of Time Passes outstrips the whole novel; thus gaining an organic relevance, changing our perception of the form of the literary work. From my point of view, Time Passes overcomes the structural 6 level in order to gain relevance in giving the novel another way of interpreting it through the issue of time and temporality.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

This study attempts to interpret Virginia Woolf¡¦s works by appropriating Jacques Lacan¡¦s theoretical concepts, especially the concept of ¡§psychic structure.¡¨ I argue that Virginia Woolf¡¦s psychic structure belongs to the category of hysteria and her psychic structure is revealed in both the form and content of her writing: her writing exemplifies ¡§the hysteric¡¦s discourse,¡¨ one of the four discourses conceptualized by Lacan. I want to further argue that, in her works, the hysterical Woolf can transform herself into the analyst, transforming the hysteric¡¦s discourse into the analyst¡¦s discourse. The thesis is structured in four parts. In the introduction, I will introduce the author Virginia Woolf, Jacques Lacan, review relevant criticisms, construct the theoretical framework, and present the thesis structure as well as my arguments. In the first chapter I examine Woolf¡¦s essay A Room of One¡¦s Own, arguing that, in this text, Woolf hysterically questions women¡¦s lacks in the phallic symbolic order and experiments with her writing to subvert the hierarchal patriarchal society that oppresses women. Woolf, moreover, turns herself from being a hysteric into an analyst, adopting the analyst¡¦s discourse to guide women to explore their desire repressed by the patriarchal society. In the second chapter I examine Woolf¡¦s novel To the Lighthouse, arguing that when writing the novel, Woolf unconsciously betrays her desire to withdraw from the Symbolic and regress into the maternal Imaginary order. Although, on the one hand, Woolf attempts to re-evoke the lost Imaginary mother-child dyad¡¦s unity, on the other hand she unconsciously acknowledges that she cannot paper over the lack and void of being, and this recognition greatly traumatizes Woolf. To understand the fundamental cause of her trauma, Woolf splits herself into both a hysterical analysand and an analyst, adopting the analyst¡¦s discourse to question and explore her repressed desire for the maternal Imaginary order. In the concluding chapter I restate the thesis statement and summarize the analyses of the two previous chapters.

This thesis is focused on Virginia Woolf¡¦s mourning in her Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse based on the theory of the work of mourning. Since Freud¡¦s grounding essay, ¡§Mourning and Melancholia¡¨ first appeared in 1918, numerous critics, like John Bowlby and Therese Rando, have followed Freud¡¦s path to study the process of the work of mourning. Julia kristeva also proposes ¡§the sublimatory hold over the lost Thing¡¨ as a way of curbing mourning. In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf restarts her work of mourning, which she fails when her mother, Julia Stephen dies. Woolf writes down and expresses her memories and affections of her mother through her fictional surrogate, Lily Briscoe. Through Lily¡¦s completion of her painting in the end of the novel, Woolf also completes her own work, not only the work of art but also her belated work of mourning. The reason that Woolf writes about her work of mourning in a belated time is that she has not find an appropriate voice of her own to speak out her mind. It is until the creation of Mrs. Dalloway, in which she experiments with the technique of stream-of-consciousness, that Woolf finds a voice of her own. As a result, after the composition of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf starts her work of mourning in To the Lighthouse. The first chapter begins with an introduction to the theories of mourning and Robert Humsphrey¡¦s theory of the techniques of stream-of-consciousness in modern novel. The second chapter is the discussion of Mrs. Dalloway. By means of her experiment of the new technique of narration, Woolf is able to reveal her belief of the work of mourning through the doubling of the sane Clarissa Dalloway and the insane Septimus, that any suppression of the work of mourning may cause insanity. The third chapter explains how Woolf restarts her belated work of mourning in To the Lighthouse. Since some of the plots of the novel derive from Woolf¡¦s own experiences, verbalizing her past is Woolf¡¦s first step of her work of mourning. Moreover, Woolf expresses her feelings and sentiments for her mother, represented as Mrs. Ramsay, through Lily Briscoe, the surrogate mourner in the novel. By means of the technique of stream-of-consciousness, Woolf is able to speak out her true thoughts about her mother through Lily¡¦s observation of Mrs. Ramsay. Therefore, in the end of the novel, Woolf and her surrogate, Lily, are finally able to finish their own work of art and of mourning as the story ends. In the last chapter, I suggest that Woolf¡¦s new invention of the technique of stream-of-consciousness as her own voice in Mrs. Dalloway initiates her next novel, To the Lighthouse. This is why Woolf restarts her work of mourning of her mother three decades later¡Xbecause she is finally able to speak of her own.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:25:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2010-02-19Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:12:04Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 attie_jp_me_arafcl.pdf: 608579 bytes, checksum: 7eefd3a7f5fd191e2eaa2ee092be0188 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / O objetivo da dissertação é expor a relação entre vida e morte em To the Lighthouse, da ficcionista Virginia Woolf. Essa estruturação conflituosa ganha destaque a partir dos efeitos provocados pelo trabalho com a voz narrativa, com o tempo e com a intertextualidade. A autora, pertencente ao Modernismo Inglês na sua fase inicial, enfatiza a importância daquilo que não é apreendido somente pelas aparências. Para isso, utiliza as técnicas do fluxo da consciência, especialmente o monólogo interior indireto, para registrar o temor à morte e a angústia de existir, tensões responsáveis pelas grandes revelações de To the Lighthouse, trazidas ao leitor por meio do trabalho com as lembranças e as reflexões. Portanto, o romance segue o percurso da memória das personagens refletido na ausência de linearidade temporal. Estratégia que enfatiza o emprego do tempo psicológico que, conjugado à voz narrativa, intensifica os efeitos do conflito, responsáveis pela revelação dos eventos interiores percebidos pelas personagens. O trabalho com a intertextualidade ajuda a sublinhar a recorrência à memória já que intertextos, de épocas e gêneros literários diferentes, compõem ecos da tradição literária, ampliando e enriquecendo sobremaneira o sentido do romance. Assim, a oposição central, vida e morte, é o foco desta dissertação, resistência cuidadosamente construída por Virginia Woolf e percebida como um amálgama vital pela personagem Lily Briscoe, pintora que realiza uma obra de arte, cujo término coincide com a chegada ao farol e o fim do romance. / The aim of this dissertation is to expose the relation between life and death in Virginia Woolf’s novel, To The Lighthouse. This conflicting structure is emphasized by the effects caused in the work with the use of the narrative voice, time and intertextuality. The writer, who belongs to the initial phase of the British Modernism, emphasizes the importance of learning things that are beyond the appearances. In this way, she uses the stream of consciousness’ techniques, especially the indirect interior monologue, to register the fear of death and anguish, and tensions, which are responsible for great revelations in To The Lighthouse. They are brought to the reader through the work with remembrances and reflections. Hence, the novel follows the characters’ memory, reflected in the lack of temporal linearity. Strategy that emphasizes the use of the psychological time, which added to the narrative voice, intensifies the conflicting effects, responsible for the revelation of the inner events realized by the characters. The intertextual work helps to underline the recurrence to memory, because the intertexts, from different epochs and genres, compose the echoes of literary tradition, enlarging and enriching exceedingly the novel’s meaning. Thus, the central opposition, life and death, is the focus of this dissertation, reluctance carefully constructed by Virginia Woolf and apprehended as a vital amalgam by the character Lily Briscoe, a painter who makes a work of art, whose ending coincides with the arrival at the lighthouse and the end of the novel.

Autor no autoriza el acceso a texto completo de su documento. / The issue of dominance and submissiveness in Virginia Woolf’s (1927) To The Lighthouse will be the center of this study because of a number of reasons. Virginia Woolf shows an interesting mixture composed of governing and subservient figures in her novels. These first ones are represented mainly by men such as Mr. Ramsay, and the second ones, by women such as Mrs. Ramsay. The creation of this dichotomy is clearly influenced by the Post-Victorian environment in which Woolf grew up and wrote. There is an innovative way to present us these characters because she shows us the reality of dominance and obedience in a sarcastic way, that is, by saying something when she wants to state the opposite. Virginia Woolf’s novels are characterized by the presence of governing and subservient protagonists. This happens due to the context in which she created her novels, that is, the Post Victorian period. Nevertheless, there is an attempt to balance these two complementary forces, dominant and submissive, in order to criticize the established order. She did it in a subtle way, though; the social conventions at that period prevented her from going any further. The aim of this essay will be to discover the element that makes dominance and submission to be apparent in the characters, this key element could be the post- Victorian society or a personal contribution of the author, specifically a modern strategy, to change society from the individual rather than system. This work will be a contribution in the sense that as a starting hypothesis is that dominant and submissive figures in Woolf’s novels are presented in a non-traditional fashion. Therefore, one of the contributions of exploring these seemingly ascendant and passive representations would be to encourage a more realistic approach to characters, leaving aside stereotypical notions. Another contribution of this study, which lies on the examination of artistic and aesthetic motivations, is related to aesthetic purposes of the author. However, these are treated in an innovative way, not explaining much about their nature with practical language, but using rhetoric and poetic resources. Finally, it is important to relate these dichotomies to Woolf’s Modernism.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / From this richness of descriptions in the novel, this analysis ventures to, first, report how the hegemonic Victorian discourse on marriage is presented in the novel and, second, describe the characters’ relation to this discourse, in other words, how they interact and conflict with it. The last stage in the analysis, from a gender-role perspective, will be an attempt to glimpse Woolf’s modern conception on the nature of human relation through her character’s interaction, and how the discourse on marriage and its gender-role expectations shapes and effects the connection among the characters in the novel.