To the Lighthouse Through the Lens of Elaine Showalter's "Feminist Criticism"

According to Elaine Showalter in her essay, Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness, the feminist writer exists as two separate entities, as reader and as author; however, the male reader and male author, of course, taint this division:

Linguistic and textual theories of women's writing ask whether men and women use language differently; whether sex differences in language use can be theorized in terms of biology, socialization, or culture; whether women can create new languages of their own; and whether speaking, reading, and writing are all gender marked. (315 Showalter)

Naturally, the woman writer tries to compete and transcend the traditional medium of a male dominated culture, but is immediately met with complicated but strong opposition from society.

Virginia Woolf's novel, To the Lighthouse, becomes a double-voiced discourse; it provides a glimpse into two ways of thinking. Her work describes both Mrs. Ramsay, the quintessential housewife, and Lily Briscoe, as the feminist who blatantly denies male culture. That is to say that Woolf employs both a muted old view and a dominant contemporary view of social and cultural traditions; the ideas of general culture versus unexpressed culture occur. Showalter makes claim that "gynocritics," a term she coined, assess and evaluate the specialized discourse of women's writing. This discourse contends with women's language, women's ideas, women's ways of communication, women's careers, "the history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by women" and essentially, four different ways of thinking about the differences between men's and women's writing and literature: the biological, the cultural, the psychoanalytic and the linguistic (Showalter 311).

This discussion by Showalter examines timeless questions about the differences between men and women and the obvious resulting competitions and arguments. For Virginia Woolf to undertake the writing and publishing of a variety of novels, short stories and essays proves, in and of itself, to assert her gift for writing and beg for equality between men's and women's literature. Unfortunately, this declaration may not have been entirely intended as we see in To the Lighthouse the entirely subservient woman's gender role represented in Mrs. Ramsay; however, we do also see Lily Briscoe, entirely indifferent to men and their needs. Still, it is unclear as to whether or not Virginia Woolf was truly concerned with the discourses of female authors in a male-dominated world, or simply wanted to write. Regardless of these facts, it proves the idea that even her mostly unknowing, irresolute efforts could have contributed to the issues of women's writing, or that the discourse itself could have created aspects of her writing and quiet rebellion. Woolf and her writing are quoted several times throughout Showalter's essay, clearly saying that, "A woman's writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine; at its best it is most feminine; the only difficultly lies in defining what we mean by feminine." This quote begs the answer, which came first, the discourse on feminist literature or the creation of feminist literature?

"Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it" (Woolf 10). Woolf immediately introduces the Ramsay family, Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay, their six-year-old son, James, and seven other children. Upon reading this sentence, we are obviously and immediately returned to the introduction of psychological theory and the Oedipal complex. James embraces his mother through both his words and his actions, but he greets even the smallest negative behavior from his father with scorn and intense anger and evidently, he lightly toys with the idea of killing him. Showalter's essay calls into question similar theories on biological differences between men and women that have particular effects on writing. It can be said that female writing is consistent with and finds parallels with the pre-Oedipal relationship between women, within the female emotional and social connection. "They have so many things in common...She must arrange for them to take a long walk together. Foolishly, she had set them opposite each other. That could be remedied tomorrow" (Woolf 157). Mrs. Ramsay thinks to herself here about encouraging her friends, William and Lily, to garner a romantic interest in each other. In reality, however, it is the very discourse of the relationship between males and females that creates gender roles and forces them apart. A similar relationship is evident in Doris Lessing's To Room Nineteen, in which the husband and wife are initially attracted for their similarities, but eventually fall into forced, yet stereotypical, gender roles. According to Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, two theorists of the psychological movement, these gender roles obligingly compel the male and female - their actions, their words, their behaviors, and their relationship - towards blatantly different ends of the gender spectrum. Women become defined by their relationships with other women and men are defined by what women are not. Within the course of Woolf's novel, Mrs. Ramsay exhibits her gender role perfectly, having qualities of the loyal female friend, the supportive and dutiful wife and the loving and earnest mother of eight. Mr. Ramsay, of course, presents himself as what Mrs. Ramsay is not, her complete and utter opposite. He is demanding, selfish, harsh, overwhelmingly serious and relatively unsupportive of his family. Ultimately, men and women are separated into two distinctive categories that unquestionably pit the genders against each other. It is unsurprising then, that Mrs. Ramsay fails in her quest to unite William and Lily.

Woolf's novel also dallies with Showalter's concept of the double-voiced discourse, which includes qualities of both a dominant and a muted story. In this case, the dominant and muted are portrayed through the characterization of Mrs. Ramsay and Lily, respectively. "That man, she thought, her anger rising in her, never gave; that man took…Mrs. Ramsay had given. Giving, giving, giving, she had died - and had left all this. Really, she was angry with Mrs. Ramsay" (Woolf 223). Mrs. Ramsay, as previously mentioned, is the definitive mother, wife and hostess; she rarely ever falls out of character, out of step with these qualities. Dissimilarly, Lily, while she respects Mrs. Ramsay during her life - they possess together a close female relationship - in the first section of the novel, she remains fully unimpressed and unaffected by what she should be to whom and how she ought to act under cultural and societal conventions. Mrs. Ramsay is the dominant character to which everyone relates in the first section of To the Lighthouse, while Lily remains mostly in the background as the painter and friend looking on and only quietly judging Mr. Ramsay's words and actions. The dominant and muted concentration on the women, coupled with the dominated and muted focuses on their behaviors, are representative of Showalter's double-voiced discourse. Showalter specifically points out this model of culture and society that frames this particular relationship and without which, we might be otherwise unable to truly see and understand their womanly relationship in direct contrast to their extraordinarily altered relationships with men.

Finally, we may briefly analyze Woolf's attitudes and the conveyance of her feelings through literature and again, through the lens of the dominant and the muted. While this novel is classified as being mostly written in a stream of consciousness, once we take on the visions and theories by Elaine Showalter of the double-voiced discourse, we are forced to look further into Woolf's authorial intentions; of course, she is the creator of Mrs. Ramsay and of Lily Briscoe, but even beyond that, her diction and grammatical choices also dictate the flow and overarching sensations of this work. Even the most simple of sentences, such as:
Well then, Nancy had gone with them, Mrs. Ramsay supposed, wondering, as she put down the brush, took up a comb, and said 'Come in' to a tap at the door…whether the fact that Nancy as with them made it less likely or more likely that anything would happen; it made it less likely, somehow, Mrs. Ramsay felt, very irrationally, except that after all holocaust on such a scale was not probable." (Woolf 120)
We see in this the run-on of a female stream of consciousness. It is likely that a man would not take time to consider the positive, negative, true, false, possible and emotional ramifications of such an insignificant situation, particularly not while utilizing two different items of beautification. Men are typically more concerned with facts and actions, rather than speculation and emotions; all these facts distinctly separating this mere sentence, extracted from a greater work, as exceptionally feminine. This excerpt is therefore much different than that of a man, but perhaps created as such because according to Showalter, women are forced to separate themselves and their work, to find a new voice amidst a historically male-dominated culture.

It is clear from these few examples from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse that it falls in close relation to Elaine Showalter's Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness. "Women's culture forms a collective experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women writers to each other over time and space" (Showalter 321). According to the discourse, this is unsurprising as women are inextricably linked through their sameness, emotional continuity, social responsibilities, bodies and thoughts; through the lenses, as denoted by the "gynocritics," of the biological, the cultural, the psychoanalytic, and the linguistic. Most notably, we gain further awareness of gender roles - omnipresent in every facet of life from household duties to the employment industry, from emotions to thoughts, from husbands to wives, from reading to writing and from general behavior and beyond - and we are privy to the essential difficulties of women throughout history to conform or defy these functions, attitudes and responsibilities. In the end, we still remain in the "wilderness," without clear definitions or absolute insight into the split, between males and females, and its effects on women's writing; but such is theory.