The Temporality of Anti-Consolation: Redeeming Women’s Solidarity in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
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This essay examines the problem of narrative temporality in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse to explore how she envisions a collective identity for women that diverges from the linear model of temporal development. I argue that the novel interrogates the cultural representation of women as providers of comfort, sympathy, and consolation in the nineteenth century and suggests new possibilities for female subjectivity through artistic practices. At the same time, Woolf acknowledges the danger of perpetuating the gender stereotype of woman as the consolatory function of art. Lily Briscoe, the figure of the artist, is tasked with the challenge of simultaneously continuing and resisting Mrs. Ramsay’s legacy, the epitome of Victorian femininity. Lily’s ambivalent attitude towards Mrs. Ramsay disrupts the reparative temporality of postwar elegy, as well as the linear narrative of liberation of women from the private to the public realm. Instead, the cyclical pattern of the story represents the persistent subjugation of women in the postwar era, while suggesting the possibility of redemption through a retrospective lens that acknowledges the persistence of the past in the present. Through a close reading of the relationship between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily, this essay locates Woolf’s feminist politics in a vision of androgyny, one that moves beyond the binary system of gender relationships and envisages the future of women.
Abstract
This essay examines the problem of narrative temporality in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse to explore how she envisions a collective identity for women that diverges from the linear model of temporal development. I argue that the novel interrogates the cultural representation of women as providers of comfort, sympathy, and consolation in the nineteenth century and suggests new possibilities for female subjectivity through artistic practices. At the same time, Woolf acknowledges the danger of perpetuating the gender stereotype of woman as the consolatory function of art. Lily Briscoe, the figure of the artist, is tasked with the challenge of simultaneously continuing and resisting Mrs. Ramsay’s legacy, the epitome of Victorian femininity. Lily’s ambivalent attitude towards Mrs. Ramsay disrupts the reparative temporality of postwar elegy, as well as the linear narrative of liberation of women from the private to the public realm. Instead, the cyclical pattern of the story represents the persistent subjugation of women in the postwar era, while suggesting the possibility of redemption through a retrospective lens that acknowledges the persistence of the past in the present. Through a close reading of the relationship between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily, this essay locates Woolf’s feminist politics in a vision of androgyny, one that moves beyond the binary system of gender relationships and envisages the future of women.
참고문헌 (22)
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