Virginia Woolf’s Vision of Post-Victorian Masculinity in To the Lighthouse

Abstract

Although Virginia Woolf’s scholarship has examined To the Lighthouse within the feminist critique of the Victorian patriarchal tradition and has critiqued Mr. Ramsay as the representative of Victorian patriarchy, Woolf puts a more essential emphasis on revising the problematic patriarchy through the male character. Woolf presents the tyrannical Mr. Ramsay first, revises his despotic masculinity in the middle, and envisions a post-Victorian masculinity through the altered Mr. Ramsay who forgets his previous preoccupations with authority at the end of the novel. Aiming to enrich current gender discussions in To the Lighthouse, this essay explores Mr. Ramsay’s domineering patriarchy in “The Window” and how it has been reconfigured in “The Lighthouse.” To do so, this essay importantly examines the single, female painter Lily Briscoe’s painting in which Lily evokes Mr. Ramsay’s gentlemanly moment in the buried past. By remembering Mr. Ramsay’s helping hand to Mrs. Ramsay in the revisited memory, Lily envisions Mr. Ramsay’s post-Victorian masculinity that forgets previous preoccupations with the patriarchal authority.