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Virginia woolf as a modern writer.research paper
Virginia woolf as a modern writer.research paper
Virginia woolf as a modern writer.research paper
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Lily Briscoe is working on a painting throughout the book To The Lighthouse. She does not want anyone to see her painting and considers throwing it to the grass when someone walks by (Woolf 17-18). Other characters in the book seem to have different opinions about her painting. Mrs. Ramsay, William Bankes, and Charles Tansley all have differing views about Lily’s painting. While showing her painting to William Bankes, Lily realizes that she doesn’t like it. During Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party, Lily realizes what she needs to do to fix her painting but doesn’t until the end of the story. The painting itself grows and changes throughout the book, just as Lily grows and changes as a person as she lives her life (Woolf 102).
The reactions to Lily’s painting represent the differing views about women and art during the time period in which the book is set. Mrs. Ramsay believes that Lily’s painting will not be noticed, either because she is a woman or because she looks Chinese - perhaps both (Woolf 17). William Bankes questioned the meaning of some of the elements of Lily’s painting, such as the use of a purple triangle to represent Mrs. Ramsay and James (Woolf 52). After Lily explained some of the elements of her painting to him, “He was interested. He took it scientifically in complete good faith” (Woolf 53).
Lily’s use of a purple triangle to represent Mrs. Ramsay and James (Woolf 52) could symbolize many different things. Lily says, “It was a question [of] how to connect the mass on the right hand with that on the left hand” (Woolf 53). To connect one with two requires three, the completion of a triangle, the third stroke. Mrs. Ramsay is a representation of that third stroke. She brings people together through her d...
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...msay’s death, Lily is able to reject the ideals of marriage and family that Mrs. Ramsay represented and choosing to remain unmarried and pursue her art (Koppen 386).
Works Cited
Derbyshire, S.H. “An Analysis of Mrs. Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.” College English 3.4 (1942): 353-360. Print.
Koppen, Randi. “Embodied Form: Art and Life in Virginia Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse.’” New Literary History 32.2 (2001): 375-389. Print.
Stewart, Jack. “A ‘Need of Distance and Blue’: Space, Color and Creativity in To the Lighthouse.” Twentieth Century Literature 46.1 (2000): 78-99. Print.
Walsh, Anne-Marie. “The Illuminating Gaze: Capturing Light and Consciousness in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.” The English Journal, Sweet Briar College (2006). Web.
Woolf, Virginia. To The Lighthouse. Orlando: Harcourt Books, 1981. 17-19, 48, 52-53, 102, 147, 172, 209. Print.
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In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway undergoes an internal struggle between her love for society and life and a combined affinity for and fear of death. Her practical marriage to Richard serves its purpose of providing her with an involved social life of gatherings and parties that others may find frivolous but Clarissa sees as “an offering” to the life she loves so well. Throughout the novel she grapples with the prospect of growing old and approaching death, which after the joys of her life seems “unbelievable… that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant…” At the same time, she is drawn to the very idea of dying, a theme which is most obviously exposed through her reaction to the news of Septimus Smith’s suicide. However, this crucial scene r...
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