Mother Nature (Gaia)‎ and the Androgynous Artist : Holism in to the lighthouse and a room of one’s own

الملخص EN

With the rising interest in ecocriticism , Woolf‘s works have become a common subject of ecocritical and ecofeminist analysis.

This paper proposes to study the holistic and biocentric life patterns apparent in both the Coleridgean concept of androgyny as a mental state which comprehends the interconnectedness of all life processes, gender equality, and the Gaia hypothesis explored in both A Room of One‘s Own(1929) and in To the Lighthouse (1927) .

The female characters of Lily Briscoe and Mrs.

Ramsay in To the Lighthouse are considered models of the two aforementioned concepts, respectively.

As one of the first-wave feminists, Virginia Woolf criticizes atomistic individualism and rationalism of the liberal tradition in the two works studied in this paper.

In fact, first-wave feminists have done so by proposing a holistic concept of life which emphasizes collectivity, emotional bonding, and a principle of organic unity among all polarities, either conceived or conceivable such as male / female, humans / nature and subject /object.

Being a holistic value system, ecofeminism views the intrinsic value of nature and all life (spirituality) as an essential element of the required social transformation toward a new perception of reality that takes into consideration the interconnectedness of all life processes.

Thereupon, the modern anthropocentric view of life should be replaced by a biocentric view that can understand the interconnectedness of all life processes as proposed by Woolf in the works aforementioned.

Finally, the false dualisms at the heart of the conceptual social framework of patriarch that are based on the male-/female polarity (such as thought versus action, art versus science, and experience versus knowledge) Woolf rejects , should be integrated to form a holistic perception of reality conveyed through the medium of art to humanity at large