Ebbs and flows : writing the feminine in Virginia Woolf’s to the lighthouse

Abstract EN

This study explores the feminine aspects of Virginia Woolf’s narrative in To the Lighthouse in the light of Hélène Cixous’s feminine writing proposed in her controversial paper, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976).

The paper attempts to show that Woolf’s novel displays a unique narrative style that can be seen as anticipating the feminine quality of writing, which springs from the woman’s experience of the body.

Thus, the style of Woolf in To the Lighthouse is characterized by fluid narrative structures; amalgamation of poetic and personal narratives; representations of motherhood and open spatial and temporal boundaries, all of which express a feminine modality that characterises the writer’s identity.

The paper also explores such aesthetics of the feminine experience through the character of Lily Briscoe, an aspiring artist, upon whom Woolf projects the turmoil of the creation process in parallel with the experience of the writer herself.

Through a close qualitative analysis of the novel, the paper aims at highlighting the precedence of the feminine narrative style of Woolf that was later advocated in the French Feminist theories of Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva among others in the eighties of the past century.

Thus, through examining Woolf’s text from a different perspective, the research ultimately emphasizes the potential quality inherent in her narrative and modernist aesthetics which shape her identity as a creative writer and as a woman.

In other words, the paper concludes that literary writing of women writers can provide narrative prototypes that are open to the feminine quality of the body through subversive employment of narrative aspects.

Therefore, this research can be used as a springboard from which further research can be generated on Woolf’s fiction as well as the works of other modernist women writers.