To the lighthouse - Essay Example

Victorian gender roles can only be seen as evidence of the fact that Woolf herself likely experienced a high degree of gender role identification within her own life. As such, the autobiographical nature of the novel will not make up a key component of this analysis; however, it is necessary to understand and appreciate that Woolf herself noted that her own most formative childhood experiences were made not in London where she grew up – but rather in Cornwall (specifically the coastal region around St. Ives) where similar to the family in the novel, her own family would spend the summer months.

However, regardless of the autobiographical nature of the work, the fact remains that the gender identification and fluid gender roles that Woolf introduces to the reader are a defining component of the story itself. The first gender role that is questioned appears within the first opening pages of the novel. Whereas traditional society has often cast the wife as the distinct individual within a marriage relationship that is desirous of incessant affirmation of love, Woolf seeks to differentiate this view by introducing the reader to an insecure husband that evidently suffers from a low self-esteem.

This type of reversed gender role seeks to present the reader with a family dynamic that is far from what one has come to expect from the traditional literature and societal views that pervaded the era in and around the time that Woolf penned the novel. However, where one might expect the author to continue to differentiate the gender roles into what the reader has come to expect as a clear rejection of tradition and an embrace of modernism/feminism, Woolf steers away from this. Instead, the author seeks to further categorize the manner in which the men and women in the story interact.

Says Mrs. Ramsey, Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated