Virginia Woolf: Defying Masculine Assumptions

By Tricia Ares 

Many consider Virginia Woolf to be one of the greatest innovators in the English language. As an early modernist and feminist, Woolf predicted that female voices would gradually change the very language of literature; a trend in which she, herself, played a principle role. This linguistic change was not merely grammatical, Woolf questioned the connotative meaning of words; the attitudes, emotions, and value judgments associated with words. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf illustrates how masculine word associations can create internal conflict for women.

In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar note how difficult it was for women to break free from the ‘eternal types’ imposed upon them by centuries of masculine writers:

Before the woman writer can journey through the looking glass toward literary autonomy . . . , she must come to terms with the images on the surface of the glass, with, that is, those mythic masks male artists have fastened over her human face . . . (17)

The internal and external descriptors of Mrs. Ramsay serve as excellent examples of this conflict. Throughout the novel we see Mrs. Ramsay struggle with the concept of the universal mother. In chapter VI of “The Window,” Woolf writes:

They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman. All day long with this and that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions. (32)

With this statement Woolf defines Mrs. Ramsay’s social role as the nurturer. Woolf then demonstrates how society reinforces this role, by creating a number of masculine admirers. Despite Mrs. Ramsay’s mundane physical description, her admirers characterize her as beautiful. Lily Briscoe recognizes this admiration for what it really is: “It was love . . . like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases” (Woolf 47). Mrs. Ramsay personified the masculine ideal of the ‘Madonna’.

To her observers, Mrs. Ramsay is the epitome of feminine devotion, the perfect mother and wife. The illusion comes at a price, however, as Mrs. Ramsay’s strength is “drunk and quenched by . . . the arid scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again” until she is left with “scarcely a shell of herself for herself” (Woolf 38). Unlike Lily whose internal conflict arises from her defiance of male definitions, Mrs. Ramsay’s internal conflict arises from her attempt to fulfill them. “[S]he did not like, even for one second, to feel finer than her husband” (Woolf 39). In this way, Woolf creates a dichotomy in which her heroines “seek power and authority either by becoming like men or by becoming liked by men” (Young-Eisendrath 49).

Lily observes that in her relationships with women, Mrs. Ramsay is “wilful” and “commanding” (Woolf 49). She also senses that “knowledge and wisdom were stored up in Mrs. Ramsay’s heart” (Woolf 51). Yet in Mrs. Ramsay’s opinion, it is her husband who was “infinitely the more important” of the two, and that “what she gave the world, in comparison with what he gave, negligible” (Woolf 39). This line of reasoning denotes how Mrs. Ramsay bought into masculine assumptions of intellectual hierarchy. Mrs. Ramsay not only submits to Mr. Ramsay but craved his dominance: “That was what she wanted—the asperity in his voice reproving her. If he says it’s wrong to be pessimistic probably it is wrong” (Woolf 123).

By experimenting with stream-of-consciousness, Woolf exposes the underlying psychological and emotional motives of her characters, creating juxtaposition between external patriarchal pressures and internal emotional realities experienced by women. As noted by Maureen Murdock in The Heroine’s Journey:

To destroy the myth of inferiority a woman needs to carry her own sword of truth . . . so much of women’s truth has been obscured by patriarchal myths, new forms, new styles, and a new language must be developed by women to express their knowledge. (56)

Woolf was aware of this need, and used her style of story telling to question assumptions created and perpetuated by generations of male authors before her.

Works Cited
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer
and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Murdock, Maureen. The Heroine’s Journey. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc, 1990.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1981.

Young-Eisendrath, Polly, and Wiedemann, Florence. Female Authority, Empowering
Women through Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press, 1987.