Lily Briscoe's Protest against Male-Chauvinism in Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Abstract

Woolf's To the Lighthouse embodies the encouraging and enticing ideas for women empowerment and their desires repressed in patriarchy through the historical span of time. The characters portrayed in the novel are symbolic ad speak the voice of both the ruled and the ruler, in other words, females and males respectively. The female characters carry on Woolf's views and attitudes towards men and rest of the male-dominated society. Woolf through one of the prominent characters Lily Briscoe has attempted to make it crystal clear that there is nothing that women cannot do against the patriarchal understatement- "women can't write; women can't paint". On this ground, women are as valiant and courageous as men and everything is possible on the part of the entire sex, female. To the customary trend women are confined to a certain domain of duties and responsibilities and most of them are concerned with emotional and delicate notion of jobs but To the Lighthouse breaks this boundary extant in patriarchy by forwarding Lily Briscoe as a painter and a woman who defies the marriage institution by living bachelor throughout the novel.