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Summarize Freud's psychosexual theory of development
Feminism in Virginia Woolf's to the lighthouse
Summarize Freud's psychosexual theory of development
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The opening scene of To The Lighthouse between Mr Ramsay and Mrs Ramsay displays the gender division that flows throughout this passage highlighting Woolf’s own perspective on society and sexuality between genders. Woolf supports the belief in a complete change to society resulting in a non – hierarchical society. Woolf felt for this to happen aside from the practical changes, that a radical redefinition of sexuality was also needed. The novel focuses on sexual issues of the twentieth century central to feminist campaigns, such as marriage being a form of institutionalized slavery . She brings to attention one of Freud’s most well-known theory, the oedipal conflict. The author draws upon the story of Oedipus who kills his father and marries his mother. Freud states that the daughter demands the attention of the father and the son the attention of her father. In doing so this monopolizes the love the son has for the mother at the risk of jealousy from the father, due to the dominating attention the child wants from the mother. Similarly, this oedipal triangle is formed between James and his parents. Woolf gives reference to Freud and his views on male development and family dynamics by sharing his views on the unconscious whilst talking about them in her own way. She “absorbs many of Freud’s insights about male and female gender identity, yet at the same time infected them in a manner now known as feminist.” The dialogue between the Ramsay’s and James is seen by the reader to express feelings equating to sexual intensity in the way he loves his mother and hates his father, simply by his reaction to Mr Ramsay’s comment about the foul weather. His preference for his mother over his father is clear when he states she is “ten thousa...
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...want to be a mother" (15.374) this is seen to be of a humorous nature yet it draws to the attention of the reader Blooms ability to sympathize with the women around him and his ability to consider the pain and struggles they go through. Joyce utilises Bloom as a voice that appreciates women and understands their plight.
Works Cited
Justin Levenstein. ‘Ulysses, Dubliners, and the Nature of Relationships in the Modern World’. Emergence: A Journal of Undergraduate Literary Criticism and Creative Research. Available from(WWW) http://journals.english.ucsb.edu/index.php/Emergence/article/view/21/100 Date Accessed: 11/12/13
Virginia Woolf In To The Lighthouse( p68
Ljiljana Ina GJurgjan. The politics of gender in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and James Joyce’s A portrait Of The Artist Of A Young Man. (Zagreb: 2010) pp 9
James Joyce. To The Lighthouse. (pp330)
Throughout the book To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, there are many burdens upon relationships in the storyline. One such burden is that of male superiority; through the belief of male superiority relationships are stressed because males constantly need to prove that they are better then females. This stress causes problems within marriages and affects the domestic life of husbands and wives. The unspoken problem between the sexes causes tension and affects thoughts shown within internal monologues more then it directly affects events.
In Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse”, the struggle to secure and proclaim female freedom is constantly challenged by social normalcy. This clash between what the traditional female ideologies should be and those who challenge them, can be seen best in the character of Lily Brisco. She represents the rosy picture of a woman that ends up challenging social norms throughout the novel to effectively achieve a sense of freedom and individuality by the end. Woolf through out the novel shows Lily’s break from conventional female in multiply ways, from a comparison between her and Mrs.Ramsey, Lily’s own stream of consciousness, as well as her own painting.
In the predominantly male worlds of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora Leigh (Book I)”, the women’s voices are muted. Female characters are confined to the domestic spheres of their homes, and they are excluded from the elite literary world. They are expected to function as foils to the male figures in their lives. These women are “trained” to remain silent and passive not only by the males around them, but also by their parents, their relatives, and their peers. Willingly or grudgingly, the women in Woolf and Browning’s works are regulated to the domestic circle, discouraged from the literary world, and are expected to act as foils to their male counterparts.
A collection of short stories published in 1907, Dubliners, by James Joyce, revolves around the everyday lives of ordinary citizens in Dublin, Ireland (Freidrich 166). According to Joyce himself, his intention was to "write a chapter of the moral history of [his] country and [he] chose Dublin for the scene because the city seemed to [b]e the centre of paralysis" (Friedrich 166). True to his goal, each of the fifteen stories are tales of disappointment, darkness, captivity, frustration, and flaw. The book is divided into four sections: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life (Levin 159). The structure of the book shows that gradually, citizens become trapped in Dublin society (Stone 140). The stories portray Joyce's feeling that Dublin is the epitome of paralysis and all of the citizens are victims (Levin 159). Although each story from Dubliners is a unique and separate depiction, they all have similarities with each other. In addition, because the first three stories -- The Sisters, An Encounter, and Araby parallel each other in many ways, they can be seen as a set in and of themselves. The purpose of this essay is to explore one particular similarity in order to prove that the childhood stories can be seen as specific section of Dubliners. By examining the characters of Father Flynn in The Sisters, Father Butler in An Encounter, and Mangan's sister in Araby, I will demonstrate that the idea of being held captive by religion is felt by the protagonist of each story. In this paper, I argue that because religion played such a significant role in the lives of the middle class, it was something that many citizens felt was suffocating and from which it was impossible to get away. Each of the three childhood stories uses religion to keep the protagonist captive. In The Sisters, Father Flynn plays an important role in making the narrator feel like a prisoner. Mr. Cotter's comment that "… a young lad [should] run about and play with young lads of his own age…" suggests that the narrator has spent a great deal of time with the priest. Even in death, the boy can not free himself from the presence of Father Flynn (Stone 169) as is illustrated in the following passage: "But the grey face still followed me. It murmured; and I understood that it desired to confess something.
Garrett, Peter K., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Dubliners. Prentice-Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: 1968.
In the novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf illustrates the character of Mr. Ramsay, a husband and father of eight children. As a husband, he degrades and mentally abuses his wife, Mrs. Ramsay, and as a father, he disparages and psychologically injures his children. Yet, Mr. Ramsay has another side -- a second dimension. He carries the traits of a very compassionate and loving husband and a securing and nurturing father. Although Woolf depicts Mr. Ramsay as crude, brusque, and insensitive, he, nonetheless, desires happiness and welfare for his family.
Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse illustrates a bridge between the worlds of the Victorian mother and the modern, potentially independent woman. The Victorian woman was to be absorbed, as Mrs. Ramsay is, by the task of being mother and wife. Her reason for existing was to complete the man, rather than to exist in her own right. Mrs. Ramsay certainly sees this role for herself and is disturbed when she feels, momentarily, that she is better than her husband because he needs her support to feel good about himself and the life choices he has made. Yet the end of the Victorian era saw the rise of women's rights and greater freedom for women to excel without men or children. Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born, says that To the Lighthouse is about Virginia Woolf's need to understand her own mother and to prove, through the character of Lily Briscoe, that a woman can be "independent of men, as Mrs. Ramsay is not" (Rich, p. 228).
In the novel Woolf subverts the patriarchial portrayal of feminism with the character of Lily Brascoe. Lily is constructed as an independent character who defies the ingrained beleifs of how a woman should act. She does this through her actions in a different style despite Mr Tansley¹s assertion that Œwomen can¹t write, women can¹t paint¹ and refuses to marry even though it was a popular belief that all women should marry Œas an unmarried woman has missed the best of life¹. Instead Lily thought that that 'she did not need to marry, thank heaven she did not need to undergo that degradation. Woolf applauds this attitude, as at the completion of the novel, Lily is one of the few characters who has achieved fulfilment or in her case the completion of a painting begun ten years prior.
Virginia Woolf, a founder of Modernism, is one of the most important woman writers. Her essays and novels provide an insight into her life experiences and those of women of the 20th century. Her most famous works include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928), The Waves (1931), and A Room of One's Own (1929) (Roseman 11).
In Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay, a professor, philosopher, and father to eight children, is the husband to a beautiful and very admired woman, Mrs. Ramsay. He uses her as his support against his crippling doubt and constantly needs her to coddle him. However, he finds her compassion towards others annoying and cannot fully respect her because of her gender. With Mrs. Ramsay’s presence, his ego grows, and while she seems to be helping Mr. Ramsay, instead she is normalizing his outbursts of harshness and insecurities by praising him. And because she rarely directly goes against him, he paradoxically cannot respect her as a wife but depends on her too much to function normally. After Mrs. Ramsay passes away, Mr. Ramsay is forced
In the novel To the Lighthouse, two main characters named Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay have an intriguing relationship with one another. Throughout the novel, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay appear to have alternative viewpoints on life, and they tend to disagree. However, there are certain times where the two of them have an unspoken interaction where they seem to reveal their true feelings for one another. While one may question the status of their relationship and as to whether it is good or even healthy, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay appear to be normal human beings who show various emotions and perceptions on life. Since the Ramsay’s marriage is complicated and shows various levels of attraction towards one another, someone could sum up the status of their relationship
Throughout history, women writers used pen names and pseudonyms to avoid the eyes of the patriarchal society. The female writers were no strangers to harsh criticism from the gender-biased readers regarding their artistic works. However such emphasis on gender discrimination coined the words, feminism and sexism, which now reflect on the past and the present conflicts. In the book A Room Of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf tracks down the history of women and fiction to find the answer. She argues, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. She chants on and on about the topic of “women and fiction”, contemplating the role of women in the traditional domain and the virtues of women writers. Although, Woolf may have contemplated over such awareness that a woman needs an atmosphere of her own in which nobody can intrude, the modern world has prevailed over such hindrances throughout technological innovations that offer freedom of speech. Also, economical affluence is not a necessity for women to engage in the fictional world but rather a sufficient condition in the modern world. Thus Virginia Woolf’s predictions failed to represent the current vantage point revolving around women and fiction.
Theme of Love in Joyce’s Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses
In the Broadview Anthropology of Expository Prose, Buzzard et al. describe Virginia Woolf’s essay “Professions for Women” as a “lecture to a society of professional women” (100). As a queer writer, Woolf’s voice during the 1930’s received much attention, along with praise and criticism. Woolf’s fight for women’s empowerment and gender equality are evident throughout her essay, and as of now, in the 21st century, it is unequivocal that Woolf saw herself as a feminist. However, as Woolf writes her “Professions for women” she makes use of the blanket terms “the woman” and “herself” to refer to a general professional woman. It leads us to question who the woman really is: which kinds of individuals are included in and excluded from Woolf’s filtered view of women. How does
In the novel To the Lighthouse, two main characters named Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay have an intriguing relationship with one another. Throughout the novel, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay take alternative viewpoints on life, disagreeing frequently. For example, in the first chapter of the novel, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay argue about what the forecast will be for tomorrow. However, there are certain times where the two of them have an unspoken interaction. They reveal their true feelings for one another, striving to protect each other from harm. While one may question the status of their relationship and as to whether it is good or even healthy, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay appear to be normal human beings who show various emotions and perceptions on life. Since the Ramsay’s