Virginia Woolf Essay

The target novel for this term paper is To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf was a British female novelist born in 1882, who was raised in a family which is full of atmosphere in intellectuals and also literatures. She wrote her first novel in 1915, and until 1927 she has finally made her signature piece, To The Lighthouse, of which it is famous for using consciousness stream. Woolf is also being well-known for promoting modernism and feminism.
While To The Lighthouse is the signature piece from Woolf, it mainly talks about the lives of the Ramsays during wartimes, with their journeys towards a lighthouse as the main plot line of the novel. In this novel, Woolf tried to use the stream of consciousness to show personalities of different characters, and express her views about feminism and humanity. According to Humphrey, the term “Stream of consciousness” is coined by William James and it refers to an approach for presenting psychological aspects of the …show more content…
In my opinion, it is a “Yes”. By writing different characters’ action, dialogues, emotional changes and interaction, it can also reflect their personalities. Direct description like adjectives is not a must in every novel. Like the example mentioned in the above, Woolf can make readers fully understand who Mrs. Ramsays really is, but just showing her actions and speech. Meanwhile, the novel can reflect the social environment that time, like the way Mrs. Ramsays wanted everyone to get rid of conflicts, especially under the sensitive period of wartime. It is also because Woolf has successfully projected the environment that she lived at that time to the novel. It feels like we are travelling in a parallel world. All in all, I think To The Lighthouse is really a good piece from Virginia Woolf, and being a model for stream-of-consciousness