Male & Female Distinctions in "To the Lighthouse"

Lily, on the otherwise hand, represents the artistic temperament, and in the novel her creativity with ideas and images is set in assembly line to Mrs. Ramsay's ability to understand people and career. The latter is seen as a particularly feminine capability, a feminine way of flavour at the world that is beyond the manlike. Lily in her painting thunder mug capture a moment and make it eternal, taking it out(a) of life, as it were, part Mrs. Ramsay deals with events in the flow of life, with all the change over and confusion that this implies.

The contrasts between Lily and Mrs. Ramsay are many. Mrs. Ramsay is married and believes that the married life is the only way for a woman to fulfil herself, while Lily is unmarried and expresses herself through her painting, through the act of creation. There is a price to be paid for this ability, however, and Lily is to a fault withdrawn from life, apart(p) and living more within herself than with other people. Mrs. Ramsay, on the other hand, is beautiful and always the center of attention, giving as acceptable as she gets in terms of human relations.

To say that Mrs. Ramsay represents the

feminine way of thinking is not to say that she is born that way, for part of Woolf's demolition of the traditional ideas of male and female is to show that these ideas are imposed by society. Some, corresponding Mrs.

Ramsay, accept their lot and in effect become wide-cut at it, while others, like Lily, manage to fuse the masculine and feminine in and through their creative work. Mrs. Ramsay at angiotensin-converting enzyme time had dreams of a more creative and socially utile life. She states that she would have liked to be "an investigator, elucidating the social problem" (Woolf 20). She has also had ideas on how to structure a dairy, but when she expresses these ideas at the dinner party table,

her children laughed; her husband laughed; she was laughed at, fire-encircled, and forced to vail her crest, dismount her batteries (Woolf 160).

Mrs. Ramsay has adopted the mode of melodic theme and behavior that fits this image, the image the uncreative male, the all male mind, has of the woman. She whence sees Lily as aberrant and tries to convince the latter that she can ne'er be "normal" until she is also married, insisting that "she moldiness, Minta must, they all must marry" (Woolf 8
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