Gyno-Critical Study of Virginia Woolf’s Protagonist in To the Lighthouse: A Womanist Perspective

Abstract

The present research offers a gyno-critical analysis of Mrs. Ramsay, the female protagonist created by Virginia Woolf in her novel To the Lighthouse (1927), reconstructing and reinterpreting her female identity from the perspective of Womanism, a recently introduced ideology within Feminism that is a Universalist ideology for all women, regardless of color, race or class. The paper aims to address the question whether we should look at Mrs. Ramsay’s character in a traditional feminist way or go beyond that. The study has been carried out by applying the ideas of Elaine Showalter (1979) which were presented in her essay Toward a Feminist Poetics. She elaborated gender differences on the basis of four elements i.e. biological, linguistic, psychological and cultural. As a result of the text-based gyno-critical exploration, it has been found that Mrs. Ramsay is a womanist and feminine rather than a feminist character of some political implications. This Gyno-critical model can further be exploited in the execution of any research in the similar domain which intends to reinterpret any character or book from gyno-critical perspective, womanism or feminism.