Women in the spotlight: feminine characters in Ellen Glasgow's "Virginia" and Virginia Woolf's"To the Lighthouse"

Abstract

Ellen Glasgow and Virginia Woolf are both among the most renowned female authors of the twentieth century. Being their novels labelled as feminist literature, both writers focus their attention on women discrimination on distinct historical contexts. This paper aims to prove how the above-mentioned authors, in their novels Virginia and To the Lighthouse respectively, succeeded in portraying the role of traditional and more modern women in the Old South and in the antebellum Scotland. To a lower extent, the paper also examines how the endings of the narrations are used by the authors to forewarn women of their precarious circumstances. To do so, characters representative of the clashing women profiles will be analysed in each of the novels. In Glasgow’s Virginia, Virginia Pendleton will be scrutinised in regard to her Traditional Southern lady role, while Susan Treadwell, Abby Goode and Margaret Oldcastle will be examined from a New Women perspective. As for Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Mrs Ramsay clearly embodies the role of the Victorian woman, being Lily Briscoe a portrayal of the opposite, a Modern woman. Additionally, the position of each character when the novel finishes will be shortly presented, in order to demonstrate how those endings can have an effect on the perception on women discrimination in female readers. The paper concludes that in fact, both authors triumphed in portraying an accurate reality when it came to gender issues, especially women discrimination. Among women discrimination, the novels appear to present a general picture of the two women profiles coexisting in certain historical times: the traditional women profiles and the emerging modern women. Moreover, Glasgow and Woolf succeeded, by introducing, comparing and displaying each of the chosen characters’ endings within the story, to trigger female readers so that they adopt new attitudes towards the role of women, abandoning their enslavement.