To the Lighthouse Through the Lens of Elaine Showalter's "Feminist Criticism"

According to Elaine Showalter in her essay, Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness, the feminist writer exists as two separate entities, as reader and as author; however, the male reader and male author, of course, taint this division: 

Linguistic and textual theories of women’s writing ask whether men and women use language differently; whether sex differences in language use can be theorized in terms of biology, socialization, or culture; whether women can create new languages of their own; and whether speaking, reading, and writing are all gender marked. (315 Showalter)

Naturally, the woman writer tries to compete and transcend the traditional medium of a male dominated culture, but is immediately met with complicated but strong opposition from society. 

Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse, becomes a double-voiced discourse; it provides a glimpse into two ways of thinking. Her work describes both Mrs. Ramsay, the quintessential housewife, and Lily Briscoe, as the feminist who blatantly denies male culture. That is to say that Woolf employs both a muted old view and a dominant contemporary view of social and cultural traditions; the ideas of general culture versus unexpressed culture occur. Showalter makes claim that “gynocritics,” a term she coined, assess and evaluate the specialized discourse of women’s writing. This discourse contends with women’s language, women’s ideas, women’s ways of communication, women’s careers, “the history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by women” and essentially, four different ways of thinking about the differences between men’s and women’s writing and literature: the biological, the cultural, the psychoanalytic and the linguistic (Showalter 311).