Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf’s artistic legacy in her novel To The Lighthouse swells beyond the realm of the literary tradition of modernism and into the sphere of female consciousness and creation.  As a woman creating at the turn of the century in a medium dominated by men, Woolf reconciles the traditional role of women as mothers and wives with the non-traditional role of the female artist, by way of the characters Mrs.Ramsay and Lily, in an attempt to converge these two identities into an all encompassing realm of female creation.   In this novel, Woolf’s tendency to dichotomize gender works in a way to create a legacy of creation and art sustained completely within the female realm by way of the structural and stylistic elements of her prose, such as the non-linearity of time and the cycle of repetition, which are intrinsically connected to the female voice and therefore in opposition to the male.   Woolf’s method of setting up these oppositions by means of stylistic representation of the female consciousness allows for the occurrence of female artistic creation and a permeating female voice, therefore deconstructing the traditional notions of modernist prose and male-female gender roles.