Mediation between Internality and Externality in Woolf’s Gendered Spheres

Virginia Woolf was a feminist writer who used stream of consciousness to push the boundaries of capturing one’s thoughts with written words. Though her writing style and the feminist nature of her texts have been extensively analyzed by scholars, they have not been used in tandem to develop a deeper interpretation of her work. Her novel To the Lighthouse is rich in gendered politics as well as an exploration of internality and externality. I will explore this text by reading Woolf’s stream of consciousness style through a feminist lens.  The feminine private sphere is associated with internality through Mrs. Ramsay, and the masculine public sphere is associated with the externality through Mr. Ramsay, with Lily acting as an androgynous force that subverts traditional gender binaries, resisting both social spheres of influence. As Rachel Blau Duplessis says, “The family, Woolf shows oppositionally, is the institution that reveals that interpenetration of public and private” (Duplessis 329). The ways each of the Ramsay’s mediate between their internal and external consciousnesses parallels the spheres of influence they are embedded in based on their genders, while Lily achieves liberation in her rejection of traditional social conventions.