Virginia Woolf’s Feminism Thoughts And Its Reflection In Her Literary Works

The writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is one of the most important writers who have initiated stream of consciousness in British literature of20th century. Her complex thoughts and original writing skills provide great possibility for future study of her works. Woolf focuses on female consciousness, female experience, and female literary tradition in her literary creation. In that process, she also bravely tries new writing forms so that the once silent female voice can be heard, thus making her contribution to a more true and complete understanding of the gender world. Later on, with the development of western feminist movement, the feminists paid attention to Woolf’s essays, proses, letters and diaries and made careful study of her works. On this basis the feminists deeply explored Woolf’s gender thoughts. It is acceptable to analyze Woolf’s works in feminist perspectives, but whether she is a feminist remains open to question.This thesis will try to analyze Woolf s important gender thoughts, makes clear of her binitarian identity of a writer and a feminist.and on that basis, analyzes her works. Through close reading of Woolf’s works, the author of the thesis will discuss her thoughts in three chapters. In the first chapter, the author of this thesis will focus on discussing Woolf s initial thoughts"androgyny" by combining with her life story. During that period of time, Woolf realizes the unfair treatments of women compared with men. Although she has shown her irritation to the fate of women, there is no clear feminist position. What’s more, she highlights her gender consciousness of bisexual coexistence. The second chapter will mainly probe into the change of her thoughts after turning her attention to the feminist position. In this period, she writes and trys hard to explore the ways to get rid of the difficulties in expressing female thoughts and female themselves,also analyzes the ideological and cultural reasons for this gender inequality. At the same time, she plays an vanguard part in free expression and self-establishment of female writing. The third chapter starts with her outsider identity, which is put forward in the later period of her life, and then probes into Woolf s deep thoughts beneath that outsider position. Throughout all my points of view, we find that Woolf’s thoughts keep changing with time. In the conclusion of this thesis, the author will appraise all the thoughts in this three periods and define her status in literature.Virginia Woolf has never stopped her thinking about the gender relationship. The fact that her thoughts develop from her half knowledge of feminist problems to her participation in the feminist movement to explore the ideological and cultural reasons for patriarchy and finally to the "outsider community". To great excent, Woolf s concern of gender relationship doesn’t stop and keeps evolving. Woolf not only comes up with her own theories but also puts them into practice in her life and writing. She consistently pays her attention to "man" himself and digs up from his spiritual world the personal feelings and insights, such as, sympathy, understanding, tolerance, love and poetry, thus making a valuable space for female existence. Although Woolf s thoughts are not comprehensive to some degree, from her ideas about the gender relationship we may see that she emphasizes the diversification of human existence and advocates the integration and harmony surpassing conflict. At the same time, she also notices the difference beneath that integration and promotes the subjectivity of an individual in the process of integration. It is of great significance for us to build a harmonious living environment today and to solve the various problems caused by the diversity in culture, gender, class, religion and so on.