Study On The Female Images In The Works Of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was one of the most famous female stream-of-consciousness authors in Britain, and she was also a pioneer of the feminist movement. Woolf dedicated her whole life to female issues and thinking of the destiny of women. With all her reflections, she created a plenty variety of female images.In her early works, Woolf mostly focused on the females who have made different choices in romantic relationships. When faced with love, some females chose to obey the traditional view of love, some ceaselessly sought for their identities in the process of disavowing the traditional love view; some pursued for freedom in love, refusing to be constrained by their romantic relationships; some considered their career as significant as love. After getting married, Woolf formed a deeper understanding of marriage. In this period, she created female images that attached themselves to their husbands and lived for their husbands; that failed to free themselves from the restrictions of marriage but started to fighting for their self-liberation in their deep insides; that gave up the marriage for their careers. In her later period, Woolf developed some new thoughts on sexual relationships. She envisages homosexuality and raised the theory of androgyny to break the stereotype of gender and obtain the harmony in sexual relationships.After a comprehensive integration and analysis of these female images and Woolf’s other works, we can conclude that females in Woolf’s time should have the courage to fight for equality and freedom in the premise of respecting gender differences. By equality we mean that females should enjoy the rights of equal employment, equal access to education and equal participation in politics. Freedom means that females should have the freedom to control their own destiny, to have an independent inside world, and to speak for themselves.