Virginia Woolf's Feminism: From Difference To Equality

This thesis is designed to discuss one of the major concerns of Virginia Woolf's writing: finding a voice for women. Feminism and psychoanalysis are the two approaches applied, and three pieces of Woolf's work, Mrs. Dalloway(1925), To the Lighthouse(19Z7), and A Room of One's Own(1929), studied for the purpose. Mrs. Dalloway is a novel of female emotions whose plots are planned to build up the fundamentally different courses of development between the two sexes. Two ladies, Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, are described in To the Lighthouse to show how they live for complete forms as their personal responsibility. A Room of One's Own, the foundation for present-day feminist criticism, advocates equal chances of education for women and their right. In these three books, Woolf's deep insight subverts the traditional idea of normal and abnormal, male and female, active and passive, sacred and profane. Woolf not only focuses but also calls for people's focus on women's difference from men in self-development, which is caused by both natural and cultural reasons. Only when people really understand and tolerate the difference can gender equality be realized. Woolf's feminism, the difference versus equality feminism, is a realistic way to find a voice for women.