The Need to Restructure Gender Identies

In her novel To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf explores love as a construct of gender systems. Being good to someone, a simple, basic definition of love, has a destructive effect on both the giver and receiver of the love. These destructive tendencies of love are shaped by gender identities, which Woolf establishes early in the novel; Mr. Ramsay is fixed as hard and logical and Mrs. Ramsay as soft and emotional. In the novel Mr. …

…with Mrs. Ramsay sitting there. In Lily’s final stroke, Woolf portrays her position that the male and female gender identities need to exist together within an individual. Woolf emphasizes the need to readjust gender structures, but not eliminate them, for she realizes love cannot exist without difference and otherness. She sees the solution as the need to recognize that male and female traits are contained in each person and work together as fluctuating pairs.