"The inadequacy of human relationships in To the lighthouse : gender-role stratification and victorian discourse on marriage"

Abstract

From this richness of descriptions in the novel, this analysis ventures to, first, report how the hegemonic Victorian discourse on marriage is presented in the novel and, second, describe the characters’ relation to this discourse, in other words, how they interact and conflict with it. The last stage in the analysis, from a gender-role perspective, will be an attempt to glimpse Woolf’s modern conception on the nature of human relation through her character’s interaction, and how the discourse on marriage and its gender-role expectations shapes and effects the connection among the characters in the novel.