The Female Image in Virginia Woolf’s Novels, ed

1. The Female Image in Virginia Woolf’s Novels

CONSTANTINE THE PHILOSOPHER UNIVERSITY IN NITRA
FACULTY OF ARTS
Department of English and American Studies
The Female Image in Virginia Woolf’s Novels
Defense of Bachelor Thesis
Diana Kyryliuk
Academic year 2026
Name and surname of the supervisor
Name and surname of the opponent

2. THE MOTIVATION FOR CHOOSING THE TOPIC AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE THESIS

Virginia Woolf’s fiction remains central to feminist literary criticism
because it presents women as complex inner subjects rather than
fixed social types. This thesis examines Mrs Dalloway and To the
Lighthouse to explore how gender, identity, and female autonomy
are shaped within modernist narrative.
• feminist reading of Woolf’s novels
• gender, identity, and women’s autonomy
• Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay, Lily Briscoe
• comparison of social roles and inner freedom
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3. THEORETICAL PART

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THEORETICAL PART
The theoretical part defines feminism and gender as tools for
reading Woolf’s fiction, focusing on subjectivity, power,
representation, and cultural norms. It also connects Woolf’s feminist
concerns with the modernist narrative techniques through which
female consciousness is revealed.
• twentieth-century feminist thought
• gender as cultural and literary construction
• women’s voices, domestic experience, authorship
• link between feminist themes and narrative form
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4. METHODOLOGY

The thesis applies feminist literary criticism, close reading, comparative
textual analysis, and narratological interpretation. The analysis focuses on
how Woolf constructs female experience through both themes and narrative
form.
• primary texts: Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse
• stream of consciousness, free indirect discourse, shifting focalization
• comparison of female subjectivity across the two novels
• key categories: image, focalization, agency, domesticity, gaze
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5. RESEARCH RESULTS

The analysis shows that Woolf represents women as complex
subjects shaped by memory, social norms, emotional conflict, and
inner reflection. In both novels, female identity emerges through the
tension between public roles and private consciousness.
• Clarissa Dalloway: social role and inner division
• relational agency through hosting and communication
• limits of marriage, class, and patriarchal judgment
• To the Lighthouse: contrasting models of femininity
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6. DISCUSSION OF THE FINDINGS

The findings show that Woolf connects feminist criticism with modernist
narrative form, revealing how gender norms shape everyday life, private
thought, and female identity. In Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,
women’s experience appears as layered, unstable, and shaped by both
social pressure and inner resistance.
• gender as performed and internalized role
• Clarissa: respectability, memory, hidden resistance
• Mrs Ramsay: domestic ideal and self-sacrifice
• Lily Briscoe: artistic autonomy and female creativity
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7. BIBLIOGRAPHY

• ANVESAK. 2021. Vol. 51, No.1(XII), August – December 2021. UGC Care Group 1 Journal. ISSN
0378–4568.
• ANGEL, K. 2010. The history of ‘Female Sexual Dysfunction’ as a mental disorder in the 20th
century. Current Opinion in Psychiatry, 23(6), 536.
• BANFIELD, A. 2000. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• BEAUVOIR, S. de. 2011. The Second Sex. Translated by C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier.
New York: Vintage Books.
• BOWLBY, R. 2014. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
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