Women and Women’s Literature

On To the Lighthouse and My Ántonia

Jiwen Lin

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 A Room of One’s Own is one of the most influential essays written by Virginia Woolf

on women writers and female characters in fiction first published in 1929. It is now regarded

a canon of the literary critique on feminism. The renowned writer and critic herself, therefore,

has been highly praised and honored as a pioneer of feminist movement especially from the

1970s and on. The room of one’s own is not a mere physical space where a woman writer

lives, it is a cry-out for a space of speech in the literary scene that would be reserved for

women, for literature had been dominated almost exclusively by male’s voice since the

beginning. What is more, there has always been this astonishing sheer contrast between how

female is depicted in male literature and how women live in a patriarchal society:

Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant.

She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the

lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents

forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words and profound thoughts in

literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read; scarcely spell; and was the

property of her husband. Along with the social inequality that women suffer from, she also

points out that women are different than men in the way of perceiving the world and their

roles in the society. In order for a female writer to reveal her true self fully and let her

potential of literary creation evolve, she must abandon the standards of critique set up by men

and build up her own criteria in writing, a space of speech, a room of her own.

The British and posteriorly American literature had never lacked vividly depicted

female characters, but their roles were not as complex as males, such as virtuous wife, good

loving mother. A woman could never be without a man, in this sense, she is his prey of love,

his sacrifice when needed, or merely a substitute. Even Jane Eyre, a passionate and strongly

principled heroine, who values independence and freedom, is not free from traditional

patriarchal social conventions. When it came to 20th century, the irrepressible awakening

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force of female conscience was firstly lighted up in some female writers who not only had

deep insight of the society where they were found in, they were also equipped with

knowledge and non-conformist free spirits; hey broke off the confinement found in traditional

“male-literature” and created unconventional female characters from the perspective of

another gender. This female conscience even went further: literature became a mirror of

women’s living condition, it reflected the reality seen by women and later, it will shape the

reality as we perceive it today.

The reason I choose Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Willa Cather’s My

Ántonia over other two works is not that they are great female writers, which is undoubtedly

true: both chefs-d'oeuvre are strongly linked with the writers’ personal experience. Willa

Cather, through inheritance and surroundings had much in common with the pioneers. Born

on her maternal grandmother’s farmhouse in 1973, at the age of nine she moved to a ranch

near Red Cloud, Nebraska, where she dwelt among Germans, Russians and French

immigrants. Her nearest neighbors were Scandinavians and in the adjoining town was a

whole settlement of Bohemians. This period of life created the strongest impression and

served as the greatest influence in her writings, for she said once: "I think the most basic

material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” Cather had a pony and she

got the custom of riding faraway to visit (as Jim Burden does in My Ántonia, interestingly)

the immigrants whose difficult lives fascinated her and whose stories of their former homes

deepened her understanding and stirred her with a burning desire to interpret them to others.

These are the settings that her novels such as O Pioneers! and My Ántonia are framed in.

These autobiographical traces are more discernible in To the Lighthouse. The

central figure of the novel Mrs. Ramsay is based on Woolf’s own mother, beautiful, beloved,

charitable, and respectable. The visits to St. Ives in Cornwall with her parents, where her

father rented a house, are the happiest memories in Woolf’s childhood. But her world turned

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upside down at the age of thirteen, Woolf’s mother died and from then Mr. Woolf’s life was

shadowed by gloom and self-pity. Here is the counterpart of Mr. Ramsay. Furthermore, Woolf

dedicated many words to Lily Briscoe, a young girl not much talkative, whose much of time

is committed to the painting that seemed to be never finished for Mrs. Ramsay. But she is

more complex than what she appears to be, especially on the psychological level. Lily’s

struggle with art and life is exactly what Woolf faced to, the writer projected her own life into

Lily’s, creating a self in the world of fiction, whose story underlies that of the Ramsays. It

is fair to say Lily’s story is the backbone of the novel’s structure, Lily is therefore, the central

figure of the work.

Firstly, she bore up the restrain and the disdain that a traditional patriarchal society

pressed upon her. Charles Tansley, a young philosopher with humble background, held Lily,

and in general all women, in contempt: they never got anything worth having from one year's

end to another. They did nothing but talk, talk, talk, eat, eat, eat. It was the women's fault.

Women made civilization impossible with all their ‘charm,’ all their silliness. Tansley is a

representation of male intellectuals who shared similar misogynist point of view in those

times. Though Lily fought back restlessly by proving her undoubtedly talent in painting,

Tansley’s contemptuous words constantly hovered around her. “Let him be fifty feet away, let

him not even speak to you, let him not even see you, he permeated, he prevailed, he imposed

himself. He changed everything. She could not see the colour; she could not see the lines.”

Women did not dare to express bravely what they felt and saw, as men did. Education

excluded women implicitly following social conventions. Women could not access as freely

as men did to cultural events or art. Unlike her friend William Bankes, Lily had never seen a

Rembrandt in Amsterdam, never had the chance to adore Sistine Chapel, never been to El

Prado, the only occasion she went abroad was to visit her ill aunt in Paris. In addition to the

social inequality, women writers of the new era fear of malevolent and acrimonious critics

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that may disapprove of them, an inexperienced artist like Lily would surely feel unconfident

about their work.

Lily’s painting is, above all, a woman’s vision of the reality. She chose Mrs.

Ramsay to be her subject, a caring mother and a virtuous wife, whom she indeed admired.

But as time passed by and thanks to her talented artistic instinct, she was able to regard Mrs.

Ramsay from a different angle: she is no longer an idealized perfect woman, she is capricious

and overconfident, she cared for others for the sake of her own pride; furthermore, her self-

sacrifice for the family and her blind obedience towards her husband resulted exactly a

tyrannical father and a selfish husband. The portrait of Mrs. Ramsay was completed then

because the woman being depicted could not be more real from Lily’s perspective; for it was

a woman not idealized by any male.

In terms of the idea of awakening force of artistic creation and the realization of a

female artist, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia seemed to adopted an opposite approach to the

female understanding of the reality. Far away from civilization, social inequality and

discrimination are not what pioneers are mainly concerned of, the soil of the boundless

prairie that breeds them is their most ferocious enemy. They fight not for equality but only

survival. The spirit of the land gains so much of reader’s attention that it became a character

on its own. Whether we see for the first time through Jim Burden’s eyes the overwhelming

nature of the prairie upon his arrival, "between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted

out. I did not say my prayers that night; here, I felt, what would be would be;" or when we

accompany him in his journey back years later when Ántonia is already a self-made farm

owner with a happy family, there is always an unbreakable link between the land and its

inhabitants. The land is omnipresent, and Ántonia is the embodiment of this rich spirit of the

land with its beauty and hardship.

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 The person of Ántonia unfolds itself before us in the eyes of youthful Jim Burden.

There are no complexities in Ántonia. Her Bohemian peasant background and the extreme

poverty of her family limit her earliest years to a fierce struggle for existence. That first cold

winter, which brings nothing but hardship and pain, climaxed by the tragic suicide of her

beloved father and enjoyed much from life. Above all it builds a determination to fight on in

the face of obstacles that in later years never deserts her. Upon her father’s death, Ántonia left

the work of women and started to plough the land. Her courage and strength allowed her to

aid the family, even though by self-sacrifice she was deprived of opportunities of being

educated and therefore a brighter future. In contrast to her male-like strength and self-

determination, the male characters are generally feeble and melancholic. Here the most tragic

character in the book Mr. Shimerda, Ántonia’s father, a respectable violinist in his old

country. However, his sensitive and infirm artistic nature make him unfit (or not strong

enough to fit) for the tough life of immigrants on the prairie, even his physical condition did

not allow him to: “he was tall and slender, and his thin shoulder stooped.... I noticed how

white and well-shaped his own hands were. They looked calm, somehow, and skilled. His eyes

were melancholy, and were set back deep under his brow. His face was ruggedly formed, but

it looked like ashes-like something from which all the warmth and light had died out. It is

apparent that he is already equal to be dead.”Not only the death of an artist is actual, the few

occasions on the prairie that the characters had the experience of art resulted not joy or

beauty, but death and sadness. For instance, Jim was plunged into sorrow when went to

theatre to see “Camille” with Lena: “Even the handkerchief in my breast-pocket, worn for

elegance and not at all for use, was wet thoroughly by the time that morbid woman sank for

the last time into the arms of her lover.” What’s more, although Jim Burden had had the

privilege of being educated and finishing his study in university, his life has never been as

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happy as Ántonia’s, especially upon his return to the prairie many years later, when both he

and Ántonia were in marriage.

On one hand, Willa Cather created her characters on the basis of a duality of

genders, representing women, such as Ántonia, as the embodiment of the spirit of the land,

and what seems to be intellectual or artistic is not reconcilable with the hardship of the

reality. On the other side, Virginia Woolf fought for gender equality in the literary circle.

However distant the points of departure of their arguments may be, however different in

social status their characters are represented, there is one thing the two writers share in

common: the lives of these courageous and free-spirited women full of determination. These

lives are pieces of artwork by themselves.

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