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Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is distinguished by the spaces in it, starting with a family summerhouse and culminating in the eponymous lighthouse, a beacon that leads mariners to safety. Yet those spaces are more than settings: each contributes a layer of meaning to the novel's plot. In mapping those meanings onto the plot, readers can see how the various spaces, particularly in the Ramsays' vacation home, help dramatize the ways in which gender roles and expectations are formed and reinforced in the characters of Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. In fact, as I will argue, Woolf constructs a novel that shows in its use of particularly charged spaces more than it explains. Mrs. Ramsay, the Victorian housewife, and Lily, the "New Woman," are made more complex to the reader when they perform their roles in spaces that are carefully constructed according to Victorian norms of behavior.1 In tracking their performances, readers can recover clear indications of how Woolf was trying to address the necessity for change in women's roles, but in productive, evolutionary encounters, where the older and newer roles for women known in her day confront each other and, in a dialectical revolution, produce new scripts for a "New Woman" who is more than a bluestocking.2
In order to read the novel this way, I will map the spaces in the Ramsay home as key to how Woolf structures the novel, and then consider them as gendered spaces, using Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe as case studies in order to show how the house also maps their behaviors. Indeed, Lily and Mrs. Ramsay begin the novel by performing according to gender expectations, especially while in the house. Even though both women spend time in the rooms of the house and enact social performances commensurate with those spaces, their thoughts eventually drift toward alternatives, thus showing their preoccupation with their problematic roles. By tracing their behaviors and thoughts, I want to show that Mrs. Ramsay acts as though she is the "Angel in the House"; her thoughts, however, frame her as a potential "New Woman."3 In contrast, Lily, the aspiring artist, represents the "New Woman," but actually does not become one until later in the novel, after her relationships to...