To The Light House Essay
· Write an essay in which you identify and explore the painterly images associated with Mrs. Ramsay. Use them to elaborate the relationship between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe as well as Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay.
· What is the symbolic significance of the lighthouse? Discuss it in relation to the novel’s trajectory as well as individual characters’ relationships to it.
· Compare the first and last sentence of the novel. Make a claim about the critical significance of these lines and how they help to elaborate the underlying relational structures of the novel.
· Consider gender in the text and make a claim about Woolf’s view of femininity and masculinity in the text. In what ways are women shaped by expectations of them? But what about the men?
· Consider the stream of consciousness mode of storytelling that prevails throughout the novel and the claim by many critics that for Woolf’s fiction the action is on the inside. What truths about human psychology and relationality might this technique reveal?
· Write an essay about modernism and how this text hews to the characteristics of modernism. For this topic you will likely need to find outside scholarly sources that enable you to define modernism.
