Virginia Woolf and Feministic Discourse:

To the Lighthouse
In feminist discourse the term “womb envy” denotes the fear that men experiences or an envy of the
biological functions of the female sex .The concept is analogous to the concept of female penis envy,
derived from the theory of psychosexual development, presented in Freudian psychology Spivak in
“Feminism and Critical theory” analyzes “womb envy” as the want or desire of possessing the womb. Men
who are jealous of reproductive rights of women seek to dominate females socially as a psychological
compensation for what men cannot do biologically. Throughout the novel, Mr. Ramsay implores his wife
and even his guests for sympathy. Mr. Ramsay is uncertain about the fate of his work and its legacy. His
insecurity manifests itself as a weakness. His keen awareness of death’s inevitability motivates him to dash
the hopes of young James and to bully Mrs. Ramsay into declaring her love for him. This hyperawareness
also forces him to confront his own mortality and face the possibility that he, like the forgotten books and
plates that litter the second part of the novel, might sink into oblivion. Mrs. Ramsay is aware of the fact that
Mr. Ramsay is in continual need for love and sympathy. Womb envy arises when men realize that they are
not in control of their lives as they thought they were. Mrs. Ramsay is the creative centre; the womb. She is
the “productive” centre as opposed to Derridian “phallogocentrism” which signifies the empowerment of the
masculine (phallus). She is the centre to which others are drawn, with “one wanting this, another that” She
boasts of “her capacity to surround and protect”. As opposed to Mr. Ramsay’s truth, Mrs. Ramsay builds up
a world of possibilities:”Perhaps you will wake up and find the sun shining and the birds singing.” For Mr.
Ramsay the negative centre, the engulfing sea/darkness/womb/death is a source of physical pleasure and
mental solace. We see him repeatedly attempting to achieve a merged state-“to be taken within the circle of
life, warmed and soothed”. The male, as opposed to the womb, is seen as empty and barren-thus he is not
regarded to possess seed, or, being fertile. The female, in contrast, is virtually always a positive force; she
is both the structure and the centre. She opens up, gives out to others, embraces, internalizes and
withstands negativity.

Also if we note the style of Virginia Woolf’s writing in the novel we can trace the detachment from the male
centric language, she is violating the existing structure, the words are moving in a fluid and poetic manner,
the text is full of juxtapositions and sudden shifts; for instance, Mrs. Ramsay loves her husband one minute,
is filled with irritation for him the next, and then admires him again.

In “Making and Unmaking in To the Lighthouse”, Gayatri Spivak argues that Mrs. Ramsay is in the position
of predicate rather than the subject; she sees Lily’s creation as a form of uterine plentitude developing a
thematic of “womb envy” in the novel, but one in which Mrs. Ramsay cannot participate. By portraying Lily
Briscoe, the struggling artist, who had failed to become herself a mother, a wife, a lover, Virginia Woolf
stresses the fact that art would assist her in compensating all of the above. The outwardly timid and
awkward Lily carefully guards the secret of how much her art means to her. Lily is far from being the
visionary artist whose prophetical “I have had my vision” she finds it extremely difficult to focus on her
canvas because of Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear, "Women can't paint, women can't write ...” Lily would
still “urge her own exemption from the universal law; plead for it”, as she realizes that in fact “she liked to be
alone; she liked to be herself; she was not made for that; and so have to meet a serious stare from eyes of
unparalleled depth, and confront Mrs. Ramsay's simple certainty (…) that her dear Lily, her little Brisk, was
a fool.” Hence, Lily Briscoe’s art is the “womb” or the creation which is envied by the egocentric, narcissistic
males in the novel.

Woolf said that she based the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse on her parents.
Indeed, Leslie Stephen was, like Mr. Ramsay, self-conscious, domineering, needy, and self-dramatizing. To
Virginia and her older sister Vanessa, their father was "the tyrant of inconceivable selfishness. Woolf wrote
of her father's relationship to her mother that he was "difficult, exacting, and dependent on her"

Spivak demonstrates that Marx’s theory of alienation of the worker from the product of his labor is based on
inadequate evidence because it doesn’t takes into account the instance of womb as a workshop and the
very different forms of alienation of product from labor represented by childbirth and by women’s domestic
work as unpaid; i.e. unvalued labor. Sigmund Freud’s account of penis envy as a chief determinant of
femininity similarly avoids confronting the womb as a place of production, or the possibility of ‘womb envy’
as “penis envy’s” interactive complement.

The womb is often being defined as a ‘lack’ by man in order to cover over a lack in man, the lack, precisely
of a tangible place for production. The womb according to Spivak is not an emptiness or mystery; it is a
place of production. The modern aspects of To the lighthouse represent the problematic situation of
modern human existence. Modern existence is so outrageous and immensely terrifying that any soul who is
seeking for pure pristine tranquility will be carrying the idea of ‘womb envy’ in his “collective unconscious”
as an archetypal pattern. So, in the light of Carl Jung’s theory of collective unconscious, we can read Mr.
Ramsay’s character to be an incarnation of the ‘primitive man’ who seeks comfort in his wife.