The Garden and Ecofeminism in To the Lighthouse

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the garden as “an elegiac garden,” a site where Virginia Woolf both commemorates and feels sensuously towards the presence of her mother. In this respect, I analyze To the Lighthouse by focusing on the garden noting that ecofeminists have cited Woolf as a proto-ecofeminist. Before examining the possibilities of interpreting Woolf’s modernist narrative strategies from ecofeminist perspectives, though, I would like to find the answer to the question whether Woolf’s feminism can embrace the agendas of ecofeminism. First, I investigate what motifs Woolf drives from the connection with the gardens and how she represents them in her writings. Next, I reevaluate Woolf’s defiance of the dualism that is enshrined in the terms of “naturecultures” which Donna Haraway has provided for new directions in ecofeminism. Further, I attempt to find a potential alliance with ecofeminist concepts in Woolf’s “organic perception”. Lastly, I inquire into how Woolf’s usage of natural images revise the myth of Demeter and Persephone.