SOURCE: “‘Robbed of Meaning’: The Work at the Center of ‘To The Lighthouse,’” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp.217–34.

In the following essay, Emery examines patriarchal and colonialist elements in To the Lighthouse.

I

Critiques of “Western feminism” have demonstrated convincingly that much of feminist discourse constructs its subject through processes of exclusion (see, for example, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Chandra T. Mohanty, Biddy Martin and Chandra T. Mohanty, and Gayatri C. Spivak's “Texts” and “Foreword”). A passage from Virginia Woolf's well-known essay “A Room of One's Own” exemplifies the dynamic: “It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her” (52). The sentence constitutes its subject—“woman” and “one”—as exclusively English and white. It excludes black women from the category “woman” and presumes to judge them as “very...