To the Lighthouse | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 39 pages of analysis & critique of To the Lighthouse.
This section contains 11,148 words
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SOURCE: “The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf's ‘To the Lighthouse,’” in New Literary History, Vol. 26, Autumn, 1995, pp. 731–53.

In the following essay, which was originally presented at the Seventeenth International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg/Wechsel, Austria, in 1994, Nussbaum discusses the ability of people to know and understand the minds of others as Woolf sets forth her theory in To the Lighthouse.

“How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?”1 Sitting close to Mrs. Ramsay, “close as she could get” (78), her arms around Mrs. Ramsay's knees, loving her intensely, Lily Briscoe wonders how to get inside her to see the “sacred inscriptions” in her heart, “which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public” (79). She searches for a technique by which these internal...

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This section contains 11,148 words
(approx. 38 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Martha C. Nussbaum
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Critical Essay by Martha C. Nussbaum from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.