Death, gender and social roles in To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse is a book concerned with death, and gender is formulated by difference in response to its threat . Women pursue immortality through the creation of illusions and men through the pursuit of facts. The novel questions the distinction between the sexes that has hardened into pre-World War I gender roles that are exemplified in the institution of marriage. A younger generation fights against the rigidity of gender boundaries and Lily is the main representative of this rebellion. She must learn to integrate her masculine and feminine qualities into a balanced whole so as to be a creator of illusions and a pursuer of facts. Lily's painting is her creative representation of the underlying truth of gender life and will allow her to achieve immortality. The main interpretive difficulty of this novel is Woolf's use of multiple perspectives. Josephine O'Brien Schaefer writes: “The window in Part I is, of course, the literal one in which Mrs. Ramsay sits with her little son James… The title, however, has a much broader application. Each of the characters has his own window open onto the world, and much of the first section of the novel differentiates [the different characters'] frames of reference... Virginia Woolf, adding her own voice to that of the characters, gradually completes a vision both “inside” and “outside”, in other words, a vision of the spectator framed by the window. The moments of vision that occur much later in Part III must be understood as occurring within the frames provided in Part I” (Latham, 72). It's easy to accept a character's version of reality as true, and Woolf periodically warns us, through the confusion of her characters... middle of paper... society has tried to discourage such gender mixing within itself by creating roles separate for women and men. Woolf believes that women must learn to accept their femininity, cultivate their masculinity and choose the role they want to play. Only when they do so is it possible to achieve immortality through self-realization. Works Cited Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. No man's land, volume 3: letters from the front. London: Yale University Press, 1994. Latham, Jacqueline, ed. Critics of Virginia Woolf. Florida: University of Miami Press, 1970.O'Brien Schaefer, Josephine. The triple nature of reality in Virginia Woolf's novels. The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1965, pp. 111-13, 118-25. (Latham, pp. 72-78).Woolf, Virginia. At the lighthouse. Introduction by DM Hoare, Ph.D. London: JM Dent and SonsLtd., 1960