Death, Gender and Social Roles in To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse is a book concerned with death, and gender is formulated through difference in response to his threat. Women seek immortality by creating illusions and men by obtaining facts. The novel challenges the distinction between the sexes that became rigidified in pre-World War I gender roles, exemplified by the institution of marriage. A younger generation fights against the rigidity of gender boundaries, with Lily being the main representative of this rebellion. She must learn to integrate her masculine and feminine qualities into a balanced whole so that she can be a creator of illusion and a pursuer of facts. Lily's painting is her creative representation of the underlying truth of gendered life and will achieve her immortality. The major interpretive difficulty of this novel lies in Woolf's use of multiple perspectives. Josephine O'Brien Schaefer writes: "The window in the first part is, naturally, that at which Mrs. Ramsay is seated with her little son James...The title, however, has a much wider application. Each of the characters has their window open to the world, and much of the first part of the novel differentiates the frames of reference [of the different characters]... Virginia Woolf, adding her own voice to that of the characters, adds little to bit a view “inside” as well as “outside”, in other words, a view of the viewer framed by the window. The moments of vision that occur much later in Part Three must be understood as occurring within the frameworks provided in Part One” (Latham, 72). It is easy to accept a character's version of reality as true and Woolf periodically warns us, through her characters' confusion... middle of paper ... society has tried to discourage such gender mixing by creating distinct roles for women and men. Woolf believes that women must learn to accept their femininity, cultivate their masculinity, and choose the role they wish to play. Only when they do so can immortality through personal fulfillment be achieved. 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. Reviews 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