Culture, Memory and Desire: Hannah Arendt’s Politics of Art in Virginia Woolf’s 'To the Lighthouse'

The article examines Woolf's consciousness of the necessity of enlarging the panorama of possible female identity patterns and of a new female body politics to dismantle the discrimination of women in a man's world. Lily the artist, and Woolf the writer will both be united in their engagé decision to contest the patriarchal, symbolic order in which they are forced to live, represented by the manqué philosopher, Mr Ramsay. Lily and Mrs Ramsay, on different levels and through different media (painting and writing), testify thus to the necessity for women to intervene directly in life, assuming an ante-litteram Arendtian vita-activa type of participation, i.e. taking on the responsibility of one's identity politics. They thus transform personal action into social transaction, coalescing Mrs Ramsay’s ‘private memory and desire’ into the shareable collective history of their respective works of art.