Images of Women in Modernist Fiction: A Farewell to Arms and to the Lighthouse

Abstract

Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Virginia Woolf”s To the Lighthouse are both canonical works of literary Modernism, yet they picture women in almost opposite ways. This article compares Hemingway’s Catherine Barkley, a nurse whose identity is built almost entirely around Lieutenant Frederic Henry, with Woolf”s Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, two women who hold incompatible views of what a woman’s life should look like and are made to answer to no one but themselves. The study proceeds through close reading supported by feminist literary criticism, examining how each novelist structures interiority, voice, and narrative sympathy around its female characters. Catherine is read through Shoshana Felman’s account of madness as a label historically imposed on women and through Judith Fetterley’s resisting-reader model, both of which clarify how the novel channels narrative sympathy toward its male protagonist at the moment of Catherine’s death. Mrs. Ramsay and Lily are read through Woolf’s own writing on the “Angel in the House” and the androgynous mind, concepts that show why the novel refuses to rank domestic devotion above artistic ambition. The article argues that the difference between the two novels is not simply a matter of authorial sympathy but a structural one. Hemingway subordinates Catherine’s death to Frederic’s grief, while Woolf lets Mrs. Ramsay’s death open a space for Lily rather than close one. The comparison is offered not to indict one writer for the benefit of the other but to clarify what a literary text does structurally when it grants a female character interiority and when it withholds it, with implications for how Modernist studies more broadly assesses gendered narrative sympathy.