To see life steadily or to see it whole: Gender, perception and place in Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster

Through close readings of To the Lighthouse and Orland by Virginia Woolf and Howards End and A Passage to India by E. M. Forster, I will discuss the connections between gender and other sets of binary oppositions at work within these novels. After I introduce the general framework of my argument in Chapter one, Chapter two will examine the gender extremes present in some of the novels, and discuss the connection between gender and sensory perception, primarily vision. Chapter three applies the gender framework from Chapter two to individual characters who fall outside the traditional gender identity categories, and examines how androgyny is thematically situated within these novels. Chapter four discusses the liminal spaces present in each novel, and looks at how (usually androgynous) characters come to be associated with them. It then addresses the idea of liminal space, or borderland, as a metaphorical extension of the concept of androgyny.