Reimagining Reality: Challenging Lukács through Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Abstract

This article examines how Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) engages with the social and historical realities of early twentieth-century Britain, challenging Georg Lukács’s claim that modernist literature “negates outward reality.” While Lukács interprets techniques such as interior monologue, shifting focalization, and narrative fragmentation as retreats into private subjectivity, this study argues that Woolf’s formal experimentation offers a historically rooted mode of modernist realism in which consciousness registers social structures and historical pressures. In line with recent scholarship that reconsiders modernist form as socially responsive and historically situated, this article shows that Woolf’s narrative techniques make visible the ideological and material conditions that shape consciousness. The argument is developed through three sections. The first explores how Woolf integrates class hierarchy, gender norms, and social anxiety into the individual thought, presenting interiority as a form of social understanding. The second examines how bourgeois perception and domestic ideology produce gendered silences and structural absences that restrict what characters can notice or comprehend. The third analyzes how Woolf conveys historical rupture - especially the trauma of World War I - through temporal disconnection, omission, and structural fragmentation. By bringing together interiority, social perception, and formal disruption, To the Lighthouse demonstrates modernism’s capacity for subtle, historically attentive social critique.