Most readers will agree that the dinner party in To the Lighthouse is important despite the fact that it is just a part of the whole story, because the party represents the world of Mrs. Ramsay who attracts all the people around her and "presides" in a sense even after her death. It is a well-known fact that Mrs. Ramsay was modeled after Woolf's deceased mother. Many critics point out that Mrs. Ramsay embodies the values of the Victorian Era, which are somehow connected with Woolf's mother in her mind. Therefore it may be said that Mrs. Ramsay's party symbolizes the values of the Victorian Era as well as the harmonious world Woolf's mother created. There are several studies of the parties which take place in the works of Virginia Woolf, but the importance of the party in To the Lighthouse is not fully discussed in any of them. This paper focuses on the dinner party in To the Lighthouse and clarifies the significance of the party in the whole work and also for Woolf herself. The argument will be formulated with reference to the ideas regarding social life in Europe proposed by Georg Simmel and Masakazu Yamazaki. First, this paper argues that while Mrs. Ramsay's dinner party is of a typical type practiced in Victorian society, her party also represents an ideal form of society. Then, taking into consideration Woolf's idea developed in her subsequent essay A Room of One's Own, the paper explores how fashionable society is related to art, particularly the art of writing, in terms of the linkage of women of different generations. It is concluded that Mrs. Ramsay's dinner party as an ideal form of sociability provides a clue to the pursuit of the possibility of women's new art.

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The aim of this paper is to analyze how two contemporary female modernists at the beginning of the 20^<th> century, Virginia Woolf in the U.K. and Midori Ozaki in Japan, employed similar literary images of "the sea" which were fostered by familiar and fondly-remembered scenes from their childhood, and how these images influenced their literary themes. The sea images used by Woolf derive from the town of St Ives in Cornwall and those of Ozaki from the town of Iwami in Tottori. Though they worked separately in England and Japan probably without knowing much about each other, Woolf and Ozaki built up a very similar kind of literature. The shared characteristics of their works can be found in their description of the human unconscious or subconscious, by using "stream of consciousness" in the case of Woolf, and by picturing "the world of the seventh sense" (Dai nana kankai) in Ozaki. This paper analyzes and compares the influences of their sea images on their works, and also their opinions on literature as expressed in their essays. The paper concludes that the objects or content of their expression are very close to each other, though their styles of expression are different: Woolf being inclined to impressionism and Ozaki to expressionism. For both Woolf and Ozaki, the images of the reality of life distilled from their experiences with nature (including the sea) in their childhoods seem to have worked as essential sources of inspiration in creating the unique body of literature they produced.

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This paper aims to re-examine the significance of gaps prevalent in Virginia Woolf's The Years (1937). As the text is known to have undergone a long process of editing and deletion, there have been strenuous efforts at recovering the original manuscript to supplement the "lack" that the final version immanently seems to possess. However, there still remains a question as to whether the empty spaces in the text, the unfinished sentences, interrupted speeches, debarred entrance, all have meanings in themselves, rather than merely representing an emptiness to be fulfilled. The "margins" in the novel require further scrutiny because not only does repression involve a character's sexual experience but the abject presence in the text is incarnated by a Jewish character. I will therefore re-examine the "emptiness" in the text by focusing on the margins in the text as something that was left in by the author rather than as something left out. By reading the margins in the novel, readers will eventually realize that the suppressed silence in the text represents the writer's as well as the characters' anxiety, unfulfilled desires and need for escape. The problems mainly discussed here are those of sexuality and "Jewish-ness", largely because they were two of the immediate concerns for Virginia Woolf at the time and because they were inevitably the subjects to be censored out in the late 1930s.

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