Forever Eating the Past in the Present? Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Tom Forsythe’s Food Chain Barbie
Forever Eating the Past in the Present? Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Tom Forsythe’s Food Chain Barbie

Summary/Abstract: This paper compares the images of women created in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927) and Tom Forsythe’s photography series Food Chain Barbie (1997). Both artworks illustrate the western construction of women, past and present, as insignificant members of patriarchal society apart from the sustenance level. Sustenance itself is engendered(Teresa de Lauretis) in society, i.e. constructed along gender lines, through the muting (Edwin Ardener) of some of its members with respect to legitimate self representation. Drawing upon contributions by Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Michèle le Doeuff, Gayatri Spivak and Edwin Ardener to the twentieth-century understanding of power relations between individual and society through representation, I suggest western philosophy’s and art’s complicitous critique of patriarchy.

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