EDUCATION AND THOUGHT IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Betty A. Sichel
Long Island University

To understand Virginia Woolf’s contribution to current discussions of masculine and feminine modes of thinking and living, we begin this present study by joining Mrs. Ramsay’s guests at a dinner party that is described halfway through Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. All the male guests are eagerly talking. As she listens, Mrs. Ramsay wonders:

What did it all mean? To this day she had no notion. A square root? What was that? Her sons know. She leant on them; on cubes and squares; that was what they were talking about now; on Voltaire and Madame de Stael; on the character of Napoleon; on the French system of land tenure; on Lord Rosebery; on Creevey’s Memoirs; she let it uphold her and sustain her, this admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way and that, like iron girders spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world, so that she could trust herself to it utterly, even shut her eyes.¹

At the same time that this and other passages depict what is now known as masculine reasoning, Woolf does not narrowly render reasoning through an either/or rendition or two valenced genderized extremes. She portrays a complicated, criss-crossing of different forms of reasoning, perceiving, feeling, relating to others, and living in the world. This intricate design not only highlights the extremes of masculine and feminine reasoning, but some of the shortcomings of the present tendency to genderize theories. To unravel Woolf’s design, we first look at the reasoning of the men who are Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner guests, then direct our attention to Mrs. Ramsay, and finally, look at the limitations that Woolf discerns in both these extremes.

Against the background of the rationality and reasoning that developed since the beginning of the Enlightenment, we understand Mrs. Ramsay’s puzzlement about the conversation and logic of the men at her dinner table. She anticipates the present rebellion against this older type of reasoning and the positing of other ways of conceptualizing reason, one of which is dependent on gender differences.

Mrs. Ramsay muses about the features of “masculine intelligence,” a reasoning as abstract as the square roots, the cubes and squares that her sons understand so well. The results of this thinking are as certain and unchanging as the solution of a square root. The image “square root” reminds us of the supremacy of the physical sciences and logic. Akin to the diagramming of an algebraic verbal problem,² we can diagram the solution to all sorts of other dilemmas.

Remembering Andrew’s comment that his father’s work is like a “kitchen table,”³ Lily Briscoe likens Mr. Ramsay’s philosophic work on “subject and object and the nature of reality” to a “large kitchen table,” a “scrubbed kitchen table,”⁴ that was a “symbol of her profound respect for Mr. Ramsay’s mind.”⁵ This “phantom kitchen table” is a pregnant, but ironical image in that a kitchen table usually invokes the busyness of family life, a workplace and social meeting arena that is overrunning with the ingredients for Mrs. Ramsay’s Boeuf en Daube, the many hands chopping and mixing the vegetables and seasonings, and the easy chatter and stories of the cooks. A scrubbed kitchen table is a misnomer, since even when clean, the kitchen table is not free of the flotsam and incremental remains of family life. But this is not the import of Lily Briscoe’s thought of the kitchen table. Her image points to the human mind as a tabula rasa, wiped clean of every emotion and feeling, of personal interests and needs; it resonates to Mr. Ramsay’s thoughts of Hume, and then, for us, out to the more recent veil of ignorance.

No matter the problem, this form of reasoning accepts that every human being including the reasoning individual is of equal worth, no better or worse than any other individual. A moral agent canna consider any special relationship with a particular human being, with A or with B. A, B, and the moral agent are actually placemarks in the moral calculus and could be replaced by any other individual. For Mr. Ramsay, James, Andrew, Prue, and Cam are not unique, his precious children, but the facts of his life, a scholar who struggles to support his family and educate his children. Yet Mr. Ramsay is troubled by his scholarly investigations. What can he know? Using linear logic, Mr. Ramsay realizes that an uncommon genius will jump from A to Z, see the whole march of knowledge in one leap. But Mr. Ramsay had to take a more difficult road, climbing from A to B, from B to C, more recently struggling from P to Q, but what of R? Will he arrive at R? Whoever undertakes this scholarly quest for knowledge, whether genius or not, will take this logical journey. For there is no other road.

Mr. Ramsay, the one reasoning, the moral agent, detaches himself from the objects of thought. The objects of thought are as psychologically separate as Voltaire, Madame de Stael, Napoleon, or the French system of land tenure are separated by time from the men at Mrs Ramsay’s dinner party. Psychological, temporal, and logical detachment implies that the subject examines the problem in the same manner as William Bankes would use a microscope, dissect a specimen, or do a scientific experiment. Just as Bankes, the scientist, does not become bonded with experiment, the men talking at the dinner party do not become imbedded in the objects of their conversation. This subject-object relationship assumes that human beings can be known and understood in the same way as a table, a chair, or any other thing. Napoleon and Voltaire are not real people to be nurtured and befriended; they are the A’s and B’s, the X’s and Y’s of logical thought and calculative reasoning. They are objects, as distant as the lighthouse that Mrs. Ramsay will never visit.

In a more negative vein, some philosophers claim that this detachment can have undesirable consequences. For Martin Buber, this form of relationship can be “the lust to make use of men by which the manipulator of ‘propaganda’ and ‘suggestion’ is possessed.”⁶ Stuart Hampshire graphically describes negative facets of calculative reasoning as a “habit of mind [that] has brought with it a new abstract cruelty in politics, a dull, destructive political righteousness: mechanical, quantitative thinking, leaden loveless minds setting out their moral calculations in leaden abstract prose.”⁷

In the family, we see a precursor of Buber’s and Hampshire’s warnings. Speaking about Mrs. Dalloway, Ellen Bayuk Rosenman states, “Underlying these external manifestions is a masculine state of consciousness, a general conception of the relationship between Self and Other. Its interpersonal imperialism dehumanizes and objectifies the Other to block out any disturbing sympathy or sense of likeness which might impede conquest.”⁸ In To the Lighthouse, though he enrages James, Mr. Ramsay “block(s) out any disturbing sympathy”⁹ and never sensing his son’s feelings, bends and “tickle(s) James’s bare calf with a spring of something” (49).

Though each man at the dinner party seems to be autonomous with his own point of view, a unique person is not speaking about Napoleon or French land tenure. Any suitably educated man would voice similar ideas, speak about the same subjects, and use the same form of argument. Mr. Ramsay might contend that impartialism is an ideal of reasoning, but impartialism often masquerades power and authoritarianism. The facts and truth are impartial for Mr. Ramsay, no matter their affect on his children. We cannot go to the lighthouse tomorrow; the weather will be bad. It is a fact.

Throughout To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay completely trusts men to provide a “Heaven of security” (51), to “upholding the world,” to the extent that she can “even shut her eyes.” Since the time of Plato, sight and the eyes have been metaphors to signify the attainment of knowledge and understanding. In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” after an arduous journey, the released prisoner, the philosopher King, finally sees the stars and sun and knows the Ideal Forms of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Through the image of “shut eyes,” Woolf metaphorically highlights Mrs. Ramsay’s inability to think and know as men do and thus, her dependence on them.

Yet, Mrs. Ramsay silently thinks, she dozes, she muses. If she played the game of men and accepted their “phrase-making…she would have blown her brains out by now” (106) Mrs. Ramsay, a personification of women’s way of thinking, recognizes that men’s way of thinking runs counter to women’s very being. Though they adore her, men do not listen to Mrs. Ramsay; they do not take her ideas and judgments seriously; they are not concerned about her unique way of reasoning or about her picture of the world.

If we listen to Mrs. Ramsay, we hear a very different Language. Mrs. Ramsay’s musings are the melody of another way of thinking:

No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures…[her son] had cut out — a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress — children never forget For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did (95).

And then:

His arm was almost like a young man’s arm, Mrs. Ramsay thought, thin and hard, and she thought with delight how strong he still was, though he was over sixty, and how untamed and optimistic, and how strange it was that being convinced, as he was, of all sorts of horrors, seemed not to depress him, but to cheer him…. Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made different from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things…. Did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view? No. Did he even notice his own daughter’s beauty, or whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef (107)?

At the dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay glories in the Boeuf en Daube:

And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine, and thought. This will celebrate the occasion — a curious sense rising in her, at once freakish and tender, of celebrating a festival, as if two emotions were called up in her (151).

When describing Mrs. Ramsay and other women’s thinking and how their moral reasoning develops, the literary critic, Q. D. Leavis states, “‘One’s own kitchen and nursery…is the realm where living takes place…and [they] serve as a sieve for determining which values are important and genuine and which are conventional and contemptible.’”¹⁰ Though kitchen and nursery provide the experiences for developing both masculine and feminine reasoning, for each gender, there are different interpretations and understandings of these places and their objects. In the case of a common kitchen object, Andrew depicts his father’s austere philosophic work with the image of a kitchen table, whereas Mrs. Ramsay’s emotions and thinking are heightened by the image of the boeuf en daube.”¹¹

Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts give us a glimpse of the contours, the objects and processes of women’s thinking. These contours indicate that women see the world and life in a different way; this domain is charged with their values and what they discern as important With this view of the world, the subject matter, problems, and purposes of thinking are transformed. More recently, Sandra Harding pointed out that inquiry and thought that begins “with what appears problematic from the perspective of women’s experiences” leads to “research for women…. That is, the goal of this inquiry is to provide for women explanations of social phenomena that they want and need, rather than providing…answers to questions that…[men in power] have.¹² In Three Guineas, Woolf does not just advocate education for women, but a different type of education, one that recognizes their different worlds. This different education would allow Mrs. Ramsay to solve problems that seem irresolvable, matters like the impurity of milk delivered to homes and the absence of a hospital on the island.

Mrs. Ramsay’s world is directed forward by the particular and concrete, the fragrance of the Boeuf en Daube and the strength of another’s arm. Each particularity, each concrete aspect of life is unique, with its own history and distinct relationship with a thinker.¹³ Even the Boeuf en Daube is not common, generalized entity. The cook’s relationship to the Boeuf is not identical with Mrs. Ramsay’s. The aroma and the taste vary with each person. The preparation and the memories of other times, other dinners, and other recipes contribute to each person’s understanding of and relationship with the present Boeuf en Daube. Even more than the Boeuf en Daube that Mrs. Ramsay serves to her dinner guests, there is the concreteness and particularity of each person, each of the guests, each of her children as a distinct, concrete person with a life history, a narrative, with abilities, dreams and hopes, with needs, interests, feelings, and desires, with a preferred way of thinking, with different vocabularies and texts to enrich his or her life.

Knowledge of the other, whether person or object, is not based on fragmented parts, on some additive process by which separate, unconnected facts are combined. As Woolf says elsewhere, “It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, not yet entirely what is done.”¹⁴ When she sees her children smiling, running, or playing, when she wonders whether Minta Doyle will marry Paul Bayley and the suitability of this choice, Mrs. Ramsay is not analyzing a smile, a judgment, or an instance of behavior. A so-called instance of behavior is akin to William Blake’s epigram “To see a world in a grain of sand [and]…. Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand.”¹⁵ However, it is not Infinity with a capital “I” that Mrs. Ramsay sees in her child’s eyes. It is a world that is James, her son.

Though this form of knowledge and thinking at first seems ephemeral and unstable, it can be described in a number of ways, as intuitive knowledge and tacit knowing. As with intuition, Mrs. Ramsay does not lack knowledge or use an incomprehensible, confused type of thought. Her knowledge and thinking are not empty or unexplainable. Though a mother’s understanding of her infant’s needs and desires may be called intuitive or a maternal instinct, this understanding is based on a form of knowledge and way of gaining knowledge. There is intense concentration on and involvement with the other and with the other’s world. This concentration is not just hearing words and interpreting or translating their meaning into logical, propositional form. It is listening, listening in the quietude and fullness of one’s whole self. It is the leaching out, the seeing, the grasping, the feeling, the encounter. At the same time that this knowing person remains herself and retains her knowledge and values, there is a letting go of one’s notions and assumptions and entering the place of the other while yet not defining that place.

Relationships form the core of the world Mrs. Ramsay inhabits. Problems requiring caring, responsiveness, communication, tangled networks of concern, emotions, and the avoidance of betrayal or isolation,¹⁶ and the understanding of another’s life history emerge from these relationships. No relationship with another can be understood through a narrow, unitary dimension. According to Blum, for example,

responsiveness involves both cognitive and affective dimensions. It includes a cognitive grasp of another’s condition…. At the same time the altruistic aspect of responsiveness involves our emotional natures, in that responsiveness is not a purely rational willing of another person’s good.¹⁷

Each problem requiring thought consists of a unique situation in which all parties retain their personal identities, their life histories, emotions, and feelings. Caring and relationship occur between distinctive, concrete persons; moral situations exist within some particular historical and sociological context, bound by time and place. Though the language of care and response requires one to nurture and respond to the other and not to hurt either the other or oneself, it also necessitates demystification, openness, and a rejection of self-deception.

As we read To the Lighthouse, we recognize the two ways of thinking about and relating to the world, others, and ourselves. We take Mrs. Ramsay’s perspective and become part of the world that she inhabits. We experience the loss and desperation of Mr. Ramsay after the death of Mrs. Ramsay. We may wonder whether his loss was the loss of Mrs. Ramsay or not having everything in its place, not having someone to take care of his mundane world, and not having the comfort of the ordinary. Mr. Ramsay never searches to know the other world and way of life that Mrs. Ramsay personified. Mr. Ramsay never questions whether at times he too should enter into this other way of knowing and thinking. Though men’s language provides a “heaven of security” for ha life, Mrs. Ramsay does not presume she should speak this foreign language or enter men’s world; she does not entertain the idea that this too should be ha world.

But just as the second and third sections of To the Lighthouse are fraught with darkness and foreboding, the resonance of this feeling reverberates back to expose the despair and forewarning in the first section. Even from behind the protective shield of “The Window,” the melancholy, frustration, and resentment of “Time Passes” and “The Lighthouse” are felt. The foreboding and darkness emanate from below the surface and are not just based on the sudden death of Mrs. Ramsay, the shell that kills Andrew, the death of Prue in childbirth, the loneliness of Mr. Ramsay, and the bitterness of James. In the section, “The Window,” we are often struck by what is not said, by what is missing. In the either - or categories personified by Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay, we are led to recognize the uneasiness that Lily Briscoe feels and the discomfort of Bankes at having to dine with the Ramsays.

Mrs. Ramsay herself poses one of the problems that bothers us. When Bankes speaks of friends Mrs. Ramsay has not seen for many years, Mrs. Ramsay cannot believe that they still exist, that they have led their own life, throughout these years, a life she knew nothing of. Maybe, we can even say that she cannot imagine that there are other voices and themes, other moral songs and ways of living beside the one that she knows so well.¹⁸ She never entertains the idea that caste, social class, and economic system, race specific experiences, cultural or historical setting, and ideological differences, like language itself, may generate different, equally acceptable ways of living and thinking. Even Mrs. Ramsay’s empathy with the crying chambermaid whose father is dying so far away, in Switzerland, is not a case of universality, but the nearness of the young maid.

The thinness of Mrs. Ramsay’s visits to the poor and needy are like the stocking she knits for the lighthouse keeper’s son. They are all part of ha goodness, but it is a goodness that does not have to confront the realities of these others. Mrs. Ramsay’s caring for others focuses on face-to-face encounters with those who are intimates family, friends, and all of those who are part of her daily life. Her caring, akin to Noddings’ view, refers to members of constrained “concentric circles…the inner, intimate circle” being those Mrs. Ramsay loves and its bordering circles “those for whom…she has a] personal regard.’’¹⁹ Caring, response, knowledge, and thinking, for Mrs. Ramsay, focus on a very limited population, on those people, events, and occasions when she can directly affect those who hear her voice and feel her presence.

And yet, this image of Mrs. Ramsay’s thinking, caring, and responsiveness are partially dissipated in what Martha Nussbaum now appropriately calls “the fragility of goodness.”²⁰ However, we must go beyond this idea. For in the case of Woolf’s ideas, it is not just that algebraic equations or mathematical puzzles, failsafe solutions and the quest for certainty, unbridled belief in rationality and logic, in the forms that Mr. Ramsay would cherish, mask a deeply tragic element of human life. There is something equally tragic about Mrs. Ramsay’s portrayal of life. Even Mrs. Ramsay herself wonders if she is too overpowering and overprotective, whether her caring at times smothers others, whether her view of what someone else’s life should be is mistaken.

Do the ones she believes need caring for really need the care she gives? She orchestrates the marriage of Minta and Paul, thinks about whether Lily Briscoe and William Bankes should marry, wonders about the fate of Charles Tansley as a scholar who follows in the footsteps of ha husband, only imagines ha daughters’ future in terms of marriage. But Mrs. Ramsay’s dreams, her caring and responsiveness, come to naught. Minta and Paul’s marriage does not measure up to the ideal match it promised to be on the day Minta lost her grandmother’s brooch and became engaged to Paul. Lily Briscoe never marries, but attains ha own identity in a way Mrs. Ramsay could never imagine. And Charles Tansley during the Great War to end all wars gives speeches about love, not about logic or the scholarship Mr. Ramsay so revered. What does this tell us? To say that care, as with any other moral standard or standard of rationality, is fallible or that life has a deeply tragic vein would be to say the obvious. Instead, there is something else. With the passage of time, with the transformation of Charles Tansley and of Lily Briscoe, we also recognize how time, historical events, the vast sweep of personal and public historical events also requires us to change and reconceptualize our intellectual concepts, the way we look at reasoning and morality.

At present, a few writers suggest that covertly underlying the moral theory of the last few decades are notions of care, responsiveness, and interconnectedness. What some may call masculine reasoning and a masculine moral language are thus being reconceptualized to include aspects of the feminine. Along this line, Susan Okin argues that we must reinterpret John Rawls’ theory of justice to make room for care and for a feminine language of reasoning if the theory of justice and fairness are to have any depth.²¹ The either/or categories represented by Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay are now being shown to be partial and anemic.

Other researchers and theorists claim that it is not a matter of only women, like Mrs. Ramsay, using a feminine language and only men, like Mr. Ramsay, using a masculine language.²² Though each sex uses both languages that men cluster more frequently around the masculine language and women around the feminine language, as if each has its own native tongue.²³ In one sense, this claim is misconceived and the issue is very different. The more important issue is how we conceptualize each form of reasoning and each type of moral standard.²⁴

If we accept, for example, caring, as a quality, a virtue that imbues the presence and life of someone like Mrs. Ramsay, then we must also think about what other virtues are required to give that one virtue breadth and meaning, disclose its inner its inner core. Any study of “an important range of moral virtues — compassion, kindness, generosity, helpfulness, considerateness, sympathy”²⁵ cannot refer to fragmented entities, each with its own set of responsibilities, each bounded by a high wall, each one a separate trait; a “bag of virtues” conceptualization s not what is required.²⁶ Instead, any one moral virtue refers to a coherent set of other, interconnected virtues. For example, caring for someone requires the virtue of courage since caring for often requires acts that are out of the ordinary, that go beyond the commonplace to encounter and overcome something someone may fear. At times, we are distressed at Mrs. Ramsay’s silence, at her neutrality, in the face of Mr. Ramsay’s unfeeling response to his children and we wonder why Mrs. Ramsay’s paralysis, why ha silence, her inability to speak, and to defend her children.²⁷ Similarly, justice would be a cold, a frigid virtue, as unresponsive and austere as Mr. Ramsay often was, if it did not possess care and compassion.

In addition, feminine theorists need to provide a richer interpretation of community, instead of favoring the idea of “concentric circles,” networks, and webs of relationships. One can understand the rejection of certain traditional and fundamentalist communities that autocratically and at times irrationally control and dominate not only women’s lives, but the lives of men as well. However, when feminine ethical theory stresses life history and narrative, it cannot only speak of a person’s life from the time of birth. Instead, these theories must recognize as Virginia Woolf did, that at the time of birth, the infant does not merely relate to caregivers, family members, and other intimates. The Ramsay family is not disassociated from some larger framework. We recognize this family as the same family described in the Godless Victorian,²⁸ the biography of Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father and the model for Mr. Ramsay. This family like any other family is not a self-contained network or web of interacting relationships. Rather, in the background and within its very being, there is an explicit or tacit community that contributes to the education of the infant her life history, and the way she chooses a life narrative.

The networks of caring and loving relationships that nourish infants have tangled and at times indiscernable roots in a wide variety of communities. These communal roots contribute metaphors, symbols, meanings, skills, values, excellences, virtues, and interests to those who nourish and care for an infant. Through these caregivers, the child is inducted into a moral world that is populated by the community’s moral priorities and virtues. The point here is that if we speak of particularity and concreteness and yet, dismiss rampant relativism, where do we find content for our moral virtues? The content and meaning of our interlocking system of moral virtues must then be found in the history, the memories of communal life. Let us join with feminine theorists, but let us take their findings and ideas where they are meant to go. Talk about cultural, ethnic, and religious roots and about the particular and the concrete requires that we attend to the substance of their roots and how the particular and concrete acquires meaning. When Wallace Stevens writes, “A mythology reflects its region,”²⁹ he also describes how we must look at moral virtues like generosity, altruism, caring, kindness, and responsiveness. These moral virtues acquire substance and meaning through being part of a region, a community.

For a response to this essay, see Haroutunian-Gordon.

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¹ Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927), 159. Cf., 53-55.

² Similarly, for the reasoning of a young boy, Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), 26-28.

³ Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 38.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid., 41.

⁶ Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man, trans. Maurice Friedman and Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966/1965), 69.

⁷ Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Cambridge, Massachussets: Harvard University Press, 1983), 85. For a similar idea when interpreting Virginia Woolf, Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, The Invisible Presence (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 78.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Quoted in Martin Dodsworth, “The concerned reader,” The Times Literary Supplement, no. 4,510 (September 8-14,1989): 963. Also see Sara Ruddick, “Maternal Thinking,” in Joyce Trebilcot, ed., Mothering Essays in Feminist Theory (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Allanheld, Publishing, 1984), 213-30. Also, Sara Ruddick, “Preservative Love and Military Destruction: Some Reflections on Mothering and Peace,” Ibid., 231-62. For criticism of Gilligan, see Carol B. Stack, “The Culture of Gender Women and Men of Color,” Signs, 11 (1986): 321-24; Debra Nails, “Social-Scientific Sexism: Gilligan’s Mismeasure of Man,” Social Research, 50 (1983): 643-64. Also, Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

¹¹ My understanding of how masculine and feminine thinking in To the Lighthouse depict common objects differently was heightened through a discussion with Dr. Joan Kelly.

¹² Sandra Harding, “Introduction: Is There a Feminist Method?” in Feminism and Methodology, Social Science Issues, ed. S. Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 8. This theme of the different subject matter of feminist social science research occurs throughout Feminism and Methodology.

¹³ For particularity and morality in young children, Lawrence Blum, “Particularity and Responsiveness,” in The Emergence of Morality in Young Children, eds. Jerome Kagan and Sharon Lamb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 306-337.

¹⁴ Virginia Woolf Jacob’s Room (London: Hogarth Press, 1922/1954), 19, 153.

¹⁵ William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence.”

¹⁶ Carol Gilligan, “Reply by Gilligan,” Signs, 11 (1986): 326.

¹⁷ Blum, “Particularity and Responsiveness,” 311.

¹⁸ Stack, The Culture of Gender, 321-324.

¹⁹ Noddings, Caring…, 46.

²⁰ Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

²¹ Susan Moller Okiin, “Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice,” Ethics, 99, 2 (1989): 229-249.

²² The question here relates to the troubling philosophical problems of the logical priority of ethical theories of justice. For these problems, see Lawrence A. Blum, “Gilligan and Kohlberg: Implications for Moral Theory,” Ethics, 98 (1988): 472-491. For one response to Blum, Jonathan E. Adler, “Particularity, Gilligan, and the Two Levels View: A Reply,” Ethics, 100 (1989): 149-156.

²³ Carol Gilligan, “Adolescent Development Reconsidered,” in Mapping the Moral Domain, eds. Carol Gilligan, Janie Victoria Ward, and Jill Mclean Taylor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, l988), e.g., xviii.

²⁴ The issue is that “Because autonomy and relatedness are viewed as gendered, they come to be seen as opposites, and their similarities are overlooked.” The question is how to reconceptualize both autonomy and relatedness, justice and care to include a rich range of characteristics. Sharon Berlin and Craig G. Johnson, “Women and Autonomy: Using Structural Analysis of Social Behavior to Find Autonomy Within Connections,” Psychiatry, 52, 1 (1989): 79-95.

²⁵ Blum, “Particularity and Responsiveness,” 306.

²⁶ “Bag of virtues” is Kohlberg’s expression.

²⁷ For a similar criticism of Gilligan in terms of her suppression of anger, N. Katherine Bayles, “Anger in Different Voices: Carol Gilligan and The Mill on The Floss,” Signs 12 (1986): 23-39.

²⁸ Noel Annan, The Godless Victorian, (New York: Random House, 1984).

²⁹ Wallace Stevens, “A Mythology Reflects Its Region,” in The Palm At the End of The Mind, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vantage Books, 1967), 398.