Drawing on Tajefl and Turner's (1979) social identity theory, this thesis aimed to analyze the multifaceted relationships between the concepts of duty and desire in the construction of subjectivity, focusing on George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Both novels describe the protagonists – Maggie Tulliver and Lily Briscoe, who struggle with women’s traditional roles of daughter, wife, and mother and their desire to be artists or lovers. Maggie’s conflict in The Mill on the Floss is intrinsically bound up with her responsibility toward her family, particularly to her brother Tom, and her moral and emotional selves. Even though she wants to be independent and engaged in mental work, she always contradicts her wishes because of the family’s traditions and receives a tragic ending. However, in To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe struggles between her desire to become an artist and her morality as a caretaker of the Ramsay family, which appears to be the main goal enforced by society. Instead, Woolf depicts Lily’s struggle as a much more contemplative experience where her ability to successfully finish her painting represents the victory of individual self-fulfillment over societal duty. The results present the idea that, although both authors describe duty as the limiting factor, both authors also consider the idea of harmony between the duty and desire, providing a complex view on the creation of the individual personal identification, specifically within the paradigm of gender and societal roles.
