«To The Lighthouse» by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

« To The Lighthouse »

Chernovol Valeria

An interesting introduction

• «To the Lighthouse» was Virginia Woolf’s fifth novel. By this stage of her career, she’d written a couple of more conventional novels.
• «To the Lighthouse» is Woolf’s most autobiographical work of fiction, drawing on her own childhood and family experiences in the 1890s and early 1900.
• However, to call «To the Lighthouse» (1927) a ‘novel’ at all is to go against Woolf’s own intentions, slightly: she believed that a new word more satisfactorily summed up what she is trying to do in this now.
• There are brief forays into third person narrative, most notably during Part Two, but for the most part Woolf runs in and out of everyone’s brains at will. Her narrative style is intensely free-flowing, which was pretty ground-breaking back in the day.

introduction

• Most of the novel’s action – let’s make that "action" – takes place before and after World War I, which places the characters in a pretty specific time frame, the main repercussion being that gender is a big deal.
• «To the Lighthouse» is a Modernist novel. In fact, many argue that the actual story of the novel itself takes get put on the backburner in favor the form with which it's told. That's one of the hallmarks of Modernist literature: the typical meat-and-potatoes of plot and character sit in the back seat, while previously overlooked aspects like style and structure get to sit up front and drive.
• Virginia Woolf was looking to capture what a story looked from inside her character's minds, rather than from an objective narrator's point of view.

Summary

• The book is divided into three sections: ‘The Window’, ‘Time Passes’, and ‘The Lighthouse’.
• The first section, ‘The Window’, follows Mrs. Dalloway in being set over the course of just one day during the Ramsays’ family holiday on To the Lighthouse Woolf the Isle of Skye. The son, James, wants to take a boat out to the lighthouse, but his father, the distant Victorian patriarch Mr. Ramsay, isn’t sure the weather will allow it – perhaps tomorrow.
• The second section, ‘Time Passes’, is at odds with the first section in reducing ten years of ‘action’ into a relatively short middle section. Several of the novel’s characters – including Mrs. Ramsay herself – die, news of their deaths dropped casually into the narration parenthetically. The War lurks behind this section – that is, WWI.
• The final section, ‘The Lighthouse’, sees James – now grown into a young man – finally making the trip to the lighthouse, ten years after he’d originally wanted to make the journey.

Genre

• Modernist literature likes to break from established structures in favor of deeper aesthetic exploration – in this case, a deeper exploration into the human mind.
• The kind of action we get is Lily picking up a paintbrush, or Mrs. Ramsay knitting. But the real action is going on in the characters’ heads, exploring their thoughts about themselves, their lives, and each other. The plot isn’t the most important aspect of this book, it’s the thoughts of the individuals that make this book interesting and unique.
• The book has long stretches that record the haphazard workings of human thought. This technique is known as stream-of-consciousness. There's a certain flow to the way thoughts emerge on the page, as one thought suggests another. Like a stream, too, these thoughts don't move in a straight line. They twist and turn, even doubling back on themselves.

Check out this example:

«Going to the Lighthouse. But what does one send to the Lighthouse? Perished. Alone. The grey-green light on the wall opposite. The empty places. Such were some of the parts, but how bring them together? she asked. As if any interruption would break the frail shape she was building on the table she turned her back to the window lest Mr. Ramsay should see her. She must escape somewhere, be alone somewhere. Suddenly she remembered. When she had sat there last ten years ago there had been a little sprig or leaf pattern on the table-cloth, which she had looked at in a moment of revelation. There had been a problem about a foreground of a picture.

The character

• Mrs. Ramsay is about as close as Virginia Woolf ever got to Angelina Jolie: Mrs. Ramsay's.
• Mr. Ramsay. When we are first introduced to Mr. Ramsay, he comes off as a bit of a jerk. To paraphrase, he. Mr. Ramsay seems to embody the male, patriarchal, linear, and teleological view of the world which nineteenth-century novels had often adopted: he sees ‘thought’ as something to be understood in a linear fashion, like working through the alphabet from A to Z. He also spends part of the early section of the novel reciting Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, which is revealing because this is a Victorian poem by the pre-eminent Victorian poet but also because it is a poem about the action of charging, moving forward, attacking, progressing.

The character

• Lily Briscoe. "Lily’s picture! Mrs. Ramsay smiled. With her little Chinese eyes and her puckered-up face, she would never marry; one could not take her painting very seriously; she was an independent little creature, and Mrs. Ramsay liked her for it; so, remembering her promise, she bent her head". Although Lily doesn’t fit into Mrs. Ramsay’s notions of womanhood, Mrs. Ramsay likes her anyways.
• James Ramsay is the youngest of the Ramsay family's eight children.
• Charles Tansley is a student of Mr. Ramsay’s who was invited to the house for the summer.
• William Bankes is friends with Mr. Ramsay, and thus he warrants an invitation to the summer house.
• Augustus Carmichael. He uses opium that stains his beard yellow.

Symbols

• The Lighthouse as a Symbol for Traditional Family Structure. Like the Lighthouse tower itself, the family as an institution is solid and unchanging. But individual families come and go as rapidly as a lighthouse beacon goes on and off – time changes the shape of all families. As is the case in many Woolf novels, the progress of time is a major theme of To the Lighthouse. No matter how solid Family may seem as a concept, every family has its own private shape and trajectory, a tension between the ideal and lived reality that the Ramsay family certainly dramatizes.
• The Lighthouse represents family (paternal) authority. That’s why James Ramsay wants to go so badly, as he’s rebelling against his father and clinging to his mother. James wants to stake out the Lighthouse as his own – in other words, to take over his dad’s authority. This symbol of power could also be why Mr. Ramsay winds up bullying his children to go to the Lighthouse in the third section, as he’s trying to cement his place as head of the family even as his children are growing older and his wife has passed away.

QUOTES

• "It will rain," he remembered his father saying. "You won’t be able to go to the Lighthouse."
• The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening.
• James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it?
• The other Lighthouse was true too. It was sometimes hardly to be seen across the bay. In the evening one looked up and saw the eye opening and shutting and the light seemed to reach them in that airy sunny garden where they sat.

Conflict

• James wants to go to the Lighthouse, though his father says that the weather won't be good enough to go. Lily Briscoe wants to paint, though Charles Tansley has told her to her face that women can't write or paint.
• James's desire to go to the Lighthouse – and his father's insistence on refusing – is the main conflict through which James's difficult relationship with his oppressive father gets represented. Mr. Ramsay wants all of his children to behave on his terms and to strive according to his orders. James's rebelliousness shows that the main conflict of James's life is going to be with his father and his father's power over James's life.

Complication

• Both James and Lily rely on Mrs. Ramsay as a kind of alternative model of power to Mr. Ramsay's bullying tyranny. But Mrs. Ramsay throws them each a curveball by not really supporting either James's trip to the lighthouse or Lily Briscoe's painting. The beautiful, charming, perhaps secretly frustrated Mrs. Ramsay seems at first like one possible alternative to the oppressive Mr. Ramsay. But:
• Mr. Ramsay turns out not to be all that bad, with his massive secret insecurity;
• Mrs. Ramsay turns out not to be all that great. We mean, she's still lovely and sympathetic, but she knows that James isn't going to get to the Lighthouse. And she regrets the fact that she disguised the truth from him ("She felt angry with Charles Tansley, with her husband, and with herself, for she had raised his hopes"), but she still lied to him in the name of preserving his feelings.

Climax

• World War I strikes and the Ramsay family suffers a series of losses that change the shape of both the house on the Isle of Skye and of the family itself.
• In the midst of James Ramsay's efforts to get to the Lighthouse and Lily Briscoe's efforts to get recognition for her artwork, To the Lighthouse draws its focus away from the people of the novel. The second part of the novel experiments with the passage of time through focusing on the shifting, decaying form of the semi-abandoned house on the Isle of Skye, with limited interruptions for the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, Prue Ramsay, and Andrew Ramsay.

Denouement

• The denouement is the point in the plot when everything becomes clear. Both James Ramsay and Lily Briscoe do get their denouements by the end of To the Lighthouse.
• In Part Three, Chapter Twelve, Mr. Ramsay praises James Ramsay for his steering skills. At last, he acknowledges that James has talents in his own right, that he need not control every aspect of James's life.
• James Ramsay and Mr. Ramsey share a moment of mutual understanding at the Lighthouse, witnessed by Cam: "[James] was so pleased that he was not going to let anyone share a grain of his pleasure. His father had praised him. They must think [James] was perfectly indifferent. But you've got it now, Cam thought". Mr. Ramsay has at last given some of his power to the next generation. He will always be a domineering father, but he's brought up James to follow in his footsteps, and he is willing at last to let James take his place at the Lighthouse. We finally learn what James's quest to get to the Lighthouse really means: he is taking up the social and intellectual authority of the Man.

Conclusion

• Both James and Lily have gotten what they've been wanting, so all that's left for the conclusion is that final "line there, in the centre" to emphasize Lily's recognition of her own freedom from the Lighthouse and all it represents.
• Following the denouement, we get a final chapter in Part Three. Lily Briscoe sees that Mr. Ramsay's boat must have arrived at the Lighthouse. It's at this moment, when she observes from afar Mr. Ramsay's greatest moment of family bonding, that Lily really gets the degree of perspective on the Ramsay family that she's been searching for all of these years. Lily and Mr. Carmichael have both achieved an aesthetic resolution. They may not share the Ramsay family's social status, but their abilities to capture the essence of such scenes gives them intellectual and artistic security outside the conventions of marriage and family life. Lily has come to understand that all of the minor pressures of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay on her fate have fallen away – which is perhaps why the Lighthouse "had become almost invisible, had melted away into a blue haze". Lily has solved the problem of the Lighthouse and how she can operate independently of it as a single woman artist: she has, at last, completed her painting.

Stylistic devices

• The method of telling the story "about one thing through another" also defines a special grammatical construction of the text.
• "Incorrect" syntax, chopped phrases, repetitions, together with phonetic features, make the text of the first Chapter itself look like a full text. Inversion is another way to show the disorder, "wrongness" of the stream of consciousness, the inability to clearly structure it and the need to fix it in all its diversity.
• Polyphony, multiple voices and their alternate sound-the idea of clashing minds and their addition to a single experience is developed in the first paragraph.

My review

• Virginia Woolf is an unusual writer. You can even say that she is strange. I liked its regularity, slowness, beauty. Many of the lines echoed, and the whole work was like a slowly looming canvas.
• This is a very poetic book. There is no plot here, laid out on a platter. Sometimes you don't even know why you're reading this BOOK. Sometimes it is especially difficult to understand what is written.
• the process was felt like a new attempt to feet the narration that continued to repel me.
• The image of Mrs. Ramsay was close to me. I especially liked watching her through the lens of Lily's feelings, who turned out to be the most striking character there for me.

This is my painting .

« To The Lighthouse »

Virginia Woolf

2020