To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, Oxford University Press, (1992).
By Sarah Cowell
To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s 5th novel and was written in 1927. Oxford University Press first published it as a paperback in 1992. This publication is 285 pages long. It includes a biographical preface, select bibliography and a chronology of Virginia Woolf by Frank Kermode. There is also an introduction, note on the text and explanatory notes by Margaret Drabble. The retail price is £3.99.
The three sections of the book take place between 1910 and 1920 and revolve around various members of the Ramsay family during visits to their summer residence on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. A central motif of the novel is the conflict between the feminine and masculine principles at work in the universe. With her emotional, poetical frame of mind, Mrs. Ramsay represents the female principle, while Mr. Ramsay, a self-centred philosopher, expresses the male principle in his rational point of view. Both are flawed by their limited perspectives. A painter and friend of the family, Lily Briscoe, is Woolf's vision of the androgynous artist who personifies the ideal blending of male and female qualities. Her successful completion of a painting that she has been working on since the beginning of the novel is symbolic of this unification.
Essentially the novel takes one event, the trip to the lighthouse, as a symbol for representing the main characters. Mrs. Ramsay is motherly, nurturing and often reflects nature. Like a flower she blooms, is fruitful with children, and then fades away. This is in stark contrast to her rigid, somewhat cruel and very intellectual husband, who is a philosopher. Her death is shocking, more so because, like the deaths of her children, it occurs only in brief aside remarks. The flow of life continues unabated by these interruptions. Only Lily Briscoe must stop, now and then, to mourn Mrs. Ramsey even as she congratulates herself on narrowly escaping the life of a married woman, a life that Mrs. Ramsay desperately wanted for her.
Review
English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is a successful innovator in the form of the novel. She is considered a significant force in 20th-century fiction. She was educated at home from the resources of her father’s huge library. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a critic and writer on economics, with whom she set up the Hogarth Press in 1917. Their home became a gathering place for a circle of artists, critics, and writers known as the Bloomsbury group. This was the name given to the literary group that made the Bloomsbury area of London the center of its activities from 1904 to World War II. It included Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, Vita Sackville-West, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and John Maynard Keynes. Its members were committed to a rejection of what they felt were the strictures and taboos of Victorianism on religious, artistic, social, and sexual matters.
To the Lighthouse reflects this rejection of rigid structure and is one of Woolf’s most successful and accessible experiments in the stream-of-consciousness style. This is a technique that records the different thoughts and feelings of a character without regard to logical argument or narrative sequence. Woolf attempts, by the stream of consciousness, to reflect all the forces, external and internal, influencing the psychology of a character at a single moment. The technique was first employed by Édouard Dujardin (1861–1949) in his novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888) and was subsequently used by such notable writers as James Joyce, and William Faulkner. William James in Principles of Psychology (1890) first used the phrase "stream of consciousness" to indicate the flow of inner experience.
Much has been made of the stream of consciousness style of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Woolf seeks to catch the flow between a character’s interior monologue and verbalised utterings. Since the first of the three parts of the novel all occurs in one evening, this serves to stretch Time and really examine the events of that evening in miniscule detail. To the Lighthouse is primarily concerned in representing the flow of ordinary experience. Woolf’s emphasis is not on plot or characterisation but on a character’s consciousness and their thoughts and feelings, which she brilliantly illuminates by the stream of consciousness technique. Woolf does not limit herself to one consciousness, however, but shifts from mind to mind. Her prose style is poetic, heavily symbolic, and filled with superb visual images. The interior monologues capture each character in their moment of being and support an overall view that most of life is lived alone. All these elements mean that the novel does not have an obvious plot. It examines an event, the trip to the lighthouse, as symbolism for the life, death and the hopes of the main characters.
If you need a novel with a defined plot, this is not for you. But if you read To the Lighthouse for the language, rhythms and continuity between character point-of-view, you will be blown away.
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