To The Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf is a household name when it comes to lyrically figurative writing, rambling through the interior lives of characters. Her brand of modernism pairs the poetic with the complex; she champions an intellectualism that many other modernists (as well as readers and critics that have come since) have branded snobbish and off-putting. And yet, Woolf’s writing, like that of other modernists (James Joyce, for example), attempts to capture the inner life of humanity. Her fiction and nonfiction alike, excavate the uniqueness that is human thought, love, experience. In her novel To The Lighthouse (originally published in 1927 and one of my favorites among her oeuvre) Woolf again takes up this project. In this version, her investigation is Beauty (yes, with a capital “B”), the artistic process, and the muse. As with many of her novels, the unbearable destruction witnessed during the Great War greatly influences both her subject(s) and the mood. While the world crumbles and devastation punctuates nearly every family’s story, the human pursuit of beauty does not cease; it is simply forced to pivot as a new generation comes of age.
Like much of early twentieth-century life, I imagine, To The Lighthouse is divided into three parts: before the war, during the war, and following the war. Woolf sets To The Lighthouse on the Isle of Skye at the home of the large Ramsay family with prominent thinker/philosopher, Mr. Ramsay, at its head. Beautiful, gracious Mrs. Ramsay is its heart. In the first section, “The Window,” the reader meets all the players: the Ramsay parents and siblings (both young adult and fairytale-loving children) and their many guests. Poets, thinkers, politicians, and artists flock to the refuge of the Ramsay’s summer home on Skye. Beside the Ramsays, the reader meets the frustrated artist: Lily Briscoe. Through Lily, Woolf explores feminist themes alongside the joys and frustrations of the creative life. Lily, the lighthouse, the youngest Ramsay children, and Skye are the threads that weave throughout this moving metaphor of a novel.
Through the myriad characters with whom Woolf brings this novel to life, the reader experiences a wide range of human emotion: frustration, joy, love, disappointment, anger, longing, and grief. To The Lighthouse investigates the ways we humans vacillate from one state to the next; how we ebb and flow. The second and third sections of Woolf’s novel—“Time Passes” and “The Lighthouse”—accelerate the novel’s pace as the characters must face the unspeakable darkness of the world. As with all Woolf’s writing, metaphors abound. There are seemingly infinite depths to the messages one might absorb from this novel. It is for this reason, I see it as a book to read and reread as the years pass.
Needless to say, this is a novel worthy of reading time and again. It is a classic that deserves our attention now, nearly one hundred years after its publication, just as acutely as it did in its first decade. Woolf’s project—inquiring after the muse and the artistic process—is timeless, even as it is firming rooted in early twentieth-century experience. The reader should be prepared for the wash of wave and salt air to grow rough at times. Likewise, the wind may die and the reader may find herself sitting amid a dead calm in the narrative as the artist grapples with her composition, the philosopher with his diminishing ideas, the mother with the stockings taking form on her knitting needles. To The Lighthouse is a treatise in creativity and mortality both in its form and its subject. Woolf’s writing sparkles like the beacon of a lighthouse in the dark days of modernity. The twenty-first century demands its illumination just as desperately as the twentieth.
Bibliography:
Woolf, Virginia. To The Lighthouse. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Publishers: 1955.
A Few Great Passages:
“[A]nd Mrs. Ramsay could not help exclaiming, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited by men” (23).
“She could see it all clearly, so commandingly, when she looked it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment’s flight between picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often dealt herself—struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: ‘But this is what I see; this is what I see,’ and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her. And it was then too, in that chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselves upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance” (32-33).
“They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions” (51).
“With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one’s relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotized as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!” (99-100).
