To the Lighthouse  Virginia Woolf

“But while I try to write, I am making up To the Lighthouse – the sea is to be heard all through it. I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant “novel”. A new --- by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?”.[1]

In this quotation Woolf expresses the problems inherent in reading To the Lighthouse. It is not a “novel” in the traditional Charles Dickens or George Eliot model and cannot be judged as such. Very little action occurs in the course of its 230 pages, or at least what action does occur, and by “action” I mean the births, marriages, deaths and external events (the notable one for Woolf to include would have been the First World War) which fill the traditional novel, are dispensed with at an extraordinary pace and often included only in parentheses, as inconsequential additions. To compound the “problem” in reading and relating to Woolf’s “elegy” the language employed is highly metaphorical and the narrator practically inseparable from the actual characters.    

To the Lighthouse is separated into three sections: “The Window”, “Time Passes” and “The Lighthouse”. “The Window” details a day of the Ramsey family holiday. “Time Passes” is the shortest section and is concerned with the ten years which pass before the Ramsey’s return to the site of their holiday. The final section, “The Lighthouse”,  as in the first section, chronicles a single day of the holiday of the, now much depleted, Ramsey family, concluding with the journey to the lighthouse of the title, which has been anticipated since the opening page of the novel and taken a decade to be realised. Such a simple description of the plot, however, undermines the extent to which Woolf was writing an “elegy” rather than a “novel”. That the Ramsey family are on holiday is not the substance, nor even is the much anticipated trip to the lighthouse the main feature. These factors simply give her work coherence.  What Woolf actually chose to dominate is the subjective experience of her characters. It is not so much what they do but how they see – how they react to those around them, how they see themselves, and each other, and how they attempt to correlate this with the external world.

The second page of To the Lighthouse provides us with an example of the human emotion (and confusion) which dominates. James, the six year old son of Mr and Mrs Ramsey, wants to visit the lighthouse. Mrs Ramsey confirms that, as long as the weather is fine, they will go on the “expedition”. This is followed by a brief, but intense, moment of “extraordinary joy” on the part of James which is ended by Mr Ramsey’s curt and authoritarian assertion that “it won’t be fine”. James’s reaction to this is typical of the style which Woolf adopts in her “elegy”:

        “Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr Ramsey excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule on his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement”.[2]

   The blending of the narratorial and the character’s voice is typical of To the Lighthouse. We know that it is James’s opinion that Mrs Ramsey is ten thousand time better than her husband but whose opinion is it that Mr Ramsey is “as lean as a knife”? At six years old James could not possibly articulate his feelings as such (and may not have been able to express the opening sentiments of the passage either) which means we would have to attribute them to the narrator. Conversely the imagery used expresses perfectly the sense of fear and anger which James is consumed by in regard to his father. The passage therefore is a modified form of indirect discourse – the narrator simply facilitates the expression of emotions and feelings into a language which is beyond the capacity of the characters.

The other striking feature about the style of To the Lighthouse is its use of imagery and multiple perspectives to reveal character. In the passage quoted above Mr Ramsey, who is tyrannical and domineering, is compared to a “blade”, an image with echoes throughout the novel in relation to his character. Equally Mr Ramsey sees himself through heroic imagery – he quotes the “Charge of the Light Brigade” and compares his intellectual journey to that of progressing through the alphabet. Mr Ramsey considers his intellectual journey to have only progressed as far as Q though, a sign of the void and uncertainty which is at the centre of his character. This doubt over his success is in stark contrast to the “reverence” which his wife holds him in. This complexity of character is further shown by the fact that his fellow academic and friend William Bankes sees him as being like a “mother hen”. Cam, the youngest daughter of Mr and Mrs Ramsey, senses the contradictions in her father – seeing him as a “tyrant” and yet preserving his humanity in that he is gentle towards her. In this respect Cam (and indeed Woolf herself) shares common ground with Sylvia Plath – particularly in the poem “Full Fathom Five”. In this poem the father figure is the sea god – all powerful and dangerous and yet strangely alluring. If Woolf and Plath can challenge their fathers – be they their literal ones or their literary ones – they still remain enchanted by them.    

While I have only referred to Mr Ramsey to demonstrate the process by which Woolf reveals character it could easily be extended to any of the other major characters. Mrs Ramsey, who tells fairy stories and is associated with fantasy by her children in private is actually highly pessimistic, and critical of whether her chosen course has achieved anything (though she does fall short of changing her view on female subservience) and James who feels intense anger towards his father is in fact desperate for his father’s praise, simply another male who feels that life should be an “expedition”.

As well as shaping individual characters Woolf’s imagery also unites them. The journey motif which unites Mr Ramsey and James is also important for the other characters. The central journey for all of the characters is that of the trip to the lighthouse – whether they actually make it there or not. For Woolf this journey represents the journey of life – and more specifically the idea that life is a dangerous and difficult journey where forces beyond your control can harm you. The trip to the lighthouse is not so much a literal journey as a journey of self discovery and acceptance. Mr Ramsey, Cam and James all reach the lighthouse, each with a new understanding of their own role – in relation to themselves and each other. They share, however, the journey with Lily Briscoe, the 40 year old unmarried woman, who a decade earlier had joined them on their holiday, even though she never leaves the confines of the garden to their house. The events which have occurred between the initial desire to reach the lighthouse and the actual arrival there include the deaths of several members of the Ramsey family – most noticeably of Mrs Ramsey herself. The journey to the lighthouse, be it metaphorical or literal, is also, therefore, about the acceptance of their grief for the absence of Mrs Ramsey – the “angel of the house”.

The fact that Mrs Ramsey is closely associated with the lighthouse aids the flow of the “elegy”. During “The Window” when Mrs Ramsey finally finds herself alone the lighthouse acts as a release for her imagination – first of all it allows her to examine her purity and then it acts as a release for her more erotic desires. In this respect the lighthouse is at the heart of the novel not so much for its overall symbolic purpose but because it allows each of the characters to place their own symbolism on to it. In turn the journey motif and the lighthouse connect with the second crucial part of the statement from Woolf’s diary with which I opened this essay – the influence of the sea. Like The Waves (a novel which is even more worthy of the description of “elegy”) To the Lighthouse is dominated by the continuous ebb and flow of the sea – unstoppable and all powerful. For Lily, when she finally accepts her grief over Mrs Ramsey’s death, she “step[s] off her strip of board into the waters of annihilation”. In “Time Passes”, which is dominated by the constant continuation of the sea and nature, Andrew (one of the sons of the Ramsey’s) is killed in the First World War and “there [is] a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath”. In this case the sea may reflect human trauma rather than be an agent for it, as it is in the case of the wreck which the Ramseys are told about during their trip to the lighthouse, but it still carries on regardless. However much the characters wish to externalise their fears and emotions the sea is ignorant of such desires and simply continues at its own pace, denoting the unstoppable passage of time.                            

 Due to the fact that the internal, rather than the external, dominates To the Lighthouse it is undoubtedly “limited” in its range. There are no attempts to explore social conditions as Dickens did, or to examine the impact of politics and class as George Eliot did in her novels. These factors never impinge upon Woolf’s novel, where the domestic dominates the flow. Even the deaths of members of the Ramsey family are secondary, placed in parentheses and barely alluded to. Moreover the death of the Ramsey’s son Andrew temporarily highlights the issue of the First World War (which takes place during the “Time Passes” section). Never again is this alluded to by either the characters or Woolf. Rather like the silence surrounding the issue from the people at Clarissa’s party in Mrs Dalloway it never breaks into the foreground of the thoughts of the Ramseys. This however is not to criticise Woolf’s choice of a particularly narrow range, indeed it is one of the greatest strengths of the novel that she forsakes the surface appearance to delve into the “dark” and “unfathomably deep” so we do not need to judge her characters by the brief moments when they “rise to the surface”. Instead we get the internal musings, the fragmented thoughts and the multiple perspectives of her characters that mean that they transcend the boundaries of caricature which novelists who have a preoccupation with the ‘wider picture’, such as Dickens, can create. It is out of the characters that themes and ideas develop. The domestic preoccupation allows the exploration of the sphere of private power – that between men and women and that between parents and children. Through Lily and Mrs Ramsey we see the different possibilities for women and, as befits an “elegy” we are intimately acquainted, if not with the actual moment of death, then with the shock and bereavement which follows it.

To the Lighthouse is not without its flaws though. "Time Passes" lacks the intensity and depth of the other two sections. Here the underlying meaning seems to give way to the importance of elegance of expression. The idea of the passage of time and continuous progress of nature is exploited more effectively in the shorter extracts which intersperse the dramatic monologues in The Waves. Equally while Woolf's portrayal of the Ramseys and their upper-middle class counterparts is practically faultless, her portrayal of the lower class Tansley and the housekeeper Mrs McNab is often crude and unnecessarily malicious. Fortunately for the novel, Tansley and Mrs McNab are only minor characters and Woolf's "elegy" is not damaged by this in the manner which Henry James's  The Portrait of a Lady is. Indeed these flaws are minor in comparison with the success of the rest of To the Lighthouse.

In To the Lighthouse Woolf manages to transcend the barriers of the "novel". Her prose if filled with the complex and disjointed wonderings of the characters she portrays. Woolf herself commented that:

"Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of alien and external as possible".

As the reader concludes their journey to the lighthouse there can be no doubt in their mind over the achievements of Woolf - for they too have just experienced the "luminous halo" of life.