Virginia Woolf’s to the Lighthouse: a Critique
Paper 9: The Modernist Literature
KAUSHAL DESAI
PG
Enrollment No: BU13141001177
MA
Sem.: 3
Roll
No: 12
Department
of English,
Maharaja
Krishnakumarsinghji Bhavnagar University
Bhavnagar(Gujarat-India)
Bhavnagar(Gujarat-India)
Virginia Woolf, one
of the prominent representatives of modernist novelist in England, has
contributed significantly to the development of modern novel in both theory and
practice. She abandoned traditional fictional devices and formulated her own
distinctive techniques. The novels of Woolf tend to be less concerned with
outward reality than with the inner life. She also takes the readers to the
high glory of perception thinking. The sense of liveliness her is depicted in
this novel that how the thinking and our root of observation is defers. Her
masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, serves as an excellent sample in analyzing
Woolf’s literary theory and her experimental techniques. There is a mythical
pattern in this novel and how it is shown here and it is symbolize that makes a
kind of reading of this novel. This
paper is to attempt every aspect and depict to her novel “To the Lighthouse”
and to deal with her idea about stream-of-consciousness literary techniques:
indirect interior monologue and free association. And also it is good to see
how Language, Subject, Self: Reading the Style of the novel.
Keywords:
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Stream-of-Consciousness technique, Mythical
pattern, Symbolism.
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse” is divided
into three parts, first is ‘The Window’, second is ‘The Passes’ and third one
is ‘The Lighthouse’. Firstly, it is necessary to discuss about the main idea
for which this novel is contracted and that is stream of consciousness
technique. In this novel, we see that the structure of external objective
events is diminished in scope and scale, or almost completely dissolved. It is
composed of the continual activity of characters’ consciousness and shower of
impressions. External events occupy little space in the novel compared to the
rich development of the response to these events. We can also find in this novel
the writer as an omniscient narrator has almost completely vanished and almost
everything stated appears by way of reflection in the consciousness of the
dramatic characters. And the novel does not progress on “what-happens-next”
basis, but rather moves forward through a series of scenes arranged according
to a sequence of selected moments of consciousness. And the techniques to which
Mrs. Woolf mainly employs are interior monologue and free association.
One reason for this is that
Woolf began writing novels more than a decade before the major discoveries of
the quantum physicists were published; in fact, the publication of To the
Lighthouse in 1927 coincided with the publication of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
Furthermore, as Carol C. Donley and Alan Friedman point out, while quantum
theory represented a "dramatic and traumatic break with both relativity
and classical physics," it was much more slowly popularized than
Einstein's work. It did not, they note, "spur headlines or immediate
literary investigation of its meaning" (P. 111). In To the Lighthouse,
where questions of perception, perspective, and knowledge press, the limits and
uncertainties are sometimes poignant. Of the landscape about to be revisited in
"Time Passes," Woolf writes:
It seemed now as if,
touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the
curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave
falling; the boat rocking, which, did we deserve them, should be ours always.
But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not
please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so
confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or
that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the
littered pieces the clear words of truth.
Actually, the stream of conscious technique
is beyond something that particularly is not primitive. In the sense of Woolf’s
writing it is mentioned that she is thinking about stay to somewhere else. And
go in the deep thinking and imagination and also here we cannot connect the
portion with the realness because one person can think of nothingness and that
has to be as the person doing nothing. But here Woolf’s characters are playing
as she is thinking in the stream of consciousness. Here I’m putting the
thematic construction diagram that’s how this novel is working through.
Now
we are going to discuss about Mythical Patterns, in this novel Virginia Woolf's
concept of woman's role in life is crystallized in the character of Mrs. Ramsay,
whose attributes are those of major female figures in pagan myth. The most
useful myth for interpreting the novel is that of the Primordial Goddess, who "is
threefold in relation to Zeus: mother (Rhea), wife (Demeter), and daughter
(Persephone)." One of the major sources of the myth is the Homeric "Hymn
to Demeter," in which the poet compares Rhea with her daughter
Demeter, and makes it clear that Demeter and her daughter Persephone "are
to be thought of as a double figure, one half of which is the ideal complement
of the other."1 This double figure is that of the Kore, the primordial
maiden, who is also a mother. Also useful in interpreting the novel is the
Oedipus myth. Virginia Woolf in her diary reiterated the role of her
"subconscious" in the germination of a novel and noted "how tremendously
important unconsciousness is when one writes."
One thing can clear our idea about mythical Patterns
and that is to take examples of the novel and that is like;
Mrs. Ramsay has many of
the physical attributes of a goddess. To Lily's eyes she seems to wear "an
august shape ..." (80). She has a "royalty of form ..." (47).
Lily perceives that Mr. Bankes "wor- shipped" Mrs. Ramsay (75). When
Mr. Bankes hears her voice, he visualizes her as "very clearly Greek"
(47), and feels that "the Graces assembled seemed to have joined hands in
meadows of asphodel to compose that face" (47). Augustus Carmichael bows
as if to do her "homage" (167). When Charles Tansley glimpses her
standing mo- tionless, a picture of Queen Victoria behind her, he realizes that
she is "the most beautiful person he had ever seen" (25). He
visualizes her "stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her
breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her
eyes and the wind in her hair ..." (25). And her glance comes from
"eyes of un- paralleled depth" (77). Even as he speaks of prosaic
things, "one would be thinking of Greek temples, and how beauty had been
with them there in that stuffy room" (291). Even her bearing is regal:
"like some queen who, finding her people gathered in the hall, looks down
upon them, and descends among them, and acknowledges their tributes silently,
and accepts their devotion and their prostration before her . . . she went
down, and crossed the hall and bowed her head very slightly, as if she accepted
what they could not say: their tribute to her beauty" (124). (Vision in To the Lighthouse)
After that one target is to find enormous fact that can tells a close view on Virginia Woolf’s Power over the situational changes and theme is so connective to Woolf’s imagery and with myth content. It’s all about mind that is working here, that conveying the root of the characters and also trekking to what the way that Mrs. Ramsay makes. So first let’s look on the chart.
It’s
also talks about internal relationship and its discourse. Here Lily’s character
is so in amusements to be clear. Lily Briscoe, begins the novel as a young, uncertain
painter attempting a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay and James. Briscoe finds herself
plagued by doubts throughout the novel, doubts largely fed by the claims of
Charles Tansley, another guest, who asserts that women can neither paint nor
write. Tansley himself is an admirer of Mr Ramsay, a philosophy professor, and
his academic treatises. She is showing the path and says that, “I have had my vision” the Vision of truth and after all happen, the
glimpse that remains same and the glory of desire that is lighthouse and that
stands alone but give light means, give light to everyone who is in need and
that’s what take care of ourselves.
If one
thing can be optimize so that can be clarify. Woolf’s attachment with the
lighthouse and how it began to the Virginia Woolf’s mind it’s so important
aspect.
Woolf's father began renting Talland House in St.
Ives, in 1882, shortly after Woolf's own birth. The house was used by the
family as a family retreat during the summer for the next ten years. The
location of the main story in To the
Lighthouse, the
house on the Hebridean island, was formed by Woolf in imitation of Talland
House. Many actual features from St Ives Bay are carried into the story,
including the gardens leading down to the sea, the sea itself, and the
lighthouse. Although in the novel the Ramsays are able to return to the house
on Skye after the war, the Stephens had given up Talland House by that time.
After the war, Virginia Woolf visited Talland House under its new ownership
with her sister Vanessa, and Woolf repeated the journey later, long after her
parents were dead. (To the
Lighthouse)
If one can think of further or beyond caption so
mind can see of continuously observing portion. Virginia Woolf's project also moves us beyond these
critical insights. And philosophy of symbolism is shown here after that I will
argue that, beneath her explorations of both of these layers of philosophical
doubt, Woolf reveals that the "emotions of the body" which Lily feels
in response to that "emptiness there" are precisely the means whereby
the text can turn inside out the unnamed, body-transcending core of traditional
Western philosophy and narrative. While Woolf's characters vacillate between
vertigo and exhilaration as they stand on the edge of "that emptiness
there," Woolf's narrator moves into and within that emptiness, both
discovering already within it a phenomenological fullness and further filling
it herself. Specifically, in To the Lighthouse the narrator stations herself
within the objects which situate the mother's and the other characters'
presence in the world; she can therein reincarnate and even extend the mother's
phenomenology insofar as it is carried silently within those objects; but in
doing so she not only breaks the mother's silence, evincing the "emotions
of the body," but also revises the patriarchal coding of bodily emotions,
in which the traditional mother is complicit.
It
is good to see that Virginia Woolf attracted towards the art and that is
observed, According to Virginia Woolf, "Painting and writing... have much
in common. The novelist after all wants to make us see.... It is a very complex
business, the mixing and marrying of words that goes on, probably
unconsciously, in the poet's mind to feed the reader's eye. All great writers
are great colorists...." While "sound and sight seem to make equal
parts of first impressions," Woolf stresses their painterly quality in To
the Lighthouse; Woolf's search for spiritual essences is expressed in light and
color. Johannes Itten's metaphysic of light and color illuminates the relation
between creative source and creative artist Lily Briscoe’s painting in her
novel. In this novel her art goes beyond impressionism and symbolism toward a
flexible form that "does not shut out." The consciousness of each
character tends to overflow individual boundaries, mingling its colors with,
those around it, as it modifies the total pattern.
To be
summing up my attempt to this novel so in short I want to give one example of Ulysses
by James Joyce. It is also a high construct art and here ‘To the Lighthouse’
is also a master piece that can be consider as difficult to read and to
give justice but here my observation of this novel is clarified by these all
the aspects that discussed. One last statement from the movie of this novel I
want to put here, “close the door and open the window”.
Works
Cited
Blotner, Joseph L. Mythical Patterns in To the
Lighthouse. 1 Oct 2013.
To the Lighthouse. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Lighthouse>.
Vision in To the
Lighthouse.
<http://www.jstor.org/visionTothe Lighthouse>.
Woolf, Virginia. To
the Lighthouse. United Kingdom: Hogarth Press, 5 May 1927.
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