Virginia Woolfe: To the Lighthouse

Examination text on The Art of the Novel Paper

International Baccalaureate English Higher level course

Year 2000 examination onwards

Part One The Window

1. We see the contrast of Mr and Mrs Ramsay, their polarity: Imagination v Reason. She is the static centre at the window, whereas Mr Ramsay is walking with Tansley. What is the significance of the first piece of dialogue?

Virtually all dialogue is about the weather, the surface narrative,and below is Mrs Ramsay's inner consciousness, conveyed by interior monologue.The conversation is in the present tense and thoughts/reflections are in the past, ranging in time.

2. Return to the present. Mr Tansley softens under the influence of Mrs Ramsay.
3. Introduction of Lily Briscoe and her painting. Transition from the centre (Mrs Ramsay) to Lily's mind. She is a spectator and observer as well as an artist

Sounds are important here: sound of the sea, an ambiguous aural image both soothing and destructive, joyful and painful. Also the sound of Mr Ramsay reciting poetry: the image of a leader fighting against the odds.

4. Lily, the artist , compared to Ramsay, the philosopher, two conflicting ways of perceiving the world. She cannot create what she sees to paper (the artist's dilemma- the novelist?).

William Bankes and Lily observe the sea. The sea and sands release thoughts of time and change in first Lily's mind, then the author's, then Bankes'.

5. Mrs Ramsay thinks of the house, being ravaged by time. The open doors of the house suggest change. William Bankes sees Mrs Ramsay's beauty. We don't see the author as a narrator of facts but reality is reflected through the consciousness of the characters.

6. Words from 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' suggest Mr Ramsay 's "blundering" into Lily and William and his thoughts on heroic leadership. His thoughts then return to harmony, peace and beauty, inspired by his wife.

7. In reassuring her husband, Mrs Ramsay takes on the role of the elemental female, creative and loving. She gives, a creator, a "rosy-flowered fruit tree." He is seen as a male image: hard, brutal and decisive, "scimitar of the male."

8. Mr Ramsay thinks of great men and art, and how important art is for ordinary men. He doesnÕt reach a conclusion but he is seen as lighthouse symbol. Considerations of relating art and life as he turns from his august theme to thoughts of his family. Lily Briscoe also thinks of how difficult it must be for Mr Ramsay to change from books (art) to his family (life).

This theme connects into the next section

9. Lily is searching for meaning and order. One of the themes of the novel is the search for order amid the chaotic and disordered nature of life. The problem raised here is how to know others with "people, sealed as they were" The image of the bees haunting the hive suggests the approaching of an understanding of others but not really penetrating.

10. Now interest turns towards Minta and Paul. Mrs Ramsay is reading the story of 'The Fisherman and his Wife' to James and intersperses her reading with thoughts of Minta and Paul, then her children, her problems in life and the greenhouse repair. Mixture of the grand and the trivial. The sea is stormy in her reading, symbolising life's problems. She doesn't want her children to grow up and lose their innocence.

The lighthouse symbol emerges at the end of the section.

11. Mrs Ramsay in solitude. She goes into deep thought, identifying herself with long third stroke of lighthouse beam: steady, immutable. A remorseless light of truth: stable and deep. She experiences an ecstasy and gives herself to her husband, who wants to protect her-moving towards a union.

12. The Ramsays stroll through the garden together. A union but ironically they fail to make real contact. However, they do complement each other and share their moods of optimism and pessimism.

13. Lily has a mystical moment, as she sees the Ramsays transcend their ordinary life and take on the meanings of symbols of marriage.

14. We see four relatively new characters: Nancy and Andrew are out with Minta and Paul. The first two are between childhood and adulthood, unwilling to come to terms with the adult world, while the latter are on the verge of adulthood. Rather than a love scene with a proposal we have the thoughts of Nancy and Andrew.

Mrs Ramsay is seen as a "light" and has influenced Paul to marry Minta.

15. Brief connection back to the main narrative

16. The rooks serve as a significant symbol and mean different things for Mrs Ramsay and Jasper.

The regal entry to dinner. Mrs Ramsay the spiritual centre and figure of beauty, drawing all to the central event of the dinner.

17. The Dinner Party, the emotional climax of Part One. 14 people come to the table. The sharing of the meal has symbolic connotations; the pattern of the arrangement. Mrs Ramsay is Queen Bee bringing out others and Mr Carmichael responds to the beauty she has created. It is a gathering together of individuals developed earlier and VW moves from one character to another, in and out of their minds. VW's technique of presenting character in all its complexity is seen well in this section: the characters interrelate, are influenced and respond to others, but are not always true and honest to each other.

Lily returns to her picture during the dinner. She is a detached observer on the action but trying to capture life

The Boeuf en Daube is tender, life-giving and celebratory.

The section is a formal, set-piece with a public gathering, a ceremony with a hostess and a special dish.

Mrs Ramsay achieves order out of chaos, concord out of discord, harmony from fragmentation. She helps everyone to respond to each other. Her action is on two levels: her concerns with duties of the present moment and her simultaneous mood of despair.

18. The party breaks up and Mrs Ramsay goes upstairs to the children. She senses the unity of life and the place of that night in the continuity of time, in a changing world. Future: 'the Rayleys' and her own death- the skull. The Past: her mother and father's furniture. She leaves Paul and Minta to go off to the beach, the waves and Life.

19. Mrs Ramsay returns to her husband, who is reading. A resolution of the polarity of Mr and Mrs Ramsay. He is reading a Scott novel, she a book of poetry.

This final section explores the relationship of literature and art to life. Both of them are moved and stirred by their reading. Art is seen as an expression and formulation of Life's chaos and flux.

Part Two Time Passes

The most difficult abstract piece of writing

"this impersonal thing...the flight of time and the consequent break of unity in my design." VW.

A poetic interlude, dealing metaphysically with man's relation to nature. The Part separates Mrs Ramsay, who rules Part One and Lily Briscoe. This Part is experimental: in structure associative, knit together by time scheme. The span is from bedtime to waking. The human beings are distanced and removed. We are more concerned with universal forces. Also the effect of part Two is to consider the characters in a wider context- to move outside the minds of the characters. The novel reaches its lowest point of despair until in Section 9 the universal forces of time and nature are stemmed by human activity. With Lily's return we see the re-establishment of a human community.

1. Surface narrative carries over from Part One. The return of family and visitors to the house.

The forces of night, chaos and the future move in as the lamps are extinguished.

2. All are in bed except Mr Carmichael, who binds the first two sections, keeping a lone vigil with Virgil.

The agents of time: rain, darkness and airs, dissolve the present.

3. One night goes into many nights.

Mrs Ramsay's death- the forces of fate and time. A traditional novel would treat her death fully but we are more interested in thoughts and poetic vision than story and action. Her death is distanced by brackets and subordinating syntax.

4. The gloom of the empty house is lightened by the Mrs Mcnab, the comic, blundering charlady. "One fold of the shawl loosened" and the metaphor suggests a a gradual shedding of clothing throughout the remaining sections.

5. Mrs Mcnab is the comic, low side of life's pattern, showing resilience and hope. She has suffered, is old but can still sing.

6. Three years covered- now a swifter movement. There is the irony of beauty and joy marked by tragedy and death: Prue's death in childbirth and Andrew's in the war.

7. The horror of storm, chaos and night.

8. Mrs McNab's memories of Mrs Ramsay, who is now too old to stop the decay of the house.

9. The house on the brink of reverting to nature, but is saved and restored by the two old women: Mrs McNab and Mrs Bast. In restoring the house the disintegration and despair have been overcome. The intensity of the darkness is replaced by a gradual restoration of peace and order.. This section shows the human capacity to produce form, beauty and wholeness out of chaos, disorder and destruction.

Lily and Mr Carmichael arrive- the artist and the poet- as order is restored.

10. War is over and peace reigns. The sea is soothing and peaceful. Lily awakes to life and creativity.

"These sections which together create an elegy on the darkness and anguish of human life, conveying poignantly the pain of death and the horror of war, are written with an imaginative or poetic intensity."

Part Three The Lighthouse

A central theme of Part Three is the process of recovering the past and the shaping of memory into art.

It is also a linear section with a journey and Mr Ramsay (and Lily Briscoe) at its centre.

"This part is composed of two separate actions not fused but yoked by ingenuity together."

1. Morning. Upheaval in house as Mr Ramsay prepares to take James and Cam to the lighthouse. Chaos.

Lily returns to her painting. Unity.

Two movements: Lily's painting, static and an inner journey. Journey to lighthouse, literal and psychological. Both are real and symbolic and both travellers complete their journeys.Her journey is to awareness and to a summary of the Ramsays.

2. Mr Ramsay needs sympathy, whereas Lily withdraws from emotional involvement, although she at last feels sympathy for him- the trivial incident of tying the bootlaces.

3. Lily begins to paint. Progress of picture mirrors progress of the boat. The problems of creation (seen in terms of water and sea imagery) and transmitting ideas into art.

4. The boat's progress. The boatman's story of the storm at sea and the three deaths mirrors the family tragedies.

Cam is of the present, Mr Ramsay of the past. She wants to resist his tyranny but she admires him and is attracted to him.

5. Those in boat look back at the house, while Lily looks at the boat (with its father figure) from a distance. She will be able to paint as life's experiences reveal their meaning. The incident with Mrs Ramsay on the beach shows the simultaneity of the past and present. Lily imagines scenes from the Rayleys marriage. She dwells on thoughts of art giving permanence to changing life.

6. Boat still progressing through the sea of life with all its pain.

7. Lily is aware of Mrs Ramsay's presence.

8. The boat becalmed. Like the dinner party, it enables people to come together. James remembers his father in hard, cutting images. The lighthouse is seen in the past (misty) and the present (stark), and as both male and female.

9. Lily looks out across the bay. Her poetic viewpoint.

10. Cam's view. She looks back at the island (the past) and forward with joy at the adventure. Her feelings change towards her father as she begins to sympathise with him.

11. A key section. Lily and her painting. "so much deeper, she thought, upon distance.". She tries to come to terms with the complex personality of Mrs Ramsay. she was active whereas the artists; Lily and Mr Carmichael are introverted. Lily's vision of the shape of Mrs Ramsay at the window.

12. They reach the lighthouse. Seen as stark and bare Truth. reaching the lighthouse suggests fulfilment. father and children are now in harmony and wish to please each other.

13. Lily completes her painting. It is her journey and Mr Ramsay's. The final stroke of Lily's painting, a line drawn in the centre, relates and harmonises the opposed masses. Is the line the lighthouse, which the whole novel has been approaching? "I have had my vision."

The form of the novel

Virginia Woolf's method is to reproduce the moments at which experience is caught and reflected in the mind

Two aspects of her method:

<1. The impressions of the moment

2. Subjective impressions of multiple consciousnesses

Often exterior occurrences release thoughts which range freely through time.

Human experience is fluid, impressions are not ordered and logical : The stream of consciousness is used which is impressionistic, associative. Thoughts wander back and forth in time, the simultaneous apprehension of the past and present. She explores the inner selves of her characters with rapid shifts of ideas and images and a mixture of the trivial and important. But, she also recognised the need for form and shape. She wanted synthesis and selection from the mass of life's details.

The significant action of the novel is firmly located in the sphere of the mind.

Structure

The three parts : three strokes of the lighthouse beam

"I conceive the book in three parts. 1. The drawing room window. 2.Seven years passed. 3. the voyage." VW.

Part One is static with Mrs Ramsay at the centre, as a psychological,emotional and structural force. Part Two is verbally constructed: poetic, associative and symbolic. An impersonal narrator. Part Three is linear with Mr Ramsay and Lily Briscoe at the centre. The theme here is the process of recovering the past and shaping of memory into art.

Characters

Her characters are indefinite, fluid, a kaleidoscope of different pieces. They try to establish relationships with others but often communication is flawed and partial.

Lily Briscoe: The artist figure, the novel's unifying persona.In the final section, it is through her consciousness that Mrs Ramsay is kept vivid. She has insight into human behaviour and the imperfect knowledge we have of others and the inadequacy of human relationships. She questions the meaning of life. In the end she sees the duality of art and life, and how the artist must be involved in life.

Mr Ramsay: involved with prose. Rather a comic figure, often a mock-heroic tone is used.

Mrs Ramsay: involved with poetry. She presides over ceremonies and transforms reality into imaginative myth. She is the matriarch, the Queen Bee. She is also a figure of Beauty.

Then the writer, the lovers, the atheist, the children.

Themes of the novel

A journey of fulfilment and self-discovery. The Quest.

Permanence of art and the changeability of life

Order in art, chaos in life

Time. The relationship of chronological time to inner time. Novel does not so much progress forwards as inwards. Part One: events of a single afternoon and evening. Part Two: expands single night into ten years. Part Three: Events of following morning (ten years later)

Male and female relationships

Symbolism

Sea

Both soothing and destructive. Its alternating rhythms invade everything. Sea has mystical, spiritual quality as it gives people moments of awareness and vision

Lighthouse

Creates disharmony and finally harmony

Light (radiance) Mrs Ramsay "torch of her beauty."

Dark (gloom) Mr Ramsay "facing the dark of human ignorance." "stark tower on a bare rock"

Polarity

The lighthouse, and James himself, establish Mr Ramsay's rational reality and Mrs Ramsay's intuitive reality in a relationship which admits the validity of both and implies the necessity of both.

Window

The dividing medium between interior and exterior action and in the end the inner reality is exalted over the outer.

Characters seen in metaphor:

Mr Ramsay : knife, hawk, scimitar, tramping alone across bleak wastes.

Mrs Ramsay: Queen Bee, fountain and spray, fruit tree. Knitting is an action to capture reality

* * * * *

Lily's "I have had my vision" brings the novel to a point of rest, of poised wholeness. At the same the past tense in which she speaks recognises clearly if unemphatically, that it is only an aesthetic resolution that has been achieved.

Having recognised that in human life there is no ultimate stability or permanence, Virginia Woolf shifted her attention from life to art and stressed such stability and permanence as art could offer. However, the full implications had still to be faced that it is not in Art that we live but in the flux of Nature; not in the security of the lighthouse but in the uncontrollable waves.

" To the Lighthouse continually hovers on the edge of becoming a fairy tale, or, more ambitiously, a mythical or even Christian allegory, whose subject, a frequent subject of myth, is the conquest of death." Hermione Lee

"Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions- trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms." VW.