Literary Encyclopedia: head

To the Lighthouse
Woolf, Virginia
(1927)

John Mepham, Kingston University

Domain: Literature. Genre: Novel. Country: England, Britain, Europe.

To the Lighthouse was published in 1927 when Virginia Woolf was 45 years old. This novel,
which consolidated her reputation as a major modernist writer, also proved more popular and
commercially successful than her earlier works. It was the third in the series of innovative,
modernist novels, after Jacob’s Room (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925). It was immediately
recognised as a major achievement, in which she developed her experimental techniques to new
levels of subtlety and effectiveness. Ever since publication it has been her most universally
acclaimed work and is now probably her most popular and widely read novel.

There is a great deal of information about the writing of To the Lighthouse in Woolf’s diary for
1926-27 and in her later autobiographical writings. Of all her novels, To the Lighthouse is the
most closely and clearly drawn from Woolf’s own life. The Ramsay parents in the novel are
fictionalised versions of her own parents and the family holiday setting is drawn closely from that
of her own annual holidays in St Ives in Cornwall. Her starting point was an image of her father,
sitting in a boat reading; later, images of her mother came to dominate the first part of the novel.
However, the novel does not aim at factual accuracy. Many details, from the size of the family to
the setting, have been changed. Another main character in the novel, Lily Briscoe, an unmarried
young painter, is wholly made up, though aspects both of Woolf and of the painter Vanessa Bell,
Woolf’s sister, can be seen in her. Moreover, the novel does not aim, in the familiar manner of
autobiographical fictions of childhood, at an account of the author’s remembered life as a child.
Woolf aims not only to write about her parents as she remembers them, but also to invent what
she imagines it was like to be them. Of course, it is a far greater challenge to imagine what your
parents were like, in their own inner experience, than it is to recapture childhood scenes in the
conventional manner. The narration in To the Lighthouse renders, in Woolf’s subtle and
wonderfully inventive version of stream of consciousness prose, her parents’ imagined streams of
inner mental life. Woolf accomplishes the difficult trick of recomposing her own childhood in
such a way that it is her parents who occupy the centre stage, while her own childhood self is
marginalized, or in fact made almost invisible, seen only in some aspects of the Ramsay children.
It may be, as Woolf herself later suggested in her šA Sketch of the PastŠ, that in trying to
imagine what it was like to be her mother, she was attempting something that other people
achieve through psychoanalysis. She aimed at resolving and making safe her own obsessions and

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negative feelings towards her parents. Through writing, her ambivalence was carefully tamed,
disarmed of its hurtful violence, and contained within a generally good humoured, elegiac and
celebratory portrayal. In 1939 she wrote about her mother that:

it is perfectly true that she obsessed me, in spite of the fact that she died when I was thirteen,
until I was forty-four. Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I
sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary rush.
[] When it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I
do not see her. I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I
expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it
and then laid it to rest.

The shape of the novel is, as Woolf herself explained, that of two blocks with a corridor between
them, perhaps two caves connected by a tunnel. The novel is in three parts. The first and longest
part, šThe WindowŠ, takes place in a few hours of a single day in September, some time before
the Great War. The Ramsay family and some friends are on holiday on a Scottish island. Their
son James wants to go on a trip to the lighthouse but his father warns him that the weather will be
bad. Mrs Ramsay sits with James at the open window, and knits a stocking. Lily Briscoe begins
to paint a picture and others go for a walk to the beach. Later they all have dinner together, and
then disperse. Part II, šTime PassesŠ, is the shortest of the three parts. Ten years pass. The family
holiday house, now unoccupied, gradually deteriorates, until at last it is rescued by cleaning
women who come to prepare it for the returning family. Major human events during the ten years
are mentioned only in passing, within parentheses (Mrs Ramsay and two of her children die, and
there is a war). The main focus of the narrative is elsewhere, on the passing of inhuman time, the
time of seasons, weather and natural processes. In the final part of the novel, šThe LighthouseŠ,
the surviving members of the family and friends return to the house and again the narration
covers the events of only a few hours in one day. Mr Ramsay and two of his children, Cam and
James, now teenagers, sail to the lighthouse while on the island Lily Briscoe finishes her
painting.

The novel recounts a host of apparently trivial incidents. It has no story in the conventional sense
of the term. What unites all the incidents is not a story but the continual activity of the characters’
minds. This activity, the making and unmaking of meanings, of weaving experience into
networks of interconnected thoughts, is never ending. There is no final, stable conclusion to be
arrived at and life continues to throw up new incidents, changes and shocks. Children grow up,
books are written, there is a war, people die, and time passes.

The first critical reactions to To the Lighthouse were with few exceptions very positive. The
emphasis in critical comment was an analysis of the novel’s unfamiliar technique. Woolf’s 1925
essay šModern FictionŠ provided some hints as to what she was aiming at. She had suggested
that fiction should, like impressionism, attempt to capture the ordinary life of Monday or Tuesday
and to register the myriad atoms or impressions of experience as they fall upon the mind.
Moreover, she wanted to capture in writing the shaping activities of the mind as it attempts to

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form experience into intelligible patterns. Critical comment focussed upon Woolf’s very
distinctive and subtle stream of consciousness style, on the absence of an authoritative external
narrator and on her rendering of the complexity of each moment of experience. Here is a typical
passage:

The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes
which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the
window), that the men were happily talking; this sound which had lasted now half and hour
and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the
tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, šHow’s that? How’s that?Š of
the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the
beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and
seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of
some old cradle song, murmured by nature, šI am guarding you Œ I am your support,Š but
at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly
from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums
remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its
engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after
another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow Πthis sound which had been obscured and
concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look
up with an impulse of terror.

This one single sentence captures through a brilliantly layered structure of subordinate clauses
the complexity of a single moment. One sound ceases, so Mrs Ramsay becomes aware of
another, and reacts with a momentary fear. But enfolded within this one apparently trivial
incident are many other memories, rhythms, thoughts and images. The complexity of the
characters’ streams of thoughts is particularly rich at those moments when their minds tunnel
back through memory to connect the present moment to past experiences. As time passes, layers
of meaning build up like silt at the bottom of a pond. Characters’ minds tunnel back into the past
and, as Woolf puts it, images rise up off the floor of their minds. Memory remakes or recomposes
the incidents of a life, reconnecting them in new patterns. The writing itself recomposes them still
further, into a highly shaped, carefully composed structure of patterned interconnections of
scenes and images. Temporally distant incidents are held together in close proximity, in a way
which might seem to cancel out or overcome their temporal, so fleeting, impermanent nature.
There are particularly rich examples of remembering as a complex activity of meaning making in
Part III of the novel, as James and Lily Briscoe in particular find themselves remembering Mrs
Ramsay. Because of its preoccupation with the flow of consciousness and with the remaking of
past time, Woolf’s work has been compared with that of Marcel Proust, which she read with great
admiration. It has also been compared with the work of Dorothy Richardson and Katherine
Mansfield (who she regarded as her only serious rival).

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In To the Lighthouse Woolf depicts two contrasting kinds of time, the linear and regular plodding
of clock or objective time, and the reiterative, non-linear time of human experience. Her
depiction of subjective time, layered, complex and shot through with desire was, critics have
observed, not unlike that of the philosopher Henri Bergson, though there is no evidence of any
direct influence.

It is in the šTime PassesŠ section of the novel that Woolf’s interest in the contrasting forms of
temporality is most evident. The narrative style of this part is very unusual and is quite unlike that
of Parts I and III described above. It has always been among the most debated aspects of the
novel. While some readers have admired its lyrical beauty, others have felt uncomfortable with
its effort to narrate from what Woolf called an šeyelessŠ point of view. It is as if she is thinking
of the philosophical problem, said to be the problem with which Mr Ramsay grapples in the
novel, of how to think of the world when there is no one there. This is translated into an artistic
problem, of how to narrate the passage of time when there is no one there to witness it. Natural
time is inhuman. It is destructive and violent and has no concern for human purposes. Woolf’s
solution to this problem is to invent a poetic style that, strangely, relies heavily upon the devices
of personification and animism. The shadows of the trees šmade obeisance on the wallŠ,
šloveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroomŠ, šlight bent to its own image in adoration
on the bedroom wallŠ and šin the heat of the summer the wind sent its spies about the house
againŠ. It has been questioned whether these devices are successful. It is as if Woolf wishes to
fill the emptiness of inhuman nature with primitive animistic entities and malign agencies. Her
solution can seem oddly childlike, personification and animism being, as Freud pointed out,
typical of infantile thought. The problem illustrates, perhaps, the difficulty of avoiding images of
human agency even when they are least appropriate.

The first period of critical comment on To the Lighthouse culminated with Erich Auerbach’s
book Mimesis in 1946. Auerbach examines šthe representation of reality in Western literatureŠ
from Homer onwards. In the final chapter he selects To the Lighthouse to stand as the exemplary
novel of the modernist period. Not only does he provide a fine, painstaking analysis of Woolf’s
use of multipersonal narrative points of view and of her display of what he calls
šomnitemporalityŠ (the coextence within experience of different time frames), he also argues that
To the Lighthouse can be seen as a response to the specific character of modern life. The book is
seen, along with works by Proust and Joyce, as articulating the key themes of modernity. This
work, and also the publication, beginning in the 1970s, of Woolf’s letters, diaries and
autobiographical writings, opened up discussion of the novel to a broad range of approaches, so
that criticism was enabled to move away from the narrow judgement that it represented merely ša
sophisticated aestheticismŠ, set in a very narrow world of upper class privilege and appealing
only to a narrow audience, as had been argued by F. R.Leavis in 1942.

All of Woolf’s novels, usually in a quiet, non-explicit manner, depict very specific moments in
English cultural and social life and are packed with specific reference and authorial comment
about them. To the Lighthouse is no exception to this and since the 1980s this aspect of the novel
has been much studied. The novel shows English life at a time of historical rupture, of very

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significant social and cultural change. The difference between the Ramsay parents and their
children (and Lily Briscoe who is also a representative of the younger generation) is the
difference between the Victorian and more modern forms of civilisation. The question of
civilisation (what it is and what are the likely forms of its progress) was much debated by
Woolf’s contemporaries. In To the Lighthouse the men, who are all professional intellectuals, are
anxious about their contribution to civilisation. One great question that the men tend to worry
about is the extent to which marriage and family life are necessarily in conflict with men’s
ambition to contribute to the advance of civilisation. How can great men devote themselves to
their work given the demands and distractions of family life? This question, which the text gently
mocks, is taken to be a symptom of these men’s inflated sense of self-importance.

Men and women, young and old, are caught up in an anxious debate about Victorian hierarchical
society. Education, work, health-care and marriage are among the institutions of Victorian
society that are questioned. Even Mrs Ramsay, otherwise rather conservative in her views, feels
strongly about the need for social reform. The novel was written in 1926, at the time of the
General Strike, a traumatic event in English political life that strongly suggested that reform had
been inadequate.

The questioning of marriage and more generally of the oppressiveness of conventional gender
norms and expectations, was one of the most significant cultural-political aspects of the early
decades of the twentieth century. The debate about marriage is at the centre of the novel. It
presents a portrait of a Victorian upper-middle class marriage. The patriarchal attitudes and the
self-sacrifice and subordination of women on which it was built are critically displayed. The
younger women laugh at it or furiously reject it. Lily is relieved to escape it and she resents Mrs
Ramsay’s šsimple certainty that an unmarried woman has missed the best of lifeŠ and her
high-handed efforts to manipulate younger women into marriages.

More recently, feminists and psychoanalytically minded readers have highlighted the subtlety of
Woolf’s depiction of the processes of development of gendered subjectivity. Many incidents in
the novel illustrate the hazards and obstacles that stand in the way of the journey to so-called
šnormalŠ masculinity and femininity. The gendered subject is always in process and is shown to
be unstable, unfinished, with patterns of typical anxieties and dissatisfactions. Examples are Mrs
Ramsay’s unwillingness to confront clearly her discomfort when she feels superior to her
husband; Lily’s sharp ambivalence about passionate love, both desiring it and yet fearing it and
recognising its destructive potential; and Mr Ramsay’s combination of a stereotypically
masculine forcefulness, in fact even a bullying patriarchal authority, with an embarrassing
infantile dependency and narcissistic anxiety. His disciple Charles Tansley, moreover, manifests
both contempt and adoration for Mrs Ramsay, women being simultaneously objects of
idealisation and derision. Women, in particular, are harshly caught in gender traps. Mrs Ramsay
is the object of the male gaze and her beauty inspires rapture; yet she is also treated by men with
condescension because her mind suffers, as men perceive it, from an absence of manly
intellectual virtues. In other words, gendered subject positions are occupied only with some
difficulty and self-doubt. Both masculinity and femininity, in these culturally specific versions,

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are presented as contradictory and unstable constructs.

Psychoanalytic readings comment not only on the depiction of gender in To the Lighthouse, but
more generally on Woolf’s subtle rendering of the effects of the unconscious. Psychic lives
manifest not the conventional patterns of intelligible motivation and feeling, as in traditional
realist fictions, but are shown to be riven by strong disruptive impulses. The characters never
settle into undisturbed predictability but suffer a constant lack of composure that derives from
intense inner, yet alien, forces. Mrs Ramsay, perceived by her family and friends as a figure of
wifely and motherly composure, in her inner life suffers from unaccountable episodes of terror,
desire and erotic joy. James and Cam are dutiful children, yet they are thrown into turmoil
inwardly by the intensity of their feelings for their father. Mr Bankes, a scientist and perhaps the
most composed (repressed) of all, suddenly thinks that his friendship with Mr Ramsay has
survived the years šlike the body of a young man laid up in peat for a century, with the red fresh
on his lipsŠ. This surprising and suggestive image is disturbing, yet it is left without comment. In
general, characters are not presented as achieved but as effortful, attempting to evade messages
from the unconscious and striving to recompose themselves as they are shaken by strong yet
unacknowledged ideas and images. The novel is a brilliant yet unstated presentation of the
presence of the unconscious.

Another theme that has excited comment is the role of art, represented in To the Lighthouse both
by Lily’s painting and by the various stories and poems enjoyed by the characters. The text
proposes that fiction gives to its characters ša wholeness not theirs in lifeŠ. Writing, as Woolf
herself proposed, brings the severed parts together. To the Lighthouse both employs and unmasks
the mythologizing power of love, memory and fiction. The recreation of remembered people both
in loving memory and even more in the highly crafted patterns of a work of literature, produce a
pleasurable but non-lifelike wholeness, and help us to evade or deny the uncomfortable muddle
and confusion of embodied, as distinct from textual, people.

To the Lighthouse has been shown to be open to many different readings. There is no single
answer to the questions it raises. What is the significance of Lily’s triumphant conclusion to her
painting, a line down the middle? What is the meaning of the lighthouse itself, symbolic, but of
what? Readers share with the character James the feeling that šnothing was simply one thingŠ
and readers’ minds are, like those of the characters, agitated by shifting interpretations. The novel
both depicts and elicits the discomfort of unceasing mental activity. It is now read very widely,
not just among students and literary scholars but among a broad popular audience. It remains the
most popular of Woolf’s novels and is accessible in numerous editions and translations.

John Mepham, Kingston University

First published 20 October 2001

Citation: Mepham, John. "To the Lighthouse". The Literary Encyclopedia. 20 October 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8388, accessed 17 August 2010.]

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