Summer '07 Reading: 'To The Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf

[Janine]

Virgil, excellent post and good documentation. I think I agree with everything you have said. It is quite complex and one cannot know all of the mystery of human interaction and relationships, as some of the last quotes indicate.
The intricacy of this novel is a lot to digest and articulate. I think that Lily is very drawn to Mrs. Ramsey and wants to feel a part of her and her life. I feel she envies aspects of her being and cannot fully get through to the core of that being or how to merge with it, but she longs to in some conscious way, and feel a certain frustration in the isolation you mention in your last statement.

[Quark]

First in reply to those who think that Mrs. Ramsey doesn't love her husband there is this:

Notice she is thinking of the "inadequacy of human relationships". So yes, her marriage is not perfect, but she also says "the most perfect was flawed, and could not bear the examination which, loving her husband, with her instinct for truth, she turned upon it." I think she is being very frank. "Loving her husband" is an honest expression, supported by the further honesty of it being "flawed". Notice also how just like Lilly, she feels inadequate personally, and within the context one can draw out that its root is her womanhood in comparison to the male world.

I think this is a good way to phrase it. That is: they are as close to love as characters can get in this story. Or, I would say, they are as close to love as is possible for Mr and Mrs. Ramsay. Whether we would call this imperfect arrangement "love" is still debatable, but I do agree that they are as close as they will come.

The other passage I wanted to highlight is in respect to the theme of isolation. Lilly in her complete admiration and love of Mrs. Ramsey is laying her head on her lap and trying to understand her and what makes her so special.

So many questions and they seem to all go unanswered. That in itself is significant. Let me re-highlight this:

and

Ponder those passages. She is trying to penetrate Mrs. Ramsey's being and truely know her. But look at the very next paragraph: "Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! as she leant her head against Mrs Ramsay’s knee." Three times she says "nothing," a negation and Woolf uses exclamation marks. And then the critical question:
And the answer is the following ending:

The best that she can do is this vague feeling of someone in a dream, hardly a solid understanding of another. And then Mrs. Ramsey rises and leaves.

I think to me Woolf is clear here that human interaction is a vague thing where each is isolated within themselves.

Once again, yes, totally agree. I could almost see a motto for this book being "human interaction is a vague thing where each is isolated within themselves". I wonder why Woolf--I think we're on safe grounds when we intuit this as one of Woolf's beliefs--believes that human interaction is imperfect. She certainly isn't unique in this claim, but I think she might have a different reason for arguing this. I thought it might have something to do with Woolf's emphasis on personal emotions over universal ideas. Whether that's true or not I really don't know--it's been over a month since I read the novel and it's starting to fade in my mind.

[Virgil]

I think this is a good way to phrase it. That is: they are as close to love as characters can get in this story. Or, I would say, they are as close to love as is possible for Mr and Mrs. Ramsay. Whether we would call this imperfect arrangement "love" is still debatable, but I do agree that they are as close as they will come.

OK. But there are other passages - the one where they interact after they have put James to bed - where it is quite a normal marriage relationship. I didn't choose it because neither actually says they love each other, but I think it comes across.

Once again, yes, totally agree. I could almost see a motto for this book being "human interaction is a vague thing where each is isolated within themselves".

Very well said, but I will amplify on this before I'm done here. That is part of the central theme of the novel, but there is another part to that.

I wonder why Woolf--I think we're on safe grounds when we intuit this as one of Woolf's beliefs--believes that human interaction is imperfect. She certainly isn't unique in this claim, but I think she might have a different reason for arguing this. I thought it might have something to do with Woolf's emphasis on personal emotions over universal ideas. Whether that's true or not I really don't know--it's been over a month since I read the novel and it's starting to fade in my mind.

Well, Woolf suffered throughout her life from serous bouts of depression. They did not have modern psychiatry then so I doubt she was medically treated. Probably a pill today would have helped her immensely. Not sure if you know, but she committed suicide.

[Janine]

It is true that Woolf suffered with depression and later committed suicide. Definitely her work is colored with this sense of depression, I feel it strongly. I have only read two of her books but it is pretty evident. Often creative people such as Woolf do suffer from some type of mental illness. A newer pill may have helped her but she might not have produced the work she did produce...interesting fact and sadly true. Often the mentally ill are quite subdued with their medications although they need them to function sufficiently. I know because I have a relative who suffers from Bipolar (Manic-Depression) disorder. Look at John Nash, the famous mathmatician, ('A Beautiful Mind'). He is a perfect example of genius and the fine line between genius/insanity.
I think that Woolf in this novel is writing very much about her own family and her perspective on them and the way they interacted and the way they lived and loved. I don't know if it is our place to judge that or analysis the degree of love the parents have for each other. I personally do feel they love each other, but that love does have limitations. After reading the Lawrence book I am sure Lawrence would agree with that. They don't seem to be really close, like some couples are able to achieve closeness ,and yet they are so much like the general population in the they are very accepting of the love/marriage that they do have and they work within those confines. Whether their type of love is real and more genuine is a debate that could go on forever. I don't know if anyone could call Mrs. Ramsey joyously happy, nor Mr. Ramsey. I don't see that at all. But as I said before - both characters are older now and going through what many middle-aged couples go through, a whole inner questioning of being and of how their life has been spent up up until the present time. I think that Woolf is not writing about anything that extremely different in this family - only that some families have more alienation between the members than others. Also, keep in mind this is Woolf's vision which has been colored by her own deficiencies or idiosychrosies. The story is obviously very personal to her.
I don't know if any of this makes a lot of sense, but this is my own impression of the book. I have read from several sources that the characters are fashioned after her own family - how close to reality is that? I have no idea, but then how close to reality was Woolf herself? It may be like in "Sons and Lovers" where Lawrence's family is somewhat changed and the father is exaggerated, therefore the relationship of the parents also, is highly exaggerated as being one of non-love. I feel the parents in TTLH had to have something to stay together for so long and have so many children - afterall their youngest is still a small child. Is it an ideal love - no, I don't think it is. But they both feel a dedication to each other and support one another, in their own odd ways, perhaps, but the support still exists.

[Virgil]

Perhaps we should explore this isolation theme a bit more. I mentioned the window as an important part of the novel. The window sets up limitations of perception. Lily looks into the window and sees Mrs. Ramsey reading to James. But that is such a small view. Notice the limitation. When we look inside a window from out side, all we see is a small fraction of what is inside the house. We just catch an image but a life is within which we are not privey to. This parallels our understanding of people. All we see is a glance, but we don't know them really, even our closest relatives. Isolation is in part because of the inability to reach into other people and connect.

Another part is that life is in Woolf's view hard. In Mrs. Ramsey's extended stream of conscousness in section 10 of "The Window", she contemplates life itself.

Only she thought life—and a little strip of time presented itself to her eyes—her fifty years. There it was before her—life. Life, she thought—but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through it all. To eight people she had said relentlessly that (and the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds). For that reason, knowing what was before them—love and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary places—she had often the feeling, Why must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, Nonsense. They will be perfectly happy.

Life, time, nature is a fight, a struggle to overcome. There is irony throughout that passage. We know they will not all be happy. We know that nature and time will dislocate the entire house in the upcoming part II, "Time Passes." The natural elements will over power the human struggle. And that struggle is individual. Here's one of the passages where Mrs. Ramsey contemplates a fear that her children out on the cliffs may have encountered a tragedy:

Well then, Nancy had gone with them, Mrs Ramsay supposed, wondering, as she put down a brush, took up a comb, and said “Come in” to a tap at the door (Jasper and Rose came in), whether the fact that Nancy was with them made it less likely or more likely that anything would happen; it made it less likely, somehow, Mrs Ramsay felt, very irrationally, except that after all holocaust on such a scale was not probable. They could not all be drowned. And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.

There are other examples, but let it suffice to say that the struggle is an isolating one, an indvudual combating the forces of nature and time. Another fascinating passage, which I'm sure most will overlook and go by, is where Nancy is playing in the water:

Once on the beach they separated, he going out on to the Pope’s Nose, taking his shoes off, and rolling his socks in them and letting that couple look after themselves; Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselves. She crouched low down and touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones, who were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock. Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down. Out on the pale criss-crossed sand, high-stepping, fringed, gauntleted, stalked some fantastic leviathan (she was still enlarging the pool), and slipped into the vast fissures of the mountain side. And then, letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above the pool and rest on that wavering line of sea and sky, on the tree trunks which the smoke of steamers made waver on the horizon, she became with all that power sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing, hypnotised, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever, to nothingness. So listening to the waves, crouching over the pool, she brooded.

Here is Woolf capturing the forces of nature and reaching back to primordial soup where life first originated and the over powering forces of nature which shapes and ends life. And the lives are so insignificant in respect to the natural forces. Mrs Ramsey's death, the death of the central character in the novel, is announced in a parenthesis.

[quasimodo1]

To Janine and Virgil: Obviously, I'm not a player in this thread but both of your remarks relative to fine lines, sanity and creativity are so true and i relate even more due to certain family members with this kind of incapacity. How many great writers had the truly happy mairrage, the perfect lifesyle, and stroll through life content and serene? Just had to comment. quasi

[Virgil]

Thanks Quasi. I hope you'll read this fine novel some day.

[Janine]

Virgil, good post. I am getting a lot out of this whole discussion although I am not actively participating as I had hoped to. I did read some commentary I scanned today. I took TTLH back to my library about a week ago. I know you said it was online too and posted the link. I am not that good at reading novels online though. I should get the book out of the library and review it. I read it about a month ago and it does not all stay with me - only really the essense of it and not the particular passages. Thanks for quoting directly from the book - I find that very beneficial to understanding the story and the interaction of the characters.
I will keep reading along and I know I have already gathered more knowledge of the book than I previously had by merely observing the posts. Thanks everyone. Good job so far.
I will try to quote my book and post some of the analysist's ideas tomorrow - I scanned the pages awhile back.
Yes, thanks to you Quasi, for your remarks. I too hope you can read this fine novel one of these days. You won't regret it.

[Quark]

Virginia Woolf was a very unstable and depressed person. There really isn't any denying that--even Woolf herself admitted so. She didn't commit suicide in a fit of passion or an temporary low mood; she calmly considered her options and choose death over life. There certainly is evidence of this depression in To The Lighthouse. I think Virgil quoted a good passage about Mrs. Ramsay's attitude towards life that shows this. Here, we can see that life isn't seen as a pleasure or a triumph. No, here life is one big defeat after another. In life, the hopes and ideals of people are crushed by an indifferent fate. This is not a particularly optimistic way of approaching life, and, yes, this attitude might have been brought about by a depressed writer. But, I don't think that's the only way we should look at it. Or, I should say, that this might be the least productive way of looking at it. I'm a little weary of attributing entire ideas and themes of novels to the writer's problems and whims. While, yes, this may be an important part of the cause, I think it takes away a chance to have a useful discussion. Besides, if we make this about Virginia Woolf, then we have to read a great deal more about her life, times, and psychology. My laziness revolts against this idea, and I think it would turn a literary discussion into a class on psychology or history. We only really want to know why the characters are isolated, and the reasons should be in the novel. That isn't to say I completely hate psychology or history. I'm just saying that literary merit might be something different.

I think Virgil has given us three kinds of isolation here: Lily's, Mrs. Ramsay's, and the separation due to the narrative style. Lily, as the artist, paints as a means of expression. Her isolation is about the problems that plague honest expression. She is alone because she cannot communicate. Mrs. Ramsay, though, suffers from a different kind of isolation. She has ambitions which cannot be realized in the actual world which rapidly changes. Her struggle for permanence isolates her from the other characters. Finally, the narrative voice isolates the characters because it focuses on the inner emotions of the characters and not on external dialogue or easily graspable ideas. Now, I know that in the story it probably doesn't break down into these individual categories: with Mrs. Ramsay representing one thing and Lily another. For example, Mrs. Ramsay has problems communicating to Mr. Ramsay and Lily has some of the same anxieties about life that Mrs. Ramsay has. I just used the characters as categories like this because we brought up these ideas in connection with certain characters.

I've written this all very quickly, and I don't know whether it all makes sense--or whether it's accurately punctuated. I just wanted to get it down before I leave. I'll probably edit it into more understandable form later. Bye.

[Walter]

Quark, I like your view of the matter because I think it is the direction I lean when reading a novel.
Mrs Woolf set out to write a novel, that is to say, to create a fictional setting, place fictional characters in the setting, give them personalities, and have their thoughts and interactions move the plot forward. I think we should be able to see and describe at least that much within the framework of the novel, without appealing to outside evidence.

That the story may have contacts with reality in her own life doesn't make the book a history, or an autobiography, nor does it necessarily mean that any similarities that we may recognize are highly accurate representations of reality. However accurate they might seem, they have still been filtered through her own artistic process in setting the words down on the page.

So the short form is, that I much prefer close reading, and rereading, of the actual words on the page for obtaining an understanding of what story the author was trying to communicate by putting them there, before too quickly trying to elevate into seeing a purpose, message, theme, or borader interpretation for the story. For me, the latter excursions of the imagination are easier when I feel I finally have the interactions within the underlying story well understood. And, for To The Lighthouse, I am still working on them.

[Janine]

I have been reading a commentary book on TTLH. This might help some. This quote is from the book by Many Johnson.

In her diary Virginia Woolf wrote that she wanted to present the personalities of her father and mother in To the Lighthouse, and St. Ives (where they spent their summers) and childhood. Aware that involvement with material so close to her own life could produce a damaging tone of nostalgia and regret, she avoided these with great technical skill, employing several points of view to minimize any overpowering emotional fixation and introducing comic aspects of domestic life to further reduce sentimentality. But what lifts this novel above the level of the ordinary family chronicle is Woolf's treatment of the human condition in an inscrutable universe. The multiple perspectives and the variations of tone serve chiefly to integrate episode, scene, and character toward this end, which is an intricately articulated response to the question "What is life?"

Therefore, I feel one of the main themes, if not the main theme is "What is life?" Now that may seem like a very broad question, but all along Lily seems to be asking this and observing a sort of cosmos of life about her within the confines and dynamics of this one family - the Ramseys.
To totally dismiss the personal interest that Woolf had in this particular story, I feel is an utter mistake. One can never divorce the life and the personality of the author from his work. That is what truly makes works so unique and so enthralling and yes, personal. They are colored by the inner workings and minds of the authors. I think as this article says "what lifts this novel above the level of the ordinary family chronicle is Woolf's treatment of the human condition in an inscrutable universe."

In this article or another is mentioned Woolf's use of the brackets to announce the various tragic lives of the family members. I can't seem to locate the exact quote, but the critic I read seems to feel it was a device employed by Woolf in order not to appear mauldin or oversentimental in the book. In these beautiful descriptive passages, in the long middle chapter of of the book depicting the passing of time as an evitable part of life, these bracketed statements appear, almost like the ticking a clock or the spaced like the natural passage of time. They come upon one suddenly and unexpectedly (perhaps mimicing the shock one would feel when hearing of such occurances intially.) on first reading but Woolf never dwells on that sad moment more than the one statement devoted to each tradedy....interesting, I think. I have never read a book quite like this book and with the use of such a way of describing something so poignant by placing it in [ ] brackets, interspersed within the story descriptions. Wonderful and brilliant.

[Quark]

I don't mean to suggest that Woolf's personal life had nothing to do with the writing of To The Lighthouse. Your source is accurate when it says that the story is largely based on Woolf's own family, and it isn't too much of a leap to conclude that Woolf, herself, may have been trying to work out her complicated relation to her family and times through this story. But, at the same time, I don't think that Woolf's particular life is as interesting as the novel. I don't think her biography would have the same effect. I agree with the quote from Johnson, "what lifts this novel above the level of the ordinary family chronicle is Woolf's treatment of the human condition in an inscrutable universe". While, yes, the novel may be a "family chronicle" for Woolf what makes this literature is its "treatment of the human condition in an inscrutable universe", and I think that we can comment on one without total knowledge of the other. That isn't to say that Woolf's artistic rendering of the world isn't connected with the actual world in which she lived; or, that art--in general--is completely ideal or pure. I'm just arguing that the more interesting artistic side of the novel is more important in a literature discussion than the personal psychology of writer. And, to answer literary questions like "What causes 'isolation'?" or "What does 'life' mean?" with suppositions drawn from the history or mental states of the writer would take away from that discussion.

[Virgil]

Virginia Woolf was a very unstable and depressed person. There really isn't any denying that--even Woolf herself admitted so. She didn't commit suicide in a fit of passion or an temporary low mood; she calmly considered her options and choose death over life. There certainly is evidence of this depression in To The Lighthouse. I think Virgil quoted a good passage about Mrs. Ramsay's attitude towards life that shows this. Here, we can see that life isn't seen as a pleasure or a triumph. No, here life is one big defeat after another. In life, the hopes and ideals of people are crushed by an indifferent fate. This is not a particularly optimistic way of approaching life, and, yes, this attitude might have been brought about by a depressed writer. But, I don't think that's the only way we should look at it. Or, I should say, that this might be the least productive way of looking at it. I'm a little weary of attributing entire ideas and themes of novels to the writer's problems and whims. While, yes, this may be an important part of the cause, I think it takes away a chance to have a useful discussion. Besides, if we make this about Virginia Woolf, then we have to read a great deal more about her life, times, and psychology. My laziness revolts against this idea, and I think it would turn a literary discussion into a class on psychology or history. We only really want to know why the characters are isolated, and the reasons should be in the novel. That isn't to say I completely hate psychology or history. I'm just saying that literary merit might be something different.

Quark, I like your view of the matter because I think it is the direction I lean when reading a novel.
Mrs Woolf set out to write a novel, that is to say, to create a fictional setting, place fictional characters in the setting, give them personalities, and have their thoughts and interactions move the plot forward. I think we should be able to see and describe at least that much within the framework of the novel, without appealing to outside evidence.

That the story may have contacts with reality in her own life doesn't make the book a history, or an autobiography, nor does it necessarily mean that any similarities that we may recognize are highly accurate representations of reality. However accurate they might seem, they have still been filtered through her own artistic process in setting the words down on the page.

So the short form is, that I much prefer close reading, and rereading, of the actual words on the page for obtaining an understanding of what story the author was trying to communicate by putting them there, before too quickly trying to elevate into seeing a purpose, message, theme, or borader interpretation for the story. For me, the latter excursions of the imagination are easier when I feel I finally have the interactions within the underlying story well understood. And, for To The Lighthouse, I am still working on them.

I agree with both of you. And I must say both of you express it extremely well. I believe in looking at the art itself, not so much the artist or the social context, although both have a place in getting the most out of the book. Actually it was D.H. Lawrence, Janine, who said (I think I'm paraphrasing) "trust the art, not the artist."

[Janine]

Virgil, true Lawrence did say that, but how can one divorce the author from his work? especially L? Look at any author who has written a number of works and there is something personal running through them whether they intended it or not. I think TTLH has many aspects to it, even being such a short book, and I doubt we have begun to touch on them all. I agree that we can look at the 'art' of the book as a complete thing and quite objectively. For one thing everyone is going to have a different interpretation of the book, so we have a pretty wide berth here in which to disguss. It seems to me that nothing in the book is 'cut and dry'. For instance have we really addressed all the imagery - such as the use of windows, the beacon of the lighthouse, perhaps the contrasts of light and dark, and the changes that time wroughts on the family, and the sense of time passing and things 'beyond ones control' in life, such as the deaths of some of the members? I love the way the book is divided into 3 parts - very significant. Interesting to compare the characters and their changes from first part to the last with the house as a character in between the two. I appreciate the structure of the book. It feels like a painting within itself and seems apropriate that the book centers around the perception of an artist - Lily.

Not sure I am making sense here; I have not been well centered on this discussion - please forgive me - I have some family matters ensuing and distracting me presently. I have some more of commentary I read that I will post soon. It will expound on some of the visual aspects and symbolism I mentioned.

[Virgil]

You're making sense Janine, I just don't agree. I understand what you're saying. From my point of view think of it this way. If a book is crap as a work of art, then who cares what the biographical relationship is? No one is ever going to look up the biographical relationship of my poems or short stories to my life. Once a work is an aknowledged classic for itself, then it is interesting and enlightening to understand it in the context of the author's life.