51 pages • 1 hour read
Virginia WoolfTo the Lighthouse
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1927A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context
Virginia Woolf alludes to the autobiographical underpinnings of To the Lighthouse in her diary entry for May 9, 1925, in which she reflects that the novel ‘will be fairly short: to have father’s character done complete in it: & mothers; & St. Ives; & childhood; & all the usual things I try to put in—life, death &c.”
Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, is ‘done complete’ in the character of Mr. Ramsay, who blusters about the terrace and gardens, quoting Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poetry and pondering metaphysical principles. Like his fictional counterpart, Leslie Stephen was a respected academic writer, preoccupied with his own thoughts, and predisposed to outbursts of both self-importance and self-pity. Woolf’s mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen, devoted herself to her children, her husband, and helping others. An archetype of Victorian motherhood and female beauty, the character of Mrs. Ramsay strongly resembles Julia Stephens, whose own celebrated beauty inspired respected painters of the era. The novel’s setting in the Hebrides islands off the Scottish coast is a thin disguise for the Cornwall coast and the village of St. Ives, where the Stephenses and their seven children enjoyed summer holidays at Talland House—and sailed to nearby Godrevy lighthouse.
Woolf’s childhood unfortunately supplied a good deal of source material for the “death &c” that occurs in the novel, as well. Just as Prue Ramsay does not survive childbirth, Woolf’s beloved half-sister, Stella Duckworth, died shortly after her marriage in 1897, perhaps from pregnancy-related complications. Andrew Ramsay’s senseless death in war recalls that of Woolf’s brother, Thoby, who perished from typhoid at age 26. But it is Mrs. Ramsay’s death that most haunts the novel, and, as many Woolf scholars argue, it was the loss of her own mother that left a traumatic mark on the writer. Julia Stephen died in 1895 when she was 49 years old and Virginia was just 13. Following her mother’s death, Woolf experienced a long bout of mental illness, the first of many that would disrupt her life and work until she died by suicide in 1941.
In “Sketch of the Past,” an autobiographical piece penned shortly before her death, Woolf reflects on her mother, admitting, “She obsessed me [. . .] until I was forty-four” and began writing To the Lighthouse. If this obsession arose from Woolf’s yearning for lost maternal love, it also involved her struggle to shake off the repressive Victorian ideal of femininity her mother modeled. Woolf’s complicated, conflicted feelings about her mother take shape in Lily Briscoe’s efforts to capture Mrs. Ramsay’s essence on canvas. Even as her painting of Mrs. Ramsay and young James pays tribute to motherhood, Lily challenges the Victorian notion that “woman can’t paint” (48) by choosing art over marriage and motherhood.
Literary Context
In the opening pages of her 1924 essay “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown,” Virginia Woolf submits “that in or about December 1910, human character changed.” While this statement leaves much to speculation, the event that made 1910 momentous for Woolf was the December debut of the art exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists.” Mounted by Woolf’s friend Roger Fry at a London gallery, the exhibition introduced paintings by Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin, among others, that were so revolutionary in subject matter and visual language, they shocked the public. Indeed, Picasso’s works from this period flouted traditional linear perspective, featuring instead arrangements of planes that seemingly present subjects from multiple angles, or viewpoints, at the same time. As if referring to Picasso’s cubist approach, Lily Briscoe muses while trying to paint Mrs. Ramsay that “[f]ifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman” (198).
Lily’s words register the surge of dissatisfaction early twentieth-century painters and writers directed towards traditional forms of artistic representation. The result was a period of aesthetic innovation that lasted until roughly mid-century and which scholars now refer to as Modernism. While it touches on changes happening in the visual arts, the real subject of Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown” is parallel developments occurring in the literary arts. The essay contrasts the methods of traditional novelists with those of the modernists, but because the latter term had yet to be coined, Woolf describes the conflicting views between the old Edwardians and the new-generation Georgians (so-called for the new monarch, George V). While the Edwardian novelists have “established conventions which do their business”, such ‘business’ is “to preach doctrines, [. . .] or celebrate the glories of the British Empire”, of British society, or of God and King. Preoccupied with institutions and ideologies, the Edwardian writers failed to grasp “human nature” itself. Moreover, by the turn of the twentieth century, the views expressed in Edwardian novels had become suspect, and thus, in Woolf’s estimation, their “conventions are ruin, [. . .] are death” (638).
Even as she condemns traditional literary conventions in this essay, Woolf doesn’t articulate clear alternatives, but these are apparent in her fiction. To the Lighthouse is considered an iconic example of literary Modernism due to its innovative form and focus. Whereas the narrative viewpoint of traditional nineteenth-century novels is singular, all-knowing, and even God-like, Woolf’s novel features multiple narrative perspectives centered within the minds of the characters themselves. The novel’s focus is not on outer reality or socially-established truths, but on the ever-changing inner states of individuals. This elevation of various subjective points of view over one objective ‘reality’ is characteristic of Modernist fiction and reflects a growing sense of alienation and uncertainty accompanying the profound changes underway in a rapidly modernizing world.
Historical Context
Although To the Lighthouse contains only brief references to World War I, which lasted from 1914 until 1918, the impact of the ‘Great War’ reverberates through the novel’s thematic concerns, as it does through literary Modernism itself.
The stability that marked the Victorian age was already eroding by the end of the nineteenth-century. Rapid scientific, technological and industrial developments were shifting the distribution of wealth and education, weakening the ideological foundations of British society: reverence for God, the King and the Empire. But the unprecedented devastation and carnage of the Great War shattered long-held assumptions that the ruling social, political, and moral order of Western culture would safeguard civilization from collapse. As Sam Hynes writes in A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, “That change was so fast and so abrupt as to make the years after the war seem discontinuous from the years before, and that discontinuity became a part of English imaginations”.
In her 1947 essay “The Leaning Tower”, Woolf imagines the war as a sudden “chasm in a smooth road,” while in To the Lighthouse, she compares the war to the passage of time run rampant. The novel’s unconventional style signals its break with the traditions of nineteenth-century literary Realism, yet it retains the three-part structure that was popular in Victorian-era fiction.
Part I, “The Window,” is presided over by Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and the Victorian values they promote: rationalism, patriarchy, heroism, orderliness, marriage and family. Then comes the rupture—the chasm—in “Time Passes.” Although the war takes place ‘off-stage,’ Part II depicts the upheaval symbolically, as the onslaught of unrestrained time. The acceleration of narrative time speeds up the pace of change, transforming it into a rapid-fire, disorienting assault on the old established order. In what amounts to a metaphorical rendering of war destroying civilization, time sweeping through the Ramsay’s house leaves havoc in its wake. Two stalwart woman rescue the house from ruin but concede that the Ramsays will “find it changed” (141).
Indeed, when Lily Briscoe returns in Part III, change informs her perspective. Gone are the days when Charles Tansley whispered, “Woman can’t paint” (48) and Mrs. Ramsay insisted women must marry. Lily now paints with renewed self-determination and finally realizes her vision by drawing “in the centre” (209) of her canvas a line—a line that divides, like a chasm, but also unites.
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