So concerned in her own fiction with disparities between the mind and the world
without, Virginia Woolf is naturally enough one of the clearest of critical commentators
on the division between subjective and objective methods in the writing of her period. As
she stated in her essay "Modern Fiction" (1919), "Examine for a moment an ordinary
mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic,
evanescent, or engrave 555g68f d with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and, as they fall, as they shape themselves into
the .life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old.. Life is not a
series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged surrounding us from the beginning of
consciousness to the end.
Adeline Virginia Stephen was born
on 25 January 1882 at 22
Kensington. Her parents, Leslie Stephen and Julia Jackson, had strong associations with
literature while her mother had also aristocratic connections. Julia Jackson was an
associate of the Pre-Raphaelites while her father was a journalist, biographer and
historian of ideas and he founded the Dictionary of National Biography.
Although
she was denied a public school and university education.
enjoyed her father's library. But her lectures were interrupted by a breakdown on
her mother's death in 1895 and another one in 1904 when her father died after he had
fallen ill two years before. During her second breakdown
in Greek - she had learned this language and acquired some competence. When she
recovered she moved to
To the Lighthouse was published in 1927 and considered Virginia Woolf's
masterpiece, and also an autobiographical work. She succeeded in harmoniously
combining recollections of her mother, her father and her childhood with her poetic
technique and the final result was a reconciliation between life and art. Frank Bradbrook
stated that the themes of the novel are those of Shakespeare's sonnets: time, beauty, and
the survival of beauty through the means of art, absence, and death.
The stream of consciousness takes different forms with different writers. For
some of them consciousness revealed the contingency, the chaos, the stress, with Joyce
stream of consciousness is "in both aesthetic (Stephen's reflections) and subterranean
(Molly's soliloquy) ", therefore intellectual and intuitive, above all painterlike and
aesthetic - the means by which art can enter the realm of intuition, imaginative pattern,
heightened responsiveness, a reverie of the ego rather than an emancipation of the id.
In her novels consciousness flows, not only backward and forward in time, and spatially,
from this place to that, but among and above the characters, who often share a strange
intuitive relation to some common symbol: the lighthouse, the waves".
Woolf's consciousness is that of a writer and writing for her is a kind of refuge or
an "antidote for madness", though writing she evinces the existence of another
personality and the value of feelings and emotions. In her diary she redefines the concept
of personality in terms of feeling and emotion.
Virginia Woolf's main characters are women connected in a way or another to the
auctorial process In To the Lighthouse Woolf "points out that the two women. (Mrs.
Ramasay and Lily), each in her own way, are artists and calls attention to the fact that the
realization is important enough to be termed revelation ". His statement is based on
Lily's memory of the moment when Mrs. Ramsay brought them all together and "making
of the moment something permanent' as she tries to clothe something in another sphere is
'of the nature revelation' "
The lighthouse through the alternation light and darkness evokes the alternation
between life and death. Although this symbol is present in Night and Day, in the novel To
the Lighthouse it acquires the main place since the work follows the succession light -
darkness, life - death. The matches struck in the dark stress the idea of transience. These
short illuminations make consciousness reach "to the edge of eternal revelation, to
moments of vision". From this point of view the the process of creation which needs such
created starting from these moments, they reader is led towards stimulate the process -
and also stability since they are similar: "there is a coherence in things; a stability;
something, she meant, is immune from change, an shines out (she glanced at the window
with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like
a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had once today, of peace, of rest. Of
such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures" (To the Lighthouse). Lily
Briscoe remembers the same vision "In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal
passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck
into stability. Life stands here, Mrs. Ramsay said"
To the Lighthouse is a result of Woolf's attempt to understand the nature of time and
immortality since she is obsessed with the transience of life and the oblivion of death.
The plot is a very simple and structured on three sections, which correspond to different
moments of light or darkness, life or death consciousness or unconsciousness. The first
chapter entitled The Window suggests light, life, and calmness. Woolf weaves her
monologues round the Ramsays' dinner on vacation. Mrs. Ramasay is presented as
mother, as hostess and as wife.; Lily Briscoe works at a painting; the children play. The .
author reduces this section to an afternoon and evening. In this section as well as in the
third one Virginia Woolf's technique relies on the interior monologue which appears as a
form of indirect speech. In her diary the author states that "indirect discourse, the
consciousness of the narrator married to the consciousness of the character and speaking
for it... To the Lighthouse is a masterwork of the exploration of the consciousness of .
others with the tool of indirect discourse".
"The first and the third sections of To the Lighthouse concentrate
comprehensively on the subjective life of the mind; the second creates a style not so
much objective as adept in bringing objects themselves to life, dramatising, equally
comprehensively, the domain beyond consciousness which inexorably resists its order
and light.'
The second part is associated with a nightmare, which deepens the reader in
terror, through it life becomes more meaningful as in terror, through it life becomes more
meaningful as in the case of Septimus's death. The unconscious level, including the war,
can be interpreted as a testament or as a warning, 'what is left when the human eye is
subtracted from the sum of things; matter drained of spirit, pure as a chair or table or
flower viewed by some Teutonic artist prescient of War and death-camps".
Although the human eye loses its power being unable to see any more the narrator
keeps vigil the eye of the lighthouse whose twinkle suggests rebirth. However the idea of
rebirth is also suggested by violets and daffodils, which reappear every year. They are
always new but their presence is familiar.
The succession of light and darkness, of life and death implies a linear perception
of the coexistence of life and death. But this temporal perspective which actually
suggests motion is also created at a motionless level, the image of the island surrounded
by water. The sea has the same meaning as darkness and at the same time the waves
which are familiar and expected for this frame suppose a reiterative cycle and, of course,
rebirth.
The whole novel is a reiterative document from facts to language. The characters
Mr. and Mrs. Ramasay - the representatives of male and female are associated, the
former with an analytic rationalist mind and the latter with an 'intuitive, holistic, creative
imaginative mind". This difference determines two ways of reaching the lighthouse in the .
third section Mr. Ramsay who is anchored in contingency goes to the lighthouse
accompanied by his children while Mrs. Ramsay, who is dead, reaches the lighthouse .
from a spiritual point of view - her memory is transcendent and she remains in Lily's
painting as a sitter and as a form of inspiration. On the other hand some critics relate Mrs.
Ramasay creation of harmony at the dinner table to Lily's search for the final form of her
creation.
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