There are so many levels to talking about "To the Lighthouse" that I've decided to focus on three of the big picture themes: structure, time, and (some) communication. If for whatever reason I ever need to reconsider the socio-economic undertones of the book, well, then, that's another post. Much of this post will be quotations, because sometimes my blabbering just dilutes things and this is one of those times.
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| Godrevy Island, St. Ives Bay, where Woolf visited |
"Woolf described the structure of To the Lighthouse as if it were a letter H, 'Two blocks joined by a corridor,' in which the uprights, the first and third sections, recorded a day in the lives of the family on holiday, although substantial changes took place between the two." (Cambridge Companion, Julia Briggs, p.74)
The above quote is brilliantly true and frames the entire novel in a simple yet elegant fashion. In the book, spinster Lily Briscoe struggles with her painting hobby as Woolf presumably strugged with the novel; how to capture it all, how the light and shadows must interact, what's the structure that will be most perfect and illuminate fundamental truths of life: "To say: 'But this is what I see, this is what I see,' and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast" (p.19). I thought it was interesting how much the grey-green color is emphasized throughout but that Lily's painting attempts to buck that trend with bright blues and purples. In any case, the book IS the painting and Woolf says as much in her personal letters:
"I meant nothing by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together." (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1923-1928)
Which is the same reason for Lily Briscoe's final artistic vision at the end of the novel; drawing the line of The Lighthouse down the middle of her painting. It holds her vivid portrait of the Ramsays cottage (and her time with them) together. The Lighthouse also functions as the bridge to the H structure; "Time Passes" but The Lighthouse remains. Like the saying goes, the more things change the more things stay the same.
For as much as the book is about time passing and the transience of existence, it's also about repetition. The waves, the beacon from The Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay pacing up and down the terrace, and the nostalgic repetition in the second half of the novel. Woolf practically bangs the reader over the head with it: "It was to repeat that they met" (p.21) and, "He had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one little book when he was only five and twenty; what came after was more or less amplification, repetition" (p.23). The subject of the latter being Mr. Ramsay the philosopher. His work is described as imagining a kitchen table with no one there -- more or less what occurs in the "Time Passes" section -- and seems to connect with a quote from Mrs. Ramsay ("For it was extraordinary to think that they had been capable of going on living all these years when she had not thought of them more than once all that time" p.88). Ramsay and, to a different extent, his wife are painfully aware of their mortality and insignificance.
Mrs. Ramsay says that the sea "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 -- this 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" (p.16).
Her husbands shares the shelter of domesticity a few pages later, with one of my favorite sentences of all time: "He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes" (p.44).
In both cases, the emphasis of nature eating away at civilization and humanity is tempered by domestic duties. Mr. Ramsay glumly notes that, "The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare" (p.35) and Lily Briscoe picks up the theme on the beach, saying the "distant views seem to outlast the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest" (p.20). Towards the end of the book, Lily seems to connect this mortal transience with the urgency of her painting:
"... She could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps the last time, as a traveler, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again" (p.194).
Sound advice for the reader in the aptly-titled "The Window" section, for one may never see Mrs. Ramsay or Prue or Andrew ever again. Blink and you'll miss the parenthetical deaths.
Lastly, sticking to a theme that really defines Virginia Woolf's work, the novel depends on relationships between characters. The narrative floats from one to another and portrays attempts at understanding, at empathy and sympathy. All the characters are perpetually trying to see what the other characters are thinking, to imagine or persuade their thoughts. Much like Lily's translation from sight to canvas, the thoughts-to-actions route is imperfect and muddled, thus compounding the tragedy of mortality. "She had done the usual trick -- been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her," Lily realizes after conversing with a guest (p.92). Another acute moment occurs after Mrs. Ramsay's death, while Lily is trying to paint the empty steps where once she had sat (p.178; and likely mimicking Woolf's own grief after the death of her mother):
"For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? ... It was one's body feeling, not one's mind. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have -- to want and want -- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!"
And finally, an equally poignant moment of non-communication between Mr. Ramsay and his two older children as they reach The Lighthouse, ten years past the initial expedition that never was (p.207):
"They both wanted to say, Ask us anything and we will give it you. But he did not ask them anything. He sat and looked at the island and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone, or he might be thinking, I have reached it. I have found it; but he said nothing."
The Castaway
