Dorobantu Alexandra

Second Year, Group 4, Series 2, English- Russian

Woolfs narrative technique in To the

Light House

The modern fiction novelist, Virginia Woolf places emplasis on THE

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS - a phrase coined by William James , to
characterize the continuous flow of thought and sensation in the human
mind( Lodge 42) - when she contours the characters of her renowned
writing To the Light House. Not being the only novel which frames the
family life with respect to the connections between individuals, succeeds
in masking the war terrors and point to the picture of life.
We are introduced into the Ramsay family, having as guide the
characters thoughts, less then their actions. The omniscient narrator
reveals in the first part The Window, a moment of September It was
September after all, the middle of September, and past six in the
evening.( Woolf ) when Mrs. Ramsay was knitting and next to her was the
youngest of her eight children, James Mother and child then objects of
universal veneration, and in this case the mother was famous for her
beauty.(Woolf )
The lighthouse turns from a childish desire into a symbol of the novel
which reflects it as being the witness of the passing of time and life. The
misunderstandings and the lack of communication between Mrs. And Mr.
Ramsay conjures the relationship between the writers own parents,
Woolf being also concerned herself with the question of womens equality
with men in marriage, and she brilliantly evoked the inequality of her
parents marriage.( Feminist Critiques )

As David Lodge analyzes the narrative technique of the stream of

consciousness, he indicates in The Art of Fiction that there are two ways
in which we should examine it: One is interior monologue, in which the
grammatical subject of the discourse in an I, and we, as it were, overhear
the character verbalizing his or her thoughts as they occur. (Lodge, 43)
The narrator burdens his writing with a multitude of thoughts and
feelings. At every different glance we have exactly what passes through
charactersminds. While Mrs. Ramsay is concerned with her children, her
husband is preoccupied by his writings, Lily Briscoe concentrates over her
painting. The inequality between the husbands is also pointed out. That
was true of Mrs. Ramsay she pitied men always as if they lacked
something- women never, as if they had something. ( Woolf ) From the
two of them, Mrs. Ramsay seems to be in an upper position because of her
clear vision of life.
We become acquainted with the principal characters not by being
told about them, but by sharing their most intimate thoughts, represented
as silent, spontaneous, unceasing streams of consciousness. For the
reader, its rather like wearing earphones plugged into someones brain,
and monitoring an endless tape-recording of the subjects impressions,
reflections, questions, memories and fantasies, as they are triggered
either by physical sensations or the association of ideas. ( Lodge, 47)
To the Lighthouse comprises sudden reactions and also the multitude
of their sharp ideas: She liked Charles Tansley, she tought, suddenly; she
liked his laugh. (Woolf ) And then instantly, for no reason at all, Mrs.
Ramsay became like a girl of twenty, full of gaiety. (Woolf ) There are
some elements which indicates the age of the characters, some of their
futures but all in all we come to understand them and to evaluate them
through what they present to us: their everyday life. We succeed in
forming an image built up around different personalities evoked by the
narrator.
The other method, called free indirect style, goes back at least as far
as Jane Austen, but was employed with ever-increasing scope and

virtuosly by modern novelists like Woolf. It renders thought as reported

speech ( in the third person, past tense ) but keeps to the kind of
vocabulary that is appropiate to the character, and deletes some of the
tags, like she thought, she wondered , she asked herself etc. that
a more formal narrative style would require. This gives the illusion of
intimate access to a characters mind, but without totally surrendering
authorial participation in the discourse. ( Lodge, 43 )
Mrs. Ramsays thoughts give authenticity to the writing. In the
following part we are introduced to her inner which recreates the idea of
Cogito, ergo sum. ( Lodge, 42) but also as a modern characteristic we
have the idea of a monotonous life: That was what now she often felt the
need of - to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. Often
she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in
her hands until she became the thing she looked at the light, for
example. ( Woolf ) We can also identify the loss of herself, her hopes and
aspirations: Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir.
( Woolf )
The existence of which we are most assured and which we know best
is unquestionably our own, for of every other object we have notions
which may be considered external and superficial, whereas, of ourselves,
our perception is internal and profound.Sensations, feelings, volitions,
ideas-such are the changes into which my existence is divided and which
color it in turns. (Ellmann, 723)
The second part of the novel Time Passes is created by the same
connoisseur narrator, with the exception that life have changed. During
the war there was no life: Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness
connected with childbirth, Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in
France, among them Andrew Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay, she was dead, they
said; years ago, in London. ( Woolf ) but more than that, everybodys lives
got tained : everyone had lost some one these years. ( Woolf )
The third part The Lighthouse presents, as Lily Briscoe finds out,
how you and I and she pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but

not words, not paint. ( Woolf ) Only the lighthouse remained as a hero of
time.
My memory is there, which conveys something of the past into the
present. My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually
sweelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing
rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow. (Ellmann, 723 )
Lily Briscoe is a present character during the entire novel, her interest
is heading towards Mrs. Ramsay, in the beginning at her as a living,
present creature and in the last part as an entity which still lives, but only
in Lilys memories. She recalls that moment of ten years ago Mrs.
Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying Life stand still
here. but as herself noticed Life has changed completely. ( Woolf )
Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the
future and which sweells as it advances. And as the past grows without
ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation. Memory.. is not a
faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a
register. There is no register, no drawer. In reality, the past is preserved by
itself, automatically. (Ellmann, 725)
Lily is triumphant in several ways: she is still alive after ten years,
being in the same place after the war and without the influence of Mrs.
Ramsay she succeeds to have her vision. Being more symbolic and
complex in its veiled statements, this novels meaning springs from the
gap between people and times. This gap is bridged only by people who
belong to the past and by art; and in this somberer novel, even art itself is
metaphorically shown to have great difficulty in becoming accomplished.
( Zirra, 7)
Summing up, this writing contains all the required elements to be
specified among other modern fiction achievements: the spotlight is on
the characters thoughts, feelings, on their inner regarding stream of
consciousness Mrs. Ramsey felt not only exhausted in body( afterwards,
not at the time, she always felt this) but also there tinged her physical

fatigue some faintly disagreeable sensation with another origin. (Woolf ) ,

the language is complex, having various shades, time becomes a
psychological item as art.
Furthermore, over the characters hovers the loss of hope, in a modern
world in which there is no God : We are in the hands of the Lord. But
instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it ?
Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean. (
Woolf ) We can distinguish that her thoughts are presented in the third
person, in the past,by a narrator who seems to an expert in the reading of
his characters souls.
Undoubtedly this kind of novel tends to generate sympathy for the
characters whose inner selves are exposed to view, however vain, selfish
or ignorable their thoughts may occasionally be; or, to put it another way,
continuous immersion in the mind of a wholly unsympathetic character
would be intolerable for both writer and reader. (Lodge, 42)

Works cited :
1) Ellmann, Richard - The Modern Tradition: Background of Modern
Literature Oxford University Press, USA, 1965
2) Feminist Critiques The Modernism Lab at Yalee University
http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Virginia_Woolf
3) Lodge, David - The Art of Fiction Viking Penguin, Penguin Books
USA Inc.
4) Woolf, Virginia To the Light House The University of Adelaide,
eBooks@Adelaide, 2014
5) Zirra, Ioana Lecture Five Stream of Consciousness as a
Subjective/ Impressionistic Way of Transcending Public Trauma:
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Light House