Modernism and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

In 1927 when she published To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf had already formulated her own
conception on the ‘new’ novel, which was the novel of flowing consciousness, psychological intensity,
released from the rule of time-scale and identity. As Erich Auerbach observes in his critical study
Mimesis, her new novel made use of multiple subjective consciousness to represent an impression of
something perceived and felt, put in contrast exterior and interior time, reducing exterior life thorough
cutting away historical events or major episodes in individual lives.
Fiction for Virginia Woolf was not a ‘criticism of life’, but a re-creation of the complexities of
experience, seen as a flux that the novelist must communicate. The task of the novelist was also to
dematerialize what was material, to de-create form and to make the novel a self-creating species, at
once decomposition, and composition. Plot, character, comedy, tragedy and the concentration on ‘love
interests’, the old conventional themes, were all disposed of, and no longer considered adequate to
communicate the stream of the modern consciousness.
‘Consciousness’ became a key word in modern fiction, and its occurrence could be traced back
possibly to Walter Pater or to William James’s insistence in Principles of Psychology that reality was
subjectively perceived through consciousness. Under the influence of Dostoevsky, James, Freud and
Bergson, the psycho-aesthetic vision intensified, and Bloomsbury, whose leading member was Virginia
Woolf, contrived the ‘new’ composition as able to produce a symbolist metamorphosis, an aesthetic
epiphany through the medium of an authorial consciousness. The key phrase which, the novelist and
critic, May Sinclair had taken from William James, in The Egoist, in 1918, to describe her technique,
namely, ‘stream-of-consciousness’, was to be used by all great Modernist novelists, James, Joyce,
Woolf, Lawrence, Faulkner, with the purpose of giving the reader a sense of receiving the direct flow
of a character’s perceptions, unmediated by a narrator, a sense of the richness, untidiness and
associativeness of the mind. Given her feeling for Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, and
her great sensitiveness, delicacy and wit, Woolf’s ‘consciousness’ is flowing, poetic, feminine, paint-
like and aesthetic. It breaks down all the barriers, flowing backward and forward in time, and spatially,
from this place to that, among and above the characters, to achieve some kind of shared experience, a
collective awareness, a common consciousness, which can make people feel they are parts of
something larger, undifferentiated being.
In 1925, at a time when Woolf was planning To the Lighthouse, she recorded in her diary an
ambition to substitute poesis for mimesis. “I have and idea that I will invent a mew name for my books
to supplant ‘novel’. A new –by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?” The new novel, To the Lighthouse,
did indeed prove to be an elegy, for her father, Leslie Stephen, the literary critic and biographer, and for
her mother, Julia Stephen, a legendary pre-Raphaelite beauty. In Sketch of the Past, she recalls that the
writing of the novel had been cathartic, a form of therapy in which she came to terms with her mother’s
loss by deliberately recalling her presence in a portrait that, according to her sister Vanessa, was
wonderfully lifelike. The pain of that loss, indirectly experienced by Lily Briscoe as ‘a hardness, a
hollowness, a strain…to want and not to have – to want and want’, was at last laid to rest.
The book is structured as a triptych: the first part, “The Window”, gently celebrative, limits
itself to depict the only September evening spent by the Ramsays and their friends at a holiday home in
the Hebrides, the second part, “Time Passes”, evokes the decay of the house over the period of the
Great War, during which two of the Ramsay family die, and Mrs. Ramsay, and the third, “The
Lighthouse” treats a world of absence redeemed by art.
All throughout the first section, Mrs. Ramsay is continuously ‘framed’, either within the
boundaries of Lily’s painting or in the window through which Lily sees her. She is the character whose
portrait is the subject of the novel, caught, and framed within the shadow of memory, trapped within
the field of male desires and fantasies. If the ideal of manhood involves reaching destinations and
conquering heights, and is a constant process of becoming, women by contrast are expected to impress
by their qualities of being, by beauty rather than intellect, by serenity rather than achievement. For
instance, Minta feels the magic surround her as she comes in to dinner: ‘she wore her golden haze,
sometimes she had it; sometimes not’, while the eldest daughter is growing beautiful.
Nevertheless, Woolf’s struggle to liberate herself from this patriarchal ideal of womanhood and
exorcize many of the Victorian values her parents magnificently embodied, produces Lily Briscoe, who
disapproves with Mrs. Ramsay’s values, while she deeply loves her. She refuses to co-operate with her
and is rejecting that traditional code of behaviour, which requires a woman to accommodate a male
ego, to allow a young man at dinner ‘to expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his
urgent desire to assert himself’. Lily is not only the figure of the artist in the novel, but also a double
for the author who had herself experienced a desperate yearning for and ultimate rejection of what her
mother had stood for, Victorianism.
The characters’ monologues cross one another at the deep inner level of consciousness, where
the author achieves the profound communication she desires. Flowing in and out of characters, those
wanderings from one consciousness to another are transcribed with an art of transition, which, in To
the Lighthouse, reaches its peak during the celebratory dinner scene. From one consciousness to
another, the text floats smoothly, providing as a whole, a polyphony, acquired by overlapping
characters’ interior monologues. We can identify here, in this novel, as in others by Woolf, the rapport
between the inner flux and the exterior, objective behaviour, the interior time becomes the level of
genuine, spontaneous experience, free of boundaries and codes, while the exterior behaviour is that of
the artificial existence, confined in stiff patterns and rules. Removing the conventional layer,
penetrating the secret recesses of the surrounding people, those characters dear to their creator, such as
Mrs. Ramsay, discover a realm of genuineness and purity.
The coming of night at the end of the first part, is also the coming of death and emptiness. The
middle section, which Woolf envisaged as the corridor that would join the present of “The Lighthouse”
to the past of “The Window” takes the form of a dream that simultaneously lasts for one night and ten
years, so that the journey to the lighthouse, promised but postponed from the first section, is fulfilled on
the next morning. The abyss of “Time Passes” carries off not only Mrs. Ramsay, Prue and Andrew, but
also the world they belonged to, the Victorian world, with its idealization of male, heroism, marriage,
and family life. The shocking deaths are at once central and yet reported and contained within
parentheses, a device used throughout the novel to convey different levels of awareness.
Though the house in “Time Passes” is emptied of its occupants, it is full of things happening,
like the mind in sleep loosed from the bonds of consciousness. The primal fertile forces of nature and,
the forces of destruction, in “The Window”, so strongly contained, channelled into the socially
acceptable structures of love and marriage, now well up powerfully. The shawl that Mrs. Ramsay
arranged to hide the pig’s skull swings free and plants pervade everything. The effect is exhilarating, as
by being free of human desires and demands in the absence of agents, the mind can float freely through
the house down to the beach, without being constrained by clothes or a body. Nevertheless, the cost of
such freedom is to allow yourself to be subject to the chaotic forces that threaten to swallow up in the
house and the island, not only in darkness, but also in water. The occurrence of these forces is
associated by critics with the madness of the Great War or the sickness, both figurative and
epidemiological, of the whole country, in that ‘consumption’ was the most common name for
pulmonary tuberculosis.
The redemption of the decayed and storm-tossed house, which approaches total degradation,
comes with the arrival of human beings, which might suggest the mind moving from deeper levels of
sleep and subconscious to a greater awareness of itself, towards less abstract dreams and potentially,
real life. Inevitably, women’s work must repair and restore the damaged house, and Mrs. McNab and
Mrs. Bast represent that lot of mindless labour necessary to maintain a certain order and normality in
the world and to make activity and thought at all possible for others.
 The last part of the novel, “The Lighthouse”, is free from the idealizing presence of Mrs.
Ramsay and all that she stood for. In its opening, we are told that the expedition to the lighthouse is
planned again and that Lily Briscoe is returning to the painting, which she started ten years before. In
this world of the present, everyone seems to be exposed to the sea and sky without protection, as James
and Cam are exposed to the whims of their father’s emotions without their mother’s intervention, Lily
thinking here ‘this was tragedy…children coerced, their spirits subdued’. While Lily finds a certain
freedom in the cold new world without constraints or social boundaries, even though she grieves
intensely Mrs. Ramsay’s absence, Mr. Ramsay dramatizes his loss, demanding constant recognition of
his tragic bereavement with a relentless self-pity, which infuriates both Lily and the children. However,
as Macalister describes the storm, Mr. Ramsay ultimately accepts her death and scatters the crumbs
from his sandwiches over the sea, as if unconsciously performing the office of the death. His quiet
acceptance completes the process of reconciliation, which springs up spontaneously both in him and in
his children.
As Lily goes on painting trying to stay immersed in the painting but coming to the surface of
what surrounds her and her memories, details of daily life of the Ramsays impose themselves on her,
including a very vivid recollection of Mr. Ramsay stretching out his hand and raising his wife from her
chair, and she feels that this was how they must been when she agreed to marry him. What we can
notice is that Lily seems to be able to complete her picture, to remember clearly enough the shadow on
the steps , which is Mrs Ramsay’s shadow and which will give centre to her painting, only by
reconstructing something of the relationship between them, as husband and wife. In the same way that
Lily proceeds by ‘tunnelling her way into her picture, into her past’, Woolf employs her own tunnelling
- a tunnelling process, enabling her to keep the past and the present in place simultaneously – to the
heart of her parent’s relationship and represents it in its complexity.
The novel is so organized that it concludes with simultaneous revelations, its last word being
‘vision’, an appropriate term for a novel, which seeks a meaning. All the tensions, which the novel
explores between the real and the imaginary, husband and wife, separation and connection are
embodied in the lighthouse itself. As a child, in ‘The Window’, James remembers it as ‘a silvery,
misty-looking tower with a yellow window eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening’, deeply
romanticized, but when he approaches it, in the final part of the novel, he realizes it is no more than a
‘tower, stark, and straight…barred with black and white… washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that
was the Lighthouse, was it?’ By reaching the lighthouse with Mr. Ramsay, James, and Cam. we are
able to see that the lighthouse is just another place of work; a thing of utility, not romantic at all.
However, it seems to be a moment of revelation, of triumph rather than disappointment.
 Just when the lighthouse trip is achieved, Lily Briscoe finishes her painting: ‘she drew a line
there in the centre. It was done, it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying her brush down in extreme
fatigue, I have had my vision.’ The human has passed into the aesthetic, which is also an intuitive
metaphysic, culminating in a unity called form, composition. Therefore, while the flux may be the flux
of human consciousness, it reaches coherence not of life and thought, but of aesthetic completion by
Lily’s final brushstroke.
To the Lighthouse is a book of constant stases, momentary gazing, contemplation, and rapture,
full of ‘moments tense with vibration, moments drawn out fine, almost to the snapping point’, attuned
to ‘little daily miracles, illuminations’, and ultimately, a book of epiphanies and visions.

References:
Bradbrook, Frank W. “Virginia Woolf the Theory and Practice of Fiction” , in B. Ford (ed), The
Modern Age, vol vii of the Pelican Guide to English Literature, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1964.
Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel 1878-2001. Penguin Books Ltd, 2001.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford University Press, New York, 2006.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse; with an introduction by Julia Briggs, New York: 1992.