To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
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Book Reviews of To the Lighthouse
Book Review: Men, women, gender roles & stream of consciousness.
Summary: 5 Stars
The time span in "To a Lighthouse" is from 1910 - 1920. And time is a critical element in this novel whose beginning paints a very insular setting, the small-scale world according toMrs. Ramsay. The season is summer and it is an annual event that she, her husband and eight children, a coterie of Mr. Ramsay's academic-type admirers and a spinster with a love of painting, adjourn to the Ramsay's seaside household.
The story's unfolding is mirrored in the manner of Mrs. Ramsay's thinking...all internal: about her husband; her children; their family friends; an anticipated engagement; marriage in general and her own in particular; and her husband's preoccupation with his academic career. Without a doubt, Mrs. Ramsay is the glue that holds this little, private cocoon together.
Mr. Ramsay, succinctly put, is self-centered. He's introspective; he's occupied with his achievements; and "reaching Z" is an all-absorbing goal! Contemplative walking and pacing seem to be among his favorite pastimes and his amblings provide him more space to contemplate "I, I, I" as aptly described by Lily Briscoe, an amateur artist. At times it seems as if being the father of eight, even though his wife shields him from much of the routine of family life... including household expenses...serves as a hindrance to his further achievements. He is a man of logic and will not even tolerate his youngest child's yearnings to go to the lighthouse because the weather on the following day will most assuredly not "be fine" as Mrs. Ramsay tries to assure the child it will be.
There is an occasional sadness and distance about Mrs. Ramsay that manifests following her husband's frequent petulant scenes. Nonetheless she plays her roles to absolute perfection: mother, wife, and nurturer to all including their guests. She sees their shortcomings but accepts them and fosters each in her own way according to their perceived needs.
Women are relegated to minor roles; it is the men who are the intelligent ones. And Mr. Ramsay conjectures that much of what his wife reads she may not understand. Yet the couple loves one another... each person according to his own capacity. Mrs. Ramsay is obviously her husband's fan, the one who bolsters him and protects and nurtures him...and the reader is privy to all her thoughts accordingly. There is a glimmer, too, of her disappointment in him, his self-centeredness and his sole reliance on logic.
Age (a mechanism employed to show the passage of time) is also a theme in "To the Lighthouse". Mrs. Ramsay was a beauty, is yet considered a beauty despite her age. Her aging husband, however, is still considered handsome and attracts and welcomes female attention...female flattery. This is appropriate for a man; a woman may gain admiration for her skills and her looks but it would be inappropriate to call attention to herself.
The world of children, weather, guests and their idiosyncrasies, Mrs. Ramsay's desire that things remain the same thus assuring her children never having to grow up to face life's problems, takes a huge leap and the reader is propelled from the previous protected cocoon into "real life".
Mrs. Ramsay dies, son Andrew perishes in World War I, her daughter Prue is escorted down the aisle by her father, and one year later dies giving birth. Yet, the author is ingenious about holding fast to the internal world of the characters, with only an occasional external utterance.
Everything has changed. Without the foundational piece, the cement that holds the household and extended household together, the summer place is abandoned, dusty, rotting, decrepit, unattended. No one has vacationed there for 10 years. Subsequently, orders are generated to a former household staff member to re-open the house for a smaller onslaught of visitors.
Nothing is the same without Mrs. Ramsay. She is mourned, especially by Lily Briscoe. Only three of the Ramsay children have accompanied their father to the summer retreat. He is still the bully that he was in their childhood. Their world still operates according to his moods, whims and orders. James and Cam, now 16 and 17, are morose and it always seems as if they are waiting for the "other shoe to drop". Nothing must go awry or their aged father will be irritated and critical.
Mr. Ramsay's preoccupation is still with himself and it is the guests' duty to pity him, fawn over him and focus their attention on the pain dealt him. Lily Briscoe refuses to do this (she is adamant that marriage, as espoused by Mrs. Ramsey as a must, is not necessarily so). She braces herself to deliberately focus her efforts on her art and its composition. She seeks balance in a painting that just doesn't seem to come together. This could be deemed symbolic of a search for balance in her own life and a challenge to attain some personal resolution to her grief over
Mrs. Ramsay's death.
"To a Lighthouse" is a masterpiece; it succeeds as a group and character portrait While a difficult "read", the story, the plot, the character definition, and the passage of time...largely accomplished through internal dialogue... is ingenious!
Book Review: The Interconnectedness of All Things
Summary: 5 Stars
Many critics, teachers and readers consider To the Lighthouse to be Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. To the Lighthouse was published in 1927 and its structure is unique, although it does contain elements of the Victorian. Woolf wrote this novel in only one year and did very little rewriting. Both subtle and sharp, the ease with which the book was written is apparent in the flow of both its narrative and its prose. The novel was written during one of the brief peaceful and happy times in Woolf's life. (In 1895, after her mother's death, Woolf became almost continuously depressed and suffered a series of nervous breakdowns, culminating in her suicide by drowning in 1941.)To the Lighthouse, like Woolf's previous novel, Jacob's Room, is a somewhat disjointed story, possessing numerous characters, points-of-view and conflicts. The overlapping and separation of the characters and their stories seems to result from both intention and oversight and is a product of what Woolf referred to as "all characters boiled down," and the "break of unity in my design."
The story centers around the summer vacation to the Isle of Skye of the Ramsey family, a family Woolf admitted was very much like her own. In fact, Woolf said that writing To the Lighthouse helped her "rub out" the obsessive memory of her own mother. Mrs. Ramsey, like Woolf's own mother, is a woman of decidedly Victorian ideals, choosing to focus on her home, her marriage and her family.
Interacting with Mrs. Ramsey is the character most representative of Woolf, herself, Lily Briscoe, a young girl who is staying in the same beachouse as the Ramseys. Unmarried, Lily draws both disapproval and sympathy from Mrs. Ramsey who firmly believes that "an unmarried woman has missed the best of life."
Mrs. Ramsey and Lily represent the conflict between the Victorian and the Edwardian eras, the age of the woman in the home and the advent of the woman in the workplace. An intelligent young woman, as well as a sensitive and talented artist, Lily is very aware of Mrs. Ramsey's disapproval.
The role of art in the novel deals primarily with Post-Impressionism and the attempt to freeze reality, not on paper or on canvas, but in the mind, and then to paint the very equivalent of this reality. In many ways, To the Lighthouse resembles a painting because of its three distinct images of reality: the summer, the return and the seven years in between.
Woolf was not the only writer to "paint" her novels. In Place in Fiction, Eudora Welty writes of "painting and writing, always the closest two of the 'sister arts.'" Throughout the novel, Lily works on one painting and cannot seem to "connect the mass on the right hand with that on the left...But the danger was that by doing that the unity of the whole might be broken." The need for connection in the painting is much like the need for connection in the narrative. And Lily and Mrs. Ramsey both serve to fulfill the role as unifier.
One of the most startling moments of unification occurs as Mrs. Ramsey is staring at a bowl of fruit she has placed in the middle of the table during a dinner party. Because of her extreme attention to detail, Mrs. Ramsey focuses on the bowl throughout the dinner. She particularly notices the perfection of the arrangement while also fearing its imminent destruction as she catches another guest looking at the fruit, no doubt desirous of it. Mrs. Ramsey thinks, "That was his way of looking, different from her. But looking together united them."
Even when not physically present in the story, Mrs. Ramsey continues to exert a strong influence. At the end of the novel, Mr. Ramsey finally takes his two youngest children, James and Cam, to the lighthouse. Both children have changed considerably from the time of their first vacation; Mrs. Ramsey's absence has required that they develop a new independence, yet she was their only tie to their father, the typically restrained and uninvolved Victorian husband.
The children must, however, incorporate the influence of both of their parents on their journey to the lighthouse, a journey that is both literal and figurative. From shore, Lily watches them as she paints their journey, recalling Mrs. Ramsey with both annoyance and love. Lily, like Woolf, herself, has finally come to terms with the connection of all things, the completion of a painting as well as the completion of a journey.
To the Lighthouse is a quiet, reflective and meditative novel and one of the first to display Woolf's unique Impressionistic stream-of-consciousness style.
Book Review: Life Stand Still Here...
Summary: 5 Stars
Each sentence in To the Lighthouse is so alive that, like toys at night in a haunted room, they wake up, change into strange things and go still again. The illusion is part due to its layering and weave - dense as poetry, light as air, not a word accidental. And part due to the structure of the novel, its great invisible solidity fixed under imagery and detail moving over it like transparent veils. Its parts are elemental: water, air, sunlight, seaweed - frilled strips pinned to the attic walls, or later trailing around Cam's fingers in the water when the sails fill. Part of the pleasure in reading To the Lighthouse is the revelation of its interlocking structure, how the macro-structure of the novel is reflected everywhere on the micro-scale. An example: the three sections of the novel and their pace are seen again in the trajectory of the sailboat across the bay in the final section, where the wind takes it, then dies down, then moves again.
The passages describing Lily Briscoe at work on her paintings seem to reflect a kind of rapture in which Woolf must have written this novel: "...with all her faculties in a trance, frozen over superficially but moving underneath with extreme speed." "It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to tears..." And "She was not inventing; she was only trying to smooth out something she had been given years ago folded up; something she had seen." But some of them describe the novel itself, which has all the feel of a ghost story: "It was to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses."
In fact, much of the novel - like the light and dark of the lighthouse beacon, or waves crashing in and back out - works in a balanced opposition: Crowdedness and the lack of privacy juxtaposed against the condition of utter aloneness. The bond between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay counterbalanced with their awareness of what they've cost one another. The collusion of the children, their secretiveness and wildness, but then their docility and vulnerability. Trapped thoughts that can't be told, but are then understood without saying, as the same reflection - like quantum tunneling - might wind from one point of view to the mind of a different character.
In part II the sound of bombs falling in the distance is described as "the measured blows of hammers on felt." There are lines like that, which come in so lightly, but their impact on landing is powerful: the novel itself explodes in your heart like a silent H-bomb. One example is the last line in paragraph #3 in chapter XII of part 3, which I won't give away. (And don't sneak ahead: it won't mean anything unless you've arrived there in the right order!) And this one about James, belonging as he does to the unspecified "great clan" mentioned on page one: "He was so pleased that he was not going to let anyone share a grain of his pleasure. His father had praised him. They must think that he was perfectly indifferent. But you've got it now, Cam thought." Many of the details in To the Lighthouse you might not even notice on first read, but when you go back they surprise you. This is part of the secret of the novel's geode-like quality, where you never guess what's contained inside it until you've seen the whole thing and it opens for you, then you see it. Another Amazon reviewer was right in saying this: you have to read it twice.
Although a short novel, To the Lighthouse contains so many themes: vision and seeing, nature at odds with human life, time and its nonlinear movement, community and individual isolation. It's about what Mr. Ramsay knew: how "...our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness" and what James knew: "That loneliness which for both of them was the truth about things." It's about things you want, and do or do not get: whether you want to go to the lighthouse, or whether you don't want to go; whether anyone will get to Sorley, the lighthouse keeper, with tobacco and newspapers, or whether he'll remain isolated out there; whether Lily will capture what she sees on her canvas; whether Paul Rayley will find Minta's lost brooch. What Mrs. Ramsay wished for was the impossible. It was guessed by Lily Briscoe: "Life stand still here."
Book Review: Words and more words, so take your time.
Summary: 4 Stars
Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse" (pub. 1927) has some similarities to her previous work, "Mrs. Dalloway" (pub. 1925). The latter covers just one day in the life of Mrs. Dalloway; in the former, the first 127 pages of 209 pages cover just one day in the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. A dinner party at the end of the day has an important place in both of the novels as well as in the lives of Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay. Aside from those similarities, the overwhelming one is the stream of consciousness writing style that Woolf adopted in "Mrs. Dalloway" and carried over into "To the Lighthouse." I can't remember the applicable quote but the sense of it is "There are certainly a lot of words there." Words fall on words as grains of sand in an hourglass fall on to the pile of sand at the bottom of the glass - words, words, words, etc. Impressions that might well have been only momentary feelings of a character are turned into paragraphs and even pages of words.That isn't all bad. If you like the sounds that words make (some of the passages really should be read aloud) or if you like the images that can be invoked, there are some enchanting passages in "To the Lighthouse." At times, however, there seems to be just endless words - I had to force myself not to resort to skimming in order to get the story being told. Looking for the story is, to some degree, pointless because Woolf shows no interest in a definite beginning or ending - she ends the work without ending the story. Perhaps one should say that in this work it really is the journey and not the starting and ending points that is the reason for reading. At times, Woolf's words have a certain madness about them. Some say her own madness affected her writing, some say not. I tend to agree with the former - she herself indicated a certain fondness for the imagery which came to her during her "mad" periods. Even though she did not write during those periods, she may well have stored away images to evoke later in her writing just as one can store away vivid images received in dreams.
Woolf succeeds in making her characters live in this book, perhaps because Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are closely modeled on her own parents. One has to remember, though, that they are seen through the eyes of an impressionable daughter and that they died before Woolf developed an adult relationship with them - she was only 13 when her mother died and just 22 when her father died. Perhaps the ambivalent reactions of the character, Lily, in the story mirror Woolf's own impressions of her parents. Her characters have no constant viewpoint, just as real people grow cold and warm on different issues and on their relationships with other people in their lives. They can both detest and love some other person in the course of a day or even in the course of an hour or a minute, having both lovable and irksome, even maddening characteristics. One of the most interesting "characters" in the story is the house which they rent for each summer. The house is on a beach and has all the problems and frailties of beach houses of the early 1900's. The Woolfs were of the British intelligentsia and, although certainly not wealthy, could afford to have a cook and servants. One might think Woolf would ignore the presence of these menials, as is often the case for such writers, but she doesn't and her treatment of them adds some depth to the story of the house and the times.
The most appealing character, to me, is Mrs. Ramsay. She is a compulsive caretaker who guards her husband's and children's tender feelings from hurt. Something like a female Don Quixote, she is a guardian of the lonely and shy, even when they don't want a guardian. Like most of the people who knew her, I came to have an affection for Mrs. Ramsay.
If you like history and science writing and have not developed a fondness for writing such as that of Jane Austen, you may not have the patience to enjoy this work. If you do like Austen and/or if you like poetry, you may very well enjoy reading "To the Lighthouse." Even better might be the audio version - just close your eyes and listen to the sound pictures as Woolf flits about the room.
Book Review: Woolf's "Lighthouse:" Persistence Pays
Summary: 4 Stars
Those who come to Virginia Woolf for the first time do not know quite what to make of her style. Most authors structure their novels in the traditional rising action, climax, falling action manner. A linear line of plot is most often the key to their works. In Woolf's novels, she eschews such straight line plotting in favor of a weirdly blended kaleidoscopic view that makes relentless use of both a stream of consciousness narrator and interior monologues. In TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, Woolf tells the tale of a married couple, the Ramsays, who lived in England just before the First World War. The Ramsays are the prototypical Victorian family replete with servants, a summer beach house, eight children, and a keen awareness of the fragility of life. What happens to them is neither earth shaking nor memorable. What happens within them is of far greater consequence. As Woolf focuses on each character, she presents a highly subjective view of the internal thought processes of that character. Each thought is like a ripple caused by a stone thrown into a still pool. Woolf allows her character to meander not only spatially (from point to point) but also chronologically. Events are described as if they were occurring within the literal present, but most often the events are from the past merging into the future. Thus, the plot ripple pool is constantly crosscutting each other with events removed from each other both in space and in time. It is no wonder, then, that readers unfamiliar with such an expanding and contracting temporal flux are confused. Woolf challenges her readers to involve themselves in a manner that requires a dedication to reading not often found in more traditionally structured novels.As one reads from section to section (there are three: The Window, Time Passes, and The Lighthouse), one becomes aware that the novel's primary symbols--the lighthouse, Lily's painting, the sea, and the internalized thought processes of Mrs. Ramsay--function in a manner that does not become clear until after one has read considerably into this admittedly puzzling work. The initial clue lies within the title of the book: "To the Lighthouse." Thus, the lighthouse is seen both as a starting point in a journey (its radiating beacon of light lies close to the Ramsay's summer home) and a destination in that the youngest of the Ramsays, James, wants to go there, but it takes him ten years to do so. Lily is Lily Briscoe, a close friend of the Ramsays who seems to have difficulty painting a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay, no great surprise there since that portrait points not so much to Mrs. Ramsay as it does to an abiding life-long interest of Virginia Woolf herself: the desire to impose order and form on a universe that is inherently chaotic. It is crucial to note that Lily succeeds only at the very end of the novel when Mrs. Ramsay has long been dead, thus emphasizing the ephemeral nature of her task. Mrs. Ramsay's personality also is a barometer of Woolf's belief that the post Great War society of England would forevermore be seen as formless as Mrs. Ramsay's meandering thoughts. The first section "The Window" forms the bulk of the book. It is here that Woolf depicts a rather ordinary family who collectively symbolizes the inability of individuals to leave an abiding footprint on the shifting sands of time. In the second part "Time Passes," time does indeed pass, ten years worth. The home of the Ramsays falls into decay that requires the re-entry of the surviving family members to invigorate it and themselves in the final section "The Lighthouse." Lily's painting of the now deceased Mrs. Ramsay allows Virginia Woolf to claim even a minor victory in the ultimately losing battle against cultural entropy.
I suspect that the major reason that most readers have with this book lies in their immediate recognition that they have to pay a great deal of attention to psychological free associating. As the characters' thoughts bounce off each other both temporarily and spatially, so must those of the readers, a most imposing task. But for those with persistence and an eye for the nontraditional in plotting, the effort is usually worth it.