"To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf

                                                                         

The 1927 publication of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse was a landmark for both the author and the development of the novel in England. Usually regarded as her finest achievement, it won her the Prix Femina the following year, and gained her a reputation as one of Britain's most important living authors. Not only was it a critical success, it was popular too, selling in large quantities to a readership that encompassed a broad spectrum of social classes. Since Woolf's death in 1941, To the Lighthouse has risen in importance as a focus of criticism concerning issues of gender, empire, and class. Along with James Joyce's Ulysses, it continues to be heralded as a milestone in literary technique.

The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.

Immediately we can see that subjective experience and perspective are key elements of Woolf’s novel. Mr Ramsay sees the world very differently from his wife. However, the two are not so different as they may first appear. For instance, Mr Ramsay seems to embody the male, patriarchal, linear, and teleological view of the world which nineteenth-century novels had often adopted (where we find out who the murderer was, the man and woman get together, and all loose ends are satisfactorily tied up by the final page): he sees ‘thought’ as something to be understood in a linear fashion, like working through the alphabet from A to Z (there is an autobiographical suggestion here, too, since Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, who was the model for Mr Ramsay, was the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, now the ODNB). He also spends part of the early section of the novel reciting Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigad’, which is revealing because this is a Victorian poem by the pre-eminent Victorian poet (Tennyson was Poet Laureate for 42 years) but also because it is a poem about the action of charging, moving forward, attacking, progressing.

However, it is also ironic, because the ‘charge’ memorialised in Tennyson’s poem was a futile and self-destructive military action which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of men: the light brigade charged to their deaths. But the linear, progressive, masculine quality of Mr Ramsay’s reference to this poem is also undermined by the fact that he is constantly repeating the same phrase (tellingly, ‘Someone had blundered’), and is thus caught in a cyclical world of repetition and return which is at odds with the linearity he ostensibly embodies. Mr Ramsay’s best work also appears to be behind him, and he seems doomed to repeat the same ideas in his later work. He is caught in an ideology of teleological development but cannot develop to any precise ‘end’.

Similarly, Mrs Ramsay’s narrative may embody more ‘feminine’ qualities, with its emphasis on cycles, return, nurturing, and selflessness, but these same qualities also point up her complicity in the Victorian patriarchy embraced by her husband: she is a traditionalist who believes women should be married, wives should serve their husbands, and unmarried men and women should not stay out too late together. In other words, those looking for a clear distinction where Mr Ramsay = linearity and progress and Mrs Ramsay = cycles and returning are sure to be disappointed.