Moments of Being (To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf)

Name: Frankingsteins

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Product:	To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Date:	18/07/07 (203 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: An interesting study of psychology and art.

Disadvantages: Takes some perseverance, and not the most riveting plot.

Virginia Woolf’s most daring expression of modernism continued her experiments in finding a distinctly female voice and writing style to stand against the male-dominated literary canon. Like ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ before it, which is more well known and less cerebral, the book is written entirely in a stream-of-consciousness style, the long-winded sentences striving to evoke each character’s thought process as their minds flit from one topic to another, and back and forth through their lives.

Despite being her preferred means to find the feminine voice, contrasting against more usual rigid sentence structures she saw as typical of male phallic domination, the technique was largely inspired by Irish author James Joyce, whose demanding final chapter of ‘Ulysses’ is a huge un-punctuated sentence of around forty pages, chronicling the mental process of Leopold Bloom’s adulterous wife as she drifts off to sleep, masturbates, and comes onto her period. It’s a highly creative and revealing insight into a woman’s mind that is, of course, written by a man. ‘To the Lighthouse’ is similarly a celebration of the feminine against male oppression, as well as a very effective and chilling observation of the generation gap carved by the First World War, particularly in the changing attitudes of women.

Woolf’s novel is divided into three uneven sections all taking place on the Isle of Skye, the favoured holiday destination for the Ramsays and their middle-class friends, over a period of ten years. The author’s own preferred analysis of the structure was to imagine an ‘H’ shape, with the first part of the novel (occurring in 1910) linked to the third (in 1920) by the smaller and radically different central section, forming the horizontal connection of the H. Being a sucker for a clever structure, this was what appealed to me the most about Woolf’s novel, as the clipped, rushed and deeply impersonal central passage is just about as different to the sprawling interior monologues that dominate the bulk of the book. Woolf’s intention was to represent a world devoid of human influence as the holiday retreat is left to decay while a great war is being fought overseas, and the narration’s flippant and detached descriptions of the deaths of major characters from the first part are quite shocking in their unsympathetic finality. Once things cool down and the surviving Ramsays and friends return to the island, it’s clear that the world has radically changed.

‘To the Lighthouse’ is a demanding work of fiction, but far from the neoclassical pomp of ‘Ulysses,’ and its family drama and deeply personalised narratives should appeal to anyone who survived through ‘Mrs. Dalloway.’ Both novels disregard the normal conventions of time in stretching single moments over pages and pages of reactions, and there’s a fair amount of chaos in a novel whose seventeenth chapter, the pivotal dinner scene, lasts for around a quarter of the book. The main focus is on the conflicting attitudes of the characters and their feelings towards each other, demonstrated memorably in the first few pages when the young James Ramsay is told by his father that they cannot visit the nearby lighthouse due to the probability of bad weather, and the child’s thoughts instantly turn to vicious murder. It is similarly revealing to see the downtrodden Mrs. Ramsay living a servile life under the dominance of her husband, but not having the ability to see this as a problem. Her opposite comes in the form of the artistic Lily Briscoe, who spends her time on the island painting Mrs. Ramsay’s portrait despite repeated criticism from Charles Tansley that ‘women can’t paint, women can’t write.’ Her timidity aside, it’s clear that Lily is the closest thing to a representation of Woolf herself in this novel, the female artist struggling in a male world with a knowledge that the time is right for change.

If I’ve favoured the book’s structure and messages over detailing its plot, it’s because there’s very little plot to speak of in Woolf’s story, which she preferred to label an ‘elegy’ for wont of a more appropriate term. The Ramsay children repeatedly ask to be taken to the lighthouse, and are repeatedly denied this by their father, while Mrs. Ramsay takes care of the meal and tries to re-live her youth by match-making a couple of young friends. While the first part of the elegy, sub-titled ‘The Window,’ is dominated chiefly by Mrs. Ramsay and her old fashioned view of a world facing imminent change, the third, definitively called ‘The Lighthouse,’ belongs to Lily Briscoe as she finishes her portrait. This section finally sees the gulf between Mr. Ramsay and his adult children narrowed as they set about on their long-awaited journey, while Lily contends with the ghosts and demons in her own mind to complete her work.

This is not a novel that would translate well to film, and I’m surprised to see that this has indeed been attempted. In terms of a script adaptation, the majority of dialogue is secondary to the characters’ thoughts revealed in the narration, and often either contradictory to their true feelings or simply inconsequential and not revealing of very much at all, meaning that without a significant re-write, an authentic film version would need to freeze frame on a character’s troubled expression for five minutes while they provide a voice-over. It’s an interesting observation of the difference between what people say and what people think, and although it all stems from Woolf’s ideas of what men and women are like, the book’s admitted semi-autobiographical basis indicates that she probably has a fair grasp of what she’s doing.

As a major work of modernist literature still read and studied today, Woolf’s novel (or elegy) is an effective analysis of the emergence of women’s rights and independence facilitated by the Great War, and an interesting enough statement of her artistic ideals through Lily, such as her arbitrary rearrangement of scenery into a form that looks more pleasing as opposed to a steadfast reproduction of ‘the truth,’ that it can be enjoyed by readers who aren’t quite so eager to delve into Woolf’s essays. Just like in the earlier ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ the long, multi-comma’d sentences take some time getting used to, much like those in my reviews that I’m quite aware of, and the focus on middle class characters is sure to annoy some idiots who feel Virginia Woolf should have tried instead to write intimately about a type of people she had less familiarity with. I was surprised how much I enjoyed this book, having struggled through ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ a year earlier, but the creative structure and historical significance lead to me recommending this book to anyone interested in experimental fiction, even eighty years after its original publication.

Summary: Virginia Woolf's fifth novel (1927).