Notes on the modern period - 22 - Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse"

Of the many possible approaches to discussing Woolf’s novels, some concern her portrayal of men and women, her vision of “moments of being,” her ways of rendering characters’ consciousness, and her understanding of how art infuses and illuminates lives. In my earlier posts on modern fiction, I have emphasized a sort of gigantism both of modern novelists’ ambitions and of their created characters’ selves, in the face of modernity’s paradoxical combination of enormous growth and encompassing disillusionment, due in part to the Great War’s millions of lives lost. That sense of the modern novel as a process of “magnification” is evident in Woolf’s work; I’ll be focusing my comments here on her most developed novel after Mrs. Dalloway (1925): the great To the Lighthouse, published in 1927 (her fine 1931 novel, The Waves, resonates with similar themes though it is perhaps less realized “as a novel” than the earlier two). In many respects, both of these later novels are acts of mourning and, in a sense, homages to her late parents in the 1927 novel and to her late brother in The Waves.

To the Lighthouse is dominated by three characters – Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. There are many subordinate characters (the Ramsay children, friends of the family, etc.), but the moments of deepest vision and richest human contact involve those three characters in one way or another. Both women are artists, Lily literally and Mrs. Ramsay in terms of her shaping of the human relations around her and also her imaginative sensitivity and receptivity. Both characters are, in different ways, attuned to the neediness of Mr. Ramsay and the other male characters, though Lily explicitly rejects the “angel in the house” role of bolstering and soothing the male ego and compensating for instances of male sterility (for example, Charles Tansley’s insecure and compensating ego). Mrs. Ramsay, in contrast, triumphs in precisely those activities, certainly in protecting the bright but poverty-stricken Charles and particularly with regard to her husband, Mr. Ramsay, but Mrs. Ramsay does so as part of the larger project of nurturing all the humans connected to her, male and female alike, so that falsifying Victorian sexual politics seem to have loosed its grip on her. The novel's great example of her project is her family dinner, exactly at the center of the novel, where boeuf en daub is served and each member and guest is made to feel part of the living continuum of human relations she “orchestrates.”

Central – and thrilling – in this novel, however, is Mrs. Ramsay’s imaginative self-consciousness and self-accounting; these reveries loom and envelop the first half of the novel, a wonderful instance of Woolf’s magnifying a character’s consciousness into a “giant in time.” Images of death repeatedly register in her consciousness as do images of living possibility (along with those of thwarting chaos and failures to communicate). The imagery which embodies these perceptions shoot through her magnified consciousness, and they are additionally remarkable for being unwittingly shared by Lily, the also self-searching summer guest who is painting a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay.

This shared imagery within the enveloping consciousness of each character establishes an unconscious connection among Woolf’s main characters, often independent of class, gender, or role: an “underground” structure of shared humanity, which is in part Woolf’s modernist response to the pervasiveness of alienation and death in the period.  For example, there are the waves Mrs. Ramsay hears, which “like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.” Soon Lily sees “the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves…[where] behind the great black rock, almost every evening spurted irregularly, so that one had to watch for it and it was a delight when it came, a fountain of white water.” Later, when Mr. Ramsay stands there demanding “sympathy,” Mrs. Ramsay “seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her [knitting] again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself.” Later still Mrs. Ramsay senses “dully, ominously, a wave fall, how it came to this” exhaustion she now feels; this occurs just before Lily sees the family before her “like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.”

This shared imagery helps to unify the novel’s unfolding structure of consciousness, or rather its process by which each character's consciousness is unfurled and displayed in all its rich verbal tapestry. (As you can see from the clash of terms, temporal and spatial dimensions face off against each other in this novel, so that in the second part of the novel, images of time’s action devastate both character and plot.) The culmination of the imagery woven through the novel’s first hundred and twenty pages occurs when Lily attempts to complete the portrait, she searches for some representation of Mrs. Ramsay’s “unity,” her capacity to compose all their lives, and she paints a dark “triangular purple shape” to balance the composition. This image is echoed at the end of the evening, when Mrs. Ramsay wants finally “to be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.” Then she looks out at the lighthouse, responsive to the light from it, the plan to visit it, the living promise of the visit.

The novel’s imagery, then, takes up entire lives – of Mrs. Ramsay and all who surround her – and helps to transform them into a beautifully unified composition. Of course, not only the imagery works in this way, for the internal monologues which bear the images within them are themselves flowing and brilliant constructs, great envelopes of self-critical awareness, as we’ve seen. (Woolf portrays Mr. Ramsay himself as a scathingly self-critical consciousness; the noted philosopher struggles against the failure of reason to account for existence. The results are his piteousness and his bitterness and even his refusal to take his son James to the Lighthouse the next morning.)

Of course, the visit does not occur that morning. In fact, the novel’s first part – “The Window,” with its domestic vantage point – gives way to the short, abrupt “Time Passes,” which in twenty pages chronicles the abandonment of the summer house in the following years. The sentences here contain clipped, abrupt phrases of turbulence and grief interspersed with terse, bracketed announcements of death [Mrs. Ramsay’s, their newly married daughter Prue’s, and in World War I, their son Andrew’s]. Time becomes a ruthless character in this second part of the novel; it is as if the richly composed first part of the novel were a fending off of time and death, “magnified,” shot through with premonition, yet a beautifully constructed oasis nonetheless.

“The Lighthouse,” the seventy-page third and final part of the novel, narrates the return of what remains of the family to the summer house, and it focuses on Lily Briscoe’s effort to confront the loss of Mrs. Ramsay and the grip death has on them all. She realizes both that sympathy might remedy their grief and that life and art, too, are nakedly vulnerable to the “waves,” to the reality of death. By the end of the novel, Mr. Ramsay, too, faces that vulnerability to an empty lonely universe. And on the sailboat finally nearing the lighthouse, he and his son James and his daughter Cam witness the fisherman’s son holding up a caught fish, mutilated and alive. Each character in this section is “extraordinarily exposed” to reality, and each faces how both violence and beauty can flash forth from ordinary experience. Here is Lily’s vision by the end of the novel: “to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy.” The huge infusion of imaginative consciousness achieved by Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is a struggling yet beautifully composed and partly sacramental response of modern art to the modern period’s terrible disclosure that the world of things, like the world of people, is potentially a dead world. Here's a link to the novel: To the Lighthouse (and to The Waves).
 

Notes on the modern period - 21 - Woolf and Bloomsbury

Virginia Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a respected intellectual in the last decades of the Victorian era, and it is significant for her development that this late Victorian patriarch opened his considerable library to her without restriction. (Yet her extensive reading there did not prevent her from believing that she was yet uneducated – a feeling she give to Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway.) Intellectually, the ‘father’ who influenced her development most was Walter Pater (incidentally, Pater’s sister Clara was Woolf’s first tutor in Greek and Latin, suggesting how interconnected the community of intellectuals was – and perhaps remains – in English life). The notion of “moments of being,” central to Pater’s thought about the nature of consciousness and art, remained important to Woolf throughout her life, as a conception of aesthetic experience and of how the stream of experience attains its potential fullness and intensity. (See my earlier post on Walter Pater.)

In “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf chronicles her earliest experience of such “moments:” She begins with the image of lying in her nursery bed and listening in a sort of “rapture” to the “waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind.” Soon her account of these intense “moments of being” extends to the experience of violation and death. One of “these sudden shocks” involved the child abuse she suffered at the hands of her cousin Gerald (“His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking it….This seems to show that a feeling about certain parts of the body…must be instinctive. I proves the Virginia Stephen was not born on the 25th January 1882, but was born many thousands of years ago; and had from the very first to encounter instincts already acquired by thousands of ancestresses in the past”).

“These exceptional moments [occasioned particularly by contact with death] brought with them a peculiar horror and a physical collapse.” Yet, she writes, the “shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it…; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole.” Her “philosophy” as a writer is “that behind the cotton wool [of daily life] is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are all parts of the work of art.” An extraordinarily communicative being survives the traumatic “shocks” and is stirred by them to create a vision of wholeness and connection, which recognizes the deep patterns below the false boundaries on the surface of life with its “cotton wool” of insulated egos and habitual behavior.

After the death of her father in 1904 and a mental collapse which followed, she and her sister, Vanessa, moved from their darkly Victorian parental home to a well-lit house in Bloomsbury square, near the British Museum at the time, and it was here that a group of friends dedicated to subverting and transcending those ‘false boundaries.’ The Bloomsbury group formed around the sisters and their charismatic brother Theo, who brought his friends down from Cambridge. In 1906, he died of typhoid fever on a trip with his sisters to Greece, the second death within two years of a beloved family member. The agonized human struggles of the Stephen family and, generally, of the Bloomsbury friends only deepened their faith in one another. Guided from the start by the ideals of friendship and personal affection voiced by the Cambridge dons G. E. Moore and G. L. Dickenson, the Bloomsbury circle came to believe in a sort of liberal aristocracy made up of people like themselves, comprised that is – to quote E. M. Forster – of “the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky,” i.e., the courageous (famously, he wrote that he would rather die for his friend than for his country). True civilization, Forster and his friends believed, existed only within the cracks in the edifices of power, which needed liberal reform but not revolutionary abolition.

That attitude can be found in the influential thought of the major members of the Bloomsbury circle, beyond the gifted novelist Forster – for example, the economist J. M. Keynes (who helped to found the modern field of economics) and the brilliant art critic Roger Fry (who initiated the English-speaking world into the experience of post-impressionist art), the preeminent English post-impressionist artist Duncan Grant, and several other highly influential English intellectuals. (Acquaintances included the philosopher Bertrand Russell (who wrote Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead, invited Wittgenstein to Cambridge, and later became a stalwart anti-nuclear leader in the “ban the bomb” movement.)

Yet Bloomsbury was hardly a purely cerebral group of friends. The art critic Clive Bell fell in love with the Stephen sisters and particularly Vanessa, whom he married (a few days after her brother Thoby’s death). The brilliant Leonard Woolf (who helped to found the modern Labor Party) fell in love with and married Virginia, whom he saw as beautiful and demur on the outside, showing great intelligence in her eyes – on the inside, satirically witty and hypercritical. Lytton Strachey, the bohemian homosexual writer and acerbically realistic biographer, opened the floodgate of conversation about sex when, in 1910, he pointed to a white stain on Vanessa’s dress and said matter-of-factly: “Semen.” (It was not for nothing that D. H. Lawrence was an acquaintance – however critical and questioning – of several members of Bloomsbury, Forster above all.)

This post presents more background than I’d intended to offer, for I’d like to locate some of the crucial “moments of being” created in Virginia Woolf’s novels – I’ll try to do so in my next post. (By the way, you can read "A Sketch of the Past" and a good selection of essays and novel excerpts in The Virginia Woolf Reader.)

Notes on the modern period - 20 - Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

In my twenties, I found Woolf too ensconced in her class for her gifts to be fully accessible, though it was clear to me that those gifts were extraordinary – the sensitivity to how consciousness worked and the attunement to how language can evoke its rhythms and intensities. Then at a certain point in my life, there she was! I began to love Woolf’s novels for their depth of understanding and their wonderful language and structure. My writing, in its odd and lesser way, began to resonate with the appreciation of her work, and this was partly due to my undertaking at the age of forty to write the first of my novels; that will do it for one. The novel I began to draft then has finally become my new novella, Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable.

In any case, here I want to try to suggest the basis of my admiration for Woolf. The novel of hers which I have read and taught most often is Mrs. Dalloway. Particularly in the various versions of my course on modernism, that work powerfully (and usefully) evokes several crucial concerns of the modern period: the nature of the stream of consciousness, the shock of the First World War, and the issue of “moments” of intense experience, of “being.” Woolf’s use of limited omniscience to focus, first, on the stream of Clarissa Dalloway’s consciousness renders the great range of her receptivity to existence – her sensitivity to the presence of death (evoked by the repetition of the Shakespearean song “Fear no more the heat of the sun” or by Big Ben tolling the hour, etc.) as well as her attunement to the flux and flow of life: “In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.” This is not Leopold Bloom’s Joycean free associative stream of consciousness, for Woolf has selected and rhythmically arrayed these phrases and perceptions (and often she uses other distancing controls, locutions like “one would think” employing the conditional and the impersonal pronoun), yet her characterization of Clarissa Dalloway does capture an affirmation akin to Bloom’s – a lyric upwelling of Clarissa’s sense of life as she simultaneously prepares to give her upper-class party and simultaneously resonates with memory, with her alertness to the proximity of death, and with the possibility of vivid, vital life.

“This moment in June” can stand for the primacy of momentaneous experience in this 1925 novel’s vision of modern existence. She has inherited Pater’s pre-modern aesthetic of the vital, hallowed “moment” and ushered it into modernity. Her great tragicomic novel renders the unfolding of intense moments of life and of death, of passion and of loss, as they struggle to endure after the Great War in the face of cultural mourning for death’s massive presence in “one’s” consciousness. Clarissa Dalloway’s “double” in this beautifully double-plotted novel is Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War. Septimus’ capacity to respond "normally," "to feel," has been exhausted – burned out of him – by the horror he has witnessed, above all by the death of a friend, Evans, a soldier blown to bits before his eyes. As a result, Smith lacks a protective layer insulating him from the forces and voices around him which would “scrape and rasp his spine.” Nevertheless, he responds to the interconnectedness of life, to the canopy of trees “quickened” to life or to the sounds of birds, which in his painfully distorted case chatter on in Greek. His struggling existence parallels Clarissa’s, often in shared imagery and language: her love of the canopy of trees at her childhood home, her terror at the forces which scrape and rasp her spine, or her incantation – like his – of “Fear no more.”

Septimus Smith is driven to suicide by his obtuse psychiatrists, who in the early 1920s make him feel that he is a freak who must be locked away for his failure to maintain “a sense of proportion.” Woolf’s censure of these doctors may well stem from her own experiences of their treatments, but more deeply, her horror at their inability to understand how to mourn, how to face tragic loss, is a signal feature of her modernist vision; it is conveyed in a quasi-omniscient sequence almost exactly in the middle of the novel: “But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged – in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London.” Psychiatry’s occupation of the psyche becomes linked to Imperialism’s conquests. “Conversion is her name, and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace.” Again, in an echo between the double plots, Clarissa responds as follows to the efforts of a Dickensian-named, born-again Miss Kilman to convert her daughter: “Had [Clarissa] ever tried to convert any one herself? Did she not wish everybody merely to be themselves?...[L]ove and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul.”

In the climax of the novel, as Clarissa is made to hear about the suicide of the psychiatrist’s patient, she has a series of epiphanies. There is the moment of revelation when Sally Seton arrives at the party; when they were young women, she had given Clarissa the passionate “gift” of a kiss, and here she was now, “older, happier, less lovely,” talking about her “five enormous boys.” Earlier there had been the arrival of Peter Walsh, the man who had been passionate toward her in youth, and there is her realization that he is now, in his mid-fifties, perturbed and injured by life. Most important for Clarissa, though, is her hearing of Septimus throwing himself to his death: “her body went through it first…Up had flashed the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it….He had flung it away. They went on living…they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate.”

In exploring what death communicates, Woolf is writing from the center of modernist vision. “There was an embrace in death” of all that had been negated by the “sense of proportion,” the “converted” self, and a moribund society. Septimus “made her feel the beauty; he made her feel the fun,” for his death stirred in her 'sympathetic imagination' (which is her "gift") all of the silenced possibilities for meaning obliterated by the spiritual death in Clarissa’s world: “the impossibility of reaching the center” – the “closeness” and “rapture.” Given the enormity of World War deaths, of what seemed the death throes of a civilization, all humans struggled to see how death could be understood beyond the chaos, bitter emptiness, and fear (“Fear no more the heat of the sun / Nor the furious winter’s rages”). Woolf’s novel shows us that the challenge of modernity is to imagine how death can function as a portal through which transfiguring knowledge can speak – how it can function as the sign of an autonomous new sense of being, bridging the torrent of death.

How Woolf imagines these possibilities needs more explanation than I’ve offered here, and in my next post I’ll try further to sketch her vision in the context of her ideas and of her other novels. Here's a link to the novel about Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith: Mrs Dalloway.