One could not say what one meant.
(Mrs Ramsay laments, p.23)
Who knows what we are, what we feel?
(Lily Briscoe ponders, p.159)
No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again…
(Lily ponders some more, p.165)
‘To The Lighthouse’ is Virginia Woolf’s fifth novel and generally considered to be her most popular. It is really quite brilliant. It showcases her phenomenal strengths as a writer and also her limitations. It is divided into three parts.
Part 1. The Window (105 pages)
Mr and Mrs Ramsay are the parents of no fewer than eight children who are, of course, in the approved upper middle-class way, all exceptional.
- Andrew (extraordinary gift for mathematics)
- Jasper (likes shooting birds)
- Roger
- James (aged 6)
- Prue (takes your breath away with her beauty)
- Rose (wonderfully gifted with her hands)
- Nancy
- Cam (aged 7)
The Ramsays take their children for their annual holiday to an island in the Hebrides (called Finlay? p.56), where every summer they rent the same ramshackle old house. The rent of the house (presumably for a week), along with the garden and tennis court, is precisely two-pence ha’penny, or about one modern penny (p.29).
It is a Victorian family so Mrs Ramsay has also brought servants – Mildred the cook, and two maids, one named Marie from Switzerland (her father is dying of cancer, poor thing, p.30), the other named Ellen. (Back at home, in Oxford (?) they have Kennedy the gardener who Mrs R routinely accuses of being lazy, p.63. You just can’t get the servants!)
Mr Ramsay tends to abrupt and unfeeling truth-telling, often upsetting their children. Mrs Ramsay (aged 50) is, of course, much more conciliatory and supportive. She is a great empathiser. She visits the sick and poor of their parish, helping them out, writing down in her notebook details of their wages and spending. She wants to go out to the lighthouse on an island in the bay purely to give gifts to the lighthouse keeper, Sorley, and his son who is afflicted with a tuberculous hip, lonely souls!
Mr Ramsay supports all this by being an academic philosopher, writing about ‘Subject and object and the nature of reality’ as his son, Andrew, sums it up (p.26).
Mrs Ramsay is, of course, too busy being a mother to read any of his books or the books given to her by the poets and authors of their acquaintance (‘Croom on the Mind and Bates on the Savage Customs of Polynesia’). Like Mrs Dalloway, she has a superficial smattering of culture but isn’t that bothered. But then she has something more important than education or culture; she has feeling.
She knew then — she knew without having learnt. Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. Her singleness of mind made her drop plumb like a stone, alight exact as a bird, gave her, naturally, this swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth which delighted, eased, sustained… (p.31)
The novel opens with Mrs Ramsay promising one of her children, James, aged 8, that they will go out to the lighthouse on the island, tomorrow. To her irritation, her husband immediately contradicts her, saying the wind is in the wrong direction.
Her husband is a successful academic and author, a philosopher, and has an irritating habit of attracting fan students, young men who come and stay with them and the rest of the family has to put up with. On this holiday it is a bony youth, a ‘conspicuous atheist’ named Charles Tansley. (For Mr Ramsay’s supposed ‘thoughts’, see ‘Intellectual shallowness’ below.) When Mr Ramsay says the wind is in the wrong direction, he is immediately backed up by Tansley to Mrs Ramsay’s irritation.
After breakfast one day Mrs Ramsay invites Charles to accompany her into the nearest village to do a few chores. They pass a Mr Augustus Carmichael, the old poet, lying out in the sun. In town she sees a one-armed man pasting up a big poster on a wall for a circus that’s coming to town. She finds out more about Tansley, that he’s one of nine children, his father was a lowly chemist, he paid his way from the age of 13, he’s dragged himself up by his shoestrings to become a junior academic and is now writing a book about the influence of someone on someone else. (Mrs Ramsay is a mother of a certain age; she’s not interested in the details, she doesn’t really listen to whatever Tansley’s dissertation is about, a point so important to Woolf she repeats it, on pages 16, 64 and 96).
They go to a house where Mrs Ramsay disappears upstairs, presumably to talk to the wife or mother, Elsie (?), maybe bed-bound. As they walk the street, a workman stops his digging to look at her. Tansley realises he’s half in love with her.
Cut back to the present where Mrs Ramsay is cheering James up by selecting pictures in the Army and Navy catalogue to cut out. The other children are playing cricket. She, Mrs R, is being painted by another guest, young Lily Briscoe (33). In fact Lily is staying in a house in the village, along with William Bankes (60), ‘old enough to be her father too, a botanist, a widower, smelling of soap, very scrupulous and clean’.
Twitchy young Charles Tansley has made an enemy of Lily by boldly telling her women can’t paint and women can’t write, a phrase she remembers with scorn half a dozen times, more or less every time she looks at him. (And comes to realise is typical of the way people say things which aren’t meant to be true but feed some kind of need in themselves.)
Tradition and innovation
At the time, the way the narrative of ‘To The Lighthouse’ weaves in and out of the characters’ thoughts and memories which, by definition, are from various points in the past, was considered highly innovative. A hundred years later, we have become so used to mixed-up narratives, not just in high literature, but in popular films and TV shows, that the technique feels completely natural and accessible, more or less transparent.
No, what comes over instead is the deep, deep traditonalness of the subject matter: the sensitive feelings of an upper middle-class mother and those around her, with a central focus on Love. As Anthony Burgess says in his biography of D.H. Lawrence, the novel is an essentially bourgeois art form and Virginia Woolf’s novels describe characters at the upper end of the bourgeoisie. Lovely people having lovely thoughts, no wonder they have remained popular to this day with bookish ladies who pride themselves on their sensitivity.
One of the commenters on one of her novels on Amazon says how lovely and elegant Woolf’s prose is. Exactly. It is exactly this quality which holds it back. No matter how ‘modernist’ her enjoyment of flitting between her characters’ points of view, the actual sentences themselves are constrained by good manners. Their vocabulary is limited by good taste. They always strive for the same effect of melliflousness, of politesse and refinement. The result is that they delve, exquisitely and with perfect decorum, but into a very limited, narrow, blinkered experience of the world: the same calm and demure and polite good taste.
Here’s an example. It’s a long sentence but the subordinate clauses are arranged clearly and logically, so it flows simply enough.
Qualities that in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the Polar region would have made him the leader, the guide, the counsellor, whose temper, neither sanguine nor despondent, surveys with equanimity what is to be and faces it, came to his help again.
The balancing of antitheses – ‘neither sanguine nor despondent’ – and the vocabulary itself – counsellor, temper, equanimity – hark back to the stately elegancies of the eighteenth century. Although her perceptions are often ‘modern’, Woolf’s style is almost always Georgian.
Woolf’s novels radiate all the pampered privilege of her class while mocking the very men – the politicians and financiers and businessmen and imperial soldiers – which made her life of sensitive impressions possible, whose farflung empire provided the flowers and foodstuffs and finery which her privileged female protagonists enjoy sampling and savouring. And she is aware of it and expresses it.
A square root? What was that? Her sons knew. She leant on them; on cubes and square roots; that was what they were talking about now; on Voltaire and Madame de Staël; on the character of Napoleon; on the French system of land tenure; on Lord Rosebery; on Creevey’s Memoirs: she let it uphold her and sustain her, this admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way and that, like iron girders spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world, so that she could trust herself to it utterly, even shut her eyes, or flicker them for a moment, as a child staring up from its pillow winks at the myriad layers of the leaves of a tree. (p.98)
It just doesn’t matter to her. It’s not what she’s about. Men are the adults who create and maintain the structure of the world, and women…? Women do something else, no less important, subtle and enduring.
Intellectual shallowness (Mr Ramsay)
Like so many novelists, Woolf would have us believe that her male protagonist is a successful and respected Thinker, a philosopher with a post at Oxford (I think, since there’s mention of Balliol College). He is said to be frequently distracted from everyday life by Great Thoughts about philosophy. And yet, when she comes to portray these Great Thoughts, they are pitifully inadequate. In fact they aren’t philosophy at all. Does he ponder on the mathematical bases of philosophy like Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead, does he respond to the dazzling theories of the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, does he engage with the moral philosophy of G.E. Moore, is he aware of the turn to linguistics signalled by the rise of the logical positivists or the Vienna Circle, does he engage with the sociocultural implications thrown up by Darwin’s theory of evolution or its recasting into the scientific positivism of Herbert Spencer? Has he heard of Continental philosophy? What does he make of the German tradition of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, or Nietzsche? Does he have views on the creative evolution of Henri Bergson?
No. Instead Woolf has Mr Ramsay wandering up and down his garden with a head full of tragically simple-minded, obvious, trite and clichéd cultural questions from mid-nineteenth century magazines: would culture have been different if Shakespeare had never lived? Is culture the product of great men? How do you measure culture and civilisation, by how it affects everyone, or as a product for an elite? And so on (pages 43 to 44).
These are not the questions asked by professional philosophers anywhere, they are the tired, hackneyed themes of thousands of half-baked essays by half-educated litterateurs. What a complete failure to understand or depict the thoughts of a supposed ‘philosopher’. Mr Ramsay is (rather hilariously) described as ‘so brave a man in thought’ and yet, on the evidence of these ‘thoughts’, he could barely think his way out of a paper bag; is not much different from the guide on a coachload of American tourists: ‘And on our left, ladies and gentlemen, the birthplace of William Shakespeare, the jewel in the crown of our national culture’ etc.
(Same happens a bit later when Mr Ramsay walks by chuckling to himself at the thought of the philosopher David Hume grown so fat he once got stuck in a bog. Is he given a witty joke about Hume’s philosophical scepticism and metaphysical naturalism, his devastating demolition of the argument from induction? No. Instead, Ramsay chuckles over Hume getting fat and falling in a bog. This is Laurel and Hardy, not philosophy. And Woolf likes it so much she has Mr Ramsay think about it on three separate occasions, pages 62, 66 and 70)
It is not for the quality of her ‘thought’ that anyone reads Virginia Woolf. There isn’t much ‘thought’ on display. Move Woolf a few inches outside her comfort zone of bookish book chat and she is lost. It is the extraordinary quality of her art which makes her great – which means a combination of her perceptions and insights into human psychology, arranged into beautiful patterns, and expressed in elegant and mellifluous prose.
The beautiful protagonist (Mrs Ramsay)
It helps a lot when your protagonist is effortlessly beautiful, ‘astonishingly beautiful’ (p.112):
She bore about with her, she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty; she carried it erect into any room that she entered; and after all, veil it as she might, and shrink from the monotony of bearing that it imposed on her, her beauty was apparent. She had been admired. She had been loved.
This – being beautiful and sensitive – is much more important than reading books and knowing things. Woolf is a great feminist saint but I always find it ironic how counter-feminist her fictions actually are. Mrs Ramsay, like Clarissa Dalloway, isn’t clever or well-read or particularly cultured or well-informed, but she is valued by Woolf simply because she is beautiful and sensitive.
And because she wants to give. Mrs Dalloway thinks her own strength is in bringing posh people together at her house, being a wonderful party host. Mrs Ramsay thinks her strength is caring for her eight children plus all sorts of miscellaneous good causes – ‘this desire of hers to give, to help’. Both, as you can see, live for others in the most clichéd stereotype of the selfless, empathetic upper middle-class woman.
The core subject of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To The Lighthouse’ is Love. Women are depicted as a) a bit dim and ineffectual but that’s OK because they are b) continually thinking about lost loves, past loves, present loves – as if a woman’s life was entirely one of emotions and feelings, and nothing to do with rational thought and achievement. What could be more sexist?
More events in part 1
‘Plot summary’ or ‘synopsis’ are both a bit too precise for what happens in a Woolf novel. Things happen but mostly people have sensitive feelings, memories, perceptions and polite conversations.
Lily just can’t capture on canvas the vivid colours she sees in real life. She is embarrassed when Mr Ramsay wanders by and sees her canvas.
Two other young people are staying, Minta Doyle (24; a tomboy) and Paul Rayley. As is the way with classic bourgeois fiction, the interest here is in whether Paul will propose to Minta and whether she will accept him. Women, in this ideology, have only one purpose and that is to get married – at least, this is Mrs Ramsay’s view.
Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world, whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. (p.49)
Later, Mrs R suddenly wants young Lily Briscoe to marry William Bankes. ‘What an admirable idea! They must marry’ (p.68). Maybe it’s only here, though. At the end of the novel, Lily wonders what lay behind Mrs Ramsay’s ‘mania’ for marriage (p.163).
Mrs Ramsay reads her son, James, the story of the Fisherman and his Wife, continually interrupted by her own thoughts about her husband, her marriage, her children (they grow up so fast, don’t they?), wondering whether Paul has proposed to Minta, worrying why they haven’t come back for a walk.
She finishes the story and James goes off to have supper with the rest of the children. Mrs Ramsay mentions them all being given baths and then put to bed, activities she seems to have no involvement in and so, presumably, are conducted by the three woman servants. Hard life.
During all this the lighthouse light is lit and she observes the triple beam which swings over sea and shore. Sometimes she wakes and sees it on the floor of the bedroom.
She is continually worrying that repairs to the greenhouse back home are going to cost £50 and she hasn’t plucked up the courage to tell her husband yet. She thinks their gardener, Kennedy, is lazy. She remembers her Aunt Camilla who was, of course, ‘the most beautiful woman I ever saw,’ said Mrs Ramsay. (She also has an Uncle James, in India.)
Mr and Mrs R are walking in the garden. It’s just past 7pm. They arrive at the gap in the red hot pokers and see the lights of the town twinkling on the sea. He wants to apologise for being a bit harsh when rebuffing her suggestion they all go to the lighthouse tomorrow, but can’t. They are happily married but there are gulfs between them.
Lily sees them walking and, as dusk falls, has a vision of them as perfect emblems, ‘symbols of marriage, husband and wife’.
Early on in the book we learned that old Mr Ramsay is developing the habit of wandering round declaiming poetry out loud, because the early pages have lines from Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade scattered through them. Once again it’s not the idiosyncrasy it’s the extreme ancientness of the poem, published in 1854, which is striking.
Minta and Paul had indeed gone down to the beach as Mrs Ramsay suspected, taking with them not only Andrew but Nancy, too. They are still children and scatter to explore rock pools. When the tide starts coming in, Nancy squeals and runs up the beach, round a big rock and bang into Minta and Paul who are having a kiss. They separate and Nancy and Andrew are bad tempered on the walk back because of the embarrassment. Half way back Minta realises she’s lost the brooch her grandmother gave to her and starts crying. They go back to look but the tide’s coming in and it’s getting dark. Paul promises to get up at dawn and come and find it tomorrow.
The dinner
It’s getting dark as they arrive back at the house and the lamps are being lit for dinner. There are fifteen for dinner (Mr and Mrs R and their 8 children, Charles Tansley, Minta and Paul, Mr Carmichael, and Mr Bankes has agreed to dine with them for the first time.)
Mrs Ramsay looks out the window at the rooks settling in the trees. She’s nicknamed the oldest one Old Joseph.
A servant rings the gong for dinner, Mrs Ramsay proceeds in stately manner to the dining room, everyone assembles and sits and starts on the soup, and there is a Woolfian smorgasboard of everyone’s thoughts intertwining.
Young uncomfortable Charles Tansley covers his embarrassment by despising everyone for their dinner tittle-tattle. Mrs Ramsay talks to Mr Bankes about a mutual friend, Carrie Manning whose house at Marlow she used to visit, who she hasn’t thought about in decades. Mrs Ramsay is interrupted to give orders to the servants and Bankes wistfully wonders how perishable human friendships are, wonders what it’s all about, really etc.
Charles is twitching with frustration so Lily very consciously, as a favour to Mrs Ramsay, speaks to him and sparks a torrent of feeling about the plight of poor fishermen, which involves criticising the present government, and both Lily and Mrs R can sit back and let the men crap on. God, how boring they and their politics are!
It’s dark and Mrs Ramsay orders the candles to be lit which suddenly transforms the room and the long table into a fairy land. Minta and Paul burst into the dining room, very late indeed, Minta crying about losing her grandmother’s brooch. Minta sits down next to Mr Ramsay and he immediately starts flirting with her. Mrs Ramsay is jealous but, then again, likes the way the young women he likes surrounding himself with keep him young. Also, Minta has a golden aura about her and Mrs R guesses Paul proposed and she said yes (since getting married is, in her eyes, the most important thing a young woman can do with her life).
When Paul tells his end of the table that he’s planning to get up at the crack of dawn and go and find the brooch, Lily is swept with enthusiasm and asks if she can come and help him, to which he is suddenly brutally indifferent. Please yourself. Mrs Ramsay notices this, thinking how cruel love can be, has made the handsome Paul. Sitting near him both plain Lilly and ugly Charles suffer in comparison.
Some argument starts up about Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels and when someone says something about work which lasts she knows that will trigger her husband, who is very conscious of not being truly great, that his best years are behind him, that he is already turning into a back number. But luckily Minta with her golden glow says something flattering and defuses the tension.
Incidentally, the centrepiece of the dinner is a big chunk of beef, cooked Bœuf en Daube according to a recipe of Mrs Ramsay’s grandmother. (There’s a passage of conversation about how lamentable British cooking is.)
Most people have finished eating when she hears her husband reciting a poem to golden Minta and slowly the general conversation dies down as they all listen. Mrs Ramsay stands and walks to the door, taking Minta’s arm. This rather glorious family dinner is over.
The party breaks up. Mr Bankes takes Charles Tansley out onto the terrace to carry on talking about politics, as men will. Lily watches Mrs Ramsay walk stately upstairs to check on the younger children who should be in bed. It has been a memorable evening, one everyone present will remember. She pauses to look out the window at the black outline of the elm trees, to steady and centre herself. The ghost of Woolf’s madness momentarily casts its shadow…
Irritatingly, the children are still awake, not least because someone called Edward (not otherwise mentioned in the text) had sent the children the skull of a pig which someone nailed to the wall of their bedroom and now they can’t sleep for fear of it. So Mrs Ramsay covers it in her shawl and tells her impressionable young daughter, Cam, that now it’s like a lovely bird’s nest.
As she goes back downstairs Prue calls up that some of them had thought of going down to the sea to watch the waves, and Mrs Ramsay is transfigured with girlish enthusiasm. Off they go but, in fact, something keeps her behind; it is her duty to go into the living room and be with her husband who is anxiously reading a novel by Walter Scott, anxious because he is always anxious whether his work will last.
She picks up a volume of poetry and they both read in companionable silence. Marriage, reflects Mr Ramsay, probably reflecting an opinion of Woolf’s, is not all about going to bed with a woman. There are also these moments of soul peace.
Suddenly he wants her to tell him she loves him. She knows it but rarely says it. She stands at the window looking at the beams of the lighthouse. Then she turns and, astonishingly beautiful as she is, gives him a radiant smile.
Part 2. Time Passes (15 pages)
I was expecting some major change of time or setting but part two follows on without a break from part 1. Mrs Bankes, Prue and Andrew come back from the beach. It was so dark they couldn’t distinguish between the sea and the sand. Slowly the lamps go out all round the house. Darkness falls and cheeky little draughts explore the old house.
But then it kicks in, and part 2 becomes a wild farrago of purple prose, about winter winds, hails, waves destroying, ravages, tattered flags, gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and bones bleaching in faraway deserts. I presume this all refers to the First World War. In the long dark winter Mrs (Maggie) McNab the housekeeper comes to air and tidy the house. Spring comes round and summer and another winter.
Meanwhile, bracketed against the long convoluted paragraphs of purple prose, is a series of short, factual declarations which tell us the news of the family, in hard square brackets. It is hard, heart-breaking news.
- In a throwaway sentence we learn that Mrs Ramsay, heart and soul of part one, has died.
- In May Prue, looking beautiful, gets married.
- A year later Prue dies from complications of childbirth.
- Andrew, in the British Army in France, is killed instantly by a shell.
- Old Carmichael brings out a volume of poetry which has an unexpected success. War has given the public a taste for poetry.
It is some years later and Mrs McNab surveys the mouldering old house, all the clothes rotting in their wardrobes, the pipes overflowed and the carpet ruined. Rats in the attic. The garden overgrown and alive with rabbits. The family had promised to return but the war made travel difficult.
Suddenly after years of silence Mrs McNab receives a letter asking her to make the place ready. It is such a ruin she has to recruit the help of her friend Mrs Bast and her son, George. Builders have to replaster, fix doors, and locks. It is an epic amount of work.
Then one day Lily Briscoe arrives, followed by old Mr Carmichael. Mrs Beckwith (who we’ve never heard of before) comes to stay.
Part 23 The Lighthouse [ten years later] (55 pages)
Overnight, as if by magic, the other surviving members of the family have arrived – Mr Ramsay, Nancy, James and Cam. And somehow, the next morning they breakfast early because it has been arranged to go out to the lighthouse.
And Lily, rather like the reader, dazed and confused by everything which has happened, sits at the breakfast table wondering what it’s all about: What does it mean then, what can it all mean? What does one do? Why is one sitting here after all?
I’ve mentioned Woolf’s mental illness more than once: here again, in the sense of profound disorientation, the reader feels it again.
Sitting alone (for Nancy went out again) among the clean cups at the long table she felt cut off from other people, and able only to go on watching, asking, wondering. The house, the place, the morning, all seemed strangers to her. She had no attachment here, she felt, no relations with it, anything might happen, and whatever did happen, a step outside, a voice calling (‘It’s not in the cupboard; it’s on the landing,’ some one cried), was a question, as if the link that usually bound things together had been cut, and they floated up here, down there, off, anyhow. How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought, looking at her empty coffee cup. (p.138)
The extraordinary unreality was frightening… Such were some of the parts, but how bring them together?… If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things…
Here, as in the mad sections of ‘Mrs Dalloway’, it feels like Woolf is recycling her many weeks and months and years of illness and mania, of the special peripheral vision it gives you, of the world and of yourself.
It is ten years since Lily left her painting unfinished (which is why commentators generally take the dates of the two visits to be 1910 and 1920). She is now 44 with an ‘old maidish’ manner. A long passage is devoted to Mr Ramsay coming up to her where she’s painting and exerting the full weight of his grief, his need, his exorbitant self pity, on her, demanding that she say something sympathetic, but she just stands there, hostile and dumb.
Suddenly, randomly, she notices his lovely brown boots and says out loud how nice they are, and to both their astonishment, he bucks up, becomes proud and lively and shows them off, and a knot he uses, of his own invention. Cam and James arrive (sulky 16 and 17 year olds) and Mr Ramsay declares they’re off to the lighthouse and marches them down the garden.
Leaving Lily facing a blank white canvas and riddled with doubts and conflicting emotions. Woolf spends quite a while describing the feelings she has as she makes the first marks on the canvas. It is an essay on the feeling of painting. It’s also mixed up with her love-hate relationship with patronising poor Charles Tansley. She remembered a happy moment when they took to playing ducks and drakes across the sea, and how it only happened because Mrs Ramsay, like God in Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy, watched it happen.
What is the meaning of life? Is there a meaning to life? No. There is no one great Revelation. Instead there’s a steady stream of epiphanies and insights.
What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark… (p.150)
She walks over to a view of the sea and sees the little boat with Mrs Ramsay, James and Cam in it set sail and move out beyond the others, towards the lighthouse.
In the little sailing boat Mr Ramsay gets impatient. He has forced two more new characters, Macalister and Macalister’s boy, to come with them. He makes Macalister tell him about the great storm last Christmas, which drove 11 ships into the bay of which three were shipwrecked. When the wind picks up and they start properly sailing, tense Mr Ramsay can relax. But Cam and James are surly and resentful at having been forced to go on this trip, purely to lay their father’s ghosts. They really hate him, Cam in particular remembering:
that crass blindness and tyranny of his which had poisoned her childhood and raised bitter storms, so that even now she woke in the night trembling with rage and remembered some command of his; some insolence: ‘Do this,’ ‘Do that’; his dominance: his ‘Submit to me.’ (p.158)
Back in the garden, Lily continues trying to pain, her mind aswirl with memories of Mrs Ramsay’s presence, when she last tried to paint here, when she played ducks and drakes with Charles Tansley, moments in time, why does she remember some and forget huge stretches of others?
She remembers going to visit the Rayleys (Paul and Minta after they married) in their place at Rickmansworth and finding the atmosphere terribly strained. Some time later she went back and found them reconciled and friendly, and this was because Paul had taken a mistress with radical political views like his, and Minta thoroughly approved.
From this Lily rambles on to thinking about her own relationship with the much older William Bankes. How Mrs Ramsay wanted them to get married and how they dated and went places together and felt great affection but never enough to marry. This long passage of meandering thought has taken us deep into mysteries:
What was it then? What did it mean? Could things thrust their hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the fist grasp? Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?—startling, unexpected, unknown? (p.167)
And she finds herself crying and saying Mrs Ramsay’s name out loud.
Cut to James in the sailing boat. The wind slackens and the sail flaps and James lives in terror of his father looking up from the book he’s studiously reading and reprimanding. James lives in permanent terror of his father’s reprimands and hates him with a white-hot hatred. He remembers being seven and wanting to go to the lighthouse and the harshness of his father’s refusal – the scene which opens the novel, a resentment he’s never forgotten. His memories of boyhood are like grains of misery.
Cut to Cam remembering being small and coming across her father sitting quietly in his study, accompanied by another venerable old gentleman, a copy of the Times crinkling in someone’s hand, as her father wrote slowly and neatly across the pages of his book. And she looks at her father now, curled up in the middle of the boat and quietly, purposefully reading, and her heart softens towards him.
Cut to Lily on land thinking about what you feel for things depends on whether they’re far or near: the nearer, the more familiar and funny; the further away, the more hazy and venerable. Then the light changes, the mood of the sea changes, and she is unhappy. She looks at her painting and thinks she hasn’t caught it at all. And Woolf delivers a little lecture on the struggle to create, to capture life in art.
Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything. Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh; she said desperately, pitching herself firmly again before her easel. It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on. (p.178)
Compare T.S. Eliot 1940:
and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion…
Samuel Beckett in 1983:
Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.
And plenty of other examples in between. The inability of language to adequately express our feelings and perceptions is a fairly common trope in the literary world.
Lily looks at slumbering Mr Carmichael. He’s famous now but still the same polite old geezer she’s always known. People can be two people, in fact people can be many people. One thing leads to another and she tells us that Charles Tansley got his fellowship, got married, lives in Golders Green. She went to hear him speak during the war, in a half-empty hall droning on about brotherly love, and again she remembers for the third or fourth time the occasion when she and he played ducks and drakes at some cask which came floating in on the waves while Mrs Ramsay watched them.
Lily remembers countless times seeing Mr Ramsay losing his temper, shouting, behaving badly, throwing a plate through the air, then loitering round his wife waiting for her forgiveness. Odd that all this comes out at the very end of the text because only now does it make sense of the scene which opens the novel, the couple’s sharp disagreement about whether to go to the lighthouse on the morrow. Canny withholding.
Lily notices someone has finally gotten up and is moving about inside the house and for a mad moment she thinks it’s her beloved Mrs Ramsay.
Cut to James in the sailboat. They are getting close to the lighthouse now and he can see it, a tall tower on jagged rocks. He observes his father getting to the end of the book he’s been reading. Finally he finishes it and announces he’s hungry. He opens the packet with their sandwiches in. Out of respect to Macalister he stops Cam throwing a half-eaten sandwich over the side. Macalister is 75 and Mr Ramsay shares that he’s 71.
And his father finally praises James’s steering. All this time James’s hatred is based on his father’s unerring criticism. Just one word of praise makes him pitifully grateful. All through this Cam lives in two worlds, part of her seeing her shabby father, the other part excited because he is taking them on an adventure. Freudian ambivalence.
Finally the boat reaches the lighthouse jetty, Mr Ramsay buttons his jacket, puts on his hat, tells the kids to get the packets which Nancy had wrapped for the lighthouse keeper, stands erect at the bow and steps ashore.
Cut back to Lily on the island who is joined by Mr Carmichael standing up. They both look towards the lighthouse which has become hazy and agree they must have arrived by now. And Lily looks from the steps up to the terrace, then back at her painting, and then has the inspiration on how to finish it. And the novel ends with a symbolic phrase which describes not only what Lily has seen and captured, but what Woolf the author has also done – achieved her vision.
She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. (p.192)
It’s a masterpiece.
Cast
Woolf’s fictions overflow with people, not just the primary characters but also a throng of secondary and tertiary characters, people who pop up sometimes for just one mention, for one sighting only, but who add to the sense her novels give of a dense tapestry of human lives all impinging on each other.
The Ramsays
1. Mr Ramsay
2. Mrs Ramsay
3. Lily Briscoe
4. Andrew Ramsay
5. Jasper Ramsay
6. Roger Ramsay
7. James Ramsay
8. Prue Ramsay
9. Rose Ramsay
10. Nancy Ramsay
11. Cam Ramsay
House guests
16. Charles Tansley, student writing his dissertation
17. Augustus Carmichael, old poet with white beard stained yellow
18. Lily Briscoe, painter
19. Minta Doyle, tomboy
20. Paul Rayley, young and handsome
21. William Bankes, scientist
Servants
12. Mildred the cook
13. Marie the Swiss maid
14. Ellen the maid
15. Kennedy the gardener
22. Aunt Camilla
23. Uncle James
24. Mrs McNab
25. Mrs Bast, helps Mrs McNab clean up the old house
26. George Bast, scythes the grass
27. Mrs Beckwith, turns up as a guest in part 3
28. Old Macalister
29. Macalister’s boy
30. Miss Giddings – mentioned just once, as being startled when Mr Ramsay suddenly, randomly quoted some poetry at her.
31. Mr Langley – also mentioned precisely once, in an anecdote Mrs Ramsay tells, that he had been round the world dozens of times but told her he never suffered as he did when my husband took him across to the lighthouse (p.85).
32. Mrs McNab – the housekeeper who airs and maintains the house in the family’s absence, through the long dark winters.
Credit
‘To The Lighthouse’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1927. Page references are to the 1977 Granada paperback edition, although the text is easily available online.
Related links
Related reviews
- Virginia Woolf reviews
- 1920s reviews
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