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Exploring Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse as a ‘Modernist’ novel.

Srinjona Koleh

Roll Number: 001800201069

UG/CL/Core/4.1: ‘Modernism’ in Western Literatures.

Professor Sucheta Bhattacharya

March 27 , 2020
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How best can we understand the internal experience of alienation? In both Woolf’s essays

and her fiction, she shapes the slippery nature of subjective experience into words, while her

characters frequently lead inner lives that are deeply at odds with their external existence. To

help make sense of these disparities the time when we read Woolf, here are some aspects of

her life and work to consider.

Virginia Woolf was born as Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882 at a large wealthy family 1

which enabled her to pursue a life in the arts. The death of her mother in 1895 was followed

by that of her half-sister, father and brother within the next ten years. These lose paid in

Woolf’s first depressive episode and subsequent institutionalization. As a young woman she

purchased her house in the Bloomsbury area of London with her siblings , this brought her

into contact with circle of creative’s including EM forster2, Roger Fry3, Clive Bell4 and

Leonard Woolf5. These friends came to be as the Bloomsbury group, also Virginia and

Leonard got married in 1912. The members of this group were prominent figures in

modernism.

Modernism was a cultural movement that sought push the boundaries on how reality

represented. Key features of the modernist writing including the use of ‘Stream of

Consciousness’ , ‘Interior Monologue’ , ‘Distortions in Time’ and ‘Multiple or Shifting

Perspectives’. These appeared in the work of Ezra pound, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and

Woolf herself . While reading Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’6 Woolf began writing ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ , like

‘Ulysses’ the text takes place over the course of a single day and opens under seemingly

mundane circumstances , Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself but the novel

1
English author Leslie Stephen was her father and Pre-Raphaelite model Julia Prinsep Stephen was her

mother.

2
English novelist and short-story writer.
3
English painter and scholar of the Old Masters.
4
Arthur Clive Heward Bell was an English art critic, associated with formalism.
5
Leonard Sidney Woolf was British political theorist, author and civil servant.
6
Ulysses is a novel by James Joyce which is constructed as a modern parallel to Homer’s Odyssey.
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dives deeply into the characters traumatic past weaving the inner world of numb socialite

Dalloway with that of shallow sort veteran skepticist Waren Smith. Woolf uses interior

monologue to contrast rich world of the mind against her character’s external existences. In

her novel To The Lighthouse, mundane moments like a dinner party or losing a necklace

triggers psychological revelation in the lives of the Ramsey’s, a fictionalised version of

Woolf’s family growing up. To The Lighthouse also contains one of the famous examples of

Woolf’s radical representation of time, in the ‘Time passes’ section ten years are distilled into

about twenty pages. Here the lack of human presence in the Ramsay’s beach house allows

Woolf to re-imagine time in flashes and fragments of prose, the house was left, the house was

deserted, it was left like a shell on a sand hill to fill with dry greens where another life had

left. In her novel The Waves, there is little distinction between the narratives of the six main

characters. Woolf here experiments with collective consciousness, at times collapsing the six

voices7 into one, for example quoting from her novel “It is not one life that I took back upon;

I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am” (How to

distinguish one life from others?). In The Waves six character becomes one but in a gender

bending Orlando,8 a single character inhabits multiple identities , the protagonist is a poet

who switches between genders and lives for three hundred years. With its fluid language and

approach to identity Orlando is considered as a key text in gender studies. Another essay is

Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown which is an important exploration of modernism by Virginia

Woolf. This edition of the essay was published on 30 October 1924 by the Hogarth Press.

This essay is important for understanding Woolf’s characters. In Mr. Bennett and Mrs.

Brown Woolf analyses the state of modern fiction by contrasting two generations of writers.

7
Six characters in Woolf’s The Waves were Bernard, Jinny , Susan, Neville, Rhoda and Louis.
8
Orlando: A Biography is a novel by Woolf published in 1928.
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The essay is framed as a response to an essay by novelist Arnold Bennett9 in which he

declares that the current generation of ‘Georgian’ authors – D H Lawrence, James Joyce, T S

Eliot – have failed as writers because they have not created real, convincing characters. But

Woolf challenges Bennett’s concept of ‘reality’:

Mr. Bennett says that it is only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance of

surviving. Otherwise, die it must. But, I ask myself, what is reality? And who are the judges

of reality? Woolf recognises that ‘the tools of one generation are useless to the next’. New

forms must be explored if writers are to capture the rapidly changing modern world. She

explains that the Georgian writer has turned to an impressionistic, fragmented technique that

more accurately reflects modern existence. The Georgians may have not yet mastered their

art, Woolf admits, but they nevertheless strive towards ‘telling the truth’.

The mind can only fly so far from the body before it returns to the constrains of life, like

many of Woolf’s characters Woolf’s life ended in tragedy when she loaded her pockets with

heavy stones and drowned herself at the age of 59 yet she expressed hope beyond suffering.

Through deep thought Woolf’s characters are shown to temporarily transcend from the

material reality and its careful consideration of the complexity of the mind. Her works charts

the importance of making our inner lives known to each other.

Virginia Woolf on ‘Modernity’ and ‘Modernism’.

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon

the freedom of my mind.” -Virginia Woolf.

Modernity, as defined by Woolf, is a society and culture in flux. With references to breaking,

‘smashing and crashing’, and chaotic noise, Woolf presents modernity as fragmentary and

unstable. Woolf’s narrative style literary called stream of consciousness, correspond to the
9
The writer Arnold Bennett had written a review of Woolf’s Jacob’s Room(1922) in Cassell’s Weekly in March
1923, which provoked Woolf to rebut it. Her response was published in the United States in Nation and
Athenaeum in December as Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.
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perception of time, which has to be viewed as the vital element of modernity, these can be

marked in her novel To The Lighthouse. Therefore, before addressing to Woolf’s literary

style it is necessary to describe how modernist authors were influenced by the new concept of

time. Time has experienced by modernist author as a phenomenon in which past, present and

future are juxtaposed at the same time; therefore, time is not the representative of

chronological moment. In this sense, our experience of life is not restricted to presence rather

it is a combination of unfulfilled wishes, memories and desires. Her feminist polemic A

Room of One’s Own 10, itself the foundation for modern feminist literary, cultural, and

political theories, had instant and palpable impact not least for its consideration of most

women’s exclusion from university education, from the professions, and from mainstream as

well as highbrow literary discourse. Her feminism consolidated further with pacifism and

anti-Fascism in her other major polemic Three Guineas(1938)11. Much of Woolf’s own

critical writing, such as her essays ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925)12 and ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs.

Brown’ (1924), was framed to help readers understand the nuances and ‘difficulties’ of the

new, advent- grade literary practices that we have come to call ‘modernist’. Virginia Woolf

refuses to consider any mimetic writing following a clear pattern as able to convey real life,

as she also states in ‘Modern Fiction’: “Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically

arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the

beginning of consciousness to the end.” Thus, convinced that “’The proper stuff of fiction’

does not exist,” Woolf follows her own technique. Her modernist aesthetics, even in these

essays, are intricately bound up with her feminist politics. Since her death, Woolf’s

substantial body of published works has been augmented by editions of letters, diaries,

10
Extended essay by Woolf first published in September 1929.
11
Published in 1938, as Europe drifted towards war with the rise of fascism in Europe,  Three Guineas is a
companion piece to Virginia Woolf’s earlier polemic A Room of One’s Own.
12
Woolf’s essay ‘Modern Fiction’, which was originally published under the title ‘Modern Novels’ in 1919,
demonstrates in essay form what her later novels bear out: that she had set out to write something different
from her contemporaries.
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memoirs, and journals, and comprehensive collections of her essays and short stories. Woolf

records and explores, questions and refashions everything in modernity and modern life-

cinema, sexuality, shopping, education, motor cars, aeroplanes, feminism, politics, war, and

so on. Woolf’s contributions to the shaping and reshaping of modernist aesthetics, in her

fiction and in her critical, polemical, and autobiographical writings, with particular attention

to some of her later fragmentary works in process, left unfinished – but perhaps artfully so –

and certainly most carefully worked and reworked.

Exploring To The Lighthouse as a ‘Modernist’ novel.

The plot of the novel is too simple and short which opens with the Ramsay family and a few

friends who spends a day in a vacation home, they talk about going to the lighthouse but they

doesn’t visit. Ten years passed to that and then they do go to the lighthouse and then the book

is over.

Even though not much happens , a lot is happening in To The Lighthouse. Broadly speaking

this is a ‘Modernist’ novel. It really exemplifies and also help to define a modernist novel.

The novel is written from the perspective of house which is quite modernist in its approach.

So Virginia Woolf describe the form of the novel as two blocks joined by a corridor. The two

blocks are of course the first and last section which is ‘The Window’ and ‘The Lighthouse’

and the corridor is the middle section which is ‘Time passes’. The story is written in third

person but it takes on the tone and thinking of the character which it is focussing on that is

constantly shifting. But in the middle section the style of narration which is often known as

‘Free Indirect Discourse’13 is that of more radical but its character driving the narrative isn’t

the Ramsay or the guests , it is the ‘vacation house’. The house is left empty during the first

world war and the war is being described as a terrible storm around the house.

13
‘Free Indirect Discourse’ can also be seen in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and James Joyce’s Ulysses. 
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“The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves

fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and

choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths.”

-Part Two: Time passes, Chapter 3

Free Indirect Discourse is one of the most important, interesting and perplexing linguistic

techniques in ‘Modernist’ literary fiction. It is basically a type narration that slips in and out

of characters' consciousness. In other words, characters' thoughts, feelings, and words are

filtered through the third-person narrator in free indirect discourse. With ‘Free Indirect

Discourse’ Woolf represented non-verbal thoughts, feelings and perceptions with language,

and thereby showed them to the reader. People do appear in this section (Time Passes) but

only briefly, as mentioned above there are triumphs and deaths are discussed only in brackets

probably because what happens to an individual human doesn’t really matters to the house.

To The Lighthouse can also be described as ‘a stream of

consciousness’ novel because it records the flow from one thought to the next along with the

emotions which go with those thoughts . And sometimes there are very intense emotions

even in response to very minor plot points like when six year old James feels a murderous

hatred for this father just because his father thinks it would probably rain the next day.

Stream of consciousness14 is a narrating technique used in literature where the reader knows

the flow of thoughts occurring in a character's mind. Through an interior monologue, a

character's thoughts and feelings are explored.

“ Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in

his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the

extremes of emotion that Mr Ramsay excited in his children's breasts by his mere presence;

standing, a snow, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one ,grinning sarcastically,

14
Some authors known to use stream of consciousness include James Joyce and Jane Austen.
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not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who

was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some

secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement.”

-Part One: The Window, Chapter 1.

The novel captures nothing less than the wealth of reality

and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice . This

combination of ‘Stream of Consciousness’ and ‘Free Indirect Discourse’ is what gives the

novel a sense of fracture and fragment. When a person read this novel, it switches from head

to head and thought to thought and it feels so destabilizing. Also, the novel argues that the

constantly shifting perspective is the only way to really understand the characters and the

world comprehensively when Mrs. Ramsay says:

“One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough

to get round that one woman with, she thought.”

-Part Three: The Lighthouse, Chapter 13.

The novel also explores time and what it does to memory, houses and life. It argues on what

is ephemeral and what is eternal, what we lose to time and in what ways we can endure it. A

lot is lost to time in this story but there are a few moments where time seems to be suspended

where the main one is the dinner party where Mrs. Ramsay finally achieves a sense of peace,

she feels there is a coherence in things, a stability; something she meant is immune from

change and shines out.

“ (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the

fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once

today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that

endures.”

-Part One: The Window, Chapter 17.

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Mrs. Ramsay is genius in bringing and holding people together so that for a few moments

they feel they are part of something greater than themselves, in that instance they can

surrender their loneliness, sorrow, their sense of intimacy to a community that feels eternal.

Throughout To the Lighthouse we can see that very notion

of self and one’s relationship with another is being examined. Mrs Ramsay reminds us that

death is inevitable. Everyone will die, everyone will leave. Yet that does not mean that is the

end of us. Mrs Ramsay dies but her presence lingers. In her life she filled such a space in the

summer house that her absence cannot be ignored. Woolf shows that “homes, houses and

cities carry the haunting presence of times and people who have left, are gone”. Her lack of

presence is a reminder of how much space she occupied, a reminder of her central, vital role

in the family. Her existence continues because she is “imprinted on places and on others”

lives.

 To the Lighthouse seems to argue that even without religion or god we can still live on after

our deaths. Every relationship we have means that some part of us will have an impact after

our death. The memory of someone remains, as does the influence that person had while still

alive. In the grand scheme of things nothing we do may really have any great influence, that

makes what we do is more important, because it is the only thing that lives on.

Nobody wants to live for a very long time. The problem in immortality is that there is a huge

difference between an extremely large number and an infinite number, an extremely large

number shows that it will someday end but an infinite number seems to be completely

indifferent which sounds terrible. So may you life a fascinating fulfilling life but that may not

last forever therefore, the novel suggest there is one other path to immortality that is through

making art. Lily Briscoe is haunted by the words when other party guests says “women can’t

write, women can’t paint” and she worries that her painting probably just would be rolled up

under a sofa or something but, first of she proves the critic wrong by painting and also,
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painting itself even if it isn’t very good even if it just a purple triangle and a line in the middle

it endures and brings the novel in full circle and because the painting is a portrait although a

very abstract one but still it is a portrait, it is also capable of bringing Mrs. Ramsay back after

she is gone. Whether it is Mrs. Ramsay’s party or Lily’s painting or having a child, they all

make up the moment something eternal weaving all the known feeling of being infinite in a

moment. The novel lasts to Mrs. Ramsay’s words “life stands still here”. So, Mrs. Ramsay

and Lily Briscoe regard the lighthouse as "a symbol of the eternal and immutable" and the

journey to it, as the journey from egocentricity and pride to impersonality and humility. Mrs.

Ramsay and Lily, therefore, "not only create unity and harmony but also, like the saintly

people, radiate peace and have a calming influence." And here I will leave a passage from the

novel said by Lily Briscoe, a passage that argues may be we are never going to create a great

work of art or even can host a perfect dinner party but we can all look for moments which are

touched by the eternal and which are part of something greater than ourselves.

“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; here was one.”

-Lily Briscoe

-Part Three: The Lighthouse, Chapter 4.

Bibliography

Jane Goldman: The History of British Women’s Writing, 1920–1945 pp 57-77 | Cite as

Virginia Woolf and The Aesthetics of Modernism.
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Penguin Classics: To the Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf

Eugene Luann: Marxism and Modernism| “Modernism in Comparative Perspective”.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Whitworth, M. (2010). Virginia Woolf, modernism and modernity. In S. Sellers (Ed.), The

Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 107-
123). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCOL9780521896948.006.

Dostoevsky, Werfel, and Virginia Woolf: Influences and Confluences : TEMIRA

PACHMUSS. Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Dec., 1972), pp. 416-
429 Published by: Penn State University Press Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40246082 .

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Ruth Livesey Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1, From Decadent to
Modernist: And Other Essays (2007), pp. 126-144 Published by: Modern Humanities
Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20479282 .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf.

http://www.susanhatedliterature.net/essays/11361-2/

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/three-guineas-by-virginia-woolf#

“Modern Fiction” by Virginia Woolf from McNeille, Andrew, Ed. The Essays of Virginia
Woolf. Volume 4: 1925 to 1928. London: The Hogarth Press, 1984.

Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown(1924) By Virginia Woolf

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