To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

“He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.” 

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is one of the most well known modernist books. The novel was written in a stream-of-consciousness style and it was set in three parts and the plot can be really quickly summed up with:

The Window: Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay with their children and guests spending time in their Scottish holiday home. Six-year-old James wants to go the lighthouse, his mother agrees but Mr. Ramsay states that the weather is not good enough for the boat journey. One of the guests, Lily Briscoe is painting. Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle (two guests) get engaged.

Time Passes: World War 1 breaks out and the house is left abandoned. Everyone dies... Jokes – it just felt like that. Mrs. Ramsay died suddenly, Andrew Ramsay (oldest son) dies in battle and Prue (daughter) dies after giving birth. (Note: the deaths are all told in brackets)

The Lighthouse: Mr. Ramsay with his children (those that are still alive) and two of his guests decide to go back to the house. Mr. Ramsay makes his children go with him to the Lighthouse. Lily goes back to painting and this time manages to achieve her vision.

Personally, the summary that I just gave was exactly what a whole 227 page novel spent describing. But, if you’ve read my review on Mrs. Dalloway, my lack of enthusiasm for Virginia Woolf wouldn’t be surprising. For me, I need a plot that I can invest myself in. However, one thing that I must give to Woolf is her sense of rhythm, like the repetitive and familiar lives of the Ramsays as the waves come and go in their island. Only when I went back to the introduction written by Hermione Lee in 1991 (it was included in the version I borrowed) that I realised how much of a difference her editing and style really made. Read the manuscript version to see for yourself:

 “For nothing/no one [could be more] attracted her more than this strange old man. His hands were beautiful; & his [strong] shapely feet. His voice was beautiful, & his words. [He] Above all, his haste & his fervour; his oddity; his ridiculousness; his burning extreme/energy; & his remoteness; [& his] But what remained intolerable, & would forever indicate as with the suddenly raising, unknown to himself, of an arm, upright, & monitory, & enough to quell the stormiest passions of her heart, [was] his intolerable [arrogance, his irra] demand upon her, upon James, upon the whole world perhaps; Submit to me”

And now, the final version;

“For no one attracted her more; his hands were beautiful to her and his feet, and his voice, and his words, and his hate, and his temper, and his oddity, and his passion, and his saying straight out before everyone, we perish, each alone, and his remoteness. (He had opened his book.) But what remained intolerable, she thought, sitting upright, and watching Macalister’s boy tug the hook out of the gills of another fish, was that crass blindness and tyranny of his which has 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’.”

A note to future readers of the book – don’t over read it!! As a student of English, as soon as I reached the topic of the light house I instantly thought of some symbolic meaning, that the lighthouse stood for something, some longing or repression. But the lighthouse itself is not a code word for anything it is really just a way to connect all three parts and to provide a time for characters to reflect on their own emotions as they wonder about the lighthouse. Even Woolf actually said,

“I meant nothing by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together. I saw that all sorts of feelings would accrue to this, but I refused to think them out, and trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions – which they have done, one thinking it means one thing another. I can’t manage Symbolism except in this vague, generalized way.”

Since Woolf doesn't concentrate in the use of symbols and motifs in To the Lighthouse, a simple reading can give the reader both pleasure (if you enjoy modernist books) and an understanding of what was in Woolf’s mind – life, death (always looming) and family. In truth, the book was almost a therapy for Woolf’s own problems and memories of her childhood and her parents. It was a way for Woolf to get out all of thoughts on her family into a book and this was the main idea of the story. There was no real complex plot but it was an analysis of family life and dealing with grief/loss. It analysed the familiar routines and how we try to repeat the routine even when things change and we grow, but nothing can happen twice; there were two dinners, a promised and a real journey to the lighthouse and two paintings and none of them were as good as the first time, especially coming back to the house without Mrs Ramsay.