ALLISON PEA SE
Introduction
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) is a landmark achievement in
modernist iction and one of the most widely read novels written in English.
Readers turn to the novel for its radiant prose, its nostalgic depiction of
familial love and loss, or its audacious rendering of the passage of time.
Some revel in its feminist wit and resistance, its delicate and diffuse por-
trayal of minds in thought, or its masterful use of literary allusion. There are
abundant pleasures to be found in the text. Yet for all of its pleasures, To
the Lighthouse is not an accessible novel. First-time readers are frequently
bafled by its apparent lack of plot and rapid shifts in perspective, and sea-
soned scholars can be overwhelmed by the amount of criticism one should
know. With so many readers interested in To the Lighthouse and so much
information available on it, this Cambridge Companion seeks to illuminate
the novel’s genesis, major ideas, and formal innovations while also summa-
rizing and advancing important critical debate.
The novel opens on a September’s day several years before World War I at
the Scottish isle vacation home of an English family, the Ramsays. Mr. and
Mrs. Ramsay and their eight children host a number of guests, including two
young women: Lily Briscoe, an unmarried dilettante painter, and Minta Doyle
who, in the course of the opening section “The Window,” becomes engaged to
one of two young male guests, Paul Raley. Charles Tansley, the other young
male, is an insecure and disagreeable working-class pupil of Mr. Ramsay’s,
eager to impress. The guest list is completed with Augustus Carmichael, an
opium-addicted poet whose work later becomes popular during the war,
and William Bankes, a widower whom Mrs. Ramsay hopes will marry Lily
Briscoe. The action of the irst section is limited: Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay dis-
agree about whether the weather will permit a boat trip to the lighthouse that
is visible from their home, a trip much desired by their youngest son James;
Mr. Ramsay walks around the grounds of the house chanting poetry to him-
self and worrying over the limits of his intelligence and career; Mrs. Ramsay
takes Charles Tansley into town with her to run errands and check in on an
1
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781107280342.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Introduction
ailing woman, then poses for Lily’s painting; Lily and Mr. Bankes walk to the
edge of the garden and look out over the sea; the children play on the lawn;
Mrs. Ramsay knits a stocking for the boy at the lighthouse; the young people
take a walk on the beach and, after getting engaged to Paul, Minta loses her
grandmother’s brooch. In the evening, the entire party convenes for dinner,
after which Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay read and doze, and share small talk loaded
with emotional intent before going to bed. It is in many respects an unre-
markable day. But as any serious reader of To the Lighthouse will note, a reci-
tation of the action of the irst section of the novel misses entirely what “really
happens” and what the novel is about. For more important than outward
action are the inner lives of the characters, their private thoughts imbued with
imagination, memory, and fear, and their frustration at their inability truly to
communicate with – or know – the other characters. Shot through the irst
section and the third section of the novel is an acute awareness of what the
middle section of the novel makes clear by its title, “Time Passes.”
“Time Passes” creates a ten-year interval in the story, marked mostly by
the passing of time through natural processes of destruction and decay that
are brought to a close by the human agency of Mrs. McNab, a local servant
who prepares the house for the visit by a reduced number of the original
party. As the reader learns in short, bracketed sentences in the second sec-
tion, Mrs. Ramsay, Prue Ramsay, and Andrew Ramsay have all succumbed
to the forces of time and destruction and have died in this brief passage
of time. Thus the third and inal section of the novel, “The Lighthouse,”
centers on Mr. Ramsay and his two children Cam and James, now teenagers,
inally taking the much-delayed family trip to the lighthouse by boat. Lily
Briscoe watches the boat, the sea, and the lighthouse as she inishes the
painting she began ten years before and Mr. Bankes looks on. Mrs. Ramsay’s
absence is a veritable presence for all of the characters in this section as
each reconciles with loss, time, and the desire to capture, even momentar-
ily, the essence of life and its meaning. But what things might mean, the
novel consistently makes clear, is a matter of perspective, both in time and
in space, and to capture that meaning, one needs, as Lily thinks, “ifty pairs
of eyes to see with” (303). And so it is with To the Lighthouse: to capture its
meanings, its beauties, its curiosities, one cannot rely upon a single perspec-
tive. Accordingly, this Companion has been arranged to provide a variety of
perspectives and to come at the novel multiply.
To the Lighthouse has generated nearly nine decades of commentary, as
Jean Mills chronicles in Chapter 13, and this volume mirrors the arc of that
commentary by exploring (1) the novel in relation to Woolf’s life, (2) its
form and formal innovations, (3) its thematic and philosophical preoccupa-
tions, and (4) its political conigurations of gender, race, and class.
2
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781107280342.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Introduction
Unlike the work of say, T. S. Eliot or James Joyce, key modernist writers
alongside whose works Woolf’s novels of the 1920s have long been com-
pared, literary criticism of Virginia Woolf’s iction is unusual for the degree
to which it is informed by her biography, diaries, and letters. Those looking
to understand To the Lighthouse frequently begin, as Anne Fernald does in
the irst chapter, with Woolf’s diaries and notebooks in which she details
her plans to write the novel and examines the biographical likeness of the
Ramsay family to her own. Woolf was a meticulous literary record keeper
and planner, and the fascinating documents she left behind can guide us
as to her intentions. Yet inasmuch as Fernald’s chapter informs us of the
raw materials from which Woolf constructed To the Lighthouse, Fernald is
quick to point out, as is illustrated clearly in Hans Walter Gabler’s chapter
on the genesis of the novel from draft to published text(s), that the novel
is more craft than autobiography, and it is in the craftsmanship that To the
Lighthouse becomes art.
To shape life into art, one must represent what one sees, and thus begins
one of the novel’s meditative pleasures. Who, in the novel, is doing the
apprehending and the shaping? How does form shape meaning? Michael
Levenson’s chapter on narrative perspective identiies the novel’s abundance
of representational resources and “perspectival virtuosity” and guides us
through the continuous acts of seeing, hearing, knowing, and being that
occur in the novel. In his reading of Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts as she knits
a stocking, he shows how mental acts of “relecting, reconsidering, rumi-
nating, feeling stuck, feeling sure” inform a sequence that “moves through
phases analogous to chapters in plot based on exterior life” (p. 22) while
also exposing the limits of narrative knowledge. Emily Dalgarno explains
that it is the representation of reality and perception that is at the heart of
the relationship between philosophy and literature in To the Lighthouse.
Dalgarno’s chapter shows us not just the literal relationships between phi-
losophy and life as depicted in the novel’s main characters, but as depicted
in the centuries of ideas about representation and knowing that the novel
and its critics have taken up. Further, she elucidates how questions the novel
asks, such as “What does it all mean?” (225) or “What am I? What is this?”
(196) are “like those of the Platonic dialogue in the sense that they ask for
deinitions as a means to engage the attention of the reader, and to prevent
our taking for granted a vocabulary that includes not only truth but also
knowledge and love” (p. 70). Suzanne Bellamy’s chapter on the visual arts
in the novel reines the representational focus to painting, centering on Lily
Briscoe’s painting as analogy and innovation in Woolf’s verbal narrative.
Bellamy shows us how Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, and the art critic Roger
Fry inluenced Woolf’s ideas about formalist representation. This interest in
3
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781107280342.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Introduction
the symbolic and formalist nature of the novel has spawned a rich history
of critique of the novel. Jane Goldman rounds out this volume’s formalist
consideration of the novel through a robust analysis of the novel’s triadic
structure, repeated motifs and words, and disarming use of parentheses and
brackets. To comprehend Goldman’s analysis of Woolf’s use of the semico-
lon in the novel is to understand how a single hinge is responsible for hold-
ing up a cathedral.
Space and time are not just the shaping elements of To the Lighthouse
but its thematic preoccupations. Paul Sheehan argues that Woolf’s narrative
creates a temporal regime outside of human jurisdiction in which time is
the “main event.” Comparing Woolf’s use of time to other modern authors
concerned with it, Marcel Proust, Walter Pater, and Henri Bergson, Sheehan
shows that the narrative of To the Lighthouse is shaped by three different
time orientations, the irst section looking forward to the future, the second
section oriented to the present, and the third section looking backward in
time. Space represents a similar plenitude of possibility, as Melba Cuddy-
Keane shows in her chapter on space and cognition. Against the claims of
reviewers and readers that Woolf’s characters were practically without bod-
ies, Cuddy-Keane inds that bodies pervade To the Lighthouse, showing us
how perception can play a central role in cognition and how the know-
ing body moves in space to communicate its understanding. Hans Walter
Gabler’s chapter on genetic criticism further contributes to attention to
Woolf’s bodily orientation by arguing that Woolf writes “from emotions of
her body and her memory” (p. 151). Thus Cuddy-Keane and Gabler formu-
late an important departure from the structuralist paradigm of literary criti-
cism. In asking the question “can perception play a central role in cognition,
with no need for concept formation to be involved?” (p. 59), Cuddy-Keane
elides language as the tool by which meaning is created, a question integral
to To the Lighthouse.
While To the Lighthouse is a complex artistic construct that self-relexively
and philosophically questions its own status as an object of representation, it
is also a product of its historical moment and a representation of the middle-
class British culture from which it sprang. Thus examinations of the political
conigurations of the novel are very much rooted in the world as it existed
in the irst decades of the twentieth century. Ana Parejo Vadillo’s chapter
on generational difference reminds us that the novel is very much about
generational change from Mrs. Ramsay’s Victorian “Angel in the House” to
the New Woman that Lily Briscoe represents. Parejo Vadillo provides bio-
graphical and textual evidence to argue that while the novel searches for the
modern, it is “signiicantly hung up on the past” (p. 123). As Parejo Vadillo
shows, the codes of behavior observed in the novel have speciic Victorian and
4
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781107280342.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Introduction
in-de-siècle origins and correlates to Coventry Patmore’s Victorian poem,
The Angel in the House (1854), and Victorian critic John Ruskin’s essay
“Of Queen’s Gardens” (1865) on the duties of men and women. Gabrielle
McIntire maintains in her chapter on feminism and gender in the novel that
those codes of behavior, most notably marriage and cultural patriarchy, are
exposed to critique not only through what is represented but also through
the forms of representation. The novel, published just one year before Woolf
delivered her lectures to Newnham and Girton Colleges that would later be
published as A Room of One’s Own, celebrates female imagination and pro-
ductivity amid structural paucity while portraying men as sterile and selish.
Where race and class are frequently lumped into the same critique with
gender, Urmila Seshagiri and Kathryn Simpson provide appraisals that con-
irm a complexity of attitudes in To the Lighthouse. Seshagiri inds that
although To the Lighthouse is one of Woolf’s least explicit works on race or
Empire, the identities of the characters in To the Lighthouse are rooted in
racial difference made evident through Empire. Seshagiri claims, “Reading
Lily Briscoe’s artistic development in the context of early-twentieth-century
English formalism’s racially derived doctrines reveals how To the Lighthouse
transforms modern English selfhood” (p. 100). Lily Briscoe’s “little Chinese
eyes” elevate her artistically and inform her alternative vision. There is no
getting around the fact that Woolf was a privileged woman who had servants
her whole life and wrote very little about the working class in her novels. Yet
despite claims that Virginia Woolf was a snob, a question Woolf famously
asked of herself, Simpson inds her perspectives on class “inherently con-
tradictory,” self-relexive, and illustrative of both Woolf’s social status and
artistic aspirations. Because Woolf was composing the “Time Passes” section
of the novel in 1926 during a General Strike in which miners across Britain
were joined by transport workers and other laborers in bringing the country
to a halt, she may have been more alert to issues of class than otherwise.
Many attribute Mrs. McNab’s presence in the novel to this event.
The ever-replenishing meanings yielded by the novel resonate through all
of the chapters in this volume. Each chapter offers a particular, if limited,
vantage from which to approach the novel; each chapter recognizes the
contradictions inherent in its own readings. If the novel’s title teaches us
anything, it is about indeinite closure. One ventures to the lighthouse again
and again, in time, in place, in body, in perspective. What is best about each
“vision” is that it need never be “simply one thing.”
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781107280342.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
