To the Lighthouse—Virginia Woolf

A murmuration of minds

Murmuration

One day in September, sometime in the early 1910s, Mrs. Ramsey and her husband entertain family and friends in their summer home on the Isle of Skye. In such an idyllic setting, Agatha Christie would have had at least eight people meet untimely ends here and there around the property. D. H. Lawrence would have had smoldering passions spilling over the rocks under the well built lighthouse. P. G. Wodehouse would have somehow found a way to involve a telescope, a local constable, and an annoying pekingese. But Virginia Woolf! Virginia Woolf has a dinner party. And oh what a dinner party! In fact, the tour de force chapter describing it occurs in the middle of the novel and represents a culmination of sorts.

This amazing work of modernist fiction has nothing like a traditional plot. In the first and longest part, “The Window,” everyone spends the day pursuing their interests. Mr. Ramsey struts around looking for sympathy; Lily Briscoe works on a painting; and Mrs. Ramsey makes sure everyone feels comfortable. The second part, “Time Passes,” covers ten years in a mere twenty pages, during which the unoccupied house gathers dust, mold, and small animals. Oh, and three people die in parenthetical asides. The third part, “The Lighthouse,” covers a fine summer day after the Great War when some of the surviving characters from the first part have returned to the house. Mr. Ramsey sails with two of his kids, now sulky teenagers, to the Lighthouse; and Lily finishes the unfinished painting from ten years ago.

New theories of psychology, notably those of Sigmund Freud, had gained much currency by the time To the Lighthouse came out in 1927. Likewise, the early twentieth century saw great developments in British philosophy: in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and the nature of the human being and of society. Woolf incorporates some of these new ideas as she builds the fictional world of the novel. She includes an Oedipal conflict in the house of Ramsey between the mother, father, and James, the youngest of the eight Ramsey children. I suppose the Lighthouse itself (always capitalized, by the way) casts a Freudian shadow across almost every scene. But all this Freudian stuff seemed to me like a sop to the times. Her strikingly original narrative style probably owes more to William James than to Sigmund Freud. Woolf demonstrates here a total mastery of stream of consciousness narration. We eavesdrop on the thoughts of most of the characters at some point or other, and always in third person. As a result, we don’t get a crisp separation of outer and inner. The transitions between speech, thought, and matters of fact, lack the clunky conventions of many writers—quotation marks or dashes for speech, italics for thought, or some other such device. Consider this passage, for instance.

And so she said, “Yes; all children go through stages,” and began considering the dahlias in the big bed, and wondering what about next year’s flowers, and had he heard the children’s nickname for Charles Tansley, she asked. The atheist, they called him, the little atheist. “He’s not a polished specimen,” said Mr. Ramsey. “Far from it,” said Mrs Ramsey.

Mrs. Ramsey states her childrearing cliché aloud, as the quotation marks indicate, but the narrator flows imperceptibly from thought to unquoted speech before abruptly returning to standard dialogue. The decisions about how to render the difference of inner and outer dialogue defy rules but work beautifully.

Woolf’s intimacy with all her characters allows her to serve up delightful blend of insight and humor. The overall tone of the book affected me as quite serious, though lacking melodrama. A deep longing for communication, shared meanings, recognition, dignity, suffuses every scene. Yet so much of what the characters really think, as opposed to what they say, comes out just plain funny. But, that struck me as perfectly right. Wouldn’t any unfiltered transcript of thoughts, even your own, race off on absurd tangents and betray a confusing moral complexity? In other words, shouldn’t we all think of ourselves as great bundles of standup comedy material, if only someone could tap into it?

Many private thoughts of the characters remain unspoken, out of embarrassment, kindness, or a sense of propriety. Here, for instance, we get a glimpse of Mrs. Ramsey’s resentful assessment of her husband’s worldview. In this scene, Mrs. Ramsey has just brought a thrill of joy to James, at the prospect of going to the Lighthouse if the weather permits, but Mr. Ramsey has stomped on that joy by declaring with masculine authority that the weather most certainly will not permit such a trip.

What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsey would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.

I particularly like the barbed detail of his “little” blue eyes.

Mrs. Ramsey would sooner die than let Mr. Ramsey know her real thoughts. And later, Mr. Ramsey himself suffers a terrible embarrassment when others overhear him chanting lines from Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.”

At the dinner party, the whole cast assembles: eight adults, each concealing their thoughts while trying to fathom those of the others. For thirty-two pages, with Mrs. Ramsey’s mind grounding our excursions, we probe the thoughts, irritations, and judgments of her husband and the other guests. By this point in the novel, we have come to know all the characters and how they feel about each other. So we savor the little islands of conversations and subtle meanings as they heat up and cool down. Suddenly, one of the guests unconscionably asks for another plate of soup, greatly annoying Mr. Ramsey. Mrs. Ramsey instantly senses a disturbance in the force.

It was unthinkable, it was detestable (so he signaled to her across the table) that Augustus should be beginning his soup over again. He loathed people eating when he had finished. She saw his anger fly like a pack of hounds into his eyes, his brow, and she knew that in a moment something violent would explode, and then—thank goodness! she saw him clutch himself and clap a brake on the wheel, and the whole of his body seemed to emit sparks but not words. He sat there scowling. He had said nothing, he would have her observe. Let her give him the credit for that! But why after all should poor Augustus not ask for another plate of soup? He had merely touched Ellen’s arm and said:

“Ellen, please, another plate of soup,” and then Mr. Ramsey scowled like that.

And why not? Mrs. Ramsey demanded. Surely they could let Augustus have his soup if he wanted it. He hated people wallowing in food, Mr. Ramsey frowned at her. He hated everything dragging on for hours like this. But he had controlled himself, Mr. Ramsey would have her observe, disgusting though the sight was. But why show it so plainly, Mrs. Ramsey demanded (they looked at each other down the long table sending these questions and answers across, each knowing exactly what the other felt.)

And at this moment of conspicuous self-control, Mrs. Ramsey has the servant light the candles. Somehow, the mood changes, and the party’s desultory mood reverses itself. Well, I thought this chapter one of the finest pieces of writing I’ve seen in a long while.

Everyone’s world seems to revolve around Mrs. Ramsey, and she epitomizes the gender role that British society expects all women to play. Woolf expresses that gender role with astonishing, nonjudgmental verisimilitude. Yet she has the greatest sympathy with Lily Briscoe, the painter. Lily has built her world from colors, lines, and shapes, not the heady abstractions that Mr. Ramsey, a renowned philosopher, writes about. She and William Bankes, a biologist, while taking a walk together, find themselves talking about Mr. Ramsey’s lamentable need for public recognition. Lily defends him by saying, “Oh, but think of his work!”

Whenever she “thought of his work” she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew’s doing. She asked him what his father’s books were about. “Subject and object and the nature of reality,” Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant. “Think of a kitchen table then,” he told her, “when you’re not there.”

So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsey’s work, a scrubbed kitchen table. It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, for they had reached the orchard. And with a painful effort of concentration, she focused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark of the tree, or upon its fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, one of those scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to have been laid bare by years of muscular integrity, which stuck there, its four legs in the air. Naturally, if one’s days were passed in this seeing of angular essences, the reducing of lovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal¹ four-legged table (and it was the mark of the finest minds so to do), naturally one could not be judged like an ordinary person.

Anyway, later in “The Window,” Lily struggles with the composition of a painting. Out on the lawn, the view she seeks to capture includes a window, through which she can see Mrs. Ramsey reading a fairy tale to James. Bankes approaches Lily and expresses some curiosity about her art.

Taking out a pen-knife, Mr. Bankes tapped the canvas with the bone handle. What did she wish to indicate by that triangular purple shape, “just there”? he asked.

It was Mrs. Ramsey reading to James, she said. She knew his objection—that no one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no attempt at likeness, she said. For what reason had she introduced them then? he asked. Why indeed?—except that if there, in that corner, it was bright, here, in this, she felt the need of darkness. Simple, obvious, commonplace as it was, Mr. Bankes was interested. Mother and child then—objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was famous for her beauty—might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow without irreverence. […] The question being one of the relations of masses, of lights and shadows, which, to be honest, he had never considered before, he would like to have it explained […]

The full conversation (from which I have taken these excerpts) clearly makes an impression on Mr. Bankes, and Lily comes away from it feeling understood. Unlike others in Lily’s experience, Mr. Bankes actually listens without judging. She takes her canvas off the easel and reflectively packs up her materials.

This man had shared with her something profoundly intimate. And, thanking Mr. Ramsey for it and Mrs. Ramsey for it and the hour and the place, crediting the world with a power which she had not suspected—that one could walk away down that long gallery not alone any more but arm in arm with somebody—the strangest feeling in the world, and the most exhilarating—she nicked the catch on her paint-box to, more firmly than was necessary […]

The novel replaces plot with a multitude of inner landscapes, not a mere sequence of inner monologues, but a graceful flowing of interlaced consciousnesses, jointly creating an intersubjective world. As a reader, I find myself adrift in a sea of minds, each containing infinite relations to other minds as well as their own private reservoirs of thoughts, impressions, emotions, anticipations, and memories. Objectivity gives way to perspectives; degrees centigrade to ambience; mass to weight. Yet, though the novel mostly lacks an objective standpoint, no single perspective dominates the whole work. Mrs, Ramsey, whose immediate and reflected presence looms large throughout “The Window,” dies without explanation in “Time Passes,” leaving the survivors, and the readers, to rebuild a new community.

So much of this novel deserves careful analysis. Woolf’s deft portrayal of British society through gendered eyes, for example. The sympathetic view of the world we get from inside Mrs. Ramsey’s mind and the unpleasant glimpses we get from Mr. Ramsey’s point of view do play a large role in this novel. But I’ll leave others to discuss that. I found the treatment of Lily’s isolation as an independent, female artist, and the unexpected discovery of a companion with whom she could talk openly about her art, albeit a companion from outside the world of painting, the most moving.

While I enjoyed Mrs. Dalloway, I feel that Virginia Woolf achieved perfection in To the Lighthouse. The points of view, to borrow from a description of Lily’s thoughts, “danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate, but all marvelously controlled in an invisible elastic net.” Woolf has formed a recognizable world out of a murmuration of minds. As random as the scattered thoughts might look, removing a single word would only have damaged the novel.

§ § §

The in-person reading group I belong to will read Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, sometime this year. So I think I’ll go ahead and tackle that one next.

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Works mentioned or alluded to in this reflection

To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

The Principles of Psychology, by William James

“The Charge of the Light Brigade,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

1. White deal is a light-colored softwood, like pine.