The first section of Virginia Woolf’s
To The Lighthouse captures a day in the lives of the Ramsay family and their friends, a group of writers and artists, during a summer stay in the Isle of Skye. Then, after an interlude of ten years (which is brilliantly captured in only a few pages), we meet some of those characters again – after WWI, after unexpected deaths, and after the many social changes that took place in that ten-year period.
It would be difficult for me not to love a novel such as
To The Lighthouse, since it focuses on a moment in history that interests me immensely: the transition from the Victorian/Edwardian period to the looser social mores of the latter decades of the twentieth century. As Nicola Bradbury puts it in her introduction to this edition, in
To The Lighthouse “the personal and autobiographical is caught up in a larger cultural shift from one era and code of values to a new range of possibilities, especially for women.”
What appealed to me the most about this novel, then, was Woolf’s exploration of the role traditional gender expectations play in communication, in relationships, in the possibility or impossibility of ever achieving real intimacy.
On the one hand, we have Mrs Ramsay, a perfect example of the Victorian matriarch. Her marriage is a long and solid one, and she’s at the centre of her family’s domestic life. Yet there are endless barriers that prevent her and her husband from ever communicating honesty, and thus from ever forming a truly close connection. Lily Briscoe, on the other hand, is an unmarried painter who knows what’s expected of her as a woman, but takes pleasure in disregarding it. Yet her friendships contain more real intimacy than the Ramsay’s decades-long marriage.
What’s interesting about how To The Lighthouse contrast these two situations is the tone in which this is done. In the hands of another writer, this could easily have been a smug, self-satisfied novel about how wrongheaded the Victorian generation was. But Woolf portrays her characters far more generously and complexly than that. The tone is never angry or disapproving – Lily herself, after all, is half in love with the vanishing world of the Ramsays. There’s real tenderness and appreciation in how this world is portrayed, which only makes the end result more moving. And yet we are frequently reminded that despite all its appeal, Lily still wants to break free.
I particularly loved this passage about Lily’s struggle with the heavy social expectations that fall on her as a woman:
There is a code of behaviour, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behoves the woman, whatever her own occupation might be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there smiling.
As enjoyable as perplexing someone like Mr Tansley by not following this code of behaviour might be, readers aren’t allowed to forget that this struggle is very much real. Woolf never minimises how much it takes for Lily to break free of these expectations (and she wouldn’t – I imagine that this is something she very much struggled with herself). Even ten years later, with she returns to Skye, resisting Mr Ramsay’s all-consuming plea for sympathy still makes Lily feel that,
It was immensely to her discredit, sexually, to stand there dumb. One said--what did one say?--Oh, Mr. Ramsay! Dear Mr. Ramsay! That was what that kind old lady who sketched, Mrs. Beckwith, would have said instantly, and rightly. But, no. They stood there, isolated from the rest of the world. His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at her feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet. In complete silence she stood there, grasping her paint brush.
Yet this sense of inadequacy is compensated for by options far less lonely than a Victorian marriage. Lily has her friendship with William Bankes, for example, “one of the pleasures of her life”. This is a friendship that teaches her that “one could talk of painting then seriously to a man”. The shock of finally being taken seriously, of being treated like an intellectual equal at last, is followed by the knowledge that “this man had shared with her something profoundly intimate”.
The Ramsay’s marriage, on the other hand, is full of walls and prohibitions and rigid roles that have to be played, all of which inevitable results in a lot of loneliness and a lot of no-go areas: “No, they could not share that; they could not say that.” I think the following passage, from Mrs Ramsay’s point of view, illustrates it best of all:
She did not like, even for a second, to feel finer than her husband; and further, could not bear not being entirely sure, when she spoke to him, of the truth of what she said. Universities and people wanting him, lectures and books and their being of the highest importance--all that she did not doubt for a moment; but it was their relation, and his coming to her like that, openly, so that any one could see, that discomposed her; for then people said he depended on her, when they must know that of the two he was infinitely the more important, and what she gave the world, in comparison with what he gave, negligible. But then again, it was the other thing too--not being able to tell him the truth, being afraid, for instance, about the greenhouse roof and the expense it would be, fifty pounds perhaps to mend it; and then about his books, to be afraid that he might guess, what she a little suspected, that his last book was not quite his best book (she gathered that from William Bankes); and then to hide small daily things, and the children seeing it, and the burden it laid on them--all this diminished the entire joy, the pure joy, of the two notes sounding together, and let the sound die on her ear now with a dismal flatness.
The burden is on them both – it’s a relationship model that disallows intimacy, and is therefore lonely and constrictive and unsatisfying for men and women alike. Even Mr Ramsay’s belief in the righteousness of his demands for sympathy, in the priority of his own emotional needs, doesn’t satisfy him in the end. This is not, by the way, something I think we’ve completely overcome now. Certainly this relationship model is no longer held up as the one we all ought to aspire to – there are different possibilities now, thanks to people like Lily disobeying the code of behaviour, and that makes me infinitely grateful. It makes a world of difference. But when I see certain people express their gendered attitudes today, when I hear them express their belief that their partners are Man or Woman first and Person second, and that there are therefore strict rules to be followed concerning what can or cannot be discussed with them, what they will or will not understand – when I see this, I wonder how much like the Ramsay’s their lives really are.
There’s a lot more I could say about this novel – for example, that as in Mrs Dalloway I loved Woolf’s use of point of view. I loved that we got to see each of the central characters from the inside, and how this makes the fact that they are each of them a complex human being inescapable. Getting to know them this intimately prevents us from judging or dismissing them – as Lily thinks to herself at one point “but nevertheless, the fact remained, it was impossible to dislike any one if one looked at them.”
I also loved the novel’s exploration of time – both in the famous “Time Passes” middle section and throughout the text in general. The world of To The Lighthouse is one that is indifferent to its inhabitant’s struggles, and yet this isn’t presented as a source of anguish. Time passes, people die, new people move through the spaces that the dead once inhabited, and often their struggles and preoccupations are very much the same. There’s an acceptance of impermanence here that I very much appreciated. I’ll leave you with two passages that illustrate it well:
His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two, and would then be merged in some bigger light, and that in a bigger still. (He looked into the hedge, into the intricacy of the twigs.) Who then could blame the leader of that forlorn party which after all has climbed high enough to see the waste of the years and the perishing of the stars, if before death stiffens his limbs beyond the power of movement he does a little consciously raise his numbed fingers to his brow, and square his shoulders, so that when the search party comes they will find him dead at his post, the fine figure of a soldier? Mr. Ramsay squared his shoulders and stood very upright by the urn.
With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that. (...) She stopped knitting; she held the long reddish-brown stocking dangling in her hands a moment. She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one's relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
They read it too:
Evening All Afternoon, Book Gazing, Moored at Sea, Still Life With Books, Medieval Bookworm, Erin Reads, Nonsuch Book, Rebecca Reads, Paperback Reader
(Yours?)
