This week second reading looks at To The LighthouseBy Virginia Woolf (1927)
A SMALL BOY pleads to visit the lighthouse, for him it becomes a personal quest. Nothing else matters. His mother attempts to bargain, "Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow." His philosopher father, however, is a man of science who deals in facts, not promises. "But it won't be fine."
Small wonder the boy's response is to imagine a weapon close at hand, and capable of killing his father. Mr Ramsay prides himself on the truth; his wife, however, favours grace, charm, imagination and the unsaid. He deals in posterity, she lives for the moment.
This is Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, a symphonic novel in which her literary genius confronts ghosts and memories, most especially her love for her wistful, tragic mother. For all Woolf's technical skill, lilting prose and inspired use of the consciousness as a filter of powerful emotion, her astute meditation on the dramatic choreography of life and death, is an atmospheric, heartbreakingly elegiac study of a family and its close circle of intimates.
At its heart shimmers Mrs Ramsay, a beautiful woman , still lovely though aging; enthusiastic, yet weary, a magician preparing to vanish.
Some two years after completing Mrs Dalloway, itself a formidable performance, Woolf achieved her artistic testament. Here she draws on the physical reality of life which sustains an exploration of emotion and memory. It is as instinctive as it is analytical. The characters engage, react, observe and are in turn, observed and in the case of Mrs Ramsay, invoked, lamented.
The long opening section recreates the bustle of a ritualised family vacation. Each summer the Ramsays abandon London for the Isle of Skye. The children vary in age from young James and Cam, still wary of shadows at night, to Andrew, a promising mathematician, and Pru, ready for romance. Mrs Ramsay has established a household away from home where she tends her family and friends. Woolf allows her characters freedom to ponder, but it is to Lily Briscoe, a watchful, single woman and aspiring artist, that she entrusts the vital role of observer.
It is Lily, existing beyond the immediate control of Mrs Ramsay, though shaped by her presence and her absence, who ponders, late in this dreamy, exact, boldly impressionistic narrative, the meaning of life.
There is gaiety, eccentricity. There is also a prevailing male/female tension in the ramshackle if all- welcomingly chaotic holiday house. Mr Ramsay, egotistical and volatile, shouts, pontificates, quotes poetry and argues. His wife accepts him as he is; his children seethe and rebel. All the while, romances evolve, an engagement is announced and the future beckons - as does fate.
In a single sentence deliberately off stage and placed within brackets - "[Mr. Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning, but, Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his arms out. They remained empty.]" - Woolf jolts the reader into grasping the far-reaching significance of a narrative that not only chronicles a family's history, it also considers an England faced with social upheaval and a generation lost in the battlefields of the Great War.
Ten years pass, the survivors return. Mr Ramsay, James and a sullen Cam finally undertake the odyssey to the lighthouse, "the tower, stark and straight," while Lily, older, wiser, looks on and understands so much more.
...
This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon