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Virginia Woolf
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WOOLF
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) came from a prominent literary family. Her
father, Leslie Stephen, was the originator of the (British) Dictionary of
National Biography, and her mother was a Duckworth, the publishing
family Her sister Vanessa Bell was, like her husband Clive, an artist, who
designed jackets for the Hogarth Press, set up by Virginia and her husband
Leonard in 1917. Virginia, a woman of ethereal beauty and, like so many of
the Bloomsbury group, bisexual, married Leonard, social reformer and author,
in 1912.
Woolf, whose life was punctuated by nervous breakdowns, was an experimental
novelist often compared with [ovce. Besides her own work, she was a
stimulating commentator in her luminously intelligent essays and in her
feminist criticism, for example, A Room of One's Own, 1929. Her early
novels, The Voyage Out (1915, but written earlier) and Night and
Day (1919) were relatively realistic. The interval between them was
largely occupied with the Hogarth Press, which published Katharine Mansfield
and T. S. Eliot, among others.
Her reputation as England's leading modernist author was established in the
1920s by Jacob's Room (1922), based on the life and death of a
beloved brother; Mrs Dalloway (1925), a classic using the stream-of-conscious-ness
technique; To the Lighthouse (1927), employing the same technique to
explore male-female conflict and based on her parents; and The Waves
(1931), her most boldly experimental (and difficult) novel, and considered
by some critics to be her masterpiece. The eponymous Orlando (1928),
is alternatively male and female through four centuries. Something of a
departure, it was her most successful novel and dedicated to Vita Sackville
West, a woman of shared affinities. Her last novel Between the Acts
(1941) returns to the stream-of-consciousness technique and celebrates
traditional English values in the shadow of war.
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Virginia Woolf
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Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell
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Virginia Woolf
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Vanessa Bell
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Virginia Woolf
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Virginia Woolf
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Virginia Woolf
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Adeline)
Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English
novelist and essayist, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary
figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a
significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury
Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the
Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of
One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room
of her own if she is to write fiction."
Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London to Sir Leslie Stephen, considered
the father of the Bloomsbury Group, and Julia Prinsep Stephen (born Jackson)
(1846–1895), she was educated by her parents in their literate and
well-connected household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Virginia's
parents had each been married previously, and their spouses had died.
Consequently, the household contained the children of three marriages:
Julia's children with her first husband Herbert Duckworth: George Duckworth
(1868–1934); Stella Duckworth (1869–1897); and Gerald Duckworth (1870–1937).
Laura Makepeace Stephen (1870–1945), Leslie's daughter with Minny Thackeray,
who was declared mentally disabled and lived with them until she was
institutionalised in 1891 to the end of her life; and Leslie and Julia's
children: Vanessa Stephen (1879–1961); Thoby Stephen (1880–1906); Virginia;
and Adrian Stephen (1883–1948). Sir Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor,
critic, and biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray (he was the
widower of Thackeray's eldest daughter) meant that Woolf was raised in an
environment filled with the influences of Victorian literary society. Henry
James, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Julia Margaret Cameron (an aunt of
Julia Stephen), and James Russell Lowell, who was made Virginia's godfather,
were among the visitors to the house. Julia Stephen was equally well
connected. Descended from an attendant of Marie Antoinette, she came from a
family of renowned beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as
models for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early photographers. Supplementing
these influences was the immense library at 22 Hyde Park Gate, from which
Virginia (unlike her brothers, who were formally educated) was taught the
classics and English literature. According to her memoirs her most vivid
childhood memories, however, were not of London but of St Ives in Cornwall,
where the family spent every summer until 1895. The family stayed in their
home called the Talland House, which looked out over the Porthminster Bay.
Memories of the family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially
the Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the fiction she wrote in later years,
notably To the Lighthouse. She also based the summer home in Scotland after
the Talland House and the Ramsay family after her own family. The sudden
death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half
sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several
nervous breakdowns. The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most
alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalized. Her breakdowns and
subsequent recurring depressive periods, modern scholars have claimed, were
also induced by the sexual abuse she and Vanessa were subject to by their
half-brothers George and Gerald (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical
essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate). Throughout her life,
Woolf was plagued by drastic mood swings. Though these
recurring mental breakdowns greatly affected her social functioning, her
literary abilities remained intact. Modern diagnostic techniques have led to
a posthumous diagnosis of bipolar disorder, an illness which coloured her
work, relationships, and life, and eventually led to her suicide. Following
the death of her father in 1904 and her second serious nervous breakdown,
Virginia, Vanessa, and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate, and bought a house at
46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. Following studies at King's College London,
Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan
Grant, and Leonard Woolf, who together formed the nucleus of the
intellectual circle known as the Bloomsbury Group which came to notorious
fame in 1910 with the Dreadnought hoax Virginia Woolf participated in,
dressed as a male Abyssinian royalty. Virginia Stephen married writer
Leonard Woolf in 1912, referring to him during their engagement as a
"penniless Jew." The couple shared a close bond, and in 1937 Woolf wrote in
her diary "Love-making — after 25 years can’t be attained by my unattractive
countenance ... you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted, a pleasure
that I have never felt." They also collaborated professionally, in 1917
founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published most of Woolf's
work. The ethos of Bloomsbury discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922,
Woolf met Vita Sackville-West. After a tentative start, they began a
relationship that lasted through most of the 1920s. In 1928, Woolf presented
Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous
hero's life spans three centuries and both genders. It has been called by
Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, "the longest and most charming
love letter in literature." After their affair ended, the two women remained
friends until Woolf's death. After completing the manuscript of her last
(posthumously published) novel Between the Acts, Woolf fell victim to a
depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The war, the
Luftwaffe's destruction of her London homes, as well as the cool reception
given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry, worsened her condition
until she was unable to work.On 28 March 1941, after having a nervous
breakdown, Woolf drowned herself by weighing her pockets with stones and
walking into the River Ouse near her home. Her body was not found until
April 18. Her husband buried her cremated remains under a tree in the garden
of their house in Rodmell, Sussex. In her last note to her husband she
wrote:
"I feel certain that I am going mad
again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I
shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate.
So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the
greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone
could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this
terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling
your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I
can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe
all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me
and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody
could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but
the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.
I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. "
Woolf began writing professionally in 1905,
initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about
Haworth, home of the Brontë family.[5] Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was
published in 1915 by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth and
Company Ltd. This novel was originally entitled Melymbrosia, but Woolf
repeatedly changed the draft. An earlier version of The Voyage Out has been
reconstructed by Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the
public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that many of the changes
Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in her own life.Woolf
went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both
critical and popular success. Much of her work was self-published through
the Hogarth Press. She has been hailed as one of the greatest novelists of
the twentieth century and one of the foremost Modernists, though she
disdained some artists in this category. Woolf is considered one of the
greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented
with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as
emotional motives of characters. Woolf's reputation declined sharply after
World War II, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of Feminist
criticism in the 1970s. After a few more ideologically based altercations,
not least caused by claims that Woolf was anti-Semitic and a snob, it seems
that a critical consensus has been reached regarding her stature as a
novelist. Her work was criticised for epitomizing the narrow world of the
upper-middle class English intelligentsia. Some critics judged it to be
lacking in universality and depth, without the power to communicate anything
of emotional or ethical relevance to the disillusioned common reader, weary
of the 1920s aesthetes. She was also criticized by some as an anti-Semite,
despite her marriage to a Jewish man. She wrote in her diary, "I do not like
the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh." However, in a 1930 letter
to Ethel Smyth quoted in Nigel Nicolson's biography,Virginia Woolf, she
recollects her boasts of Leonard's Jewishness confirming her snobbish
tendencies, "How I hated marrying a Jew- What a snob I was, for they have
immense vitality."Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have
tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical
novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a
narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes
almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive consciousness. Intense
lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with
auditory and visual impressions. The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic
vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings - often wartime
environments - of most of her novels. For example, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to
organize a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus
Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World
War bearing deep psychological scars. To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two
days ten years apart. The plot centers around the Ramsay family's
anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the
connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the
struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she
struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a
meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war, and
of the people left behind. The Waves (1931) presents a group of six friends
whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior
monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a
prose poem than to a plot-centered novel. Her last work, Between the Acts
(1941) sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations: the
transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on
the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion
and rejuvenation - all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative
encompassing almost all of English history. While nowhere near a simple
recapitulation of the coterie's ideals, Woolf's work can be understood as
consistently in dialogue with Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency
(informed by G.E. Moore, among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism.
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Jacob's Room
Virginia Woolf
1882-1941
Jacob's Room, the first of Woolf's novels to be published by the
press that she founded with Leonard Woolf, was also the work in
which she broke with the fictional conventions that she felt had
constrained her first two novels. Jacob's Room is an elegy for a
lost brother and for the war-dead; one in which the narrative is
structured around an absence—an empty room. !t is a form of
search or quest for a "character" who cannot be captured, not
only because he himself is elusive but because other human
beings are "utterly unknown" to us. The novel was in large part
an ironic commentary on the over confident ways in which
novelists had portrayed their characters as fully knowable and
representable. While Jacob's experiences are typical of his
privileged sex and class—public school, Cambridge, London life,
travel abroad—he is given to the reader only in glimpses and
through the limited perspectives of a narrator, and other, more
fleeting figures. Jacob's Room works to deconstruct rather than
to construct its central figure, and to expose the processes by
which characters are composed in realist or naturalist novels.
Jacob's Room was, the novelist and critic Winifred Holtby wrote,
Woolf's war book, though it "never mentions trenches, camps,
recruiting officers, nor latrines." Rather, it asks what is lost
when a young man is killed in war:" What was lost by him? What
was lost by his friends? What exactly was it that had
disappeared?"
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Orlando
Virginia Woolf
1882-1941
For a demonstration of the sheer vitality of Woolf's writing,
Orlando is unsurpassed. It is a provocative exploration of
gender and history, as well as the very nature of biography;
perhaps surprisingly, it was highly popular when first
published.
Following the adventures of Orlando over a four-hundred-year
life that encompasses wild adventure, love, and a shift in
gender, the character was apparently based on Woolf's lover Vita
Sackville-West. In the exuberant court of Elizabeth I, Orlando
is a dazzlingly handsome sixteen-year-old nobleman. There
follows a frost fair on the Thames at which a love affair with a
Russian princess begins, only to end in heartache. Later he is
sent by Charles II as ambassador to the Ottoman court in
Constantinople, where he becomes a woman, before returning to
England to reside in the company of Pope and Dryden. A marriage
in the nineteenth century leads to a son and a career as a
writer, and the story ends in 1928,as Woolf's text was
published.
This extraordinary tale is augmented by a series of writerly
flourishes, questioning our conception of history, of gender,
and of biographical "truth." If these are constructs, then who
constructs them? What do they mean for individuals living and
telling their lives? Woolf uses a series of devices to
facilitate this kind of speculation: clothes are prominent, as
is their role in shaping perceptions of gender; the narrative
voice too is brilliantly conscious of itself, and of us as
readers. It is a remarkable text.
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The Years
Virginia Woolf
1882-1941
Covering a span of fifty years as it recounts the fortunes of
the Pargiter family, this is the longest and most commercially
successful of Woolf's novels.The Pargiters are headed by a
retired military patriarch who, owing to his wife's disability,
is also an occasional philanderer.The children (three sons and
three daughters) variously flirt with nonconformity but
ultimately spread themselves effortlessly among the middle-class
professions. In many ways the Pargiter family is a remnant of
the Victorianism that Woolf inveighed against throughout her
career. This is not a chronicle in the conventional sense of the
term. By the close of the novel, fortunes have been won and
lost, loves forsaken, and lives have perished. Nevertheless, it
is Woolf's characteristic attention to fragmentary moments of
experience that produces the most intense writing. As the
characters variously return to the past in a modern world that
resists easy understanding, the poeticism of the writing focuses
instead on unfinished vignettes and the particularity of sense
impressions. A perceptive critic and observer, Woolf reveals the
plight of women in a world that denies them education and
careers; she shows the tragic consequences of the Great War for
its survivors and retains an unflinching eye for the mortifying
effects of bourgeois social pretension. The reader will find
that the extended lyricism and crystalline expressiveness of the
writing lingers in the memory long after the final pages have
been read.
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Between the Acts
Virginia Woolf
1882-1941
Woolf's last novel, published posthumously, conveys a strong
sense of finality, or more precisely, depicts a transitional
moment, at the brink of something threatening and unknown. This
was, of course, the war. Woolf set the novel in 1939 (all the
action takes place at an English country house on one June day),
but while she wrote it, London was under heavy bombardment. The
day in question is that of the annual community pageant,to be
staged (as always) in the grounds at Pointz Hall.The novel is
concerned with everything that happens—not only between the
acts, but before, after, and alongside—and with the interactions
between the Oliver family and the outsiders and villagers
attending the pageant. Even though the novel is comprised of
fragments, the irrevocably separate bits of individual lives and
experiences, it still conveys a profound sense of rhythm and
interconnectedness.
Virginia Woolf's acute management of narrative perspective is
both microscopic and macrocosmic— swinging in one moment between
blades of grass to a consideration of the historical palimpsest
that is the surface of the earth when viewed from above. The
pageant itself—scenes and segments from English literature and
history—mirrors the texture of the novel. Significantly,
although the pageant mystifies its audience (like the novel, it
is prone to disruption), a moment of fragile equipoise is
caught, only to be dispersed, in turn, by military aircraft
flying overhead.
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Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
1882-1941
Woolf's novel Mrs. Daliowoy takes place over the course of a
single day, and is one of the defining texts of modernist
London. It traces the interlocking movements around Regent's
Park of the two main protagonists: Clarissa Dalloway is a
socialite, and wife of Richard Dalloway, a Conservative MP,
while Septimus Warren Smith is a veteran and shell-shocked
victim of the Great War.The passage of time in the novel,
punctuated by the periodic striking of a giant, phallic Big Ben,
ultimately takes us to a double climax; to the success of Mrs.
Dalloway's illustrious party, and to the suicide of Septimus
Warren Smith, who finds himself unable to live in the postwar
city.
Much of the effect of this novel derives from the
irreconcilability of its two halves, an irreconcilability which
is reflected in the space of the city itself. Different people
go about their different lives, preparing for suicide and
preparing for dinner, and there is no way, the novel suggests,
of building a bridge between them. Septimus and Clarissa are
separated by class, by gender and by geography, but at the same
time, the novel's capacity to move from one consciousness to
another suggests a kind of intimate, underground connection
between them, which is borne out in Clarissa's response to the
news of Septimus' death. A poetic space, which does not
correspond to the clock time meted out by Big Ben, underlies the
city, suggesting a new way of thinking about relations between
men and women, between one person and another. Mrs. Dalloway is
a novel of contradictions—between men and women, between rich
and poor, between self and other, between life and death. But
despite these contraditions, in the flimsy possibility of a
poetic union between Septimus and Clarissa, the novel points
toward a reconciliation we are still waiting to realize.
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MRS. DALLOWAY
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Type of work: Novel
Author: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Type of plot: Psychological realism
Time of plot: 1920s
Locale: London
First published: 1925
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Mrs. Dalloway traces a single day in the life of two characters,
Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, largely through their impressions,
thoughts, and feelings. For Clarissa the day culminates with a
successful party; for Septimus it ends in suicide. In the complex
psychological relationship between the two, Virginia Woolf suggests
provocative ideas about the nature and meaning of life, love, time, and
death.
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Principal Characters
Clarissa Dalloway, a woman fifty-two years old and chic, but
disconcerted over life and love. The June day in her late middle years
is upsetting to Mrs. Dalloway, uncertain as she is about her daughter
and her husband's love, her own feelings for them and her former fiance,
lately returned from India. Years before Peter Walsh had offered her
agony and ecstasy, though not comfort or social standing, and so she had
chosen Richard Dalloway. Now, seeing Peter for the first time in many
years, her belief in her motives and her peace of mind are gone. Engaged
in preparations for a party, she knows her life is frivolous, her need
for excitement neurotic, and her love dead. Meeting her best friend,
Sally Seton, also makes her realize that their love was abnormal as is
her daughter's for an older woman. Although she knows that her husband's
love for her is very real and solid, she feels that death is near, that
growing old is cruel, that life can never be innocently good again.
Richard Dalloway, her politician husband, a Conservative Member of
Parliament. Never to be a member of the Cabinet of a Prime Minister,
Richard is a good man who has improved his character, his disposition,
his life. Loving his wife deeply but silently, he is able only to give
her a conventional bouquet of roses to show his feeling, a fortunate
gift because roses are the one flower she can stand to see cut. Devoted
to his daughter, he sees her infatuation as a passing thing, an
adolescent emotional outlet. He is gently persuasive among his
constituents and colleagues and in thought and deed a thoroughly good
man.
Peter Walsh, a widower lately returned from India to make arrangements
for the divorce of a major's wife, a woman half his age whom he plans to
marry, again an action to fill the void left by Clarissa. Perceptive and
quick to understand motives for unhappiness, Peter sees his return to
England as another step in his failure to live without Clarissa.
Unnerved by seeing her again, he blurts out his recent history, and he
continues the cruel probe all day and that night at her party.
Septimus Warren Smith, a war casualty who commits suicide on the night
of Mrs. Dalloway's party and delays the arrival of one of the guests, a
doctor. A poet and a brave man, Septimus brings back to England an
Italian war bride whom he cannot really love, all feeling having been
drained from him by the trauma of war. Extremely sensitive to motives,
Septimus sees his doctors as representing the world's attempt to crush
him, to force him into conventionality. Feeling abandoned and unable to
withstand even the devotion of his lovely wife, he jumps to his death, a
martyr to the cause of individuality, of sensitivity to feelings and
beauty.
Lucrezia Smith, called Rezia, the Italian wife whom Smith met in Milan
and married after the war. Desperately in love with her husband, she
tries to give him back his former confidence in human relations, takes
him to doctors for consultation, and hopes to prevent his collapse and
suicide.
Elizabeth Dalloway, the daughter who has none of her mother's charm or
vivacity and all of her father's steady attributes. Judged to be
handsome, the sensible seventeen-year-old appears mature beyond her
years; her thoughtfulness directly contradicts her mother's frivolity.
She is until this day enamored of Miss Kilman, a desperate and fanatical
older woman who is in love with Elizabeth but conceals her feeling under
the guise of religiosity and strident charity. On the day of the party
Elizabeth sees Miss Kilman's desire for power and escapes from the
woman's tyranny of power and need. That night Elizabeth blossoms forth
in womanly radiance so apparent that her father fails to recognize her.
Doris Kilman, Elizabeth Dalloway's tutor and friend, an embittered,
frustrated spinster whose religious fanaticism causes her to resent all
the things she could not have or be. With a lucid mind and intense
spirit, largely given to deep hatreds of English society, she represents
a caricature of a perversion of womanly love and affection.
Lady Rosseter, nee Sally Seton, the old friend with whom Mrs. Dalloway
had believed herself in love when she was eighteen. Sally has always
known that Clarissa made the wrong choice and has always been aware of
the shallowness of her friend's existence. Mellowed now, Sally and Peter
Walsh can see the pattern of life laid out before them at this gay
party, and they console each other for loss of girlhood friend and
beloved.
Dr. Holmes, Septimus Smith's physician. Brisk and insensitive, he fails
to realize the seriousness of his patient's condition. Puzzled because
Smith does not respond to prescriptions of walks in the park, music
halls, and bromides at bedtime, he sends him to consult Sir William
Bradshaw.
Sir William Bradshaw, a distinguished specialist who devotes
three-quarters of an hour to each of his patients. Ambitious for worldly
position but apathetic as a healer, he shuts away the mad, forbids
childbirth, and advises an attitude of proportion in sickness and in
health. Because of Septimus Smith's suicide he and his wife arrive late
at Mrs. Dalloway's party.
Lady Millicent Bruton, a fashionable Mayfair hostess. A dabbler in
charities and social reform, she is sponsoring a plan to have young men
and women immigrate to Canada.
Hugh Whitbread, a friend of the Dalloways and a minor official at Court.
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The Story
Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway went to make last-minute preparations for an
evening party. During her day in the city, she enjoyed the summer air,
the many sights and people, and the general bustle of London. She met
Hugh Whitbread, now a court official and a handsome and sophisticated
man. She had known Hugh since her youth, and she knew his wife, Evelyn,
as well, but she did not particularly care for Evelyn. Other people came
down to London to see paintings, to hear music, or to shop. The
Whitbreads came down to consult doctors, for Evelyn was always ailing.
Mrs. Dalloway went about her shopping. While she was in a flower shop, a
luxurious limousine pulled up outside. Everyone speculated on the
occupant behind the drawn curtains of the car. Everywhere the limousine
went, it was followed by curious eyes. Mrs. Dalloway, who had thought
that the queen was inside, felt that she was right when the car drove
into the Buckingham Palace grounds.
The sights and sounds of London reminded Mrs. Dalloway of many things.
She thought back to her youth, to the days before her marriage, to her
husband, and to her daughter Elizabeth. Her daughter was indeed a
problem and all because of that horrid Miss Kilman who was her friend.
Miss Kilman was a religious fanatic, who scoffed at the luxurious living
of the Dalloways and felt sorry for Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway hated
her. Miss Kilman was not at all like the friend of her own girlhood.
Sally Seton had been different. Mrs. Dalloway had really loved Sally.
Mrs. Dalloway wondered what love really was. She had loved Sally, but
she had loved Richard Dalloway and Peter Walsh, too. She had married
Richard, and then Peter had left for India. Later, she learned that he
had married someone he met on shipboard. She had heard little about his
wife since his marriage. The day, however, was wonderful and life itself
was wonderful. The war was over, and she was giving a party.
While Mrs. Dalloway was shopping, Septimus Smith and his wife were
sitting in the park. Septimus had married Lucrezia while he was serving
in Italy, and she had given up her family and her country for him. Now
he frightened her because he acted so strangely and talked of committing
suicide. The doctor said that there was nothing physically wrong with
him. Septimus, one of the first to volunteer for war duty, had gone to
war to save his country, the England of Shakespeare. When he got back,
he was a war hero and was given a good job at the office. They had nice
lodgings, and Lucrezia was happy. Septimus began reading Shakespeare
again. He was unhappy; he brooded. He and Lucrezia had no children. To
Septimus, the world was in such horrible condition that it was unjust to
bring children into it.
When Septimus began to have visitations from Evans, a Comrade who had
been killed in the war, Lucrezia became even more frightened and called
in Dr. Holmes. Septimus felt almost completely abandoned by that time.
Lucrezia could not understand why her husband did not like Dr. Holmes,
for he was so kind and so interested in Septimus. Finally, she took her
husband to Sir William Bradshaw, a wealthy and noted psychiatrist.
Septimus had had a brilliant career ahead of him. His employer spoke
highly of his work. No one knew why he wanted to kill himself. Septimus
said that he had committed a crime, but his wife said that he was guilty
of absolutely nothing. Sir William suggested a place in the country
where Septimus would be by himself, without his wife. It was not, Sir
William said, a question of preference. Since he had threatened suicide,
it was a question of law.
In the meantime, Mrs. Dalloway returned home. Lady Bruton had invited
Richard Dalloway to lunch. Mrs. Dalloway had never liked Millicent
Bruton; she was far too clever. Then Peter Walsh came to call, and Mrs.
Dalloway was surprised and happy to see him again. She introduced him to
Elizabeth, her daughter. He asked Mrs. Dalloway if she were happy; she
wondered why. When he left, she called out to him not to forget her
party. Peter thought about Clarissa Dalloway and her parties; that was
all life meant to her. He had been divorced from his wife and had come
to England. Life was far more complicated for him. He had fallen in love
with another woman, one who had two children, and he had come to London
to arrange for her divorce and to get some sort of a job. He hoped Hugh
Whitbread would find him one, something in the government.
That night, Clarissa Dalloway's party was a great success. At first, she
was afraid that it would fail; but at last the prime minister arrived,
and her evening was complete. Peter was there, and Peter met Lady
Rossetter. Lady Rossetter turned out to be Sally Seton. She had not been
invited but had just dropped in. She had five sons, she told Peter. They
chatted. Then Elizabeth came in, and Peter noticed how beautiful she
was.
Later, Sir William Bradshaw and his wife entered. They were late, they
explained, because one of Sir William's patients had committed suicide.
Feeling altogether abandoned, Septimus Smith had jumped out of a window
before they could take him into the country. Clarissa was upset. Here
was death, she thought. Although Smith was completely unknown to her,
she somehow felt it was her own disaster, her own disgrace. The poor
young man had thrown away his life when it became useless. Clarissa had
never thrown away anything more valuable than a shilling into the
Serpentine. Yes, once she had stood beside a fountain while Peter Walsh,
angry and humiliated, had asked her whether she intended to marry
Richard; and Richard had never been prime minister. Instead, the prime
minister came to her parties. Now she was growing old. Clarissa
Dalloway, knew herself at last for the beautiful, charming,
inconsequential person she was. Sally and Peter talked on. They thought
idly of Clarissa and Richard and wondered whether they were happy
together. Sally agreed that Richard had improved. She left Peter and
went to talk with Richard. Peter was feeling strange. A sort of terror
and ecstasy took hold of him, and he could not be certain what it was
that excited him so suddenly. It was Clarissa, he thought. Even after
all these years, it must be Clarissa.
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Critical Evaluation
Mrs. Dalloway comes midway in Virginia Woolf's career and near the
beginning of her experiments with form and technique (just after Jacob's
Room, her first experimental novel). The book is really two
stories—Clarissa Dalloway's and Septimus Smith's—and the techniques by
which Woolf united these two narrative strands are unusual and skillful.
While writing the novel, Woolf commented in her diary on her new method
of delineating character. Instead of explaining the characters' pasts
chronologically, she uses a "tunneling process": "I dig out beautiful
caves behind my characters." The various characters appear in the
present without explanation: various sense impressions—a squeaky hinge,
a repeated phrase, a particular tree—call to their minds a memory, and
past becomes present. Such an evocation of the past is reminiscent of
Proust, but Woolf's method does not involve the ego of the narrator.
Woolf's "caves" reveal the past and at the same time give characters'
reactions to present events. Woolf is then able to connect the "caves"
and also her themes by structural techniques, both spatial and temporal.
Unlike that of Joyce, Woolf's handling of the stream-of-consciousness
method is always filtered and indirect; the narrator is in command,
telling the reader, "Clarissa thought" or "For so it had always seemed
to her." This ever-present narrative voice generally helps the reader by
clarifying the characters' inner thoughts and mediating the commentary
of the novel; at times, however, it blurs the identity of the speaker.
Woolf's use of this narrative voice becomes more prominent in To the
Lighthouse (1927) but disappears in The Waves (1931).
With its disparate characters and various scenes of street life, the
structure of the book seems at first to lack unity. Woolf, however, uses
many devices, both technical and thematic, to unite those elements. The
day (in mid-June, 1923), moving uninterruptedly from the early morning
to the late evening, is a single whole. Although the book is not divided
into chapters or sections headed by titles or numbers, Woolf notes some
of the shifts in time or scene by a short blank space in the manuscript.
More often, however, the transition from one group of characters to
another is accomplished by the remarking of something public, something
common to the experience of both, something seen or heard. The world of
Clarissa and her friends alternates with the world of Septimus Smith;
and the sight of the motorcar, the sight and sound of the skywriting
plane, the running child, the woman singing, the omnibus, the ambulance,
and the clock striking are the transitions connecting those two worlds.
Moreover, the striking of the clocks ("first a warning, musical; then
the hour, irrevocable") is noted at various other times to mark a shift
from one character's consciousness to another within Clarissa's group.
The exact time is given periodically, signaling the day's progress (noon
comes at almost the exact center of the book) and stressing the
irrevocable movement toward death, one of the book's themes. Usually at
least two clocks are described as striking—first Big Ben, a masculine
symbol; then a few seconds later, St. Margaret's, a feminine symbol,
suggesting again the two genders of all existence, united in the echoes
of the bells, "the leaden circles."
The main thematic devices used to unify the book are the similarity
between Clarissa and Septimus and the repetition of key words and
phrases in the minds of various characters. The likeness between
Clarissa and Septimus is most important, as each helps to explain the
other, although they never meet. Both are lonely and contemplate
suicide. Both feel guilty for their past lives, Septimus because he
"cannot feel" the death of Evans, Clarissa because of her rejection of
Peter and her tendency to dominate others. Both have homosexual
feelings, Septimus for Evans, Clarissa for Sally Seton. More important,
both want desperately to bring order out of life's chaos. Septimus
achieves this momentarily with the making of Mrs. Peters' hat, and
Clarissa creates a harmonious unity with her successful party. Septimus
understands that the chaos will return and so takes his own life uniting
himself with Death, the final order. Septimus' suicide forces Clarissa
to see herself in a new and honest way, understanding for the first time
her schemings for success. Clarissa "felt somehow very like him"; she
does not pity him but identifies with his defiant "embracing" of death.
Certain phrases become thematic because they are so often repeated,
gaining richer overtones of meaning at each use, as different characters
interpret the phrases differently. "Fear no more," "if it were now to
die," the sun, the waves—these are some of the phrases and images
appearing over and over, especially in the thoughts of Septimus and
Clarissa.
All the disparate strands of the story are joined at Clarissa's party,
over which she presides like an artist over her creation. Not inferior
to the painter Lily Briscoe—another observant character in To the
Lighthouse—as a creator, Clarissa's great talent is "knowing people
almost by instinct," and she is able triumphantly to combine the right
group of people at her party. Not only Clarissa but Richard and Peter
also come to a new realization about themselves at the party. Richard,
who has been unable to verbalize his love for Clarissa, is finally able
to tell his daughter Elizabeth that he is proud of her. At the end,
Peter realizes that the terror and excitement he feels in Clarissa's
presence indicate his true feeling for her.
The two figures who are given unfavorable treatment—Sir William, the
psychiatrist, and Miss Kilman, the religious fanatic—insist on modes of
existence inimical to the passionate desire of Clarissa and Septimus for
wholeness. Claiming that Septimus "lacks proportion," Sir William
nevertheless uses his profession to gain power over others and, as
Clarissa understands, makes life "intolerable" for Septimus. Miss
Kilman's life is built on evangelical religion; she considers herself
superior to Clarissa, whom she wants to humiliate. She proudly asserts
that she will have a "religious victory," which will be "God's will."
The real action of the story is all within the minds of the characters,
but Woolf gives these inner lives a reality and harmony that reveals the
excitement and oneness of human existence. Clarissa and Septimus are
really two aspects of the same being—the feminine and the
masculine—united in Clarissa's ultimate awareness. Mrs. Dalloway remains
the best introduction to Woolf's characteristic style and themes.
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TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
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Òóðå of work: Novel
Author: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Type of plot: Psychological realism
Time of plot: ñ 1910-1920
Locale: The Isle of Skye in the Hebrides
First published: 1927
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This major psychological novel, based in part on the author's own
family background, is significant for its impressionistic evocation of
setting and character; its effective use of stream-of-consciousness
technique; its complex, unified structure; and its advancement of
Woolf's theory of androgynous personality.
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Principal Characters
Mr. Ramsay, a professor of philosophy, a metaphysician of high order, an
author, and the father of eight. Not really first-rate, as he realized
by the time he was sixty, he knew also that his mind was still agile,
his ability to abstract strong. Loved by his wife, he is nonetheless
offered sympathy and consolation for the things he is not. Lithe, trim,
the very prototype of the philosopher, he attracts many people to him
and uses their feelings to buoy him in his weaknesses. Not truly a
father, his gift for the ironic and sardonic arouses fear and hatred
rather than respect among his children. Broken by his wife's and oldest
son's deaths, he continues to endure and sharpen his mind on the fine
whetstone of wit.
Mrs. Ramsay, a beautiful woman even in her aging; she is warm,
compassionate, and devoted to the old-fashioned virtues of hearth,
husband, and children. With an aura of graciousness and goodness about
her, ineffable but pervasive, Mrs. Ramsay gathers about her guests,
students, friends, and family at their summer home on the Isle of Skye.
Loving and tender to her children, polite and pleasant to her guests,
she impresses upon them all the sanctity of life and marriage, the
elemental virtues. Mrs. Ramsay's love and reverence of life have its
effect on all her guests, even an atheistic student of her husband and
an aloof poet, but especially on Lily Briscoe whose self-revelation at
the end of the novel is due in part to Mrs. Ramsay's influence.
James, the Ramsays' youngest son and his mother's favorite, though the
child most criticized by the professor because the boy robs him of
sympathy that he desperately needs. Sensitive and austere, James at six
and sixteen suffers most the loss of his mother, taken from him at first
by a calculating father's demands and later by her death. He and his
sister Camilla make a pact of war against their father's tyranny of
demands and oversights. Finally, on a trip to the lighthouse, the symbol
of what had been denied him by his father, Mr. Ramsay praises his son's
seamanship.
Prue, who dies in childbirth, Andrew, killed in World War I, Nancy,
Roger, Rose, Jasper, and Camilla, called Cam, the other children of Mr.
and Mrs. Ramsay. All the children resent their father and his dominance.
Mrs. Ramsay regrets that they must grow up and lose the sensitivity and
imagination that will come with adulthood.
Lily Briscoe, an artist and friend of the family who more than any other
loved and cared for the weeks spent with the Ramsays in the Hebrides.
Desperately in need of assurance, Lily has withheld love and affection
from others until the summer she spends at the Ramsay cottage where she
observes life with its fixed center and raw edges. Completely won over
by Mrs. Ramsay, Lily almost gets her chance at life, and had the war not
interfered, she might have married. She is not really a great artist,
but during a visit to the Ramsay home after the war she experiences a
moment of fulfilled vision, a feeling of devotion to the oldest cause,
of a sense of oneness with all time, of sympathy for the human
condition, and she is able to express this fleeting moment in a painting
she had begun before Mrs. Ramsay's death.
Augustus Carmichael, a minor poet with one major success, a hanger-on,
the only one who does not at first love his hostess but who finally
discovers her genius years after her death. Laughed at by all the Ramsay
children because of his yellow-tinted beard, the result of taking opium,
as they imagine, he soaks up love and life without himself giving
anything. His late fame as a poet is a surprise to all who know him.
Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley, two handsome guests who become engaged
through Mrs. Ramsay's quiet management. Minta is like the young Mrs.
Ramsay and sends out an aura of love and passion, while Paul, with his
good looks and careful dress, is a foil for all affections and strong
feelings. But the marriage turns out badly; Minta leads her own life and
Paul takes a mistress. No longer lovers, they can afford to be friends.
William Bankes, a botanist, the oldest friend of Professor Ramsay. An
aging widower, he first comes to visit with the Ramsays out of a sense
of duty, but he stays on enraptured with life. The object of Lily
Briscoe's undisguised affections, he appears to Mrs. Ramsay almost
willing to become domesticated in spite of his eccentricities and set
ways. Nothing comes of this relationship except a broadening of Lily's
views on life.
Charles Tansley, Mr. Ramsay's protege, a boorish young man who
eventually is won over to the warmth and love of Mrs. Ramsy. It is his
opinionated conviction that women cannot paint or write. Interested in
abstract thought, he makes his career in scholarship.
Mrs. McNab, the old charwoman who acts as caretaker of the Ramsay house
in the Hebrides during the ten years it stands empty.
Mrs. Bast, the cottager who helps Mrs. McNab get the house ready for the
return of the Ramsay family.
George Bast, her son, who catches the rats and cuts the grass
surrounding the Ramsay house.
Macalister, the aged Scottish boatman who takes Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and
James on an expedition to the lighthouse. He tells the voyagers tales of
winter, storm, and death.
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The Story
Mrs. Ramsay promised James, her six-year-old son, that if the next day
were fair he would be taken on a visit to the lighthouse they could see
from the window of their summer home on the Isle of Skye. James, the
youngest of Mrs. Ramsay's eight children, was his mother's favorite. The
father of the family was a professor of philosophy whose students often
thought he was inspiring and one of the foremost metaphysicians of the
early twentieth century; but his own children, particularly the
youngest, did not like him because he made sarcastic remarks.
Several guests were visiting the Ramsays at the time. There was young
Mr. Tansley, Ramsay's student, who was also unpopular with the children
because he seemed to delight in their discomfiture. Tansley was mildly
in love with his hostess, despite her fifty years and her eight
children. There was Lily Bricoe, who was painting a picture of the
cottage with Mrs. Ramsay and little James seated in front of it. There
was old Mr. Carmichael, a ne'er-do-well who amused the Ramsay youngsters
because he had a white beard and a mustache tinged with yellow. There
was also William Bankes, an aging widower, and Prue, the prettiest of
the Ramsay daughters.
The afternoon went by slowly. Mrs. Ramsay went to the village to call on
a sick woman. She spent several hours knitting stockings for the
lighthouse keeper's child, whom they were planning to visit. Many people
wondered how the Ramsays, particularly the wife, managed to be as
hospitable and charitable as they were, for they were not rich; Mr.
Ramsay could not possibly make a fortune by expounding Locke, Berkeley,
and Hume to students or by publishing books on metaphysics.
Mr. Carmichael, pretending to read, had actually fallen asleep early
after lunch. The children, except for James, who was busy cutting
pictures out of a catalogue, had busied themselves in a game of cricket.
Mr. Ramsay and Mr. Tansley had passed the time in a pointless
conversation. Miss Briscoe had only made a daub or two of paint on her
canvas. For some reason, the lines of the scene refused to come clear in
her painting. She then went for a walk with Mr. Bankes along the shore.
Even the dinner went by slowly. The only occasion of interest to the
children, which was one of tension to their mother, came when Mr.
Carmichael asked the maid for a second bowl of soup, thereby angering
his host, who liked to have meals dispatched promptly. As soon as the
children had finished, their mother sent the younger ones to bed. Mrs.
Ramsay hoped that Mr. Bankes would marry Lily Briscoe. She also thought
how Lily always became seasick, so it was questionable whether she would
want to accompany them in the small sailboat if they should go to the
lighthouse the following day. Then she thought about the fifty pounds
needed to make some necessary repairs on the house.
After dinner, Mrs. Ramsay went upstairs to the nursery. James had a
boar's skull that his sister detested. Whenever Camilla tried to remove
it from the wall and her sight, he burst into a frenzy of screaming.
Mrs. Ramsay wrapped the boar's skull in her shawl. Afterward, she went
downstairs and joined her husband in the library, where they sat
throughout the evening. Mrs. Ramsay knitted, while Mr. Ramsay read.
Before they went to bed, it was agreed that the trip for the next day
would have to be canceled. The night had turned stormy.
Night followed night. The trip to the lighthouse was never made that
summer, and the Ramsays did not return to their summer home for some
years. In the meantime, Mrs. Ramsay died quietly in her sleep. By now,
her daughter Prue had been married and died in childbirth. World War I
began, and Andrew Ramsay enlisted and was sent to France, where he was
killed by an exploding shell.
Time passed. The wallpaper in the house came loose from the walls. Books
mildewed. In the kitchen, a cup was occasionally knocked down and broken
by old Mrs. McNab, who came to look after the house from time to time.
In the garden, the roses and the annual flowers grew wild or died.
Mr. Carmichael published a volume of poems during the war. About the
same time his book appeared, daffodils and violets bloomed on the Isle
of Skye. Mrs. McNab looked longingly at a warm cloak left in a closet.
She wished the cloak belonged to her.
At last the war ended. Mrs. McNab recieved a telegram requesting that
the house be put in order. For several days, the housekeeper worked,
aided by two cleaning women. When the Ramsays arrived, the cottage was
in order once more. Several visitors came again to share a summer at the
cottage. Lily Briscoe returned for a quiet vacation. Mr. Carmichael, the
succesful poet, also arrived.
One morning, Lily Briscoe came down to breakfast and wondered at the
quiet that greeted her. No one had been down ahead of her, although she
had expected that Mr. Ramsay and the two youngest children, James and
Camilla, would have eaten early and departed for the long-postponed sail
to the lighthouse, to which the youngsters had not been looking forward
with joyful anticipation. Very shortly, the three straggled down; all
had slept past the time they had intended to arise. After a swift
breakfast, they disappeared toward the shore. Lily Briscoe watched them
go. She had set up her canvas with the intention of once again trying to
paint her picture of the cottage.
The journey to the island where the lighthouse stood was not very
pleasant, as the children had expected. They had never really liked
their father; he had taken too little time to understand them. He was
short and sharp when they did things that seemed foolish to him,
although these actions were perfectly comprehensible to his son and
daughter. James, especially, expected to be blamed caustically and
pointlessly if the crossing were slow or not satisfactory in some other
way, for he had been delegated to handle the sheets and the tiller of
the boat.
Mr. Ramsay strode down to the beach with his offspring, each carrying a
paper parcel to take to the keepers of the lighthouse. They soon set
sail and pointed the prow of the sailboat toward the black and white
striped pillar of the lighthouse in the hazy distance. Mr. Ramsay sat in
the middle of the boat, along with an old fisherman and his son. They
were to take over the boat in case of an emergency, for Mr. Ramsay had
little trust in James as a reliable seaman. James himself sat in the
stern, nerves tingling lest his father look up from his book and indulge
in unnecessary and hateful criticism. His nervous tension, however, was
needless, for within a few hours the little party reached the
lighthouse, and Mr. Ramsay sprang ashore like a youngster, smiled back
at his children, and praised his son for his seamanship.
Lily Briscoe and her art become the true unifier of the story's
disparate elements. During the dinner party, as she remembers Charles
Tansley's dictum that "Women can't write, women can't paint," she
suddenly envisions the way to give her picture coherence, and she moves
the saltcellar to remind herself. Her painting, however, remains
incomplete, and, like the trip to the lighthouse, is not accomplished
until many years later. Lily, an unmarried professional, embodies both
rational (masculine) and imaginative (feminine) characteristics. She
analyzes art with William Bankes and still feels emotionally attuned
with Mrs. Ramsay. Lily becomes the central figure in the final section;
her visions of Mrs. Ramsay and of Mr. Ramsay and the children finally
landing at the lighthouse enable her to complete her work, uniting the
rational and the imaginative into the androgynous whole which the
painting symbolizes.
The novel's structure is thematically as well as techincally brilliant.
The work has three parts: the first, entitled "The Window" takes place
about 1910, the last, entitled "The Lighthouse," about 1920. The middle
section is entitled "Time Passes" and narrates the intervening time
period. The window in the first section functions as a symbol of the
female principle, as the narrator returns again and again to Mrs. Ramsay
in her place near the open window. Mrs. Ramsay is the center and unifier
of the family, and even as different characters participate in various
activities, their thoughts and glances return to Mrs. Ramsay. The
reddish-brown stocking she is knitting is another emblem of her unifying
power; but, like the trip to the lighthouse and Lily's painting, it is
not completed in the first section. The thoughts of different characters
are narrated by means of interior monologue, and Woolf makes skillful
use of the theory of association of ideas. Mrs. Ramsay's mind is most
often viewed, however, and she is the most realistic of the characters.
Early in the novel, the lighthouse, in its faraway light-giving aspects,
functions as a female symbol. Mrs. Ramsay identifies herself with that
lighthouse: "she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like
that light." In the last section, however, the lighthouse becomes a
masculine principle; when seen from nearby it is a "tower, stark and
straight . . . barred with black and white." Nevertheless, the male and
female aspects become joined in that section as well; James thinks, "For
nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too." James
and Camilla, therefore, come to understand their father as well as their
dead mother. The line that Lily Briscoe draws in the center of her
picture—perhaps her image of the lighthouse—enables her to complete her
painting, uniting the masculine and the feminine.
The center section, "Time Passes," is narrated from the viewpoint of the
house itself, as the wind over the years peels wallpaper; rusts pots;
brings mildew, dust, spider webs, and rats. Important events in the
lives of the Ramsays are inserted prosaically into this poetic interlude
by means of square brackets.
To the Lighthouse is a difficult work, but each successive reading
brings new insights into Woolf's techiniques and themes.
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Critical Evaluation
Because of its unity of theme and technique, To the Lighthouse is
probably Virginia Woolf's most satisfying novel. In theme, it is her
most direct fictional statement about the importance of an androgynous
artistic vision: that ideal which is neither masculine nor feminine but
partakes of both. The book was almost contemporaneous with her important
essay on women and fiction, A Room of One's Own, and Orlando, her
androgynous fictitional biography. In A Room of One's Own, she appeals
for androgynous creation, arguing that it is fatal for a writer to
emphasize gender. For Woolf, the mind that blends female and male themes
"is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided." Many of her
protagonists and most of the artists in her novels have both traditional
masculine and feminine characteristics: Bernard in The Waves, Eleanor in
The Years, Miss La Trobe in Between the Acts, and Lily Briscoe in To the
Lighthouse. Each of these characters has an androgynous consciousness,
even as Orlando completes the physical change from male to female.
To the Lighthouse clearly shows the deficiencies of the purely masculine
(Mr. Ramsay) and the purely feminine (Mrs. Ramsay) personalities, and,
as well, holds up the androgynous vision as a way of unifying the two—in
the person of Lily Briscoe, the artist. Mr. Ramsay, a philosopher, has
those qualities associated with the empirical view, while Mrs. Ramsay
employs a mythopoetic vision. Mr. Ramsay is concerned with the discovery
of truth, and his mind functions in a logical, reasoned fashion, moving,
as he says, from A to Z, step-by-step. He worries that he has only so
far reached Q. Mrs. Ramsay cares about details, about people's feelings,
about her relationship with her husband and children; and her mind jumps
and skips with the association of ideas—she can move from A to Z in one
leap.
Mr. Ramsay is deficient in the attention he gives to his children and
his wife, in concern for financial details, in awareness of social and
international situations. His character is satirized by Lily, who always
pictures him as seeing the whole of reality in a phantom kitchen table
(the table is a traditional object for philosophic speculation). Mrs.
Ramsay is lacking as well: she attempts to direct and fashion people's
lives (she engineers the engagement of Minta and Paul and tries to match
Lily Briscoe and William Bankes); she does not want her children to grow
up; she cannot understand mathematics or history; she too often relies
on men and their "masculine intelligence." The dinner scene shows Mrs.
Ramsay's main strengths and weaknesses. She orchestrates the whole,
directs the conversation, worries about the Boeuf en Daube, thinks about
the lateness of the hour, makes sure all the guests are involved.
Nevertheless, she lets her mind wander, looking ahead to the next
details. She is the unifier in the first part of the book, but she fails
because her vision is too limited; the trip to the lighthouse is not
made, and she dies before the Ramsays can return to the island.
Lily Briscoe and her art become the true unifier of the story's
disparate elements. During the dinner party, as she remembers Charles
Tansley's dictum that "Women can't write, women can't paint," she
suddenly envisions the way to give her picture coherence, and she moves
the saltcellar to remind herself. Her painting, however, remains
incomplete, and, like the trip to the lighthouse, is not accomplished
until many years later. Lily, an unmarried professional, embodies both
rational (masculine) and imaginative (feminine) characteristics. She
analyzes art with William Bankes and still feels emotionally attuned
with Mrs. Ramsay. Lily becomes the central figure in the final section;
her visions of Mrs. Ramsay and of Mr. Ramsay and the children finally
landing at the lighthouse enable her to complete her work, uniting the
rational and the imaginative into the androgynous whole which the
painting symbolizes.
The novel's structure is thematically as well as techincally brilliant.
The work has three parts: the first, entitled "The Window" takes place
about 1910, the last, entitled "The Lighthouse," about 1920. The middle
section is entitled "Time Passes" and narrates the intervening time
period. The window in the first section functions as a symbol of the
female principle, as the narrator returns again and again to Mrs. Ramsay
in her place near the open window. Mrs. Ramsay is the center and unifier
of the family, and even as different characters participate in various
activities, their thoughts and glances return to Mrs. Ramsay. The
reddish-brown stocking she is knitting is another emblem of her unifying
power; but, like the trip to the lighthouse and Lily's painting, it is
not completed in the first section. The thoughts of different characters
are narrated by means of interior monologue, and Woolf makes skillful
use of the theory of association of ideas. Mrs. Ramsay's mind is most
often viewed, however, and she is the most realistic of the characters.
Early in the novel, the lighthouse, in its faraway light-giving aspects,
functions as a female symbol. Mrs. Ramsay identifies herself with that
lighthouse: "she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like
that light." In the last section, however, the lighthouse becomes a
masculine principle; when seen from nearby it is a "tower, stark and
straight . . . barred with black and white." Nevertheless, the male and
female aspects become joined in that section as well; James thinks, "For
nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too." James
and Camilla, therefore, come to understand their father as well as their
dead mother. The line that Lily Briscoe draws in the center of her
picture—perhaps her image of the lighthouse—enables her to complete her
painting, uniting the masculine and the feminine.
The center section, "Time Passes," is narrated from the viewpoint of the
house itself, as the wind over the years peels wallpaper; rusts pots;
brings mildew, dust, spider webs, and rats. Important events in the
lives of the Ramsays are inserted prosaically into this poetic interlude
by means of square brackets.
To the Lighthouse is a difficult work, but each successive reading
brings new insights into Woolf's techiniques and themes.
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The Waves
Virginia Woolf
1882-1941
The Waves, though Woolf's most experimental piece of writing, is
nevertheless endlessly rewarding. It shares many of the
preoccupations of her other novels: experiments with time and
narrative; the representation of lives in biographical writing;
and the unfixing of identities. It also pushes the "stream of
consciousness" in new directions: becoming an exploration of the
relationship between inner life and the "impersonal" elements of
waves and water, rather than a narrative technique.
Woolf uses the time-span of a clay to explore the temporality of
a life, or lives—the movement of the waves defines the passage
from dawn to dusk and provides a structure for the novel. It was
conceived as "prose yet poetry"—the six selves of the novel are
represented by "dramatic soliloquies," and interspersed with
"poetic interludes" that describe the passage of the sun across
the sky and the rhythms of the tide.
The Waves traces the six lives from childhood to middle age, but
seeks to show continuities rather than developments. "We are not
single," as Bernard (the novel's chief chronicler) remarks. The
characters speak their thoughts as separate entities, rarely in
dialogue, yet the novel brings them together by listening in at
synchronous moments in their lives and by regrouping them at
various stages. The Waves is concerned with the experience and
articulation of identity through a fascinating discourse that
cannot be named either as speech or as thought.
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THE WAVES
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Type of work: Novel
Author: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Òyðå of plot: Psychological realism
Time of plot: The present
Locale: England
First published: 1931
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A major psychological novel, The Waves presents a series of
interlocking dramatic monologues in which six characters, all of them
more or less androgynous types, reveal the hidden essence of being at
successive stages of their lives. The action is a record of time passing
as the six characters trace the course of their memories and sensations
from childhood to old age and death.
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Principal Characters
Percival, a childhood friend of the six central characters, who respect,
admire, and love him; he is the symbol of the ordinary man, the
conventional figure. Rather awkward, bumbling, but pleasant and accepted
everywhere, Percival forms the light around whom the six-sided flower
revolves, as Bernard put it. In love with the natural woman, Susan, he
is beloved by Neville, the scholar, the lover of young men, the
brilliant poet. A sportsman, a hale fellow, a poor scholar, and finally
a soldier who dies in India, Percival represents a kind of norm in
personality and conduct.
Bernard, the phrasemaker, the chronicler of the group of childhood
friends as they grope toward death, the great adversary of all human
life, he thinks. Through Bernard the rest of the characters see life,
because in his attempt to grasp reality he is able to become whomever he
meets or talks with. Though he sees himself as a failure, he does catch
at essences and makes of these his unfinished stories, tales that
Percival once saw through and would not let him finish. Deeply devoted
to his best friend Neville, he nevertheless is all things to all the
characters. A husband, father, provider, friend, he becomes, finally, a
seer who tries to sum up the meaning of experiences all have shared.
Neville, the poet, the scrupulous artist, the lover of a single man, the
sensitive genius who keeps his life carefully wrapped and labeled. Gaunt
and handsome, gifted with the tongue of all great men and able to mimic
them from Catulus to Shakespeare, he finds it difficult to survive the
shock of Percival's death. He turns first to reproductions of the man
and measures his time by the conversations with young, handsome men to
whom he is a kind of Socrates. Lonely, introspective he finally finds
diversion with frivolous Jinny. He has the ability to speak to them all,
even Susan, who sees him as her antithesis.
Susan, the elemental woman, nature-loving and natural, a born mother and
an implement of life. Disliking the pine and linoleum smells of school,
civilization, she endures education, even travel, so that she may
replace her dead mother, administer love to her earthy father, marry a
farmer, and raise a family amid the natural, lovely, rural England where
she can indulge in its sights, smells, sounds, and feelings. She has
long loved Bernard and has been the object of Percival's love, but none
know of these things until later. She resists social ways, dress,
attitudes even to the point of boorishness, though she carries human
feelings, love and jealousy, admiration and disgust, to their meetings.
Louis, the son of a Brisbane banker, a self-conscious outcast of the
society of his friends but the most brilliant and egotistical one of the
group. Endowed with self-knowledge, the result of fine breeding from the
Hebrews in their Egyptian bondage through the present, Louis hides his
endowments and very real gifts out of shame and fear of ridicule. In
this way he finally becomes assertive and makes of business a romance,
false but substantial. He fears all the others except Rhoda, whom he
makes his mistress after these two outsiders are drawn together by their
loneliness. All recognize his supremacy in subtle ways, and he is
respected for this fierce inner being in spite of the discomfort it
causes the group.
Rhoda, the plain, clumsy misfit who tries to imitate the world which
despises her. Alone with her meager self, she longs for anonymity and
retreats from reality early. Tolerated by Susan, avoided by Jinny, she
has a kind of ease with Bernard and a negative attraction to Louis. Not
gifted in any way, she denies the role life has created for her and
commits suicide in middle life.
Jinny, the hedonist, the careful cultivator of externals, and the one
who causes a rustle wherever she goes. Beautiful, she possesses physical
vitality, which she burns out in a few brief years; Jinny has the
superficial drive of appearances as opposed to the elemental in Susan.
Assignations are her business; epicureanism is the method, and weariness
is the result.
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The Story
The waves rolled shoreward, and at daybreak, the children awoke.
Watching the sunrise, Bernard, maker of phrases, seeker of causes, saw a
loop of light—he would always think of it as a ring, the circle of
experience giving life pattern and meaning. Neville, shy and passionate,
imagined a globe dangling against the flank of day. Susan, lover of
fields and seasons, saw a slab of yellow, the crusted loaf, the buttered
slice, of tea time in the country. Rhoda, awkward, timid, heard wild
cries of startled birds. Jinny, sensuous and pleasure loving, saw a
tassel of gold and crimson. Louis, of a race that had seen women carry
red pitchers to the Nile, heard a chained beast stamping on the sands.
While the others played, Louis hid among the currant bushes. Jinny,
finding him there and pitying his loneliness, kissed him. Suddenly
jealous, Susan ran away, and Bernard followed to comfort her. They
walked across fields to Elvedon, where they saw a woman writing at a
window. Later in the schoolroom, Louis refused to recite because he was
ashamed of his Australian accent. Rhoda was unable to do her sums and
had to stay in. Louis pitied her, for she was the one he did not fear.
The day brightened. Bernard, older now, yawned through the headmaster's
speech in chapel. Neville leaned sideways to watch Percival, who sat
flicking the back of his neck. A glance, a gesture, Neville realized,
and one could fall in love forever. Louis, liking order, sat quietly. As
long as the head talked, Louis forgot snickers at his accent, his
memories of kisses underneath a hedge. Susan, Jinny, and Rhoda were in a
school where they sat primly under a portrait of Queen Alexandra. Susan
thought of hay waving in the meadows at home. Jinny pictured a gold and
crimson party dress. Rhoda dreamed of picking flowers and offering them
to someone whose face she never saw.
Time passed, and the last day of the term arrived. Louis went to work in
London after his father, a Brisbane banker, failed. In his attic room,
he sometimes heard the great beast stamping in the dark, but now the
noise was that of city crowds and traffic. At Cambridge, Neville read
Catullus and waited with uneasy eagerness for Percival 's smile or nod.
Bernard was Byron's young man one day, Shelley's or Dostoevski's the
next. One day, Neville brought him a poem. Reading it, Bernard felt that
Neville would succeed while he would fail. Neville was one person in
love with one person, Percival. In this phrasemaking, Bernard became
many people—a plumber, a horse breeder, an old woman in the street—as
well as Byron's or Dostoevski's man. In Switzerland, Susan dreamed of
newborn lambs in baskets, or marsh mists and autumn rains, of the lover
who would walk with her beside dusty hollyhocks. At a ball in London,
Jinny, dancing, felt as if her body glowed with inward fire. At the same
ball, Rhoda sat and stared across the rooftops.
They all loved Percival; before he left for India, they met at a dinner
party in London to bid him good-bye. Bernard, not knowing that Susan had
loved him, was already engaged. Louis was learning to cover his shyness
with brisk assurance; the poet had become a businessman. Rhoda was
frightened by life. Waiters and diners looked up when Jinny
entered—lovely and poised. Susan became dowdy, hated London. Neville,
loving Percival in secret, dreaded the moment of parting that would
carry him away. Here, thought Bernard, was the circle he had seen long
ago. Youth was friendship and a stirring in the blood, like the notes of
Percival's wild hunting song.
The sun passed the zenith, and shadows lengthened. When word came that
Percival had been killed in India, Neville felt as if that doom had been
his own. Nevertheless, he would go on, a famous poet and scholar after a
time, but always as well a lonely man waiting in his rooms for the
footstep on the stair of this young man or that whom he loved in place
of Percival. Bernard was married then; his son had been born. He thought
of Susan, whom Percival had loved. Rhoda also thought of Susan, engaged
to her farmer in the country. She remembered the dream in which she had
offered flowers to a man whose face had been hidden from her, and she
knew at last that the man had been Percival.
Shadows grew longer over country and town. Louis, a wealthy, successful
businessman, planned a place in Surrey with greenhouses and rare
gardens, but he still kept his attic room where Rhoda often came; they
had become lovers. Susan walked in the fields with her children or sat
sewing by the firelight in a quiet room. Jinny groomed a body shaped for
gaiety and pleasure. Neville measured time by the hours he spent waiting
for the footstep on the stair, the young face at the door. Bernard tried
to snare in phrases the old man on the train, the lovers in the park.
The only realities, he thought, were in common things. He realized that
he had lost friends by death— Percival was one—and others because he had
not wished to cross the street. After Louis and Rhoda parted, his new
mistress was a vulgar cockney actress. Rhoda, always in flight, went to
Spain. Climbing a hill to look across the sea toward Africa, she thought
of rest and longed for death.
Slowly, the sun sank. At Hampton Court, the six friends met again for
dinner. They were old now, and each had gone a different way after
Percival had died in India years before. Bernard felt that he had
failed. He had wrapped himself in phrases; he had sons and daughters,
but he had ventured no farther than Rome. He had not become rich, like
Louis, or famous, like Neville. Jinny had lived only for pleasure,
little enough, as she was learning. After dinner, Bernard and Susan
walked by the lake. There was little of their true thoughts they could
say to each other. Bernard, however, was still a maker of phrases.
Percival, he said, had become like the flower on the table where they
ate—six-sided, made from their six lives.
So it seemed to him years later, after Rhoda had jumped to her death and
the rest were old. He wondered what the real truth had been—the
middle-class respectability of Louis, Rhoda's haunted imagination,
Neville's passion for one love, Susan's primitivism, Jinny's sensuous
pleasures, his own attempt to catch reality in a phrase. He had been
Byron's young man and Dostoevski's and also the hairy old savage in the
blood. Once he had seen a loop of light, a ring; but he had found no
pattern and no meaning, only the knowledge that death is the great
adversary against whom man rides in the darkness where the waves break
on the shore.
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Critical Evaluation
The Waves owes nothing whatever to the traditional form of the novel. In
this book, Virginia Woolf was attempting to give to fiction the subtle
insights and revealing moments of perception that at one time were the
sole domain of poetry. Her method is highly stylized. In a series of
interlocking dramatic monologues, six characters reveal the hidden
essence of being at successive stages of their lives. The action, if
anything so fleeting and inward can be called action, is a record of
time passing as the six characters trace the course of their memories
and sensations from childhood to old age and death. There is nothing
irrelevant here; everything is observation, sensation, and naked
intuition.
Woolf looked at life with a poet's vision, and in this novel, she went
even beyond Joyce in her use of symbols to make objects in the external
world correspond to inner reality. Each section of her story is prefaced
by a descriptive passage in which the movements of sun and waves through
a single day stand for time and eternity. Uniting her people is the
character of Percival, viewed only through their eyes, symbol of the
natural man and also of the emotional certainty that all seek in life.
At the end, Bernard summarizes the experiences of the group and sees in
their lives man's challenge to death.
The six soliloquies, spoken by six different characters at different
periods in their lives from childhood to old age, are not literally
spoken aloud; in most cases, the characters are verbalizing their
thoughts and inner feelings. Often the narration is in the present
tense, as a character explains what he is doing at that moment.
Characters do not usually speak to one another, although at times they
almost seem to communicate telepathically; each person is set apart,
alone, although each knows and thinks about the others. The soliloquies
are too well ordered for random thought patterns and too sophisticated
and artificial for actual speech; they evoke the atmosphere of a
dreamworld. Each soliloquy is paralleled by the passing of a day from
sunrise to sunset; descriptions of nature—of the sun, the sea, birds,
and plants—precede each section and serve to make implicit comparisons
with the characters' speeches. The most dominant of these images is that
of the waves.
The characters have different qualities: Bernard is the leader and
unifier; Jinny is an extrovert, Rhoda an introvert; Louis wanted
desperately to succeed; Neville is a poet; Susan loves the country life.
The quality of their speech, however, is not differentiated, and it is
perhaps more correct to say that the six characters are all parts of one
being; or the six may all be aspects of the personality of Woolf
herself, or of the human personality. In addition to these main
characters, there is Percival, a schoolfellow of the other six who dies
in India in his midtwenties and who never speaks directly in the novel
but appears as the others speak of him. He is a unifying element for the
group, all of whom care deeply about him. He seems to have almost
mythical powers over them as well, and his name is related to Parzival,
the keeper of the Grail. They all look to him as their ideal and goal.
Woolf often uses Bernard to express ideas about the ambiguity of
language, which is one of the book's major themes. A phrasemaker,
Bernard comes to distrust words and believes in the experience that is
inexpressible. Words have always enabled Bernard to create order from
chaos, but he comes to understand that words may not capture the reality
of the experience at all, but only an image of it; thus, he worries
about the very process of telling the story. Actually, the "story" in
The Waves is practically nonexistent. The crucial event is Bernard's
renewal, as the wave of life's desires again rises in him; this
reuniting with the cycle of life, death, and rebirth has been
foreshadowed throughout the novel by the symbol of the waves. Thus, the
shining ring that Bernard envisioned as a boy becomes an appropriate
symbol for the oneness of art and life that Woolf has established by the
end of the book.
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