To the Lighthouse

Ocean Novel #8 in my wet summer reading project, the 1927 classic by Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.

What are the two greatest novels in English ever written?  The Guardian newspaper asked various authors, and Michael Cunningham (whose novel The Hours is about Virginia Woolf and reads like her as well) chose James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.  He writes, in part,

“Let's remember that the novel, in English, is less than 300 years old. Given its youth, its track record is remarkable. We've had, in relatively short order, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, Bleak House, The House of the Seven Gables, Moby-Dick, The Golden Bowl, The Sound and the Fury, and The Great Gatsby – just to name a few.

For me, however, it was the modernists who engendered the most significant literary revolution. Suddenly, in the early 20th century, novels had as much to do with language as they did with events. They were about outwardly ordinary lives, and thereby established that there's no such thing as an "ordinary" life; there is only inadequate appreciation of humanity. And a novel was no longer meant as moral instruction for readers who were, perhaps, ever-so-slightly in need of it.”

To the Lighthouse is indeed about language and about ordinary lives, if the large Ramsey family and their friends, who spend summer weeks at their house on the Isle of Skye before and then after WWI, are ordinary.  There’s very little plot or dialogue.  Between the page one promise by Mrs. Ramsey to 6 year old James that they will go to the lighthouse the next day (a hope immediately dashed by grumpy controlling Mr. Ramsey) and the last page, 10 years later, as sullen teenage James finally steers the boat to the lighthouse shore, with his only his father and sister, but no Mrs. Ramsey, very little “happens.”  The bulk of the novel is the interior ruminations of Mrs. Ramsey and her artist protege Lily Briscoe. 

But both the minimal plot, and the rich introspective language are drenched in ocean metaphors – depth, surface, wave, stroke, dip, pool, and so the novel joins my collection of ocean novels .  If, as Carl Jung says, a dream about the ocean means we are diving right into our unconscious, then this novel of introspection and emotion is a deep dive into the characters’ souls, and ours.  I felt wet from start to finish, bathed in wonder, carried along on this “stream” of consciousness by my surprising thirst for the next sopping metaphors.

It’s easy to make fun of the lack of plot, or to get impatient – just go to the damn lighthouse already.  Margaret Atwood has a funny piece also in The Guardian about reading the novel as a young college student, feeling bored and confused, and then rereading it when she is Mrs. Ramsey’s own age, and identifying with her and her interior richness.  Of all the ocean fiction I have read this summer, this novel and Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea are the only two I had read previously, also as a college student.  Like Atwood, this time I got a lot more out of these simple yet dense novels, reading them as myself an “old woman of the sea” and a nostalgic mother likewise enamored of lighthouses.

As a girl Virginia Woolf and her family regularly summered at St. Ives in Cornwall, near the Godrevy Lighthouse, also on a rocky island offshore.  And like Mrs. Ramsey, Woolf’s mother died young and suddenly when Woolf was 13.  Woolf is something a feminist pioneer, especially for her essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” which I also reread last year, where she argues that there are few known women writers because women must depend on men for money and because women have no place where they can shut the door and be left alone to write. 

Godrevy Lighthouse near St. IvesMrs. Ramsey, in whose head we spend more than half the book, has neither, room nor money of her own, but she still manages to have a rich internal life and gives the gift of her inescapable depth to her eight children, a wide circle of friends, and to some extent to her husband.  Her protégé Lily Briscoe picks up the torch of this creative depth ten years later, pondering about the creative process as she tries to complete a painting on the shore while watching the small boat finally arrive at the lighthouse. 

As I read I jotted down many of the ocean metaphors, not to prove my point or to justify this as an ocean novel, but just because they were so varied and delicious.  Here are two long passages (one can’t edit and still get the flow) about creativity and “stroke.” 

First, Lily painting and ruminating: 

“She took her hand and raised her brush.  For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the air.  Where to begin?  That was the question, at what point to make the first mark?  One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions.  All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests.  Still the risk must be run; the mark made.

“With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at the same time must hold herself back, she made her first quick decisive stroke.  The brush descended.  It flickered brown over the white canvas; it left a running mark.  A second time she did it – a third time.  And so pausing and so flickering she attained a dancing rhythmical movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and all were related and so, lightly and swiftly pausing, striking, she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no sooner settled there than they enclosed (she felt it looming out at her) a space.  Down in the hollow of one wave she saw the next wave towering higher and higher above her.  For what could be more formidable than that space?....”

Earlier Mrs. Ramsey had reflected also on the sea, and on the word “stroke.” 

“It was a relief when the children went to bed.  For now she need not think about anybody.  She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of, to think, well, not even to think, to be silent, to be alone……Although she continued to knit, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.  When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless……There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on the platform of stability.  Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness.  Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things she saw, and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke.  Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at – that light, for example….”

Some say Woolf’s novel is about time, others the creative process.  In these two passages we see these women finding time and space alone to be creative, using the motion of wave and the lighthouse light, the stroke of brush and beam, to mark the time and to free them from time, the rhythm and the light, the steep gulfs and foaming crests.

See – I’m starting to write and think like these creative women myself! Ocean is motion, ocean is depth and source of life.  I will give myself to that gentle regular rhythm of brush and light.

Both women have the advantage of servants and money to free them for such creativity, but I think Woolf would say that everyone has these gulfs and crests, these strokes of emotion.  And that more women, if freed from constraint, could exercise like her and Mrs. Ramsey and Lily, these “strokes” of genius.

The sea and the lighthouse in this novel are ordinary.  Unlike some of the sea adventures I have read, the water and rocky shore are not threatening, the tension is not whether they will capsize, but whether their respective wills and emotional needs will simply allow them finally to get into the boat in the first place.

And, as Cunningham notes, this modernist novel does not moralize (“That’s what happens if you don’t practice boat safety!”)  Surely the Ramsey children will need some psychotherapy, having weathered their strange parents and early death of their mother.  Between the idyllic beginning and the ten year return to the island, the Ramseys personally and all of Europe has been devastated by World War One. But that’s not why Woolf wrote the novel. 

Maybe Mrs. Ramsey IS the lighthouse, the steady reassuring stroke of light that enables creativity and safety for others.  For that reason alone, I am relieved that they finally make it to the lighthouse.

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter