Elegy to a Lost Time: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
Francesca Lucchetti
Virginia Woolf once famously observed that “on or about December 1910 the human character changed” (Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” 2). By the 20th century, Victorian society and its rules for interpersonal relationships were in decline. More importantly for Woolf, the standard for art was also changing, as post-impressionism gained momentum in Europe, either expressing the shift in human nature or rising as a symptom of it. The breakout of the Great War in 1914 finalized this split between past and present. The simultaneous failure of European non-aggression pacts, previously thought to be unassailable, and the gruesome nature of trench war engenders an epistemic crisis, as old certainties could no longer be counted on.
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is a novel that rises in response to this crisis. In her diary Woolf expressed the desire to write a new form to go with the novelty of the age, and the word that came to her mind was “elegy.” In this essay, I will argue that To the Lighthouse is both an elegy to the lost time before the war, as well as a search for new meaning in an age when seemingly nothing can be certain. I will be examining this theme in relation to two central characters of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe—their polar approaches to life, specifically life as women, respectively designate them as representations of the pre-war and post-war human character.
Mrs. Ramsay is the protagonist of the first part of the novel set before the war. This section opens with Mrs. Ramsay asking if the weather will be fine enough to go to the lighthouse. Mr. Ramsay, backed by the atheist Tansley, points out that the barometer indicates a storm. Despite being faced with the facts, Mrs. Ramsay insists that “Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow” (Woolf, Lighthouse 19) in order to comfort her youngest and most sensitive child, James. Her husband denies her this hope, reaffirming that a storm will come, and “the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare” into Mrs. Ramsay’s “spray of life” (Woolf, Lighthouse 43). Woolf draws attention to the barrenness of men, who believe in nothing, especially not in the desultory comforts of women— though in a perverse form of justice, men (and Mr. Ramsay in particular) are the ones who most rely on women’s assurances.
Male barrenness is also a reminder of the war, fought by men to the detriment of women, mothers, and life itself. As if in confirmation of this, Mr. Ramsay’s storm does finally come. The storm is the protagonist of the second section of the novel, set during the war. Woolf describes the war as:
The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. (Woolf, Lighthouse 140)
This passage seems to be describing not just the storm, but the war itself, a “downpouring of immense darkness” (Woolf, Lighthouse 137) where the bodies of soldiers are blown apart and suffocate in trenches like leaves in a storm. The storm, like the war, is a fact: it cannot be softened by Mrs. Ramsay’s hopeful words.
As the storm rages on, all of Mrs. Ramsay’s care for the house is annulled. Mrs. Ramsay herself does not survive the storm but perishes suddenly, almost indifferently, between brackets. Like that human character which ceases to exist around 1910, Mrs. Ramsay belongs to a different time, before the sufferings of the war, and the novel follows her struggle to maintain the role of a 19th century woman in the changing age. Her excellent performance as wife and mother, though rewarding to her Victorian convictions, ultimately tires her to death. Although she “[boasts] of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent” (Woolf, Lighthouse 44). The task of the Victorian woman is to smooth out any social discomfort, but in order to do this Mrs. Ramsay must resort to lying, which goes against her genteel nature, reducing her to a “shell of herself.” Some of Mrs. Ramsay’s lies are about the cost of the greenhouse, as well as the failure of her husband’s latest book— both things she must keep from her husband while having to shoulder the responsibility herself. She pretends to be interested in Charles Tansley’s self-interested conversation, simply because she “had the whole of the other sex under her protection” (Woolf, Lighthouse 10) and must help them relieve their vanity. Most of all, Mrs. Ramsay is plagued by the lies she tells her children, in her “perfect goodness” (Woolf, Lighthouse 219) to protect them from suffering. Knowing that they must eventually face life, this anxiety mixes with all others:
There were eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through it all. To eight people she had said relentlessly that (and the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds). (Woolf, Lighthouse 66-67)
Fitting herself the mold of the perfect Edwardian woman, Mrs. Ramsay is beautiful, to the effect that even her husband discredits her intellect to magnify her beauty. Her mind being often overlooked, Mrs. Ramsay’s self-worth is entirely drawn from how well she can perform the role of mother and wife, even though the exercise plagues her. Lily Briscoe effectively summarizes Mrs. Ramsay’s duality when she remarks: “how worn she looks […] as if her own weariness had been partly pitying people, and the life in her, her resolve to live again, had been stirred by pity” (Woolf, Lighthouse 92).
Among the effects of the Great War was the unwavering awareness of human life’s impermanence. The only way to survive the impermanence is to search for some form of stillness, in art or literature or otherwise. The desire for stillness is first introduced in the setting of the novel itself: a house presiding over an ever-moving sea that “eats away the ground we stand on” (Woolf, Lighthouse 50). A family sits down for dinner and becomes “conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out there” (Woolf, Lighthouse 106). The fluidity of the weather throughout the novel is the fluidity of life itself.
The only character who achieves this stillness among this fluidity is Lily Briscoe. Lily is the anti-Mrs. Ramsay: unattractive, incompetent with men, and most importantly, a woman of the post-war generation. Despite Lily’s dislike of the womanly behaviour sanctioned by Mrs. Ramsay, Lily is immensely devoted to the matriarch. Lily’s devotion to Mrs. Ramsay, which only grows after the woman’s passing, is Woolf’s elegy to that lost time: a time before the war, when suffering wasn’t an uncompromising reality, and when one could still hope that it might be fine tomorrow. Throughout the novel, Lily is mystified with Mrs. Ramsay’s duality. Superficially, Mrs. Ramsay is a fretful mother, good at keeping the house in order and eager for everyone to marry. Yet the mother’s inner form is described as a “wedge of darkness” (Woolf, Lighthouse 69). While painting Mrs. Ramsay’s portrait, Lily sees this secret essence and wonders how the mother of eight can live on, emotionally spent as she is:
Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty […] or did she lock up within her some secret which certainly Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all? (Woolf, Lighthouse 57)
Lily believes that Mrs. Ramsay holds the secret to going on in life. To Lily, Mrs. Ramsay was a woman who “fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round” (Woolf, Lighthouse 214). The reader shares this belief, as Mrs. Ramsay’s character emerges from a collection of her own thoughts as well as other characters’s impressions of her. With this wealth of information, one cannot piece together all that Mrs. Ramsay is. Mrs. Ramsay herself does not know all that she is, except maybe the third stroke of the lighthouse.
Mrs. Ramsay discovers the stroke of the lighthouse after her children have gone to sleep, the only time when she can be herself. This loss of her performative personality allows Mrs. Ramsay to arrive at a moment of stillness. In this moment when Mrs. Ramsay is completely herself, the beam of the lighthouse purifies her mind of all lies. Like the light of the lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay is in search of some truth. However, just like the beam of a lighthouse that must always turn, this search is never-ending. In this regard, Mrs. Ramsay is reminiscent of the women in Katherine Mansifeld’s Prelude, in the way that the performance of gender obscures or becomes entirely intertwined with the self, so that the search for truth must be carried out while the performance goes on, and with it the constant production of lies. It remains beyond Mrs. Ramsay’s abilities to explain suffering without convenient lies, such as “We are in the hands of the lord” (Woolf, Lighthouse 70). In her inability to find truth, Mrs. Ramsay fails at finding stillness, and succumbs to life’s impermanence.
Like Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe also searches for a solution to the impermanence that characterizes life in the post-war climate. Throughout the novel, Lily asks herself what the point of painting is. Eventually her work will be forgotten and left to be hung in the servant’s bedrooms or stuffed under sofas. Tansley’s critique that women can’t paint or understand art is but one of the obstacles in Lily’s way, her lack of sexual appeal and artistic skill often being brought up to her discredit. The solution to impermanence comes to Lily unexpectedly, in a memory of Mrs. Ramsay writing letters while Lily searched for scattered pages among the waves. The flux of emotion from this ordinary moment, a comical anecdote of Mrs. Ramsay’s near-sightedness, brings Lily to her (non-)revelation:
The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs Ramsay saying, “Life stand still here”; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent… (Woolf, Lighthouse 175-176)
Lily realizes that stillness is not merely found; rather, stillness is made by rendering ordinary moments “permanent” through emotion. Emotion is what immortalizes Mrs. Ramsay in Lily’s memory, keeping her alive in the novel even after her character’s death. This acceptance of the ordinary as material for the great revelation, i.e. that there is no great revelation to life’s meaning, is what resolves Lily’s suffering. Lily is able to repudiate the male expectations placed on her; she no longer conscribes herself to academic standards for art, using emotion rather than Mr. Pauceforte’s techniques to complete her vision of Mrs. Ramsay’s portrait.
Lily no longer feels inferior to other women, as she is able to give Mr. Ramsay the sympathy he seeks. She recognizes in him her own struggle against the ordinary, as Mr. Ramsay takes great pride in his boots, but is unable to make the moment of happiness last. Lily exemplifies the struggle as: “one wanted […] to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy” (Woolf, Lighthouse 218). To achieve both, the ordinary must be made permanent by the addition of emotion.
There is no question that Lily Briscoe is a stand-in for both Woolf and the quintessential Modernist woman. Lily and Woolf both choose the domestic lives of women as subjects for their work, seeking to elevate women’s lives by stripping away the material and revealing the spirit underneath. Both in Woolf’s novel and Lily’s painting, women’s exterior lives, which men judge to be simple and lacking in understanding, are enriched to include the wealth of experience contained in emotion. Men lack this mode of knowledge, and only the women in To The Lighthouse are privy to this inner richness and its revelations. Indeed Mrs. Ramsay always “pitied men always as if they lacked something—women never, as if they had something” (Woolf, Lighthouse 93).
To The Lighthouse is undeniably a modernist work. Modernism sought to reframe human experience in light of the war; it sought new literary forms, as there was no longer any belief in the old artistic conventions, both in realism being “real” (for how could the war be real?) or in the otherworldliness of romanticism as an explanation for the unfathomable. To The Lighthouse succeeds in this momentous task with its impressionistic and associative narration, which contains an extraordinary amount of information, different each time it is read. It is precisely through the varied and ever-changing impressions of the novel’s characters that life emerges. Woolf believed that, when building characters “you should insist that she is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety […] for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself” (Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” 21).
Works Cited
Woolf, Virginia. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 1924. www.columbia.edu/~em36/MrBennettAndMrsBrown.pdf.
———. To the Lighthouse. Penguin Modern Classics, 2000.