To The Lighthouse...Introduction

My students always find Woolf's novel extremely challenging. I always tell them not to worry about it but to go with the flow of the prose and it will become easier to follow the "meaning."

The difficulty is that Woolf's stream of consciousness technique in this novel is indirect interior monologue. (For those familiar with James Joyce's Ulysses, the narrative there is direct interior monologue: The reader always knows whose mind is thinking/telling the story.) In Lighthouse, the narrative is sometimes from the omniscient narrator, and at other times it flows through the minds of the various characters. There is also direct dialog and sometimes unspoken dialog. (We can look at specific examples later.) There is also no traditional plot. Woolf is exploring changes in social values from the Victorian to the Modern periods through "ordinary" people on ordinary days.

The novel is divided into three parts. In "The Window" section present time is from 6PM to approximately 11PM on a day in the middle of September, 1909, at the Ramsay's summer home on the Isle of Skye. We are in a Victorian domestic setting. (Queen Victoria died in 1901. However, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, 60 and 50 years of age, are products of that era.)

The shortest section is "Time Passes" which covers the next ten years, including World War I. The narration in this section is extremely interesting because the setting is the empty summer home and "certain airs" seem to narrate parts of it. Reality is described in squared brackets.

The third section is "The Lighthouse" and involves the survivors returning to the summer home one day in late summer, 1919.

This novel is the most autobiographical of any of Woolf's fiction. She is describing, in the first section, her parents and family. Her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, wrote this in a letter to Woolf after first reading the novel (which was published in 1927):

"I think I am more incapable than anyone else in the world of making an aesthetic judgement on it--only I know that I have somewhere a feeling about it as a work of art which will perhaps gradually take shape & which must be enormously strong to make any impression on me at all beside the other feelings which you roused in me....It seemed to me in the first part of the book you have given a portrait of mother which is more like her to me than anything I could ever have conceived of as possible. It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead...It was like meeting her again with onself grown up & on equal terms....You have given father too I think as clearly, but perhaps...that isn't quite so difficult....So you see as far as portrait painting goes you seem to me to be a supreme artist & it is so shattering to find oneself face to face with those two again that I can hardly consider anything else."

I'd like to look at the portrait of Mrs. Ramsay first.