To The Lighthouse...Cam and James

Cam thinks that, unlike James, she is exposed "to this pressure and division of feeling" regarding their father. While sitting in the boat on the trip to the lighthouse, she looks at her father and thinks, "For no one attracted her more: his hands were beautiful, and his feet, and his voice, and his words, and his haste, and his temper, and his oddity, and his passion, and his saying straight out before every one, we perish, each alone, and his remoteness" (169). Cam is observant and thoughtful, much more so than James. She also seems more independent than her mother was.

If we equate Cam with any real person, it would be Woolf herself.  In an essay she wrote for The Times on November 28, 1932, "Leslie Stephen, The Philosopher at AHome: a Daughter's Memories" Woolf talks about the fact that her father allowed her full access to his library. That extensive reading and the discussions she had with her father about those books, constitute Woolf's informal education and account for her understanding of history and the human character. Cam remembers being in her father's study. "Just to please herself she would take a book from the shelf and stand there, watching her father write, so equally, so neatly from one side of the page to another....And she thought, standing there with her book open, one could let whatever one thought expand here like a leaf in water" (189).

I think that we witness James grow in understanding on the trip to the lighthouse. He remembers when he was six wanting to go there: "The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now--James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too" (186).

James has come to accept reality while at the same time remembering his dream. More importantly he understands that one perspective is not the only truth; that there are numerous frames of reference.  It seems to me that that is what Woolf is showing us in this very "cubist" novel where she paints various points of view simultaneously.