Virginia Woolf - Eduinnova

Stream of Consciousness
and Reality in the Works of
Virginia Woolf
Esther Cores Bilbao

Introduction
Contents
Mrs. Dalloway vs. Reality
Stream of Consciousness in To the
Lighthouse
The intellectual’s approach to reality
The intuitive approach
The artist’s position
Bibliography
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Introduction
“Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two
contradictions. This has gone on for ever; will last for ever; goes down
to the bottom of the world – this moment I stand on. Also it is
transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves.
Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another,
so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous we
human beings, and show the light through. But what is the light? 1 ”
This statement written by Virginia Woolf in her diary reveals her uncertain
attitude to life. In fact, her novels are an exploration in an attempt to find an
answer to her own problems. She places her characters in the same uncertain
position in which she finds herself and we can see that in their attempt to see the
‘light’ and in the way in which they react to life, they are made to define
themselves, to adopt an attitude and act according to it. It is through their minds
and actions that Virginia Woolf studies and criticizes different approaches to life.
In the three novels I have selected Virginia Woolf deals with different
approaches to reality. In Mrs. Dalloway, she studies the behaviour of a broad
section of society; in To the Lighthouse, she concentrates primarily on one family,
1 Virginia Woolf, “A Writer’s Diary”, pg. 141
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and in The Waves she deals with the particular response to reality of six
individuals.
I have also considered it interesting to examine Virginia Woolf’s own
response to life (from the evidence available in extracts from her diary and in the
autobiography of her husband, Leonard Woolf) as well as the effect that her
vision of the world had on her technique as a novelist.
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Mrs. Dalloway vs. Reality
In her diary, Virginia Woolf gave an account of the purpose she had in mind
when writing the novel:
“I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize
the social system and to show it at work at its most intense 2 ”
The society Virginia Woolf was criticizing was that of the post-war period (in
fact, the action is set during one of the first days after the end of the First World
War). She did not criticize society as a whole, but chose a part of it upon which
she mainly directed her attacks. This section of society she chose was the English
upper middle class, which is represented by Mrs. Dalloway and her friends.
This class is criticized for its lack of depth and sensibility, for its frivolity in
the aftermath of one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known:
“laughing girls in their transparent muslins who even now, after
dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run” pg.
7.
The members of this society are also criticized because they have forgotten
their inner life and feelings and live only for a social public life; what D.H.
Lawrence calls “living in the mirror”.
2 Virginia Woolf, ibid., pg. 57
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This antipathy of Virginia Woolf towards the upper middle class and their
artificial way of living has at the same time a wider significance in that many of
the characters are people who are the leaders of their society.
There is, for instance, Hugh Whitebread, with his little job at the Court, who
represents what is “most detestable in the English middle class” (pg. 81). He “has
read nothing, thought nothing” (pg. 9). Virginia Woolf is criticizing in him the lives
and outlook of the public school men, which he represents with his snobbery
(“he loves dressing up in golden lace and doing homage” –pg. 191) and the way
in which he passes through life (“Hugh Whitebread it was, strolling past in his
white waist-coat, dim, fat, blind, past everything he looked except self-esteem
and comfort” –pg. 209).
The waste of time that his life has been is made explicit by Virginia Woolf in
the fact that he proudly sums up the labour of his life as “an improvement of the
public shelters... and the protection of the owls of Norfolk” pg. 114.
Virginia Woolf’s irony is used most cruelly in relation to Hugh Whitebread.
There is another instance in Sally’s description of him “he looked after the King’s
cellars, polished the imperial shoe-buckles, went about in knee breeches and lace
ruffles” pg. 82. Through his person we see clearly the antipathy Virginia Woolf
felt, not only for the kind of person he represents, but for the ideas they uphold.
He is, in N. C. Thakur’s words “symbolic of the mental servility to plumed
authority”. This attitude is not only his but that of the whole society, which feels
a “dark breath of veneration” (pg. 19) when a car carrying an unknown
personage passes by in the street:
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“yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond
Street to Oxford Street, on one side to Atkinson’s scent shop, on the
other, passing invisibly, inaudible, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon
hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sudden sobriety and
stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly
disorderly. But now mystery had brushed them with her wing, they
had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad
with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide” pg. 17
This common attitude towards ‘greatness’ is shown by the fact that there is
always a crowd at the gates of Buckingham Palace, waiting to see the King who
stands, not only to them, but “to millions of people... for a symbol”. P.129.
Virginia Woolf had a contemptuous attitude not only towards political authority,
but against religious authority also based on the grounds that man should be free
from any idea which prevented him from regarding life as it is; it is significant
that the same aeroplane which distracts the people at the gates of Buckingham
Palace from seeing the King, distracts a man who was about to enter St. Paul’s
Cathedral:
“and while he hesitated, out flew the aeroplane over Ludgate Circus.
It was strange, it was still. Not a sound was to be heard above
traffic...” pg. 33
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A more clearly defined antipathy towards religion is expressed through the
person of Miss Kilman, the clumsy and ugly governess of Elisabeth Dalloway;
Miss Kilman is one of the few characters in which Virginia Woolf got emotionally
involved, and in the picture she makes of her we can clearly see her antipathies:
She is ugly (this fact is over-emphasized), and always appears dressed in an old
mackintosh. Her love and religiosity are not the product of pure feelings, but
escapism from her anger and hatred, so her love is possessive, and her religiosity
corrupt. She wants to subdue Mrs. Dalloway, because the essential emptiness
and frustration of Miss Kilman’s life – she has taken to ‘good works’ and religion
to fill the vacuum, which has resulted in the breaking out of destructive impulses:
“But it was not the body, it was the sould and its mookery that she
wished subdue; make feel her mastery. If only she could make her
weep, could ruin her; humiliate her, bring her to her knees crying!”
pg. 138.
Elisabeth:
Miss Kilman feels the same destructive and perverted love towards
“she was about to split and fail asunder, she felt. The agony was so
terrific. If she could grasp her, if she could make her hers absolutely
and for ever and then die; that was all she wanted” pg. 146.
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It is significant that Virginia Woolf should choose this repugnant character
with a love-hatred perversion to represent the religious. The reaction that she
arouses in the reader is nearly the same as that of Mrs. Dalloway:
“love and religion, thought Clarissa going back into the dressing
room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are! For
now that the body of Miss Kilman was not before her, it overwhelmed
her the idea. The cruellest things in the world, thought seeing them
hot, clumsy, domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous,
infinitely cruel and unscrupulous, dressed in a mackintosh coat on the
landing, love and religion! Had she ever tried to convert anyone
herself? Did she not wish everybody merely to be themselves? ... But
love and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of
the soul” pg. 140.
There is no doubt that in this paragraph Mrs. Dalloway is transcribing the
thoughts of Virginia Woolf, whatever the difference of attitude may exist
between them.
As Miss Kilman represents “religion”, Mrs. Dalloway stands for the political
man whose life is spent in trifling in committees, in parties and in Parliament. He
has done nothing in particular; neither does his own wife know the matters he
discusses in his committees. Everything about him is vague as is to signify that his
life has been nothing. Take the matter-of-fact way in which Sally asks about his
work:
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“but what has he done? ... public work, she supposed” (pg. 209) . Also, he is
criticized for the effects that he had on Mrs. Dalloway:
“in all this the was a great deal of Dalloway, of course; a great deal of
public-spirited, British Empire, tariff-reform, governing class spirit,
which had grown on her” pg. 86.
The irony this time is that this representative of the “governing class spirit”
is a “sportsman”, a man who “cared only for dogs” and who “when he came into
the room he smelt of the stables” pg. 209, a man who have been happier farming
in Norfolk (pg. 86) and who maintained that “no decent man ought to read
Shakespeare’s sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes” (pg. 84).
Another representative of society is criticized – the magnificent Lady
Burton, who even “debarred by her sex, and some truancy too, of the logical
faculty” (she found it impossible to write a letter to “The Times” pg. 199) has
“engaged all her attention and not merely her attention, but that fibre which was
the ramrod of her soul on a project for emigrating young people of both sexes
born of respectable parents and setting them up with a fair prospect of doing
well in Canada” pg. 120
Lady Bradshaw, too, comes in for satire with her:
“large dinner parties every Thursday to the profession; an occasional
bazaar to be opened; Royalty greeted; too little time, alas! With her
husband whose work grew and grew... child welfare, the aftercare of
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the epileptic, and photography so that if there was a church building
or a church decaying, she bribed the sexton” pg. 105.
The uselessness of the lives of all these people is clear enough. They are not
only representatives but the leaders of the social class Virginia Woolf detested,
and she does, perhaps, lessen their credibility by her lavish attribution of
negative characteristics to them. She has drawn them to present what is negative
in their social milieu so that they become rather caricatures than characters.
And the awareness she has of the futility of their lives is manifested by
reference to time: Big Ben strikes each half hour and “its leaden circles dissolved
in the air”. This phrase is significant of the lives of the members of this society,
how they are wasting their time and how time is “irrevocable”.
The function of the clocks is double; on the one hand, they are a technical
device of the authoress to provide a link between two different persons:
“it is this, he said as he entered Deans Yard. Big Ben was beginning to
strike, first the warning, musical; then the hour irrevocable. Lunch
parties waste the entire afternoon, he thought, approaching his door.
The sound of Big Ben flooded Clarissa’s drawing room” pg. 130
Mrs. Dalloway, the protagonist of the novel, is an offspring of this society
whose values she upholds. Peter Walsh has her in mind when he says: “the
perfect hostess”. Her life is essentially shallow and meaningless:
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“Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves, but to
make people think this or that.”
The woman she admires most is Lady Bexborough “who opened a bazaar,
they said with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed” pg. 7.
The necessity of a repression of feeling to be able to live in this particular
world is again and again emphasized throughout the novel.
In fact this is the aim pursued by Mrs. Dalloway all her life; she first married
Richard Dalloway, a “political man”, although she was in love with Peter Walsh.
Peter, together with Sally Sexton, represents the people who cannot fit into
this conventional society. Peter goes to India and Sally lives in the country; they
escape from being Londoners, who, according to E.M. Foster are countrymen “on
the road to sterility 3 .
Peter is interested in “Wagner, Pope’s poetry, people’s characters
eternally” pg. 9. He is able to understand other people’s feelings; and when he
comes back after an absence of fifteen years, he is able to see the futility of
Clarissa’s life:
“Here she is, mending her dress, mending her dress as usual; here she
has been sitting all the time I’ve been in India, mending her dress,
playing about, going to parties, running to the house and back, and
all that...” pg. 46.
And he makes her aware of it:
3 E.M. Foster, “The Longest Journey”, pg. 257
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“Holding her life in her arms, which she put down by them and said:
this is what I have made of it! This! And what has she made of it?
What indeed? Sitting there sewing, this morning with Peter” pg. 48.
But although Peter is a positive character who has been able to see
beneath the superficial way of living of society, as he was rejected by Clarissa his
life became sterile and his creative impulse resolved into a destructive impulse;
that may be implied by his continually playing with a pocket-knife.
Sally is the other unconventional character:
“She stole a chicken from the larder because she was hungry in the
night; she smoked cigars in her bedroom. She left a priceless book in
the punt” (pg. 200).
She, unlike the other characters reads Morris, Shelley and Plato, is
interested in abolishing the private property and is able “to see through things”
(pg. 81). She implored Peter:
“to carry off Clarissa, to save her from the Hughs and the Dalloways
and all the other ‘perfect gentlemen’ who would stifle her soul (she
wrote reams of poetry those days), make a mere hostess of her,
encourage her wordliness”(pg. 84).
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She has realised the artificial way of living of society and the effects it has
on human beings (In this respect, Peter and Sally are the spokespeople of Virginia
Wool) and the attitude of Sally, who got “from her flowers a peace which men
never gave her” (pg. 213).
It’s common ground for Virginia Woolf’s characters to find solace in nature.
Septimus, in this same novel says “do not cut down trees” (pg. 28).
But Peter and Sally, the only ones who have seen beneath the artificial way
of living of the society of their days, and who have deserted her, are considered a
failure by that same society. Peter knew that he was a failure in the “Dalloway’s
sense” because at fifty-three he had to ask Richard for a job. Sally, on the other
hand, is married to a miner’s son and lives, as she says “in the wilds”. She is
considered to have “married beneath herself” (pg. 210).
These two characters, who had influence upon Clarissa, tried unsuccessfully
to prevent her marriage to Richard Dalloway. Nevertheless, Clarissa, who “had a
perfectly clear notion of what she wanted” (pg. 84) married him, and carried on
the superficial life of a society hostess. Her development in the novel is first to
admit that she was wrong in marrying Dalloway and not Peter (“If I had married
him, this gaiety would have been mine all day! It was over for her. The sheet was
stretched and the bed narrow” (pg.52)) and later to realise that her whole life
has been wasted:
“Somehow it was her disaster – her disgrace. It was her punishment
to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman in this
profound darkness, and she was forced to stand there in her evening
dress. She had schemed, she had pilfered. She was never wholly
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admirable. She had wanted success, Lady Bexborough and the rest of
it. And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton. Odd,
incredible; she had never been so happy” (pg. 204).
At the moment she is remembering Bourton she is recalling her youth,
when she was a woman of strong feelings. Now “Lady Bexborough and the rest”
have stifled her sould, she has repressed her feelings so much that now the only
thing she can strongly feel is hatred, or rather a perverted feeling of love-hatred.
It is significant that the only moment in which Virginia Woolf allows her character
to express herself with passion should be this:
“Kilman was her enemy, that was satisfying, that was real. Ah, how
she hated her. She hated her, she loved her.” Pg. 193.
And then, as Virginia Woolf wanted to show what are the results of the
repression of feelings and the insanity they provoke, she ends up saying “It was
enemies one wanted, not friends”.
But Mrs. Dalloway is not only the representative of her social milieu, she is
somewhat different from the others, although the fact of living among them has
made her adopt the superficial view of life of a society hostess and what she
admires is the mere surface of life in that society:
“In the people’s eyes, in the swings, tramps and trudge; in the below
and the uproar; the carriages, motorcars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich
man, brass bands, barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and
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the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she
loved; life, London, this moment of June” pg. 6.
The difference is that she has the intuition that something unifying must
exist who could bring together the different beings and give some meaning to life
and death; this belief in a unifying force allows her to attach some meaning to
the apparent meaningless of life, so that, in a sense, she feels identified with life:
“or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended
absolutely? But that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb
and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in
each other, she being part, she was positive of the trees at home; of
the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of
people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the
people she knew best” pg. 11.
And a result of her view of life is her attitude to death. She was not afraid of
it. The lines she quotes (from “Cymbeline”) are significant: “fear no more the
heat of the sun, nor the furious winter’s rages” pg. 12.
While she feels identified with the world, though at a superficial level, she
is terribly aware of the isolation of individuals, she sees how there is no real
communication among them and how lonely they are in a hostile world. The
recognition of this leads her to a characteristic response in Virginia Woolf’s
female characters: she tries to impose order and tries to make something out of
the life of the human individuals by bringing them together. But in the same way
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that her view of life is superficial, she, according to her position as a hostess, tries
to bring people together by the only means she understands – parties.
With her parties, she is trying to somehow accomplish a mission, so she
attaches to them significance that neither Peter nor her husband can
understand. She tries to explain:
“All she could say (and nobody was expected to understand): there
was So-and-So in South Kennsington; someone up in Bayswater, and
someone else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense
of their existence, and felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and
she felt if only they could be brought together, and so she did. And it
was an offering, to combine, to create, but to whom?” (pg. 135).
There is in her a feeling that something might be tried beyond the
superficial relationships, so she says that in parties “it was possible to say things
you couldn’t say anyhow else, things that needed an effort. Possible to go much
deeper” (pg. 189)
But in fact, this doesn’t happen, as the people who are grouped round her
are essentially superficial and empty and their only life is the one lived in society;
they have not anything to say to each other, so that communication is not
achieved. Virginia Woolf in this way wants to tell us that besides the lack of
communication existing among these superficial people, the need for
communication is a problem of every human being; in her novels, dialogue is
comparatively rare and the situation in which one character wants to say
something but cannot put it in words is recurrent in her novels. Here, for
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instance, with Richard and Clarissa, “but he could not bring himself to say he
loved her, not in so many words”.
One feels that in Virginia Woolf’s novels the characters are essentially
isolated beings, who can never communicate, and that is emphasized by the fact
that frequently, at those moments when the characters are about to say
something important, something external prevents them from saying what they
want so that communication is not achieved:
“- Tell me, he said, seizing her by her shoulders. Are you happy,
Clarissa? Does Richard-?
The door opened” (pg. 53).
“Tell me the truth, he repeated, when suddenly the old man Breitkopf
popped his head in carrying The Times, stared at them, gaped and
went away” (pg. 72).
But those interruptions do not only occur in Mrs. Dalloway’s superficial
world. In To the Lighthouse, the same phenomenon occurs:
“But now as she wished to say something, could have said something
perhaps, there they were – Cam and James” (pg. 175).
It seems, then, that Virginia Woolf believed communication between
individuals occurs but very seldom and only in the cases when human beings
have something fundamental in common. Even then, as it happens in To the
Lighthouse between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay:
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“for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew,
that she loved him”.
Or in the recognition that the last phrase of Peter Walsh implies in Mrs.
Dalloway: “For there she was”, that people understand one another without
words.
If communication only occurs in those instances, the project of Mrs.
Dalloway to redeem people from their solitude by bringing them together in her
parties fails completely. When at the end of the novel, she suddenly sees the
insincerity and emptiness of her party, when she does not want to feel the
presence of people around her but goes to a silent room and envies the old lady
that she sees through the window going to bed alone, she is redeemed of her
worldliness:
“It was fascinating with people still laughing and shouting in the
drawing room, to watch that old woman, quite quietly going to bed
alone. She pulled the blind now” (pg. 205).
It was very significant that at the same time in which Mrs. Dalloway
acknowledges the futility of her life, Virginia Woolf makes the clock begin
striking, as a symbol of the time that has been passing with nothing to fill it. Mrs.
Dalloway acknowledges that so has been her life, and suddenly she feels
identified with Septimus, whose death she has heard of at this party:
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“But she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two,
three, she did not pity him, with all this going on... She felt glad that
he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living” (pg. 206).
This unknown young man with whom she feels identified is the means by
which she recognises the futility of her world and the impossibility of
communication that the young man has solved by dying:
death:
“But he had flung it away. They went on living. They would grow old.
A thing was what mattered; a thing wreathed about with chattier,
defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop everyday in corruption,
lies chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was
an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of
reaching the centre which mystically evaded them; closeness drew
apart, rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death”
(pg. 204)
The identification is so complete that she even guesses the motives of his
“Suppose he had had that passion, and had gone to Sir William
Bradshaw, a great doctor, yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or
lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable
outrage –forcing your soul, that was it – if this young man had gone
to him, and Sir William had impressed him, like that, with his power,
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might he not then have said (indeed she felt it now), life is
intolerable; they made life intolerable, men like that” (pg. 204)
And we see in fact that Septimus was driven to his death by the inanity and
cruelty of a society whose false values were upheld by Dr. Holmes and Sir William
Bradshaw.
“Dr. Holmes seemed to stand for something horrible to him: ‘human
nature’, he called him” (pg. 155)
“Staggering he saw her mount the appalling staircase laden with
Holmes and Bradshaw, men who never weighed less than eleven
stone six, who sent their wives to court. Men who made ten
thousand a year and talked of proportion; who differed in their
verdicts, yet judges they were. Who mixed vision and the sideboards;
saw nothing clear, yet ruled, yet inflicted” (pg. 164)
The young man has identified human nature with Dr. Holmes and Sir
William Bradshaw because to him they are the representatives and preserverers
of the society he had once tried unsuccessfully to understand.
Through the person of Septimus, Virginia Woolf cruelly depicts the effects
that the life of society has upon sensitive people. He, brought up in this society
that despises feelings, behaved according to its code.
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Just as Lady Bexborough opened her bazaar without showing any emotion
at the death of her son, Septimus repressed his feelings at the death of his
friend:
“When Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus,
far from showing any emotion or recognising that there was the end
of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and
very reasonably. The war had taught him, it was sublime” (pg. 96)
But this repressed feeling and the consideration that he ‘could not feel’
raised a panic in him, under the influence of which he, one evening, became
engaged to Lucrezia, the daughter of his landlady in Italy. Afterwards, when he
realises that he cannot feel for another human being, not even for his wife, he is
overcome by deep remorse; he considers that he has sinned against human
nature and therefore he is condemned by her to die:
“So there was no excuse, nothing whatever the matter, except the
sin for which human nature has condemned him to death; that he
did not feel, he had not cared when Evans was killed. That was worst,
but all the other crimes... how he had married his wife without loving
her...” (pg. 161)
In Septimus’ progress towards death there are two stages:
First, he believes that he is the one who had sinned against human nature,
so that human nature has condemned him to die because of his lack of feeling.
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After his contact with the doctors, however, he realises that it has not only been
his crime but that society has taught him to be insensitive and that the whole
society lacks feeling:
“That human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity
beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They
hunt in pack, they desert the fallen” (pg. 99)
Septimus then realises that he is the one who is now right though once
wrong in his attitude to life, and that it is society that upholds false values.
He is then able to see the necessity of love. He reiterates this message of
universal love but the irony is that he doesn’t know to whom to give his “supreme
secret”. He thinks of the Prime Minister and of the Cabinet. But the Cabinet is
formed by men like Richard Dalloway and Lady Bexborough who are the
advocates of the repression of feeling. In fact, the whole society is indifferent and
hostile to his message and insists on conformity to its norms; society replies to his
urgent message by telling him “to go to the music hall to play cricket” (pg. 29). To
put on weight as Dr. Holmes, who, “if he found himself a pound below eleven
stone six, asked his wife for another plate of porridge at breakfast” (pg. 101). And
finally, he is advised that he must go to a “delightful home down in the country”
(pg. 107), a sanatorium for the “mentally unbalanced”.
Society upholds, through its doctors, the law of Proportions:
“Worshipping proportion Sir William not only prospered himself but
made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth,
penalized despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their
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views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion... so that not
only did his colleagues respect him, his subordinates fear him, but
the friends and relations of his patient felt for him the keenest
gratitude for insisting that these prophetic Christs and Christesses,
who prophesied the end of the world or the advent of God, should
drink milk in bed as Sir William ordered” (pg. 110).
Thus the doctors in the novel stand for an established hierarchy in which
the visionary has no place, so Septimus’ only alternative, as he does not accept its
values, was to kill himself:
“Holmes would get him. But no, not Holmes, not Bradshaw. But he
would wait till the very last moment, he did not want to die. Life was
good. The sun was hot. Only human beings?... Holmes was at the
door. I’ll give it to you! He cried, and flung himself vigorously,
violently down on to Mrs. Filmers area railings” (pg. 165).
There are then two very different visions of life in”Mrs. Dalloway”. The
vision of Septimus, disillusioned and with a sense of the horror of reality and that
of Mrs. Dalloway and her friends. The unity of the book consists in the bridging of
these disparate visions, in that at the end Mrs. Dalloway feels identified with
Septimus; his death has made her aware of the futility of her life; she has
understood the ‘attempt to communicate’ in death: through his death she has
seen.
The means by which these two approaches to life are brought together is
the party at which Sir William relates Septimus’ suicide. And the party constitutes
the definite revelation to Clarisse that her life is a sham.
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The party is then a device to bring together the two parts of the novel:
Septimus and Clarissa with their respective ideas. But the party also provides an
excellent medium to show the upper-class relationships at their worse; all the
members of this artificial society are grouped there. Hugh Whitebread “on tiptoe,
dancing forward, bowing and scraping, as the Prime Minister and Lady Bruton
emerged”; Sir Harry “who produced more bad pictures than any other two
academicians in the whole of St. John’s Wood”. Lady Bruton, who “could never
think of anything to say to Clarissa, though she liked her”; Lady Bradshaw “in grey
and silver, balancing like a sea-lion at the edge of its tank, barking for invitations;
Duchesses, the typical successful man’s wife”; Lord Lexan “saying that his wife
wouldn’t wear her furs at the garden party because my dear, you ladies are all
alike”; Ellie Henderson “getting nervous and flushing, ... said that many people
really felt the heat more than the cold”; Sir William Bradshaw who “stopped at
the door to look at a picture. He looked in the corner for the engraver’s name. Sir
William Bradshaw was so interested in art”; Richard Dalloway who has so ardently
lived the public life, significantly fails to recognise his own daughter, and thinks of
her “who is that lovely girl?”
Among these vain people stand, and are able to laugh at them, Sally Sexton
who “thrust” herself in, without invitation, and Peter Walsh, who criticises
Clarissa:
“How delightful to see you! said Clarissa. She said it to everybody
‘how delightful to see you! – she was at her worst – effusive,
insincere” (pg. 185)
25

Peter, when seeing the attitude of the people at the party towards the
Prime Minister, exclaims “lord, lord, the snobbery of the English!” for:
“Nobody looked at him. They just went on talking, yet it was
perfectly plain that they all knew, felt to the marrow of their bones,
this majesty passing, this symbol of what they all stood for, English
society” (pg. 190)
But the novel does not finish here; though pessimistic, Virginia Woolf was
not absolutely negative in her attitude towards this society. The sacrifice of
Septimus has had an effect: Mrs. Dalloway has acknowledged the
meaninglessness of her life, and when she, after her meditation, comes back to
the party, she is able to create in Peter a strong natural feeling:
“What is this terror? What is this ecstasy? He thought to himself.
What is that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he
said. For there she was”.
26

Stream of Consciousness and To the lighthouse
“All bounds of union seem broken, yet some control must exist”
(Virginia Woolf, “The Narrow Bridge of Art”)
“To the Lighthouse is a search for control, for something unifying; in a
world where nature is apparently hostile and threatening. Mrs. Ramsay, when
thinking of her eight children is afraid that they should grow up because they will
only find solitude, hostility and injustice in the world; while the ultimate reality
appears her meaninglessness:
“For that reason, knowing what was before them –love and
ambition, and being wretched alone in dreary places- she had often
the feeling, why must they grow up and lose it all?” (pg. 70)
Not only she, but her husband too has a sense of the superficial
inconsistency of life, and:
“How you and I and she, pass and vanish, nothing stays, all changes”
(pg. 204)
But although the apprehension they have of life is the same, the attitude
they take, as the result of their apprehension is very different. While Mr. Ramsay
27

esolutely insists on a rational approach to the meaning of life, refusing to admit
that something beyond the facts might exist, his wife seeks for something
beyond the surface of things, for something that can allow her to interpret the
meaning of life.
Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, at this point, are representatives of the human
beings of a generation who have lost religious faith but who also have to face the
problem of giving a meaning to this apparently absurd life.
In the second part of the book, “Time Passes” in which the forces of nature
are seen in action and which surely represents the authoress view of the nature
of things, Virginia Woolf puts this common aim poetically:
“In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water,
in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form, dreams persisted,
and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every
gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed
to declare (but if questioned at once to withdraw) that good
triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules”... (or to resist the stimulus
to search something)... “single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the
sand, which would render the possessor secure” (pg. 150)
But Virginia Woolf’s pessimism makes her add what in the context is
ironical: Mrs. Ramsay, who represented the seeker for meaning and union, and
whose influence had created a unity that seemed to defeat hostile nature, is now
dead: two of her children are dead (the girl, Prue, in childbirth and the boy,
Andrew, in the war). And yet it was in the combining, creating in relation to the
28

lives of these that her powers lay, and all the while the house is decaying as the
result of the hostile forces of nature:
“Tortoise shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and pattered their
life out on the window pane, Poppies showed themselves among the
dahlias; the lawn waved long grass; giant artichokes towered among
roses; a fringed carnation flowered among cabbages, while the
gentle tapping of a weed at the window had become, on winter’s
nights, a drumming from sturdy trees and thorned briars which made
the whole room green in summer” (pg. 157)
Nevertheless, Virginia Woolf feels, this is the fact, this is what human
beings have to face; and they have to make something out of this.
In “To the Lighthouse” she is mainly concerned with two ways of responding to
reality: through intellect and through intuition.
29

THE INTELLECTUALS APPROACH TO REALITY
In her diary, Virginia Woolf said that she was writing “To the Lighthouse” to
“have father’s character done complete in it” 4 so that Mr. Ramsay is the picture
of her father.
In another part of her diary, she says with reference to her father:
‘And the set of walking or climbing seemed to inspire him to recite whichever it
was that came uppermost or suited his mood” 5 . Mr. Ramsay also shares this
characteristic of the authoress’s father, and throughout the novel he reiterates
lines from certain poems, which provide Virginia Woolf with an excellent medium
to show, with economy of description, the characteristic attitude of Mr. Ramsay
towards life. First of all, it is significant that one of the poets he quotes,
Tennyson, is a Victorian, and that his attitude is ‘heroic’. An example of this
would be Tennyson’s “The charge of the Light Brigade”.
At the same time, she includes poems of nostalgic melancholy, more
representative of much of Tennyson’s works and of Victorian poetry in general.
The other poet Mr. Ramsay quotes is Cowper, the Cowper of “The Castaway”.
Here, Mr. Ramsay reveals his characteristic self-pity. Ramsay, seeing the human
predicament and his own in particular, as tragic:
“We perished, each alone
But I beneath a rougher sea
4 “A Writer’s Diary”, pg. 76
5 Ibid., pg. 71
30

Was whelmed in deeper gulps than he”
The irony here is, of course, that Cowper’s personal predicaments gave him
good cause to write those last two lines; Ramsay is merely adopting a tragic
pose.
Mr. Ramsay represents the intellectual who, having seen the horror of life
(“life is difficult; facts uncompromising and the passage to that fabled land where
our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness” –pg.6)
has uses “courage, truth and the power to endure” to face it.
Nevertheless, as he does not believe in anything but reason and in the
visible facts, the awareness he has of the hostility of life leads him to a feeling of
complete loneliness and to a contemptuous attitude to things and people. As a
result of his attitude, the feelings he inspires are of antipathy, which are
illustrated in the first we hear of him through his own son:
“Had there been an axe handy, a poker or any weapon that would
have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and
then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of
emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere
presence” (pg. 6)
The cause of these adverse feelings is his insensibility to the feelings of
others and his insistence on a ruthlessly logical interpretation of facts:
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“He was incapable of untruth; never tempered with a fact, never
altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of
any mortal being” (pg. 6)
Whereas to his wife:
“To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other
people’s feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so
brutally was to her such an outrage of human decency...” (pg. 38)
Having represented such a different attitude to people in terms of male -
Mr. Ramsay- and female –Mrs. Ramsay-, Virginia Woolf emphasized this
dichotomy with reference to the projected visit to the lighthouse. The insistence
of Mr. Ramsay that the weather would be bad, and Mrs. Ramsay’s sympathetic
attitude to her child in trying not to destroy his hopes is an illustration of her
attitude to male and female behaviour.
And as Joan Bennet points out, Virginia Woolf “discerns more clearly
perhaps than any other novelist the peculiar nature of typically feminine modes
of thought and apprehension and their peculiar values as the complement of
masculine modes” 6 . The feminine mode being in general intuitive and vague,
whereas men distinguish themselves by their logical way of thought.
In fact, Mr. Ramsay is so carried away by his logic that in a sense he remains
out of touch with reality; the irony being that he, who is ultimately concerned
with the meaning of life lacking “the power of being in uncertainties without
6 Joan Bennet, “Virginia Woolf, her art as a novelist”, pgs. 76-77
32

irritably seeking after the fact” misses life and the apprehension of the beauty of
things, or at least that is what it seemed to his wife:
“Made differently from other people, born blind and deaf and dumb
to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary with an eye like an
eagle” (pg. 81)
Virginia Woolf shared at this point Mrs. Ramsay’s ideas, and the word
“irritably” applied to Ramsay’s way of looking at the facts expresses her own
point of view about the rational attitude of those who try to understand life by
means of intellect. Here is Virginia Woolf speaking again (in Mrs. Ramsay’s
words):
“How much they missed, after all, these very clever men! How dried
up they became!” (pg. 115)
“He never looked at things” (pg. 82) and if he did “all he would say
would be, poor little world, with one of his sighs”.
Mr. Ramsay contemptuous and arrogant attitude is not only towards
inanimate things but towards human beings. An example of this may be found at
the dinner party where he became furious just because Mr. Carmichael had
asked for a second plate of soup for “He loathed people eating when he had
finished” (pg. 110). And it is not strange that with this temperament he might
feel very much alone.
33

If we lastly admire him, as Virginia Woolf without a doubt did, is because
even if he feels essentially alone and does not hope to reach the letter ‘g’ that to
him represents the truth, he never submits and:
“He would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and
there, his eyes fixed in the storm, trying to the end to pierce
darkness, he would die standing” (pg. 41).
However, in his attitude we may find a hyperbolical stoicism, making his
attitude something of a pose –his walking alone up and down the terrace, his
declaiming aloud “someone has blundered”, his emphasis on the fact that he
would die standing.
Apart from the admiration Virginia Woolf may have felt for his courage and
endurance, she does not fail to make us see that Ramsay’s attitude is wrong and
sterile. She does this by means of images (“an arid scimitar”, “he was lean as a
knife, narrow as the blade of one”) and by showing us that ultimately he is not
self-sufficient; he needs the admiration or compassion of others, and he, the one
who maintains that reason and a ruthless facing of facts stands above all, is the
most emotional of all the characters and is continuously demanding the
sympathy of others:
“It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all,
and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed, and soothed,
to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile and
all the rooms of the house full of life” (pg. 44)
34

In the person of Charles Tansley, Virginia Woolf presents us another
intellectual but, in her wish to make clear the essentially wrong approach of the
intellectual to life, he is more of a caricature than a real character. He shares all
the defects of Ramsay but has not his courage or integrity. He is not a great
thinker but a man who in reasoning sees a way to reassure himself of his own
importance. He has no real intelligence or ideas. Virginia Woolf presents him
following Mr. Ramsay up and down the terrace, and repeating his words:
“No going to the lighthouse, James”. He is a parody of Ramsay, and Ramsay
himself is something of a parody.
Tansley has the similar arrogant attitude of Mr. Ramsay towards his fellow
human beings:
“You have wasted your lives. You are all of you wrong. Poor old
fogies, you’re hopelessly behind the times” (pg. 109)
Tansley also shares Mr. Ramsay’s egotism and lack of interest in others:
“Until he had turned the whole thing round and made it somehow
reflect him and disparage them he was not satisfied” (pg. 10)
He also has a need of others reassure him because, after all, he is intelligent
and sometimes can see that his life is without shape and wasted:
35

“At this moment, sitting stuck there with an empty seat beside him,
nothing had shaped himself at all; it was all in scraps and fragments.
He felt extremely, even physically, uncomfortable. He wanted
somebody to give him a chance of asserting himself. He wanted it so
urgently that he fidgeted in his chair, looked at his person, then at
that person, tried to break into their talk, opened his mouth and shut
it again” (pg. 104)
In several of Virginia Woolf’s novels intellectuals appear who try to solve
their problems by logic and reasoning; their characteristics are pride, selfishness,
insensibility, yet Virginia Woolf may feel respect for them –in the case of Mr.
Ramsay in this particular novel- or admiration for them –as for Neville in “The
Waves”. Sometimes she deals with semi-intellectuals like Tansley in this novel or
Miss Kilman in “Mrs. Dalloway” who provoke derision and ridicule. But
nevertheless, she believes that their response to reality is inadequate, that the
search for truth without considering human nature is useless, and that those
who rely only on their reasoning powers are bound to be mistaken and to
misunderstand life; that they may achieve our admiration, or even our sympathy,
but they will never be able to create order, to see clearly. And that they finally
rely on some other more intuitive persons, as Mrs. Ramsay in this novel.
36

THE INTUITIVE APPROACH
Mrs. Ramsay is the exponent of another attitude to life; instead of
Ramsay’s scientific and detached way of looking at things, she has had an
intuition of truth merely by observing the ordinary:
“She was silent always. She knew then –she knew without having
learnt, her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. Her
singleness of mind gave her, naturally, this swoop and fall of the
spirit upon truth which delighted eased, substained” (pg.34)
It is not that she doesn’t realize the hostility and horror of life; she is well
aware of it when thinking of the future of her children and when she, considering
the essential aloofness of the individuals and their efforts to communicate, says
that “beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep” and that
“now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by” (pg. 73).
But instead of the arrogant position of her husband, Mrs. Ramsay, although
feeling the horror of life, feeling that “there was not treachery too base for the
world to commit” (pg. 74) and that “there is no reason, order, justice, but
suffering, death, the poor” (pg. 70), she is able to accept it and she feels herself
part of the world:
37

“It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone one leant to things,
felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in
a sense were one” (pg. 74)
And feeling a part of the world, she is not so much preoccupied with her
own personality (as Tansley for instance is), because she believes that “losing
personality one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir” (pg. 73).
This characteristic unselfish attitude of hers is what makes her able to
understand the others, till she becomes a sponge sopped full of human
emotions. Although her integrity sometimes makes her question the motives for
which she does, she helps others:
“For her own satisfaction was it that she wished so instinctively to
help, to give, that people might say of her ‘Oh, Mrs. Ramsay!, dear
Mrs. Ramsay!” (pg. 49)
Whatever the motives, what she wanted to communicate, to make others
aware of was that “this eternal flowing and passing was stuck into stability” (pg.
183) and that although things seemed meaningless and incoherent, there was a
coherence, something immune from change which the others were not aware of.
That mission of hers, of which she is perfectly aware (“and the whole of the
effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. Again she felt without
hostility the sterility of men, for if she did not do it, nobody would do it” –pg. 96),
may explain the title of the novel. The lighthouse is not merely the place where
they were going on an excursion, but it is a symbol of her way, of the truth she
38

possesses and of the illuminating effects that she produces on others by her
mere presence:
“That woman sitting there writing under the rock resolved everything
into simplicity... she brought together this and that and then this, and
so made out of that miserable silliness and spite something” (pg.
182)
Mrs. Ramsay, in the consciousness of her mission, even identifies herself
with the light:
“She praised herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was
stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light”.
The symbolism is furthermore emphasized by the fact that in the first part
of the novel, “The Window”, she is sitting at dusk in an enlightened room, while
her husband is walking in the terrace and sees her through the window. Here the
difference between them both is pun in images: she is in the light and he is in the
dark.
The differences between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are also shown in another
significant situation, when at the dinner party Augustus Carmichael asks for a
second plate of soup. The attitude of both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are
characteristic:
Mr. Ramsay was “screwing his face up, he was scowling and frowning
and flushing with anger” while his wife thought “surely the could let
39

Augustus have his soup if he wanted it... and looking at him, drinking
soup, very large and calm in the failing light and monumental,
contemplative, she wondered what did he feel then; and how he was
always content and dignified” (pgs. 110-111).
However the difference of attitude may exist between them both (or
because of it), they really love each other and their relationship is satisfactory.
Mrs. Ramsay, in the same way as she has tried to find the meaning of life by
going deep and seeking something beyond, has tried in her marriage to find
something beyond the pure sexual relationship. This other relationship is
suggested through a Freudian sexual imagery in Chapter Seven:
“And into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the
fatal sterility of the male plugged itself, like a beak of brass, barren
and bare...”
“Standing between her knees, very stiff, James felt all her strength
flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid
scimitar of the male which smote mercilessly, again and again,
demanding sympathy...”
“Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one
petal closed in another, the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon
itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in
exquisite abandonment to exhaustion across the page of the
Grimm’s fairy story...” (pgs. 44-45).
40

As the result of this relationship, she, when she walks away, is able to feel
‘the pulse’ of ‘successful creation’ which “gives to each of them the solace which
two different notes, one high, one low, struck together, seem to give to each
other as they combine” (pg. 46).
Their different personalities complement each other. She soothes his
wounded vanity:
“Filled with her words, like a child who drops off satisfied, he said at
last, looking at her with humble gratitude, restored, renewed that he
would take a turn” (pg. 45).
And he gives to her a sense of security and confidence:
“She let it uphold and sustain her, this admirable fabric of the
masculine intelligence... upholding the world, so that she could trust
herself to it utterly” (pg. 122).
An example of what their relationship was is to be found at the end of the
first part of the novel, when they are both silent, each of the reading a book, but
at the same time some sort of understanding existing between them without the
need for words:
“But through the crepuscular walls of their intimacy, for they were
drawing together, involuntarily, coming side by side, quite close, she
could feel his mind like a raised hand shadowing her mind; and he
41

was beginning now that her thoughts took a turn he disliked –
towards her pessimism as he called it- to fidget, though he said
nothing, raising his hand to his forehead, twisting a lock of hair,
letting it fall again...”
“You won’t finish that stocking tonight” he said, pointing to her
stocking. That was what she wanted, the asperity of his voice
reproving her. If he said “it’s wrong to be pessimistic” probably it is
wrong, she thought; the marriage will turn out all right” (pg. 141)
In the same way as Mrs. Ramsay’s relationship with her husband is
satisfactory, so are her relationships with all the other characters in the novel.
She becomes for all of them a symbol of order and unity, and although the
reason why she has such an extraordinary influence is often questioned, nobody
seems to find an answer:
LILY: “Why different, and how different?, yet she vowed, she would
inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow”
(pg. 57)
BANKES: “Why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy have
upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific
problem?” (pg. 56)
The characters grouped round Mrs. Ramsay submit to her influence and are
helped by her:
42

TANSLEY, walking by her side “felt an extraordinary pride” and was
completely happy because “he was walking with a beautiful woman
for the first time in his life. He had held her bag” (pg. 18)
PAUL: “She had made him think he could do anything. Nobody else
took him seriously. But she made him believe that he could do
whatever he wanted” (pg. 90)
It is significant that when Mr. Bankes is talking about Ramsay’s marriage he
suddenly recalls a hen “straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little
chicks” (pg. 25); and in Lily’s description of Mrs. Ramsay, when they are at the
dinner party, she sees her holding “her hands over it to warm them, to protect
them” (pg. 117).
With this image of the hen, Virginia Woolf makes clear the attitude of Mrs.
Ramsay, and also her meaning in the world; she is not a society hostess as Mrs.
Dalloway, who cannot create anything. She has succeeded in her desires to help
people and has created something.
The dinner party which takes place at the end of the first part of the novel
and which is described at length is an example of what Mrs. Ramsay was able to
do with human relationships:
Before dinner all the guests were disintegrated, “scattered about, in attics,
in bedrooms, on little perches of their own, reading, writing, putting the last
smooth to their hair or fastening dresses” (pg. 95)
43

This may be the representation of life as Virginia Woolf sees it, how people
live separately, and how without the effort of some creative persons they would
remain forever alone; but as they congregate around the dinner table
“They were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on
an island; had their common cause against the fluidity of out there”
(pg. 112)
The first feeling that surges in them is a feeling of community; they are in a
sense redeemed of their essential egotism. Here again the image of the light
appears, as they are held there together, with a sense of communion, the light
from the dinner party spreads out into the dark world:
“Now all the candles were lit, and the faces on both sides of the table
were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had
not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was
shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of
the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here inside the room,
seemed to be order and dry lands; there, outside, a reflection in
which things wavered and vanished, waterly” (pg. 112)
A further victory is achieved by Mrs. Ramsay at her party; the individuals,
besides their feeling themselves of identification forget for a moment their
problems and their egotism, and are able to feel for others.
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There is, for instance, Lily Briscoe, the painter, at pains with the
composition of her picture, who during the course of the dinner suddenly has a
‘flash’ and sees how she will arrange it:
“I shall put the tree further in the middle; then, I shall avoid that
awkward space” (pg. 98)
And so she feels prepared to help Mr. Tansley, who was demanding
sympathy, so that he is relieved of his egotism and begins to enjoy himself.
Paul and Minta are both “blowing and burning” because they have become
engaged. Mr. Ramsay sees Minta’s glow and, influenced by her, does not look
“burdened, not weighed down with the greatness of his labours, and the sorrows
of the world and his fame or his failure” but, “astonishingly young”. This is an
example of Virginia Woolf’s irony; it is after a description like this that one can
speak about his ‘stoic pose’.
Mr. Carmichael, hostile always to Mrs. Ramsay, for a moment forgets his
indifference “turned slightly to her... and bowed to her as if he did her homage”.
The party has also a good effect on him, he who was always “silent, monumental
and contemplative” is seen at the end of the dinner singing an old song.
And William Bankes who at the beginning was “conscious of his treachery,
conscious of her with to say something more intimate, yet out of mood for the
present” says “It is a triumph!, eating the ‘boef en daube’ which has been
prepared especially for him”.
Nothing important has been said, but the guests have transcended, for a
moment, their loneliness. Mrs. Ramsay, the authoress of this moment
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“Like a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of
her body fully and sweetly... holding them safe together” (pg. 121)
But as if her mere presence was the force which held them together, the
moment she goes out of the room “a sort of disintegration set in; they wavered
about, went different ways”. And to emphasize the truth that only on her rested
the effort of creating, Mrs. Ramsay’s death is presented by Virginia Woolf in the
second part of her novel, associated with a series of images of destruction, and
of forces of nature working upon the house.
When ten years after the dinner party the family comes back to the house,
Lily realises that without the presence of Mrs. Ramsay
“The link that usually bound things together had been cut, and they
floated up here, down here, off, anyhow. How aimless it was, how
chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought looking at her empty coffee
cup. Mrs. Ramsay dead...” (pg. 166)
The whole family, after Mrs. Ramsay’s death offers a picture of confusion,
with Nancy asking “What does one send to the lighthouse?”; Mr. Ramsay
wandering aimlessly up and down and Lily observing:
“The empty places. Such were some of the parts but how bring them
together?” (pg. 167)
46

Nevertheless, Mrs. Ramsay’s death, as that of Septimus in “Mrs. Dalloway”
though in a different sense, is not the end of her influence; she still lives in the
minds of the characters, to whom she has become a symbol of the beauty and
the meaning of the world; so that Lily, when she wants to find order, calls her to
mind:
“What was it the? ... no guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and
leaping from pinnacle of a tower into the air?... For one moment she
felt that if they both got up, here, now, on the same lawn, and
demanded an explanation, then, beauty would roll itself up; the
space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if
they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’
she said aloud. ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’” (pg. 205)
Even after her death, her figure, standing among the others and
illuminating them, can be compared to the lighthouse.
As the lighthouse spreads its light, she has made people around her aware
of the existence of some meaning in the world; has enlightened them and taken
them out of the dark, at least for one moment, to see the harmony of the
universe which she has seen through intuition and sensibility, forgetting her
egotism and thinking of the others.
The principal reason of her influence upon the others is that, unlike her
husband, she is concerned for them. Her “turning infallibly to the human race,
making her nest in its heart” (pg. 223) is ultimately what has made her approach
to reality be right and her existence positive.
47

THE ARTIST’S POSITION
The artist’s attitude to reality and life is in this particular novel presented in
the person of Lily Briscos, the painter, friend of the Ramsays, who has changed
the “fluidity of life for the concentration of painting” (pg. 180)
As the result of her predicament, her attitude towards life is not open and
receptive, but she calls life “that ancient enemy of hers” (pg. 180). In the same
way as her work as an artist made her select themes from reality and colours
from her palette by thinking about and comparing them, her attitude to life is
not active but contemplative, for “some notion was in both of them (herself and
Mr. Carmichael) about ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought” (pg.
223).
Her attitude then is opposed to that of Mrs. Ramsay, although at times Lily
finds her derisible (“how absurd she was, sitting up here with all her beauty
opened again in her, talking about the skins of vegetables” –pg. 116). She can’t
fail to acknowledge that “she put a spell on them all” and that if she compares
her life to that of Mrs. Ramsay “all this (her father, her home, her paintings)
seemed so little, so virginal against the other” (pg. 58)
Moreover, she felt that “knowledge and wisdom were stored in Mrs.
Ramsay’s heart” (pg. 60) and she tried to get them from her, but “nothing
happened. Nothing! Nothing! As she leant her head against Mrs. Ramsay’s knee”
(pg. 60)
In the same way as real communication among human beings is impossible
to achieve (or at least very difficult), Lily has a vision of the world in which each
one “haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air countries of
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the world alone” (pg. 60) she, in her experience as an artist finds it extremely
difficult to give form to her visions:
“this passage from conception to work, as dreadful as any down a
dark passage for a child” (pg. 23)
This sense of aloofness, together with the recognition of the incoherence of
facts that could have lead her to a pessimistic attitude, is in fact solved by the
presence of Mrs. Ramsay, who, sitting at the window with her son, gives to her a
sense of stability and a feeling of “how life being made up of little separate
incidents, which one lived by one, became turned and whole like a wave which
bore one up with it” (pg. 55)
On the other hand, she shares some of the characteristics that Virginia
Woolf attributes to women, one of the being the impulse to create harmony out
of the disordered facts of life. But in contrast to Mrs. Ramsay, who creates order
out of human beings, her predicament as an artist leads her to the limitation
implied in creating harmonies among masses, colours and shadows:
“it was a question, she remembered, how to connect this mass on
the right hand with that on the left... a light here required a shadow
there” (pg. 62)
This artificial and somewhat barren attitude of Lily, and her inability to find
the sense of life, is symbolically made clear by the fact that her effort is,
artistically, unworthy; her pictures will be “hung up in attics”.
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But she realizes also the emptiness of her life, for she wouldn’t let anybody
see her painting “the residue of her thirty three years” (pg. 61); whereas at the
party she feels herself “inconspicuous” sitting by Paul’s side, he glowing and
burning, she aloof and satirical; he bound for adventure; she, moored to the
shore. He launched, incautious; she, solitary, left out.
As the result of the detached way in which she looks at reality, for “it was
an odd road to be walking, this of painting, out and out one went; further and
further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone over
the sea” (pg. 195)
If, ultimately, Lily is able to create something out of human beings as at the
dinner party by ‘being nice’ to Tansley, it is all Mrs. Ramsay’s doing:
“For, of course, if Mrs. Ramsay said to her, as in effect she did, ‘I am
drowning my dear, in seas of fire, unless you apply some balm to the
anguish of this hour, and say something nice to that young man
there, life will run upon the rocks’” (pg. 106)
And the fact that in the course of the same party Mrs. Ramsay “draws” her
into the “things” by exclaiming “Lily, anyhow, agree with me”, has the further
significance that Lily’s ulterior vision of life will come by means of Mrs. Ramsay.
She has a vision of her “sitting on the step, knitting her reddish brown stockings”
(pg. 230) and
“With sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a
line there in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she
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thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue. I have had my
vision”
Those are the last words of the novel, but not probably signifying that Lily
has been able to understand reality, but that Mrs. Ramsay, the only one who
through her intuition of life took a positive and creative attitude, is still able to
influence her.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Virginia Woolf’s works:
Mrs Dalloway – Penguin Books Ltd; New Edition – 1996
To the Lighthouse –Penguin Books Ltd; New Edition – 1996
A Writer’s Diary –Harvest/HBJ Book, LONDON – 2003
The Common Reader, First and Second Series; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt -
2003
Criticism on Virginia Woolf:
John BENNET: “Virginia Woolf, her Art as a Novelist”, Cambridge University
Press– 1975
Frank V. BRADBROOK: “Virginia Woolf, the Theory and Practice of Fiction”
(Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 7 – 1960
Molly HOFF: "The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs. Dalloway" Twentieth
Century Literature - 1999
Julie KANE: "Varieties of mystical experience in the writings of Virginia
Woolf" Twentieth Century Literature - 1995
N. C. THAKUR: “The Symbolism of Virginia Woolf”, London University Press
– 1965
George PANICHAS: "Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: "a well of tears,'"
Modern Age - 2004
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General Criticism:
David DAICHES “The Present Age” (chap. “The Age of Experiment”)
Walter ALLEN “The English Novel”
Robert HUMPRHEY “Stream of consciousness in the Modern Novel”
University of California Press – 1972
Works Consulted:
Leonard WOOLF “Beginning Again” Harvest Books, LONDON – 1989
E.M. FOSTER “The Longest Journey” Bantam Classics -1997
E. M. FOSTER “Aspects of the Novel” Atlantic Publishing - 2000
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