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Woolf and Joyce
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the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as
she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the
open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking
at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and
the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh
said, ‘Musing among the vegetables?’ – was that it? – ‘I prefer men
to cauliflowers’ – was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one
morning when she had gone out on to the terrace – Peter Walsh.
He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she
forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings
one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his
grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished –
how strange it was! – a few sayings like this about cabbages.
The novel contains many flashbacks to Clarissa Dalloway’s past
experience as she seeks to bring together past memory and present
action and as she endeavours to balance a need for privacy with a
need for communication with other people.
In The Waves, Virginia Woolf takes six characters who are all at different
stages in their lives. She explores how each one of these characters is
affected by the death of a person they all knew well. In To The Lighthouse,
two days in the life of a family on holiday are recorded: one before the
Great War, one after it, when some of the characters have died. Again,
Virginia Woolf is more interested in her characters’ mental processes than
in their visible actions. Mrs Ramsay is a powerful figure in the family who
is searching for a truth which lies beneath surface facts. Her husband, Mr
Ramsay, is more literal-minded and contrasts with Mrs Ramsay. In the
second part of the novel we learn that Mrs Ramsay has died, but she
continues to exert a spiritual influence over all those who return to the
holiday home years later. The narrative and emotional focus of the novel
is on Mrs Ramsay, but the inner worlds of many of the characters are
communicated. Some readers have felt that in places the novel breaks
away from prose and becomes something closer to poetry. The novel is
also marked by a use of poetic symbolism, most strikingly in the ‘lighthouse’
of the title. The lighthouse is a suggestive and ambiguous symbol which
takes on uniquely different meanings for each character in the novel and
for each reader who attempts to interpret it.
Several Modernist novels during this period are centred on key