To The Lighthouse: Brief Critical Introduction

(i) Introduction
Virginia Woolfs second novel Night and Day was published in 1919 and her famous essay
on contemporary fiction, included in the Common Reader: First Series, was also written in the
same year. In this essay she strongly expresses her dissatisfaction with the current form of the
novel as represented by the novels of Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy. According to her in their
novels Life escapes, because life is not like what they, specially Bennett, present in their famous
novels. To her nothing else is worthwhile without life. The form of the novel which prevailed in
the first quarter of this century seemed to her to obscure or even to falsify her experience.
And Virginia Woolf has expressed her own ideas most forcefully in her inimitable poetic style in
a passage in the same essay:
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being Like this. Examine for a moment an
ordinary mind or an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressionstrivial, fantastic,
evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant
shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday
or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old;the moment of importance came not here but
there; so that, if the writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not
what he must, if he could base his work on his own feeling and not on convention, there would
be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style..Life is
not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent
envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the
novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration
or complexity it may display..?And hence, to convey this varying, this unknown and
uncircumscribed spirit, we find Virginia Woolf setting herself to destroy the current form of the
novel and then driven to invent one which would express her own vision of life.
(ii) Publication of the Novel
To The Lighthouse appeared in 1927. This is Virginia Woolfs fifth novel and is considered to be
one of her outstanding works. It is a highly admirable piece of workmanship and critics like F.R.
Leavis consider it to be her best novel. It is also probably, the most popular and widely admired
of her novels.
Three-fold Division
To The Lighthouse happens to be the only novel of Virginia Woolf which has a three-part
structure or division: The Window, Time Passes and The Lighthouse. In the very beginning of
the first part, The Window, we find Mrs. Ramsay planning for a trip to the Lighthouse near their
island the next day. Her youngest child, James, is very much eager to take this trip. But Mr.
Ramsay with his incapability of untruth and Tansley with his odious habit of saying disagreeable
things dash the young childs hope to the groundby telling him bluntly that the weather is not
going to be fine enough to enable them to take the trip. And the journey is not made. And in this
section we get, more or less, a full and varied view of the personalities and characters of Mr. and

Mrs. Ramsay through the eyes of Lily Briscoe, William Bankes, young James and the guests
assembled in thatsummer house in the Island of Skye in the Hebrides.
Time Passes, rather a short interlude, makes up part two. In this section we find memory
beginning its task. This is very powerfully operative in the mind of old Mrs. McNab the
charwoman. A period of ten years elapses. During this period the emptysummer house begins to
decay and the actors of the piece age and some of them, including Mrs. Ramsay, pass away from
this world.
In the third section people come back to the summer house once again. The late Mrs. Ramsay is
seen very mysteriously and powerfully through the eyes of Lily Briscoe. She seems to influence
the lives of others mere powerfully even after her death. In the end we find Mr. Ramsay landing
at the Lighthouse and Lily having her vision to complete her picture.
(iii) The Characters
Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay along with their eight children are in their summer house on the Island of
Skye. They have also a few guests with them. Mrs. Ramsay with her sympathetic and intuitive
nature and with her personal charms is the-central figure of the novel. Mr. Ramsay is a reputed
philosopher and an erudite scholar. Among the guests William Bankes, an elderly person and a
devoted scientist, is the boyhood friend of Mr. Ramsay. Lily Briscoe is a dedicated artist and
Mrs. Ramsay wants her to marry Mr. Bankes. Paul Reyley and Minta Doype, an attractive pair,
are in love with each other. Mt. Augustus Carmichael with his stained beard is a poet with an
unhappy past. And then there is Charles Tansley, the scholarly student of Mr. Ramsay, with his
egotism and social maladjustment. It may be noted that the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay
greatly resemble those of Mrs. Woolfs parents and she has put much of her own self in the
character of Lily Briscoe. Hence the novel is also of great autobiographical significance.
(iv) Synopsis of To The Lighthouse
There is nothing much complex in the story of this novel. In fact the story is of very little
significance. The Ramsays are spending their holidays in their summer house on the Island of
Skye with a group of friends. The Lighthouse that shines out at night at a distance in the sea is
the point, both material and symbolic, towards which all the lines of the novel converge. In the
very opening chapter we find James Ramsay, the six year old child of the Ramsays, cutting
pictures from an old catalogue. He is sitting at the feet of his mother who is seen knitting by the
window. The sensitive soul of young James is excited as he is going to realise his dream of
making his first trip to the Lighthouse the next day. His sympathetic mother encourages him by
saying that they are sure to go if the weather is fine. But his hopes are dashed to the
ground when first Mr. Ramsay and then his scholarly disciple Tansley tells him that the weather
wont be fine. And this sets the ball rolling creating extreme antagonism between the father and
the son. The day moves on. Different characters are busy in their pastimes. Lily Briscoe paints
and Carmichael dozes and dreams.
In the evening the clangour of the gong summons them all to assemble in the dining room to
enjoy the special dishes prepared by Mrs. Ramsay for this great occasion. The dinner goes by
slowly and dully. Dinner being over the children go to bed; the young people go off to the beach

for a stroll. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay sit in their room and read. It is likely to be rainy the next day.
So the trip to the Lighthouse is to be cancelled. The evening is empty and yet as full and almost
as long as Clarissa Dalloways day in Mrs.Dallaway. Whereas the latter took its rhythms from
the hours struck by Big Ben, here only the changing light in the garden marks the flow of time
and the unchanging noise of the waves holds the evening motionless. A multiplicity of contacts
is created by the characters through their physical closeness, but each also withdraws into his or
her haunted solitude. Though they are living together yet each is an isolated soul.
With the advent of night everybody comes indoors and the lights go out; and that night, that few
hours withdrawal, blends with the darkness, and the withdrawal of ten years absence that flow
over the empty house in twenty-five pages in which marriage, births and deaths are inscribed in
parenthesis. One night Mrs. Ramsay died quietly. Prue was married and died due to some illness
connected with child-birth. And Andrew Ramsay was killed by an exploding shell in a battlefield in France. Time passed. Nobody came to the summer house that was gravitating towards
decay and destruction. Only Mrs. McNab came there from time to time to look after the house.
This is the second part which after the personal reign of duration, asserts the impersonal
triumph of time.
Then the morning dawns after the successive nights merged into one and the guests start
coming again to the old summer house. Mrs. Ramsay is no more, but still she dominates and
greatly influences the lives of others; specially those of Mr. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. Mr.
Ramsay starts off for the Lighthouse with Cam and James. And Lily Briscoe sets up her easel
where it must have stood ten years ago. And she realises her vision at the same moment as
James realises his childhood dream by landing at the Lighthouse. In the intensity of this second
moment duration (psychological time) has revived and triumphed over time (clock time),
triumphed even over death, since Mrs. Ramsaywho has died in parenthesis, under the reign of
time haunts these pages with a presence that echoes the material permanence of the
Lighthouse.
(v) The Lighthouse Symbol
David Daiches has justly remarked: The framework of To The Lighthouse is simple but upon it
Virginia Woolf weaves a delicate pattern of symbolic character and situations. This is because
she wants to convey inner reality or psychological truths. So we find that the sea, the window,
the waves and even the characters or group of characters have been treated as symbols. And the
most important symbol is the Lighthouse itself. Standing lonely in the midst of the sea, it is a
symbol of the individual who is at once a unique being and as part of the flux of history. To
reach the Lighthouse is, in a sense, to make contact with a truth outside oneself, to surrender the
uniqueness of ones ego to an impersonal reality. That is why we find that when Mr. Ramsay and
others finally reach the Lighthouse, personal grudges disappear, compassion and understanding
emerge and egotism gives way to impersonality.
(vi) The Stream of Consciousness
It must be noted that Virginia Woolfs To The Lighthouse like most of her other famous novels is
not a conventional novel. In it we have a great departure from the nineteenth century tradition
of the English novel. The novelist has designed her book to present life as she sees and

understands it totally rejecting The Arnold Bennett form. We may call it a stream of
consciousness novel in many respects even though Prof. Arnold Kettle has his objections. Such
novels have their essential subject matter as the consciousness of one or more characters. We
find the depicted consciousness serving as a screen on which the material in these novels is
presented. We are introduced into the interior life of a character by means of the interior
monologue with very little intervention in the way of explanation or commentary on the part of
the novelist. There is very little external action or violent deeds; instead there is the interior
monologue and the fluid mental states. Thus in this novel we can view each of the important
characters through his or her own thoughts and actions as well as through the consciousness of
other characters. This may be called the multiple point of view technique. This is no doubt a
stream of consciousness novel but with a difference. And an eminent critic has justly remarked;
There is a careful weaving together of characters consciousness, authors comments, and one
characters view of another. Hence To The Lighthouse is neither chaotic nor incoherent like
most of the novels of this genreit is more finely organised and more effective than anything
else Virginia Woolf wrote.
(vii) The Unity is Poetic
We have already noted that Virginia Woolf made a definite break with the traditional technique
of the conventional novels. So a reader is not likely to find that continuity of the traditional
novel, real or attempted, in novels of Virginia Woolf. This continuity is very much apparent in
the novels which follow the traditional technique. This is because there is a gulf of difference
between the two presentations of life. In the conventional novel the novelist makes his own role
much more obvious. The scenes are set deliberately and the action is stage-managed. The author
draws the threads together gradually from outside with an eye to a climax. This traditional
method is dramatic and the unity is dramatic. But in Virginia Woolfs novelsfrom Jacobs
Room to The Waveswe find that there is far less scenesetting and none of it is obvious. There
is no deliberate Stagemanaging, if it is there it is concealed. But still the unity is there and it is
deliberately achievedachieved in a new way. Virginia Woolfs method is poetic and the unity is
a poetic unity.
(viii) Characters as Types
The cast of characters may be identified as individuals but still they are discernible as types. Old
Mr. Carmichael, Mr. Banks, the devoted scientist, Lily Briscoe, the dedicated artistall are
suggestive of types. The very name Lily, conferred on the devotee of art indicates the pure
beauty, the flowering whiteness appropriate to weddings and funerals. And above all in Mr. and
Mrs. Ramsay we find how artistically Mrs. Woolf wears intellect and intuition and then reveals
that it is Mrs. Ramsays intuition that really controls the union.
(ix) Lyricism
Virginia Woolfs lyricism has been revealed in a most enchanting manner in her To The
Lighthouse. Her style has generally been recognised to be poetic prose. And this poetical
character of her style is in evidence in the superb lyrical nature of the second part of this great
novel entitled, Time Passes.

(x) Themes
To The Lighthouse displays a galaxy of fictional characters who are trying, with varying degrees
of success, to establish relationship with people around them. Accepting this the novel may
justly be called a study of the ways and means by which satisfactory human relationships might
be established.
In fact as a complex work of art the novel suggests a number of themes and ideas. And different
critics have interpreted them in different ways. Blackstone suggests that its dominant themes
are firstly love, married life and family and secondly self-shedding and self-dramatisation.
Norman Friedman feels that the novel studies the subject and object and nature of reality.
Conclusion
Virginia Woolfs To The Lighthouse is a unique work of art and there is nothing second hand
about this novel. And the style in which it is written permits the novelist to convey with
wonderful precision a certain intimate quality of felt life. Let us conclude by quoting some very
apt and elucidating lines of an eminent critic like David Daiches:To The Lighthouse is a work in
which plot, locale and treatment are so carefully bound up with each other that the resulting
whole is more finely organised and more effective than anything else Virginia Woolf wrote. The
setting in an indefinite island off the north-west coast of Scotland enables her to indulge in her
characteristic symbolic rarefications with maximum effect, for here form and content fit
perfectly and inevitably. Middle class London is not, perhaps, the best scene for a tenuous
meditative work of this kind, and Mrs. Dalloway might be said to suffer from a certain
incompatibility between the content and the method of treatment. A misty island is more
effective than a London dinner party as the setting for a novel of indirect philosophic suggestion,
and as a result qualities of Virginia Woolfs writing, which in her other works tend to appear, if
not as faults at least as of doubtful appropriateness, are seen in this work to their fullest
advantage. In To The Lighthouse Virginia Woolf found a subject that enabled her to do full
justice to her technique.