To the Lighthouse by V. Woolf

 

Historical background

Massive destruction and a a huge number of victims were left behind by World War I. The Bloomsbury Group (among whom were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey) were pacifists. War was one of the occurrences Woolf said couldn’t be described but in her diary she detailed the events of the war, including air strikes, casualties, and sinking ships. The “huge events already developing across the water are looming over us too closely and too massively to be worked [in] without a terrible jolt in the perspective,” she remarked of the war. This change of viewpoint is evidenced in her narrative technique.

Women in Britain filled various domestic roles while the men were at war. After the conflict women were unwilling to withdraw because they had gained ground in society beyond the home, including rights and a voice. This raised the feminist voice in the UK and its echoes are heard in Woolf's novel.

Literary context

As a literary movement, Modernism is characterised by its rejection of prior literary traditions through innovations in form and content. Modernist authors radically shifted their attention from external events to human psychology through the method of personal narrative. They discarded chronological development by building plotless narratives and they experimented with language forms. To the Lighthouse embraces all these modernist hallmarks and represents a complete breakaway from traditional conventions of the novel genre. Woolf intended that her new form serve better the aims of exploring the meaning of human existence, which, in her opinion, was the sole purpose of literature and which the conventional novel form could not accommodate.

Bertrand Russell’s philosophical work on the relation between words and the world helps explain Woolf’s interest in how language fails or succeeds in capturing inner life. Woolf dramatises the limits of language through interior monologue and moments where meaning is “shown” rather than stated. (e.g. Mrs. Ramsay can't explicitly tell her husband she loves him, but he knows that through her behaviour.) This harmonises with Woolf's narration which knits meaning and form as a unity.

The war’s devastating effects, including the deaths of family members and the desolation of the Ramsays’ lives and home, are discussed in the novel's second section, “Time Passes.” This chapter acts as a transition between prewar and postwar. It embodies Woolf’s “indescribable” through its fused approach of time, narrative distance, dramatic metaphor, and understatement of death. In this way Woolf also synthesises content and form in her novel.

(A mindmap Summary and a Review will appear here mid-February after publication in l'Eco de Sitges.)