To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: Woolf’s Greatest Elegy?

‘One sees a fine pass far away. What image can I come up with to convey what I want to say? There really aren’t any, I think.

Woolf’s writing in her 1925 diary reveals her lifelong preoccupation with the problematic representation of experience. Her sense of the ineffability of reality haunted all of her major novels and in To the Lighthouse perhaps her art found its fullest expression.

The novel begins with a promise, a promise a mother makes to her little son that he can go visit the nearby lighthouse where the large family vacations every year. It ends with the lighthouse that is finally reached years after the death of the mother. The process that takes us from a casual promise to its manifestation is for me one of the most magical journeys in literature. I will be brave, one of the most magical journeys of my life! Because, like Proust, Woolf is concerned with memory, with the ways in which the past never ends and reappears.

Questioning the exact generic title of her ‘novel’, Woolf wrote:

‘I have the idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel’. A new one – by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegant?’

An elegance is exactly what To the Lighthouse turns out to be. It takes place before and after the First World War and the ‘elegy’ quietly suggests the complex mourning processes that people underwent after the Great War. Woolf’s brilliance lies in her fluid, suggestive style that often brackets the seemingly insubstantial moments of experience and makes them extraordinary.

With her foot on the threshold, she waited a moment longer in a fading scene as she watched, and then, as she moved and took Minta’s arm and left the room, she changed, took another form; she had been converted, she knew, casting one last look over her shoulder, back in the day.

Woolf’s protagonist, Mrs. Ramsay, literally hovers on a “threshold” between reflection and conjecture. Hers ‘her moment of being’ exists for her outside linear ‘lived time’ and communicates her sudden awareness of the miracle of spatial time, ‘outside’. The complexity of this realization is reflected in the complexity of the award itself, with its tangle of subordinate clauses. The prize falters as the experience is lived and this stopping of the ‘flow’ of the prize is revealing.

The careless tenderness of the reference to “Minta’s arm” merges Mrs. Ramsay’s intensely private thoughts with her public role as hostess and engenders a commotion that haunts the rest of the novel. Because this is a farewell, and ironically it is a farewell to Mrs. Ramsay who will remain relentless until the very last scene of the narrative.

The final scene of the text shows the artist Lily Briscoe searching for a means to complete her painting, a painting begun years before, in the early stages of the novel. Suddenly, Mrs. Ramsay “visits” her once more and acknowledges the haunting centrality of her dead friend of hers; and the extraordinary gift of love from her.

‘With a sudden intensity, as if he saw it clearly for a second, he drew a line there, in the center. It’s done; It was finished. Yes, he thought, putting the brush down with extreme fatigue. I’ve had my vision.