"To The Light House" by Virginia Woolf

• To The Lighthouse

• Lighthouse To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is remarkable work of 20th century / Modernist literature.

• This novel is famous because of its writing technique- Stream of consciousness- which is trademark of Modernist literature. Virginia Woolf breaks the traditional way of telling a story and creates something novel (new).

• The text is heavily autobiographical. By reading Woolf's biography, we come to know about her traumatic experience, her disturbed mind, illness, depression etc. So what she wants to write is not possible in traditional form of writing. So stream of consciousness is appropriate technique in To The Lighthouse.

• The novel is divided into three parts:

•  The Window
•  2)Time Passes
•  3)To The Lighthouse

• Each is fragmented into stream of consciousness.

• It is very difficult technique to write as well as to understand. We are mostly in the minds of the characters. Readers also come to know that characters while doing something- thinking about something else. And writer also tells minor things like sound of waves, someone or something is passing by etc. This kind of internal thinking process finds place in stream of consciousness.

• ★ Stream of consciousness:-

• What is Stream of consciousness??

• Stream of consciousness was a phrase used by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890) to describe the unbroken flow of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings in the waking mind.

• And then it has been adopted to describe a narrative method in modern fiction.

• Long passages of introspection, in which the narrator records in detail what passes through a character's awareness, are found in novelists from Samuel Richardson, through William James’ brother Henry James, to many novelists of the present era.

• Stream of consciousness is the name applied specifically to a mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce, without a narrator's intervention, the full spectrum and continuous flow of a character's mental process, in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings, and random associations.

•   (A Glossary of Literary Terms – M.H. Abrams)

• ★Interior Monologue in To The Lighthouse

• Interior Monologue is a term that is most often confused with stream of consciousness.
• It presents to the reader the course & rhythm of consciousness precisely as it occurs in a character's mind

• In Interior Monologue author does not intervene nor does it minimally- as a describer, guide or commentator.
•   It is the exact presentation of the process of consciousness.

• 2 types:-

• 1)Direct monologue: - negligible author interference
•  2)indirect monologue: - author intervenes between character's psyche and the reader.

• # Difference:-
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• -indirect monologue gives reader a sense of the author's continuous presence
• Direct monologue either completely or largely excludes it.
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• In To The Lighthouse, we can observe the modernist phenomenon that - traditionally made up stories were no longer important, what matters was the impression they made on the characters that experienced them.

• Virginia Woolf, in her essay, Modern Fiction :“Let us record the atom as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearances, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.”

•  Example from the text;

•  Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgment. What he said was true. It was always true. (Pg. 1)

• This shows the similarities between a narrator's utterance & omniscient narrator commentary
• narrator steps aside but soon comes to give the comment “What he said was true...".

• # Use of Parenthesis:=

• “Teaching and preaching is beyond human power, Lily suspected. (She was putting away her things.)”(p.32)
• Parenthesis can also be little asides, expectations, pointers to what is going on.

• [Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.] (Pg 91)
•  [Prue Ramsay, leaning on her father’s arm, was given in marriage. What, people said, could have been more fitting? And, they added, how beautiful she looked!] (pg 93)
• [Macalister’s boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still) was thrown back into the sea.]

•   Thus, through Stream of consciousness, Woolf expresses the character's inner world in great coherence and unity.
•  It reveals the character’s flow of thoughts and takes the reader into the consciousness of the character. It deals with conscious, subconscious and even unconscious part of her character.
• Sudden death of central character, Mrs.Ramsay, in parenthesis in the novel's highly stylized middle section, was deeply strange because this is Modernist Literature.
•  ToThe Lighthouse follows & extends the tradition of Modernists, like Marcel Proust and James Joyce. It cited as a key example of stream of consciousness literary technique- most of it written as thoughts and observations.