Abstract
To the Lighthouse, an exquisitely formed, musical novel composed of triads, is Woolf s only novel with a Table of Contents, and named (rather than numbered) sections. Part I, “The Window,” although it takes up more than half the novel, covers half of one day in the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay; Part II, “Time Passes,” is a brief but extraordinary lyric interlude which occurs after the death of Mrs. Ramsay; Part III, “The Lighthouse,” alternates the simultaneous events of an expedition to the lighthouse with the completion of a painting.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The dialectic of light and dark permeates Woolfs other novels; e.g., The Waves, The Years, and Between the Acts. Night and Day is the title of an early novel, her second.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays ( New York: Atheneum, 1979 ), p. 92.
Yet in her essay, “Lives of the Obscure,” Woolf speaks of great men as falling “upon the race of life like beams from a lighthouse. They flash, they shock, they reveal, they vanish ” (Collected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967 ), Vol. IV, p. 131 ).
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: A Harvest Book, 1955 ). Hereinafter, pagination will be given in the text.
Eugene F. Kaelin, Art and Existence: A Phenomenological Aesthetics (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1970), p. 112. Kaelin notes that Ramsay’s knowledge, being “conceptual” and “general” (112), is “separated from its objects by the signs he must use to think with” (112–13), thus “removed from the reality he would like to describe” (113).
Yet another radiance pervades the party: the engaged couple, Minta and Paul, exude the glow of their passion, as if they could “throw any light upon the question of love” (155).
S. P. Rosenbaum, “The Philosophical Realism of Virginia Woolf,” in English Literature and British Philosophy: A Collection of Essays, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971 ), p. 342.
H For example: “Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he began?” (201–2), and “Night fell, his head crowned; his sceptre jewelled” (213).
W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” line 11: “The death of the poet was kept from his poems.”
S. P. Rosenbaum, op.cit., p. 343.
Compare Merleau-Ponty’s observations on the ontology of painting, especially his description of painting as “a logos of lines, of lighting, of colors, of reliefs, of masses — a conceptless presentation of universal Being” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, trans. J. M. Edie ( Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964 ), p. 188.
Compare Merleau-Ponty on painters as “artisans of Being” (op. cit., p. 180) and of their vision as encountering “as at a crossroads, all the aspects of Being” (p. 188).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Randles, B.S. (1992). Virginia Woolf’s Poetic Imagination: Patterns of Light and Darkness in To the Lighthouse . In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Elemental Dialectic of Light and Darkness. Analecta Husserliana, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3296-3_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3296-3_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4121-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-3296-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive