‘To the Lighthouse’: Searching for the Sacred
A review of ‘To the Lighthouse’, by Virginia Woolf; Hogarth Press, 1927.
To the Lighthouse is a simple story: a family spends the summer on the Isle of Skye; a decade passes; those who remain come back. There is no real plot. Events happen in fragments, thoughts blur into one another, and action, when it comes, is distant, almost incidental. There is a war in which people die, but Woolf notes these only in brackets, as if time has made them small. What matters in this book are the gaps: the silences, the wordless sidelong glances, the unfinished sentences. It is a novel of perception, memory, time, and the search for something greater than ourselves: the yearning for a permanent sacred in a world without God.
To the Lighthouse opens in the summer home of the Ramsay family, on the Isle of Skye. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay preside over a house full of children, guests, and lingering tensions. A simple question — will they be able to go to the lighthouse the next day? — is the book’s central motif. Mrs. Ramsay, who is warm and intuitive, soothes her youngest son, James, with the promise of the trip. The more rigid Mr. Ramsay insists the weather will not allow it. This small domestic friction becomes a symbol for larger, more abstract forces: certainty and doubt, hope and reality, masculinity and femininity.
Surrounding the Ramsays are a cast of minor figures. Each is caught in his own private anxieties. Lily Briscoe, a painter, struggles with the limits of her art. Charles Tansley, a pompous young scholar, worships intellect but lacks tenderness. Mrs. Ramsay, for all her grace, is aware of the transience of happiness. The house itself, full of voices and interruptions, is both a sanctuary and a stage on which these dramas unfold.
A simple question — will they be able to go to the lighthouse the next day? — is the book’s central motif.
Then comes the second part of the novel, ‘Time Passes’. Here, Woolf steps back and lets time itself become the main character. The Ramsays leave the house. War breaks out. Mrs. Ramsay dies, as do two of her children. The house falls into ruin, its emptiness described in remote, impressionistic bursts. The decay of the house reflects the quiet crumbling of a world that once seemed permanent. Woolf’s prose becomes most daring. Sentences trail off, major events are noted in passing, and the sheer indifference of time is laid bare.
And then, in the final section, the Ramsays return. James is older, and can finally makes the trip to the lighthouse. But the journey is not the triumph he once imagined. Lily Briscoe, before her canvas, attempts to finish what she started years before. Each character, in his own way, tries to finish something left undone, to make sense of the past. There is no great epiphany, no moment of final clarity. There is just the quiet recognition that life goes on, that meaning is made in small gestures, that the act of seeing, of perceiving, is an end in itself.
So Woolf, as you can probably tell, was not interested in established storytelling. She was interested in what happens in the mind — the way thought flows, the way memory lingers. Even in A Room of One’s Own, we have the feeling we are following a single, meandering thought. To the Lighthouse is often called an experimental novel; but this suggests something cold, abstract, self-indulgent. In fact, the book is deeply human. Woolf sees the weight of a single glance, the sadness in an unfinished sentence. She captures the strange solitude that exists even in marriage, even in love.
At its heart, the novel is about time: time as an enemy, time as a friend. Time, as the saying goes, destroys all things. But time is the greatest healer also. Mrs. Ramsay is the centre of the first section, yet absent in the last. But she is more present in memory than she ever was in life. The lighthouse itself, seen from a distance, is constant but unreachable. It is an image of longing — of all the things that remain just beyond our grasp.
The novel also deals with art. Lily Briscoe’s struggle to paint connects to the question of how best we should shape experience, how we can hold onto something that is always slipping away. She is told that women cannot be great painters, just as Woolf was told that women could not be great writers. Her final stroke on the canvas is both a personal victory and a feminist one and an assertion of artistic purpose, as she sees it.
At its heart, the novel is about time: time as an enemy, time as a friend.
Woolf, who was always keenly aware of gender roles, sets the intellect of Mr. Ramsay against the intuition of his wife. But neither comes out of this conflict as the winner. Mr. Ramsay, for all his pomposity, can be tender and kind. Mrs. Ramsay, for all her warmth, is bound tightly by convention. Woolf suggests that, in general, men and women see the world differently, but that both ways of looking are incomplete on their own. In A Room of One’s Own, she explores the ‘androgyny’ of writers like Shakespeare, suggesting creative genius needs both anima and animus.
Like Eliot’s The Wasteland, To the Lighthouse deals with the question of fragmentation, of reality seen only partially. The First World War cut down the flower of British youth; but meaning was also one of its victims. Like the characters in The Sun Also Rises, whose amusements and dramas conceal the basic emptiness of their existence, those who populate To the Lighthouse yearn for the transcendent, represented in the idea—if not the reality—of the lighthouse. Fittingly, the style of the book is elusive, ungraspable, more poetic than prosaic.
And yet—speaking of the prosaic—the novel deals squarely with the ordinary: a family meal, a walk by the shore, a gaze across the water. It is suggested that eternity is not to be found ‘over there’, but here, in the moment. Eternity, as Nietzsche implies, as Augustine suggests, as Scruton conjectures, is a matter of depth, not extension. They are here, now at Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world’. Meaning, Woolf suggests, does not spring from grand events but is found in the texture of everyday experience: in the sound of the the waves retreating, in the shadow of someone leaving a room, in the celestial printed prose of a century-old novel.
