To the Lighthouse

In the late-1990s, Modern Classics Library marked To The Lighthouse as #15 on their Top 100 list for fiction in the twentieth century. This high rating was due, in part, to Woolf’s experimentation here with exploring the human psyche and consciousness. According to one source, Woolf spent many of her days ruminating on lived consciousness and trying to map out her precise reactions to emotional stimuli and the chain of thoughts that cross through her mind. In other words, Woolf was an early pioneer of what we now call “mindfulness meditation.”

The plot of To The Lighthouse revolves around the Ramsay family—Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, and their eight children. Part I of the novel opens with the Ramsay family vacationing with close friends at a home near the Isle of Skye off Scotland. Mrs. Ramsay wishes to visit the lighthouse off shore on a small island in the Hebrides. Mr. Ramsay declares that the weather will preclude any travel on the following day. Thus emerges tension between husband and wife, with Mrs. Ramsay becoming contemplative about the relationship she has forged with her husband, his constant need for self-validation, her role in supporting his ego, and her rumination about the meaning of life. The family is unable to visit the lighthouse and thus Mrs. Ramsay cannot deliver her parcel of goods for the lighthouse keeper and his disabled son.

Part II is a transitional point in the novel as a decade elapses. The First World War begins and ends during this span of time, and the Ramsay’s eldest son, Andrew, is killing in the war. Their eldest daughter, Prue, dies in childbirth, and Mrs. Ramsay also dies unexpectedly. This portion is told from the perspective of the omniscient narrator and partly from the perspective of an old housekeeper who desperately tries to hold back the rot of time within the abandoned vacation home.

Part III focuses on the return of Mr. Ramsay and two of the children and their attempt to cross the sound to the lighthouse and finally fulfill the mission of delivering parcels to the lighthouse keeper.

The plot here is really secondary to the psychological exploration of consciousness that Woolf embarks on throughout the novel. You will find no dialogue, and the perspective can transition from one character to another within the same sentence. In other words, if you are not following along with focused attention you can very easily lose track of what is happening.

There are many positive remarks I could mention about this book, but I’ll focus on one before closing the review. In A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Woolf’s non-fictional essays), Woolf considers how the art of women suffered under a patriarchal system during the 19th and early 20th centuries. She notes that women like Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters produced flawed art because they were either a) sheltered and could not engage in world-building (I.e. Austen), or b) channeled their anger against the patriarchal system through their characters and thus spoiled any opportunity to comment dispassionately on both male and female psyches and egos (I.e. Charlotte Bronte). It seems to me that in To The Lighthouse, Woolf was able to avoid both of these common pitfalls. There is robust world-building within the vicinity of the vacation home and the Isles of Skye. Furthermore, Woolf speaks pointedly about human nature common to men and women, and the specific foibles of each. That Woolf, a female writer in the early twentieth century, could write a character like Mr. Ramsay (a self-absorbed and fatalistic philosophy professor) that resonates so well with me even in the twenty-first century is remarkable. Through Mr. Ramsay, Woolf showed that she had a command of understanding human nature in ways that most of us simply lack today.