m_w@inkwell.socialA grief observed
The following is a discussion of plot points from Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse. Whilst not graphic, the ideas might be difficult and troubling. — Hello friends, I hope you are well. Today I am thinking about themes from To The Lighthouse and wondering about how we can
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The following is a discussion of plot points from Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse. Whilst not graphic, the ideas might be difficult and troubling.
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Hello friends, I hope you are well.
Today I am thinking about themes from To The Lighthouse and wondering about how we can engage in a deep(er) way with the text.
I think the major theme of the book is about loss and grief. In the first long section of the book the reader accesses Mrs Ramsay's inner monologue and we see a person with intelligence and perception and poise. She is someone who apparently can have several layered thoughts at the same time whilst also noticing things that are happening around her and continuing with a different conversation.
We then have a picture of her husband, Mr Ramsay, who is a frustrated academic. He has apparently been working in philosophy for some while and is attempting to come up with his great contribution to human knowledge, which seems to consist mostly of the idea that objects in the world only really exist in the world when they are given meaning by humans so that when they stop being noticed they stop existing. Unfortunately he extends this metaphor to his wife and children, who become small actors in the play where he is the Hollywood star. He stops noticing them and they barely exist for him.
By the third short section we see Mr Ramsay plunged into grief. His wife has died, literally in parentheses at the end of a chapter. He then has to face further trauma alone and without Mrs Ramsay who was, despite being belittled and intellectually ignored by him and the other men of his set, was emotionally supporting and holding the family together.
Ten years later Mr Ramsay tries to return to a happy holiday moment in the past with some of his remaining children who it seems he has already lost. The children were young when their mother died and survived through tragedy with an emotionally distant father.
It seems to me that part of the power of this part of the book is because Mr Ramsay seems to believe intellectually that things stop existing when people stop taking notice of them and Mrs Ramsay has died and therefore no longer exists. On the other hand he has these feeling of grief and loss which are more than can be explained by the philosophy. He is torn in two directions - the extension of his philosophy seems to be that nothing really matters but the witness of his heart is that it does and did.
At the very end of the novel he is in a boat sailing to the lighthouse with his older teenage daughter Cam and son James. Both children boil with rage at the tyrant with James even imagining himself stabbing his father through the heart as he imagines his father murdering his mother. And yet there is also some level of yearning for affirmation and affection as if this would somehow help with healing from the terrible loss they have been through together. We are left with the unanswered question of whether Mr Ramsay is capable of being the person that Cam and James need or whether he is going to continue berating them for failing to match up to his standards and failing to account for his needs into old age. Given what we know of him from the book it seems that he will get increasingly crotchety until he pushes them away, adrift in their twenties without really having emotionally grown since their early childhood.
Mrs Ramsay I think is a tragic figure of lost potential, surrounded by inadequate men who think they are special. She never really gets a chance at much of a life.
Have you read To The Lighthouse and can you add anything to this conversation? Have you got a different impression of the book we could take about? I would be interested to talk about it here