To The Lighthouse is titularly suggestive of something idyllic and child-like. To me, at least, it seemed to evoke an image of a fairy-tale, or a mystical adventure. Although not entirely accurate, considering this is a Virginia Woolf novel.
“The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
It is post 1919, and the fragmented vision of England is displaced into Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Mrs Ramsay, along with her husband, Mr Ramsay, take their family, which, with eight children, is more like an army to their summer home in the Hebrides. With a blend of a metaphysical philosopher, a young artist this is anything but a harmonious group; but, written at the heart of the Modernist era, you can be assured that this is reflected in the text.
An ode to Modernism, provides a stream of consciousness which allows for a perplexing perception of time which was apt of this period of history, which leads us ultimately to the lighthouse. In order to get there, we must cross the boundaries of Modernism.
Free indirect discourse is pursued with the vibrancy of the literary revolution Throughout the novel, Woolf distances herself from Realist traditions: no sensation is irrelevant and Woolf refuses the Lighthouse the symbolism one might expect, thus denouncing the “materialists” she described in her essay Modern Fiction, who merely explored what is clear to the eye.
As Mr Ramsay persistently poses the possibility of visiting the Lighthouse, the novel experiences a sense of teetering; a trait which defined this era of literature and the style which Woolf employs, as opposed to the sense of physicality associated with the Industrialised Victorian era. In To The Lighthouse, Woolf explores the metaphysical. Trotting through the corridors of time, Woolf emphasises her admiration for the covert by incorporating the empirical, plot-driven in brackets, and leaves the subjective to drive the novel. Even the grand epiphany of the novel is a vacant crescendo, denouncing the symbolic and the enduring in allowing epiphanies to be soft and retrospective as long as you live the moment in the body and the mind.