Symbolism in To The Lighthouse

Name – Shital D Italiya

Roll no – 29

Paper – 9(modernist literature)

SEM – 3

Topic – Symbolism in To The Lighthouse

Submitted to – Smt S.B.Gardy Department of English

                                     M.K.Bhavnagar University

                                               Bhavnagar

Introduction

                   To the lighthouse is in many ways revolutionary book. Writing in the 1920, Virginia Woolf was attempting something quite new in the English novel. The novel is about different ways of perceiving the process of life. Many of the people in it are struggling to find answer to the question that is ‘who know that what we are, what we feel? She wanted to capture in words the nature of human consciousness. What is actually feels like to be alive. To the lighthouse is a book which makes one think as mush about the methods and techniques of fiction as about the character and scenes it describes.

According to Virginia Woolf

“I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel’ a new- by Virginia Woolf but what?

                         (Diary, 27 June 1925)

When another novelist, Arnold Bennett was reviewing to the lighthouse

“A group of people plan to sail in a small boat to a lighthouse; at the end some of them reach the lighthouse in a small boat. That is the externality of the plot”.

    To the lighthouse is divided into three sections;

1)    The window

2)    The lighthouse

3)    Time passes

              Each section is fragmented into stream of consciousness contribution from various narrators.

v       The literary context

                 Virginia Woolf was disappointed by the limitation she found in many contemporary novelists writers like H.G.Well’s, john Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett.

v Time and structure of to the lighthouse.

                    To the lighthouse deals with three sections ‘the window’, ‘time passes’ and ‘the lighthouse’. It is unequal lengths of time covered by each of the three sections. The first and the third- the window and the lighthouse each occupies less than a day. While the middle section the time passes deals with a span of about ten years.

               James Joyce’s Ulysses is based on the same short time span. So in the same way there are many similarities between James Joyce and Woolf. In their works both may represents the human consciousness and in showing the part which memory and association play in this. The period of a day provide an apparently random. But none of them less useful space within which to move. Virginia Woolf was far from being alone among her contemporaries in describing the mind’s working in this way. It was a time when the understanding of psychology was rapidly broadening.

v      Character

“ it is no good trying to sum people up, one must follow hints, not exactly what is said, not yet entirely what is done’’.

                    (Jacob’s room)

                  Time passes more quickly as the novel enters the ‘’ time passes’’ segment war breaks out across Europe.

v      Symbolism

             To the lighthouse is not concerned with ordinary story telling rather through integrate symbolic web it reads the mind. To the lighthouse is not just presented, however as a hard firm object linked with the touch image of break and scimitar with which we are made to associate Mr Ramsey .the novel is about different ways of perceiving the process of life. Many of the people in it are struggling to the find answer of the unanswerable question.

            To the lighthouse is a book which makes one thinks as much about the method and the technique of fiction as about the character and scenes it describe. And it is interesting to note that Woolf herself was not happy with the conventional term of definition when she was writing this book.

What is symbolism?

               The word symbolism came from the Greek word ‘’ symbolein’’ which means ‘to throw together’, mark. Emblem, token or sign. The verb symbol is an object which can be animate or inanimate symbols represent or stand for something different.

          Definitive manifesto of symbolism was publishing in September 1886 in an article ‘lefdigaro’ written by jean moreas. He founded the symbolist school whose members were Baudelaire, Mallarme and Verlaine .other famous followers include Remeghil, Griffith and Gustavo khan. According to critic M.H .Abrahams

“In the usage of literary historian, symbolist movement designates specifically a group of French writers beginning with charlosBaudlaire.’’

         In literature there are many objects commonly used as symbol by writers.

Examples-

1) Scale: symbol of justice

2) Monarchy: symbol of rule

3) Dove: symbol of peace

4) A goat: symbol of lust

5) The lion: symbol of strength and courage

6) The lily: symbol of purity

7) The rose: symbol of beauty

8) Cross: symbol of Christianity

9) The swastika: symbol of Nazi in German

10) Blood: symbol of mourn and violence.

According to J.A.cuddon

“A private symbol combines an image with a concept. It may be public or private, universal or local”.

v      Symbolism in to the lighthouse.

1) Lily’s painting

               A good deal about Mrs. Ramsay from her unspoken thoughts but is this same Mrs. Ramsay as the person who excites and disturbs Charles tensely as they walk to the fishing village together? Or who is the mother of jasper, who reflects that being his mother she lived away from in on other division of the world. Lily point to how even a multiplicity of perspectives cannot lead to a final definition and pinning down of Mrs. Ramsay’s character.

“Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman”.

         This estimation of her self must be unbalanced by the impression other has of her beauty- even if, like Mrs.ramsay they see sternness’ as its heart. But remembering just her beauty, the physical deil catches nothing her personality. As lily puts it

“Beauty had this penalty it come too readily, each too completely, it stilled life frozen it”.

            In learning about one character one also learns about others about their ways of seeing and habit of judgements.

               Lily’s painting represents a struggle against gender convention, represented by Charlestensly’sstatementtha woman cant pain or write. Lily’s desire to express Mrs, ramsay’sessens as a wife and mother in the painting mimic the impulse among modern women to know and understand intimately the gender experience of the woman who came before them. Lily’s  composition attempts to discovers and comprehend Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty just as Woolf’s contribution of Mrs. Ramsay’s character reflect her attempts to access and portray her own mother.

              The painting also represents the dedication to feminine artistic vision expressed through lily’s anxiety over showing it to William banks. In regardless of what to happen to it is the most important thing; lily makes the choice of establish her own artistic voice. In the end, she decided that he vision depends on balance and synthesis: how to bring together desperate thing in harmony. In this respect, her project mirror Woolf’s writing, which synthesizes the perception of her many character to come to a balanced and truthful portraits of the world.

2) The light house

              Lying across the bay and meaning something different and intimately personal to each character, the lighthouse is at once inaccessible, illuminating and infinitely interpretable. As the destination from which the novel takes its title, the lighthouse suggests that the destination that seems surest is most unobtainable. Just as Mr. Ramsay is certain of his wife’s love for him and aims to hear her speak words to that end in “The window”, Mrs.Ramsay find these words impossible to say. These failed attempts to arrive at some sort of solid ground, like lily’s first try at painting Mrs. Ramsay or Mrs. Ramsay’s attempt to see Paul and Minta married, result only in more attempts, further excursions rather than rest. The lighthouse stands as a potent symbol of this lack of attainability. James arrives only to realize that it is not at all the mist shrouded destination of this childhood. Instead, he is made to reconcile two competing and contradictory images of the tower – how it appeared to him when he was a boy and how it appears to him now that he is a man. He decides that both of these images contribute to the essence of the lighthouse – which nothing is ever only one thing – a sentiment that echoes of the novel’s determination to arrive at truth through varied and contradictory vantage points.

3) The Ramsay’s summer house

                   The Ramsay’s house is a stage where and her character explain their beliefs and observation. During her dinner party, Mrs.ramsay sees her house display her own inner notions of shabbiness and her inability to preserve beauty. In the “time passes” section, the revenges of war and destruction and the passage of time are reflected in the condition of the house rather than in the emotional development or observable again of the characters. The house stands in for the collective consciousness of those who stay in it. At times the characters long to escape it, while at other times it serves as refuge. From the dinner party to the journey to the lighthouse, Woolf shows the house from every angle, and its structure and contents mirror the interior of the characters that inhabit it.

4) The sea

                References to the sea appear throughout the novel. Broadly, the ever changing, ever moving wave’s parallel the constant forward movement of time and the changes it brings. Woolf describes the sea lovingly and beautifully, but her most evocative depictions of it point to its violence. As a force that brings destruction, has the power to decimate island, and, as Mr. Ramsay reflect, “Eats away the ground we stand on” the sea is a powerful reminder of the impermanence and delicacy of human life and accomplishments.

5) The Boar’s skull

                   After her dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay retires upstairs to find the children wide awake, bothered by the boar’s skull that hangs on the nursery wall. The presence of the skull acts as a disturbing reminder that death is always at hand, even during life’s most blissful moment.

6) The fruit basket

               Rose arranges a fruit basket for her mother’s dinner party that serves to draw the partygoers out of their private suffering and unite them. Although Augustus Carmichael and Mrs. Ramsay appreciate the arrangement differently- hr rips a bloom from it; she refuses to disturb it – the pair is brought harmoniously, if briefly, together. The basket testifies both to the “frozen” quality of beauty that lily describes and to beauty’s seductive and soothing quality

Post colonialism in Black Skin White Mask

Name – Shital D Italiya

Roll – 29

Topic – Post colonialism in Black Skin White Mask

Paper – Post colonial literature

Semester – 3

Submitted to – Smt.S.B.Gardy Department of English

                                   M.K.Bhavnagar university

                                            Bhavnagar

Post colonialism in Black Skin White Mask.

Introduction

In the popular memory of the English socialism the mention of Franz Fanon stir a dim, deceiving echo. Black skin white mask, the wretched of the earth, towards the African revolution – these memorable titles reverberates in the self-righteous rhetoric of résistance.

             There has been no substantial work on fanon in the history of the new left review; one piece in the new states register; one short book by an English author of late, the memory of the Fanon has been kept alive in the activist tradition of race and class.

           Memory of Fanon tends to mythical. He is either revered as the prophetic spirit of third world liberation or reviled as an exanimating angle, the inspiration to violence in the black power movement. Despite his historic participation in the Algerian revolution and the influence of his ideas on race politics of the 1960s and 1970s, Fanon’s work will not be passed by one political movement or moment, nor can it be easily placed in a shameless narrative of liberationist history. Fanon refuses to be so completely claimed by event or eventualities. It is the sustain irony of his work that his sever commitment to the political task in hand, never restricted the restless, in squiring movement of his thought. 

“Franz Fanon does not want to be a Black man; he wants to be a man, plain and simple”. 

                 To read Fanon is experience the sense of division that prefigures and fissures, the emergence of a truly radical thought that never draws without casting an uncertain dark. His voice is most clearly heard in the subversive turn of a familiar term. In the silence of a sudden rapture

“The Negro is not any more than the white man.” 

            The writings of psychiatrist Frantz Fanon had tremendous impact on the European anti-colonialist movement. His books Black Skin White Mask and The Wretched of the Earth explore the effects upon colonialism on both the conquerors and the conquered.

His first book is an analysis of the impact of colonial subjugation on the black psyche. It is a very personal account of Fanon's experience being black: as a man, an intellectual, and a party to a French education.

Fanon believed that black’s adopting the language and the culture of the dominate society had larger implication for one’s consciousness: Speaking the language of the colonizers means that can accepts, or is concerned into accepting, the collective consciousness of the person or, which identifies blackness with evil and sin. In an attempt to escape the association of blackness with evil, the black man with white mask, or thinks of himself as a universal subject equally participating in a society that advocates and equality supposedly abstract from personal appearance

                 Black Skin, White Masks remained obscure for decades after its initial publication. Since the 1980s, it has become well known as an anti-colonial and anti-racist work in English-speaking countries. However, it remains a "relatively minor work" in francophone nations, despite its explicit connection with those countries.  Modern discussions among theorists of nationalism, anti-colonialism, and liberation have largely focused on Fanon's later, more revolutionary works, rather than the psychoanalytic explanation of colonial relations.

v What is post colonialism?

According to M.H.Abraham

                  The critical analysis of history, culture, literature and modes of discourse that is specific to the former colonies of England, Spain, France and other European powers. These studies have focused especially on the third world countries in Africa, Asia the Caribbean island and South Africa. Some scholar never extends the scope of such analysis also to the discourse and cultural production of countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand. This achieved independence much earlier than the third world countries. Postcolonial studies sometimes also encompass aspects of British literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, viewed through a perspective that reveals the ways in which the social and economic life represented in that literature was tacitly underwritten by colonial exploitation.

            An important text in establishing the theory and practice in this field of study was orientalism by the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said, which applied a revised form of Michel Foucault’s historicists critic of discourse to analyse what he called ‘’cultural imperialism’’. The term orientalism is now sometimes applied to cultural imperialism by means of the control of discourse, not only in the orient, but anywhere in the world.

One can identify several central and recurrent issues.

                         The rejection of the master narrative of western imperialism in which the colonial other is not only subordinate and marginalized but in effect deleted as agency and its replacement by counter narrative in which the colonial cultures fight their way back in to a world history written by Europeans.

                       The subaltern has become a standard way to designate the colonial subject that has been constructed by European discourse and internalized by colonial peoples who employ this discourse; “subaltern” is the Latin term for “under”(sub) and “ other”(alter). A recurrent topic of debate is now, and to what extent a subaltern subject, writing in a European language, can manage to serve as an agent of resistance against rather than of compliance with the very discourse that has created its subordinate identity.

                   The major element in the postcolonial agenda is to be disestablishing Eurocentric norms of literary and artistic values and to expand the literary canon to include colonial and postcolonial writers.

v Colonial world of Fanon.

“If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization... the social structure existing in Algeria was hostile to any attempt to put the individual back where he belonged.” 

                 

                 The psychiatric hospital at Blida Joinville is one such place where in the divided world of French Algeria, Fanon discovered the impossibility of his mission as a colonial psychiatrist”.

                         The extremity of this colonialization of the person of this end of the “idea’’ of the individual produces a restless urgency in Fanon’s search for a conceptual; form appropriate to the social antagonism of the colonial relation. The body of his work splits between a Hegelian Marxist dialect,a phenomenological affirmation of self and other and the psychoanalytic ambivalence of the unconscious, its turning from love to hate, mystery to servitude. In his desperate doomed search for a dialect of deliverance Fanon explores the edge of their modes for thought: his Hegelianism restores hope to history; his existentialist evocation of the “I’’ restores the presence of the marginalized and his psychoanalytic frame work illuminates the madness of racism the pleasure of pain, the agonistic fantasy of political power.

                    As fanon attempts such audacious, often impossible, transformation of truth and values, the jagged testimony of colonial dislocation its displacement of time and person, its defilement of culture and territory, refuse the ambition of any total theory of colonial oppression.

v  Fanon as a colonial thinker.

                   1) Geographical circumstances.

There are many geographical circumstances influence on Fanon’s writing as a colonial. The first chapter of this book “Black Skin White Mask’’ open with the black man and the language. Here it is mentioned that Fanon grew up in Martinique, an island in the Caribbean ruled by France. The capital of France, Paris was the Metro pole, the centre of the empire. Martinique was the bush, the outback, the hinterland a nowhere kind of place. All the top people in Martinique either came from France or received the4ir university education there.

            In chapter first Fanon writes that...

 “Every colonized people in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiors complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality find its self face to face with the language of the civilizing nations that is , with the culture  of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle. In the French colonial army and particularly in the Senegalese regiments the black offers serve first of all as interpreters. They are used to convey the master’s order to their follows, and they too enjoy a certain position of honour.”

                     People in Martinique found Creole wanting and saw French as better. That comes not from scholarly opinion but from being colonized, from being under French rule.

Fanon becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle in the French colonial army. The words Paris, Marseille, Sorbonne become the keys to the vault. He leaves for the pier, and the amputation. He added that we are the chosen people look at the colour of our skins. The others are black or yellow: that is because their sins. He also made fun of Bible:

 

 It is laid down in the Bible that the separation of the white and black races will be continued in heaven as on earth, and those blacks who are admitted into the kingdom of heaven will find themselves separately lodged in certain of those many mentions of our father………”

 1)    The Negro and the language

                     In this chapter the author discusses that if a black person does not learn the white man’s language perfectly, he is unintelligent yes if he does tern it perfectly, he has washed his brain in the world of racial ideology.

According to Fanon,

“The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behaves in accordance with a neurotic orientation.” 

              Essentially the Negro is born into a hopeless situation. In this context, the black man will never be normal, but always an inborn - no, a preborn- human of abnormality. "Let me add only that in the psychological sphere the abnormal man is he who demands, who appeals, who begs." Fanon invokes Freud; however the Oedipus complex is a luxury for the white man.

2)    The woman of colour and the white Man

                 The colonized women look down on their own. Race and deep down won’t to be white. In “The Bluest eye” of “Tony Morrison” we find a black desire of white woman.

When Fanon talks about the limits of ontology in explaining the being of the black man, he simply means that ontology can only explain the being of the black man if and only if it deals with his existence as a black man per se and not as black man in relation to a white man. But this is unattainable because a colonized black man is Manichean constructed or brought into being in relation to an opposite, that is, a white man. Without a white man there is no black man. As far as skin colour is concerned, a black man can indeed be ontologically brown or even possess a skin shade that can make him pass for white as history has shown us. But a black man in Fanon’s time was not brown or white because the white gaze had ensured that he must not only be black, but he must be black in relation to the white man: ‘Look a Negro!’ ‘Dirty nigger!’

3)      The man of colour and white woman.

  In this chapter Fanon talks about the condition of man as a Black. He says that these men wants to become white, they are also equal to whites. Gwendolyn Brook’s poem “We real cool’’ deals with the same theme.

4) The so called dependency complex of the colonized people.

                 In this chapter Fanon argues that a people of colour may have deep desire for white rule. Those who opposite to it they don’t have secure sense of self that they have very chip sense on their shoulder.

If the black is not a man, then what is the biological, psychological and cultural identity of the black? If the black is not a man, what and who is black? Fanon’s answer to this is equally enigmatic: ‘The black is a black man.’ Moreover, his answer to what a black man wants is more enigmatic: ‘The black man want to be white’. In this book he said that...

 “Toward a new humanism…Understanding among men...Our colored brothers...Mankind I believe in you...Race prejudice...To understand and to love...From all sides dozens and hundreds of pages assail me and try to impose their will on me. But a single line would be enough. Supply a single answer and the colour problem would be stripped of its importance’ .A single answer was and is indeed not enough to deal with Dubois’ old problem of colour line.”

 5) The fact of Black

           This chapter deals with them pathetic situation of black people. Here it is shown that being always black as if they are never fully human being. No matter however education or intelligence you have or no matter how well you perform in to the society. Even we have to mention here the black historical movement to support this argument.

THE BLACK IDENTITY MOVEMENT

The Noble Drew Ali was one of the most influential Black Nationalist leaders of the century. He strongly influenced the growth and development of Black Nationalist Identity between 1913 and the 1930s. His movement combined black Messiah feelings, Black Nationalism, and a theology of deliverance from the white man’s world, culture and religion.

BLACK SLAVE OWNERS AND THE MULLATO CLASS

The majority of black slave owners were members of the mulatto class, and in some cases were the sons and daughters of white slave masters.  Many of the mulatto slave owners separated themselves from the masses of black people and attempted to establish a caste system based on colour, wealth, and free status.

6) The Negro and Psychopathology.

                   Why should people fear of being as a black? Here the white man repressed the Homosexuality and their strange hang ups about black man’s penises more generally, black man are viewed as a bodies which makes them seems like mindless, violence, sexual, animal beings. All the bad meaning that the word “Black” had even before Europeans set foot in black Africa.

Here he writes that

“As I begin to recognise that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognise that I am a Negro. There are two ways out of this conflict. Either I ask others to pay no attention to my skin, or else I want them to be aware of it. I try then to find value for what is bad--since I have unthinkingly conceded that the black man is the colour of evil. In order to terminate this neurotic situation, in which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution, fed on fantasies, hostile, inhuman in short, I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and through one human being, to reach out for the universal.

When the Negro dives--in other words, goes under--something remarkable occurs”. 

 7) Negro and Recognition.

                In this chapter he writes that how different style of white rule shaped black people in America and Martinique.

v  Post colonialism in the Black skin white Mask.

ü  Superiority and inferiority

ü  Race and states of mind.

ü  Psychological dimension of race.

ü  Colour hegemony over the other.

       Thus the reflection of post colonialism is shown through the above points. The white man portraits as superior class and have the power of rule over the other country and the society. On the other sides the Black man or the people always live under the rule of white people. Even he doesn’t have any power to rule over the other people. Even we can also prove the post colonialism through these points

ü  The idea of Blackness

ü  The idea of identity

ü  Notion of desire

ü  The idea of Negritude

ü  The idea of darkness

ü  O- Other

ü  Black-Mulatto-White.

v Conclusion.

The ambitiousness of ‘Black Skin, White Mask’ is rooted in its attempt to deal with the ways in which the psychical or fantastical reality of race might be more consequential than the empirical one. Because the connotations with the colour black are purely negative, blacks share the stereotypes as much as whites, so desalination can never mean a simple negation of what is black.