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