Hello friends!
Well we are nearing the end of our journey to the lighthouse. In today’s post, we focus on the third of the three parts in To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf which is called ‘The Lighthouse.’
But before we get into things, I wanted to quickly mention this fabulous post by
in which he has mapped Virginia Woolf’s London. It’s fascinating! We happen to be reading one of Woolf’s novels not set in London at present, but many of you will remember the vivid portrait of the city in Mrs Dalloway (which we read together last year). I also recorded a chat with not long ago about Woolf’s essay – ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ if you’re wanting to surf the Woolf-London vibe a little further.Alright (*rolls shoulders, pushes glasses up nose). In this post:
Another wide-ranging CONVERSATION with the wonderful
about ‘The Lighthouse’ (part 3 of To the Lighthouse)
A brief SUMMARY of ‘The Lighthouse’
A few THOUGHTS and OBSERVATIONS about this final section
A big THANK YOU for joining me on this little reading adventure
1. A brief summary of ‘The Lighthouse’
In this third and final part of To the Lighthouse the Ramsay family returns to the same summer house a decade later with some family members missing. In the intervening years, Mrs Ramsay died suddenly of an illness, Prue Ramsay died in childbirth (or something associated with pregnancy) and Andrew Ramsay was killed fighting in the Great War. With the Ramsays are Lily Briscoe, Mr Carmichael and a Mrs Beckwith.
In the morning, Mr Ramsay and his younger children, Cam and James, are to set off on an expedition to the lighthouse, however they are delayed because Nancy forgot to order sandwiches for them the night before. Mr Ramsay goes to Lily Briscoe (who has again set up her easel on the lawn near the house) wanting her sympathy (for the loss of Mrs Ramsay, for his plight in general) and Lily finds she is unable to give him what he wants, though soon she compliments his boots which puts him in good humour and, while he demonstrates the best way of knotting laces, Lily feels that sympathy that was lacking before, but the arrival of Cam and James stops her from being able to express it to him.
The rest of this part is split between Lily on the lawn, re-attempting her painting of the same view of the house, and Mr Ramsay, Cam and James in the boat (with Macalister and his boy) sailing to the lighthouse. While Lily paints, she reminisces about Mr Bankes, the Rayleys and others but most of all about Mrs Ramsay, thinking about her, her legacy, her impact on their lives and of life itself. At times, she feels anguished about Mrs Ramsay’s absence. In the boat, a silent power struggle takes place between Mr Ramsay (though he is unaware of it) and his children – Cam and James are resolved to resist their father’s tyranny. As they sail across the bay, Cam’s mood lightens as she watches her father reading in the boat and she begins to feel some tenderness towards him. Meanwhile James’s defensiveness is finally overcome by Mr Ramsay unexpectedly complimenting him on how he has steered the boat. As they reach the lighthouse, Mr Ramsay stands at the bow then leaps off the boat onto a rock. At about the same moment, Lily finishes her painting. She has had her vision.
2. A few thoughts and observations about ‘The Lighthouse’
Small echoes and repetitions
In the final part, it’s noticeable how many small repetitions appear – moments that echo moments from earlier in the novel. Nancy forgets to order sandwiches for the trip to the lighthouse (in part 1, Mrs Ramsay prepares to order sandwiches for the trip to the lighthouse, in case it goes ahead). Those assembled all these years later are uncertain about what to send to the lighthouse keeper (in part 1, Mrs Ramsay knows what to send). Mr Ramsay has the appearance of a leader making ready for an expedition (in part 1, we hear of Mr Ramsay’s qualities which ‘would have saved a ship’s company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water,’ which on a desolate expedition across a Polar region ‘would have made him the leader, the guide, the counsellor…’). James is still fantasising about striking his father through the heart with a knife (in part 1, it’s a poker). Cam sees her brother James as ‘the lawgiver, with the tablets of eternal wisdom laid open on his knee,’ saying silently ‘Resist him, Fight him. He said so rightly; justly’ (while in part 1, Mrs Ramsay sees James ‘all red and ermine on the Bench’). In both part 1 and 3, Lily recites Mr Tansley’s words: ‘Women can’t paint, women can’t write.’ In both, Lily remembers the kitchen table that connotes for her Mr Ramsay’s work – in part 3, Lily thinks that Mr Ramsay ‘must have had his doubts about that table’ – ‘he had had doubts, she felt, or he would have asked less of people.’ ‘See the little house,’ says Mr Ramsay to Cam (in part 1, Mr Ramsay says to his wife, ‘Poor little place’ – both have a similar quality of simplicity and sentimentality – perhaps again similar to that witnessed by Mr Bankes years earlier when Mr Ramsay pointed his stick at a hen and her chicks and said ‘Pretty—pretty’ – which Bankes believed demonstrated: ‘his simplicity, his sympathy with humble things’).
These are some of the resonances and echoes I noticed between the first and third parts (and I wonder what you noticed?) – which give cohesiveness to the novel, which might otherwise have suffered from a stark separation between the three parts; a failure to merge across the ‘Time Passes’ section. To use the metaphor of painting, (which Woolf herself uses frequently), these echoes and repetitions paint respective sections ‘into’ each other – the colour of that moment on that side is repeated here again on this side, though perhaps is shaped differently or is blended into different surrounds, different forms.
Recitation of poetry
As in the first part, Mr Ramsay recites fragments of poetry. This time he is reciting lines from ‘The Castaway’ by William Cowper. It’s difficult to know the extent to which we should read symbolic meaning into this choice of poem. Certainly, many lines from the poem resonate with themes of the novel, but it might also have been a direct memory that Virginia had of her father. Early during her conception of the novel, Woolf jotted notes in her diary about what the novel would be about:
This is going to be fairly short: to have father’s character done complete in it; & mothers; & St Ives; & childhood; & all the usual things I try to put in—life, death &c. But the centre is father’s character, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel…1
Indeed, biographer Hermoine Lee has said such scenes were not codes – they did not ‘stand’ for something else.2 And yet…
Distance
There is something interesting going on in this section with regard to distance (Nancy and I talked about this a little bit in our chat). There is the distance of time (Lily looking back at Mrs Ramsay after many years) and also spatial distance. ‘So much depends,’ thinks Lily in chapter 11, ‘upon distance: whether people are near us or far from us; for her feeling for Mr Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay.’
Cam in the boat also tunes into the effect of distance. While on the shore Lily cries out for Mrs Ramsay, in the boat Cam’s impression is different. ‘They don’t feel a thing there, Cam thought, looking at the shore, which, rising and falling, became steadily more distant and more peaceful.’ Later she observes that the land ‘was very small; it was very distant. The sea was more important now than the shore.’ Whereas, on the shore, Mr Ramsay ‘seemed to become more and more remote. He and his children seemed to be swallowed up in that blue, that distance; but here, on the lawn, close at hand, Mr Carmichael suddenly grunted. [Lily] laughed. He clawed his book up from the grass. He settled into his char again puffing and blowing like some sea monster. That was different altogether, because he was so near.’
What might Woolf be doing here with these references to distance and nearness?
The symbol of the lighthouse
An obvious question that arises when reading this novel is: what’s with the lighthouse? What does it mean? In the conversation with Nancy, we noted that Woolf seemed to rebel from symbolic interpretation of her work. In a letter to her friend, the artist Roger Fry, she wrote:
I meant nothing by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together. I saw that all sorts of feelings would accrue to this, but I refused to think them out, and trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions—which they have done, one thinking it means one thing another another. I can’t manage Symbolism except in this vague generalised way. Whether its right or wrong I don’t know, but directly I’m told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me.3
Notwithstanding Woolf’s abhorrence for being ‘told what a thing means,’ it’s clear that she expects people to make their own interpretations about the lighthouse – ‘would make it the deposit for their own emotions’. In our conversation, Nancy thought the lighthouse could be interpreted as representing ‘mother’ – which I found fascinating and meaningful. Biographer, Julia Briggs, while acknowledging Woolf’s reticence to assign meaning to the lighthouse, pointed out its symbolic resonances:
[A]s a symbol, the lighthouse is rich in significance. Associated with isolation and, by extension, the inner life, as well as with the saving power of light that opposes the flood of darkness in ‘Time Passes’, its three beams correspond to the structure of the novel – two long beams, one of them Mrs Ramsay’s, and a short beam. Placed at the centre of the novel […], its beams measure time in terms of light, for, if light is in some sense the painter’s medium, time is the novelist’s, and the two correspond, since time is one way of describing the cycles of sun and moon which we experiences as light. Time is the element that makes novels differ fundamentally from paintings, giving them what Fry termed ‘a successive unity’. Time brings change, and though the mind can move backwards and forwards across it […] resisting time’s action and the body’s involuntary ageing, what has been lost can only be restored by the imagination and its arts.4
On a very basic level, the title of the novel, To the Lighthouse, connotes an idea of a journey towards literal and figurative enlightenment. But in the novel, enlightenment comes in small flashes of insight along the way, rather than some grand revelation. ‘The great revelation had never come,’ thinks Lily Briscoe. ‘The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark’.
I’m curious to know what others made of the lighthouse – do share your thoughts in the comments!
Mr Carmichael
And what do you make of Mr Carmichael?
He has been a silent presence through most of the novel and is the only character who remains resolutely opaque to us – Woolf does not permit us entry into his mind. As in the first part, we see him out on the lawn, basking in the sun ‘like a creature gorged with existence.’ Lily observes him lying in his chair, ‘sailing serenely through a world which satisfied all his wants, so that she thought he had only to put down his hand where he lay on the lawn to fish up anything he wanted.’ She remembers that he never really liked Mrs Ramsay – Lily thinks that it might have been Mrs Ramsay’s ‘masterfulness, her positiveness, something matter-of-fact in her. She was so direct.’ But Lily also recalls that when Mr Carmichael heard about Andrew Ramsay’s death, he had ‘lost all interest in life.’
But then in the final pages, Mr Carmichael emerges from his placid inscrutability: ‘[S]urging up, puffing slightly, old Mr Carmichael stood beside her, looking like an old pagan God, shaggy, with weeds in his hair and the trident (it was only a French novel) in his hand.’ Lily and Mr Carmichael look across the bay and guess that the boat has reached its destination. And Mr Carmichael ‘stood there spreading his hands over all the weakness and suffering of mankind; [Lily] thought he was surveying, tolerantly, compassionately, their final destiny.’
It does feel like Mr Carmichael, in these final pages, takes on his true form – the form of an old pagan God, a figure at once ‘gorged’ with the joys of earthly ephemeral existence and existing somewhere beyond it. Is it his role as poet that gives him a sort of enlargement in being or mindset? In Mr Carmichael, I see a figure less bound by the constraints that hold others tightly within their lives. Perhaps it is the poet that in the end bears witness and dignifies the small, furious gestures and efforts of our lives and the quietism of our deaths.
3. Thank you!
That’s it from me for now! Thank you all of you for joining me on this small reading adventure. I’ve been so very chuffed to read your comments and to be part of this friendly community of readers. And a big big thank you to
who joined me for all of those conversations and has been such a kind, encouraging, insightful and generous interlocutor and friend. (Thanks too to who joined us for the conversation about Leslie Stephen and Mr Ramsay. Do have a look at his post about Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s father) climbing Mont Blanc.)And do add your comments below if you’d like to. There’s no deadline on comments – these posts are now up on substack so you can drop by whenever you like. If you’ve dropped behind the reading schedule, or have discovered these posts long after we officially finished reading – that’s ok! You can still comment and participate – I make an effort to monitor these posts after the fact.
If you’re willing to spend 2 minutes filling out a survey on your experience reading along with me – I would be most grateful. I’m still quite new to all this, so receiving feedback will help me understand what worked and what didn’t!
The Diary of Virginia Woolf — Volume Three: 1925-1930, ed. Olivier Bell, Harcourt, 1980, entry for 14 May 1925, p 18-19.
See Hermoine Lee, Virginia Woolf, Vintage Books, 1996, p 472.
Letter from Virginia Woolf to Roger Fry, 27 May 1927, quoted in Hermoine Lee, Virginia Woolf, Vintage Books, 1996, p 472.
Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf — An Inner Life, Harcourt, 2005, p 181-2.
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