[145515

This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled

DUALISM IN THE NOVELS OF VIRGINIA NOOLF

presented by

Theodore Harakas

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Doctorate degreein English

 

 

#MW

Major professor

Date May 20, 1982

 

MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0-12771

 

MSU

LIBRARIES

 

 

 

RETURNING MATERIALS:

Place in book drop to
remove this checkout from
your record. FINES will
be charged if book is
returned after the date
stamped below.

 

 

071513

 

 

 

 

6 H70 93

DUALISM IN THE NOVELS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

by

Theodore Harakas

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1982

ABSTRACT
DUALISM IN THE NOVELS oF VIRGINIA W‘OOLF
By

Theodore Harakas

The purpose of this dissertation is to discuss Virginia Woolf‘s
efforts in her novels to explore and express the implications of her
dualistic understanding of reality, a dualism.that results from what
she understood as a seemingly unresolvable conflict between "the stern
and philosophical self” and the "eager and dissatisfied self." She
expresses the problem that results from this dualism, and the problem
that is at the center of all of her fiction, in a diary entry: "The
problem is the usual oneevhow to adjust the two worlds." My
dissertation identifies the nature of the "adjustments" she achieved in
The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob‘s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the
Li hthouse, and The Waves, and establishes a basis for understanding
that the most profound adjustment of the two worlds she achieved was
not in The Waves, which most critics believe to be her most successful

novel, but rather in To the Lighthouse, in which she not only explores

 

and expresses the conflict, but also resolves it. My discussion of

the novels, particularly of To the Lighthouse and The Waves, extends

 

upon ideas developed by Stephen Pepper in The Basis of Criticism in

 

the Arts and Werd Hypotheses, I conclude that Woolf‘s success in

To the Lighthouse results from the fact that it is only in that novel
that she accepts the limitations of what Pepper defines as the
"contextualistic world hypothesis," and does not, as she did in

The Waves, reach beyond the limitations of that categorical approach

to reality.

DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to my wife, Marybeth, and my daughter,

Vivian.

ii

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to the Faculty of the English

Department at‘Michigan State University for their guidance and patience.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER Page
I. RETREAT FROM VISION IN THE WAVES, . . , . . . . . . . . . 1
II. THE EARLY NOVELS: DUALTSM DEFINED. . . . . . . . . . . . 26

The Voyage Qut . . . , . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Night and Day. , . . , . , , . . . . . , . . , . . . 45

 

 

III. ACCEPTANCE OF DUALISM IN JACOB‘S ROOM AND
W 0 DALLOWA‘Y , C V 1 1 I I Q Q 9 I I Q C Y 9. '. ! 9 O Q R Q 5 7

 

 

JECOb " S Room I Q C, 9‘ Q q g g g Q g 9 a q o Q 0. Q 0 fi 65
vars . DallowaX, . Q ‘ g '1 g 1 Q o g Q o 0 Q ‘ 0 Q o O 90

 

 

IV. REDEMPTIVE VISION IN TO THE LIGHTHODSE. . . . . . . . . . 107

 

“The Window”: Mrs. Ramsey‘s Temperament . . . . . . 120

"‘Time Passes" and ”The Lighthouse":

Lily‘s Temperament . , . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
V. BIBLIOGRAPHY. , , . , . , . . . . 9 q . . , . . . . q . , 158

Primary Sources, . t . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
Secondary Sources. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

iv

 

CHAPTER I: RETREAT FROM VISION IN THE WAVES

The matter that detains us now may seem,
To many, neither dignified enough
Nor arduous, yet will not be scorned by them,
Who, looking inward, have observed the ties
That bind the perishable hours of life
Each to the other, and the curious props
By which the world of memory and thought
Exists and is sustained.

William Wordsworth, The Prelude,
Bk. VII, lines 458e465.
While writing The Waves (1931), Virginia Woolf copies this passage
into her diary and noted it as something she wanted to remember.1 Her
readers will understand readily why the lines interested her, for she

is surely one who looked inward for the singleness of identity that

 

1The Diary of Virginia Wbolf, ed. by Anne Oliver Bell (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980), August 22; 1929, vol. III, p. 247.
Because several future references to the diary are to entries not yet
published by Ms. Bell, all future references will be to A.Writer's
Diary, selected and edited by Leonard Woolf. Some entries, such as
'flfis one, do not appear in A Writer's Diary, but do appear in the
already published work of MB. Bell.

I will refer to the diary frequently in this dissertation for
establishing Woolf‘s personal understanding of her techniques and
themes. Leonard Woolf‘s comments about the importance of the diary for
understanding Woolf‘s work draw attention to its significance: "In A:
Writer‘s Diary I published extracts from Virginia‘s diary which show
her engrossed in the dayetOAday work of writing these books. She uses
these pages as Beethoven used his Notebooks to jot down an idea or
partially work a theme to be used months or years later in a novel or
a Symphony. While writing a book, in the diary she communes with her-
self about it and its meaning or object, its scenes and characters.
She reveals, more nakedly perhaps than any other writer has done, the
exquisite pleasures and pains, the splendors and miseries, of artistic
creation, the relation of the creator both to his creation and his
characters and also to his critics and his public." Downhill All the
EEN: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939 (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, Inc., 1967), p. 148.

 

 

Wbrdsworth asserts. Bernard, in a soliloquy given while awaiting the
arrival of Percival, who is the symbol of the unity of identity that
each of the characters in The Waves was in search of, voices both the
need and the novel's understanding of the human capacity to fulfill the
need: "I conceive myself called upon to provide, some winter's night,
a meaning for all my observations--a line that runs from one to
another, a summing up that completes." But he concludes the soliloquy
with an understanding that precludes such a summing up: "There is no
stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is to any-
thing? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that
sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is
experiment and adventure. we are forever mixing ourselves with
unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not."2

The Waves is WOolf's most radical exploration of this conflict.
Abstractly stated, the struggle recorded in the novel opposes each
character's sense of the fragmentation and meaninglessness of existence
in general with the need to affirm the existence of a unified selfhood
that transcends this general truth. Almost without deviation, the
formal soliloquies which comprise the novel address this tOpic
explicitly. Although significantly concerned with the flux of images
and thoughts in the minds of the characters, The Waves is neither
written in streamrof-consciousness style, nor is the subject matter of
the formal soliloquies the stream-of—consciousness of the characters.
Instead, the thoughts of the characters are carefully pared to include

only material pertinent to the question the novel asks: "I am.conscious

 

2Virginia WOolf, The Waves (London: The Hogarth Press, 1963),

pp. 83-84.

of flux, of disorder; or annihilation and despair. If this is all, this
is worthless,"3 says Louis at one point, and Neville, at another, in
response to an entreaty from Bernard to confront their common enemy,
says, "Oppose ourselves to this illimitable chaos. . .this formless
im'besility."4 Because of the consistency of this focus, The waves is
the most purely philosophical novel Virginia WOolf wrote, and perhaps
the most purely philosophical novel in English.

The title is indicative of the conflict that the novel tries to
resolve. The relationship of the individual wave to the sea in Th3
‘Waggg is symbolic of the relationship between the individual man to the
whole of existence. A conflict within the novel about the meaning of
this symbolism provides an expression of the central conflict of the
novel. At times, the waves are seen as meaningful entities, in which
the individual wave, symbolic of individual life, is a metonomy for
the sea, which is eternal and whole; at other times, each wave is seen
to be limited and temporal, subject to forces that destroy its integrity
and render its existence meaningless. Interpreters of the novel
characteristically see the resolution of the conflict as an affirmation
of being in which man achieves redemption from the pathos and terror of
nothingness by recognizing ". . .that life's flux is precisely its

unity."5

"The individual life is a wave, and life itself is the sea;
to look at oneself as only one wave is to perish when that single wave

breaks, but to see oneself as an indivisible part of the sea, composed

 

3The waves, p. 67.

4The Waves, p. 160.

5James Hafley, The Glass Roof: Virginia Wbolf as Novelist
(New York: Russell and Russell, Inc., 1963), p. 108.

 

of innumerable drops of water--as part of wave after wave——is to gain
immortality."6 N. C. Thakur, reading the novel through categories
derived from eastern mysticism, concludes that the conflict is resolved
in the recognition of life as spirit: "Immune from change, it is death—
less. It only changes its form, it never dies. Like the breaking wave
that, changing its shape, turns into its original form, the spirit,
casting away the body that it wears, attains its pristine form and
glory——the still point of the revolving wheel."7 For Jean Guiguet, too,
the resolution of the struggle is affirmative, a ". . .victory of order
over chaos, of truth over the unknown, of Being over Nothingness."8

These conceptions of the meaning of The Waves and, by extension,
of Woolf's writings as a whole, are highlighted by the critics'
discussions of the concluding soliloquy of the novel. After a long and
pessimistic meditation about the unfulfillment of his own life and of
the lives of his friends, Bernard rejects the nihilism of his thoughts
and reawakens to life:

Curse you then. However beat and done with it

all I am, I must haul myself up, and find the parti—

cular coat that belongs to me; must push my arms into

the sleeves; must muffle myself up against the night

air and be off. I, I, I, tired as I am, spent as I am,

and almost worn out with all this rubbing of my nose

along the surfaces of things, even I, an elderly man

who is getting rather heavy and dislikes exertion must
take myself off and catch some last train.

 

6Hafley, p. 112.

7N. C. Thakur, The Symbolism of Virginia WOolf (London: Oxford

University Press, 1965), p. 123.

 

8Jean Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her Works, trans. by Jean

Stewart (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and WOrld, Inc., 1965),
pp. 294—5.

 

Again I see before me the usual street. The
canopy of civilisation is burnt out. The sky is dark
as polished whale-bone. But there is a kindling in the
sky whether of lamplight or of dawn. There is a stir
of some sort-sparrows on plane trees somewhere chirping.
There is a sense of the break of day. I will not call
it dawn. What is dawn in the city to an elderly man
standing in the street looking up rather dizzily at the
sky? Dawn is some sort of whitening of the sky; some sort
of renewal. Another day; another Friday; another twentieth
of March, January, or September. Another general awakening.
The stars crawl back and are extinguished. The bars deepen
themselves between the waves. The film of mist thickens
on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on
the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird
chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this
is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and
fall and rise again.

And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches
its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, some—
thing rising beneath me like the proud horse whole rider
first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we
now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now,
as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death.
Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with
my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young
man's, like Percival's, when he gaIIOped in India. I
strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling my-
self, unvanquished and unyielding, 0 Death!

The waves broke on the shore.9
Thakur concludes that, "With this vision Bernard is able to fling him-
self unvanquished and unyielding against Death. For him, 'Death is
swallowed up; victory is won.‘ He can say with the Apostle Paul, '0
Death, where is your victory? 0 Death, where is your sting?”10 But
Thakur, like most of Woolf's critics, is too quick to identify Bernard's
final understanding as Woolf's own resolution of the conflict, and

cOnsequently to see the statement as an expression or embodiment of the

theme of The Waves, and as the culmination of Woolf's lifelong effort

 

 

9The waves, pp. 210-1.

10Thakur, p. 124.

to grasp and express a redemptive vision of life based upon the unity
and permanence of the self. Wordsworth's ". . .ties/That bind the
perishable hours of life/Each to the other. . .," his ". . .curious
props/By which the world of memory and thought/Exists and is sustained
. . .," are observed by Thakur as ". . .a spirit that can see but is
not seen, that can know everything without being told anything, that is
'unconfined and capable of being everywhere on the verge of things and

' and that 'can change no more.‘ Immune from change, it is

11

here too,
deathless."
Bernard, however, is not a spokesman for WOolf even though he
shares much with the author in his role as a novelist and, more
importantly, in his sensibility. Aesthetic distance exists between the
author and her character in a way that is analogous to the distance
between James Joyce and Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as

I§_Young Man. Both novels end with rhapsodic affirmations of the future

 

that affirm life and aspiration in the face of destructive and paralyzing
realizations. But readers of Ulysses know that Stephen's final words
are not Joyce's resolution of the conflict between private awareness

and public allegiance that is the substance of A Portrait of the Artist

 

as a Young_Man, but his own; we shall likewise discover that Bernard's

 

soliloquy is by no means meant to be understood as the resolution of
the thematic conflict of The Waves. Joyce the ironist hears the self-
asserting words of his youthful self with the same sense of detachment
that characterizes his relationship to all his works. WOOlf voices
symbolically her resignation to the failure Bernard must ultimately

Confront: "The waves broke on the shore."

 

 

llThakur, p . 123 .

This concluding image coheres with the tone of pathos and unful-
fillment that pervades the novel. All of its seemingly triumphant
moments are dissipated and repudiated by ensuing experience. Repeatedly,
we see that intuitions of the self's unity and permanence, of the
singleness of identity that the six figures search for, are, if not
illusory, too fragile for man to sustain. Bernard's is a single mind,
one of the six that encompass collectively the scope of WOOlf's vision
in The waves. To read him as her chosen perspective from among six
alternatives offered by the novel is to forget too much that is
profound and valid in the others' responses to existence and to neglect
the fact that much in her own life and thought suggests that she
identified variously with each of the characters.12 Of wealf's critics
only David Daiches reminds us of the continuing significance of the
understandings of the other characters at the end of the novel: "Yet
Bernard's summing up is not really a summing up, for he is simply one
of the six, not a figure who is built up to include the other five. His
conclusions are his own, neither the author's nor the other characters',
and Rhoda the timid, Jinny the sensuous, Susan the domestic lover of
earth; Louis with his middle-class intelligence and Neville, poetic and
dependent--they all disappear without the pattern of their lives being
finally interpreted or integrated."13

Bernard's limited role in the novel can best be understood by

identifying Woolf's unique intentions in The Waves. During the early

 

 

12"This morning I could have said what Rhoda said. 'This proves
that the book is alive; because it has not crushed the thing I wanted
to say, but allowed me to slip it in, without any compression or
alteration,'" A Writer's Diary, February 20, 1930, p. 151.

13David Daiches, Virginia WOOIf (lst rev. ed.; New York: New
Directions, 1963), p. 19.

 

 

stages of writing, Woolf described her novel as an "abstract, mystical,

eyeless book."14 Although she conceived of the novel as in some sense

autobiographical ("Autobiography, it might be called."15), she struggled

with the problem of distance between herself and her characters. "But

who is she? I am very anxious that‘she should have no name. I don't

want a Lavinia or a Penelope: I want 'she. ' But that becomes arty."

Four months later, after several unsatisfactory beginnings, we find her

still struggling with the problem of distance: ". . .several problems

cry out still to be solved. Who thinks it? And am I outside the

thinker? One wants some device that is not a trick."17 To resolve
this problem Woolf eliminated the single mind who "thinks" the novel

and developed instead a series of characters who collectively represent

a single mind: "The Waves is, I think, resolving itself (I am at page

100) into a series of dramatic soliloquies. The thing is to keep them

running homogeneously in and out, in the rhythm of the waves." This

Structure is the reason she conceived of The Waves as "the most complex

and difficult of all my books,"19 for it presented her with the problem

of depicting the totality of a single mind by representing all of its

asPects as six characters who seem to have lives of their own. The

WaVes is autobiographical in the sense that none of the six characters

\
14A Writer's Diary (New York:

Nov- 7, 1929, p. 134.

 

Harcourt, Brace & WOrld, Inc., 1968),

15A Writer's Diary, May 28, 1930, p. 139.

16A Writer's Diary, May 28, 1930, p. 139.

17A Writer's Diary, Sept. 25, 1930, p. 142.

1
8A Writer's Diary, Aug. 20, 1930, p. 153.

1
9A Writer's Diary, Feb. 20, 1930, p. 151.

have meaning except as they embody a distinct and significant aspect of

the author's own dialogue with mutability and fragmentation. To the

Lighthouse (1927), published four years before The Waves, had been
Woolf's attempt to resolve the question of identity in relationship to

the overpowering presences of her parents: The Waves asks the question

of identity of the universe itself. The unique structure she devised

 

to ask this question was the reason she was perplexed by the London Times

"Odd that they

reviewer who praised her characterizations in The Waves:
20

(the Times) should praise my characters when I meant to have none."

Ralph Freedman, in his seminal study of Woolf's narrative technique,
draws our attention to the existence of a collective identity among the

characters: "Through such a network of interlocking qualities, which

branch out into the minutest details, a picture is created that portrays

the six characters not as a social group but as a single organism—-one

SYlllbol of a common humanity."21 Later, in identifying this symbol of

htlnlanity as a single person, he implies the existence of a romantic

microcosmic-macrocosmic relationship: ". . .memories overlap until a

netznvork, sometimes expressed as a composition of alternating soliloquies,

emerge like the inner life of a single person." We are reminded again

of Woolf's interest in The Prelude, for implicit in the idea that the
Six characters can represent both the inner life of a single person and
the Whole of humanity is the fundamental romantic aspiration to

Obliterate the distinction between the particular and the universal.

\
20A Writer's Diar , Oct. 5, 1931, p. 167.

 

Studies in Hermann Hesse,

21Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel:
Oxford University Press, 1963),

WGide, and Virginia Woolf (London:
. 52.

22Freedman, p . 253 .

10

"To see the world in a grain of sand" was Blake's formula for redemption
from Urizen's nightmare. Translated into the question of identity,
redemption required the assertion of a transcendental ego that would
encompass and give meaning to the labyrinth of detail that comprises the
empirical ego. Percival serves as a symbol of this transcendental ego
iJI'The waves. The moment of awareness that he centers is the only moment
wduan the characters see themselves in command of time and change. The
rarity of their collective identity stands for them as a synecdoche for
a tunity in the universe that withstands the influence of changing

ciJscumstance, while at the same time enveloping all circumstance within

itself:

'Now once more,‘ said Louis, 'as we are about to
part, having paid our bill, the circle in our blood,
broken so often, so sharply, for we are so different,
closes in a ring. Something is made. Yes, as we rise
and fidget, a little nervously, we pray, holding in
our hands this common feeling, 'Do not move, do not
let the swing—door cut to pieces the thing that we have
made, that globes itself here, among these lights,
these feelings, this litter of bread crumbs and people
passing. Do not move, do not go. Hold it for ever.‘

'Let us hold it for one moment,’ said Jinny; 'love,
hatred, by whatever name we call it, this globe whose
walls are made of Percival, of youth and beauty, and
something so deep sunk.within us that we shall perhaps
never make this moment out of one man again.’

'Forests and far countries on the other side of
the world,‘ said Rhoda, 'are in it; seas and jungles;
the howlings of jackals and moonlight falling upon
some high peak where the eagle soars.‘

'Happiness is in it,' said Neville, 'and the
quiet of ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book
‘with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the
petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as
‘we sit silent, or, perhaps, bethinking us of some trifle,
suddenly speak.‘

'Week-days are in it,’ said Susan, 'Mbnday, Tuesday,
lflednesday; the horses going up to the fields, and the
liorses returning; the rooks rising and falling, and
<3atching the elmrtrees in their net, whether it is
.April, whether it is November.’

'What is to come is in it,‘ said Bernard. 'That
is the last drop and the brightest that we let fall like

11

Some supernal quicksilver into the swelling and splendid
moment created by us from.Percival. What is to come?

I ask, brushing the crumbs from my waistcoat, what is
outside? We have proved, sitting eating, sitting talking,
that we can add to the treasury of moments. We are not
slaves bound to suffer incessantly unrecorded petty blows
on our bent backs. We are not sheep either, following

a master. We are creators. We too have made something

that will join the innumerable congregations of past

time. We too, as we put on our hats and push open the
door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our
own force can subjugat§3and make part of the illumined

and everlasting road.'
The question that the characters in The Waves ask about this moment of

collective awareness is quintessentially romantic: "Was it a vision,

or a waking dream?"
Nothing less than the verification of this moment as a vision of
an unchanging and all encompassing principle of existence could provide

a basis for the unity of identity for which each character searches.

Bernard, while awaiting the others' arrival at the restaurant, is

exPlicit in defining this function for Percival: "He rides on; the

multitude cluster round him, regarding him as if he were--what indeed
2 .
he is——a God." 4 But "the line that runs from one to another," the

"Summing up that completes" which each of the characters believed he

exPerienced at the restaurant is erased by experience. The sense of a

unified identity is destroyed. The six aspects of the novel's collective

mind which for a moment seemed to cohere separate again and are never
reaLsSembled: "The flower," said Bernard, "the red carnation that stood

in the vase on the table of the restaurant when we dined together with

 

\2
3The Waves, pp. 104—5.
24

The Waves, p. 92.

12

25 The

Percival is become a six-sided flower; made up of six lives."
ephemeralness of their momentary triumph over fragmentation and

mutability is what Woolf emphasizes in The Waves rather than the enduring

and redemptive value of what they achieved at the restaurant. The one

question on all of their minds in the last half of the novel is the

question asked by Frost's oven bird: "what to make of a diminished

thing?" No positive answer is achieved.

The importance of this failure to sustain the sense of unified

identity achieved at the restaurant does not seem to be recognized by
As noted

critics who see the final meaning of The Waves as affirmative.
earlier, the standard interpretation of the novel is that it finally
affirms a process philOSOphy instead of a philosophy based upon an
unchanging absolute. Hafley states this understanding most explicitly:
"This uniformity of style in the soliloquies has several functions, one
Of the most important of which is that it emphasizes and extends the
book's statement that the very unity found beneath the diversity is the
essence of diversity itself——that life's flux is precisely its unity."26

That such is the substance of Bernard's” final awareness is not disputed;

but that it provides or was intended to provide a redemptive resolution

to the dilemma probed by the novel cannot be accepted. Hafley and those

in agreement with him ask us to see the answer to the question the novel

asks as being, ironically, the question itself. But the conclusion that

!
‘Life's flux is precisely its unity," can be easily paraphrased into a

 

rather commonplace wisdom withOut altering its meaning: "The only
\

25The Waves, p. 162.

26

Hafley, p. 101.

13

permanence in life is change itself." For Virginia wealf, such an
awareness is not the end of inquiry into life's meaning, but the
beginning.

In "Street Haunting: A London Adventure," an impressionistic essay
irritten within the year that wealf finished The waves, Wholf provides a
clear statement of the theme of this novel; and of the basic problem
that she encounters in all of her work.

Yet it is Nature's folly, not ours. When she set about

her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should

have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her

head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us

she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly

at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked,

variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is

the true self this which stands on the pavement in

January, or that which bends over the balcony in June?

Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither

this nor that, neither here nor there, but something

so varied and wandering that it is only when we give

rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded

that we are indeed ourselves. Circumstances com e1

unity; for convenience sake a man must be whole.

IEIiAS dilemma is the dilemma of The Waves. Man cannot finally place him-
self in his universe; he cannot know the truth about his own existence.
Yet; something in that state of being that he cannot know demands no less
'flléirl this final knowledge. When she began The waves weelf wrote in her
di£3133r: "So the days pass and I search for an unwavering certitude: ask
myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver

31‘3E>€e, by life; and whether this is living. . . .I should like to take

the globe in my hands and feel it quietly, smooth, heavy, and so hold it,

 

day after day."28 This is the "globe whose walls are made of Percival,"
\
227

Collected Essays (4 vols; New York: Harcourt, Brace & WOrld,
, .1967), II, 161.

.28

 

Inc .

A Writer's Diary, Nov. 28, 1928, p. 135.

 

 

 

14

that Jinny speaks of at the restaurant. It symbolizes a reality that is

"One thing," immutable and unchanging, and that is "something abstract;

but residing in the downs or sky,"29 and, by extension, in human identity.

Bernard's rhapsodic assertion at the end of The Waves is Woolf's

acknowledgment of the persistence of this need, rather than an indication

that it can be fulfilled. His battle with death will take him again on

the search for an unwavering identity, "Which having been must ever

be."30 Implicit in that imperative, and in the failure he must again

encounter, is the theme of The Waves.
The theme of The Waves, then, is that man cannot know what he needs

to know, and that he cannot accept this limitation. "Our need mocks

31 Reality is too complex to be resolved into a stilled

our gear . "
We will

awareness of an absolute that gives redemptive meaning to life.
not find the "still point in the revolving wheel" for which our nature

coInpels us to seek because our modes of knowing, which lead us to an

_¥

29"Often down here I have entered a sanctuary; a nunnery; had a

religious retreat; of great agony once, and always some terror; so
afraid one is of loneliness; of seeing to the bottom of the vessel.

That, is one of the experiences I have had here in some August; and got
then to a consciousness of what I call "reality"; a thing I see before

something abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which
Reality

me;
nothing matters; in which I shall rest and continue to exist.
I Call it. I fancy sometimes this is the most necessary thing to me:
that which I seek. But who knows——once one takes a pen and writes?

dif f icult not to go making "reality" this and that, whereas it is one
this perhaps is what distinguishes

thing. Now perhaps this is my gift:

me from other pe0p1e: I think it may be rare to have so acute a sense
0“- Something like that—-but again, who knows? I would like to express
it. too." A Writer's Diar , Sept. 10, 1928, p. 132.

Intimations of Immortality from

How

30William Wordsworth, "Ode:
Recollections of Early Childhood," line 184.

31Adrienne Rich, "Double Monologue," Snapshots of a Daughter-in—Law
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1956), p. 34.

15

unacceptable conclusion, are inadequate to the task: we are "Nature's
folly." At times, w001f resigned herself to this reality:

But, I thought, there is always some sediment of
irritation when the moment is as beautiful as it is
now. The psychologists must explain; one looks up,
one is overcome by beauty extravagantly greater than
one could expect-—there are now pink clouds over
Battle; the fields are mottled, marbled--one's
perceptions blow out rapidly like air balls expended
by some rush of air, and then, when all seems blown
to its fullest and tautest, with beauty and beauty
and beauty, a pin pricks; it collapses. But what is
the pin? So far as I could tell, the pin had some—
thing to do with one's own impotency. I cannot hold
this——I cannot express this--I am overcome by it—-I
am mastered. Somewhere in that region one's discon—
tent lay; and it was allied with the idea that one's
nature demands mastery over all that it receives;

and mastery here meant the power to convey what one
saw now over Sussex so that another person could share
it. And further, there was another prick in the pin:
one was wasting one's chance; for beauty spread out
at one's own right hand, at one's left; at one's
back too; it was escaping all the time; one could only
offer a thimble to a torrent that could fill baths,
lakes.

But relinquish, I said (it is well known how, in
circumstances like these the self splits up and one
self is eager and dissatisfied and the other stern and
philosophical), relinquish these impossible aspirations;
be content with the view in front of us, and believe
me when I tell you that it is best to sit and soak;
to be passive; to accept; and do not bother because
nature has given you six little pocket knives with
‘which to carve up the body of a whale.

But the resignation she advises in this passage is not the final
adVice implicit in her writings: "One's nature demands mastery over
al]_ 'tflnat it receives." The "eager and dissatisfied" self cannot
iEj-IIELILILy accept the conclusions of the "stern and philosophical" self.

While speculating in her diary about the conclusion of The Waves, Woolf
\

2"Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car," Collected

m, II, 290-91.

l6

tells us unequivocally that the conflict itself is the novel's theme:
"It occurred to me last night while listening to a Beethoven quartet

that I would merge all of the interjected passages into Bernard's final

speech and end with the words 0 solitude: thus making him absorb all

those scenes and having no further break. This is go show that the

theme effort, effort, dominates: not the waves: and personality: and

defiance: [my italics]."33 Thus, Bernard's self-assertion does not

represent as Professor Guiget says, a "triumph of Being over

Nothingness." Rather, it is for Woolf only the affirmation of the will

to being in the face of the nothingness indicated by evidence of

experience .

This sense of meaninglessness is grounded in a skepticism that is

". . .my temperament, I think, is

evidenced throughout Woolf's career:

to be very little persuaded of the truth of anything."34 Her "stern,

Philosophical" self characteristically rejects all redemptive under-

standings of existence: "I shall make myself face the fact that there

is nothing-—nothing for any of us. Work, reading, writing are all

disguises; and relations with people. Yes, even having children would

be Ilseless."35 Such nihilistic statements occur too frequently in her

Cl3"-<'='l1:‘:i_es and novels to be neglected in the effort to understand her

ViSalon of life. They, together with the recurrent moments of vision

\

33A Writer's Diary, Dec. 22, 1930, p. 156.
the Symbolic meaning of the waves suggested by this statement and many
others in the diary belies the likelihood of the waves functioning as
affirmative symbols at the end of the novel as is suggested by Thakur

and Haf ley .

The understanding of

 

34A Writer's Diary, Nov. 7, 1928, p. 134.

35A Writer's Diary, June 23, 1929, p. 140.

17

that are the products of her "eager and dissatisfied self" are for her

the verities of existence, verities which point to a duality in exis—

tence that man must understand and confront. "The problem," she says

in a diary entry that defines the central problem in all of her novels,

adjust the two worlds. It is no good
"36

"is the usual one: how to

getting violently excited: one must combine.

My purpose will be to discuss Virginia Woolf's efforts to achieve

an "adjustment" of these worlds that does, unlike The Waves, provide

a redemptive vision of human existence. My contention is that, in

The Waves, Woolf retreats from the more adequate solution she had
already achieved in To the Lighthouse, a novel which offers a redemptive
vision that incorporates the persistent verities of her understanding

of life. What distinguishes the "adjustment" expressed in The Waves,

from the "adjustment" expressed in To the Lighthouse is what
distinguishes fruitless but necessary effort from accomplishment.

To the Lighthouse, I believe, is- the only novel Woolf wrote in which

 

the conflict between the "eager and dissatisfied self" and the "stern
and phflOSOphical self" is not only acknowledged, but transcended.
Since this need to achieve a redemptive vision of life is the principal
motivation of all of her central characters, and her own stated

Ililotivation for her efforts as a novelist, I believe that To the

We and not The Waves should be considered to be the triumph of

her art. My discussion will focus on three issues: why she fails, in

W, to extend upon the redemptive vision achieved in To the

Li 11thouse, how her vision develops through the four novels that

\3
6A Writer's Diary, February 18, 1934, p. 202.

 

l8

precede To the Lighthouse, and what the nature of the redemptive vision

 

expressed in To the Lighthouse is. The discussion of the first of

 

these issues will conclude this chapter, for understanding the reasons
for her retreat from vision in The Waves provides us with essential
categories for understanding WOOlf's efforts and accomplishments in

the early novels and in To the Lighthouse.

 

Shortly after completing To the Lighthouse, woolf remarks in her

 

diary about what she considered to be the success of the novel and then
points ahead, beyond Orlando (1928), to what she will attempt in
The waves:

My present opinion is that it is easily the best

of my books: fuller than J's R and less spasmodic,
occupied with more things than Mrs. D. and not com?
plicated with all the desperate accompaniment of
madness. It is freer and subtler, I think. Yet I
have no idea of any other to follow it: which may
mean that I have made my method perfect and it will
now stay like this and serve whatever use I wish to
put it to. Before, some development of method
brought fresh subjects to view, because I saw a
chance of being able to say them. Yet I am now and
then haunted by some semi-mystic very profound life
_of a woman, which shall be told on one occasion;

and time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall
somehow blossom out of past. One incident--say the
fall of a flower shall contain it. My theory being
that the actual event practically does not exist-— 37
nor time either. But I don't want to force this. . .

The method she finally adopts for The Waves is, of course, more

different than like the method of To the Lighthouse. With the exception

 

of the "Time Passes" interlude, To the Lighthouse is written in the

 

stream-of—consciousness style that dominated the experimental fiction
of the early twentieth century, a style that had its first remarkable

success in the works of Marcel Proust and its principal development in

 

37A writer's Diary, November 23, 1926, pp. 103-4.

 

19

English in the works of Joyce, Faulkner, Wolfe, Dos Passos, and
Virginia WOOlf. It was a style admirably suited for what we can define
retrospectively as a common understanding of the human condition shared
by these writers, namely, that if an answer to the dispiriting
implications of the mechanistic theories of the Enlightenment was to
be found, it would be found within the individual consciousness of man
through the verification of the belief that in the experience of life
as a mental quality man can discover something in the human condition
that is exempt from the laws of the empirically observed world. Proust,
for example, guided by the writings of Henri Bergson, tells us in
.A Remembrance of Things Past that "A single minute released from the
chronological order of time has recreated in us a human being similarly
released."38 Freedman acknowledges the prevalence of this understanding
among the experimental writers of the early twentieth century, and
also the relationship between these writers and the writers of the
romantic movement, when he tells us that "The prevailing View in the
romantic and symbolist traditions usually presupposed that experience
was primarily a mental quality and that the *mind' reflects a reality
which is obscured by the physical world."39
Freedman's linking of romanticism and symbolism, though valid in
terms of the issue he is discussing, is to some extent misleading, and

it is in understanding a major philosophical difference between the

two traditions that we can come to an understanding of the difference

 

38Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (New York: Random

House, 1934), vol. II, p. 996.
39

 

Freedman, p. 267.

20

between wealf's vision in To the Lighthouse and her vision in The waves.

 

My contention is that Woolf, in The Waves, did not continue with the
method that had served to capture and express the vision of life she
had been working towards in all of her earlier novels because she could
no longer be satisfied with the limitations of that vision. The vision
in The waves represents a retreat from the satisfactory resolution of
the conflict between the "two worlds" that she achieved in To the
Lighthouse, a resolution grounded in the ideas behind the symbolist
‘movement, and sought instead to express the resolution in romantic
terms. The key to understanding this retreat is her first comment,
quoted above, about what she hOped to achieve in The Waves——the
"obliteration" of time.

To understand the pertinent difference between the two traditions,
we must identify the philosophical hypotheses that lie behind them;
hypotheses that are most markedly different in regards to the subject

of time. Stephen Pepper, in world Hypotheses and in The Basis of

 

 

Criticism in the Arts, provides us with categorical understandings

 

that are useful in identifying these differences. Pepper identifies
four major "world hypotheses" in the history of philosophy which he
labels as "formism," "mechanism," "contextualism," and "organicism."
His discussions of the differences between organicism and contextualism
will be useful in discussing the differences between the vision of

To the Lighthouse and The waves for it is my contention that Woolf, by

 

nature a contextualist and a symbolist, retreated from the adequate
expression of a redemptive vision based on the ideas of contextualism
in To the Lighthouse, and sought in The Waves to tie the human search

for redemptive meaning to organistic, and therefore, romantic ideas.

21

Contextualism and organicism, says Pepper, though related to each
other in that both oppose the analytical epistemology of formism and
mechanism in their common assertion that a synthetic truth, verifiable
only through subjective experience rather than through logic or
empirical observation, differ from each other in their respective

40

understandings of the implications of this truth. For the organicist,

says Pepper, "

. . .Since the absolute is implicit in all fragments, and
in the absolute all contradictions and evidences of fragmentariness
are transcended, and in the very nature of the absolute no facts what—
ever are left out, then in absolute fact there are no fragments."41 He
continues by saying that "The issue (between the contextualist and

the organicist) comes to a head in the doctrine of time."42 Time, for
the organicist, is finally understood to be unreal: ". . .we may be
assured that in the absolute there is no problem of time, and that all
things are organic, and that all things are saved and in their prOper
places. Since the absolute is the absolute truth, and time and change
cannot in the absolute be true, time and change are not true, not real,
not facts."43 It is certainly the need to affirm a similar understanding

of the unreality of time that led WOOlf to anticipate writing a novel

in which "time shall be utterly obliterated" and when we look again at

 

40". . .it is tempting to regard these two theories as species of
the same theory, one being dispersive and the other integrative. . . .
But the insistence on integration which is characteristic of organicism
makes so great a difference that it is wiser to consider them as two
theories." werld Hypotheses, p. 280.

 

41wpr1d Hypgtheses, pp. 307—8.

42World Hypotheses, p. 308.

43werldHypotheses, p. 313.

 

22

the claims made by the characters at the restaurant about the nature of
the vision they are experiencing together, we see that this need is what
governed the actual composition of the novel. Their moment of vision

is characterized by the assertion that all "fragments" are included in
the absolute truth they are experiencing; the inability to sustain
belief in the redemptive power of this vision is the focus of the last
half of the novel. The resolution of the conflict between the two
selves offered and later denied in The Waves is achieved by momentarily
denying the reality of the world as seen and understood by the "stern
and philosophical self," and in so doing; achieving a vision of ultimate
reality in whidh time is obliterated. It is in man's need to affirm
the validity of such a truth, and his inability to sustain the belief,
that we find the theme of The Waves.

Contextualism, says Pepper, differs from organicism and the other
world hypotheses in that it does not depend upon the assertion of an
all-encompassing absolute which gives meaning to the particulars of
existence. Its ontology is "horizontal" rather than "vertical" in that
the experience of truth is the experience of a truth implicit in the
immediate context of experience rather than the experience of a truth
that reveals an all—encompassing absolute:

Contextualism is accordingly sometimes said to have

a horizontal cosmology in contrast to the other views,

which have a vertical cosmology. There is no top

or bottom to the contextualistic world. In formism

or mechanism or organicism one has only to analyze

in certain specific ways and one is bound, so it is

believed, ultimately to get to the bottom or the

top of things. Contextualism justifies no such faith.

There is no cosmological mode of analysis that

- guarantees the whole truth or the arrival at the
ultimate nature of things. On the other hand, one

does not need to hunt for a distant cosmological
truth, since every present event gives it as fully

 

23

as it can be given. All one has to do to get at

the sort of thing the world is, is to realize,

intuit, gez the quality of whatever happens to be

going on.4
Time, for the contextualist, exists in two modes, schematic and
"actual," or what Bergson calls "duration." To experience the "quality"
(of any context, we must experience it within "duration," but the truth
that results from this experience does not repudiate the reality of
schematic time. Schematic time is simply irrelevant to that truth.
"The great function of schematic time," says the contextualist, "is to

(order. . .nonactual events. But actual time is the forward—and—backward

.spread of the quality of event."45 In my discussion of To the Lighthouse,

 

'I will show that Woolf's treatment of time in that novel differs from
the treatment of time in The Waves in that it reflects the understanding
of contextualism rather than of organicism. It is my contention that
the dualism of the contextualistic world hypothesis is in accord with
the persistent verities of her own understanding of life, and that
because of this, the redemptive vision that she expressed in To the
Lighthouse, a vision that acknowledged these verities, was the

climactic event in her lifelong struggle to "adjust the two worlds."

WOOlf had "perfected her method” in To the Lighthouse because she had

 

perfected her vision. The radical technical innovations of The Waves,
I believe, are the result of her need to affirm a vision of life that
she was by intellectual predisposition unable to affirm.

Why Woolf moved in this direction in the writing of The Waves is

44World Hypotheses, p. 238.

45World Hypotheses, p. 242.

 

24

difficult to understand, for in doing so she resigned herself to
acknowledging the inadequacy of her visions of synthetic truth to
provide redemptive meaning to life, for the later novels reveal that
she never again restates. the vision that characterizes To the

Lighthouse. Pepper notes that the contextualist philosopher tends to

 

try 'to reach beyond the defined limitations of his understanding of
life: and that this tendency often undermines the integrity of the
visimon.he has achieved: "It (contextualism) is constantly on the verge
of :Ezilling back upon underlying mechanistic structures, or of resolving
:hntc> the overarching implicit integrations of organicism."46 Perhaps
something in accord with this tendency is what led Woolf to want to
'wrijze.a.nove1 in which time was "obliterated," and in so doing, she
lrift: behind the achievement of a redemptive vision that acknowledges
the: dualistic world view that is essential to contextualism and con—
Siertently central to her own perception of life.

That this dualism is a constant in her perception of life will
become clear in my discussions of the five novels that precede the
writing of The Waves, but I would like to conclude this introduction
by recalling acornment that Woolf made about the function of the
“OVELlist in the twentieth century, a function that she believed the
nthilrist would assume from the writers of lyric poetry:

. . .our age is rich in lyric poetry; no age perhaps

'has been richer. But for our generation and the

generation that is coming the lyric cry of ecstasy or

<despair, which is so intense, and limited, is not

renough. The mind is full of monstrous, hybrid,

'unmanageable emotions. The age of the earth is
3,000,000,000 years; that human life lasts but a

4
6World Hypotheses, p. 234.

 

25

second; that the capacity of the human mind is nevere

theless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful

yet repulsive; that one‘s fellow creatures are adore

able yet disgusting; that science and religion have

between them destroyed belief; that all bonds of

union seem broken, yet some control must exist—~it

is in this atmosphere of doubt and conflict that

writers now have to create, and the fine fabric of

a lyric is no more fitted to contain this point of

view than 27rose leaf to envelop the rugged immensity

of a rock.
Thexrea can be no clearer statement of the necessity that the twentieth-
ceirttiry artist acknowledge and accept the dispiriting and recalcitrant
farrtrs of existence in his effort to achieve a redemptive vision of
lifee. To say, as Woolf did in stating her intentions for The Waves,
thiltl time can be "obliterated" is to say that the knowledge that the
earth is 3,000,000,000 years old is finally irrelevant to our under—
standing of the human condition. It is the need to achieve a vision
13181: incorporates such truths, rather than one that denies their
ireefility, that is the real soul of Woolf's art, for, as she says later
in. the same essay, "In the modern mind, beauty is accompanied not by
itfi shadow (as in a Keats Ode) but by its opposite."48 Woolf's

intentions in writing The Waves are a digression from this under—-

StaInding, while her intentions and achievement in To the Lighthouse

 

are laased directly upon it.

x

47
"The Narrow Bridge of Art," Collected Essays, vol. II, pp. 218-9.

48
"The Narrow Bridge of Art," p. 219.

CHAPTER II: THE EARLY NOVELS: DUALISM DEFINED

The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919) are usually

 

 

discrussed only as preludes to Virginia WOolf's important work since
tfluayr are written in the realistic mode which she repudiated after
their publication. One early critic went so far as to suggest that
these early novels were written to demonstrate her ability to write
conventionally before she turned to the innovative writing that
Chatracterizes her later fiction.1 Bernard Blackstone's comments about
Woolf's abrupt shift in technique to the stream-of—consciousness, or
ifihirt Ralph Freedman calls the "lyrical" novel, serve to define the

Standard view of the significance of The Voyage Out and Night and Day

 

 

in Woolf's canon of writings:

She is trying [in the later novels] to find a form and
a style adequate to convey her individual vision of
life: and not only of life on the objective plane,

but also that ‘taste of eternity‘ which keeps breaking
through at odd moments and seems to give her vision all
its value. To convey that taste certain barriers of
prose fiction have to be broken down; that is now
obvious to her. The current form of the novel, in
which she has been working up to now, will not do.

She was hampered by the convention of an intricate
continuous plot; by set descriptions of people and
scenes from without; by the necessity to provide link
passages. But when she examined the technique of
poetry, she found that these mechanical devices were
not essential; verse could achieve an economy and a
directness which were lacking in prose. Moreover, by
rapid transitions, by allusions and imagery, poetry
could give precisely that complexity of impressions,
that sense of the eternal glowing through the momentary,

‘—

lWinifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf (London: Wisehart, 1932),
PP. 60-61, passim.

 

26

27

which was the essence of her experience. She was

interested more in the life of the mind-—Ain

sensations, thoughts, feelings intuitions——than

in the life of surface action,

Blackstone is right in explaining that Woolf's preoccupation with
achieving a ’taste of eternity' led her away from the depiction of
social interaction to the depiction of the "semi—transparent envelope"
of private consciousness, But he, like other critics, is mistaken in
assuming that no remarkable change in vision and theme accompanied and
perhaps precipitated this change,

These early novels reflect a distinct and important stage in the
evolution of Woolf's vision of life. Like the later novels, they
presuppose a duality between the phenomenal world and the world of the
Spirit, and this duality is the major concern of all of her central
characters. For Woolf, the phenomenal world, which includes individual
Personality, social life, history, and nature itself, is constantly
at odds with the need to discover an infinite and eternal spirit
Which resides in all things and which subsumes all distinct and
temporal phenomena within its coherence and infinitude. In the later
noVels, this struggle for spiritual redemption is invariably a private

affair, remote from contact with others, secluded in the recesses of

consciousness, The principal characters in The Voyage Out and

 

‘NiQt and Day: differ from the characters in the later novels in that
they do not keep to themselves their struggles to achieve redemption;
both novels explore the possibility of redemption through shared

aWareness in romantic love. Never again after these works will Woolf

ask her central characters to share their most profound awarenesses

 

 

2
Bernard Blackstone, Virginia Woolf: A Commentary (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), pp. 47—8.

 

 

28

with another, nor will the primary value of awareness be contingent
upon the possibility of this sharing. In the later novels, Woolf
retreats from this attempt, and in retreating, repudiates its
meaningf ulness ,

The shift in technique and form which begins in the writing of

Jacob's Room and culminates in The Waves. corresponds with this funda—

 

mental change in Woolf ‘s vision, The movement inward in the later
novels reflects not only Woolf's growing sense that our deepest
perceptions cannot be shared, but that the worlds of action and thought
are apparently irreconcilable. Even in To the Lighthouse, where her
two focal characters each experience in epiphanic moments a synthesis
of action and thought that resolves the conflict between the "two
worlds," the only communication implied is unspoken and figurative:
for example, when Lily "communicates" with Mr. Ramsey in her moment
013 Vision, he is across the bay and she has said nothing. The
depiction of surface reality in the two early novels is, then, con-
Sis tent with the need to make manifest the awarenesses of private
Vision in the world of action. Woolf‘s later entreaty to the novelist
that there should be "no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest
or Catastr0phe in the accepted style,"3 reflects not only a change in
her theory of fiction, but also a change in her vision of life. In

Moyage Out and Nijht and Day, surface action is not a dispensable

 

frame for an essential meaning which manifests itself solely as a
Private state of mind. Rather, it is implicated in the meaning of

theSe novels in that they concern the attempts of individuals to use

 

 

3
Virginia Woolf, "Modern Fiction," Collected Essays, 11, 106.

29

their achieved awarenesses to influence the courses of their lives.
Understanding this stage in Woolf's development is important because
in it we can see the first of a series of steps which led her to the
writing of a novel in which no one exists but the single individual

in search of personal integration, and in which the relationships
depicted are the intrapersonal relationships among the dominant aspects

of that individual‘s identity.

The qugge Out

A synopsis of the main action in The Voyage Out reveals that
inquiry into the relationship between love and death is the source of
the novel's theme. Ridley Ambrose, a scholar, and his wife, Helen,
are embarking on a sea voyage to an unnamed seacoast town in Brazil
Where they have been offered the use of his villa by Helen's wealthy
brother. At the outset, it is Helen who engages our interest because
Woolf is quick to identify her as one of those dissatisfied selves who
are always at the center of his fiction. The trip is anticipated as
a Working vacation by Ridley; for Helen, the voyage, the relief from
the normal patterns of life, will serve as an opportunity for self—
analysis and self-discovery. On board already is Rachel Vinrace,
Helen's niece, who at twenty—four is still living a sheltered life
under the direction of her father, the ship's captain. Rachel is
c‘-ha'1'::=1cterized as a naive, but sensitive and inquisitive girl, who
because of these qualities is able to establish rapport with Helen.
It is Rachel who will be the participant in the main events of the

novel, and the attempt to understand the nature and value of the love

she finds, and the implications of her early death will be the basis

 

30

of the novel's meaning. As the novel proceeds, Helen will become less
and less a part of the depicted action, but her presence will be felt
throughout in that the needs and beliefs which characterize her early
speculations will be the context for understanding the events which
occur.

The first overtly significant action of the voyage occurs when
Richard and Clarissa Dalloway come aboard for passage between two
European ports, Richard, domineering and self-asserting, fascinates
the innocent Rachel when he surrounds her with attention. Helen,
disturbed by Rachel's susceptibility to Richard's performance, counsels
her and later invites her to stay with her at the villa while her
father continues his business voyage up the Amazon River. While with
the Ambroses, Rachel meets two friends, Terence Hewett, a would-be
novelist, and St. John Hirst, a brilliant young man who is undecided
between a future as an Oxford don or as a member of Parliament. A
triangle begins to develop that is quickly resolved in favor of the
aesthetically-oriented Terence. The couple decide to marry. From this
point until Rachel's death a short time later, the couple establish
a.contrast between the elevating love they share and what they, and
‘presumably Woolf, consider to be the meaningless surface of ordinary
existence. They see their love as a participation in a spiritual
reality that redeems their lives, and it is clear that despite her
occasional patronizing of their unguarded innocence, Woolf takes them
seriously.

Throughout the early sections of the novel, Woolf counterpoints
their developing relationship with clearly unacceptable alternatives

to their understanding of life and to the redemption which they seek.

 

31

The cynical St. John, although certainly likeable, is consistently
perplexed by the inadequacy of his rationalism for coping with the

varieties of human experience. Readers of To the Lighthouse will

 

recognize him as a more sympathetic prototype of the graceless and
bitter Charles Tansley, and a less self—pitying prototype of

Mr. Ramsey, both of whom are defined by their rationalism. Two other
guests at the hotel at which they are all staying, Susan Warrington
and Arthur Venning, who become engaged on the day that Rachel and
Terence begin to recognize their love for each other, are pleasant,
but vapid. The ease with which they adapt to the ordinary conditions
of social life eliminates the possibility of seeing their relationship
in the same way that we see the love between Rachel and Terence.

For Susan and Arthur, marriage is a way to slide comfortably into
ordained places in the ordinary world of human affairs; for Rachel
and Terence, marriage and the love it objectifies is a means of
altering the terms of life lived in that world,

Thus, when the novel ends with Rachel's death from a tropical
disease, we are asked to consider the implications of her death in
relationship to the novel's themes: Does anything ultimately satisfy
in human experience? Or is all fulfillment illusory? Is human
experience redeemable through the creation and awareness of a state
of being that denies the ultimate reality of particularity and change,
0f separateness and death? Is love mankind's means for achieving that
redemption?

When Rachel dies, Terence momentarily at least responds to her

death as a liebestod:

 

32

So much the better—~this was death. It was nothing;

it was to cease to breathe. It was happiness, it

was perfect happiness. They had now what they had

always wanted to have, the union that had been

impossible while they lived. , . ,It seemed to him

that their complete union and happiness filled the

room with rings eddying more and more widely. He

had no wish in the world left unfulfilled. They

possessed what could never be taken from them.

The statement is unequivocal; the phenomenal world——the world of
impermanence——is "nothing,”« Reality is of the spirit, and the fulfill-
ment and redemption of human existence is in the manifestation of

this spirit in life. A love which transcends the temporal world is
captured by death at a moment which leaves "no wish. . .unfulfilled."
Such love is not destroyed by death, but like the spirit of the figures
on Keats' urn, is placed forever in relief against the temporality of
the phenomenal world.

We are reminded of the extremes of romantic thought about the
relationship between love and death; of Werther‘s suicide, of Keats'
lovers, "All breathing human passion far above," of Shelley in Adonais
'when he tells us to "Die,/Tf thou wouldst be with that which thou dost

seekl", of Verdi's Aida and Wagner‘s Isolde and Brunnhilde, and perhaps

even of the pathetic Aschenbach in Death in Venice. For behind

 

Terence's affirmation is the belief in romantic love as a singular
Inanifestation of the "apocalyptic marriage" between earth and heaven
vdnich'Meyer Abrams has shown to be at the center of the Romantics'

need to redeem the phenomenal world.5 The liebestod in The VOyage Out,

 

4Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, Inc., 1948), p. 353.

 

5Meyer Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W. W. Norton &
C°°a 1971), pp. 37—46, passim.

 

 

 

33

then, as it is in the Romantic tradition, is used to suggest the
possibility of achieving a reconciliation of the worlds of action
and thought, a reconciliation achieved despite the recalcitrance of
lived experience. The vision that Woolf has her characters try to
affirm is, then, essentially a romantic vision based upon a vertical
cosmology, and it is a question about the meaningfulness of what
Terence says at this point that is the central question of the novel.

Terence, himself, sets the problem when his response to Rachel's
death shifts abruptly from this affirmation of meaning to an anguished
crying out for his lost love (Rachel! Rachell). His retraction,
momentary or permanent we cannot know since these are his last thoughts
or words in the novel, prepares us for the denouement which is
primarily a collection of the varied responses to RaChel's death of
a variety of characters who think or express a range of conflicting
understandings on the subject of death. These final chapters end the
‘novel with a restatement of the sense of ambiguity which has
predominated throughout. But this ambiguity does not lie in Woolf's
inability to clarify her theme, but in her understanding of the human
condition which she describes. The theme which will prevail in
lfloolf's novels until the end of her career is established here: we
are compelled by our nature to seek to reconcile the life of action
xvith the standards established by the life of thought and meditation,
despite the insistent evidence that such a reconciliation is
impossible. "The question is the usual one—show to adjust the two
worlds."

Throughout the novel, there is a consistent rejection of all

values, personal or cultural, that are not based on this need to

 

 

34

redeem the self from the impermanence and meaninglessness that seems
to be the inevitable fate of phenomenal life. Like Camus! Caligula,
Wbolf narrows the field of meaningful human inquiry to two facts:
"Men die. And they are unhappy.u All values rooted in the temporal
'world are seen as ultimately unsatisfying in that they only distract
us from the truths which will insist themselves upon us. In short,

Memento Mori: nothing of the earth can ultimately satisfy.

 

The characters in the novel whom Woolf admires and endorses are
those who are preoccupied with the attempt to discover and live
according to spiritual reality. Woolf establishes this dualism
between spiritual and material values early in the novel through the
characterizations of Richard and Clarissa Dalloway. The Dalloways
are used as foils, in that their only role is to provide a contrast
to Helen and Rachel that establishes the hierarchy of values that
will prevail in the novel. The Dalloways are associated with those
‘whose lives are defined by the social conventions and philosophical
predispositions of upper middle-class English life. Although they
are among the most important characters at the beginning of the novel,
they disappear at the first port of call and are not heard of again.
'Woolf is not interested in what happens to them, but in what they
represent. What their presence in the novel is meant to tell us is
that positivistic humanitarianism, the dominant intellectual position
of the era, cannot satisfy man‘s need for spiritual fulfillment, and
that a life centered around these values is distorted and perhaps even
grotesquely ironic. Those who give up their dialogue with the
questions provoked by death, implies Woolf, give up their real lives

for a life of unreality.

 

35

The Dalloways are characterized by several values which they hold
in common: they are both chauvinistic about sexual rolesanhe by self
assertion and she by acceptance; they are jingoists in their belief in

British superiority and the Bax Britannia that it entails; they see

 

the arts as minor and perhaps destructive aspects of human lives when
they are afforded "undue" importance or when the commitment to the
world of art is too extreme; and they are believers in the idea of
salvation through social progreSSHein the positivistic idea of a world
in a constant process of evolution towards a moral and social utopia.

Of these values, the first two are used to establish the Dalloways
as unsympathetic characters. Such ideas in Woolf's works are always
the object of contempt, and sometimes of ridicule. The second set of
values serves a more profound function in the novel in that they
establish a philosophical position about the sources of human
redemption that is antithetical to the values endorsed by the
sympathetic characters in the novel and by the author herself. The
Dalloways‘ understanding of the role of art in the spiritual life of
'humanity, and their belief in evolutionary social progress, are both
aspects of the earthbound positivism which Woolf rejects. A brief
analysis of each of several scenes will establish that this rhetorical
role is the sole purpose for the appearance of the Dalloways in
The VOyage Out, and will provide an understanding of why Woolf
eliminated the Dalloways from the novel after concentrating on them
in the early chapters (Chap, ITTsVI, pp. 38v86).

Their attitude about art and aesthetic fulfillment and their
understanding of proper purpose in life are explicit in the first

conversation they have with the other passengers. At dinner, on their

36

first night on board, Helen Ambrose, at a loss even for interesting
small talk, casually asks Richard if he doesn‘t find the life of a
politician boring. First he, then his wife, use the question as an
opportunity for moral selfepuffery which centers around their beliefs
in the maturity of their own world view in contrast with the
irresponsibility of the artist:

"Don‘t you ever find it rather dull?" she asked,
not knowing exactly what to say.

Richard spread his hands before him, as if
inscriptions bearing on what she asked him.were to
be read in the palms of them.

"If you ask me whether I ever find it rather
dull," he said, "I am bound to say yes: on the other
hand, if you ask me what career do you consider on the
whole, taking the good with the bad, the most enjoyable
and enviable, not to speak of its more serious side,
of all careers, for a man, I am bound to say, 'The
Politician's.'"

"The Bar or politics. I agree," said Willoughby.
"You get more run for your money."

”All one's faculties have their play," said Richard.
"I may be treading on dangerous ground; but what I feel
about poets and artists in general is this: on your
own lines, you can‘t be beaten-—granted; but off your
own lines-~puff—-one has to make allowances. Now, I
shouldn't like to think that any one had to make allow—
ances for me."

"I don't quite agree, Richard," said Mrs, Dalloway.
"Think of Shelley. I feel that there's almost every—
thing one wants in 'Adonais.‘"

"Read 'Adonais' by all means," Richard conceded.
"But whenever I hear of Shelley I repeat to myself the
words of Matthew Arnold. ‘What a set! What a setl'"

This roused Ridley's attention. "Matthew Arnold?
A detestable prig!" he snapped.

"A prigvngranted," said Richard; "but, I think,

a man of the world. That's where my point comes in.
We politicians doubtless seem to you" (he had grasped
somehow that Helen was the representative of the arts)
"a gross commonplace set of people; but we see both
sides; we may be clumsy, but we do our best to get a
grasp of things. Now your artists find things in a
mess, shrug their shoulders, turn aside to their
visionSvnwhich I grant may be very beautiful——and leave
things in a mess. Now that seems to me evading one's
responsibilities. Besides, we aren‘t all born with
the artistic faculty."

37

"It's dreadful," said’Mrs. Dalloway, who, while
her husband spoke, had been thinking, "When I‘m.with
artists T feel so intensely~the delights of shutting
oneself up in a little world of one's own, with pictures
and music and everything beautiful, and then I go out
into the streets and the first child I meet with its
poor, hungry, dirty little face makes me turn round and
say, 'No, I can't shut myself uper won't live in a
world of my own. I should like to stop all the paintings
and writing and music until this kind of thing exists
no longer.' Don't you feel," she wound up, addressing

Helen, "that life‘s a perpetual conflict?"
Helen considered for a moment. "No," she said,

”I don't think I do."6

From the depiction of Richard's pompous sense of his own sagacity
suggested by his physical movements before he answers Helen's question
to Clarissa's commonaplace profundities at the end, the scene is
obviously an exercise in satire for Woolf. The humor of the scene is
grounded in the contrast between the Dalloways' self—assuredness and the
limitations of their understanding and imagination. Richard's patro-
nizing comments about art, which relegate it to a minor place in human
affairs, thinly veil a hostility toward art and the artist. For Richard,
tflle real problems of mankind have to do with the social world and for him
61 commitment to social melioration is the key to personal salvation:
'Wiell, when I consider my life, there is one fact I admit I'm proud of;
Ovring to me some thousands of girls in Lancashire—-and many thousands
tC) come after theme-can spend an hour every day in the open air which
thHEir mothers had to spend over their looms. I'm prouder of that, I

oflnfl, than I should be of writing Keats and Shelley into the bargain!"

6T}; Voyage Oat. pp. 446.-

7The Voyage Out, p. 65. Woolf's admiration for Shelley's most
eXtreme poetry is voiced in her review of Walter Edwin Peck's, Shelley:
EEE;_Life and Works when she praises Prometheus Unbound and
Efiipsychidion. She speaks of him as "'a being,’ 'not one of us,‘ but
batter and higher and aloof and apart." "'Not One of Us,'" Collected

Eases. Iv, 26.

 

 

 

38

Thus, the nineteenth century‘s ideal of progress toward a just
society is the soul of Richard‘s view of the world, His ideal is,
"In one worderUnity. Unity of aim, of dominion, of progress. The
dispersion of the best ideas over the greatest area."8 For Richard,
the world is a "complicated machine"; u, . .if the meanest screw fails
in its task, the proper working of the whole is imperiled."9 Rachel's
incredulous responses to Richard's profundities are unspoken, but
devastating in their rejection of such notions of progress and unity
in the world of human affairs:

It was impossible to combine the image of a lean black

widow, gazing out of her window, and longing for some—

one to talk to, with the image of a vast machine, such

as one sees at South Kensington, thumping, thumping,

thumping. The attempt at communication had been a

failure.10

She was haunted by absurd jumbled ideas--how, if one

went back far enough, everything perhaps was intelliv

gible; everything was in common; for the mammoths who

pastured in the fields of Richard High Street had

turned into paving stones and boxes full of ribbon,

and her aunts.
iRashel, although at times clearly intrigued by his self-asserting
Inasculinity, is never closer to Woolf's own understanding of the man

Ennd what he represents than she is in thoughts such as these. Such
1ideas of unity and progress are improbable to Woolf and to all of her
SSfinpathetic characters of whom RaChel and Helen are the first. The

itIcoherence of the phenomenal world and the permanence of life's

itljustices are constants in Woolf‘s world view; reason will never find

X

8The Voyage Out, p. 64.

 

 

9The Voyage Out, p, 66.
10
The Voyage Out, p. 66.

11The Voyage Out, p. 67.

 

39

a way to organize meaningfully social existence and make it just for
all. ”The lift man in the Tube is an eternal necessity," Mr. Ramsey
will conclude in a moment of illumination, although, "the thought was
distasteful to him,“ and he will decide that the only way to avoid
acknowledging this truth is "to find some way of snubbing the
predominance of the arts."12 If unity does exist, it is a unity that
exists apart from and perhaps despite our social existence.

This understanding gives meaning to the references made to Shelley,
Keats, and Wagner throughout the novel and to the Dalloways' condes—
cension to these artists and to those who are intrigued by them. The
Dalloways voice accepted attitudes——nothing too extreme--nothing too
immature—-and in doing so serve as embodiments of superficiality.
Richard‘s, "Read ‘Adonaisl by all means," is echoed by Clarissa's
comments to Rachel and Helen about music and Wagner in particular:

. . ."You know, she said, turning to Helen a little
mysteriously, "I don‘t think music's altogether good
for peoplew-I'm afraid not."

"Too great a strain?" asked Helen.

"Too emotional," said Clarissa. "One notices it
at once when a boy or girl takes up music as a
profession. Sir William Broadley told me just the
same thing. Don't you hate the kind of attitudes
people go into over Wagner—«like this——." She cast
her eyes to the ceiling, clasped her hands, and
assumed a look of intensity. "It really doesn't mean
that they appreciate him; in fact, I always think it's
the other way round. The pe0ple who really care about
an art are always the least affected. D'you know
Henry Philips, the painter?" she asked.

"I have seen him,” said Helen.

"To look at, one might think he was a successful
stockbroker, and not one of the greatest painters of
the age. That‘s what I like."13

k

12To the Lighthouse, p. 67.

13The Voyage Out, p. 67.

 

40

For the Dalloways, art is a thing to be kept in its place; for Woolf
and her sympathetic characters it is a subsuming facet of existence
since it is mankind‘s primary means of exploring the most important
problem of being human.‘ What the Dalloways think of as reality is
what, for WOolf, as for Shelley, ”stains the white radiance of
eternity." If redemption is possible for the human being, it is not
through progress in the social world, but in the dimensionless world
of imagination.

It is in relationship to this need, then, that we must understand
the liebestod which climaxes The Voyage Out. Love and art are
correlates in the novel in that both require the participant to enter
a world which can be fully affirmed only in the act of experiencing
that world. The fullest manifestations of both arouse incredulity
when experienced from without. Love and art are restrained, but not
contained by the known, by the fact, The seminal force in both is, in
fact, the need to overcome restraint. Both Rachel and Terence are
would—be artists who are preoccupied with the potentiality of art for
transcending facticity. Rachel, in her music, is absorbed by "an
invisible line [which] seemed to string the notes together, from.which
rose a shape, a building.14 Terence "want[s] to write a novel about
Silence, the things people don't say."15 These are the needs which
they bring to each other, rather than keep to themselves. Love is for
them a means of authenticating the spiritual world by making it the

seminal force in their temporal lives. It is, in short, the means of

I‘-

14The Voyage Out, p. 57.

15The Voyage Out, p. 216.

41

redeeming life from the fact of death in that it defines existence in
terms of a deathless spirit,

It is the question of the final value of this sense of redemption
that concludes the novel, and which is finally left unanswered. For
Jean Guiget,

Terence and Rachel live a few perfect moments,

islets amid waste spaces of uncertainty and yearning.
Their union is sealed in death, for nothing can

disturb it any more: it escapes the dissolving

factors of time and space. . . .True, this peace is
only a fleeting visitation, a moment in the life of

the soul, experienced through a kind of prolonged
anticipation. When the mind becomes once again aware
of its body and its existence, the revolt and loneliv
ness burst forth in a vain, heart—rending cry: "Rachel!
Rachel!” We may wonder what is the‘meaning of this
victory which is a defeat. Is it not that Rachel has
accomplished her voyage out alone, has reached the
haven of unity and peace while the others remain tossed
in the divizion of multiplicity, of uncertainty and
suffering?1

The answer to Guiget's rhetorical question should not be the "yes" which
it implies, nor should it be “no.” Among the varied responses to
Rachel's death in the novel's denouement, Mrs. Thornbury's is the most
explicit in giving the answer Guiget seeks:

The stunned feeling, which had been making it difficult
for her to think, gradually gave way to a feeling of
the opposite nature; she thought very quickly and very
clearly, and looking back over all her experiences,
tried to fit them together into a kind of order. There
was undoubtedly much suffering, much struggling, but,
on the whole, surely there was a balance of happiness—-
surely order did prevail. Nor were the deaths of young
peOple really the saddest things in life——they were
saved so much; they kept so much. The deadv-she called
to mind those who had died early, accidentally—were
beautiful; she often dreamt of the dead. And in time
Terence himself would come to feel—«She got up and began
to wander restlessly around the room.

X

l6Jean Guiget, p. 203.

17The VOyage Out, p. 360.

42

Her conclusion is an opiate to soothe her need for order, a product of
the human propensity to resolve its dilemmas at the expense of reality.
Such a response makes a virtue of death, instead of teaching us how to.
find meaning in spite of it. Certainly, there occurs-in Woolf's
writings evidence of her being at times "half in love with easeful
death” for its relief from the "worry strain and fret" of existence.
Her diary, particularly in the sections Leonard Woolf chose not to
publish, often reflects this nihilism.

But in her fiction, death is never a friend to man; it is a symbol
of the world of spatial and temporal finiteness that breeds despair.
Her characteristic response is the frustration and anger which we find
in another character‘s reaction to Rachel's death:

When she was alone by herself she clenched her fists

together, and began beating the back of the chair

with them. She was like a wounded animal. She

hated death; she was furious, outraged, indignant

with death, as if it were a living creature. She

refused to relinquish her friends to death8 She

would not submit to dark and nothingness.
Death cannot be affirmed as a value in itself; we can only reconcile
ourselves to it by discovering a way to deny its importance. It is
this that distinguishes the liebestod from nihilism. Our goal in life
is to discover and identify with something eternal. Death is
unimportant because it is not a part of this eternal world. It is not
because it fortunately and fortuitously ends life before the dissolving
factors of time destroy the value of awareness and identity achieved

that we are reconciled of it; rather, the state of being achieved is

itself timeless, and death is irrelevant to it. For those who have

E

18The Voyage Out, p. 359.

43

achieved participation in the eternal world through love, death, as
Terence said, “is nothing.”
Woolf neither denies nor affirms the final truth of this stance

in The Voyage Out. Here, as in all her fiction, "The difficulty is the

 

usual one-—how to adjust the two worlds." The imaginative affirmation
achieved by the “eager dissatisfied self" appears in relief against the
intellectual negation concluded by the "stern and philosophical self."
At the end of the novel, St. John Hirst is the principal spokesman
for the stern, philosophical self. His pessimism dominates the final
pages, acting as a partial coda to the novel's themes. For St. John,
Rachel takes her place among the shifting, incoherent events of
phenomenal existence: "Across his eyes passed a procession of objects,
black and indistinct, the figures of people picking up their books,
their cards, their balls of wool, their work-baskets, and passing him

one after another on their way to bed."19

And, we are to understand,
like Rachel, who acted and died, and whose existence signified nothing.
He sees no redemption from impermanence and meaninglessness; he is,
in fact, complacent in his sense of pathos. Death and change signify
to him the futility of all activity, all aspiration.

But St. John‘s response must be read in the context of values
established throughout the novel, a context which Woolf, through
Helen's perceptions, establishes at the beginning of the voyage:

The peOple in ships, however, took an equally

singular View of England. Not only did it appear to

them to be an island, and a very small island, but

it was a shrinking island in.which people were imprisoned.

One figured them first swarming about like aimless ants,

and almost pressing each other over the edge; and then,
as the ship withdrew, one figured them making a vain

l
9The Voyage Out, p. 375.

 

44 .

/
clamour, which, being unheard, either ceased or rose
into a brawl. Finally, when the ship was out of sight
of land, it became plain that the people of England
Were completely mute. The disease attacked other parts
of the earth; Europe shrank, Asia shrank, Africa and
America shrank, until it seemed doubtful whether the
ship would ever run against any of those wrinkled
little rocks again. But, on the other hand, an
immense dignity had descended upon her; she was an
inhabitant of the great world, which has so few
inhabitants, travelling all day across an empty universe,
with veils drawn before her and behind. She was more
lonely than the caravan crossing the desert; she was
infinitely more mysterious, moving by her own power and
sustained by her own resources. The sea might give
her death or some unexampled joy, and none would know
of it. She was a bride going forth to her husband, a
virgin unknown of men; in her vigour and purity she
might be likened to a§& beautiful things, worshipped
and felt as a symbol.

St. John's concluding pessimism is only one pole of the author's own
understanding of the events of the novel. Helen's sense of herself
as "a bride going forth to meet her husband" is symbolic of the human
need to reconcile the worlds of action and thought and her experience
is offered as evidence of the possibility of achieving such a
reconciliation. The "voyage out," then, is a voyage toward those
experienced intimations of meaning that spur the "eager and dis-
satisfied self” to action, and it is this voyage that St. John has
never taken. As a symbol, it is as valid and invalid as the
possibility of unity represented by Percival in The Waves, and as
real and unreal as the spiritual world in which the love between
Rachel and Terence exists. It is a state of mind, an attitude about
existence, a will to being despite the evidence of the phenomenal world.
Thus, it is significant that the denouement of the novel is

comprised of the conclusions reached by relatively minor characters who

 

2
0The Voyage Out, p. 32.

 

45

express a range of conflicting attitudes about the death they have
heard about, for uncertainty is what the novel leaves us with. Neither
the affirmation achieved by the "eager and dissatisfied self" nor the
pessimism that is the inevitable conclusions of the "stern and

philosophical self" finally prevails in The Voyage Out. Helen's silence

 

is, perhaps, the most meaningful comment of all on the events that have
transpired. It is the unheard music of Terence's proposed "novel about
silence, the things people don't say," and as such enforces the sense
of mystery in ambiguity which is the novel's final statement about the
human condition. Terence, in his abrupt shift from affirmation to
negation, has felt the polarities of the human condition, neither of
which prevail over the other in man's search for meaning. The conflict
between man's sense of the disorder, fragmentation, and meaninglessness

of phenomenal existence and his sense of a Spiritus Mandi that can

 

somehow transfigure that existence is, according to Woolf in The Voyage

 

Out, finally unresolvable. Mankind's need to "adjust the two worlds"

by achieving a synthesis of life and thought is for Woolf in The Voyage

 

Out what Shelley described as "the desire of the moth for the star" in

that it is as insistent as it is apparently futile.

Night and Day

 

If this golden rim were quenched, if life were
no longer circled by an illusion (but is it an
illusion after all?) then it ould be too dismal
an affair to carry to an end.

This statement of the principal theme of Night and Day is consistent

 

with what we have understood about the significance of the liebestod in

k

21Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (London: The Hogarth Press, 1919),
PP. 515-16.

 

46

flgme Voyage Out and can serve as a distillation of the meaning of both
rurvels. Like The Voyage Out, Night and Day is a philosophical love
:story. But the second novel differs from the first in that instead of
emphasizing the characteristics and implications of an achieved state
of union, it emphasizes the conflicting characteristics and needs of
each individual that seem to preclude the possibility of such an
achievement, yet which compel the fully aware person to search for it.
The VOyage Out establishes a relationship and ends it before it is asked

to weather the dissolving elements of time? Night and Day ends with an

 

anticipation of a love that will be lived out in time, and which will

 

be asked to recreate its tentative, spiritually redeeming center in
spite of the forces of dissolution which are the stuff of personality
and, therefore, the stuff of daily life. But in both novels, romantic
love is the mOde of approach to the necessary, though perhaps illusory,
"golden rim," and the possibility of love represents the possibility of
making manifest the life of the spirit in human action, In the novels
which follow these first two, romantic love will never again be asked
to serve as an important means of achieving spiritual redemption. But
the need to discover enduring meaning despite the apparent incoherence
Of the phenomenal world and its reflection in the individual personality
will remain the same, and paradigmatically, the assertion and
equivocation found in the passage which begins this paragraph expresses
the problem that is dealt with in all of her novels.
.A full discussion of Night and Dgy would require explorations of
.several.supporting themes, the most notable of which concerns the
anmum‘s Suffrage Movement and the larger question of the limitations

imposed on women by English society. But the problem of women's rights,

47

although a consistent motif in Woolf's writings, is peripheral to her
‘need to encounter in.her fiction the sexless realities of time, change,
and death. Therefore, this discussion will be limited to an analysis
Of the relationship between Katherine Hilberry and Ralph Denham which
is the central focus of the book and the key to understanding its
philosophical, rather than sociological, meaning,

Woolf's intention in creating this relationship is clear. The
public selves of the two characters are established early in the novel
as antipathetic, even hostile to each other, But the importance of
this conflict of personalities is tempered as the novel progresses by
both characters' rejection of the importance of personality as the
definitive factor of identity. Privately, both characters define
identity as a sense of selfhood which derives from imaginative

participation in a Spiritus‘Ngndi; both are dubious about the

 

significance of personality because it is a manifestation of the
incoherent, temporal world. What drives each of the characters
against the life defined by social circumstance and public personality
is what brings them.together. They share the belief that the struggle
to live authentically entails a perpetual conflict between the
spiritual self and the distracting influence of personality and
circumstance. Their decision to marry at the end of the novel is
made both because and in spite of their uncertainty about their
capacity for fulfilling their needs to live and identify themselves
in terms of their spiritual selves. 0n the one hand, they recognize
marriage as a risk in that it magnifies the consequences of failure
because it requires each of them to give up the relative safety of

prismate struggle; on the other hand, they see it as a means of

48

manifesting their sense of spiritual selfhood in the life of action
rather than accepting the conflict between action and thought as
permanently unresolvable and thereby accepting the doubleness of

existence as its necessary condition. Thus, in Night and Day, as in

 

The Voyage Out, love is asked to serve as a means of reconciling the

 

phenomenal and spiritual identities of the characters.

The sense of the disunity between public and private identity is
the most distinguishing characteristic of both Katherine and Ralph.
Katherine is a socially poised, intellectually competent young woman
whose principal identity to the peOple in her life derives from her
being a member of a well-known literary family, and from her being
single at an age when she should be thinking of marriage. As the
daughter of the editor of an important legal journal, and as the
granddaughter of Richard Alardyce, the novel's fictional version of
whoever the principal Victorian Age poet was, Katherine lives in the
midst of the English intellectual and literary world. We find her from
the beginning of the novel comfortable and satisfied with this world
as daily activity, but privately dubious about its ability to provide
her with meaning. In her private thoughts, she is attracted to the
study of mathematics and astronomy because of their precision and
impersonality:

Perhaps the unwomanly nature of science made her

instinctively wish to conceal her love for it. But

the more profound reason was that in her mind

mathematics were directly opposed to literature.

She would not have cared to confess how infinitely

she preferred the exactitude, the star-like imr

personality of the figures to the confusion,
agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.

 

22Night and Day, p. 40.

 

49

As the granddaughter of Richard Alardyce, living as she does in
an ambiance that is dominated by the memories of his greatness,
Katherine has come to equate literature with the vaguaries of social
life rather than with the search for truth which it represented in

The Voyage Out. For Katherine, the impersonality and precision of

 

mathematics is an alternative to a view of existence dominated by the
Victorian preoccupation with personality. But she reserves such
judgments for her private thoughts; in the world of surfaces she
continues to do what is expected of her——serving tea to her father's
friends and proteges, working with her mother on the biography of
Richard Alardyce, and conducting tours among the artifacts in the
house for visitors who come to do homage to the memory of the poet.
It is this public person who meets Ralph Denham, who has been invited
to tea because of an article he wrote for her father's legal journal.
Ralph is uncomfortable and hostile during the visit, responding to
Katherine's accomplished social ministrations with only slightly veiled
contempt for the family, and particularly for Richard Alardyce and
what he represents. Ralph responds to Katherine's elegy upon the
greatness of the past and the inadequacy of the present with an
indictment of the fascination with personality that is the source of
his hostility toward Katherine and her family: "'No, we haven't any
great men,‘ Denham replied. 'I'm very glad that we haven't. I hate
great men. The worship of greatness in the nineteenth century seems
to me to explain the worthlessness of that generation.'"23 Katherine

is perplexed and irritated by Ralph's incivility; she is unused to

 

23Night and Day, p. 13.

 

50

encountering her own real values in her social world and does not
recognize them. But the shared values behind this challenge to the
public values of England will become the foundation for the attraction
between Ralph and Katherine as she gradually becomes less willing to
live out the disunity between her public life and private awareness.

Although Katherine shares with Ralph the belief that personality
and society are the disguises of life rather than manifestations of its
reality, she is at first unwilling or unable to act on the knowledge.
She resigns herself to marriage with William Rodney, a character whose
sense of existence is bounded by the very values which Katherine
privately rejects. When speaking to Henry Otway, a black-sheep cousin
with whom she is sympathetic, she explains that she has accepted
William's proposal even though she anticipates that the life she will
lead with him.will be in conflict with her growing sense of reality:

I don't care much whether I ever get to know anything—-

but I want to work out something in figures——something

that hasn't got to do with human beings. I don't

want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I'm

a humbug--I mean I'm not what you all take me for.

I'm not domestic, or very practical or sensible,

really. And if I could calculate things, and use a

telescope, and have to work out figures, and know to

a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly

happy,22nd I believe I should give William What he

wants.
This resignation to the world of unreality is consistent with her
values at this point in the novel in that it derives from her sense of
the impossibility of reconciling the life of action with the life of
thought. On the surface she will be all she is expected to be; within,

she will search for that awareness that gives meaning to existence.

But she cannot sustain this resolve; we see operating in her the same

k

24Night and Day, p. 203.

51

need which in To the Lighthouse will temper Lily's resignation to the

 

necessity of living life on two levels: "a man must be whole."

Thus, it is no surprise to the reader when Katherine finally rejects
the certainties of a future life with William in favor of the unknowns
of a life with her fellow seeker, Ralph Denham. For despite their
shared sense of futility about the possibility of reconciling phenomenal
life with spiritual awareneSSe-"He [Ralph] felt a mixture of disgust
and pity at the figure cut by human beings when they try to carry out,
in practice, what they have the power to conceive"25—-Katherine and
Ralph will marry: "That may be what we have to face," he said. ”There
may be nothing else. Nothing but what we imagine."26

"What we imagine," for Ralph, is a reality which lies beneath the
surface of experience which ought to be capable of dominating the
conflicting evidences of the phenomenal world. We see in a lengthy
self—examination both Ralph's sense of the clash between the two worlds,
and his sense of the impossibility of reconciling them:

It is likely that Ralph would not have

recognized his own dream of a future in the fore-

casts which disturbed his sister's peace of mind.

Certainly, if any one of them had been put before

him he would have rejected it with a laugh, as the

sort of life that held no attractions for him. He

could not have said how it was that he had put these

absurd notions into his sister's head. Indeed, he

prided himself upon being well broken into a life of

hard work, about which he had no sort of illusions.

His vision of his own future, unlike many such fore-

casts, could have been made public at any moment

without a blush; he attributed to himself a strong

brain, and conferred on himself a seat in the House

of Commons at the age of fifty, a moderate fortune,
and, with luck, an unimportant office in a Liberal

 

25Night and Day, p. 319.

26Night and Day, p. 319.

52

Government. There was nothing extravagant in a
forecast of that kind, and certainly nothing dis“
honourable. Nevertheless, as his sister guessed,
it needed all Ralph's strength of will, together
with the pressure of circumstances, to keep his
feet moving in the path which led that way. It
needed, in particular, a constant repetition of a
phrase to the effect that he shared the common fate,
found it best of all, and wished for no other; and
by repeating such phrases he acquired punctuality and
habits of work, and could very plausibly demonstrate
that to be a clerk in a solicitor's office was the best
of all possible lives, and that other ambitions were
vain. 4

But, like all beliefs not genuinely held, this one
depended very much upon the amount of acceptance it
received from other people, and in private, when the
pressure of public opinion was removed, Ralph let him—
self swing very rapidly away from his actual circum—
stances upon strange voyages which, indeed, he would
have been ashamed to describe. In these dreams, of
course, he figured in noble and romantic parts, but
selfvglorification was not the only motive of them.
They gave outlet to some spirit which found no work
to do in real life, for, with the pessimism.which his
lot forced upon him, Ralph had made up his mind that
there was no use for what, contemptuously enough, he
called dreams, in the world which we inhabit. It some—
times seemed to him that this spirit was the most
valuable possession he had; he thought that by means
of it he could set flowering waste tracts of the earth,
cure many ills, or raise up beauty where none now
existed; it was, too, a fierce and potent spirit which
would devour the dusty books and parchments on the office
wall with one lick of its tongue, and leave him in a
minute standing in nakedness, if he gave way to it.
His endeavor, for many years, had been to control the
spirit, and at the age of twenty—nine he thought he
could pride himself upon a life rigidly divided into
the hours of work and those of dreams; the two lived
side by side without harming each other. As a matter
of fact, this effort at discipline had been helped by
the interest of a difficult profession, but the old
conclusion to which Ralph had come when he left college
still held sway in his mind, and tinged his views with
the melancholy belief that life for most people compels
the exercise of the lower gifts and wastes the precious
ones, until it forces us to agree that there is little
virtue, as well as little profit, in what once seemed
to us the noblest part of our inheritance.

 

27Night and Day, pp. 128-130.

53

Ralph, like Katherine, sees the roots of this world to be in something
ahuman and impersonal, perhaps even antiehuman. It is not insignificant
that both characters, when they come individually to the conclusion
that they can no longer continue to live lives so much at variance with
their profoundest awarenesses, see their choices as being either
isolation and work or a life with each other based to whatever extent
possible upon their shared awareness. We see again Virginia Woolf's
skepticism about the nineteenth century's belief that man, the
intelligence of nature, is also the fruition of its most seminal urges
toward perfection and completeness. The answer which we find repeatedly
to Tennysonian optimism about human perfectability and about the
centricity of humanity in the universal scheme invariably takes its
basic form from RaChel Vinrace's unspoken rebukes of Richard Dalloway's
positivism.28

Man's origins and his evolution define him only in the sense that
they are a constant reminder of his frailty and insignificance. Woolf
envisions no Adamic state to be returned to, as did the Romantics, nor
a Utopia to be achieved, as did both the Romantics and the Positivists:
"And yet, after gazing for another second, the stars did their usual
work upon the mind, froze to cinders the whole of our short human
history, and reduced the human body to an ape—like, furry form, crouching

amid the brushwood of a barbarous clod of mud."29

Thus, the recurrent
rejection of the dominant nineteenthvcentury views of man in Woolf's

writings is here based upon the rejection of the centricity of humanity

in the universal scheme. The worship of greatness in the nineteenth

 

8See quotations in my discussion of The Voyage Out, pp. 13—4.

29Night and Day, p. 30.

 

 

54

century, and the Titanism that resulted from the sense that man is the

reason d'etre of the universe, are consistently measured against the

fi‘

 

sense that the development of his powers of consciousness and
achievement were fortuitous rather than teleological. For Woolf and

her two principal spokesmen in Night and Day, the Spiritus Mundi does

 

 

not reach its apotheosis in man; man discovers his relationship to it
to be divorced from his humanness. In their differing ways, both the
Romantics and the Positivists tended to believe that the principle of
universal existence was made in the image of human potentiality. Woolf
rejected the sense of the importance of the human condition in
establishing her terms for redemption through consciousness.

Thus, the extent to which man partakes in the Spiritus Mundi is

 

not contingent upon his identity as man. The factors of his personality
are otiose, and the publicly observable life which results from their
manifestation is a disguise of existence rather than existence itself.
It is such a realization that marks the turning point in Katherine's
understanding of her relationship with Ralph. While walking with

Ralph in Kew Gardens, she is impressed with his ardent commitment to

the nature around him:

To her they were variously shaped and coloured petals,
poised, at different seasons of the year, upon very
similar green stalks, but to him they were in the
first instance, bulbs or seeds, and later, living
things endowed with sex, and pores, and susceptibilities
which adapted themselves by all manner of ingenious
devices to live and beget life, and could be fashioned
squat or tapering, flameecoloured, or pale, pure or
spotted, by processes which might reveal the secrets
of human existence. . , .It wakened echoes in all
those remote fastnesses of her being where loneliness
had brooded so long undisturbed.

. . .A law that might be inscrutable but was
certainly omnipotent appealed to her at the moment,
because she could find nothing like it in possession of

55

human lives. Circumstances had long forced her; as

the force most women in the flower of their youth, to
consider all that part of life which is conspicuously
without order; she had had to consider moods and wishes,
degrees of liking or disliking, and their effect upon
the people dear to her; she had been forced to deny her-
self any contemplation of that other part of life where
thought380nstructs a destiny independent of human
beings.

The shared awareness that is the result of their morning together
in Kew Gardens leads them to agree to establish a friendship which will
be free of the obfuscations of emotion: "At least, on both sides it
must be understood that if either chooses to fall in love, he or she
does so entirely at his own risk. Neither is under any obligation to
the other."31 Katherine accepts Ralph‘s offer and sees in the
acceptance no reason to end her engagement to William Rodney. That
engagement belongs to the "other world"; the friendship with Ralph is
a tentative step toward reconciling at least part of her external life
with the awareness of her private being:

Why, she reflected, should there be this perpetual

disparity between thought and action, between the

life of solitude and the life of society, this

astonishing precipice on one side of which the soul

is active and in broad daylight, on the other side

of which it was contemplative and dark as night?

Was it not possible to step from one to the other,

erect, and without essential change? Was this not

the chance he offered3Berewthe rare and wonderful

chance of friendship?

But her decision to accept the challenge of this partial attempt to
reconcile the two worlds in which she lives initiates an insistent

movement towards total unity. Ralph and Katherine will marry; their

intention will be to make manifest their vision of reality in the world

 

31Night and Day, p, 357.

32Night and Day, pp. 358-9.

56

which has seemed to both of them to be so necessarily alien to that
vision. They will marry despite their enduring skepticism about the
possibility of achieving such a unity; a man must be whole.

Night and Day ends with the lovers in this state of uncertain

 

anticipation. Unlike Rachel and Terence of The Voyage Out, they
understand precisely what Woolf understands: their love and what they
demand from it is very likely based upon illusion, yet this likely
illusion is the golden rim without which life would not be worth living.
As in The Waves, "effort" predominates; the words Katherine used to
reconcile herself to the indeterminate striving of her private world

of reflection earlier in the novel serve to reconcile us to the
ambiguity which these characters are compelled to live out: ”It's

life that matters, nothing but lifev-the process of discovering-—the

everlasting and eternal process, not the discovery itself at all."33

 

33Night and Day, p. 132.

 

CHAPTER III; ACCEPTANCE OF DUALISM IN

 

JACOB‘S ROOM AND MRS. DALLOWAY

While living in London, shortly before his journey through Europe
to Greece and his climactic epiphany at the Parthenon, Jacob reads

Plato's Phaedrus. I believe that the meanings of both Jacob's Room

 

and Mrs. Dalloway are implicit in the Phaedrus, and that attention paid
to the distinction that Socrates makes between man's life in time and
the soul's consciousness of and participation in eternity will enable

us to understand these very different novels as COntrasting expressions
of a single vision which represents a distinct stage in Virginia Woolf's
understanding of reality. Jacob's thoughts after finishing his

reading direct us to the aspect of the Phaedrus that is pertinent to

our understanding of these novels:

The Phaedrus is very difficult, And so, when at
length one reads straight ahead, falling into step,
‘marching on, becoming (so it seems) momentarily part
of this rolling, imperturbable energy, which has
driven darkness before it since Plato walked the
Acr0polis, it is impossible to see to the fire.

The dialogue draws to its close. Plato's argument
is stowed away in Jacob's mind, and for five minutes,
Jacob's mind continues on alone, into the darkness.
Then, getting up, he parted the curtains, and saw,
with astonishing clearness, how the Springetts
opposite had gone to bed: how it rained: how the
Jews and the foreign woman, at th end of the street,
stood by the pillar box, arguing.

 

1Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room (London: Hogarth Press Ltd., 1971),
pp. 108—9. ' '

57

58

Jacob is startled by the mundane world of human affairs that he sees
when he returns from his revery. He sees it "with astonishing
clearness," and what he sees is a world of isolated, inexplicable
events-sea field of activity that has for him neither coherence nor
meaning in that what he sees has no connection with the world of
meaning that Plato has posited and defined.

Jacob 's perceptions confirm the dualism upon which Socrates bases
his replies to Phaedrus. Socrates distinguishes between "true being,"
and the phenomenal state of human identity. He defines mundane
existence as a state in which man loses "the memory of holy things,

. .the colorless and formless and intangible essence [that] is
visible to the mind, which is the only lord of the soul." This supernal
reality, says Socrates, is not contingent upon mundane life for its
existence, but is, rather, ", . .enshrined in that living tomb which
we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the body, as in an
oys ter-shell , " 2

Socrates' distinction in Phaedrus between the supernal and the
mundane, particularly his melancholy acceptance of the irreconcilability
of the two worlds, is a useful starting point for exploring the

thematic implications of Jacob's Room and Mrs. Dalloway. The two

 

novels, despite the remarkable differences between the personalities
and overt values of their protagonists, are related thematically.
Together, the novels represent a stage in Woolf's lifelong effort to
define adequately the relationship between the "stern and philosophical

self" and the "eager and dissatisfied self," with Jacob as the overt

2"Phaedrus," Works of Plato, trans. and ed. by B. Jowett
(New York: Dial Press), pp. 4019.409 passim.

 

59

spokesman for the former, and Clarissa for the later. Both novels
contrast what the characters perceive as the unity, permanence, and
meaningfulness of the supernal world with the fragmentation, disorder,
and meaninglessness of mundane existence. Further, these novels,
unlike the novels which precede and follow them, depict protagonists
who accept this dualism and seek only to adjust their own lives to the
reality they perceive. This acceptance contrasts with the strivings

toward unity we saw as central to the meanings of The Voyage Out and

 

Night and Day and which recur in To the Lighthouse and The waves. If,

 

as I have said in my first chapter, the central problem behind all of
Virginia Woolf's novels was the problem of "how to adjust the two

worlds," then it is clear that_Jacob's Room and Mrs. Dalloway are

 

 

products of a period in her life when she had adjusted the worlds by
accepting their irreconcilability and refusing the struggle for whole—
ness of identity that beset her at other times in her life,

The two novels ought to be studied together because their title
characters represent alternative, but compatible adjustments of the
conflict between the "stern and philosophical self" and the "eager and
dissatisfied self." The central questions which result from this
understanding of reality are clear; if the world of meaning is
unrelated to the world of action, how can human existence be valued?'
What legitimate motivations can exist for man if he accepts this belief
in the meaninglessness of his actions? Taken alone, each novel is
potentially misleading about the answers Woolf offers. Although it
is clear that the author empathizes with both Jacob and Clarissa and
that readers are expected to value them as people and as thinkers,

their values seem contradictory. Jacob seems to renounce the life of

60

action, while Clarissa seems to celebrate it. When we are told at the
end of the novel that Jacob "tore his ticket to pieces, and walked
away,"3 we assume that he has fully renounced any further concern for
life, and our assumption is supported, if not confirmed, by the fact
that the author tells us nothing more about him but for the cryptic

announcement of his death, But Mrs. Dalloway ends differently. The

 

party that has been anticipated throughout the novel goes on, its spirit
only momentarily deflected by the news of Septimus' suicide. Clarissa,
though "She felt very much like him-”the young man who had killed
himself," and though she "felt glad he had done it: thrown it away
while they went on living,"4 continues to believe in the value and
importance of her party, and we are asked to believe in it, too.

Her thoughts about Septimus, particularly the empathy she
expresses, are indications of links that exist not only between her
and Septimus, but also between her conception of the world and
Jacob's, whose renunciation of life is motivated by perceptions
similar to those that drive Septimus to suicide. The supernal and
mundane worlds exist sideebye-side in Clarissa's consciousness, as
they do in Jacob's, and the irreconcilability of the two worlds is
as fundamental to her understanding of the human situation as it is
for Jacob. What appear to be contradictions between their responses
to the questions they seek to answer are really the result of different
emphases in their temperaments and personalities.

Jacob is associated principally with the mind: Clarissa with the

 

3Jacob's Room, p, 173.

 

4Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (London: Hogarth Press, 1968),
P. 204.

 

61

heart. Jacob's negation signifies the power of the mind to repudiate
the illusory/meanings of human action and consequently to paralyze the
will to act; Clarissa's affirmation signifies the power of the heart to
sustain a belief in the value of experience in the face of these
perceptions of meaninglessness. Something in each of them shares the
perceptions of the other. Clarissa‘s empathy with the nihilism.which
she assumes was the motivation of the young man who had "thrown it all
away" is paralleled by Jacob's fascination and empathy with the
sensuality of the prostitutes he encounters and of the peasants he
observes. Jacob and Clarissa represent alternative responses to
questions that man can answer only With equivocation. Thus, when Sally

Seton asks, near the end of Mrs. Dalloway, "What does the brain matter,

 

compared with the heart?"5 we should not assume that the question is,
from Virginia Woolf's perspective, entirely rhetorical. The heart,
indeed, is the source of the will to overcome the negation and paralysis
dictated by the intellect. But feeling no more repudiates the under—
standings that derive from a dispassionate appraisal of life than

does Yeats' 'Self" repudiate his "Soul's" belief that, "Only the dead

can be forgiven,‘ in his "Dialogue of Self and Soul." In Jacob's Room

 

and Mrs, Dalloway, Virginia Woolf offers her readers an image of man

 

that shows him caught in the tension between feeling and thought,
action and contemplation, will and paralysis.

The structure of ideas which unifies the themes of these novels
also helps to explain the remarkable technical differences between the

two novels, particularly the different methods of characterization

 

#—

5Mrs. Dalloway, p. 213.

 

62

used to portray Jacob and Clarissa. Where Jacob is ethereal, Clarissa
is concrete, Readers tend to remember Clarissa as a distinct and vivid
personality, whereas the details of Jacob‘s personality seem fleeting,
even ephemeral. Jacob is rendered in such a way that he strikes the
reader as a character virtually without personality who seems to be
present at his experiences only as a perceiving eye. Clarissa by
contrast is very much an individual, tangibly present in the events
enacted and recalled. In Jacob, we see a foreshadowing of the
"characterless" characterization that Woolf was later to claim was her
intention while writing The Waves; in Clarissa we see the engaging
fullness of personality that we will encounter again in Mrs. Ramsey in

To the Lighthouse.

 

The different methods are perhaps best indicated by the relative

density of characterization; Jacob's Room, the shorter of the two

 

novels, records events from the whole of Jacob's twenty—six—year life,

while Mrs. Dalloway is devoted to the thoughts and actions of one day.

 

It is possible to account for this difference by understanding it as
the result of an evolution in Mrs. Woolf‘s fictional technique.
Certainly, Mrs. Woolf's lifelong preoccupation with finding an adequate
fictional form tends to confirm this position as do many of her

comments about the writing of Mrs. Dalloway. But settling for this

 

key to the differences between the two novels does not take into

account that The Waves and Between the Acts, both written after

 

Mrs. Dalloway, are much more like Jacob's Room in method than they

 

are like Mrs. Dalloway, thus suggesting that the remarkable differences
between the two novels are less the result of an evolution in her

fictional technique than is usually assumed. I believe that the

63

differences are better explained by seeing them as reflections of
Woolf's thematic intentions.

I do not mean to suggest that Woolf conceived of these novels as
complements to each other. Rather, I believe that their remarkable
differences derive quite naturally from the dualism she accepted at
this time in her life. In her earlier and later novels, we find her
protagonists struggling against the implications of this dualism in
their attempts to achieve redemption through personal integration. But

that characteristic struggle, or "effort” as she calls it in discussing

 

 

The Waves, is suspended in Jacob‘s Room and Mrs. Dalloway. Jacob and
Clarissa share the belief that the valid claims of both aspects of
man's divided nature are irreconcilable. Clarissa, who loves life so
fully, who conceives of her activities as "an offering" to life, is
capable of empathizing with a suicidal young man whom she does not even
know because she understands that human experience is enveloped by a
shadow that denies it meaning. When Clarissa tells us, "There was an
emptiness about the heart of life, an attic room,"6 we understand why
Woolf considered ending the novel with her suicide instead of with her
triumphant fulfillment at the party that was so important to her.7
Like Jacob and Septimus, Clarissa has within her both the inclination
and the capacity to renounce life. And as for them, this inclination
derives from the belief that the human desire for integrated selfhood,
for wholeness of identity, is a desire that man is incapable of

satisfying.

 

6Mrs. Dalloway, p. 35.

7Mrs. Woolf asserts in the "Introduction" to the 1925 edition
. . .that Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps
merely die at the end of the party.”

64

 

In her essay, ”On Not Knowing Greek,” published in The Common
Reader shortly before the publication of Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
gives us her clearest statement of her understanding of reality during
this period of her life. Speaking of her admiration for the characters
in Greek literature, she says,

There is a sadness at the back of life which they do

not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their

standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor

and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is

to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the

vagueness, of the confusion, of tge Christianity and

its consolations, of our own age.

The "vagueness, confusion, and consolation" that Woolf here attributes
to Christianity certainly refers to the Christian commitment to a belief
in the ultimate wholeness of the fabric of existence, a wholeness in
which, as St. Paul says, ”we live, and move, and have our being." In
more general terms, Woolf's words here also indict not only
Christianity, but all synthetic understandings of human existence, and
by implication, even the struggles for wholeness of identity that
motivate the central characters of her earlier novels. Although the
aspirations for synthesis of life and thought that motivate Rachel and
Terence, and Katherine and Ralph, can hardly be understood as
"Christian," they are certainly romantic in their implications, as

the frequent references to Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Wagner

suggest. How far is romanticism from Christianity in regard to this

issue? When we recall that Wbrdsworth, in A Preface to the Lyrical

 

Ballads, reminds us of Paul's words when he speaks of "the grand

elementary principal of pleasure, by which [man] knows, and feels,

 

8Virginia Woolf, Cgllected Essays (4 vols; New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1967), I: 13.

 

65

and lives, and moves" in his own attempt to define the incarnational
relationship between spirit and action, we understand how closely
related they are.

Christianity and romanticism are similar in that they both posit
the existence of a wholeness that denies the finality of the dualism
of life and thought that Woolf believed the Greeks perceived and
accepted. In Jacob and Clarissa, we see what WOolf offers as
conflicting but what she understands to be equally legitimate responses
to this dualism. Through Jacob, who represents the "stern and
philosophical self," we explore the "sadness at the back of life";
through Clarissa, who represents the "eager and dissatisfied self,"
we explore that aspect of man that is "alive to every tremor and gleam
of existence." In short, Jacob is the human mind; Clarissa, the human

heart.

Jacob's Room

 

The themes of this novel derive from Woolf's continuing
preoccupation with understanding the relationship between human
identity and what she intuited as eternal reality. The novel is
single—minded in this respect, and the effect of this preoccupation
upon the substance of the novel is the almost total omission of
character depiction and social commentary that do not expand upon or
clarify its philosophical themes. Jacob is an abstract creation, made
tangible by a few carefully selected details. His individuality is
of little importance to the aims of the novel. Rather, he represents

what Socrates called ". . .the mind of the philosopher [which] alone

66

has wings"9 in its evolution from cradle to grave. It is for this
reason that we do not come to know Jacob as fully as we come to know
the typical intellectual hero of the streamaofrconsciousness novel, or
even as we come to know Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsey in the novels

written immediately after Jacob's Room.

 

As in The Waves, Woolf intended no characterization, because

The Waves and Jacob's Room are her most direct attempts to explore

 

reality unhindered by what she elsewhere called ", . .the cramp and
confinement of personality." Her'method in Jacob's Room.was to create

a protagonist who had the emotionless purity of vision that she some—
times sought for herself. She sought to eliminate the ulterior claims
of personality from the human search for truth by striving to eliminate
personality itself from the make—up of the protagonist. Thus, I believe
that Woolf's stated intention to write The Waves as ". . .an abstract,

mystical, eyeless book" is also pertinent to understanding Jacob's Room.

 

Jacob's Room is among the most ethereal of her novels because she
intended that Jacob should represent the contemplative mind, freed from
the conquions of personality and emotion.

This discussion of Jacob's Room, then, will attempt both to

 

demonstrate the validity of this understanding of Virginia Woolf's
intentions for Jacob, and to explain the relationships between these

intentions and the other thematic aspects of the novel. Jacob's Room

 

is in large part a commentary on Western intellectual history. It is
intended as a repudiation of those Christian and Post—Christian

understandings of man, particularly Romanticism and Positivism, which

 

9”Phaedrus," p. 408.

67

emphasize the interconnectedness between corporeal life and spiritual
fulfillment.10 The dualism that Jacob comes to understand is Virginia
Woolf's answer to these assertions of interconnectedness. What is
ultimately real to Jacob is what Socrates defined in the Phaedrus as
the eternal, undifferentiated soul. Physical existence, while not
personally odious to him, is an obstacle in his search for
identification with that spirit. Such a conclusion is directly at
odds with the Christian, Romantic, and Positivistic worldsviews which
assert in their own ways a necessary contingency between corporeal life
and spiritual fulfillment. For Jacob, as for Socrates in Phaedrus,
"The whole object of life is to free this divine element from its
temporary union with a body."11

Establishing the novel's commentary on Western intellectual
history will provide essential background for understanding the special

nature of Jacob's role, so it is with that discussion that I will

begin. Woolf is both explorative and assertive in Jacob's Room. Very

 

early in the novel we discover what she is sure of: modern man values
himself too highly. The ideas and myths from which he derives his
self—conceptions and values are too intent upon establishing a

flattering role for mankind in the enactment of a universal history.

 

10See Christianity and Classical Culture, by Charles Norris

Cochrane, and, Creation: the Impact of an Idea, edited by Daniel
O'Connor and Francis Oakley, particularly the essays by Michael Foster,
"The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural
Science," and by Hans Jonas, "Jewish and Christian Elements in the
Western PhilOSOphical Tradition," for good discussions of the relation—
ships between Christianity and Positivism, and Meyer Abrams, Natural
gupernaturalism, for a good discussion of the Christian roots of
English Romanticism.

llDaniel O'Connor, "Introduction: Two Philosophies of Nature,"
Creation; the Impact of an Idea, p. 18.

 

 

 

68

The novel establishes parameters for man's relationship to the universe
unequivocally, both through Jacob's responses to the world around him
and through essayvlike interpolations by the author which often merge
with Jacob's thoughts in such a way as to make the author's perceptions
indistinguishable from her character's. The persistent suggestions of
the ephemeralness of man and the insignificance of his activities and
accomplishments are consistently derived from perceptions which measure
the brevity of human history against the boundlessness of time, the
human sense of selfsimportance and superiority against the leveling
realization that what is enduring in and therefore ultimately important
in the phenomenal universe exists as fully in a crab as in a human
being.12 The only traditional metaphysical value which endures the
novel's assault on modern man's selfedefinition is the value of human
consciousness, and even this evaluation is to some extent diminished

by the pointed rebuttal of the romantic understanding of the creative
role of consciousness in the actualization of reality. The rhetorical
question with which Shelley concludes "Mont Blanc," ("And what were
thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,/ If to the human mind's
imaginings/ Silence and solitude were vacancy") is answered implicitly
as Jacob reflects on the realities suggested by the Parthenon: "The
extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white,
again yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, of

the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere

 

*—

12”. . .each insect carries the globe of the world in its head."
Jacob's Room, p, 162.

69

dissipated in trifles. But this durability exists quite independently

c "13

of our admiration. .
As I noted in my earlier discussion of The Waves, the "spiritual

energy" that Jacob intuits in this scene is defined elsewhere by

Woolf as ". . .the thing that exists when we aren't there." I

understand the "we" in this passage to signify both the individual

personality and human natureeethat which distinguishes one human being

from another and humanity from the other phenomena of nature. Woolf,

in Jacob's Room and elsewhere in her writing, is always vague about

 

expressing what this thing iSeecertainly she never defines it as a
Platonic world of eternal formSewbut she is consistent in her
understanding that it has nothing to do with individual personality
or with human nature. To confirm this, we have only to recall
Katherine's fascination with mathematics and her meditation on Kew
Gardens, or to look ahead to Mrs. Ramsey's "losing personality" to

' or to Bernard's question,

become a "wedgeeshaped core of darkness,‘
in The Waves, "How to describe the world seen without a self?" James

Naremore, in The World Without a Self,points out that "Mrs. Woolf's

 

novels are full of the desire to merge with the 'hosts Opposed to the

'”14 But that such an understanding of man's relationship to

ego.
eternal reality is in accord with both Plato and the dualism that
dominates Greek thought, and that it contradicts fundamental

ontological premises of Christianity, Romanticism, and Positivism is

 

l3Jacob's Room, p. 147.

 

14James Naremore, The World Without a Self (New Haven and London,

Yale University Press, 1973), p, 104.

70

clear. The Christian doctrines of creation, incarnation, and
resurrection, the Romantic beliefs in ”Natural Supernaturalism" and

the creativeeconsciousness of the individual, and the Christianeinspired
humanism.of the Positivists are ideas which firmly tie human spiritual
fulfillment to the earth, thus asserting a necessary contingency between
the separate realities of Greek dualism.15 Such ideas imbue corporeal
life with a spiritual potentiality that is absent in Greek thought.

For the Greeks, the phenomenal world is accidental and
inexplicable, the consequence of separation from the purity of spiritual
existence. Socrates' concluding metaphor in the following passage
expresses his understanding of the irreconcilability of the world of
human action and the world of eternal reality:

For as has been already said, every soul of man has

in the way of nature beheld true being; this was the
condition of her passing into the form of man. But
all men do not easily recall the things of the other
world; they may have seen them for a short time only,
or they may have been unfortunate when they fell to
earth, and may have lost the memory of the holy things
which they saw there through some evil and corrupting
association. Few there are who retain the remembrance
of them sufficiently; and they, when they behold any
image of that other world, are rapt in amazement; but
they are ignorant of what this means, because they have
no clear perceptions. For there is no light in the
earthly copies of justice or temperance or any of the
higher qualities which are precious to souls: they
are seen but through a glass dimly; and there are few
who, going to the images, behold in them the realities,
and they only with difficulty. They might have seen
beauty shining in brightness, when, with the happy band
following in the train of Zeus, as we philosophers did,
or with other gods as others did, they saw a vision and
were initiated into most blessed mysteries, which we
celebrated in our state of innocence; and having no
feeling of evils as yet to come; beholding apparitions

 

lSCOmte in System of Positive Polity and Feurbach in The Essence of
Christianity expressed the belief that something like the harmony and
comfort that Christians believe will Characterize the Millennium can be
achieved through the worship of the spiritual instincts in man, though
they deny any supernatural basis for these instincts.

 

71

innocent and simple and calm and happy as in a mystery;

shining in pure light, pure ourselves and not yet

enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about, now

that we are imprisoned in the body, as in an oystervshell.

Let me linger thui6long over the memory of scenes which

have passed away.
Jacob's acceptance of these ideas puts him at odds with the values of
his society. His reading of the Phaedrus and the epiphany experienced

Q—q—————-

at the Parthenon focus the impressions of his youth into a sweeping
repudiation of the values of modern man. The homocentric myth of
Christianity, the progress myth of Positivism, and the aforementioned
creative-consciousness myth of Romanticism are each seen as products of
an unrealizable human need to unify the worlds of action and thought.
The homocentric universal plan of Christianity, a myth of human meaning
deriving from creationist metaphysics and the belief in a sentient,
personal God, is discredited by Jacob's recurrent perceptions of the
boundlessness of time and the insignificance of human activity in the
workings of the universe. Ideas of human primacy and progress that
characterize the response of Positivism to the theories of Lyell and
Darwin are discredited by Jacob's recurrent perceptions of the
unchanging, unevolving, eternal recurrence of true being and by the
related rejection of the reality of time. What Jacob found in Greek
thought was an explanation and a confirmation of feelings and
perceptions whiCh had always characterized his responses to the
values of his society. He tells his friend, Bonomy, that he hopes to

visit Greece every year of his life, and when asked why, he replies,

"There's none of this European mysticism."17

 

l6"Phaedrus," pp. 408:9.

l7Jacob's Room, p. 164.

 

72

Jacob's statement to Bonomy helps us to understand why Woolf
tells us very little about Jacob's personality or social life. She
characterizes him only to the extent necessary to establish the intrinsic
separation of physical life and spiritual reality. We are told of only
one lasting relationship that he forms with another human being, and
even that seems to have very little significance to him in that the
other party, Bonomy, is depicted as a sounding board for his ideas
rather than as an intimate friend. Jacob's relationship with his family
is barely alluded to in the novel, surfacing only in his childhood and
upon the news of his death. Twice in the novel his brother cried out
for Jacob in a way that suggests that his anguish derives from the
sense in which Jacob is incomprehensible to him. But the import of
this distance between Jacob and his family is not to be found in an
analysis of particular familial relationships, We have, in fact, little
idea what Jacob's attitude toward his family was. Rather, his brother's
anguished cries remind us that what Jacob chiefly signifies in this
novel has nothing whatever to do with interpersonal relationships.

Even the several descriptions of Jacob's attempts to develop
relationships with women emphasize this detachment of his spiritual
self from the experiences of life. It is of course significant that
he is most attracted to and most comfortable with women who are
uncomplicatedly sensual, Laurette, Fanny, and Florinda are attractive
to him precisely because they in no way engage his spiritual selfhood,
but rather simply accept life without explanation. He says of Florinda,
"If she had had a mind, she might have read with clearer eyes than we
can. She and her sort have solved the question by turning it to a

trifle of washing the hands nightly before going to bed, the only

 

73

difficulty being whether you prefer your water hot or cold, which being

. . . . . . 18 .
settled, the mmnd can go about ltS busrness unassailed." Florinda

"u . .had called him Jacob without asking his leave. She had sat upon

his knee. Thus did all good women in the days of the Greeks.”19
Such relationships reflect, for Jacob, the truth about interpersonal
relationships and corporeal life in its totality. The events of life
have no spiritual meaning. Experience is accidental and inexplicable,
and as a consequence its value is determined only by the satisfactions
it produces. By contrast, his relationships with Clara and Sarah are
entirely unfulfilling because these relationships are complicated by
spiritual demands. The life of the spirit is fully contemplative and
has nothing to do with corporeal existence, and as a consequence, has
nothing to do with personality, interpersonal relationships, or social
obligation.
We are first alerted to the need to understand Jacob as an
archetype of the contemplative mind rather than as an individual
personality in the cryptic descriptions of his childhood that comprise
the first two chapters. He communicates with no one, and no one responds
to him. 'Woolf limits her depiction of his responses to the world to

those that are inchoate intimations of the understandings he will achieve

later in life. Bernard Blackstone's suggestion that Jacob's Room can be

 

read as a commentary on Wordsworth's Ode directs our attention to the

archetypal significance of the events recorded in these chapters.2

 

 

l8Jacob's Room, p. 78.

19Jacob's- Room, p. 75.

 

20 . . .
”The novel is developing into a commentary on Wordsworth's Ode."

Virginia Woolf; a Commentary (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), p. 63.

74

Woolf, like Wordsworth, is not concerned with the individuality
of the child, but rather with the purity of innocent perception. The
inchoate realizations of the child are elevated above the evolved,
collective wisdom of society. A salient point for establishing this
connection between Woolf's and Wordsworth's intentions is the similar

role played by Wordsworth's ”Homely Nurse,‘ who in the Ode unconsciously
tries to induce the child to "Forget the Glories he hath known," and

by Jacob's Nanny, who together with his mother is a "conspirator
plotting the eternal conspiracy of hush and clean bottles."21 The
nurses, like Blake's "woman old” in “The Mental Traveller," attempt to
distract the child from his spiritual awareness by comfort and seduction.
Later in the novel, Mrs. Wbolf will again suggest an archetypal conflict
between spiritual awareness and the acceptance of corporeal life when
she concludes a description of several of Jacob's professors by noting

that, "A woman, divining the priest, would invariably despise."22

This is not to say that Wordsworth's Ode and Jacob's Room finally

 

have much in common in their understandings of the human condition,

for they do not. Professor Blackstone has suggested that Jacob's Room

 

is a commentary on the Ode. I assume that what he meant by this is
that the novel can be read as an acceptance of Wordsworth's belief in
the value of the spontaneous intuitions of youth, but as a repudiation
of Wordsworth's sense of a providential spirit of earthly rebirth that
leads him to conclude that "To me and the meanest flower that blows

can give/ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." The tone of

 

21Jacob's Room, p, 11,
22

 

Jacob's Room, p. 39.

 

75

Jacob's Room is more consistently somber than is the Ode's; the

 

intimations of eternal reality that the novel explores are expressed
not in observations and recollections of the zestful happiness of
children at play in nature, but in rocks, crabs, stark chimneys over
Cornish hills, the ”enormous mind" of the British Museum, and the
spiritual energy embodied in the Parthenon that makes it "likely to
outlast the entire world."23 And, while Wordsworth's Ode concludes in
an affirmation that attests to the existence of a redemptive power that
finally transfigures human existence and synthesizes man's spirit with
the life he lives, Jacob's Rogm_ends with a melancholy and fearful cry
of uncertainty which serves as an appropriate denouement for a novel
that sees no connection between the two worlds in which man lives.

That Jacob is to be understood as an archetype of the contemplative
mind rather than as an individual personality is also suggested by
Woolf's including so little description, other than what I noted above,
about his relationship with his family. Jacob is isolated from his
family, but we cannot really say that he is alienated from them for we
are given no indication that he thinks about them at all. His
consciousness seems suspended above the experiences of daily life,
acknowledging only those details of existence which suggest the nature
of the human relationship to spiritual reality. Woolf's use of this
extreme method in describing Jacob's childhood anticipates the emphases
in the ensuing description of his life. Thus, when his brother, early
in the novel, calls out “Jaencobf Jawwcob!" Woolf notes that, "The

voice had an extraordinary sadness, pure from all body, pure from all

 

23Jacob's Room, p. 148.

76

' going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking

against the rocks $9.30 it sounded."24 What Jacob represents for Woolf

. I
pa331on,

' and

is a state of being "pure from all body, pure from all passion,‘
as a consequence free of individuality, of personality, and of any
significant involvement with the corporeal world.

Virginia Woolf consistently tells us, in this novel and in other
writings, that we can never really know anyone else. We see that the
reason for this is not only that the human personality, because it is
in a process of constant change, is inexplicable, but that the
archetypal human consciousneSSHethat aspect of being that is not
personalityaeis essentially inexpressible. Thus, the isolation of
Jacob's childhood anticipates the isolation of his twenty-six-year life.
Despite the fact that we assume that he leads an active life comprised
of the normal experiences of a young man, we come to know only that
aspect of his being that transcends these experiences. He lives and
dies a hermit of the intellect, unknown by all who come in contact with
him. He says for WOolf, as Manfred said for Byron, that "The Tree of
Knowledge is not the Tree of Life," and like Byron, whose "complete

"25 he chose when offered as a parting gift any

works in one volume
object from his Latin tutor's study, he will come to see an essential

dualism between the spiritual and the corporeal worlds.

 

Much of the thematic structure of Jacob's Room is suggested in the
first important glimpse we are given of the workings of Jacob's mind.

The scene captures what appears to be an inchoate first consciousness

Of the implications of death;

 

‘fi—K

24Jacob's Room, p. 7.

f __‘_

25Jacdb'szoom, p. 19.

 

77

'The rock was one of those tremendously solid brown,
or rather black, rocks which emerge from.the sand like
something primitive. Rough with crinkled limpet shells
and sparsely strewn with locks of dry seaweed, a small
boy has to stretch his legs far apart, and indeed to
feel rather heroic, before he gets to the t0p.

But there, on the very top, is a hollow full of
water, with a sandy bottom; with a blob of jelly stuck
to the side, and some mussels. A fish darts across. The
fringe of yellOWvbrown seaweed flutters, and out pushes
an opaleshelled cra rer¢~

"Oh, a huge crab,“ Jacob murmuredeese
and begins his journey on weakly legs on the sandy
bottom. Now! Jacob plunged his hand. The crab was
cool and very light. But the water was thick.with sand,
and so, scrambling down, Jacob was about to jump, holding
his bucket in front of him, when he saw, stretched
entirely rigid, side by side, their faces very red, an
enormous man and woman.

An enormous man and woman (it was early-closing
day) were stretChed'motionless, with their heads on
pocket—handkerchiefs, side by side, within a few feet of
the sea, while two or three gulls gracefully skirted the
incoming waves, and settled near their boots.

The large red faces lying on the bandanna handker—
chiefs stared up at Jacob. Jacob stared down at them.
Holding his bucket very carefully, Jacob then jumped
deliberately and trotted away very nonchalantly at
first, but faster and faster as the waves came creaming
up to him and he had to swerve to avoid them, and the
gulls rose in front of him and floated out and settled
again a little farther on. A large black woman was
sitting on the sand. He ran towards her.

"Nanny! Nanny!" he cried, sobbing the words out
on the crest of each gasping breath.

The waves came round her. She was a rock. She was
covered with the seaweed which pops when it is pressed.
He was lost.

There he stood. His face composed itself. He was
about to roar when, lying among the black sticks and
straw under the cliff, he saw a whole skulls-perhaps a
cow's skull, a skull, perhaps, with the teeth in it.
Sobbing, but absentnmindedly, he ran fart? r and farther
away until he held the skull in his arms.

The full significance of this scene does not become clear until we

experience the fullness of the novel, but in retrospect, despite the

 

2 ..
6Jacob's Room, pp. 7v8.

78

cryptic rendering of perception in the scene, its meaning seems clear,
Why does Jacob respond so curiously and passionately to these objects?
Bernard Blackstone's belief that this scene "does not harden into
symbol"27 is perhaps true, and is consistent with Woolf's stated
attitudes toward univocal symbolism in literature, but does not seem
to take into account that the events convey an explicable meaning that
is thematically coherent with the substance of the novel as a whole.

Both Jacob's recoil from his Nanny and his embrace of the skull
signify his rejection of the corporeal world of change and death as
aspects of true being. The trauma he has experienced is resolved by
his embrace of the skull, an embrace that does not signify a morbid
love of death, but rather a reconciliation with the fact of death as
the denominator of corporeal life. Socrates' explanation of the soul's
relationship to beginnings and ends in time goes far, it seems to me,
in explaining Woolf's symbolic intentions:

The soul is immortal, for that is immortal which is
ever in motion; but that which moves and is moved by
another, in ceasing to move ceases also to live.
Therefore, only that which is selfemoving, never
failing of self, never ceases to move, and is the
fountain and beginning of motion to all that moves
besides. Now, the beginning is unbegotten, for that
which is begotten has a beginning; but the beginning
has no beginning, for if a beginning were begotten
of something, that would have no beginning. But that,
which is unbegotten must also be indestructible; for
if beginning were destroyed, there could be no
beginning out of anything, nor anything out of a
beginning; and all things must have a beginning. And
therefore the selfemoving is the beginning of motion;
and this can neither be destroyed nor begotten, for
in that case the whole heavens and all generation
would collapse and stand still, and never again have

 

27Blackstone, p. 57.

 

79

motion or birth. But if the selfemoving is immortal,

he who affirms-that selfvmotion is the veryxidea and

essence of the soul will not be put to confusion.

For the body which is moved from without is soulless;

but that which is moved from within has a soul, and

this is involved in the nature of the soul. But if the

soul be truly affirmed to be the selfemoving, then must

she also be without beginnigg, and immortal. Enough

of the soul's immortality.

Jacob is no longer ”put to confusion" when he intuits that true being
is immortal. Death can be accepted without fear because it is no aspect
of his ultimate sense of reality.

Certainly this understanding of Jacob's childhood epiphany helps
us to understand why Woolf describes his death so abruptly and
mattereof-factly at the end of the novel. The death is an event in
time, and as a consequence, no real event in the spiritual life that
Jacob has pursued and embodied. Jacob's death does not affect the
understanding reader as it did his brother, who seems to have had no
awareness of what was most important about Jacob, and as a consequence
responded to the death with the confusion that Socrates describes.

The other events in Jacob's childhood revery are also symbolic
when they are read in the light of the foregoing discussion. The rock,
which is "tremendously solid" and "like something primitive" suggests
the permanence of the supernal reality that Jacob will seek to
comprehend. In the rock, but no permanent or necessary part of it, is
the hollow of water with its assortment of life. The crab, which we

will later see .trying with its weakly legs to climb the steep

side of the bucket; trying again and falling back, and trying again,”29

 

28""Phaedrus ,‘"- p. 403.

29Jacob's Room, p. 12,

 

 

80

serves as an obvious symbol of the denominator of corporeal life and

of the futile struggle to achieve fulfillment in that life. The red—
faced couple, stretched in the posture of death within a few feet of

the subsuming sea are symbols of death, and as such, the cause of

Jacob's momentary terror. The Nanny, to whom he first turns, represents
the alternative that Jacob rejects in that she seeks to seduce him
through earthly comfort into accepting the ultimacy of life's pathos.

The skull which he embraces, although a symbol of death, is also like the
rock in that it symbolizes the immutability of true being. We are

pointedly reminded of this symbolism later in the novel when Professor

Huxtable is said to lie "triumphant. . .on a pillow of stone."30

Woolf establishes a context for this interpretation of Jacob's
childhood experience in several meditations which reveal her belief
that human actions and values usually suppress the truth that Jacob
experiences. One such meditation concerns a visit to an Aquarium:

So that was a reason for going down into the

Aquarium, where the sallow blinds, the stale smell

of spirits of salt, the bamboo chairs, the tables

with ash—trays, the revolving fish, the attendant
knitting behind six or seven chocolate boxes (often

she was quite alone with the fish for hours at a

time) remained in the mind as part of the monster

shark, he himself being only a flabby yellow receptacle,
like an empty Gladstone bag in a tank. No one had

ever been cheered by the Aquarium; but the faces of
those emerging quickly lost their dim, chilled expression
when they perceived that it was only by standing in a
queue that one could be admitted to the pier. Once
through the turnstiles, every one walked for a yard or
two very briskly; some flagged at this stall; others

at that. But it was the band that drew them all to it
finally; even the fishermen 031the lower pier taking up
their pitch within its range.

 

30Jacob's Room, p. 38.

 

31Jacob's Room, p. 16.

 

81

The spectators are quickly reassured by the signs of order and purpose
which permit them to suppress the discomforting identification of the
attendant with the shark. Here, as elsewhere in the novel, we see
human self-conception measured against images which suggest the
ephemeralness and insignificance of man. Mrs. Jarvis, the clergyman's
wife, is caught in such a moment and becomes the subject of another
meditation which further confirms this understanding:

Mrs. Jarvis walked on the moor when she was unhappy,
going as far as a certain saucer-shaped hollow, though
she always meant to go to a more distant ridge; and there
she sat down, and took out the little book hidden
beneath her cloak and read a few lines of poetry, and
looked about her. She was not very unhappy, and, seeing
that she was forty—five, never perhaps would be very
unhappy, desperately unhappy that is, and leave her
husband, and ruin a good man's career, as she sOmetimes
threatened.

Still there is no need to say what risks a clergy—
man's wife runs when she walks on the moor. Short, dark,
with kindling eyes, a pheasant's feather in her hat,

Mrs. Jarvis was just the sort of woman to lose her faith
upon the moors—~to confound her God with the universal
that is——but she did not lose her faith, did not leave
her husband, never read her poem through, and went on
walking the moors, looking at the moon behind the elm
trees, and feeling as she sat on the grass high above
Scarborough. . .Yes, yes, when the lark soars; when the
sheep, moving a step or two onwards, crop the turf, and
at the same time set their bells tinkling; when the breeze
first blows, then dies down, leaving the cheek kissed;
when the ships on the sea below seem to cross each other
and pass on as if drawn by an invisible hand; when there
are distant concussions in the air and phantom horsemen
galloping, ceasing; when the horizon swims blue, green,
emotional—~then Mrs. JarVis, heaving a sigh, thinks to
herself, "If only some one could give me. . .if I could
give some one. . ." But she does n35 know what she wants
to give, nor who could give it her.

In each of these meditations, the response to glimpses of the truth

about man's place in the universe is fear. Experience provides man

 

32Jacob's Room, pp. 25-6.

 

 

82

with evidence that denies his culturally derived beliefs about the
significance of his existence, but he cannot accept the truth without
dismissing the comforting beliefs which imbue human action with meaning.
The response of mankind to the legitimate evidence of truth is typified
by Jacob's mother, who looks ". . .with uneasy emotion at the world
displayed so luridly, with sudden sparks of yellow and black mutability,
against this blazing sunset, this astonishing agitation of vitality and
colour, which stirred Betty Flanders and made her think of
responsibility and danger."33
The pattern in these meditations reflects back upon Jacob's fear
of the crab and the sun—bathing couple. Jacob overcomes this fear by
unconsciously renouncing the demands of his corporeal identity. He
intuits as a child what he will come to understand later in his life:
"The problem [of integrating life and thought, body and soul] is
insoluble. The body is harnessed to a brain. Beauty goes hand in

34 But his childhood acceptance of this truth will

hand with stupidity."
be hard—earned in later life. His journey to the Parthenon, where he
will again come to terms with the truth he experienced as a child,
will be characterized not by fear of the truth, but by resentment.

Like the Byron whom Woolf associates him.with, Jacob will be ".

ready to turn with wrath upon whoever had fashioned life thus."35

Jacob's experiences at Cambridge University crystalize his child—

hood intuitions into concepts. Cambridge is scrutinized as a symbol

 

33Jacob's Room, p. 9.

 

34Jacob's Room, p. 81.

 

35Jacob's Room, p. 81.

 

 

 

83

of Western man's will and capacity to seek the truth. Woolf meditates
on Cambridge and what it symbolizes when Jacob first arrives there.

The meditation introduces the ambivalence that will characterize
Jacob's response to Cambridge in that it ends with a question that will
be answered equivocally:

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travelers,

the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort

from the thought, and no doubt if you are of a

mystical tendency, consolation, even explanation,

shower down from the unbroken surface. But above

Cambridge——anyhow above the roof of King's College

Chapel——there is a difference. Out at sea a great

city will cast a great brightness into the night.

Is it fanciful to suppose the sky, washed into the

crevices of King's College Chapel, lighter, thinner,

more sparkling than the sky elsewhere? Does Camgridge

burn not only into the night, but into the day?

Jacob experiences a conflict of impressions about Cambridge that are
the basis for his own answer to this question. In one respect, he
understands Cambridge to be a significant part of the conspiracy of
distraction by which humanity protects itself from the implications
of the truth.

Professor Plumer, who hosts traditional Sunday luncheons for the
undergraduates, is perhaps the most obvious symbol of this aspect of
Cambridge. His values seem to be entirely grounded in the social and
political world, and because of this, he takes his place in the long
line of self—assured men who are satirized in Woolf's fiction for the
certainty with which they hold their circumscribed views: "There can
be no excuse for this outrage upon one hour of human life, save the

reflection which occurred to Mr. Plumer as he carved the mutton, that

if no don ever gave a luncheon party, if Sunday after Sunday passed, if

 

36Jacob's Room, p. 29.

84

men went down, became lawyers, doctors, members of Parliament, business
men—~if no don ever gave a luncheon partyen."37 We can complete the
rhetorical question for Jacob" What would happen to the order of life,
the sense of established rightness created and endorsed by the accepted
patterns of social existence? Woolf, of course, is not only mocking
Professor Plumer's sense of his own importance to the perpetuation of
human values, but also the social and political values that he is
spokesman for: “He could talk about Persia and the Trade winds, the
Reform.Bill and the cycle of harvests. Books were on his shelves by
Wells and Shaw: on the tables serious six-penny weeklies written by
pale men in muddy bootSvnthe weekly creek and screech of brains rinsed
in cold water and wrung drya-melancholy papers."38

It is not the Professor's interests in the affairs of the world
that disturb Jacob and Mrs. Woolf, but rather the implied centricity
of these interests to human self-conception and the formation of human
values. The papers are melancholy because they are distractions from
man's real intellectual need which is the discovery of his relationship
to eternal reality. The references to Shaw and Wells remind us again

of Richard Dalloway in The Voyage Out, and of the Positivists' attempt

 

to reconcile traditional spiritual values with the empirical bias of
post-Enlightenment science and philosophy. For Virginia WOolf and for
Jacdb, such concerns are peripheral to the spiritual needs of mankind.
"Such a thing to believe in," thinks Jacob, "~—Shaw and Wells and the

serious six~penny weeklies."39

 

37Jacob's Room, p. 32.

38Jacob's Room, p. 34.

39Jacob's Room, p. 33.

 

85

Jacob rejects this aspect of the light of Cambridge, understanding
it to be an obstacle to the fulfillment of his real needs:

Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or

woman, it must come as a shock about the age of twenty--

the world of the elderlya—thrown in such dark outline

against what we are; upon the reality; the moors and

Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep's jaw

with the yellow teeth in it; upon the obstinate

irrepressible conviction which makes youth so

intolerably disagreeable--"I am what I am, and intend

to be it," for which there will be no form in the world

unless Jacob makes one for himself. The Plumers will

try to prevent him from making it. Wells and Shaw d

the serious sixpenny weeklies will sit on its head.
We see that the estrangement from society which budded in his childhood
has grown, by age twenty, into a sweeping repudiation of the dominant
ideas of post-Enlightenment intellectual history: "What were they after,
scrubbing and demolishing, these elderly people? Had they never read
Homer, Shakespeare, the Elizabethans? He saw it clearly outlined
against the feelings he drew from.youth and natural inclination.”41
Thus when we are told the name of an essay lying on his work table,
"Does History Consist of the Biographies of Great Men?"42 we assume
that his thesis was in accord with Ralph Denham's proclamation to
Katherine Hilburry that "The worship of greatness in the nineteenth
century seems to me to explain the worthlessness of that generation."
Jacob's alienation from the values of his society will grow in intensity

as he grows older, culminating in his acceptance of what he understands

to be the values of the Greeks, whose skepticism about individual

 

4OJacob's Room, p. 34.

 

41Jacob's Room, p. 33.

42Jacob's Room, p. 37.

86

significance is the probable reason that there exist few biographies
and no autobiographies among their extant writings.43
But the impressions made by such as Professor Plumer are mitigated
by the impressions made by Professors Huxtable, Sopwith, and Cowan:
"If any light burns above Cambridge, it must be from.three such rooms;
Greek burns here; science there; philosophy on the ground floor."44
Woolf sees these men as priests of the intellect ("how priestly they
look")45 who somehow transcend their human limitations to become agents
of the world of ideas. What she emphasizes is the irrelevance of their
personalities to the primary function of this agency: "Strange
paralysis and constriction-—marvelous illumination. Serene over it all
rides the great thick brow, and sometimes asleep or in the quiet spaces
of the night you might fancy that on a pillow of stone he lay
triumphant,"46 she says of Professor Huxtable in a description that
certainly echoes Socrates' statement that "the mind of the philosopher
alone has wings." Professor Huxtable's pillow of stone recalls for us
the rock and skull in Jacob's childhood revery, and we understand that
the serenity he is experiencing is the result of his coming to terms

with the universal truth which the rock and skull suggested to the

child. Woolf furthers the connection between this achieved knowledge

 

43"It is a suggestive truth that, in more than a thousand years of
literary history, the Graeco-Roman world had failed to produce any—
thing that might be called a personal record; in this sense, Augustine
was perhaps anticipated only by the emperor Marcus Aurelius." Charles
Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1957), p. 386.

44Jacob's Room, p. 38.

 

45Jacob's Room, p. 38.

 

46Jacob's Room, p. 38.

 

87

of the Cambridge professors and Jacob's childhood intimations when

she concludes her meditation on Professor Cowan by abruptly noting:
"A.woman, divining the priest, would, involuntarily, despise." We are
reminded of "the conspiracy of hush and clean bottles," and of the
novel's persistent assertion of a fundamental antipathy between the
values of the corporeal and spiritual worlds.

Cambridge was an intellectual watershed for Jacob in that the
awareness of this antipathy dominates his consCiousness until his death.
His Byronic rejection of a society too certain of its own value and
values will lead him to write an essay entitled, "The Ethics of
Indecency,"47 and to lead for a time a life that reflects what we must
assume to have been the values of that essay. But the kind of life
that he leads is not of central importance to the novel. Insofar as
it is described, it serves primarily as a framework for the spiritual
aspirations which lead him away from mankind and even selfhood to
participation in a non-human spiritual reality. He comes to understand
his own humanness as a limitation that must be overcome before
consciousness can fully discover its relationship to true being: "To
gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth
spin; to havev—positively——a rush of friendship for stones and grass,

§§_i£_humanity were ovar, and as for men and women, let them go hang——

 

there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty

often."48

 

47Jacob's Room, p. 77.

 

48Jacob's Room, p. 140-

 

 

88

This description of Jacob's spiritual triumph brings into focus
the novel's general rejection of Christian and Post—Christian humanisms.
The belief in the contingency between human action and spiritual
fulfillment that characterizes postnclassical Western thought is
contradicted by the suggestion that spiritual fulfillment is achieved
only at the cost of one's humanness rather than because of it. The
Christian attempt to unify divine will and human will in the concept
of love, and to unify supernal and mundane being through the doctrine
of Incarnation; the Romantic belief that "All deities reside in the
human breast," and that "Eternity is in love with the productions of

49 the Positivists' belief in the evolution of mankind's spiritual

time";
capacity in his search for the selfless utopia--these characteristically
Western ideas are challenged by the belief that the body is "a living

tomb. . .that we are imprisoned in. . . ." True being was for Jacob,

as for Plato, "bare of flesh."50
Jacob's rejection of humanness as an aspect of spiritual fulfillment

should not, however, be understood to result from a contempt for

physical life. He is neither a Gnostic nor a Manichean, but rather

a committed dualist who seeks only to discover and live by the separate

terms of temporal and eternal reality. When he "tears up his ticket

and walks away" it does not seem.to me that he is expressing contempt

for life, but rather for the society in which he lives. We note that

although he ". . .seldom thought of Plato or Socrates in the flesh.

 

49William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

50"But who, save the nerve worn and sleepless, or thinkers
standing with hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see
things thus in skeleton outline, bare of flesh." Jacob's Room, p. 162.

 

89

he was beginning to think of the problems of civilization, which were
resolved, of course, so remarkably by the ancient Greeks, though their
solution is of no help to us."51 Greek society, free from
incarnational ideas, was a society with the capacity and will to live
by the truth.52 'But as for why Jacob is described as having said

that their solution is of no use to us, I can only suggest that he had
in mind something similar to Jung's rejection of Eastern solutions for

modern European problems: ".

.it is sad indeed when the European

departs from his own nature and imitates the East or 'affects' it in

any way. The possibilities open to him would be so much greater if

he would remain true to himself and evolve out of his own nature all

that the East has brought forth in the course of the millenia."53
But the hopeful note in Jung's statement is absent from Jacob's

.Rggm. The novel offers no suggestions of a possible evolution of wisdom

that will alter the self—conceptions of Western man. Further, even

the value of Jacob's climactic intuition at the Acropolis is obscured

at the end: "As for reaching the Acropolis who can say that we ever

do it, or that when Jacob awoke the next morning he found anything hard

and durable to keep for ever?"54 Perhaps this ending is an indication

 

51Jacob's Room, p. 149.

 

52"Against the background of nothingness from which it is called
forth, individual being assumes a rank of primacy [in Christian
thought] which all ancient philosophy denied it." Hans Jonas, "Jewish
and Christian Elements in Western Tradition," Creation: the Impact of
an Idea (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), p. 252.

nghe Collected Works of C. G. Jung, l7 vols., (New York:
Pantheon Books), edited by H. Read, M. Fordham, and G. Adler, vol. 13,
(Alchemical Studies, 1967), pp. 9—10.

54

 

Jacob's Room, p. 160.

 

 

 

90

that despite Woolf's apparent commitment to the dualism implicit in

 

Jacob's Room, she continued to be swayed by the need for wholeness of
identity that motivates the earlier and later novels. Such a
conjecture, however, goes against the sharply focused line of meaning
that underlies the novel as a whole. Thus when Sarah compares Jacob
to "that man in Mfioliere,”55 we believe that the comparison to Alceste

is appropriate. Jacob walks away from society because society seems

incapable of becoming what it can and ought to be.

Mrs. Dalloway

 

I suggested at the beginning of this chapter that Mrs. Dalloway

 

can be read as a technical and thematic complement to Jacob's Room.

 

If we understand the intent of the earlier novel to be the depiction
of Jacob as an archetype of the contemplative mind, then we can better
understand why Woolf chose to focus her attention on someone as overtly

mindless as Clarissa Dalloway in her next novel, for Mrs. Dalloway is,

 

in contrast to Jacob's Room, an apologia for someone who seems on the

 

surface to live by frivolous and superficial values. Woolf's intention
is to clarify and justify Clarissa's visceral and emotional approach to
life by relating it to the same dualistic understanding of reality

that underlies Jacob's Room.

 

One of Woolf's comments about Tolstoy, her favorite Russian
novelist, gives us a way to state this intention more simply:
Life dominates Tolstoi as the soul dominates Dostoevsky.

There is always at the center of all the brilliant
and flashing petals of the flower this scorpion, 'Why

 

55Jacob's Room, p. 169.

91

live?‘ There is always at the centre of the book
some Olenin, or Pierre, or Levin who gathers into
himself all experience, turns the world round between
his fingers, and never ceases to ask, even as he
enjoys it, what is the meaning of it, and what should
be our aims. It is not the priest who shatters our
dreams most effectively; it is the man Who has known
them, and loved them himself. When he derides them,
the wggld indeed turns to dust and ashes beneath our

feet.
What is emphasized in Jacob is that aspect of ourselves that turns the
world to dust and ashes beneath our feet; Clarissa, the symbol of the
human heart, is Mrs. Woolf's affirmative answer to the question, "Why
live?" Clarissa, although certainly a more complex Character, is
Virginia Woolf's Natasha Rostov, for like her, Clarissa is a symbol of

an inexplicable vitality that man can repudiate only by first refusing

to allow himself to respond to the spell it casts. In Jacob's Room

 

and Mrs. Dalloway, mind and heart are irreconcilable adversaries, and
the tension that is generated by their conflicting claims is the
condition that man must include in his understanding of the nature,
value, and meaning of human existence.

Early in Mrs. Dalloway, the author speaks of the ". . .waves of the

divine vitality which Clarissa loved."57 The passage directs us to the

 

56"The Russian Point of View," Collected Essays, 1: 245—6. Compare
this perception with her comment on Plato to see the relationship between
her understanding of Tolstoy and the Greek thought that lies behind
Jacob's Room: "All this flows over the arguments of Plato-slaughter
and movement; people getting up and going out; the hour changing; tempers
being lost; jokes cracked; the dawn rising. Truth, it seems, is various;
Truth is to be pursued with all our faculties. Are we to rule out the
amusements, the tendernesses, the frivolities of friendship because we
love truth? Will truth be quicker found because we stop our ears to
music and drink no wine, and sleep instead of talking through the long
winter's night? It is not to the cloistered disciplinarian mortifying
himself in solitude that we are to turn, but to the well—sunned nature,
the man who practices the art of living to the best advantage, so that
nothing is stunted but some things are permanently more valuable than
others. "On Not Knowing Greek," p. 9.

57Mrs. Dalloway, p. 9,

 

92

most important aspect of her character, her love of life and her capacity
to find joy and satisfaction in experience. It is important, then, that
it is her anticipation of the evening's party and the party itself that
provide the structural framework for the novel, for in our understanding
of the value of the event that Clarissa is so fully linked with we find

the central theme of Mrs. Dalloway.

 

For Clarissa, the party which she will give that evening is a way
to "kindle and illuminate."58 The party is significant to her because
it is her way not only of making her offering to life but of justifying
herself to the others in her life, and its success is, for her and for
others, a confirmation of the value of human experience in a universe
which offers no ultimate meaning to that experience. "What she liked
was simply life. 'That's what I do it for,‘ she said, speaking aloud,
to life. . . . But suppose Peter said to her, 'Yes, yes, but your
parties?’ all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to under—
stand): They're an offering; which sounded horribly vague."59

But to others in her life these parties were evidence of shallowness,
of chances missed, of a life gone wrong. Peter Walsh, whose thoughts
about Clarissa continually vacillate between fascination with the
vitality he sees in her and admonishment of what he understands to be
the wasted potentiality of her life, criticizes her because ". . .she
needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable
result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving those

incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn't

 

58Mrs. Dalloway, p. 7.

59Mrs. Dalloway, p. 134.

 

 

93

mean, blunting the edge of her life, losing her discrimination.”60 Such
thoughts are characteristic of the ways that others in the novel view
Clarissa. Lady Bruton, who ”. . .had the reputation of caring more
about politics than people“61 thought of Clarissa as one of those

". . .women that got in their husband's way, preventing them from taking

62 and indicated this evaluation of her by inviting only

posts abroad,”
Clarissa's husband to her lunchtime discussions of politics and society.
"It might have been better if Richard had married a woman with less
charm," she thought, "who would have helped him more with his work."63
And Miss Kilman, whose bitterness about the life she believed she was
forced to lead drove her to the consolations of religion, "bitter and
burning, . . .two years three months ago,"64 thinks of Clarissa as
"Fool! Simpleton! You who have known neither sorrow nor pleasure;
who have trifled your life away."65

Much of Clarissa's selfvunderstanding tends to confirm these
evaluations: "She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely

'66 When she thinks again of her

read a book now, except memoirs in bed.’
party: "Nothing else had she of any importance; she could not think,

write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6OMrs. Dalloway, p. 87.
61

Mrs. Dalloway, p. 117.
62

Mrs. Dalloway, p. 117.
63

Mrs. Dalloway, p. 120.
64

Mrs. Dalloway, p. 137.
65

Mrs. Dalloway, p. 138.
66

Mrs. Dalloway, p. 11.

 

 

94

success; hated discomfort, must be liked, talked oceans of nonsense;

and to this day, ask her where the Equator was, and she did not know."67
Yet, it is this seemingly frivolous woman who is asked to carry the weight
of meaning in this novel. The orchestrated effect of all the attention
paid to judging Clarissa is to focus the reader's attention upon the
attempted apologia. For Clarissa, for Peter Walsh, the Marlowe—like
"observer" of her actions in the novel, and, if the novel is successful,
for the reader, somewhere within the experience of the party that is the
extension and manifestation of the values for which Clarissa is indicated
by others throughout the novel is the human reply to the nihilistic

contempt for human experience that is the logical outgrowth of the

understanding of reality that permeates this novel and Jacob's Room.

 

And just as we discovered that Jacob, "pure from all body, pure from
all flesh," was an archetype of and spokesman for "that bodiless spirit
likely to outlast the entire world" that Socrates defined in Phaedrus,
we will come to acknowledge Clarissa as the fully manifested embodiment
of the "waves of divine vitality" that are the sustaining and
perpetuating substance of the temporal world.

Virginia Woolf uses several methods to effect this apologia. The
most obvious, but perhaps the least important, is the devotion of some
effort to establishing the inadequacies of the values of the several
minor characters who find Clarissa wanting. Far more important are
the characterizations of Septimus and Peter. Septimus, who functions

as Clarissa's alter ego, establishes the intellectual nihilism.that

Pr°V1deS the context for the novel's celebration of human emotion.

 

67Mrs L Dalloway , p . 135 .

 

95

Peter is the novel's enquiring mind, a figure whose fascination with and
need to understand Clarissa focuses the reader's attention upon Clarissa
as a necessary object of the human search to understand the value of

experience. These minor and major figures, more fully and vividly drawn

than any found in Woolf's more abstract novels such as Jacob's Room,

 

The Waves, and Between the Acts, enrich not only the substance of the

 

novel, but also its meaning, for this general richness of characterizatunn
together with the descriptions of London which capture the exciting
texture and movement of life in the city, cohere with the novel's

thematic intentions just as the more ethereal and abstract texture of

Jacob's Room was seen to cohere with its themes.

 

Finally, and certainly the most important method used to effect the
apologia, is the depth and density of the characterization of Clarissa
herself. Although she strikes the people who know her differently,
Clarissa thinks deeply and often about the values that direct the
choices she has made for her life. We find her at a point of crisis
in her life, facing ahead to old age, and looking back at a near—fatal
illness from which she has just recovered. Although we are led to
believe by her recollections that she has never believed that human
experience has meaningwsher persistent, life—long antipathy to all
teleologies attest to his--we do know that she has always valued
experience. It is this sense of life's value that is Challenged by
the spectres of death that confront her. Thus, the novel seeks to
achieve its apologia not merely by contrasting Clarissa's values with
those held by others in the novel, but most importantly, by testing
her values against all that tends to discredit them.from within. Her

triumph at the end of the novel, manifested externally in the

96

acknowledgments expressed by Peter and others at the party, is not simply
a triumph of communication, but also of actualization. She succeeds in
convincing others when she becomes again in action what she has always
needed to be, and through the same process, she succeeds in convincing
herself.

In her essay on Montaigne, Virginia Woolf poses the problem that
Clarissa resolves: "For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself,
there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself."68 The solution for
Clarissa is achieved only by her overcoming both difficulties in a
single moment of selfaactualization. It is not surprising, then, that
the Peter who throughout the novel has been so articulate in expressing
his thoughts'and feelings is, at that moment, at a loss for words.

When he is stunned by his experience of the moment into his series of
Keatsean questions, ("What is this terror? what is this ecstasy?.

9

What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?"),6 he finds

that the "what" that he seeks is a "who," "'It is Clarissa,‘ he said,

. vn70

‘For there she was.‘
The use of minor characters as foils, the more complex uses of

characters suCh as Septimus and Peter, the general subordination of

technique to theme, and the characterization of Clarissa herself, are,

then, Woolf's methods for effecting the intended apologia in

 

Mrs. Dalloway.

 

68"Montaigne," Collected Essays, III: 19.

 

69Mrs. Dalloway, p. 213.

 

7QMrs. Dalloway, p. 213.

 

 

97

Throughout her fiction Virginia Woolf uses the foil as a principal
means of both defining and justifying the values of her sympathetic
protagonists. We have only to recall her depictions of characters such

as the Dalloways in The Voyage Out, Professor Plumer in Jacob's Room,

 

 

and Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse to see a pattern in her fiction

 

that includes the depictions in this novel of Lady Bruton, Doctors
Bradshawe and Holmes, Hugh Whitbread and Doris Kilman. The technique
is openly didactic in that the characters are invariably indicted for
the values they hold or represent, values which usually are in direct
conflict with those held by the sympathetic protagonist. These foils
tend to clarify, by contrast, the values of the protagonist, and further,
to justify those values by discrediting objections to them. Usually,
the characters are made to appear preposterous, and the characteristic
attitude expressed when the author comments about them from her own
perspective is outrage over the fact that society seems to take them as
seriously as they take themselves. Further, they serve to relate the
ideas of the protagonist to the prevailing climate of ideas in England
during the early twentieth century, and consequently enrich the novels'
commentary on the history of Western thought, a subject that seems
always to be at the center of Woolf's interest. Never are the values
these characters represent offered to the reader as even potentially
viable alternatives to the values of the protagonist; there exist no
overtly rendered dialectical struggles in Virginia Woolf's novels such
as those found in the novels of Conrad, Dostoevsky or Thomas Mann. We
find no French Lieutenant, no Ivan, no Settembrini, nor even a Chester,

a Smerdiakov, or a Dr. Hofrat to offer compelling alternatives to the

 

98

world-view held by the protagonist and espoused by the author.71 Woolf's
foils, although invariably offered as representatives of ideas, are
always wrong in the eyes of the author, and presumably, of the
sympathetic reader. Thus, the clarity of the author's attitude toward
these characters, while perhaps unfortunate when viewed from
perspectives other than her own, serves to help the reader to overcome
the difficulties in understanding the nature and implications of the

more suggestively rendered worldeview of the protagonist.

Understanding the general function of foil characters in the novel
provides a sure framework for understanding the role of the individual
characters. Lady Rossiter's singlevminded pursuit of progress through
political activism, Hugh Whitbread's need to define himself through
social status, Doris Kilman's compulsive and self~righteous
Christianity, and the Doctors Bradshawe and Holmes' upperemiddle—class

smugness are each in their own ways antithetical to the elan vital that

 

Clarissa represents and pursues. We know, for example, that Doctor
Bradshawe's entreaty to the deranged Septimus that "life was good" has

no meaning in common with the celebration of life that the novel attempts
to achieve.72 His shallowness discredits him; we sense that he is
incapable of understanding or experiencing the factors of life that

even put the notion of life's ”goodness” into doubt, and as a

consequence we hear his words with the same indifference that is
Septimus' response. These foils are too preposterous, too close to

caricatures, to be taken seriously. Given as an image of the society

 

71 1
Characters in Lord Jim, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Magic
Mbuntain, respectively.

72Mrs. Dalloway, p. 112.

99

in which Clarissa lives, they serve to highlight the urgency of
Clarissa's struggle, for they offer a spectrum of the bankruptcies of
the human values that might be entertained as alternatives to the values
Clarissa is attempting to reaffirm. We can judge Woolf on the effective—
ness and honesty of these techniques, but we need not ponder long to
understand her meaning.

It is otherwise that we approach the more important characters,
for the meanings of their roles in the novel are far less obvious.
There is a sense in which we cannot understand these characters without
seeing them in a light cast by Clarissa, just as we cannot fully
understand Clarissa without recourse to our knowledge of them. During
one of his reveries, Peter recalls a theory of personality that Clarissa
once expressed to him.while they were walking together in London:
"She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that.
So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out all the people who
completed them: even the places."73 Two men and one woman are the
people who most clearly complete Clarissa: Sally, her childhood friend,
confidante, and near lover, whose rejection through marriage to a rich
landowner and industrialist of their youthful search for meaning in
life parallels Clarissa's choice of the placid and undemanding Richard
for her husband, whom she is glad she married instead of Peter because
". . .in marriage a little license, a little independence there must
be between people living together day in day out in the same house. . .";
Peter, with whom by contrast, ". . .every thing had to be shared,

everything gone into. . ." and with whom marriage would have resulted

 

73Mrs. Dalloway, p. 168.

 

100

in “ruin” and ”destruction,u74 but who is still the object of as much

of her thought as she is of his; and finally, Septimus, whom she does

not even know, but who represents a suppressed aspect of her understanding
of life. The personalities of each of these characters interconnect

with Clarissa's in many diversely definitive ways, but perhaps it is
enough to discuss Septimus and Peter, who of the three are the most

fully characterized and the most clearly pertinent to the themes I am
seeking to explain.

Septimus' role as Clarissa's alter ego is usually discussed by
critics of the novel, but I do not believe that anyone has adequately
explained the significance of their relationship. To say, as does
Jean Guiget, that they are interconnected through their simultaneous
experiencing of the key events of the London day is to my mind
insufficient.75 A more adequate explanation is achieved by understanding
Septimus' role in relationship to the thematic implications of Jacob's
‘Rggm. What needs to be understood is why woolf created a character who
"could not feel," who renounces life happily, who is clearly insane, as
the alter ego of a character who celebrates feeling, whose primary
preoccupation is her struggle to reaffirm her will to live, and who
must finally strike the reader as being among the sanest characters
Virginia Woolf ever created if we define sanity in terms of adjustment
to reality. How is it that characters so different in temperament and
in their understandings of life can both be understood as expressing

aspects of the author's own understanding?

 

74Mrs. Dalloway, p. 203.

75Jean Guiget, Virginia Woolf and her works (New York: Harcourt

Brace and World, 1965), p. 255.

101

What is ironic in this relationship is that Clarissa's affirmation
of life and rekindling of her own.will to live cannot be read as a
refutation of Septimus' rejection of life. We are, in fact, neither
surprised nor bemused when we finally read the now unreprinted preface
to the first edition of the novel that tells that the author considered
ending the novel with Clarissa's suicide, just as we are not jarred while
reading the novel itself when we come to the expression of Clarissa's
empathy with the suicidal young man whom.she does not even know. The
reason for this lies in the nature of the alter ego relationship that
exists between these characters.

Typically in literature, the alter ego represents a repressed
aspect of the protagonist's identity, and as a consequence his
interaction with the main character invokes a new self—knowledge for
one or both characters, as in the relationships between the fugitive
Leggatt and the duty-bound Captain in "The Secret Sharer," and between
the intellectual Stephen and the practical Bloom in Ulysses. But the
relationship between Septimus and Clarissa is not based upon a repressed

aspect of Clarissa's identity, but rather upon a suppressed aspect,

 

When Clarissa hears the news of Septimus' suicide during the party, we
understand immediately why she feels empathy because we have come to
understand her to be far more complex than others in her life believe
her to be. Clarissa's struggle to reaffirm her commitment to life has
been, throughout the novel, a struggle with the same sense of paralyzing
nihilism that drove Septimus to suicide.

What explains Septimus' nihilism and the insanity that results
from it? The war, the death of his friend Evans, are in themselves

only the surface causes of his derangement, His inability to accept

102

life derives from a more general obsession with_the immorality and
irrationality of human experience, He measures life_against a Vision
of perfection and'meaningfulness that life cannot fulfill, a vision
that reminds us, deranged though it is, of the absolute distinction
between earthly life and ”true being" that Socrates defines in Phaedrus,
and that causes Jacob to "turn with wrath upon whoever had fashioned
life thus."

Men must not cut down trees, There is a God, (He

noted such revelations on the backs of envelopes.)

Change the world, No one kills from hatred. Make

it known (he wrote down), He waited. He listened.

A sparrow perched on the railing Opposite chirped

Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went

on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and

piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and,

joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged

and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow

of life beyong a river where the dead walk, how there

is no death.
Septimus is tyrannized by such paradisiacal visions. He reaches the
state of mind in which "he could not feel, He could reason; he could
read;. . .his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then—-
that he could not feel."77 He thinks, "How Shakespeare loathed
humanity—“the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the
sordidity of the mouth and the belly} This was now revealed to
Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal
that one generation passes, under disguise; to the next is loathing,

hatred, despair,"78 Hamletalike, he concludes that "One cannot bring

children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or

 

7 so
6Eus. Dalloway, p, 28,

 

772Mrs, Dalloway, p, 98,

78
3&3. Dalloway, p. 98.

 

 

103

increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting
emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying now this way, now that."

It is precisely such an absolutism that is invoked in Clarissa
when she hears the news of the suicide at her party. She thinks of the
suicide as a positive act that snatches a.moment of personal meaning
from the meaningless flow of life‘s events:

A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed

about the chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life,

let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This

he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an

attempt to communicate, pe0ple feeling the impossibility

of reaching the center, which, magically, evaded them;

closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone.

There was an embrace in death.

But this young man had killed himselfa—had he

plunged holding his treasure? ”If it were now to die,

‘twere now to be most happyaé" she had said to herself

once, coming down in white.
Through the party itself and the news of the suicide that intrudes
suddenly upon the evening‘s excitement, Clarissa experiences both of
her contradictory responses to life's dualistic nature. Her empathy
with Septimus' suicide derives from her intellectual repudiation of
life, an understanding of existence that sees suicide as a meaningful
act of personal defiance against a life that was "a disgrace,. . .a

punishment."81

Yet, in the midst of such nihilistic understandings
of life, of her party, and of her personal significance, ". . .she
had never been so happy,“82 Unlike Septimus, who could think clearly,

but who could not feel, Clarissa thinks and feels, and it is feeling

that ultimately dominates the complexity of her response. Just as

 

 

 

 

9
7’Mrs, Dalloway, p, 99.
80

Mrs. Dalloway, p, 202,
81

Mrs. Dalloway, p. 203.
82

Mrs. Dalloway, p. 203.

 

 

104

earlier in the day when the momentary jealousy that she experienced on
hearing of Peter‘s new~romance brought forth in her, ”, , .the indomitable
egoism which_forever rides down the hosts opposed to it, the river which
says on, on; even though, it admits, there may be no goal for us
whatever,"83 Clarissa‘s heart prevails, As she had hoped from the
beginning, the party has served to rekindle her relationship to life,
to "the waves of the divine vitality which she loved," despite, or
perhaps even because of, the news that brought death to her mind,
". . .in the middle of ray-party,”84

Peter's function in the novel is to bring Clarissa‘s values into
accord with the reader‘s, for we must presume that it is he who responds
to Clarissa in the way that Mrs, Woolf would expect her readers to
respond, His early judgments of her values are in accord with what we
must, in part, think about her, Although we share his fascination with
her vitality, we must wonder why indeed she chose a marriage and a way
of life that Peter believed would ”stifle her soul, . . .make a mere
hostess of her, [and] encourage her worldliness.”85 Peter, if he does
not think for every reader, is at least the spokesman for those who
struggle against the ordinary, commonplace aspects of life in their
attempts to find a mode of existence that satisfies their need for
meaning. He who has refused to compromise throughout his life, who
unlike Clarissa has refused to accommodate society in exchange for a

comfortable place in it, is a worthy judge of a woman who seems to have

 

s—fi

 

 

83Mrs. Dalloway, pp. 50—51.
84

Mrs. Dalloway, p, 201.
85

Mrs. Dalloway, p, 84.

 

105

forsaken her youthful idealism and search forjmeaning in exchange for
what is really no more than a pleasant and comfortable place in the
society into which she was born, Thus when his judgments dissolve in
the spell she casts through her party, we too are caught in the spell.
His excitement of that moment which resolves the ambivalence he has felt
about her since their youth together completes the novel's apologia.
How and why does Peter achieve this resolution? What is it that
has changed in him that allows for this unequivocal acceptance of the
woman about whom he has felt so ambivalently throughout his life? To
some extent the question is unanswerable because the significance of
the event that brings his perceptions to this focus is finally
inexplicable. The party has been, throughout the novel, as it remains
at the end, an affair of Clarissa‘s heart, and what is communicated by
it to Peter and others is a feeling about life rather than an idea.
All we can do is relate the feelings he experiences to the dualistic
understanding of the human condition that has permeated the novel. We
can recallthat at the conclusion of Peter's dream about life and its
meaning, when he was dozing on the bench at Regent's Park, he saw as
the final image an old woman, a landlady, routinely going through the
functions of life. At the moment he experienced the dream, the meaning
of this image was impossible to determine. But when we recall it in
the light of its several recurrences in the novel, and particularly
when Clarissa, only moments before her triumph at the party, parts her
curtains and sees “. , .in the room Opposite the old lady star(ing)

straight at her,”86 we know that he has learned something from his

 

86Mrs. Dalloway, p. 204,

 

106

dream, albeit subconsciously, that has prepared him for this experience
at the party, He has learned that there is no meaning to life, and that
finally the will to live is as tentative and as inexplicable as the old
woman‘s desire to continue living, If the old woman is offered as an
objective correlative of human existence, then it is in the feelings

that sustain her in the face of approaching darkness that we must find

the will to live.

CHAPTER IV: REDEMPTIVE VISION IN TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

 

A single minute released from the chronological order of

time has recreated in us the human being similarly released.l

No more direct expression of Woolf's dualism can be found in her
fiction than in James' thoughts as the boat is approaching the light-

house near the end of To the Lighthouse.

 

"It will rain," he remembered his father saying. "You
Won't be able to go to the Lighthouse.”

The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower
with a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the
evening. Now--

James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see that it

was barred with black and white; he could see the windows
in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to
dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it?

No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was
simply one thing. The other was the Lighthouse, too°
It was sometimes hardly seen across the bay. In the
evening one looked up and saw the light opening and
shutting and the light seemed to catch them in that
airy sunny garden in which they sat.2
James thinks here what Woolf herself believes--that what is real for
the "eager and dissatisfied self" is just as real as what the "stern and

philosophical self" empirically proves to itself to be true. Although

the journey to the lighthouse has demonstrated that the lighthouses we

 

1Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (New York: Random
House, 1934), II, 996.

2Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace &

World, 1927), p. 277.

 

 

107

 

108

look at with yearning are merely buildings on rocks, and that our
‘romantic thoughts about them seem merely to be projections of our
desires, James defiantly sustains his commitment to the other light-
house, not simply as the symbol of a persistent and necessary illusion,
but as a reality. He goes on, in fact, to say that if one truth takes
precedence, it is the truth of our needs: "She E4rs. Ramsefl alone spoke
the truth; to her alone could he speak it."3 But in this later asser-
tion he is caught in the sweep of his defiance. He had spoken Woolf's
understanding, as clearly as it could be spoken, three paragraphs before,
and in so doing had come personally to the problem that is at the center
of all of Woolf's novels, and that all of her contemplative characters
confront—-"how to adjust the two worlds.”

In the novel that preceded To the Lighthouse, we saw that the con-

 

flict between the two worlds was unresolved in the mind of Clarissa
Dalloway and that the acceptance of life's dualistic nature was the
novel's central theme. Although Sally Seton, in the excitement of the
party can say for herself and others, "What does the head matter, com-
pared to the heart?" Clarissa, in her empathy with Septimus' suicide
and in her acknowledgment of the dolorous stare of the woman in the
window across the street, affirms the persistence of truths insisted

upon by the "stern philOSOphical self." Mrs. Dalloway, like Jacob's

 

322m, is clear in its understanding of the human condition. Our need
for a redemptive vision is unfulfillable because no synthesis of the
two worlds in which we live is possible. Our choice is either, like

Jacob and Septimus, "tear up [qua ticket and walk away," or, like

329 the Lighthouse, p. 278.

 

 

lO9

Clarissa, to accept life as a constant negotiation between the despair
that results from life observed and the affirmation that can result from

life experienced. By implication, Mrs. Dalloway is as much an apologia

 

for Septimus' suicide as it is for Clarissa's vitalism.

In To the Lighthouse, however, Woolf takes a significant step

 

beyond this understanding in that her principal characters, Mrs. Ramsey
and Lily Briscoe, experience a redemptive vision based upon a synthesis
of life and thought that is qualified, but not repudiated, in the novel's
thematic structure. If, as I have tried to show, Woolf's other novels
must finally be understood as commentaries on our incapacity to sustain

belief in the value of such visions, then To the Lighthouse is unique

 

among her novels. I believe that it is, and that the reason for this

uniqueness is that only in To the Lighthouse is Woolf able to resist or

 

overcome her persistent need to define and evaluate the human condition
in the terms that Pepper attributed to the organistic world hypothesis
and accepts, instead, the terms of contextualism that I believe are the
soul of her vision.4 Virginia Woolf struggled in her writing to find a
way of expressing a redemptive truth about life that she recurrently
sensed the possibility of in the privacy of her meditations. In To the

Lighthouse, a novel in which technique and meaning are grounded in the

 

epistemology and ontology of contextualism, she accomplishes this aim.

What distinguishes the moments of vision in To the Lighthouse is

 

that they are not based upon the discovery of an absolute that underlies
and gives meaning to all experience, but rather upon the experiencing

A

4I discuss Pepper's distinction between contextualism and organicism
in Chapter I, pp. l8-26.

110

of a synthesis of all factors incorporated in and delimited by the
immediate context. Both organicism and contextualism, says Pepper, are
focused on the human need for synthesis, a synthesis that includes the
subjective needs, desires, and responses of the perceiver in its unifi-
cation of the worlds of thought and action. But contextualism, Pepper
points out, understands synthesis in a way that differs from organicism.
Organicism, we recall, posits, as do formism and mechanism, a vertical
cosmology. The moment of vision of the organicist requires that the
particularities of experience be understood as the manifestation of an
absolute that is itself the only reality. What is finally true about
the world for the organicist is what we unveil. Differences among
particulars, and between particular situations, are illusory; all
phenomena are translucent manifestations of an ultimate truth that is
itself the only reality. The universe, for the organicist, is finally
one thing, or better, one spirit manifesting itself in the particular

5

forms of the mundane world. Thus James's conclusion that "nothing was
simply one thing" is alien to the organicist's understanding.
"Contextualism" says Pepper, "justifies no such faith. There is
no cosmological mode of analysis that guarantees the whole truth or an
arrival at an ultimate nature of things. On the other hand, one does

not need to hunt for a distant cosmological truth, since every present

event gives it as fully as it can be given. All one has to do to get
at the sort of thing the world is is to realize, intuit, get the quality

of whatever happens to be going on."6 Each cOntext according to the

 

5See my Pepper discussion on p. 21.

6"A whole is something imminent in an event and is so intuited,

JLntuited as the quality of that very event." World Hypotheses, p. 238.

 

lll

contextualist, has a quality which is the experienceable manifestation
of the synthesis sought. Pepper defines contextualistic acts of percep-

"7 The contextualist's

tion as ". . .voluntary vivid intuitions of quality.
cosmology, then, is horizontal rather than vertical in that the meaning-
ful experience of the quality of any context points to nothing outside
of itself, no truth, other than the potentiality for experiencing quality,
that pertains to any other context. What is illuminating and satisfying
in the experience is the experience of the quality of the context, an
experience contingent upon the attainment of synthesis.

Pepper identifies the root metaphor of contextualism as "the histori-
cal event"8 and in so doing draws our attention to the centricity of the
subject of time in contextualistic theory and to the way in which the

organicist's concept of time differs from the contextualist's concept:

"It is the integration in the process that the organicist works from,

 

not the duration of the process. When the root metaphor reaches its
ultimate realization the organicist believes that the temporal factor
disappears."9 No such transfiguring reality lies behind the world of
appearances for the contextualist. Historical time, understood to be
unreal by the organicist, is real in the cosmology of the contextualist,
but distinguished from qualitative time in that it is not part of
"actual" experience: "Beyond the intuited present quality we have
evidence for events that are past and for events to come. The great

function of schematic time is to order these non-actual events. But

 

7The Basis of Criticism in the Arts, p. 56.
8

 

World Hypotheses, p. 232.

 

9World_Hypotheses, p. 281.

 

 

112

actual time is the forward-and-backward spread of the quality of an
event. It is the tensional spread of the quality."10 Each actual event,
says Pepper, creates a new context, the contents of which can themselves
be experienced through a new vivid intuition of the quality: "This
change goes on continuously and never stops. It is a categorical feature
of all events; and, since, on this world theory all the world is events,
all the world is continuously changing in this manner. Absolute perma-
nence or immutability in any sense is, on this theory, a fiction, and
its appearance is interpreted in terms of historical continuities which
are not changeless."ll It is this paradoxical understanding of time
that is manifested in To the Lighthouse, most evidently in the key
"moments of vision," and most explicitly in Lily's when she experiences
the vision that allows her to complete her painting. In order to ex—
perience the moment, the memory of the dead Mrs. Ramsey must be momen-
tarily transfigured. Historical time must give way to qualitative time:
Mrs, Ramsey must in fact be there, sitting in her rocker, knitting.
Yet Woolf takes pains to indicate that Lily's experience, like Mrs. Ram—
sey's experience at the dinner party, was already passing as it was being
experienced.

Like the organicist, then, the contextualist focuses upon the
achievement of a synthesis in which all contradictions and fragments
are overcome, but he does not conceive of the synthesis as a particular

manifestation of a universal synthesis that is pertinent to all time

 

loWorld Hypotheses, p. 242.

11World Hypotheses, p. 243.

113

and every experience, but as the actualization of a potentiality that
exists in every context. Synthesis, for the contextualist, must be
[defined in language that verges upon paradox on that the very idea of
synthesis is at odds with a fundamental category of the contextualist's
cosmology, namely that disorder, the inevitable product of schematic or
historical time, is a permanent aspect of reality:

V .disorder is a categorical feature of contextualism,
and so radically so that it must not even exclude order.
That is, categories must be so framed as not to exclude
from the world any degree of order that it may be found to
have, nor to deny that this order may have come out of
disorder and may return to disorder again--order being
defined in any way you please, so long as it does not
deny the possibility of disorder or another order in
nature also. This italicized restriction is the forcible
one in contextualism, and amounts to the assertion that
change is categorical and not derivative in any degree
at all.

 

 

 

This ontology provides the epistemological loophole that the contextualist
philosopher makes use of in his assertion that the synthesis achieved

in the experience of a "voluntary vivid intuition of quality" is an
experience of a "truth," and not merely of a subjective projection, even
though the synthesis upon which it is based necessarily contradicts the
empirical conclusion that disorder is a categorical feature of reality.
This epistemology is what leads Woolf to have James say that "nothing
was simply one thing." Close up, the lighthouse is indeed a symbol of
mutability and fragmentation. We do indeed, ”perish each alone," just
as Mr. Ramsey constantly intones. But the lighthouse seen from the
garden that symbolizes the yearning for and the possibility of a re-
demptive synthesis that provides an "exemption from the universal law"

is also real.

 

12World Hypotheses, p. 234.

 

 

114

It is this understanding of the two modes of time that lies behind
Pepper's identification of the root metaphor of contextualism as the
historical event: "By historical event. . .the contextualist does not
mean primarily a past event, one that is, so to speak, dead and has to
be exhumed. What we mean by history, he says, is an attempt to

re-present events, to make them in some way come alive again. The real

 

historical event, the event in its actuality, is what is going on 293’

the dynamic dramatic active event. We may call it an 'act' if we like,
and if we take care in our use of the term. But it is not an act con-

ceived alone or cut off that we mean; it is an act in and with its

setting, an act in its context."13

The two "historical events" experi-
enced by Mrs. Ramsey at the dinner party and Lily as she is painting
at the end are "acts" in this sense in that both events are experiences
of the quality of the moment, and the synthesis that is the ground of

that quality, achieved through the experiencing of qualitative time.

In To the Lighthouse, as in Mrs. Dalloway, the permanently conflicting

 

 

realities of the two selves are acknowledged; there are, indeed, two
lighthouses. Yet a redemptive vision is achieved that is based, para-

doxically, upon synthesis. We live, says Woolf in To the Lighthouse,

 

modally, and those modalities are categorically tied to the way in which
we experience time. Schematic time exists; in detachment we cannot help
but acknowledge its reality and its agency. But to experience time in
its qualitative sense we must overcome detachment and in so doing we

overcome fragmentation and alienation. "Intimacy is knowledge,"14 says

l3World Hypotheses, p. 232.

14T0 the Lighthouse, p. 79.

 

 

115

Lily at one point, which is another way of saying that knowledge of a
certain kind is the product of undetached experience, not detached
observation. She understands that to grasp the knowledge that she
believes Mrs. Ramsey embodies she must become "one with the object

1 . . ‘ . . .
5 To achieve this union, which is a metonomy for and necessary

adored."
aspect of the larger synthesis she requires, she must accept her oneness
with the human condition and commit herself to the human endeavor, a
commitment about which her "stern, philosophical self" is legitimately
skeptical. Mr. Bankes' question at the dinner party, "Why take such

pains for the human race to go on?”16 is the seminal question of To the

Lighthouse in general and for Lily in particular° We discover that the

 

question is somehow answered for Lily in her achieved vision when we
discover that she is then not only willing to give Mr. Ramsey the
sympathy Mrs. Ramsey always gave willingly, a willingness that stands
throughout the novel as a metonomyfku°her commitment to humanity in

17 are the final, star-

general, but needs to do so. "She wanted him"
tling words used to describe her vision.

The overcoming of detachment, in Woolf and for the contextualist
philosopher, is an aspect of both the method for and the product of
experiencing the quality of any context and it is for this reason that
Pepper identifies the contextualist's epistemology as intrinsically
subjective: ". . .by our examination of the texture of perception we
see that the texture of the verifying act (which is a perception) must

15_To the Lighthouse, p. 79.

 

l .
5T9 thegLighthquse, p. 134.
1?

 

To the Lighthouse, p. 300.

 

116

be partly made up of the strands carried into it by the activities of
the perceiver. When these activities are the operations of verifying a
hypothesis, these operations are precisely the agent's contribution to

18 We see here why Woolf is so centrally con-

the verifying texture."
cerned with the inadequacy of Mr. Ramsey's philosophical epistemology

in To the Lighthouse. For Mr. Ramsey, ". . .thought is like the key—

 

board on a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet . .

."19 When Andrew is explain—

ranged in so many letters all in order. . .
ing to Lily what Mr. Ramsey‘s books are about, he cryptically states,
"Subject and object and the nature of reality," and in reply to her
saying that "she had no notion what that meant," he suggests that she
"Think of a kitchen table. . .when you're not there."20 Mr. Ramsey is
doomed by his objective epistemology to fail in his search for a redemp-
tive understanding of life because life observed in detachment is in-
evitably characterized by disorder and fragmentation: we do "perish
each alone” in a world that has lost its belief in any of the "vertical"
cosmologies that relate individual human existence to a higher reality.
It is only in the "voluntary vivid intuition of quality" that we can

see ourselves as part of a synthetic whole; the coalescence of subject
and object is both the path to and an aspect of the reality of what we
seek. Since reality in one of its modes is nothing but "events"
actualized voluntarily by the perceiver, the truth that characterizes

l8World Hypotheses, pp. 275-76.

 

lgTe the Lighthouse, p. 53.

2O

 

 

To the Lighthouse, p. 38.

 

117

this mode can only be grasped by accepting one's involvement in the
context.

Albert Levy, in his chapter on Henri Bergson in Philosophy and the
Modern World, is more explicit than Pepper in identifying the dual
epistemology of contextualism:

All this [Bergson's repudiation of the finality of a
mechanistic view of the World] is accomplished through

a dual epistemology. Granted that instinct and
intelligence are complementary in their functioning and
interpenetrate each other, that they are tendencies

rather than absolutes, nevertheless the function of the
intelligence is to contrive tools (symbolic or otherwise)
for the manipulation of the environment. And instinct, '
fringed about by intelligence, grown almost self—conscious
as it were, turns into that higher form of awareness which
is intuition. Intuition as knowledge can be defined only
poetically, that is, by suggestion. In An Introduction to
Metaphysics Bergson has called it "the kind of intellectual
sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in
order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently
inexpressible." He also said that intuition provides an
absolute and not a relative awareness, and the conclusion
of Creative Evolution is that it is the culminating form
of consciousness which has developed in the evolutionary
process.21

The belief in the validity of those experiences in which the perceiver

senses himself at one with the object being perceived is offered by the

contextualist as an alternative to the alienation that is implicit in

mechanism. Woolf relies heavily on the recording of such experiences in

the visionary moments that Mrs. Ramsey and Lily experience. Mrs. Ramsey,

in her meditation on the lighthouse, will "become the thing she looked
22

at—-that light, for example," as she moves toward her vision of

collective identity at the dinner party. Lily, in her moment of vision

W
_ 21Albert William Levy, Philosophy and the Modern World (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1959), pp. 97-98.

2
2To the Lighthouse, p. 97.

 

118

on the beach, will experience the "oneness" with the "object adored?
that must occur before her painting can be completed. Such moments of
identification will be offered as the basis for their replies to Mr. Ram-
sey's insistence that "We perish, each alone."

One final point about contextualist theories and their relationship

to Woolf's vision in To the Lighthouse should be made before proceeding

 

to the more thorough discussion of the text. The contextualists reject
the idea that the subjective element in their epistemology necessarily
leads to some form of solipsism. In arguing that redemptive truth can
only be known through direct experience, through an act of verification
that "must be partly made up of the strands carried to it by the activi-
ties of the perceiver," the contextualist leaves himself open to the
question, "How do I know that what you say is true about the world and
its potentiality to be experienced synthetically if I do not have similar
experiences?” Pepper points out that the contextualist's characteristic

23 Woolf's diaries

response to such questions is ”Catch me if you can."
and essays reveal her own recurrent concern about this criticism: "Have
I the power to convey the true reality? Or do I write essays about
myself?"24 she says at one point, and at another, "For it is only by
knowing how to write that you can make use in literature of your self;
that self which, while it is essential to literature, is also its most
dangerous antagonist. Never to be yourself and yet always-—that is the

25

problem." In my discussion of The Waves, I pointed out that the

 

23World Hypotheses, p. 252.

 

24A Writer's_piary, June 19, 1923, p. 57.

 

25"The Modern Essay," Collected Essays, II, p. 46.

 

119

effort to resolve this problem in that novel was the genesis of its
unique technique and directly related to the sense of failure to achieve
a redemptive vision of human experience in that novel. I believe that
Woolf had already solved the problem in To the Lighthouse in that in it
she convincingly implicates the experiencing of something that we might
call a transcendental ego, the overcoming of unique personality, as the
necessary verifying act of perception. Her success at depicting this
experience is, I believe, what made possible her achievement of a re-
demptive vision of life that is universal. It is ironic that she
achieved this end in what was, in genesis and substance, the most auto-
biographical of her novels.

It is this understanding of Woolf's vision and accomplishment that
I hope to substantiate in my discussion of To the Lighthouse. My con-
tention that this novel, and not The Waves, is her most significant
accomplishment is based upon my belief that it is only in To the Light-
EEEEEE that she convincingly achieves a redemptive understanding of human
experience that incorporates the principal verities of her understanding
of life. Woolf was fundamentally a dualist who required synthesis. As
a consequence, as we have seen, her novels are usually characterized by
the melancholy of hopeless defiance, as in The Voyage Out, Night and
Eggi, and The Waves, or by the melancholy of resignation, as in Jacob's

Room and to some extent Mrs. Dalloway. They are, as she says, "elegies."

 

‘E9 the Lighthouse is also an elegy, but is not, like her other novels,
an elegy for the human condition, but rather, an elegy for her mother

that ends, as elegies traditionally do, in affirmation.

 

 

120

 

"The Window": Mrs. Ramsey'e Temperament

In "A Sketch of the Past," an essay written shortly before her

death and twelve years after the publication of To the Lighthouse, Woolf

 

recalls her mother in terms that remind us vividly of the novel:

What a jumble of things I remember, if I let my mind

run, about my mother; but they are all of her in company;
of her surrounded; of her generalized; dispersed, omni-
present, of her as the creator of that crowded, merry
world which spun so gaily in the centre of my childhood.
It is true that I enclosed that world in another made by
my own temperament; it is true that from the beginning I
had many adventures outside that world; and often went far
from it; but there it always was, the common life of the
family, very merry, very stirring, crowded with people;
and she was the centre; it was herself. This was proved
on May 5th, 1895. For after that day there was nothing
left of it.26

Woolf characterizes Julia Stephen in the same way as she characterized
Mrs. Ramsey in the novel, as the creator and sustaining spirit of a world
that died with her death, a world that Lily Briscoe in the novel, like
Woolf in life, enclosed in another made of her own temperament.
Understanding the relationship between these temperaments is the

key to understanding To the Lighthouse, for the novel is at its heart

 

a successful effort to reconcile them and the sense of life's verities
on which they are based. Underlying the novel's multiplicity of
interests and themes--its probings into the tyranny of sexual stereo-
types, into the destructiveness and absurdity of the ego, into questions
of aesthetics and epistemology--is again Woolf‘s understanding of the
duality of existence, and the struggle for wholeness of identity that

results from that duality. In Jacob's Room and Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf

 

 

26Virginia Woolf, Momehtseof Being (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1976), p. 84.

 

121

was content to establish the validity of the claims of the two worlds.
In To the Lighthouse, she attempts and achieves a reconciliation of the
claims: "For convenience sake, a man must be whole.”

As with Clarissa and Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf establishes
and explores her theme by juxtaposing two characters who personify the
conflicting "worlds" which comprise the human condition, and by again
establishing an unspoken link between the characters that extends the
meaning of their relationship beyond a simple rendering of a conflict
of values to an understanding of the conflict as the central fact of
human existence. Just as Septimus' paralyzing sense of moral purity
and Clarissa's commitment to the "waves of divine vitality" were the
conflicting verities of Mrs. Dalloway, Lily‘s commitment to the purity
and perfection of art and Mrs. Ramsey's to the potentialities of life
experienced are the conflicting verities of To the Lighthouse.

The most direct statement of the conflict between Lily and Mrs.
Ramsey occurs late in the novel, shortly before Lily completes her
painting and the boaters reach the lighthouse:

And all the time she was saying that the butter was not

fresh one would be thinking of Greek temples, and how

beauty had been with them there. She never talked of

it-—she went, punctually, directly. It was her instinct

to go, an instinct like the swallows for the south, the

artichokes for the sun, turning her infallibly toward

the human race, making her nest in its heart. And this,

like all instincts, was a little distressing to people

who did not share it; to Mr. Carmichael perhaps, to

herself certainly. Some notion was in both of them

about the ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of

thought.27

This understanding of the intrinsic conflict between life and thought,

which has stood as a barrier between the two in Lily's mind throughout

M

27To the Lighthouse, p. 301.

 

 

122

the novel, is the basis of Lily's resistance to what she sees as a
tyranny Mrs. Ramsey imposed over others in life, and through memory, in
death. The perceived tyranny, manifested in pressures to be kind to the
likes of Charles Tansley, to marry because men like William Bankes need
flowers in their homes, and to willingly provide the "sympathy" persis—
tently demanded by Mr. Ramsey and, apparently, by all males, is in a
deeper sense seen by Lily as a tyranny imposed by one who is committed
to humanity, to the alleviation of pain, the enrichment of experience,
and the perpetuation of life, on one who is not. Throughout the novel,
Lily seeks with ". . .a desperate courage. . . her own exemption from

."28 resisting the demands of Mrs. Ramsey whom she

the universal law.
sees ". . .presiding with immutable calm over destinies she completely
failed to understand."29

But Lily's resistance to Mrs. Ramsey is countered by her conflict-
ing fascination with the vitality and richness of the world that Mrs.
Ramsey presides over and seems to sustain. Although Mrs. Ramsey's
commitment to human experience is discredited by Lily's acute sense of
"the ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought," she senses
something of value behind that commitment, a truth that Mrs. Ramsey
personifies: "Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more,
the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one's perceptions, half way to
truth, were tangled in a golden mesh? or did she lock up within herself
some secret which certainly Lily Briscoe believed peOple must have for

the world to go on at all?"30

28To the Lighthouse, p. 77.

 

29To ED? Lighthouse, p. 81.

3939_the Lighthouse, p. 78.

 

 

123

This ambivalence, reminiscent of Peter Walsh's toward Clarissa,
must be resolved before Lily can achieve the synthetic vision that she
struggles for throughout the novel, a vision that will permit her to
complete her painting while simultaneously freeing and requiring her to
give Mr. Ramsey the sympathy that he needs, a need that we are asked to
understand as a symbol for the needs of humanity. What Lily will dis-
cover, intuit, is that what motivates her as an artist has its analogue
in what motivated Mrs. Ramsey in life, that beyond Mrs. Ramsey's
seemingly futile pragmatic motivations were what Lily comes to under-
stand as aesthetic motivations that finally required commitment to
human experience to be actualized, a commitment that Lily, too, must
recognize and accept before she can fulfill herself as an artist.
Finally, Lily will discover that the choice between art and life,
thought and action, cannot be made because the fulfillment of these
commitments are contingent upon each other. In coming finally to under-
stand the relationship between her own identity as a thinker and artist

and Mrs. Ramsey's as the Magna Mater, Lily will achieve the most pro-

 

found "adjustment" of the two worlds to be found in Woolf's novels.

Like Septimus and Clarissa, and by extension, Jacob and Clarissa,
Lily and Mrs. Ramsey are alter egos whose public personalities represent
for Woolf the polarities of meaningful human identity. In Mrs. Ramsey,
beneath her public image, we find Lily's values suppressed, or at least
unspoken: she is conscious of them and the values are a significant
part of her self image even though others are unaware of them. In Lily,
we find Mrs. Ramsey's public values repressed--the basis of feelings of
attachment and empathy that she does not understand. Lily's discovery

Of the subconscious bond between them, a discovery that they are secret

 

124

sharers of a common sense of life's verities, is the climactic event of
the novel; the completion of the painting, which can only be completed
when Lily accepts this bond, is the novel's denouement. To be the artist
she wants to be, Lily must not only understand that we live in two
worlds, but must accept her obligation to live in both worlds. In short,
she must approach her art as Mrs. Ramsey, the artist of life, approached
life.

That the characterizatiOn of Mrs. Ramsey is grounded in a dualistic
understanding of existence is no more evident than in her conflicting
thoughts, at the dinner party, about the engagement of Paul and Minta,
an engagement that she, according to Paul, encouraged and caused:

This will celebrate the occasion--a curious sense rising

in her at once freakish and tender, of celebrating a festival,

as if two emotions were called up in her, one profound--for

what can be more serious than the love of man for woman, what

more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the

seeds of death; at the same time, these lovers, these peOple

entering into illusion glittering-eyed, must be danced

around with mockery, decorated with garlands.31
In such thoughts, Woolf reveals a significant aspect of Mrs. Ramsey's

conception of life, a private sense of life's meaninglessness, in this

instance, of life's absurdity, that is at odds with her Magna Mater

 

commitment to the lives of her family, friends, and all who need her.
"Why," thinks William Bankes as he observes her at the party, "does one
take all these pains for the human race to go on? Is it so desirable?"
He would be surprised to know that the same question, implied if not
expressed, is seldom far from Mrs. Ramsey's own mind.

"How could any Lord have made this world?" she asks in a Septimus-

like reflection. "With her mind she always seized the fact that there

 

31To the Lighthouse, p. 147.

 

125

is no reason, order, justice; but only suffering, death, the poor.

There is no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that.

No happiness lasted; she knew that."32 While at another time, reflecting

on August Carmichael's antipathy toward her, she recognizes ". . .the

pettiness of some part of her, and of human relationships, how flawed

33 "All this

desire of hers to give," she thinks at another point, ”was vanity."34

they are, how despicable, how self-seeking at their best."

Such reflections are too consistent to be understood as momentary lapses
into self—doubt, or as simply expressions of modesty or humility. They
represent instead a consistent understanding of human existence, an under-
standing at odds with her public image as ". . .this delicious fecundity,
this fountain and spray of life," whose commitments to the lives of

others through the encouragement of marriages, of social causes, and

of children's dreams are the basis of her familial and public person-
ality. Her dolorous husband, ". . .with all his gloom and desperation"

."35 in that

was indeed "happier, more hopeful on the whole than she.
her secret melancholy is based not only on an obsession with mutability

and individual loneliness ("We perish, each alone," is his idee fixe),

 

 

but also on an acute and potentially paralyzing sense of the degrading
self-centeredness of all human motivation.
Yet despite this private pessimism, Woolf asks us to believe in

the sincerity and efficacy of Mrs. Ramsey's public hopefulness, not

 

 

 

32To the Lighthouse, p. 134.
33 .

:Qg_the Lighthouse, p. 98.
34T0 the Lighthouse, p. 65.
35

To the Lighthouse, p. 91.

 

126

simply as a desire on her part to make the best of the bad situation
that life seems clearly to be, but as an attitude necessary for the
actualization of real potentialities in life. Although she is very much

a provider of "sympathy," she is no Mater Dolorosa whose principal moti-

 

vation is to give solace for and encourage distraction from an intrinsi—

cally unsatisfactory reality, but a Magna Mater who like Blake's "thher

 

Earth" in Thel encourages life because she believes in its possibilities

 

despite the paralysis that is the logical result of life observed. Her
husband does not understand or accept this hopefulness: ". . .she flew
in the face of facts, made his children hope for what was utterly out of

36 and beneath the simple conflict

the question, in effect, told lies,"
over whether or not James will be able to sail to the lighthouse we find
this larger conflict about life's possibilities. Mrs. Ramsey, too,
understands the weather report and that the hoped-for trip will not take
place in the morning, but she is thankful that the circumstances that
distract James allow her to avoid acknowledging this to him, for she also
understands that the anticipation of the trip and the belief in its
possibility are more important than wehther or not this particular trip
actually occurs. He will have to confront the facts soon enough. It is
hope, not the trip itself, that is at stake. She understands that the
child's hope to go to the lighthouse is, at a deeper, inchoate, level,
symbolic of our hopes to satisfy our deepest needs for a fulfilling life,
hopes that Mrs. Ramsey believes must be kept alive in order that these
needs can be satisfied. Her hopefulness, then, the "yes" that is her

36To the Lighthouse, p. 50.

 

127

first word and the first word of the novel, is an attitude held despite
the evidence of life observed, but sustained by her recollections of life
experienced. It is this kind of experience that late in the evening
occurs at the dinner party.

What does the party mean to Mrs. Ramsey? To understand this we
must identify her state of mind in the hours between James's going to
bed and the party, since what occurs at the party is for her, as it is
meant to be for the reader, an answer to the self-doubt and pessimism
that she experiences during that time. We first find her in a state of
near capitulation to her husband, momentarily resigned to his View of
the world. She has just completed reading Grimm's story about the
fisherman and his wife to James, a story whose outcome serves as an
ironic comment on the conflict between herself and her husband in that
in it, the fisherman's wife has allowed her husband to renounce his king—
ship by accepting the responsibility for herself. Yet it is at this
moment that Mrs. Ramsey, doubtful about herself and her own values, had
accepted the necessity to tell James that there would be no trip to the
lighthouse the next day because "Your father says not.”37 Clearly, her
melancholy acceptance of Mr. Ramsey's insistent prediction is tied to
doubts she has expressed to herself about the validity of her own values:

. . .she must admit that she felt this thing that she called

life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you when you

gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering;

death; the poor. There was always some woman dying of cancer,

even here. And she had said to all these children, You shall

go through it all. To eight people she had said relentlessly

that (and the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds)~
. .she was driven on, too quickly she knew, almost as

o o

 

 

 

37To the Lighthouse, p. 95.

 

128

if it were an escape for her too, to sag that people
must marry; people must have children.3

When Mildred comes to put James to bed, Mrs. Ramsey is grateful that she

will not have to say to James what she now believes must be said, but she

is sure that he knows, and that the consequences of his knowing will be

greater than momentary disappointment, that in his child's mind, the

belief in the possibility of going to the lighthouse means to him what

it means to her: ". . .she was certain he was thinking, we are not

going to the lighthouse tomorrow; and she thought, he will remember

that all his life."39
It is at this point that Mrs. Ramsey begins to reconstruct her values,

and the emotional and mental developments that she experiences from this

moment through the party are offered by Woolf as a reply to the idea

that the commitment to life that she encourages in others and that she

characteristically holds herself need be thought of as simply encourage-

ment to escape the truths of life in the distractions of activity.

What she experiences, first in her moments alone, then with her husband,

then in preparation for the dinner party, and finally at the party itself,

is offered by Woolf as an apologia for her values--a manifestation of an

archetypal process leading from reflective despair to experienced affir—

mation, a process that Lily will also go through in "The Lighthouse."

Both Lily and Mrs. Ramsey will, in their respective moments, move from

a dispirited sense of life's intrinsic disorder and fragmentation to a

convincing experience of a moment of life as a synthetic whole, and in

38To the Lighthouse, p. 92.

 

39To the Lighthouse, p. 95.

 

 

129

so doing Mrs. Ramsey will reaffirm for herself, and Lily will discover,
that it is only commitment to the human experience in general that makes
such moments possible. If life observed offers confirmation of the
rhetorical pessimism behind Mr. Bankes' question, life eXperienced can
provide a meaning that refutes it. There are, indeed, two lighthouses.
Mrs. Ramsey's restoration of faith in her own values begins in
privacy, and it is ironically significant that it does, for it is as if
she must touch again, Antaeus-like, something that exists as the bed-
rock of her strength, something asocial, separate even from her own
personality, before she can begin to restore her faith in her own person-
ality and in the possibilities of the social world. Although Woolf's
description of the experience is one of the most memorable parts of IS.

the Lighthouse, it is necessary to quote from it at length because

 

several aspects of the experience need to be discussed:

No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he
had cut out-—a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman
in evening dress—-children never forget. For this reason,
it was so important what one said, and what one did, and

it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need
not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself.
And that was what now she often felt the need of—-to think;
well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All
the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal,
evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to
being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something
invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and
sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this
self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest
adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range
of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there
was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed;
one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must
feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are
simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all
spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we
rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her
horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places
she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself
pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in

130

Rome. This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no

one saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting.
There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome
of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of
stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her
experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with
her needles) but as a wedge of darkness. Losing person-
ality, one loSt the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there
rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over
life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this
eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that
stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last
of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in
this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching
oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and
this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often
she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking,
with her work in her hands until she became the thing she
looked at--that light, for example. And it would lift up
on it some little phrase or other which had been lying in
her mind like that——"Children don't forget, children don't
forget"—-which she would repeat and begin adding to it,

It will end, it will end, she said. It will come, it will
come, when suddenly she added, We are in the hands of the
Lord.

But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that.
Who had said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying
something she did not mean. She looked up over her knitting
and met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own
eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could
search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence
that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the light,
without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was
beautiful like that light. It was odd, she thought, how if
one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams,
flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt
they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational
tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as

for oneself. There rose, and she looked and looked with her
needles suspended, there curled up off the floor of the mind,
rose from the lake of one's being, a mist, a bride to meet
her lover.

The meditation begins with her thoughts about James and what she
anticipates the effect of the disappointment will be on him in later

life. At one level, of course, her concern is excessive; such

M

40To the Lighthouse, pp. 95—98.

 

 

131

disappointments are inevitably part of the texture of life. What, then,
does the disappointment mean to her? What does she believe it will mean
to James? Certainly, we must look to her deeper conflict with her husband
to answer these questions.

The conflict between them is centered on one question: is it possible
to satisfy our deepest spiritual needs, or are we doomed by the human
condition to the melancholy of unfulfillment? The nature of this need
is clear-—we need to feel connected with the world in some redemptive
way, to be able to see ourselves as part of a timeless whole that re—
pudiates the sense that isolated selfhood and mutability are the iron
laws of existence. For Mr. Ramsey, "Someone had blundered"4l in arrang-
ing the human condition. For him, our need to believe that we are re-
demptively connected with something, whether God or some other universal
truth, or simply with humanity, is an unfulfillable need; for him, the
grammar of life is simple: "We perish, each alone.” Certainly his
compulsion to tell James that there will be no trip to the lighthouse
the next day is more a spiritual grammar lesson than a prediction about
a specific event, just as Mrs. Ramsey's hopefulness, despite the evidence,
is an extension of something in her that believes fulfillment through
synthesis is possible, that there is in life some alternative to the
alienation that is the inevitable result of believing that we live in a
world defined by disorder and fragmentation. It is to reaffirm this
belief that she turns inward.

That her thoughts are focused upon disorder and fragmentation at

the beginning of the meditation is indicated symbolically by the

w

41To the Lighthouse, p. 31.

 

132

disparate cutouts that James has left for her to pick up, for certainly
we are to understand the disunity of these objects-~the refrigerator, the
mowing machine, the gentleman in the evening dress-~and James' failure
to assemble them into a coherent whole-—as an orchestration of the mood
and thought of the moment. But it is not the social world that they
depict to which she turns her attention, but to a deeper, intrinsically
private world. For the moment, her conflict with her husband and her
concern for James is put aside; what she needs is to reassure herself
that at some level of being, at least, she can experience herself con-
nected meaningfully to something outside of herself, as if it is necessary
for her to reaffirm a truth that has nothing to do with social existence,
and the ego that is involved in that existence, before she can return
with confidence to the social world.

That she is successful in having this experience is clearly indi-
cated by the metaphor of the bride and lover that concludes the passage
I have quoted, a metaphor that rhapsodically culminates the mental events
that have taken place in that the focus of the meditation is the experi-
encing of a unity between an aspect of herself and the world that she is
observing: ". . .she became the thing she looked at--that light, for
example." What has occurred in short is the coalescence of subject and
object that is a necessary aspect of the experiencing of the "quality"
of any moment for the contextualist, an event that Bergson, in An Intro—

duction to Metaphysics, refers to as resulting from ". . .that intellec-

 

tual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to

coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible."42

2Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme
(London: G. P. Putnam, 1912), p. 7.

 

133

That it is the lighthouse beam itself that she identifies with is doubly
significant since it serves throughout the novel as a releasing stimulus
for the human hope to affirm the synthetic truth we seek and need.

What are the implications of this experience? How does it relate
to Mrs. Ramsey's shaken faith in her commitment to the possibilities of
the social world? First, we should determine the sense in which it does
not, for it seems to me unlikely that the passage can be read without
its evoking the organistic ideas of romanticism. The bride and lover

metaphor, as Meyer Abrams points out in Natural Supernaturalism, is a

 

seminal metaphor of the romantic movement, which expresses the character-
istic belief of the romantic writer in the power of the imagination to
consummate "a holy marriage with the external universe, to create out
of the world of all of us, in a quotidian and recurrent miracle, a new
world which is the equivalent of paradise,"43 a belief in the ultimate
marriage between the supernal and the mundane that was the soul of their
rebellion against the dispiriting implications of the mechanistic world
view of the Enlightenment. These same dispiriting implications are, of
course, at the soul of Mrs. Ramsey's conflict with her husband, but her
experience of a synthesis is clearly qualified to deny the truth of the
organistic reply.

Certainly this is what is implied by Mrs. Ramsey's irritation with
herself for allowing the momentum of her thoughts to lead her to say,
"We are in the hands of the Lord," as it is later in the meditation when

she refers to "some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all,

43Meyer Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W. W. Norton
& Co., 1971), p. 28.

 

134

one's relations changed." If for the romantic, such experiences were
verification of their belief in the redeemability of the social world,
to her they are not: "What had brought her to say that: 'We are in the
hands of the Lord?’ she wondered. The insincerity slipping in among the
truths roused her, annoyed her. She returned to her knitting again.
How could any Lord have made this world? she asked. With her mind she
had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but
suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world
to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that." The
sense of synthesis, order, and fulfillment that she is experiencing is
here pointedly dissociated from the operations of history or the activ-
ities of the social world, from any belief that the particulars of
existence can ultimately be understood as participating, beneath a veil
of appearances, in an ultimate and beneficient teleology. If her medi-
tative experience is to be understood as a step towards her regaining
faith in and restoring commitment to the possibility of meaningful ful—
fillment in the social world, it must be understood in different terms,
terms that are "horizontal," rather than "vertical" in their cosmological
implications, for even though the experience has been dissociated from
the reassurances implicit in vertical cosmologies, it concludes positively
with the words, "It is enough! It is enough!" thus indicating that some
kind of answer to the problem on her mind at the beginning of the medi-
tation has been achieved.

Why, then, is her experience "enough?" What relationship does it
have to social existence if it does not serve to encourage faith in the
ultimate outcomes of human experience? Nothing in the experience itself

or in her immediate reflections about it provides an answer to this

 

135

question. Woolf is clear in indicating that Mrs. Ramsey, before the
party, has no sense that any connection exists between what she has
experienced in her private meditation and what she will attempt at the
party. We find her, at the beginning of the party, still doubtful about
her values, questioning, in fact, the value of her life and of her
commitment to the possibilities of human experience that the party
represents: "But what have I done with my life? thought Mrs. Ramsey,

."44 That she is as

taking her place at the head of the table. . .
dispirited as she was in the moments before her private meditation is
clear: ". . .she began all this business, as a sailor not without
weariness sees the wind fill his sail and yet hardly wants to be off
again and thinks how, had the ship sunk, he would have whirled round

and round and found rest at the bottom of the sea."45 Consciously at
least, the synthetic vision that she has achieved in private meditation
is unrelated to the event that she is anticipating: we find her still
focused on fragmentation: "The room (she looked around it) was very
shabby. There was no beauty anywhere. . . . Nothing seemed to have
merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging
and flowing and creating rested on her."46 It is her doubt about her
ability to bring about this merger that leads her to wish for "rest at
the bottom of the sea." At the conscious level, then, what has occurred
in her meditative experience is "enough" only because it provides con-
solation for what seems to her at this point to be the ultimate poverty
Of human experience.

44To the Lighthouse, p. 125.

45To the Lighthouse, p. 127.

 

46To the Lighthouse, p. 126.

 

 

136

But if we look ahead to the party itself we discover that it is
the kind of experience that she has achieved in private meditation, there
defined as asocial in nature, that defines the kind of redemptive experi-
ence that she achieves in her social world. In both experiences, what
occurs is what contextualists refer to as "voluntary vivid intuitions"
of the "quality" of the moment, an event that is intrinsically synthetic.
Finally, Woolf implies through Mrs. Ramsey's experience, we can confirm
our commitment to the value of the human experience not by reference to
some ultimate and redemptive good that will or can occur in the future,
but through the experiencing of a sufficient good that is the potentiality
of every lived moment. Ralph Freedman's observation that "The prevailing
view in romantic and symbolist traditions usually presupposed that ex—

perience is primarily a mental quality and that the mind reflects a

47

'reality' that is obscured by the physical world" is definitive on this

point, although I will later show that for Woolf, as for the Romantics
and the Symbolists, the mind functions more as a "lamp" than as the
"mirror" implied by Freedman in that she sees the role of the experi-
encer/perceiver as active and contributive rather than passive and
receptive. Mrs. Ramsey experiences the party as a mental quality, as an
event (accurring in "real" time, the realm of potential synthesis and
permmuuance, instead of simply observing it and understanding it in terms
of "schematic" or "clock" time, the realm intrinsically characterized by
disordery fragmentation and mutability. The synthesis of life and

thought that is the potentiality of experienced life is offered as

4
I 7Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Hermann Hesse,
Egghme Gide, and Virginia Woolf (London: Oxford University Press, 1963),
p. 269. '

 

 

137

sufficient compensation for the fragmentation that is the inevitable
characteristic of observed life: "Some change went through them all,

as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a
party together in a hollow, on an island; had there common cause against
the fluidity out there."48 This experience of synthesis, here experi-
enced as a sense of community, is, as she said of her earlier experience,
"enough:" "It partook. . .of eternity; as she had already felt about
something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence to
things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and
shines out. . .in the face of the flowing, the spectral, like a ruby; so
again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of
peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that

49

endures." As for the contextualists, although ”disorder is a cate-
gorical feature" of reality when observed in detachment, synthesis is a
potentiality of life experienced. If Mr. Ramsey's lighthouse is real,
so is hers, for as James will later discover, "nothing was simply one
thing."

Mrs. Ramsey, then, in her experience at the party, achieves a
resolution of the conflict that is at the center of To the Lighthouse,
and at the center of all of Woolf's novels. Her resolution is based
upon her acceptance of a dual epistemology that is in accord with con-
textualistic theory. Although her commitment to the value of human
experience cannot be justified in detachment-4kxflij in fact, reinforces
her objective pessimism later in the novel through a series of cryptic

48To the Lighthouse, p. 147.

 

4
9To the Lighthouse, p. 158.

 

138

announcements about the outcomes of Mrs. Ramsey's efforts and the fates

of the people at the party--it can be justified by the quality of the
experiences her efforts produce. The experiencing of a synthesis between
life and thought is itself "the thing that is made that endures"; the
failure of the marriage she has promoted does not mitigate the value of
the moment achieved, but rather confirms her own understanding of the
ultimate outcomes of human experience. But Paul and Minta, and the others
at the party, ". . .would. . .come back to this night; this moon; this

50 Through her effort, a moment of

wind; this house; and to her too."
human experience had become a work of art, synthesized in substance and
idea: "All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind
felt swept, felt clean. And then there it was, entire; she held it in
her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence

51 Her accomplish-

sucked out of life and held rounded here--the sonnet."
ment is her self-justification, for without her instinctive commitment
to the value of human experience, a commitment held despite the con-
clusions of her "stern philosophical self," the moment could not have
occurred. She has earned the ironic triumph of her last words: "'Yes,
you were right. It's going to be wet tomorrow. You won't be able to
go.‘ And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again. She

had not said it: yet he knew."52

 

50To the Lighthouse, p. 170.

 

51To the Lighthouse, p. 181.

 

52To the Lighthouse, p. 186.

 

 

139

"Time Passes" and "The Lighthouse": Lilyjs Temperament

In letters to V. Sackville-West and Ottoline Morrell regarding

To the Lighthouse, Woolf expressed reservations about the effectiveness
53

 

of her writing in "Time Passes." Whatever the fictional merits of
this unusual interlude are, and I believe they are considerable, there
can be no doubt about its usefulness in the development of the novel's
theme, placed as it is immediately after Mrs. Ramsey's successful reso-
lution of the conflict between life and thought that is at the center of
the novel, for it is essential to Woolf's vision that the problem be
resolved not only by the person who instinctively gravitates toward human
experience, as does Mrs. Ramsey and as did Virginia Woolf's mother, but
also by the person who is predisposed to doubt its value, as does Lily
and as Woolf did herself. "Time Passes" describes the effect of time

on the house, the peOple who were present at the party, and on humanity
in general. The point of View is omniscient and detached: what happens
is not experienced by the "consciousness" that recounts the events; it
is only observed. We are reminded here of Mr. Ramsey's epistemology:
"Think of a kitchen table, when you are not there." The ten years
between the party and the melancholy return of some of the still living
members of the group who were present at the party is described from the
point of view of the "stern, philosophical self," the aspect of the
self's dual nature that is predisposed to believe, as are Mrs. McNab and
Mr. Carmichael, the members of the group who figure most predominantly

in this section, and as is Lily, upon whom the interlude focuses at the

 

53The Letters of Virginia Woolf, III, pp. 373-374 and 377-378.

 

140

end, in the "ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought." It is
to the vision of the world that lies behind Lily's temperament that we
turn in "Time Passes."

The central question of "Time Passes" is a version of the central
question of the novel as a whole, but in "Time Passes" it is phrased
rhetorically. "Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete

54 and answered unequivocally: ". . .should any sleeper

what he began?"
fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer
of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go by himself to walk on

the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes

readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reveal

."55 There is no more direct rejection of

the compass of the soul. . .
belief in "vertical" cosmologies in the novel: "That dream of sharing,
completing, of finding in solitude on the beach an answer, was then but

."56 In the absence of an experiencing

a reflection in a mirror. . .
self, no "horizontal" cosmology is offered to provide the sense in which
the world can "reveal the compass of the soul."

The theme of "Time Passes" then, is acknowledgment of the inexorably
destructive process of time. The focus on Mr. Carmichael and Mrs. McNab,
the housekeeper who struggles to make the decaying house habitable again,
is appropriate, in that both characters view the world from the point of
View of stoical resignation. Like the omniscient observer who describes

54To the Lighthouse, pp. 201—2.

 

55To the Lighthouse, p. 193.

 

56To the Lighthouse, p. 202.

 

 

 

 

 

 

141

the decay that has occurred in the house, and reports the sad fates and
failed hopes of the people who were present at the party, and of Euro-
pean civilization in general, Mr. Carmichael and Mrs. McNab see nothing
in life that mitigates the truth derived from life observed. Mr. Car-
michael is "untempted from his bed," preferring to read Virgil into the
night, presumably finding in the characteristic sadness of Virgil's
poetry a correlate to his own bleak view. We assume that his own volume
of poems, published during the spring and successful, we are told,
because of the despairing mood in England that has resulted from the war,
expressed similarly despairing views about the possibility of personal
spiritual fulfillment. (Later, while painting, Lily imagines that she
knows what his poetry was like: "It was seasoned and mellow. It was
about the desert and the camel. It was about the palm tree and the
sunset. It was extremely impersonal; it said something about death; it
said very little about love."57) _Mrs. McNab, prompted to activity by
the news that after ten years the family was returning, engages in dis-
pirited efforts to reclaim the house from decay; content, as she works,
with her own understanding of the nature of things: "So she was dead;
and Miss Prue dead too, with her first baby; but everyone had lost some-

58 In "Time Passes," then, human history is reduced

one in those years."
to an aspect of natural history: the house and what happens to it serve
as a metaphor for the fate of mankind: "Listening (had there been any—

one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic

 

57To the Lighthouse, pp. 289—90.

58

 

To the Lighthouse, p. 205.

 

 

142

chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing,
as the winds disported themselves like amorphous bulks of leviathans
whose brows as pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of
another, and lunged and plunged in darkness or the daylight (for day and
night, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it
seemed as if the universe itself were battling and tumbling, in brute
confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself."59
In "Time Passes," the world is seen and defined solely from the
perspective of the stern and philosophical self, and it is found wanting.
But unlike Mr. Ramsey, whose response to the same knowledge is posturing
self-pity and romantic melancholy, the omniscient observer who describes
and narrates the events, and Mr. Carmichael and Mrs. McNab, who reflect
his attitude, respond to the knowledge with stoical resignation, as if
they had disciplined their spirits by reading not only Virgil on the
impossibility of personal fulfillment, but also Lucretius on the fear
of death and Epictetus on the destructiveness of emotional yearning.

It is with this understanding of life that the "voice" in the final para-

graph tempts Lily, an understanding to which we already know she is pre-

disposed: ". . .why not accept this, be content with this, acquiesce
and resign?"60 But Lily at the end is "tempted from her bed to seek an
answer." We find her at the end of "Time Passes," ". . .sitting upright

in her bed. Awake."61

59To the Lighthouse, p. 206.

 

6OTo the Lighthouse, p. 214.

 

61To the Lighthouse, p. 214.

 

 

143

What Lily awakens to is announced in the opening sentence of "The
Lighthouse": "What does it mean then, what can it all mean?"62 Her
state of mind at this point parallels Mrs. Ramsey's in the moments before
the party ("But what have I done with my life?") in that she too is
tempted to "acquiesce and resign" to the conclusions of the "stern and
philosophical self." Interestingly, her first effort to formulate an
answer to the question on her mind recalls Mrs. Ramsey's momentary capit-
ulation to her husband's view of the world: "('Alone' she heard him say,
'Perished' she heard him say) and like everything else this strange morn-
ing the words became symbols, wrote themselves all over the grey—green
walls. If only she could have put them together, she felt, write them
in one sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things."63
But it is the finality of this truth that she has awakened to confront
and repudiate. Consciously, she is on the verge of accepting it; sub-
consciously she has been awakened by the imperatives of the "eager and
dissatisfied self" to search for an alternative truth.

We find her acutely aware of her alienation: ". . .she felt cut
off from other people, and able only to go on watching, asking, wonder-
ing. The house, the place, the morning, all seemed strangers to her.

I,64

She had no attachment here, no relations with it. . . "How aimless

it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought, looking at her
coffee cup. Mrs. Ramsey dead; Andrew killed; Prue dead too--repeat it

as she might, it roused no feeling in her." Like Mrs. Ramsey in the

 

62To the Lighthouse, p. 217.

 

63To the Lighthouse, p. 219.

64Tehthe Lighthouse, p. 218.

 

144

moments after James has gone to bed and before the party, Lily is focused
on disorder and fragmentation. Her sense of personal detachment is ex-
tended to the scene she is observing, and as she begins painting, her
effort to find some way to organize the scene ("The question was of some

relation between the masses"65)

is thwarted by her sense that ". . .it
was a house full of unrelated passions," an observation that echoes

Mrs. Ramsey's thought at the beginning of the dinner party that "Nothing
seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the
effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her."

The parallel between Lily's state of mind at this point in the
novel and Mrs. Ramsey's before the party is extended by the intrusion of
Mr. Ramsey and his needs on her thoughts. Just as Mrs. Ramsey was dis-
tracted from her concentration on the lighthouse, Lily is distracted
from her canvas, which is for her what the lighthouse was for Mrs. Ram-
sey, a releasing stimulus for her need to seek a meaning and order un-
adulterated by the incoherence and fragmentation of social existence:
"She saw her canvas as it floated up and placed itself white and un-
compromising directly before her. It seemed to rebuke her with its
cold stare for all this hurry and agitation, this folly and waste of
emotion; it drastically recalled her and spread through her mind first
a peace, as her disorderly sensations (he had gone and she felt sorry
for him and she had said nothing) trooped off the field; and then,
emptiness."66

What it recalled her from was her irritation with Mr. Ramsey for
his intrusion and her anger with Mrs. Ramsey, who in her role as

65To the Lighthouse, p. 221.

 

66To the Lighthouse, p. 234.

 

145

comforting earth mother symbolizes for Lily the conventional imperatives
and expectations that Lily believes she must resist in order to function
as an artist: "Really, she was angry with Mrs. Ramsey. . . .It was all
Mrs. Ramsey's doing. She was dead. Here was Lily, at forty-four, wast-
ing her time, unable to do a thing, standing there, playing at painting,
playing at the one thing one did not play at, and it was all Mrs. Ram-
sey's fault. She was dead. The step where she used to sit was empty.

67 We recall that Mrs. Ramsey when interrupted had,

She was dead."

grudgingly perhaps, but finally, consistent with her "instinct for life,"

willingly, turned to her husband to satisfy his need for sympathy and

attention. Lily, by contrast, toys with him by praising his boots, re-

jecting as she does "His immense self—pity, his demand for sympathy

[that] poured and spread itself in pools at her feet, and all she did,

miserable sinner that she was, was draw her skirts a little closer around

her ankles, lest she should get wet."68 It is Mrs. Ramsey's instinct

for life and the imperatives implied by it that angers her, which, "like

all instincts, was a little distressing to those who do not share it. . . ."
There are two ironies in her response. First, she resists Mr. Ram-

sey's demand for sympathy despite her acceptance, at this point, of the

truth upon which his self-pity is based. Certainly, had she formulated

the sentence out of the words "perished" and "alone" that she had

earlier sought to formulate, the result would have been his sentence,

"We perish, each alone." Second, she will discover after he is gone

enri‘while she is painting that she cannot complete the painting unless

 

67To the Lighthouse, p. 224.
68

 

To the Lighthouse, p. 228.

 

 

146

she not only gives, but recognizes her need to give, the sympathy that
he demands. Moments later, when the group has just set sail, she begins
the process of understanding this second irony ("She felt curiously

69

divided, as if one part of her were drawn out there" ),_a process that

will end in her accepting the truth that Mrs. Ramsey instinctively knew--
that the answer to the question that she needs before she can complete
her painting (What does it mean then, what can it all mean?) can only be
found in experience, and in the acceptance of the imperatives of both
worlds in which man lives.

The drama of "The Lighthouse,” then, is in Lily's movement from
alienation and pessimism to acceptance and affirmation. In discovering
that the vision she needs in order to answer the question about life's
meaning is achieved only when she accepts her involvement in the context
she is trying to paint, she discovers that she must move beyond her
belief in "the ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought" and
accept the commitment to life that Mrs. Ramsey represents. If, in re-
flection, she can only conclude that the spiritual grammar of life is
expressed most adequately by Mr. Ramsey's sentence, in experience, she
finds an alternative to that truth. The nature of the experience, and
Lily's path to it, parallels Mrs. Ramsey's eXperience at the party in
that she finds that life and commitment to life is justified not by
aniticipation of the consequences of human action and concern about its
"effectiveness,” but in the full experiencing of its quality. This event
‘will serve to symbolize, through the reconciliation of their conflicting

tenmmnnmnents, the human capacity to resolve, in moments of vision that

 

6?Te_the Lighthouse, pp. 233-4.

 

147

are themselves mutable but which have permanent impact, the conflict
between life and thought that is at the core of the novel.

Lily's struggle to achieve her vision parallels Mrs. Ramsey's in
other ways as well, and these parallels reinforce the idea that her move-
ment towards vision, despite fundamental differences that result from
their conflicting temperaments, confirms the validity and universality
of Mrs. Ramsey's vision. Like Mrs. Ramsey, she sees herself in battle
against a "formidable ancient enemy," but it is consistent with her con-
scious values that she names the enemy differently. For Lily, the enemy
is "this other thing, this truth, this reality" which she understands to
be separate from and at odds with lived existence, while for Mrs. Ramsey,
who accepts instinctively that it is human experience itself that must be

70 Mrs. Ramsey, unlike Lily, understands

redeemed, the enemy is "Life."
that the struggle for synthesis must continue beyond the fulfillment she
experienced in private meditation, that finally, she must confront and
master the recalcitrant particulars of lived existence before resting in
satisfaction. Lily will need to discover this truth as she "tunnel(s).
her way into her picture, into the past."71
Like Mrs. Ramsey, who understood that although the vision she
sought was subjective in that it needed to be experienced rather than
understood, Lily must first repudiate personality and search within for
a deeper ground of being: "Certainly she was losing consciousness of

outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her

name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael

 

7OTo the Lighthouse, p. 92.

 

7lTo the Lighthouse, p. 258.

 

 

148

was there or not, her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes and
names and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain Spurting over
that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modeled it in

greens and blues."72

The reader recalls Mrs. Ramsey's thoughts, at the
beginning of her meditation on the lighthouse: "When life sank down for

a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everyone was
always this sense of limitless resources, she supposed; one after another,
she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things

you know us by are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is spread-
ing, it is unfathomably deep, but now and again we rise to the surface

and that is what you know us by."73

Clearly, Woolf wants the reader to
understand the visions they have as being experienced by an archetypal
human identity that is the ground of individual existence. We are re-
minded of the recurrence, in Woolf's diaries and essays, of the problem
of personality for the artist who deals with the inner experiences of
her characters: "Have I the power to convey the true reality? Or do I
write essays about myself?"74
The most significant parallel between their experiences, however,
is in the nature of their respective visions and in their understandings
of how their visions provide an answer to the question of life's meaning

that they both seek to answer. The dual epistemology that we noted in

Mrs. Ramsey's meditation on the Lighthouse and in her experience at the

 

72To the Lighthouse, p. 258.

 

73To the Lighthouse, p. 96.

 

74A Writer's Diary, June 19, 1923, p. 63.

 

149

party is also apparent in Lily's vision, as Lily, too, understands that
whatever answer she finds to the question in the experience of the
visionary moment will not alter her understanding of life when seen from
a detached perspective. Like Mrs. Ramsey in her irritation with herself
for allowing the momentum of her thoughts to lead her momentarily to a
providential view of life ("We are in the hands of the Lord.") and in

her dual response to the anticipated announcement of the engagement, Lily
draws attention to what she understands as the universal fate of human
effort when she qualifies her vision by anticipating the fate of her

75

painting: it will "molder in attics," she notes, or be "hung in ser-

76 Woolf orchestrates this understanding by juxtaposing

vants' bedrooms."
scenes that are taking place in the boat to what Lily is experiencing on
the beach, scenes which qualify her vision in the same way that the

"Time Passes" interlude qualifies Mrs. Ramsey's vision at the party.

Two examples of this use of juxtaposition occur immediately before and
after section XI in which Lily finally experiences the vision that allows
her to complete her painting. Before, we find Cam, who has been meditat-
ing about her father and what he means to her, overcoming her antipathy
and accepting his View of life as she murmurs to herself, "dreamily half

77 and after, we find James also

asleep, how we perished, each alone,"
acknowledging the validity of his understanding: "He looked, James

thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the

 

75To the Lighthouse, p. 309.

 

76To the Lighthouse, p. 237.

 

77To the Lighthouse, p. 284.

 

150

waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying in
the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at
the back of both of their minds--that loneliness that was for both of

78

them the truth about things." At the same moment, Lily, too, discovers

that, "Whatever she had wanted to give him, when he left her that morning,

she had given him at last."79

What she gives him, of course, is the
sympathy that can only be adequately expressed in his own words. Woolf's
point is clear, and it is a point directly reflective of the dual episte-
mology of contextualism: whatever redemptive meaning Lily grasps in her
moment of experienced vision, it does not alter the fact that disorder,
fragmentation and mutability are the iron laws of the observed world.

But for Lily on the beach, as for Mrs. Ramsey at the party, some—
thing does occur that is not subject to these laws, and its occurrence
verifies the existence of a mode of reality that is the basis for an
alternative answer to the question she awakened to answer that morning.
In her dramatic movement towards this experienced truth, Lily provides
a series of observations about what is happening to herself that further
tie what she experiences in the climactic moment of her vision to the
theories of contextualism.

Perhaps the most significant of these observations is her growing
sense, as she moves towards vision, that she is experiencing time in a

new way: "she could not shake herself free from the sense that every-

thing this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the

 

78To the Lighthouse, p. 301.

 

79To the Lighthouse, pp. 308-9.

 

151

last time."80 When we relate this observation to the memories of the
past that dominate her revery, these memories take on a new significance.
Gradually, her perception of Mrs. Ramsey shifts from recollections of

the dead past to the experience of the living present, from the sequen-
tial conceptualization of time to the experience of "actual" time, or
duration. The culmination of this epistemological shift will occur at
the moment of vision itself, when she will experience the living presence
of Mrs. Ramsey on the beach beside her. Although she is assuredly not
writing a ghost story, Woolf is clear in asking her reader to accept

Mrs. Ramsey's presence literally, and clear in her implication that Lily's
redemptive vision is contingent upon her fully accepting and experiencing
her presence. Lily's struggle to achieve "exemption from the universal
law" must finally be seen as a struggle with death and the triumph of
her vision occurs through the experiencing of time in a new mode; the
experiencing of Mrs. Ramsey's living presence has released her in the
moment of vision from the sway of the laws of sequential time. In ex—
periences what is enduring and most real in herself, namely, the "secret
which Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at
all." As quoted earlier, "A single minute released from the chronological
order of time has recreated a human being similarly released." It is
such an experience that is the basis of Lily's vision: a vision that

confirms Bergson's observation that "Theory of knowledge and theory of

 

 

life seem to us inseparable."81
8o .
To the Lighthouse, p. 288.
81

An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. l.

 

152

Woolf, then, like Bergson in particular and the contextualist
philosophers in general, leaves us in her novel with a dual epistemology,
and through this dual epistemology, with two conflicting absolutes in
answer to Lily's question of life's meaning. Levy notes that "The para-

dox of Time and Free Will is that it leaves Bergson with a deep split

 

between the external world of nature and the deepest personal self. . . .
His perplexity is not over how knowledge of the external world is possible,
but over how knowledge of the inner self is possible."82 Woolf solves
the problem in the same way that Bergson solved it, that is by acknow-
ledging the epistemological significance of experienced time. If our
knowledge of the external world tells us that man is nothing but a victim
of temporal succession and change, our experience counters this knowledge
with the belief that something endures of our lives that is not subject
to these laws. In duration, we experience time as a continuous flow
rather than as a series of moments in a sequence, and in this experience,
we grasp the reality of something in our own identity, and in human
identity in general, that endures within the succession and change that
characterizes the external world. It is certainly this duality that is
acknowledged by Lily when she, at her moment of redemptive vision,
simultaneously acknowledges Mr. Ramsey's spiritual grammar.

What, then, is the "secret" that Mrs. Ramsey had "lock[ed] up with-
in herself" that Lily experiences and, through experience, acknowledges?
Woolf warns us about the danger of labelling the secret: We are reminded

when Lily recalls Mrs. Ramsey saying, "Aren't things spoiled by saying

 

82Philosophy in the Modern World, p. 75.

 

153

them"83 that Mrs. Ramsey was never able to speak her deepest feelings to

her husband, but could only eXpress them in action. The word "love,"

for someone who is acutely aware of "some pettiness of some part of her—
self and of human relationships, how flawed they were, how despicable,
how self-seeking at their best," must certainly have stuck in her throat,
but it is nothing less than this word that will suffice for Lily, and
nothing less than this that she gives Mr. Ramsey in the moment of total
rapport that she experiences on the beach. "Love had a thousand shapes,"
thinks Lily at one moment on her path to vision, "There might be lovers
whose gift it was to choose out of the elements of things and place them
together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some
scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate) one of those
globed compacted things over which thought lingers and love plays."84
Love, then, as the aspiration for synthesis and the commitment to attain
it, is what has endured of Mrs. Ramsey and what Lily, in becoming "one
with the object adored," has experienced and acknowledged in herself.
What she defines in this passage as "love" is most certainly to be under-
stood as her primary motivation as an artist, an understanding that repu-
diates her conscious sense of "the ineffectiveness of action, the
supremacy of thought" with the understanding that the unconditional
acceptance of the life she seeks to portray is prerequisite to achieving
the vision that allows her to portray it. We recall that earlier, she
had noted that Mrs. Ramsey's accomplishments affected her "Like a work

of art," and we understand that she recognizes that the love that

83To the Lighthouse, p. 256.

 

84To the Lighthouse, p. 286.

 

 

154

motivated Mrs. Ramsey, the artist of life, is the love that must motivate
her own efforts.
But more important than her labelling the secret, is her experiencing

of it. We recall Terence's words from The Voyage Out, Woolf's first

 

effort in fiction to define the relationship between life and thought:
"I want to write a novel about silence, the things people don't say" and
remember that nothing of significance is said aloud by one person to

another in To the Lighthouse; what is significant is what is experienced

 

internally. Perhaps we should turn again to Bergson to understand why
this must be so:

The enterprise was indeed discouraging: how could the

conviction derived from experience be handed down by speech?

And above all, how could the inexpressible be expressed?

But these questions do not even present themselves to the

great mystic. He has felt truth flowing into his soul from

its fountainhead like an active force. He can no more help

spreading it abroad than the sun can help diffusing its light.

Only, it is not by mere words that he will spread it.
Woolf has spread her truth not by "mere words" but by writing a novel that
is "one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers and
love plays," and in so doing has resolved, through the convincing des—
cription of shared experience, the conflict between life and thought
that dominated her life and that she believed dominates the lives of all
of us.

How does Woolf convey this understanding? Certainly Lily's con-
ceptualizations as she moves towards the vision that affirms it are use-

ful guides for Lily herself and for the reader, but it is her experience

of love, not her conceptualization of it, that carries the weight of

 

85Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (New York:
Holt, 1935), p. 222.

 

 

155

meaning, and it is in the convincing description of Lily's movement
towards this experience, and of the moment of experience itself, that

To the Lighthouse earns its stature as Virginia Woolf's finest novel.

 

Woolf makes clear throughout "The Window" that however accurate Lily's
observations are on her path toward vision, they are inadequate to her
needs. Woolf reveals this epistemological insight by the way that she
structures Lily's path toward vision, taking her through a series of
epiphanies of increasing intensity and significance that lead her to
affirmative understandings which she is unable to sustain as she ponders
more deeply on the meaning of what she is experiencing. What Woolf con-
veys is that conceptually, the conflict between the eager and dissatisfied
self and the stern and philosophical self cannot be resolved. The resolu—
tion can only be achieved in the experience of a synthetic truth.

The unfolding structure of Lily's path towards vision is consistent
in this regard. After her first significant epiphany, a reliving of a
moment of rapport with Charles Tansley, Lily acknowledges the power and
significance of Mrs. Ramsey's artistry and the relationship of her
artistry to her own efforts as an artist:

What is the meaning of life? That was all--a simple

question; one that tended to close in on one with years.

The great revelation had never come. Instead there were

little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck un-

expectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and

the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking

wave; Mrs. Ramsey bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsey

saying, 'Life stand still here'; Mrs. Ramsey making of

the moment something permanent (as in another sphere

Lily tried to make of the moment something permanent)-r

this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of

chaos, there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing

. . .was struck into stability.. Life stand still here,

Mrs. Ramsey said. "Mrs. Ramsey! _Mrs. Ramsey!" she
repeated. She owed it all to her.

 

86To the Lighthouse, pp. 240-241.

 

156

This affirmative understanding gives way, however, to a recurrence of
her antipathy when she recalls the fate of the Rayley's marriage: "She
could not help feeling a little trimphant, telling Mrs. Ramsey that the

87 But in the process of repudiating

marriage had not been a success."
Mrs. Ramsey ("It has all gone against your wishes. They're happy like
that; I'm happy like this") her thoughts turn to William Bankes, and again,
in the reliving of a moment of rapport that Mrs. Ramsey had encouraged

and that Lily had resisted, Lily experiences and affirms Mrs. Ramsey's
creative power: "What did it mean? Could things thrust their hands up
and grip one; could the blade cut; the fist grasp? No learning by heart
the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and
leaping from the pinnacle of a tower in the air? Could it be, even for
elderly people, that this was life?--startling, unexpected, unknown?"88
Again, however, her affirmative understanding gives way to a recurrence

of her intellectual resistance, and it is in the moments between these
ecstatically expressed rhetorical questions and the final experiencing

of vision that we find Lily's resistance to Mrs. Ramsey and her values
most strongly stated. Woolf emphasizes the significance of Lily's
resistance at this point by focusing Lily's thoughts on her shared world-
view with Mr. Carmichael who is described at this point as being like "a

89 and upon their shared belief in "the

creature gorged with existence,"
ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought." It is, finally,
this understanding of life that her climactic vision repudiates. Struc-

turally, we move from conceptual denial, to re-experienced affirmation

 

87To the Lighthouse, p. 260.

 

88To the Lighthouse, p. 268.

 

89To the Lighthouse, p. 265.

 

 

157

in each stage of the unfolding drama of Lily's struggle for truth. Each
experience of affirmation increases in intensity as the figure at the
center increases in significance, from the insignificant Charles Tansley,
to the important Mr. Bankes, to the central Mr. Ramsey. Perhaps Woolf
signifies the finality of Lily's concluding moment of Vision by implying
at the end that even Mr. Carmichael acknowledges its occurrence when he
is stirred from detachment to observe the landing at the lighthouse. In
her movement towards vision, concepts and words first serve and then fail
Lily; finally, it is only experienced truth that satisfies her.

Certainly this is why Woolf has Lily observe in her path toward

"90 and perhaps even

vision that "the vision must be perpetually remade,
more importantly, that it is not the actual picture created "but what it
attempted that 'remained forever.'"_91 If love cannot be understood as a
ruling force in the universe observed by man, and through such an under-
standing as an aspect of a vertical cosmology, it can be acknowledged as

an absolute and actualizable inclination within man. Bergson's epistemology
and ontology explains this truth in general terms: "This reality is
mobility. Not things made, but things in the making, not self-maintaining
states, but only changing states exist. Rest is never more than apparent,
or, rather, relative. The consciousness we have of our own self in its
continual flux introduces us to the interior of a reality on the model of

which we represent other realities. All reality, therefore, is tendency."92

90To the Lighthouse, p. 270.
ngo the Lighthouse, p. 267.
92

An Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 65-6.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Between the Acts. London: Hogarth Press, 1969.

Books and Portraits, ed. Mary Lyon. London: Hogarth, 1977.
Collected Essays. 4 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969.
The Common Reader. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953.

Contemporary Writers. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1966.

 

The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Oliver Bell. Vol. I: 1915-1919

 

(1977); Vol. II: 1920—1924 (1978); Vol. III: 1925-1930 (1980).
New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977-1980.

Flush: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1968.

Freshwater, ed. Lucio P. Ruotolo. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,
1976.

A Haunted House and Other Stories. London: Hogarth Press, 1965.

 

Jacob's Room. London: Hogarth Press, 1965.

The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. I: 1888-1912 (1975); Vol. II:

 

1912—1922 (1976); Vol. III: 1923—1928 (1977); Vol. IV: 1929-1931
(1978); Vol. V: 1932-1935 (1979); Vol. VI: 1936—1941 (1980).
Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich, 1975-1980.

Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne

 

Schulkind. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976.
Mrs. Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press, 1968.

Night and Day. London: Hogarth Press, 1969.

M—

158

159

Orlando: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1964.

 

The Pargiters; The Novel-Essay Portion of "The Years," ed. Mitchell A.
Leaska. New York: New York Public Library, 1977. London:
Hogarth, 1978.

Roger Fry: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1940.

 

A Room of One's Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1967.

 

The Second Common Reader. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960.

 

Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press, 1952.

 

 

To the Lighthouse. London: Hogarth Press, 1967.

Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey: Letters. Edited by Leonard Woolf

 

and James Strachey. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956.

The Voyage Out. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1948.

 

The Waves. London: Hogarth Press, 1963.

 

A Writer's Diary. Edited by Leonard Woolf. New York: Harcourt, Brace,

 

1968.

The Years. London: Hogarth Press, 1965.

 

Secondary Sources

Abrams, Meyer. Netural Supernaturalism. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,

 

1971.

Albright, Daniel. Personality and Impersonality: Lawrence, Woolf and
MERE: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Alexander, Jean. The Venture of Form in the Novels of Virginia Woohg.
Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1974.

Annan, Noel Gilroy. Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in

Relation to His Time. London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1951.

 

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis, tr. William Trask. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1953.

160

Bazin, Nancy Topping. Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision. New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1973.

Beja, Morris, ed. Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse. London:

 

Macmillan, 1970.

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. 2 vols. New York:

 

Harcourt,Brace,Jovanovich, 1972.
Benjamin, Anna S. "Towards an Understanding of the Meaning of Virginia

Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature

 

o (1965):_ 214—27.

Bennett, Joan. Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist. Cambridge:

 

Cambridge University Press, 1945; 2d ed., enlarged, 1964.

Bergson, Henri. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by T. E.

 

Hulme. London: G. P. Putnam, 1912.

Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell.

 

New York: Holt, 1931.

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul

 

and W. Scott Palmer. London: Allen and Unwin, 1929.

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will. Translated by F. L. Pogson.

 

London: George Allen, 1912.

Bergson, Henri. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Translated

 

by R. Ashley Andra and Claudesley Brereton. New York: Holt, 1935.
Bevis, Dorothy. "The Waves: A fusion of Symbol, Style and Thought in

Virginia Woolf." Twentieth Century Literature 2 (1956): 5-20.

 

Blackstone, Bernard. Virginia Woolf: A Commentary. London: Hogarth,

 

1949.
Bowling, Lawrence B. "What is Stream of Consciousness Technique?"

PMLA 65 (1950):‘ 333—45.

161

Bradbrook, M. C. "Notes on the Style of Virginia Woolf." Scrutiny I

 

(1932): 33—38.

Brewster, Dorothy. Virginia Woolf's London. London: George Allen and

 

Unwin, 1959.

Virginia Woolf. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963.

 

 

Chamber, R. L. The Novels of Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Oliver and

 

Boyd, 1947.

Cochrane, Charles Norris. Christianity and Classical Culture. New York:

 

Oxford University Press, 1957.

Daiches, David. Virginia Woolf. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1942.

 

DiBattista, Maria. Virginia Woolf's Major Novels: The Tables of Anon.

 

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

Edel, Leon. House of Lions. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1979.

 

Edel, Leon. The Modern Psychological Novel. New York: Grosset and

 

Dunlop, 1964.

Ellmann, Richard, and Feidelson, jr., Charles, editors. The Modern

 

Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

 

Empson, "Virginia Woolf." In Scrutinies II, ed. E. Rickword. London:

 

Wishart and Company, 1931.

Fleishman, Avrom. Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading. Baltimore:

 

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

Forster, E. M. Virginia Woolf: The Rede Lecture, 1941. Cambridge:

 

Cambridge University Press, 1942. Reprinted in Two Cheers for

 

Democracy. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951.

 

Frazer, June M. ”Mrs. Dalloway: Virginia Woolf's Greek Novel."

Research Studies, Pullman, Washington 47 (1979): 221-28.

 

162

Freedman, Ralph. The Lyrical Novel; ‘Studies in Hermann Hesse, Andre

 

Gide and Virginie Woolf. Princeton: Princeton University Press,

 

1963.

Freedman, Ralph, ed. Virginia Woolf: Reevaluation and Continuity.

 

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Friedman, Melvin J. Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary

 

Method. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955.

Graham, John. "Time in the Novels of Virginia Woolf." University of

 

Toronto Quarterly 17 (1949):_ 186-201

 

Guiguet, Jean. Virginia Woolf and Her Works. Translated by Jean

 

Stewart. London: Hogarth, 1965.

Hafley, James. The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist. English

 

Studies no. 9. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.

Hartman, Geoffrey H. "Virginia's Web." Chicago Review, 14 (1961).

 

Reprinted in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958—70.

 

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.

Harvey, W. J. Character and the Novel. Ithaca: Cornell University

 

Press, 1965.

Hill, Thomas English. Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. New York:

 

The Roland Press Company, 1961.

Holtby, Winifred. Virginia Woolf. London: Wishart, 1932.

 

Humphrey, Robert. Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel.

 

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958.

Johnstone, J. K. The Bloomsbury_Group: A Study of E. M. Forster,

 

Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolfj and Their Circle. New York:

 

Noonday, 1963 (1954).

163

Jowett, Benjamin, translator. Works of Plato. New York: Dial Press,

 

n.d.

Jung, C. G. Alchemical Studies ianhe Collecteleorks of Carl Jung.

 

Edited by H. Read, M. Fordham, and G. Adler. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1967.

Kelley, Alice van Buren. The Novels of Virginia Woolf: Fact and Vision.

 

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.

Kirkpatrick, B. J. A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf. London: Hart-Davis,

 

1967.

Leaska, Mitchell A. "The Death of Rachel Vinrace." Bulletin of Research

 

in the Humanlties 82 (1979):, 328-37.

 

Leaska, Mitchell A. The Novels of Virginia Woolf; From Beginning to End.

 

New York: John Jay, 1977.

Leaska, Mitchell A. Virginia Woolf's Lighthouse: A Study in Critical

 

Method. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970; London:
Hogarth, 1970.

Leavis, F. R. "After To the_Lighthouse." Scrutiny 10 (1942):. 295-98.

 

Levy, Albert William. Philosophy ln the Modern World. Bloomington:

 

Indiana University Press, 1959.

Lewis, Thomas S. W., comp. Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Criticism.

 

New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975.

Love, Jean 0. Worlds in Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the

 

Novels of Virginia Woolf. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of

 

California Press, 1970.

Virginia Woelf: Sources in Madness and Art, I. Berkeley and

 

 

Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977.

164

McLaurin, Allen. VirglhlelWoolf3, The Echoes Enslaved. Cambridge:

 

Cambridge University Press, 1973.

Majundar, Robin. Virginia Woolf: An Annotated Bibliography. New York:

 

Garland, 1976.

Majundar, Robin, and Allen McLaurin. Virginia Woolf: The Critical

 

Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975.

Marder, Herbert. Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf. Chicago:

 

University of Chicago Press, 1968.
Mellers, W. H. "Mrs. Woolf and Life." Scrutiny 6 (1937):_ 71-75.

Meyerhoff, Hans. Time in therature. Berkeley and Los Angeles:

 

University of California Press, 1963.
Miller, J. Hillis. "Virginia Woolf's A11 Soul's Day: The Omniscient

Narrator in Mrs. Dalloway," The Shaken Realist: Essays in Honor

 

 

of F. J. Hgffman. Edited by 0. B. Hardison, Jr., et a1. Baton

 

Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970.

Modern Fiction Studies, 18 (1972)._ Special edition devoted to

 

Virginia Woolf.

Moody, A. D. Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963; New

 

York: Grove, 1963.

Moore, George Edward. Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge

 

University Press, 1959.

Naremore, James. The World without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the

 

Novel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.
Nathan, Monique. Virginia Woolf par elle—meme. Paris: Seuil, 1956.

Translated by Herma Briffault as Virginia Woolf. New York: Grove,

 

1961.

165

Newton, Deborah. VirginialWoelf. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press,

 

1963.

Noble, Joan Russell, ed. Recollections oflVirginia Woolf. New York:

 

Morrow, 1972.

 

Novak, Jane. The Razor Edge of Balance: A Study of Virginia Woolf.
Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1975.

O'Connor, Daniel, and Oakley, Francis, editors. Creation: The Impact

 

of an Idea. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969.

 

Pepper, Stephen C. The Basis of Criticism in the Arts. Cambridge

 

(Mass.):‘ Harvard University Press, 1965.

Pepper, Stephen C. World Hypotheses. Berkeley and Los Angeles:

 

University of California Press, 1966.

Pippett, Aileen. The Moth and the Star: A Biography of Virginia Woolf.

 

Boston: Little, Brown, 1955.

Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Translated by N. Scott

 

Moncrieff. New York: Random House, 1928.

Rantavaara, Irma. Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Helsinki: Annales

 

Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, 1953.

Virginia Woolf's The Waves. Port Washington, New York:

 

 

Kennikat, 1969 (1960).

Richter, Harvena. Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage. Princeton:

 

Princeton University Press, 1970.

Rose, Phyllis. Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf. Oxford:

 

Oxford University Press, 1978.
Rosenbaum, Stuart. "The Philosophical Realism of Virginia Woolf."

English Literature and British Philosophy. Chicago: University

 

of Chicago Press, 1971.

 

166

Rosenthal, Michael. Virginia Woolf. New York: Columbia University

 

Press, 1979.

Ruddick, Lisa. The Seen and the Unseen: Virginia Woolf's To the

 

Lighthouse. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1977.

 

Schaefer, Josephine O'Brien. The Three-Fold Nature of Reality in the

 

Novels of Virginia Woolf. London: Mouton, 1965.

 

Spater, George, and Parsons, Ian. A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate

 

Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. New York: Harcourt,Brace,

 

Jovanovich, 1977.

Sprague, Claire, ed. Virginia Woolf: Twentieth Century Views. Engle—

 

wood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Thakur, N. C. The Symbolism of Virginia Woolf. New York: Oxford

 

University Press, 1965.

Trautmann, Joanne. The Jessamy Brides: The Friendship of Virginia

 

Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. University Park: Pennsylvania

 

State University Press, 1973.

Troy, William. "Virginia Woolf: The Poetic Method." Symposium 3

 

(1932): 53-63.

Troy, William. ”Virginia Woolf: The Poetic Style." Symposium 3

 

(1932): 153—66.

Vogler, Thomas A., ed. To the Lighthouse: A Collection of Critical

 

Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1970.

Wohl, Robert. The Generation of 1914. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard

 

University Press, 1979.

Woodring, Carl. Virginia Woolf. New York: Columbia University Press,

 

1966.

Woolf, Leonard. Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880-1904.

 

London: Hogarth Press, 1960.

 

167

Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904-1911.

 

 

London: Hogarth Press, 1962.

Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911—1918.

 

London: Hogarth Press, 1964.

Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-

 

1939. London: Hogarth Press, 1967.

The Journey, Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of

 

 

the Years 1939-1969. London: Hogarth Press, 1969.

 

M'11111111111111[illflflllfll'lfllfllmES