watched. There was something solemn in it-but love and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul.' That lady represents for Clarissa the miracle, the mystery of life: 'And the supreme mystery… was simply this: here was one -804- room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?' Later, at the party, when Clarissa hears of the young man's suicide, she parts the curtains of an empty room and looks out: 'How surprising! — in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her!.. She was going to bed, in the room opposite. It was fascinating to watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the room, coming to the window. Could she see her?'
The image of the woman looking straight at Clarissa as Clarissa watches her-neither sure that the other sees her-preserves a balance between recognition and the unknown, and it frees Clarissa to feel not one but two contradictory responses to Septimus's death. Previously, she felt only desolation for the waste, but now she feels exhilaration at his defiance as well, a reprieve from fear, and she feels 'somehow very like… the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away… He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun.' And she prepares to reassemble, to rejoin her other reflection, the party she has made.
In Mrs. Dalloway, by limiting time to the chronological march of a single day, Woolf was able to explore a delicate network of spatial interconnections, woven by circumstance across London. In To the Lighthouse (1927), she takes the opposite approach: space is the anchored term, and time for ten years in the middle of the novel- floats free. The setting of the novel is the Ramsays' house in the Hebrides (based on Woolf's parents' seaside house in Cornwall) and the narrative lens is trained on that house in all three sections of the novel. The first section takes place on a single September evening, the third section on a September morning ten years later. The middle section, 'Time Passes,' skims through a decade unified only by the house's emptiness, as it falls to near ruin during World War I.
To the Lighthouse also differs from Mrs. Dalloway in the way it defines its unifying center. In Mrs. Dalloway, the center is held by character-Clarissa, shadowed by Septimus; in To the Lighthouse the center is both architectural and human, impersonal and autobiographical: on the one hand, it is the house, reflected and reinterpreted as the lighthouse, and on the other it is Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, based on Woolf's own parents, who in turn represent the union-both magical and violent-of so many other extremes that polarize the novel: light and shadow; the boar's skull and the shawl that covers it; isolation and relationship; thought and feeling; logic and beauty; shipwreck and safety. -805-
The lighthouse and the Ramsays represent what Lily tries to express in her painting: 'that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces.' Whereas in Mrs. Dalloway it is the man who kills himself, in To the Lighthouse it is the woman; but hers is not a defiant death. The manner of her death, like Septimus's, is gendered: like many wives and mothers, she slowly, prodigally, gives her life to others: 'Giving, giving, giving, she had died.' In contrast, Mr. Ramsay, with comic intensity, imaginatively assumes a range of male roles from the heroic to the absurd: he plays a soldier riding to slaughter in blind obedience to a wrong order (echoing Tennyson's 'Charge of the Light Brigade'); the responsible leader of a doomed polar expedition; and a shipwrecked castaway who drowns in magnificent isolation (following Cowper's 'The Castaway'). His odd 'compound of severity and humour' is described as 'strangely… venerable and laughable at one and the same time.' Absorbed in ruin, he is nevertheless 'happier, more hopeful on the whole' than his wife, 'Less exposed to human worries.'
With their eight children and six guests, the Ramsays' joint creation is the house they fill with life; their reflection is the lighthouse. Woolf's focus on the house grows logically out of her attention to the room in earlier novels: in Jacob's Room, the room is an emblem of Jacob's immediate environment, the only part of him that can be known with certainty; in Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa's filled drawing room becomes an emblem of Clarissa herself, and Septimus's separation from his body is figured as a self-propelled push from the window of his room. In To the Lighthouse, the narrative lens widens to include many rooms as Woolf's attention turns from the structure of individual identity to the architecture of the family (her own) and the corridors of the past. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are fictionalized portraits of Woolf's own parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen, who had both been dead for over twenty years. Woolf's challenge in writing the book parallels Lily's in painting the Ramsays: 'Such were some of the parts, but how to bring them together?'
Woolf assembles the parts with a double focus on the horror and power of family relationships, both marital and parental. She uses the two houses, the Ramsays' summer house and the lighthouse, to represent such relationships from opposite perspectives, one beautiful and distant, one ordinary and close. As Lily thinks near the end of the novel, 'so much depends… upon distance; whether people are near us or far from us, for her feeling for Mr. Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay.' The long-delayed trip to the lighthouse -806- reverses the customary perspective: James and Cam see up close what they formerly saw only from a distance. Until they were sixteen and seventeen, James and Cam had been unable to see their parents realistically; they were only ideal objects of love and hate, respectively. When they finally close the distance between themselves and the 'silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye,' when they see the fabled lighthouse at close range, with its whitewashed rocks, its stark tower, and its windows, James realizes that the lighthouse is not one but both things, the near and the far, the ordinary and the symbolic. He achieves the fragile balance that Lily is able to capture, simultaneously, in her painting: 'One wanted… to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.'
The parallel between summer house and lighthouse is subtly established in the novel's first section. The guests and children return in the gathering twilight to the Ramsays' house for a celebratory dinner of boeuf en daube, and the house fills with lights: 'The house was all lit up… and [Paul Rayley] said to himself, childishly, as he walked up the drive, Lights, lights, lights, and repeated in a dazed way, Lights, lights, lights.' The house has become, literally, a light house, filled with life and promise. But at the beginning of 'Time Passes,' 'one by one the lamps were all extinguished' and 'a downpouring of immense darkness began.' The darkened house is stroked only by the rhythmical, blind eye of the lighthouse; the lighthouse, with its connotations of beauty, ruin, and distance, has supplanted its more familiar double.
The Ramsays, too, change with distance. Seen close up, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are both, in different ways, domineering: Mr. Ramsay slices through James's feelings with his uncompromising insistence on truth; he demands sympathy from his wife; he is tyrannical to his children. Mrs. Ramsay is equally willful and commanding, largely in her insistence that women must marry; she engineers the ill-fated engagement of Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle and would like for Lily to marry William Bankes. Marriage and family life are similarly grotesque when magnified by close contact: marriage is figured as loss (when Minta agrees to marry Paul, she simultaneously loses something valuable, represented by the loss of her brooch), and family life is a «horror» that makes privacy impossible. Regarded closely, human relations are painfully inadequate: 'The most perfect was flawed' and 'the worst… were between men and women.' Men are sharply intrusive and women -807- weak; both are driven by unconscious vanity, although the vanity takes opposite forms of egotism and self-sacrifice. Most horrifyingly, Victorian marriage stipulates that each partner be radically incomplete, so that balance is only achieved through a relation of mutual dependence that the younger people abhor.
As James thinks, however, 'nothing [is] simply one thing,' and Woolf's hardest challenge, like Lily's, is to represent the beauty of a relationship she would never want to emulate. Again like Lily, Woolf can only do this from a distance (both spatial and temporal), by depicting the Ramsays' compound identity in its austere, most private form as the lighthouse. As an image both phallic and vatic, a beacon of safety and beauty, it captures in symbolic form the mystery and utility of the Ramsays' model of marriage. The narrative underscores Mr. Ramsay's similarity to the lighthouse when it stresses his intensity of mind, his lonely vigilance, his blind determination:
It was his fate… to come out thus on a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away, and there to stand, like a desolate sea-bird, alone. It was his power, his gift, suddenly to shed all superfluities… to stand on his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance… He kept even in that desolation a vigilance which spared no phantom and luxuriated in no vision.
Mrs. Ramsay compares him to 'a stake driven into the bed of a channel' that takes upon itself the duty of 'marking the channel out there in the floods alone.' In the third section, Cam reluctantly recognizes her father's resemblance to the monumental lighthouse, with its repeated, even mechanical, transmissions of warning against death and disaster.
The sublime beauty of Mrs. Ramsay is best expressed not by the tower or the rock but by the stroke of light alternating with the triangular wedge of darkness between strokes. She describes the experience of solitude as a sensation of shrinking, 'with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.' What Mrs. Ramsay believes to be invisible to others is apparent to Lily, since since it is as a
