TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
SYMBOLISM AND THE FRAGMENTS OF MODERNISM
Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse
reviewed by Amy Britton
At the end of Chapter Five in To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay
says to her son, Lets find another picture to cut out. This
is almost as crucial a symbol in the novel as the lighthouse itself,
summarising many of the intentions of the Modernist movement. Woolfs
fellow writers such as TS Eliot (published by Woolfs Hogarth Press)
and WB Yeats were concerned with the concept of fragments note,
for example, Eliots The Waste Land. After the horrors
of World War One, it was almost seen as the artists duty to amass fragments
and make sense of them in order to make sense of the fragmenting world
around them. With To The Lighthouse being a novel of two
halves the first part set before the war, the second part afterwards
this is crucial.
When Mrs. Ramsay suggests finding a picture to cut out, she is suggesting
creating fragments, in a time before the great war. Later, at the beginning
of chapter eleven, the narrative opens with, 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. Here the fragments have gone through a cyclical stage
first they have been created in order to actually be fragments.
Secondly, they have been amassed, put together. But in spite of being
collected this way they are still fragments; unconnected, linked only
by commas. There is a strange oneness to them, paradoxically not really
a oneness at all, much like society in the doomed years in the run-up
to the First World War.
Woolf is a writer of symbols, and the eponymous symbol in To the
Lighthouse is one of the most famous of all time. However, the
pictures cut out are a symbol frequently overlooked in a time of fragments,
both in real society and in literature. What is far less overlooked
in To the Lighthouse is the lighthouse itself. It has been
suggested that the lighthouse is a suggestive and ambiguous symbol;
which takes on uniquely different meanings for each character and for
each reader who attempts to interpret it. This is an ideal summary of
such a broad and loaded symbol for example, I saw the distance
that James father places between his son and the lighthouse which
he yearns to visit as symbolic of their own distance in the run-up to
the war, as it becomes slowly as unknowable to James as a calm and unthreatened
society is, distant and lonely, but everyone will have their own interpretations.
For all the poetic quality attached to the lighthouse, it is crucial
to remember that it was not simply a symbol created by Woolf for the
purposes of metaphor. It is also a real lighthouse, a Grade II listed
building at Godrevy, near St.Ives in Cornwall. There were plans to extinguish
it in 2010 but protests from Woolf aficionados have kept it in
place, showing its solid importance in English literature. To
The Lighthouse, then, is a perfect example of how something not
merely literal but actually real can become loaded with symbols- and
how, in the world of the arts, anything can become symbolic.
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