Reading the 20th Century discussion
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To the Lighthouse
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To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (October 2024)
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As I'm away this month I'm a little slow keeping up with the threads ... I'm enjoying this discussion even though I haven't had the time to reread this book, which is among my all time favourites.I hadn't picked upon Lily's Chinese eyes when I read it. Fascinating discussion. Is Woolf's Anglo-centric perspective coming through or is it Mrs. Ramsay's?
On Turing on and turning off lights, I found this gem going back to the 18th century. Turn on" and "turn off" refer to using a petcock as might be used to control the flow of water from a cask.
Source: https://english.stackexchange.com/que...
Thanks Ben, I'm leaning towards R. C.'s points re: imperialism. In the context of publication the description would stand out as damning. But if Woolf also meant it to be interpreted in the context of Mrs Ramsey's time it suggests a connection to anti-Chinese feeling stirred up to justify the Opium Wars... and the later colonisation of Hong Kong. I assume that some of the roots of the 1920s moral panic around anyone considered Chinese also hark back to that earlier series of events. I know that the Bloomsbury Group had positive links to Chinese culture partly through some members' relationship with the translator Arthur Waley who lived in Bloomsbury - he's cited in work by David Garnett that came out in the 1920s so the timeline fits. I imagine now we'd interpret that interest in Chinese culture as rather patronising/orientalist but still more positive than general attitudes towards it in that era.
But also more obviously the negative connotations, and the dismissiveness, fit with possible perspectives on Lily Briscoe who is in many ways the dangerous, disruptive other here, her choices, her artistic vision counter notions of the Victorian woman as "the angel in the house," with wife/mother her highest calling. And that's in line with Woolf's own dislike of that model of conventional womanhood which comes up in later non-fiction:https://www.nastywomenwriters.com/vir...
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I think I'm inclining, so far, to read this as Woolf's criticism of her mother who she also loved deeply but whose values she couldn't always share.
Alwynne, I completely agree about Lily as a disruptor in the Ramsays' world: is she the closest thing to the Stephen girls, given Vanessa's medium of paint but something also of Virginia's vision?
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But that reiteration of 'someone had blundered' comes adrift from the poem and adds a more sombre note. Does it also look forward to WW1 and the blunders of generals using old-fashioned military tactics against modern weaponry?
It's a poem that speaks to the values of empire, though it can be read as both a tragic tale and one of valour in the face of defeat and sacrifice.
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Great to be reminded of that essay. I guess that pressure to be 'the angel in the house' also comes from Woolf's parents as well as being internalised which creates the ambiguities that we see in the representations of the Ramsays.
Roman Clodia wrote: "The second mention of Lily's eyes is again through Mrs Ramsay's thoughts: '... Lily's charm was her Chinese eyes, aslant in her white, puckered little face, but it would take a clever man to see it..."I've always thought of her as an expression of Woolf in some way. I agree about the relationship with Woolf's mother but Mrs Ramsey's descriptions of Lily also suggest ambivalence. On the one hand Lily's a possible threat to the status quo who needs to be brought into the fold and take on her expected feminine role. But on the other Lily's difference is in some ways attractive, oddly alluring. So that suggests that Woolf thought that her mother was constrained by her role/era and might, in slightly different circumstances, have made different choices. So I thought the 'matchmaking' was also Mrs Ramsey attempting to affirm her own choices about how to live, nullifying the threat and the temptation.
Was Woolf influenced by Katherine Mansfield here btw? Does anybody know? It's just that I was struck by how much some of the descriptions of family life reminded me of Mansfield's family stories thinking of 'At the Bay,' 'Prelude,' 'The Garden Party' etc
Roman Clodia wrote: "Alwynne wrote: "But also more obviously the negative connotations, and the dismissiveness, fit with possible perspectives on Lily Briscoe who is in many ways the dangerous, disruptive other here, h..."I couldn't find a link to the whole thing but the article seemed to contain the best parts. I love the references to the chicken and the draught, sums things up so perfectly!
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Yes! I haven't matched dates but Woolf admired Mansfield's writing greatly, of course, though was also competitive with her. She was devastated when she heard of Mansfield's untimely death and part of that was that she'd lost someone who spurred on her own work in a competitive sense.
You're right: the descriptions of colour, of light, the warmth and yet ambivalences of family life, the attention to states of consciousness and female subjectivity are shared attributed of both writers.
I think Ben was reading Mansfield either recently or ongoing so may have something to say on this.
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I initially confused myself as I read something online which stated quite clearly that a character was killed in WWII, before realising that it was, of course, WWI. It was a little like AI, where the information is almost correct but if you had no knowledge about whatever you were looking up, you could write something completely incorrect.
I am pleased I read it. I felt that it was very much Virginia Woolf writing and making sense of her parents. In the first section, Mrs Ramsay is seen as beautiful, as perfect, by Lily, but in the last section, she sees - and accepts - the flaws. To write such uncompromising portraits of both her parents must have been difficult to negotiate with knowing that her sister would read that and may object. This is not a conversation in the drawing room, it is a published work, and so personal. Her father shown with all his childishness and love of flattery, her mother's match-making and her slight need to meddle.
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It's such a a complicated portrait because there's deep love and tenderness for both the Ramsays but, also, a mature view of their flaws and a sense of Woolf almost having to exorcise their abiding influence to free herself emotionally and artistically.
As well as that characterisation that you've noted so accurately, there's also the influence of their inevitably Victorian values that Woolf has grown beyond, as does Vanessa.
There's some of this in Night and Day where the protagonist is burdened by a family inheritance of a great poet who is enshrined in family mythology and struggles to find a life of her own outside this great shadow. But Lighthouse is a culmination of this thinking both in the treatment of its subject and the form.
As you say, there's something magnificent in the way Woolf grapples with something so personal as her relationship to her parents and their influence in a published book, but also something universal in that struggle that we can relate to.
I find this such a luminous, emotional book especially in its tender moments like when Mr Ramsay, after all his bombastic declarations, comes to his wife for comfort.
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I really want to read Mothers of the Mind: The Remarkable Women Who Shaped Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath
Christie is another author who really never came to terms with losing her mother. She always longed for the relationship her parents had and also struggled to gain that closeness with her own daughter. Plath I know less about, but I think I would be interesting to read.
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Plath had an incredibly complicated relationship with her mother: she blamed Aurelia subliminally, it seems, for the death of her father, but was also almost abnormally close, writing to her every day, sometimes more that once a day. She kept up the 'perfect' image in her letters to her mother (collected in Letters Home) even while her journals were telling a very different story.
Three of my very favourite writers in one book is irresistible!
That book looks fascinating, I must try to get my hands on it sometime.
I would be up for a buddy read of Mothers of the Mind.
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Certainly not earlier than January, given its length (I am a slow reader).
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'But most of all he hated the twang and twitter of his father's emotions which, vibrating around them, disturbed the perfect simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother.'
Reading the 20th Century
Books mentioned in this topic
Letters Home (other topics)Mothers of the Mind: The Remarkable Women Who Shaped Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath (other topics)
Night and Day (other topics)
Mr Ma and Son (other topics)
Night and Day (other topics)
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'How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?'