P-9 Symbols of ToThe Lighthouse Assinment

Name :- Mansi Upadhyay
Roll no :- 18
Semester :- 3
Year :- 2019-20
Paper no :- 9 ( The Modernist Literature)
Assignment Topic :- Symbols of To The Lighthouse.

E-Mail :- mansiupadhyay06@gmail.com
Submitted to :- Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

Words :- 1799

  v        Introduction of Virginia Woolf :-

                ·       Adeline Virginia Woolf born 25 January 1882 and death 28 March 1941 was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20^th century authors and also a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. she first saw the Godrevy Lighthouse, which was to become central in her novel To The Lighthouse (1927).

v Symbols of To the Lighthouse:-

  Symbols : Their Nature and Significance :

·       Symbols are essentially words which suggest much more than is conveyed by their literal meaning. Ordinary words and images when repeated acquire a symbolic significance. As symbols increase the expressive power and range of language, they are frequently used by writers who want to convey mystic and spiritual truths. Mrs. Woolf has also made extensive use of symbols in To The Lighthouse for her purpose was to render the psyche or spirit of her characters.

 Five Important symbols :

·       There are five important symbols in the novel, the novel, the sea, the lighthouse, Lily Briscoe’s painting, the window, and the personalities of Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay. They are all woven together, along with many other less important ones, into a central meaning which suggests Mrs. Woolf’s conception of life and reality.

(A)     The Sea :-

·      The sea with its waves is to be heard throughout the novel. It symbolizes the external flux of time and life, in the midst of which we all exist. It constantly changes its character. To Mrs. Ramsay at one moment it sound soothing and consoling like a cradle song, at others, “like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beating a warning of death”, it brings terror. Sometimes its power, “sweeping savagely in”, a fountain of bright water” which seems to match the sudden springs of vitality in the human spirit.

·      The sea surrounds the island on which the action takes place, which suggests both the human race in general and the individual personality. The waves have been employed as the symbol of the movement of life carrying us towards the shore, irresistible but on the whole beneficient. They have a dual aspect while identifying themselves more closely with existence in its alternating serenity and anguish.

(B)     The Lighthouse :-

·       The sea also surrounds the lighthouse as it stands alone, sending out its intermittent beams. “The Lighthouse holds a whole cluster of suggestions. To James Ramsay as a child it had seemed “a silvery, Misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly and softly in the evening” when he nears it in the boat at the end it is a stark straight tower, with window in it and wash spread on the rocks to dry: “so that was the lighthouse, was it ? no, the other was also the lighthouses. For nothing was simply one thing”. The Lighthouse is a mystery, but it also concerns day to day living. It is at once distant and close at hand. It is man made; something permanent and enduring that man has built in the flux of time, to guide and control those at the mercy of its destructive forces. From this aspect it seems related to the human tradition and its values, which last form generation and tell of both the unity and the continuity of man. Man tends its light, which sends its beams out over the dark waters to those on the island and so establishes communication with them and illumines them. To

Mrs. Ramsay, as the sits knitting in the window, it seems at one moment the light of truth, stern, searching and beautiful, with which she can unite her own personality; at another, steady, pitiless, remorseless, an enemy of Piece of mind; or again a reminder of past ecstasy, thus bringing it into the present. But it always illumines and clarifies the human condition in some way”.

·       The title of the book is To The Lighthouse. It is the quest for the values the lighthouse suggests. The book opens with a sentence hinting at the two basic limitations to human fulfillments: “yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow”. The final sentence, however, is: “I have had my vision”. By landing on the lighthouse something stable has been revealed as a flash in the general doubt, something which seems to triumph over the eternal cycle of change. To reach the lighthouse is to establish a creative relationship.

·       According to David Daiches, “The lighthouse itself, standing lonely in the midst of sea, is a symbol of the individual who is at once a unique being and a part of the flux of history. Mr. Ramsay, who is an egotist constantly seeking applause and encouragement from others, resents his young son’s enthusiasm for visiting the lighthouse, and only years later, when his wife has died and his own life is almost worm out, does he win this freedom from self and it is significant that Virginia Woolf makes Mr. Ramsay escape from his egotistic preoccupations, for the first time, just before the boat finally reaches the lighthouse.

·       The lighthouse is the most important symbol and different critics have explained it in different ways. For example H.K. Russel declares that the lighthouse is the feminine creative principle. He finds the novel as a whole an allegory of the old and new testaments; Mrs. Ramsay eve, the blessed virgin, and Christ; Mr. Ramsay is, among other things, god the father; the lighthouse is Eden and Heaven; the rokes of the lighthouse are the persons of the trinity, the third of them, long and steady representing the Holy Ghost.  

(C)     The Window :-

·       The frequent use of the window in the novel shows that it has a symbolic value. It is from the window that we have the title of the first part of To The Lighthouse. It is not a transparent but a separating sheet of glass between reality and Mrs. Ramsay’s mind. In all her novels we see a character standing at a window, gazing at the street, at the sky, at the landscape and experiencing, as by some catalytic phenomenon, the mingling of his own being with the outer reality which he beholds. The window reduces the pageant of the world to the scale of the being who contemplates it. And finally this window, is the very symbol of the imperfection of our knowledge.

(D)    Colour Symbolism :-

·       Says David Daiches, “There is a colour symbolism running right through the book. When Lily Briscoe is wrestling unsuccessfully with her painting, in the first part of the book, she sees the colours as ‘bright violet and staring white’, but just as she achieves her final vision at the book’s conclusion, and is thus able to complete her picture, she notices that the lighthouse had melted away into a blue haze; and though she sees the canvas clearly for a second before drawing the final line, the implication remains that this blurring of colours is bound up with her vision. Mr. Ramsay, who visualizes the last, unattainable, step in his philosophy as glimmering red in the distance, is contrasted with the less egotistical lily, who works with blues and greens, and with Mrs. Ramsay, who is indicated on lily’s canvass as ‘a triangular purple shape’. Red and brown appear to be the colours of individuality and egotism, while blue and green are colours of impersonality. The journey to the lighthouse is the journey from egotism to impersonality.

(E)      Characters – Mrs. Ramsay :-

·      The characters are carefully arranged in their relation to each other, so that a definite symbolic pattern emerges. Mrs. Ramsay pervades the whole book. She is above all the creator of fertile human relationship, symbolized by her love of match-making and her knitting; and of warm comfort, symbolized by her green shawl. Draped first over the frame of a picture of the Madonna and child, it is then put over her shoulders when she strolls with her husband, and later used to cover up the skull in the children’s bedroom. But these qualities are illustrated concretely in the scenes with her children, her husband, her friends and guests, or anyone in trouble or pain.

·      At the beginning of the dinner party, again, she is in a pessimistic mood: “she had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything”. As they sit at the table “nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of Marging and flowing and creating rested on her”. But as her personality warms to her task, the party, which has been a collection of resentful, self-centrad individuals, sheathing their true feelings in empty social insincerities, becomes a harmony of good fellowship.

·      When the party is over lily feels: “directly she went a sort of disintegration set in; they wavered about, went different ways..” and when Mrs. Ramsay is dead and lily comes back, she has the same sensation: “how aimless how chaotic, how unreal it was a house full of unrelated passions”.

(F)      Character – Artists and Their Art :-

·       Lily sees that Mrs. Ramsay’s gift of harmonizing human relationship into memorable moments is “Almost like a work of art”, and in the book art is the ultimate symbol for the enduring “reality”. In life, as Mrs. Ramsay herself well knows, relationship are doomed to imperfection, and are the sport of time and change; but in art the temporal and the eternal unite in an unchanging form though, as in Lily’s picture, the form may be very inadequate. We cannot doubt that lily’s struggles with the composition and texture of her painting are a counterpart of Virginia Woolf’s tussles and triumphs in her own medium, but she chooses poetry as the image that reminds mankind that the ever- changing can yet become immortal.

·       In a way, Mr. Carmichael, the poet, really rounds out the book better than the rather unconvincing completion of lily’s picture. He is symbolic figure; his is the only mind we never enter. when lily has her impulse of compassion toward Mr. Ramsay, and we have seen the scene at the lighthouse itself between him and the children, Mr. Carmichael comes panting up to join lily. By simply saying, “They will have landed”. It seems to her that he was somehow brought together and answered all that she has been feeling about the quest for meaning, for permanence, for harmony. He is, as it were poetry itself.

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