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The Reading

Please read all of Virginia Woolf’s marvelous novel To The Lighthouse and try to answer the following questions. This time, I’ve done the questions a bit differently. Instead of going through the novel section by section, as in the previous modules, the first twenty-one questions challenge you to demonstrate a grasp of the novel as a whole. Questions twenty-two and after will allow you to make sense of the novel in the way that it unfolds. You can always start at question twenty-two if you have problems with the first set of questions.

Questions to Consider:

1. Can you guess what inspired Virginia Woolf to write To the Lighthouse?

2. What primary psychological technique does Woolf deploy in the novel?

3. What are the devices that Woolf uses the most to reveal her characters?

4. What is the nature of objective reality in the novel?

5. What’s another function of those things that we might call objective reality?

6. To the Lighthouse, while displaying psychological realism, is also highly symbolic. Can you locate and comment on some of the symbols in the novel other than waves?

7. What is the role and function of nature in To the Lighthouse?

8. What does Woolf’s psychological tunneling reveal about human nature?

9. What causes the changes in our subjective reality?

10. Why do you think did Woolf consider the dinner scene to be one of her greatest achievements as a writer?

11. Why can’t we ever get to the bottom of Mrs. Ramsay’s mysterious nature?

12. What’s the main role that Mrs. Ramsay plays?

13. What are the ecstasy and the tragedy of Mrs. Ramsay?

14. By looking at Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay, can you identify he problem with romantic love?

15. To the Lighthouse has been described as simultaneously a realistic and a metaphysical (philosophical) novel. In what ways is the novel metaphysical?

16. In your opinion, what is Woolf’s answer to the problem of the human condition?

17. What aspects of life does Woolf’s approach privilege? What aspects of life does Woolf’s approach diminish?

18. What are the implications of Woolf’s privileging of the common occurances of life?

19. What’s the biggest problem with the male characters in To the Lighthouse?

20. Do you find anything interesting about the structure of the novel?

21. Virginia Woolf’s husband described this novel as a psychological elegy? Why, do you think, did he use those precise terms?

22. How does Woolf set up the psychological axis of the novel on the first page?

23. How are Mr. Ramsay and most men emotionally crippled?

24. How does Woolf’s description of her childhood summerhouse illustrate her understanding of human reality?

25. How do we know that Woolf finds human nature full of contradictions from the very start?

26. How is Charles Tansley locked in his own consciousness?

27. How do we evaluate others? How is social life possible if we do this?

28. What is problematic about man’s love of nature?

29. Given that we mainly operate according to our subjective perceptions, what image does Woolf provide of our actions in life?

30. Ultimately, what is every person’s real condition in life?

31. Why is subjective-reality such a problem?

32. How does Woolf describe the workings of Lily Briscoe’s mind?

33. What function do the minor objective realities play in the section where Mrs. Ramsay is knitting the brown stockings? What other role do objective realities play in the novel as a whole?

34. What function do domestic habits, customs and the little actions of life serve for Mrs. Ramsay?

35. What is the problem with the scientific or masculine search for “truth”?

36. How are males able to pursue the “truth” with such vigour, if this goes counter to the general tenor of life?

37. What happens to women who are forced to play such a sympathetic role to egotistical males?

38. How do such women contribute to their own problems?

39. What is the emotional life of Mrs. Ramsay like at the deepest level? What does this tell you about life generally?

40. Why does Carmichael snub Mrs. Ramsay?

41. Why is being in love so misleading?

42. In what way is Lily Briscoe’s art symbolic of the theme of the novel?

43. Who is best at understanding life – the artist or the scientist?

44. What is the significance of Mrs. Ramsay reading to her son James?

45. Where does Woolf show us the private consciousness of Mrs. Ramsay?

46. How does Woof describe the inner core of every intelligent being?

47. What is the symbol for the peace and unity that people can sometimes find by retreating into their inner selves apart from society, relationships and roles?

48. What is the significance of the phrase “We are in the hands of the Lord?” that pops into Mrs. Ramsay’s mind?

49. How does this reflect the difference between a modern writer like Woolf and an earlier writer like Dostoyevsky?

50. What’s Woolf’s problem with Mr. Ramsay’s “phrase making”?

51. What’s wrong with Mr. Ramsay’s and most male’s sympathy for the world?

52. What word does Woolf use to describe the reality that one finds when one gets to the root of consciousness? Can you think of a spiritual system that comes to a similar conclusion?

53. In Chapter 16 of Part or Section I, what is referred to as Mrs. Ramsay’s “old antagonist”?

54. How does Woolf describe the human consciousness in Chapter 17 of Part I?

55. Woolf thinks that friendship is more real and important than love, which is why she has Lily Briscoe become Mr. Banke’s friend rather than wife. But how real is friendship?

56. When people in relationships think about one another, what’s the result?

57. Is Woolf suggesting that we start being more honest in our relationships?

58. Make no mistake about it, Mrs. Ramsay is an intelligent and likeable person. But when you get right inside her character you find all sorts of attitudes that are not particularly admirable and that she keeps secret. For example, what kind of men does she like?

59. In what other ways is Mrs. Ramsay something less than the Greek godess she resembles?

60. How does Woolf explode the widespread belief in romantic love?

61. Chapter 18 of Part I focuses on an important idea that is further developed in Part II. What is it?

62. What is the significance of Part II – “Time Passes”?

63. What’s the significance of the description of the passing of the seasons with respect to the summerhouse?

64. In an indifferent universe, what is the human condition reduced to?

65. Woolf uses an interesting natural image to demonstrate the horrific and meaningless nature of human life. Can you suggest what it is?

66. Why does the character Lily Briscoe offer the reader some hope?

67. Mrs. Ramsay’s enemy was life? What’s Lily Briscoe’s enemy?

68. Instead of looking for some higher meaning or reality, where does Lily Briscoe find the answer to her questions?

69. What is Woolf’s answer to those who feel that a Godless and meaningless universe provides no hope for human beings?

70. Who is better able to appreciate and capture the new reality of everyday life – men or women? How does this relate to the increasing importance of women writers?

71. How is Lily’s art similar to that of Virginia Woolf?

72. How do Lily and Mrs. Ramsay (i.e. Virginia Woolf and her own mother) become unified at the end of the novel?

73. What does Lily have an intuitive insight into by the end of the novel?

74. What’s the problem with Lily’s intuitive insight and new understanding of life?

75. Mrs. Ramsay’s subjective universe was infinitely superior to that presented by her husband and most of the other males in the novel. Ultimately, why was her perspective so psychologically damaging?

76. Why is it virtually impossible for scientists and logical philosophers (like Bankes and Mr. Ramsay) to generate the kind of insights that Lily Briscoe can?

77. How would you describe Lily Briscoe’s new understanding of life? How satisfying to you find her solution to the problem of the human condition?

Suggested or Possible Answers:

1. The novel is loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s own childhood. The summerhouse is like the one she went to in her youth. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are based on her parents. At first, Mr. Ramsay was going to be the central focus of the novel, but gradually the enigmatic Mrs. Ramsay becomes the central character.

2. The technique is called psychological tunneling. Woolf burrows more and more deeply into the consciousness of her characters in order to reveal them more clearly. The approach can also be compared to peeling the layers of an onion.

3. She uses three devices with some regularitly. First, she offers us multiple perspectives based on the consciousness of the characters or other characters perceptions of one another. Second, she describes the mental insights of characters, when things crystallize in their minds for brief moments. Third, she uses memories, semi-fixed impressions that have somehow stayed in the mind, even if they can sometimes only be recalled with great effort.

4. Although objective reality, such as the rooms of the summerhouse, the lawn around it, the waves on the ocean or the lighthouse itself may appear to be described realistically, they have significance only in relation to the minds and dilemmas of the characters. The true reality, albeit an illusive one, is their consciousness of themselves and one another.

5. Their role is primarily symbolic. Thus, for example, waves represent a number of things in this novel. First, the surface of the waves hides the deep complexity of what lies beneath (human consciousness); waves change dramatically, like human emotions; waves are forever striving for a unity that eludes them; the unity that does occur when the ocean is still is always momentary.

6. Here you might want to talk about: 1) the lighthouse, 2) mirrors, 3) painting and the artist’s perspective.

7. Unlike the scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, who looked for the conjunction between nature and human nature, the natural world of Virginia Woolf is totally alien to man. It changes according to different laws. It is not in sympathy with, but is “indifferent to”, human beings. Although we can be moved by it, it has nothing to do with us.

8. Humans are complex emotional beings who are largely enclosed within their own subjective realities. Even that subjective reality is constantly changing and elusive.

9. Two things result in major changes in our subjective reality. First, the strength of our perspective changes as a result of time. Gradually, only a few primary memories remain of our past. Second, our subjective reality is constantly shifting with the play of emotions. Mrs. Ramsay can move from the deepest affection for her husband to a real revulsion in a matter of seconds, depending on how words or actions strike her subconscious.

10. The dinner scene is a brilliant example of the multi-personal approach to describing subjective reality and the way that people’s perceptions of one another are constantly changing even during brief periods of time. Consider, for example, the different impressions of Charles Tansley during this single meal.

11. There’s no one simple answer to this question. Here are a few. First, it is impossible to get to the bottom of anyone’s subconscious, even if they seem relatively straightforward on the outside. No one can ever really know anyone else. Second, Mrs. Ramsay is extremely beautiful, and beauty – especially female beauty – clouds one’s judgment of deep character. Third, people in life play complex roles – and intelligent women have been forced to play supportive roles – so it is difficult, even for them, to know themselves apart from these roles.

12. She’s the supporter of the male of the species. Almost her entire life (with the exception of those revealing private moments) are devoted to sympathizing with, and comforting, men. This emphasis on male-female roles does not prevent Mrs. Ramsay from being insightful, and she has a real talent for seeing things intuitively, but it means that she cannot explore other parts of her personality in the way that Lily Briscoe can. Because she sees the world in terms of male-female relationships, Mrs. Ramsay is an incessant matchmaker. She sees it as her role to bring men and women together.

13. Love is the primary emotion that allows people to feel a sense of unity and to embrace life – everyone loves a lover. The tragedy here is that, ultimately, we are all alone in our own private solitudes.

14. Love provides us with great promise of happiness and meaningfulness, but the reality of love is that it is often hard and tedious work. Look at the way that it ages Mrs. Ramsay and probably contributes to her early death.

15. The novel wrestles with the meaning of human life and the desire that human beings have for unity.

16. Woolf suggests that life is characterized by constant change – we never step into the same stream twice – and that any attempt at completeness, harmony, or solidity will be elusive. Her answer is to seek fulfillment in the moment, and to permit moments to be incorporated in memory.

17. Woolf suggests that our most real and authentic moments occur in the common events of life. She is suggesting that human beings.

18. By privileging the commonalities of life, Woolf affirms a feminine approach that emphasizes getting along and showing sympathy to others. She brings into question the overwhelmingly masculine emphasis on civilization, science and politics.

19. The male characters are emotionally dried up. They have such need for control, and are so egotistical about putting their stamp upon life, that they are socially dysfunctional. In To the Lighthouse, all the pressure is on the female characters to provide their male counterparts with sympathy.

20. The novel has a tripartite structure. The first part is a brilliant example of Woolf’s technique of psychological tunneling. The second section is a bridge that explores the effect of the duration of time on human perception. It also presents the stark and brutal fact that nothing, especially life itself, is permanent. The final section is highly symbolic, and more directly addresses the metaphysical questions that arise from the instability of life and the aloneness of each individual in a meaningless universe.

21. The term psychological should be self-evident. The term elegy suggests that one of the purposes of this work was to confront the issue of men and women facing their death in a universe that bears no connection to human needs and desires.

22. She addresses the difficulty of crystallizing and transfixing a reality that is fragmented, momentary and based on the wheel of sensation. Each person’s subjective reality is like a private code that, ultimately, is secret to others.

23. They are obsessed with facts that are black and white rather than a reality that is much more elusive and complex. They can also by tyrannical in attempting to impose those categories on others.

24. It is described as a perceived rather than a physical reality. These perceptions are based on sense impressions, emotions, and relationships. Thus, the way the sun illuminates the rooms, the objects that one sees, the feel of the grit of the sand, the sobbing of a Swiss main, and the “smell of salt and weeds” all mingle in ones consciousness to create a perceptions.

25. Mrs. Ramsay laments that her young children are already showing “strive, divisions, differences of opinion, prejudices twisted into the very fibre of their being.”

26. He’s obsessed with his own insecurities. He wants to be liked by a beautiful woman like Mrs. Ramsay but he can’t get over his impoverished youth, his envy of others, his egoistic desire to be a well-known academic, his experience with the circus, etc. He’s an extreme case of someone who is so self-obsessed that he has little capacity for sympathizing with others. But all of the other characters in the novel, to some extent, are locked up in their own private universes.

27. We evaluate and judge people from moment to moment. Sometimes we love them; sometimes we hate them. Sometimes Mrs. Ramsay likes Tansley; sometimes she thinks he is “odious”. A lot depends on how she is feeling at that particular moment and what Tansley does (i.e. upset’s her son James). We are only able to get along in society because we keep a lot of these inner thoughts secret from one another. If we always knew what others were thinking about us all the lime, social life would be next to impossible.

28. We often see nature as being in conjunction with us; we intuit a certain sympathy between human nature and nature (as in the gentle rocking of the waves). But Woolf reminds us that nature has no inherent kindly meaning. The same waves that lull us to sleep can also kill us.

29. Sleepwalking.

30. Aloneness. We are all strangers to one another.

31. It shifts and changes from moment to moment. Even at the same moment, it can be problematic or contradictory: “I’m in love with you? No, that was not true. I’m in love with all this…It was absurd, it was impossible. One could not say what one meant.”

32. Impressions and ideas “danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate, but all marvelously controlled in an invisible elastic net.”

33. They are merely trivial episodes that act as openings into the tunnel of consciousness. Elsewhere in the novel, especially in the third section, they can be brutally brief facts – like Mrs. Ramsay and Andrew’s death – that highlight the difference between our human nature (needs and desires) and our fragile and brief lives.

34. These give our life a structure and sooth us. But they can never fully obscure the fact that our lives are basically meaningless in an existentialist universe.

35. When obsessive, it shows an “astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings.” Woolf is arguing that the little considerations of life are the most important and that human “decency” should take priority over “facts” and “truths” that have no special validity outside of human consciousness.

36. They are supported by women, who constantly patch up their males’ private selves and meet males’ emotional needs. Woolf appears to be arguing for a more decent common humanity where men and women both understand that the human condition is fragile and a good life is basically about being decent to one another. Males are able to deceive themselves that what they are doing is much more important only because women take on all the emotional responsibility for being sympathetic.

37. They become physically drained and emotionally exhausted. When you penetrate more deeply into their consciousness, very intelligent women like Mrs. Ramsay exhibit much more “disagreeable sensations” that they are forced to suppress.

38. Sometimes they are “vain” about their ability to capture and mould men. Thus, they throw themselves into the responsibility for making their marriages work and don’t understand their own needs for solitude.

39. Mrs. Ramsay has an air of “sadness” about her whenever she is not engaged in the role of wife and mother. That sadness is natural to those who are intelligent and understand the nature of the human condition. Mrs. Ramsay understands the human condition intuitively. Her husband, on the other hand, only understands our existential condition intellectually. Intellectual understanding is highly artificial and limited, based as it is primarily on reason. For Woolf, we are primarily emotional beings.

40. He understands that Mrs. Ramsay also needs to dominate and control others, and that many of her actions are vain and self-seeking. Mrs. Ramsay’s love is real, but she is a human being like everyone else with an ego and a desire for praise.

41. It temporarily obscures the fact that human life is tragic and human relationships are, at best, accommodations. When Lily Briscoe feels love for Mr. Bankes, her judgment is impaired. She is saved when she opts for friendship and independence rather than marriage.

42. It is impossible to fully capture human nature. The best one can do is provide a momentary impression that reveals a perspective. Artists like people, aim for unity and completeness. But this is never possible. Life and art are “relations of masses, of lights and shadows.”

43. The artist, as long as the artist understands that the best they can achieve is a very partial picture of life.

44. Woolf uses the reading of The Fisherman and His Wife to show how the human mind multitasks – thinks of more than one thing simultaneously. Here mind wanders “like the bass gently accompanying a tune, which now and then ran up unexpectedly into the melody.”

45. In chapter 10 of the first section on “The Window”. This private self is never seen by her children or her husband, but is nonetheless more “real” than the self that she shows them, since she has “a clear sense of it there.” Whenever, she is permitted to explore this private self, she sees herself in opposition to life. Life is “terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.” When in this headspace, she cannot easily maintain her confidence in her domestic, marital and matchmaking roles. She recognizes them as a retreat or escape from what is really essential.

46. She views it simultaneously as a terrifying “core of darkness” but also a place were one can sometimes grasp “peace”, “rest” and a sense of “eternity”.

47. The steady, but intermittent, beam of the lighthouse.

48. Such slogans are socially imposed. The real truth and understanding is a private truth. You need time for reflection – away from social rules and regulations – to achieve a more accurate sense of the meaning of your existence.

49. For Dostoyevsky, the voyage interior was dangerous and socially destructive. For Woolf, it is a more natural route, even if it ends up making individuals a little bit sad and melancholic.

50. Words, especially in the form of scientific or academic rationalizations, cannot capture life. The real subjective reality of human existence is difficult to capture in words. Males use words to dominate and control, rather than interpret, life. Academic writers and scientists focus on so-called higher things rather than the “ordinary things” that make up common life. For Woolf, the latter are far more important than the former.

51. When Mr. Ramsay says things like “Poor little world” or Charles Tansley’s criticisms of the rich, they are simply mouthing artificial phrases. These men have only a very weak idea of what sympathy is because they are incapable of demonstrating it in common life and relationships.

52. The word is “nothingness” as in “the intensity of feelings which reduced her (the daughter Cam) own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the word, forever, to nothingness.” The spiritual system that puts “nothingness” at its core is Buddhism.

53. Life. Presumably, also Death.

54. She refers to “that strange no-man’s-land, where to follow people is impossible.” We can never really know anyone else, even our own families or husbands/wives.

55. “Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things.” They are based primarily on conjunctions in time and place. When Mrs. Ramsay is apart from her old friend Carrie Manning, she almost forgets that the Mannings even existed.

56. They think all kinds of things, some of them very bad. Woolf suggests that people practice secrecy because they hope that no one will recognize what they are thinking. People also hope that others are not thinking bad things about them. This applies as much to husbands and wives as casual acquaintances. We are all a mix of contradictory emotions, some of them not very flattering to ourselves.

57. Not at all. Characters who are blunt and honest about their feelings, like Tansley, show a lack of decency towards others.

58. She “liked her boobies” – attractive but dumb men who needed to be charming to make an impression. Clever men bored Mrs. Ramsay, partly because they weren’t as entertaining or as easy to manipulate.

59. At the dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay has her eye on a pear that she craves. She even “keeps guard” over it and is disappointed (even mildly offended) when her daughter Rose takes the coveted fruit.

60. She has Mrs. Ramsay go to considerable trouble to bring the couple Minta and Paul together as a symbolic unification representing the power and social significance of love. The marriage is a complete bust, at least in the conventional sense. Mrs. Ramsay’s dearest values with respect to marriage and the role of a good wife become passé by the end of World War I.

61. The inevitability of change. Everything is transitory; one’s position in the human drama can never be fully stabilized. Mrs. Ramsay hopes that her belief in the sanctity of marriage and the importance of propriety will be carried on by others. All her energies are devoted to creating a world of stable relationships. But her protogés Paul and Minta totally fail her.

62. Woolf tries to show us, in the decaying, almost destroyed, summerhouse, that nothing is permanent. The house is just a symbol for the human personality. “not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of doy or mind by which one could say “this is he” or “This is she”.

63. Nature has no concern for human life. Nature goes on its own course without any sympathy for such human questions as “to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.”

64. “We remain.” Humans simply are here; we have no purpose apart from our own needs and desires. Good does not necessarily triumph; happiness does not necessarily prevail; order does not necessarily rule. All that’s left of man’s great hopes and projects, it seems, are the ordinary pleasures of domestic life and relationships. Of course, these too are fragile. Mrs. Ramsay dies suddenly. Her brilliant son, Andrew, is killed in the work. Her beautiful daughter, and heir apparent, Prue, also dies in childbirth. Life becomes, in Woolf’s words, little more than “idiot games”.

65. She has flowers – typically symbols of human beauty and affection – “standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and terrible.” Nature is “insensible”. There is no identification between human nature and external nature in a world where even flowers can be described as terrible.

66. She has looked deeply into life and discovered the nothingness at its core – an “empty place” or an “empty coffee cup”. But she has an artists instinct for appreciating the moment and for spotting the vitality of “ordinary human things”.

67. Her “ancient enemy” is the space between human beings that is symbolized by an empty canvas. But she is able to fashion her own independent reality in that “hideously difficult white space.”

68. In the artist’s imagination – the “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” – that allow life to stand still for a moment to be captured on her canvas.

69. She suggests that we stop clinging to those big masculine questions and learn to appreciate the moments in our life.

70. Women are better able to appreciate the nuances of everyday life and social relations because that has been the domain in which they have always operated. The focus on everyday life and relations opened a natural arena for women, who have gone on to dominate the genre of the novel in recent decades.

71. Woolf describes Lily’s artistic technique in the same way she described her own role as a psychological realist: “She went on tunneling her way int her picture, into the past.”

72. Lily learns to stand up to the enormous emotional power of Mrs. Ramsay by setting her own more independent course. In the process, she lets go of any mental conflict that she had with Mrs. Ramsay and intuitively understands the terrible price that Mrs. Ramsay point for her astonishing beauty.

73. For her, the external world dissolves into a “deep basin of reality.” That reality is 1) subjective, 2) glimpsed only in the moment, and 3) related to the ordinary pains and struggles of everyday life.

74. It needs to be “perpetually remade.” This artistic understanding must be continually re-interpreted and re-envisioned in the life of each individual. Each person must take responsibility for recapturing the joy of life and for imagining a world of possibilities, that are the best antidotes to the sense of purposefulness and aloneness that are also part of the human condition.

75. Mrs. Ramsay’s perspective was so rigid, so static that she could only for brief moments embrace a deeper reality. For her, life was always the enemy. After her apotheosis, Lily is able to seize upon moments in life and to combine them in a personal picture.

76. The ability to capture ordinary moments and their significance is not something that science or logical positivism can achieve. Living life is an art. Living life well involves an emotional, rather than an intellectual, response that combines mind and body. It required the ability to jump into life and embrace it in all its emptiness, without “a guide” or “shelter”. It involved recapturing one’s sense of adventure.

77. Your answer goes here: _____________________________