To the Light House

Introduction
Virginia woolf, one of the prominent representative
Of Modernist novelist in England, has contributed significantly to
the development of modern novel in both theory and practice. She
abandoned traditional fictional devices and formulated her own
distinctive techniques. The novels of woolf tend to be less
concerned with outward reality than with the inner life. Her
masterpiece, to the Lighthouse, serves as an excellent sample in
analyzing woolfs literary theory and her experimental techniques.
Origin of the Word
The phrase Stream of Consciousness was
coined by William James 1 to describe the flow of thoughts of the
waking mind. Subsequently his phrase began to be used in a
literary context to describe the narrative method by which certain
novelists have described the unspoken thoughts and feelings of
their characters, without resorting to objectives description or
conventional dialogue. James Joyce was a pioneer in using this
technique in his novels of which the best known are Ulysses and
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And this technique was
also used by Virginia Woolf. The related phrase interior
monologue is used to describe the inner movement of
Consciousness in a characters mind. A famous example of the
interior monologue is the opening pages of Mrs. Dalloway. The
use of devices of the stream of Consciousness and the interior
monologue marks a revolution in the form of the novel because
through these devices the author can represent the flux of a
characters thoughts, impressions, and emotions and
reminiscences, often without any logical Sequence.

Virginia Woolf and To The Lighthouse

When we mention Virginia Woolfs To The
Lighthouse, its very natural to talk about her stream of
consciousness technique. In this novel, the structure of external
objective events is demised in scope and scale, or almost e
completely dissolved. It is composed of the continual activity of
characters consciousness and shower of impressions. External
events occupy little space in the novel the writer as an omniscient
narrator has almost completely vanished and almost everything
stated appears by the way of reflection in the consciousness of
the dramatic characters and the novel does not progress on what
happens next basis, but rather moves forward through a
series of scenes arranged according to a sequence of selected
moments of consciousness and the techniques to which Mrs.
Woolf mainly employs are interior and free association.
Interior Monologue in To The Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf, among the stream of
consciousness writers relies most on the indirect interior
monologue and she uses it with great skill. In To the Light House
Virginia Woolf succeeds in producing a much subtle effect through
the use of this technique. This novel contains a great deal of
straight, conventional narration and description but the interior
monologue is used often enough to give the novel its special
character of seeming to be always within the consciousness of
the chief characters. Virginia Woolf says in her essay Modern
Fiction:
Lets record the atom as they fall upon the mind in the order
in which they fall. Lets stress the pattern however
disconnected and incoherent in appearances, which each
sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.

This is the best description in her method. Lets examine the

following passage in the first chapter of part one.
For how would you like to be shut up for a whole
month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a
rock the size of a tennis lawn? She would ask; not to know how
your children were if they were ill, if they had fallen down and
broken their legs or arms; to see the some dreary waves breaking
weak after weak and then a dreadful storm coming and the
windows covered with spray, and birds dashed agonized the land
and the whole place rocking, and not able to put your nose out of
doors for fear of being swept into the sea? How would you like
that she asked?
The passage above is represented in the
manner of straight narration by the author but it is clearly what the
character feels and thinks and it reflects the characters
consciousness and inner thoughts. In this passage Woolf
facilitates the indirect interior monologues with her unique skills.
Firstly, she uses the conjunction for as an indication of the
beginning of this monologue and produces an easy and natural
swift from objective description to the characters interior
monologue,
secondly,
she
presents
Mrs.
Ramsays
consciousness by guiding phrases She would ask and She
asked to make the reader wonder about unheard in Mrs.
Ramsays consciousness. Thirdly, here she employs semicolons
to indicate the continuation of the consciousness. The use of
semicolons is characterized Woolfs skill in dealing with indirect
interior monologue, as she also shown in this novel.
In the case of indirect interior monologue
the omniscient authors continuous intervention is essential to
guide the reader in reading and the characters mind. The use of
frequent parenthesis can be signals of digression and of
simultaneity as this one:

Teaching and preaching human power, Lily

suspected.(She
was
putting
is
beyond
away
things.)Parenthesis can also be little aside, explanations,
pointers to what is going on. Lily in this passage is thinking about
Mr.Bankes:
I respect you (she addressed him silently). In every
atom; you are not vain: you are entirely impersonal; you are
finer than Mr.Ramsay. You are the finest human being that I
know; you have neither wife nor child (without any sexual
feeling, she longed to cherish that loneliness) you live for
science (involuntarily section of potatoes and rose before
her eyes); praise would an insult to you; generous, pure
hearted heroic man!
Here the parenthesis signal sudden and momentary
switches in perspective, the narrative is thrown backward and
forward.
With her unique devices, such as guiding
phrases, semicolons, and parenthesis embroidered to her interior
monologue, Virginia Woolf successfully overcomes the short
comings of stream of consciousness novel of being incoherent
and chaotic, and achieves great explicitness, coherence,
vividness and surface unity in presenting the characters inner
world. However, it should be noted that her presentation of the
characters interior monologue is not only coherent in meaning,
but also conventional in appearance.
Free Association
Virginia Woolf rightly speaks in the support of her technique
in these words:
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent

envelope surrounding
consciousness

us
to

from

the
the

beginning of
end.

Free Association in To the Light House

In To the Light House, woolf usually encloses free
association into the indirect interior monologue to represent the
psychic process of her characters. We may take the
7.10th chapter of the first part of To the Light House as an
example.
The continuity of the section is established
through an exterior occurrence involving Mrs. Ramsay and
James: Mrs.Ramsay tells James the story of the Fishermans
wife. After consoling her despair-stricken husband, Mrs. Ramsay
began to read the story to James. Here her narration of the
incidents is not coherent and she describes the events of her life
without having the continuity and order of the actions. At that time,
the stroke of the lighthouse came into her eyes. Then Mildred
came into fetch them and here chapter 10 ends.
There are some Sources of unity which helps the Story they are:
Isolation
A number of devices have been used to impart
structural unity to the novel. First, she has introduction only a
limited number of characters, and they have been isolated in a
remote island away from society. Further, out of this isolated
group, she has focused attention only on two or three
personalities, and exploited their stream of Consciousness alone.
Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, and lily Briscoe are the main figures. Other
is only of a Secondary importance.

The Role of the Central Intelligence

Secondly, the readers are not placed directly within the
minds of characters, as in the modern psychological novel, but
the central intelligence of the novelist is constantly at work as the
narrator, controlling and organizing the material, and illuminating it
with its comments, and order emerges out of chaos.
Lilys Painting
Lilys painting is another device by which the
novelist has patterned her material. The novel begins with Lily her
easel and her paints and brush on the laws of the Ramsays
Summer House, and it ends with her having her vision and
completing her picture.
The Lighthouse
The Lighthouse is another important source of unity
in the novel. It shines throughout at a distance, and all the lines of
the novel Converge towards it. The expedition to the lighthouse is
planned in part I, and it is actually undertaken in part.III.
Emotional Unity
To the Lighthouse may not have a logical unity, a
logical sequence of Cause and effect, it is have a unity of a higher
and stronger kind i.e. emotional unity. Jean Guiguet has
considered the point in detail, and we may be excused for quoting
from him at length;
Lily Briscoe, painting on the lawn, from time to
time costs a glance towards the bay to watch the boat on which
Mr. Ramsay, James and Cam are sailing. But this link is purely
eternal; the real unity of the sections lies in the Coincidence of
Project and thought me the Completion of Lilys Canvas, the

fulfillment of James plan. It is not so very important that Lily sees

the sails fall and Flap; what common is their common
immobility: Life stands still here, and The boat made no motion
at all.
And further on, the mixture of charm and tyranny in
Mr. Ramsay occupies the thoughts of Lily, and so on the end,
where Mr. Ramsays unexpressed vision is identified with Lilyshis defeat and triumph. The brackets enclosing the brief section 7
and 10 irresistibly recall the events inserted in the same fashion in
Time Passes. Like these, they are hard kernels of a different
nature to the flux out of which they emerge. The mutilated fish
interrupting Lilys tragic cry, the sea having apparently swallowed
up the little boat and obliterated the lives of the passengers while,
all the time, James, Mr. Ramsay and Cam purse their own train of
thought. But heterogeneous as they are, these observations, like
the events in time passes, have a secret relationship with the
context that they seem to interrupt. The mutilation and survival of
the fish is, at the same time, the survival of Mrs. Ramsay and the
mutilation of Lilys universe peace evoked by the scene she is
contemplating emphasize the remoteness of the past which the
occupants of the boat are remembering and the feeling of
reconciliation which is doing amongst them at this movement.
Conclusion:
Thus, seeing all the characteristics of the novel
To the Light House and comparing it with all contents of the
stream of consciousness technique. It is clearly noticeable that
Mrs. Ramsay has used the stream of constructional lines of one
person to that of another. There is very little complication To the
Light House is a masterpiece of construction. Woolf has given
form and coherence to her material all the characters also proven
all This by their interior monologue and their behavior.