15 - JAMES JOYCE and ULYSSES

14 - SAMUEL BECKET and the THEATRE of the ABSURD

Review of Literature - The Modern Age (Orwell, Joyce and Woolf)

The 20^th Century

- Historical Background: The house of Windsor from (Edward VII to Elisabeth II)

From Edward VII to the First World War

After Queen Victoria, Victorian assumptions and conventions faded away gradually. The accession of King Edward VII (1901-1910) brought no political changes until 1906 with the restoration of the Liberal Party. Leader Herbert Henry Asquith passed legislation to improve social conditions: introduction of medical services in school; pensions; coal mine regulations; and free national medical care. It took time to bring about these improvements, especially after the holocaust of the war, in fact, there was industrial unrest, strikes, and violence. There were movements for women’s right to vote, the group was called “The Suffragettes”. During George V’s reign (1910-1936), there was political violence between Home Rule for Ireland.

Britain at war

The Great War (of 1914-1919) caused great economic effects it never recovered from. Britain was also unprepared for the terrible destructive power of modern artillery, machine guns, tanks, and the use of gas and shells. Many soldiers suffered from “shell shock”. The War Poets expressed their anger about the “stupidity” of this war and showed the anxieties of soldiers. Women replaced men, who went to battle,  in their civil jobs and which helped to bring about their suffrage. Big continent allies, like Canada, Australia, South Africa, and America’s attacks against Germany brought an end to the war, but in Britain there was still an economic fall, unemployment and the unresolved Irish question.

The Twenties and the Thirties

After the war, there was a rapid rise of the Labour Party and suffrage for women (gaining the right to vote in 1928). But there was still unrest in Ireland and India. There were riots and rebellions. In 1918, after the British executed Irish leaders, an Irish Parliament was set up in Dublin and proclaimed itself and Irish Republic. In 1919 Irish volunteers became the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and prepared for civil war. The official proclamation of the Republic of Ireland in 1949 put an end to the Commonwealth. Gandhi started a non-violent protest against the British government. It took another world war before India finally achieved independence. During this period, all over Europe and America a serious crisis known as the “Great Depression” was taking place. King Edward VIII announced his marriage to a divorced American woman and, therefore, with Chamberlain as Prime Minister, he was abdicated and succeeded by his brother George VI (1936-1952). With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, won by the dictator Francisco Franco in 1939, the left-wing movement in Britain supported the Spanish republican government and many intellectuals like Orwell and Hemingway joined the anti-fascist international brigade. 

The Second World War (1939-1945)

In 1938 Germany took over Czechoslavakia and the British Prime Minister Chamberlain had meetings with Hitler but in the end he also invaded Britain. With the attack on Poland, the second world war began. Britain and Spain were reluctant to war, but there was no other way to stop Hitler from attacking all of Europe. It had less effects from that of the first, and Britain had more popular support because it was defending democracy. Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. American intervention in 1941 with the air-attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbour paved the way for final victory. In 1945 Germany surrendered. Britain and America used the atomic bomb to defeat Japan. In Britain, bomb damage and the overworking of machinery meant that many industries would have found difficulty in readjusting to peacetime conditions. D- Day - day of deliverance June 6, 1944 Allies land on the coast of Normandy, Eisenhowser and English General Montgomery free France.

- Social Background and the Transition period

Socially, there were many similarities between Edwardian and Victorian England. Class distinction were well defined and carefully preserved and there were inequalities of wealth. (About three percent were upper or upper-middle classes: they included landowners, industrialists, bankers and professional men). Most transport was by horse, and for long distances the railway. Fashion did not change much. The lower middle class were about ten percent of the population, while the working class a booming eighty-five percent of the population. Pawn-broking was the most flourishing of businesses at this time because debt was a common feature of most working-class people’s lives. One popular change during this period was the popular newspaper. The “Daily Mail” was very popular for its novel style journalism, short articles and simple vocabulary.

Between the wars, for some it was gay in the twenties, while in the thirties it was hungry for others. After the war Britain’s population continued to grow but slowly: there were less births; and death-rate fell due to improvements in health care and medicine. Now there was a  reversal from the industrialized towns back to the suburbs. There was an increase in the working class and their standard of living improved. Housing was the most important improvement during this time: new council houses were built for the working-class families. But for those unemployed, it was a time of misery, lounging on street corners, and looking for shelter in public areas. Education was made compulsory for all children to the age of fourteen. New universities were founded and state scholarships were offered to poor students. The status of women was changing, they were given the right to vote in 1928, they had more working opportunities and they were granted access to universities. Daily newspapers became more popular and radio broadcasting developed, the BBC was formed. There was a growing change in the transportation, motor vehicles began to take the place of horse and the first mass production of cars began. American jazz began to spread in Britain and young people liked dancing to it. Silent films, watching professional football matches, and golf all became a pass-time for the British.

- Modernism

The term Modernism refers to a powerful international movement reaching through Western cultures. Originating at the beginning of the 20^th century, it dominated the sensibility and aesthetic choices of the great artists of this period. It broke away from traditional values, rejected Naturalism and Decadence, and in favour of introspection and technical skill. The most common features of Modernism are: the intentional distortion of shapes; the breaking down of limitations in space and time; perception of reality is subject to change; reflect in artistic form modern urban life; an interest in the primitive and the past; and the importance of unconscious as well as conscious life.

 

The age of anxiety

The first half of the 20th century was considered the age of anxiety.  It was a period in which many began to lose their faith in religion and positive view of life because of the first World War. Especially the soldiers that returned home disturbed by the horrors of war. It was also a period of frustration.

The most common features of Modernism are: the breaking down of limitations in space and time; reflection on modern urban life; and the importance of unconscious as well as conscious life.

One of the greatest modern writers was James Joyce. Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882. He studied French, Italian and German and different literatures. Joyce believed the only way to increase Ireland’s awareness was offering a realistic portrait of its life from a European, cosmopolitan viewpoint. He left Ireland and spent some time in Paris, then returned to Dublin and fell in love with Nora Barnacle. Their first date was on the 16^th of June 1904 which was to become the “Bloomsday” of “Ulysses”. They moved to Trieste, Italy. These were difficult years, filled with disappointment and frustration. After the war, in 1920, he settled in Paris and “Ulysses” was published in 1922.

Joyce went into voluntary exile at 22, but set his works mostly in Ireland or the city of Dublin making this city popular. The facts he wrote became confused, explored from different points of view simultaneously.  At one point he isolated himself from society. This isolation and anxiety of the writer was evident in his works. He used different points of view and narrative techniques. His style, technique and language developed from realism, through the use of free direct speech and epiphany, to the interior monologue. The language was written without punctuation or grammar connections and reality becomes the place of our psychological projections, symbolical archetypes and cultural knowledge.

The age of anxiety

Modernism refers to the period in the first half of the 20th century.  It was a period in which many began to lose their faith in religion and positivistic view of life because of the first World War, the political context and new scientific principles. Especially the soldiers that returned home were either disturbed by the horrors of war (trenches) or searched for pleasure. It was also a period of increasing feelings of rootlessness and frustration caused by the dissolution of the Empire into a Commonwealth. 

The literature is influenced by the political and social situation, in fact writers like Huxley and Orwell wrote anti-utopian novels as caution towards totalitarianism.

The most representatives of this period were: Freud, Jung, Einstein, William James, Bergson and Nietzsche

Sigmund Freud emphasized the power of the unconscious to affect behavior. He declared that Man’s life was dominated by a irrational force and that the super-ego was opposed to the limits of society. He gave importance to the Oedipus phase and his concentration on sexuality in the early stage of childhood. He had also investigated the human mind through (thru) the analysis of dreams. Carl Gustav Jung continued these studies.

Albert Einstein introduced the theory of relativity which eliminated the concept of space and time which was subjective.

William James and Henri Bergson coined the phrase “stream of consciousness” to define the continuous flow of ideas and sensations that characterized the human mind.

Friedrich Nietzsche sustained that “God was dead”, so he believed that Man was a superior being and did not need Christian faith to survive.

- Modernism

The term Modernism refers to a powerful international movement reaching through Western cultures. Originating at the beginning of the 20^th century, it dominated the sensibility and aesthetic choices of the great artists of this period. It broke away from traditional values, rejected Naturalism and Decadence, and in favour of introspection and technical skill. The most common features of Modernism are: the intentional distortion of shapes; the breaking down of limitations in space and time; perception of reality is subject to change; reflect in artistic form of modern urban life; an interest in the primitive and the past; and the importance of unconscious as well as conscious life.

George Orwell

“Animal Farm” (“The final party”) - The plot is set on a farm where a group of animals are capable of speaking and reasoning and inspired by the teachings of an old boar, to overcome their cruel master and set up a revolutionary government. The pigs lead and supervise the enterprise under Napoleon’s leadership. At first the animals’ life is guided by Seven Commandments based on equality; however, these are gradually altered by the pigs who become increasingly dictatorial and take over the privileges previously exercised by humans. Only one Commandment remains: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” The parallels between the plot of the book and the history of the USSR between 1917 and 1943 are clear: each animal symbolises a precise figure or representative type, but it was not only a satire on the Soviet Union, but on dictatorship in general, like the dictating pig.

The Animals - Orwell wrote “Animal Farm” primarily as an allegory of the Russian Revolution disguised as an animal fable. It is an anti-utopia much influenced by Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”, especially in the comparison between men and animals. Besides being a symbol, each animal possess the traits of its species, also its thoughts and views from inside its mind. Old Major stands for a mixture of Marx and Lenin: he preaches basic beliefs that will become the Seven Commandments. Farmer Jones is Czar Nicholas II: a drunk farmer that neglects his farm and animals. Snowball (a cat) is Trotsky and his bravery is an example to all the other animals, but he has a darker side, susceptible to greed. Napoleon (a pig) is Stalin who used terror and force in order to assert and maintain his power over the animals. The character of Boxer (a horse) stands for the loyal hard working man (his names comes from the Boxer Rebellion linked to the rise of Communism in China), who follows Animalism without understanding it completely. The dogs are a metaphor of Terror State which Stalin created in Russia to keep order and crush political opposition.

The tone of the book blends humour and sarcasm with horrifying scenes and a painful atmosphere. The main theme is that all revolutions fail to achieve the expectations of their promoters. Tyranny is by definition, evil regardless of its political nature. Some animals have betrayed Napoleon and so the pig has decided to kill them. All the innocent animals assist the cruel scene of death and pain. The dogs attack and kill whoever was secretly complotting with Napoleon’s enemy Snowball. Subsequently, all the good animals go on a hill and, and observe the farm, meditating on the surreal reality in which they lived.

The execution represents the passage from a revolutionary and democratic government to a dictatorial one. After the victory against Farmer Jones, Napoleon centralizes his power in his hands and institutes a dictatorial government. He uses his work to explain his opinions in respect to the totalitarian ones which exploit the people using violence and terror.

“1984” (“Physical persuasive”)

Born in a middle class family, Orwell’s life takes a turn facing many difficulties. Post war destruction of buildings and little work conditions, the British Imperialism over man all turned Orwell toward the lower working class man. He began to see from their point of view by living in their types of homes, wearing their clothes, working at low-paid jobs. But it was his experience in the Spanish Civil War, when he joined the Worker’s Party of Marxist unification, that turned him completely to socialism and the ideals of brotherhood and equality.

The novel “1984” (written in 1948) describes a future England ruled by the Party, led by a figure called Big Brother. The novel is divided into three parts: Part One introduces the main character, Winston Smith; Part Two describes his love for Julia; Part Three deals with Winston’s imprisonment and torture by the Thought Police and the final loss of his intellectual integrity. “1984” is an anti-utopian novel, (or what is called today a “dystopia” a fiction describing imaginary worlds which turn out to be nightmares), showing a possible future society that is anything but ideal and that ridicules the existing conditions of society. Set in a grotesque, squalid and menacing London, there is no privacy because there are monitors, called “telescreens”, watching every step people make. The Party has absolute control of the press, communication, language, history and thought. Love is forbidden. The tone of the book is pessimistic, violent and cruel.

The protagonist Winston Smith is symbolized the last man to believe in the human values in a totalitarian state. Winston, evokes Churchill’s patriotic appeal during the Second World War, Smith, a common English surname, is a middle-aged, weak man feels a desire for spiritual and moral integrity. The novel expresses Orwell’s views, he attacks contemporary Britain and at the same time warns about the future. Three slogans of the party were: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength”.

In the Third Part of 1984, Orwell talks about the control of the memory. The Party wanted to control the present and the future by altering the memory of the past. Winston Smith is captured by the Thought Police and undergoes torture by his enemy O’Brien. He is asked question about his past, which the Party has already changed, telling his that he has had criminal records in the past and that his mind needs to be readjusted to the truth, the Party’s truth.

James Joyce

His life

Born in Dublin in 1882, he was educated at Jesuit schools. He studied French, Italian and German and different literatures. He admired Dante, D’Annunzio and Ibsen. Joyce believed the only way to increase Ireland’s awareness was offering a realistic portrait of its life from a European, cosmopolitan viewpoint. He left Ireland and spent some time in Paris, then returned to Dublin and fell in love with Nora Barnacle, a 20-year-old chambermaid. Their first date was on the 16^th of June 1904 which was to become the “Bloomsday” of “Ulysses”. They moved to Trieste, Italy, and he made friends with Italo Svevo. These were difficult years, filled with disappointment, frustration, due to his daughter’s schizophrenia and financial problems. He wrote “Dubliners” and “A Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist” which helped him establish himself as a writer, but not his financial problems. After the war, in 1920, he settled in Paris and “Ulysses” began appearing serially in New York’s “Little Review” and then the book was published in 1922. The outcry following its publication, the subsequent court action in the U.S. to determine whether it was pornographic or not, brought Joyce fame.

Joyce went into voluntary exile at 22, but set his works mostly in Ireland or the city of Dublin making this city popular like London in Dicken’s works. His effort was to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things and living ordinary lives (“Dubliners” and “Ulysses”). His poor eye-sight was compensated by his sense of hearing and the sound of words was very important to him.

Joyce was a modernist writer. His themes are re-worked to become less relevant than the narrative itself. The facts become confused, being explored from different points of view simultaneously, and are presented as “clues” and not through an omniscient narrator. Joyce’s stories and novels open “in medias res” with the analysis of a particular moment, with the introspection of the character. Time is not perceived as objective, but as subjective, leading to psychological change. Joyce, influenced by Baudelaire and Flaubert, believed in the impersonality of the artist. The artist’s task was to render life objectively. This led to his isolation and detachment from society. He used different points of view and narrative techniques for the use of his characters portrayed. His style, technique and language developed from realism, through an exploration of the characters’ points of views, through the use of free direct speech and epiphany, to interior dialogue with two levels of narration, and the use of interior monologue. Thus language is broken down without punctuation or grammar connections, into infinite puns, and reality becomes the place of our psychological projections, symbolical archetypes and cultural knowledge.

Joyce confronted the implications of the loss of a world of public values in a very different way. His attitude was complicated by the fact that he adopted the view of the alienation of the artist. The artist had to be outside all conventions, all normal society, and this not only because those conventions and that society as Joyce found them in Dublin represented a “paralysis”, a dead set of gestures having no meaning in terms of genuine human experience, but because the artist must be outside society in order to be objective, and he must be objective if he is to adopt the peculiar microcosmic view which was the way Joyce solved the modern problem. Joyce sought a method of presenting a limited tract of time and space as microcosm, as a small-scale model of human life, to which all attitudes were possible, depending on your point of view. The artist’s function was therefore not to render his own personal viewpoint, but to take all points of view and to construct in his fictional world an enormous interrelating, punning, kaleidoscopic verbal universe which presents everything as also everything else.

“Dubliners” are a collection of fifteen short stories about Dubliners which are realistic in detail and atmosphere and at the same time so organized that each detail becomes symbolic and each story has a symbolic relation to the other stories, constituting not only a picture of “the centre of paralysis” (what he described his work) but a projection of the basic crises of human experience and the archetypal rituals with which men confront them (a first step towards “spiritual liberation”). The paralysis of Dublin which Joyce wanted to portray is both physical, resulting from external forces, and moral, linked to religion, politics and culture. Another theme is “escape”, which is the opposite, linked to its consequent failure. His point was to progress from the individual to the general, and from childhood to an approximation of maturity by degrees. The last story, “The Dead”, is Joyce’s first masterpiece. The use of realism is tempered by symbolism (for example Gretta sleeping; the hotel room; Gabriel’s name according to the Bible is both the prince of fire and the angel of death). The peculiar technique of the “epiphany” (that is, the sudden spiritual manifestation), is caused by a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation. A character is lead to a sudden self-realisation about himself/herself or about the reality surrounding him/her. Joyce thought this would lead the reader to go beyond the usual aspects of life and to show their deep and hidden meaning. The epiphany is often the key to the story itself. The story “The Dead” presents the failure of love in marriage with the story of the true passion of Michael Furey juxtaposed with the materialism of Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist. The omniscient narrator and the single point of view are rejected: each story is told from the perspective of a character. It is a narrated dialogue in the form of free direct speech.

Plot

The protagonists are Gabriel Conroy, and his wife, Gretta. Gabriel teaches in Joyce’s university and is the personification of what Joyce might have been if he had not left Dublin, a city paralysed by old traditions and obsolete culture. His wife hears a song at an annual Christmas party that reminds her of Michael Furey, who used to sing it and who died for her love when he was 17. Gretta’s recalling Michael has caused Gabriel to realise that he and the guests of the party are deader than Michael Furey. His self destroyed, his identity gone, he becomes one with all the living and the dead. He can be considered spiritually dead until the end. As for Michael, he is an angel too, and he will live in Gretta’s memory for ever; eclipsing the weak presence of her husband. The most effective antithesis is the metaphoric pattern of life and death in the story, for example, Michael is physically dead, but alive in Gretta’s heart. The final image of the falling snow which is the symbolic reconciliation of life and death. Death, because it covers both the dead and the living, the symbol of hopeless solitude, isolation and alienation of the artist in Dublin, but at the same time the symbol of purification and live, since it clears the world of all negative images. Another important symbol is the “journey westward”. Traditionally “going west” means “dying” and to Joyce himself, leaving Ireland.  Gabriel’s journey westward is ambiguous since he goes to the west to meet both life and death.  The epiphany in this last section of the story is the character’s realisation of the world surrounding him, his love for his wife, his wife’s true love for Michael and his wanting to die and live at the same time.

“Ulysses” is the climax of Joyce’s creativity and sums up the themes and techniques used in previous works. It was a new form of prose based on the “mythical method”, based on psychological, ethnological, and anthropological progress. This method made it possible to make a parallel with the “Odyssey”. Homer’s myth was used to increase the actions and people of Dublin giving them another dimension and expressing the universal. He planned each movement of each character as though he was playing chess. Like the “Odyssey”, “Ulysses” is the story of a journey, the return home of the exile after the confrontation with death. It is divided into three parts: “Telemachiad” (Chapters 1-3), “Odyssey” (Chapters 4-15), “Nostos” (Chapters 16-18), with the three main characters, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom. These characters represent two aspects of human nature: Stephen is a pure intellect and embodies every young man seeking maturity; Mrs. Bloom stands for flesh; Mr. Bloom is everybody, the whole of mankind. The novel is closely related to Homeric episodes and each one develops a theme alluding a colour, a symbol, an organ of the body. The theme of the novel is moral: human life means suffering, failing but also struggling to rise and seek goodness.

Joyce uses a number of methods: the stream of consciousness technique; the cinematic technique with literary close-ups and flashbacks; question and answer; dramatic dialogue; interior monologue; and the juxtaposition of the events all united in a way to render his characters’ inner-life a so-called “collage technique” (similar to the Cubist artists).

Plot

The central character, Leopold Bloom, is Joyce’s Common Man, a parody of the wandering “Odysseus” and a representation of the wandering Jew. He leaves his home at 8 o’clock on a Thursday morning on the 16^th of June 1904 to buy his breakfast and returns finally at 2 o’clock the following morning. In between, he lands on the shores of many streets, endures misadventures and delights, recalls the unfaithfulness of his wife and the death of his little son, tastes anger and honey, as Homer’s hero did, and he reaches the “sanctuary” of his “Ithaca” where his wife, Molly, an ironically unfaithful Penelope, whose thoughts and dreams flow, in a long monologue which closes the novel. During his wanderings, Bloom meets a contemporary version of Telemachus, Stephen Dedalus, who is the alienated protagonist of “A Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist” and who temporarily becomes his adopted son. The alienated common man rescues the alienated artist from a brothel (bordello) and takes him home where the paralysis of their weakness prevents them from achieving a personal communion. There can be no direct relationship between the artist and the common man. The artist’s aim is to raise the common man from ephemeral life to permanence, and the common man exists as the artist’s infinite material.

Stream of consciousness and interior monologue

The stream of consciousness came about with the American psychologist William James. It defines the continuous flow of thoughts and sensations that characterize the human mind. It was applied to modern literature since many writers gave importance to the subjective consciousness.

The stream of consciousness is the physic phenomena itself in which characters are shown as individuals with a moral and emotional inner life.

The interior monologue, instead, is the verbal expression of the psychic phenomenon. It contains two levels of narration: one external to the character’s mind, the other internal. It often disregards the rules of punctuation and lacks formal or chronological order.  

The interior monologue is the verbal expression of a psychic  phenomena. It represents, in a novel, the unspoken activity of the mind before it is ordered in speech. (So the difference between interior monologue and the soliloquy and dramatic monologue is that it is immediate and conventional syntax is not respected, it disregards the rules of punctuation and lacks formal logical order.

Modern writers understood it was impossible to reproduce the complexity of the human minds using traditional techniques (for example the omniscient narrator), so they adopted the interior monologue, to represent the unspoken activity of the mind before it is ordered in speech. Interior monologue is often confused with stream of consciousness, although they are quite different.

Interior monologue is the verbal expression of a psychic phenomenon, while the other is the psychic phenomenon itself.

It is its immediacy which distinguishes the internal monologue from both the soliloquy and the dramatic monologue (which use conventional syntax) This immediate speech is freed from introductory expressions like he thought, etc.

Subjective reality – Woolf (moments of being) and Joyce (epiphany

Inner discourse = indirect interior monologue

Virginia Woolf (1882.-1941)

Life and Works

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882 in an intellectual family. After her mother’s and sister’s deaths, she had a nervous breakdown. When her father died in 1904 she moved to Bloomsbury (in central London) and founded a circle of intellectuals called “The Bloomsbury Group”. She was influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis and by Bergen’s concept of time. She committed suicide in 1941.

She and her husband founded the Hogarth Press which published her great works like “Mrs Dalloway, “To the Lighthouse”, “Orlando”, “The Common Reader” and “A Room of One’s Own”.

Interior time

Woolf’s novels enter into the inner world of her characters. Time is enlarged and one moment can last a long time. This is called indirect interior monologue. She did not write in the traditional linear sequence of events, she was interested in the impressions of the characters and their subjectivity. (She was concerned with female subjectivity). Woolf does not use a narrator to tell the ideas and feelings of the characters, she speaks from “within” their minds. (However, there is the occasional presence of the narrator – who is invisible- who gives some order to the character’s thoughts.)

Moments of being

The best way to describe Woolf’s technique is to call it “moments of being”, the moments of intensity, perception or vision which illuminate our lives. (Life is seen through the “moments of being” , which are rare moments of insight during the characters’ daily life when they can see reality behind appearances.)

Focus on the text: “Mrs Dalloway”

The plot

The events that take place in the novel “Mrs Dalloway” all happen in one day in central London. It begins on a June morning and Clarissa Dalloway goes to buy some flowers for a party she organized for the evening. During the day, Clarissa changes many moods and has many memories. Her thoughts are expressed in the character she once loved Peter Walsh. Her day is contrasted with that of Septimus Smith, a disturbed veteran, who at the end of the day commits suicide. Clarissa discovers the tragic event and reflects on the importance to embrace life. The novel ends with Peter coming to the party because he was looking for her for some time.

Features and themes

Woolf  rejects the traditional novel style and uses the technique of mixing Clarissa’s interior monologue with the sights and sounds of the city. Clarissa is interrupted in her walks around London with interior tunnels that open up her mind. Clarissa’s mind goes back in the past and in an uncertain future. Another important aspect of the novel is the way the characters Clarissa and Septimus are dependent on each other. His death becomes her acceptance of life.

Focus on the text: “To the Lighthouse”

The plot

The novel is divided into three sections. The first is “The Window”, the second is “Time Passes” and the final section is “The Lighthouse”.

“The Window” is about a summer’s day in the life of the Ramsays on holiday with their children.

“Time Passes” is about death of Mrs Ramsay and the sense of gloom and desolation of the family during the war years. But at the end there is a little hope when guests arrive, the painter Lily Briscoe and the poet Augustus Carmichael.

“The Lighthouse” is about the journey Mr Ramsay makes to the lighthouse and at the same time Lily Briscoe completes her painting she began 10 years ago. The past and present are united.

Features and themes

The most important aspect of the novel “To the Lighthouse” is how time is used. It is enlarged. The first part of the book is the longest and it takes place in one day. There is the use of indirect interior monologue.

Three main images dominate the symbolism of “To the Lighthouse”: the lighthouse, the journey and the sea, which are all connected to the idea of mission. Another idea is that of light and dark reflects the alteration in the flow of events between the external and the interior, for example, the promised trip to the lighthouse and the thoughts of Mrs Ramsay.

The painter’s vision also reflects the light and dark symbolism. The line she draws is an image of the  lighthouse and the “dark” time which separates the present and the past. The sea reflects Woolf’s style, which is poetic, and gives the impression of fluidity, which reproduces the inner feelings and thoughts.

The extract from “The Window”

The extract from “The Window” of “To the Lighthouse” is about Mrs Ramsay who knows that the trip to the lighthouse will not take place because of the bad weather and she does not know how to tell her son James. The lighthouse lights up and then she starts thinking about herself as a “core of darkness” and that her son will remember this disappointment in the future.

The differences between the stream of consciousness and interior monologue

The stream of consciousness came about with the American psychologist William James. It defines the continuous flow of thoughts and sensations that characterize the human mind. It was applied to modern literature since many writers gave importance to the subjective consciousness.

(Indirect Interior Monologue) The stream of consciousness is the physic phenomena itself in which characters are shown as individuals with a moral and emotional inner life.

(Direct  Interior Monologue) The interior monologue, instead, is the verbal expression of the psychic phenomenon.  It represents, in a novel, the unspoken activity of the mind before it is ordered in speech. It often disregards the rules of punctuation and lacks formal or chronological order.  

Joyce – direct interior monologue

Mrs Dalloway –

 Point of view changes constantly, often shifting from one character’s stream of consciousness (subjective interior thoughts) to another’s within a single paragraph. Woolf most often uses free indirect discourse, a literary technique that describes the interior thoughts of characters using third-person singular pronouns (he and she). This technique ensures that transitions between the thoughts of a large number of characters are subtle and smooth.

Stream of Consciousness in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (Indirect interior monologue)
"She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself."
(Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1925

Virginia Woolf just before committing suicide? ….

Even in her novel “Mrs Dalloway” she once stated that: “In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense...”

She was able to show these thoughts she had by using the themes of doubling, connecting time and timelessness, and placing the world of sanity beside an insane one. Through the characters of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, Woolf shows life as changing endlessly from moment to moment. The story takes place in one single day in which Clarissa walks and talks to people in the streets of London from the morning until the evening she gives her party. The plot does not physically connect Septimus and Clarissa, apart from the news of his death at the party, however, both characters are similar: they are emotionally intense, dependent on their partners, and sexually incapable. Moreover, Septimus is considered the dark side of Clarissa. All fears about society are absorbed in this character, who in the end, is not able to deal with reality and commits suicide. Clarissa, instead, never loses her awareness of the outside world and acknowledges her old age and the idea of death through her consciousness. This theme of doubling portrays the polarity of the self and exposes the positive-negative relationship inherent in humanity. It also illustrates the opposite phases of the idea of life and death. As we can see in the text taken from “Mrs. Dalloway”, the character Septimus has lost touch with reality because in a crowded street of London he cries out that he wants to kill himself.

These two characters can be considered the emotionally intense Virginia Woolf herself and her conflicting ideas about reality and insanity. She was only thirteen when she had her first nervous breakdown because she was deeply affected by the death of her mother. After marrying her husband in 1912, she began suffering severe headaches, so she entered a nursing home for help. She was isolated from her loved ones and attempted suicide by taking drugs. In addition to this, the Second World War increased her anxiety and fears about a world which had been disintegrated and feared losing her mind, so she drowned herself in river Ouse in 1941.

Woolf was able to create a new novelistic structure in “Mrs. Dalloway” in which she distorted the distinction between dream and reality, between the past and present, showing just what human beings do, simultaneously flowing from the conscious to the unconscious, from the fantastic to the real, and from memory to the moment. Through these characters, and the modern technique “stream of consciousness”, she was able to define the continuous flow of thoughts and sensations that characterized the mind of her characters and even more her own

Woolf and her sister set up residence in a neighbourhood of London called  Bloomsbury, where they met a circle of intellectuals, like Forster. She became a major figure of British modernism and her novels “To the Lighthouse”, “Mrs Dalloway” and “A room of One’s Own”, an important work of feminist literary criticism. It explores the historical and contextual contingencies of literary achievement.  The dramatic setting of “A Room…” Woolf has been invited to lecture on the topic of Women and Fiction and advances the thesis that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. She dramatizes the mental process in the character of an imaginary narrator (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael…or by any ither name at you please) who, the same Woolf, is struggling in the same position. The figure of Judith Shakespeare is an example of the tragic fate of a highly intelligent women would have met with at her time. (She is an imagined sister of William Shakespeare, who suffers greatly and eventually commits suicide because she can find no socially acceptable outlets for her genius.

Woolf argues (the subjectivity of truth) that even history is subjective, reality is not objective: rather, it is contingent upon the circumstances of one’s world. Women need concentration, they need private spaces of their own, free of interruptions, if not they are doomed to difficulty and even failure in their work.