First Impression About To The Lighthouse By Joaquin Gamarra

 

So far, having read the first five chapters of To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s story-telling strikes me as being primarily focused on showing the distinct stream of consciousness that the characters experience within themselves, about other people they are related to or about themselves. Through this, we become acquainted with the characters, not only by a character’s thinking but also by other people’s thinking about the subject. So Virginia Woolf presents her characters through many lenses, each lens bringing its subjective view.

 

            An instance of this phenomenon happens when Mrs. Ramsay immerses herself in her thoughts and as a result, we become acquainted with her concerns like how “shrubby” the household is or with that memory that gave her a strong impression—namely the one about her Swiss maid who while crying for the death of her father remarked that “The mountains are so beautiful”(28). These thoughts reflect Mrs. Ramsay’s concerns and feelings and they also seem to manifest in the exterior world as we see how remembering the sad and hopeless story of her Swiss maid gave her a “spasm of irritation” that led her to be severe with her son James, who was unwilling to stand still and allow his mother to take the measurement.

 

Hence Mrs. Ramsay’s stream of consciousness allows us to construct a description of her character in our minds. But we also conceive a description of her, through Mr. Bankes’s eyes as he says that “she did not like admiration—or suppose some latent desire to doff her royalty of form as if her beauty bored her and all that men say of beauty, and she wanted only to be like other people, insignificant.”(pg.30).

 

The way she presents Mrs. Ramsay in Chapter five is a recurrent theme in Virginia Woolf’s style of writing, we see it happen with Mr. Tales at the start of the novel when Mrs. Ramsay and her daughter are talking about him, and with the other characters. For Virginia Woolf shows her characters primarily through the subjective perception that other people have on a specific character or through the perception that the character has of himself.

 

As a consequence of her writing style, Virginia Woolf launches us from one character’s stream of consciousness to the next one and so on. This technique along with the elaborative, and minutes details of the setting and environment, embellishes her story-telling in such a way that the reader is invited to immerse himself in her imaginative world produced by her ink. 

Through these considerations, I am interested to see how this novel will develop and to see whether or not the relationships that the characters have with one another is linked to the stream of consciousness that each character has throughout the novel.

 

Comments

  1. Krishnan VenkateshFebruary 28, 2021 at 8:32 PM

    Very well observed, Mr. Gamarra. Since we actually live in stream-of-consciousness and can get no point of view from outside it, and since therefore the notion of an objective narrator is really only fictional, why not only write narratives in this way, from within the real workings of consciousness? I guess we might find it harder to negotiate because we are so used to the other way. In this new style of writing, what might be the principles of form?

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  2. Miz DettmerMarch 31, 2021 at 10:31 AM

    I thought something interesting about how this developed was the way Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe were able to relate to each other. Although Mrs. Ramsay is much more the object of Lily's thinking than Lily is the object of Mrs. Ramsay's, we see that each has a similar cognizance of the other, each is able to perceive the other rightly. For example, during the dinner party, when Mrs. Ramsay says that "one need never worry about Lily," and that Lily always had a private little joke with herself, I found both observations to be insightful visions into Lily's character. Though Mrs. Ramsay's ideas about Lily were clouded often with her external concerns about marriage and Mr. Banks, she ultimately had moments of clear perception where she was able to see that Lily would be alright, was running her own private joke. Interestingly, Lily was entertaining herself at the dinner with the "experiment" on Mr. Tansley, and working on her painting, reminding herself about changes to the painting by the position of the salt shaker. Mrs. Ramsay perceives some glimpse of this internal world by that expression. Similarly, we see Lily's true opinions on Mrs. Ramsay often, but most notably in parallel between the "dark wedge" Mrs. Ramsay finds within herself and the purple triangle Lily depicts her with in her painting.

    In reference to what you were saying, I wonder if we are able to understand the characters not only through other's perception of them, but through which characters perceive them rightly, and how those perceptions mesh with their understandings of themselves. For example, why does Mrs. Ramsay see herself as a dark wedge when she is /alone/ and Lily paints the dark wedge which represents /motherhood/?

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