Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

November 6, 2008 at 11:29 am (Critical Writing, Prose, Reading)

               To the Lighthouse: The Illusion of Control amidst Chaos

     In the novel To the Lighthouse written by Virginia Woolf, the chaotic and diverging elements of the story are reconciled to the form that the novel takes on. The book is structured into three sections, and in this way appears very simple: “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The Lighthouse.” From the outset this appears to be very tidy and straightforward. Of course this is not the case, and instead readers discover divergence in the plot that reaches a high point in the second section, and amidst the chaos of events, the shape of the novel emerges in a way that is more powerful than could have been suspected.
     Within the first section, “The Window,” Woolf’s style crystallizes several moments of the overwhelming into recognizable forms. For example, early on there is an instance where Lily Briscoe’s thoughts erupt into a flock of starlings:

All of this danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate, but all marvelously controlled in an invisible elastic net—danced up and down in Lily’s mind, in and about the branches of the pear tree, where still hung in effigy the scrubbed kitchen table, symbol of her profound respect for Mr. Ramsay’s mind, until her thought which had spun quicker and quicker exploded of its own intensity; she felt released; a shot went off close at hand, and there came, flying from its fragments, frightened, effusive, tumultuous, a flock of starlings (25).

This particular portion represents this idea of reconciling chaos both stylistically and thematically. The intriguing use of punctuation manipulates this wealth of information into a single sentence, and at the same time it tries to give shape and provide clarity to an occurrence that is not altogether clear. The tension between Lily’s thoughts in the mental realm and the particular objects of the physical realm create an intricate pandemonium. It is of course the intricate qualities of the anarchy that lend themselves to some sort of structuring. By lending form to this chaos we can at least recognize and enjoy it, but I doubt we can understand it fully. Woolf manages an astonishing task by willing this eldritch power into something recognizable to us.
     Divergence from the storyline likewise occurs with regularity in the novel, and is handled rather gracefully, usually with a simple use of parentheses. For example, Chapter XIV of “The Window” is set aside in parentheses, and includes the events shadowing Prue’s response to the question “Did Nancy go with them?” (73). These events sidetrack from what is going on in the story at that moment; although, they are pertinent, including the moment where Minta Doyle loses her brooch. This allows parts of the story that are no less important than others to be included, even though they are simultaneous to or divergent from the currently occurring events of the story in some way. This gesture becomes most notable in the second section, “Time Passes.”
     The second section focuses on the gradual decline of the house, but interspersed, set aside in brackets, several of the central figures from the beginning of the novel die. This is unimaginably disruptive to the goings-on of section two, creating a devastating sense of loss backgrounded, stylistically, by unforeseeable fate. Andrew and Prue are two of the characters who die. Andrew was going to be a great mathematician, and Prue was going to do so well because she was so beautiful. But seemingly instantaneously, within a single sentence dropped into the regular flow of the story, they are taken away. There is no build up—no way of knowing that they would die. Still, it happens, and this chosen shape for the chaos of these events, provides a very real sense of death. You do not know when it will come and who it will come for. Chaos is by definition unpredictable, and this use of it is mesmerizing, the shock of which is probably best captured by Lily’s thoughts in the final section: “For there are moments when one can neither think nor feel. And if one can neither think nor feel, she thought, where is one?” (193-94).
     These unforeseeable instances in the second section are shored against paragraphs about the decay of the house, which proposes simultaneity even though rationally there seems to be a disconnect. The descriptions of the house emulate the image of the kitchen table used to describe Mr. Ramsay’s delving into the metaphysical—they describe what happens when the family is not there. Mrs. McNab, the housekeeper, will reflect that the family expects the house to be the same when they return, even though like anything else, it is due to fall into some state of disrepair. They, those who stay at the house, have a misconception about how the physical world operates independently of themselves; they do not expect change to happen, even though logically it must. Similarly, a reader would not expect the deaths in the Ramsay family to happen as they do; we are unprepared. Were the deaths not provided for in their bracketed sections, a reunion at the house would be curiously smaller than the coming together at the beginning of the book. Of course, the group gathered at the house at the end of the book is smaller, but the readers know why—they have witnessed the change. Call it change, the unforeseeable future, random chance, or what-have-you, it is internalized effectively with respect to both time and space in To the Lighthouse.
     Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is laden with the unexpected, a sense of uneasiness, and the unknown. However, Woolf manages these things through a use of style that manipulates grammar as readily as syntax, giving rise to something that a reader can grasp and accept. The chaos of the novel is exactly how someone would expect chaos to be, disruptive, volatile, and unpredictable. But the stylistic and structural elements allow a reader to recognize how these occurrences coincide and are not even considerably unlikely. What happens is possible and therefore capable of being accepted. This capacity makes readers digest the novel as events that could happen, as events that do happen, in the world around them. This welding of chaos to shape, as recognized in the novel in the line “in the midst of chaos there was shape” (161), forms a tangible and strangely entrancing reality with its own elements of chance and the chaotic, comparable to our own.

*The page numbers are referenced from the Harvest Book/Harcourt edition with a foreward by Eudora Welty.