Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (1927): A Reading Through

the Phenomenology of Consciousness

Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover

Abstract: Literary texts of the 20th century are not about the world “as it is.” They do
not “mirror” an assumed “reality.” They are, like the “new art” or “new drama” in
the words of Konstantin Treplev, the young playwright in Chekhov’s Seagull, embod-
iments of “dreams.” This is nowhere better illustrated than in Virginia Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse. To the Lighthouse is constructed by or as a giant gaze or by/as myriads of
gazes which are embedded in each other, in endless perspectival repetition—en abîme.
There is no “central” narrative perspective, no narrator to guide the reader through
the maze of imagined scenes, emotions, inner monologues and pictures evoked before
him or her. The text is like a giant weave, which generates itself, self-propagates, is
fecund—like Mrs Ramsay.
This self-propagation of the text is contrasted with the labors of the artist, Lily
Briscoe. She finds it difficult to extract meaning from her material—color and paint—
and labors to fashion her thought into form. She succeeds only at the end of the novel,
in Part 3, simultaneously with another story-line which is being accomplished: the
oedipal rite of passage of James Ramsay, now 16 years of age. By contrast with Gayatri
Spivak’s feminist reading of Woolf’s novel, this essay presents a view of the novel as
a model of meaning and the creative process, in which all the characters—male and
female—have a metaphoric dimension, even if they are constructed out of fragmen-
tary and allusive socio-historical material.

The Object in Art and the Subject in Psychoanalytic Theory

Jacques Lacan, whose revision of Freud’s concept of the Unconscious has taken
psychoanalysis into the domain of structuralism and linguistics, operates
with the concept of the Other to redefine the Self as a subject of language. The
psychoanalytic Other is an abstract locus which overlaps with the Freudian
concepts of the “other scene” and the “id.” Both the Other and Freud’s ein
anderer Schauplatz1 are atemporal and nonspatial substitutions for the “unrep-

1
 Lacan, who reappropriated Freud’s term, explains: “Freud named the locus of the
unconscious by a term that had struck him in Fechner (who, incidentally, is an exper-
imentalist, and not the realist that our literary reference books suggest), namely, ein

Scholarship as the Art of Life: Contributions on Serbian Literature, Culture, and Society by
Friends of Radmila (Rajka) Gorup. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, ed. Bloomington, IN: Slavica
Publishers, 2016, 101–14.
102 Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover

resentable” or the Unconscious. Both are theorized as abstract, structural cat-

egories, which position the equally “abstract” (psychic) subject of conscious-
ness in a grid of potential significations.
Freud operated with a topological model of the psyche, in which inter-
acting systems of Perception-Consciousness, the Preconscious, Unconscious,
Repression, and “listening/hearing” (the accoustics or “listening cap” on
Freud’s “onion” diagram) were mediating instances between the “id” and
its product, the “ego” (cf. Freud 1995, 636). Lacan transformed this “static”
model into a dynamic structural model in his so-called “schema L” (Lacan
1977, 179–221).2 In Lacan’s model, the subject of consciousness is “split” from
the outset (into the Je—as distinct from the ego—the moi) and situated in a
complex relational field of imaginary identifications.3 Put concisely (and at
the risk of simplification), these relations constitute a quaternary structure,
whose sole “support” is a binary structure. The binary structure consists of an
identification with a symbiotic “other”: the mother (the nurturer), the mother’s
breast, and a host of “objects,” which are in themselves already substitutions
for an unrepresentable “lost” (or “absent”) object or originary “lack.” This
originary “lack” is located in the “real” of the subject’s body and constitutes “a
real moment of which no ‘being’ has memory, but to which each subject tries
to give voice in words, images and symptoms” (Ragland 1996, 195). The roots
of the “real” are in the “objects-cause-of-desire that give rise to the oral, anal,
vocative and scopic partial drives” (195). These substitutory objects Lacan des-
ignates as “objects of the small other” (objets petit a).4

anderer Schauplatz, another scene; he makes use of it some twenty times in his early
works” (Lacan 1977, 193).
2
 Compare also the commentary by Green (1983, 161–91).
3
 That the various “phases” of psychic transformation of the subject are not strictly
chronological categories has been stated time and again. The best way to eliminate the
notion of progression in time when speaking of the manner in which the “self-conscious”
subject comes into being and into signification is to conceptualize the subject, with
Lacan, in its three “registers”—the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, which inter-
lock in a “Borromean knot” (cf. Lacan 1983b, 169; Lee 1991, 196; and Julien 1994, 172–84).
4
 Lacan defines the objet a in terms of a primary separation or splitting of the subject,
which determines the subject’s future existence in permanent alienation from him-
self: “Through the function of the objet a, the subject separates himself off, ceases to be
linked to the vacillation of being, in the sense that it forms the essence of alienation”
(Lacan 1998, 258). In the French phrase objet petit a—the "a" stands for the French word
autre, meaning other.
 Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse 103

The quaternary structure of “schema L” traces the path of the subject’s

“split” or “doubling” as a result of his5 entry into language and culture (the
symbolic order). In the quaternary relationship, the subject “identifies” with
a “big” (capital) Other, which represents the (name of the) “Father” or the
“Law” (of the signifier). “Identification” here is synonymous with the “fading”
of the subject, his “sliding” under the signifier, which in point of fact consti-
tutes the “field” of the Other. In this “field“ (and there is no other “field”), the
subject’s “discourse” comes to be constituted as the “discourse of the Other.”
The subject is thus forever “absent” to himself, but metonymically “chained”
to his small other (objet petit a), which becomes the elusive (repressed) “cause”
of the subject’s desire.6 The psychoanalytic subject is thus from the start a
thoroughly “fictitious” (“construed” or “psychic”) being, existing only in and
through a network of imaginary relationships with imaginary (“psychic”7)
objects, and predicated on a lack-of-being (manque-á-étre).
The split subject of consciousness is thus, in part, a signifier (for him/her-
self) and for other subjects, and, in part, his own (repressed) signified.8 The

5
 I am using the term subject as a grammatical masculine form, and hence a generic
term subsuming both the masculine and feminine genders.
6
 Lacan states that “the symptom is a metaphor […] as desire is metonymy” (Lacan
1977, 175). However, as he will concede elsewhere, the two basic mechanisms of lan-
guage (metaphor and metonymy) are reciprocal constituents of the “field of the sig-
nifier”: the “one side” is “metonymy,” “the other side is metaphor” (ibid., 156). For
metonymy is present in metaphor, like a repressed (“occulted”) signifier, which goes
“under” (or “fades”) in the process of substitution, which is metaphor. For the “cre-
ative spark of metaphor does not spring from the presentation of two images, that is,
of two signifiers equally actualized. It flashes between two signifiers, one of which has
taken the place of the other in the signifying chain, the occulted signifier remaining
present through its (metonymic) connexion with the rest of the chain. One word for
another: that is the formula for the metaphor.” By contrast and concomitantly, “it is in
the word-to-word connexion that metonymy is based” (ibid., 156–57). Compare also
Jonathan Scott Lee’s lucid summary of the interaction of absence/presence in the rela-
tionship of metonymy to metaphor: “Metaphor’s ability to make present something
that is absent is the basis for language’s ability to represent (in some sense) a reality
that is external to and thus absent from language. This metaphoric power remains
ultimately dependent on metonymy, however, reinforcing the centrality of the chain
of signifiers for Lacan” (Lee 1991, 56).
7
 Lacanian “things,” as Maire Jaanus points out, “are psychic or mere traces of a real
thing” (Jaanus 1995, 125).
8
 Jonathan Scott Lee puts the “divisions” of the subject somewhat differently: “The
Lacanian subject is the uneasy coexistence of three distinct moments. There is, first
of all, the real 'presence that is speaking to you,' the speaking body, the subject of the
actual act of enunciation. Secondly, there is the symbolic subject indicated by the je of
the speaking body’s discourse, the subject of the statement actually uttered. The third
104 Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover

subject is thus “an object framed by itself” (Ragland 1996, 195). The subject’s
“repressed” is jouissance,9 which surfaces as hysteria, voice, and speech. Thus
jouissance marks language as an “excess” because language always conveys a
“sense” that is more (or less) than it would want to say (voudrait dire).10
Because the subject is defined only in relation to “an Other” and an
“Elsewhere,” the mode of being for the subject of consciousness is alienation.
That is, the subject exists as a self-instituting absence. Or, as Lacan has put it,
“[D]esire, boredom, confinement, revolt, prayer, sleeplessness […] and panic
are there as evidence of the dimension of that Elsewhere, and to draw our
attention to it […] as permanent principles of collective organizations, out-
side which human life does not appear capable of maintaining itself for long”
(Lacan 1977, 192).

Literary Texts and the Psychoanalytic Model of the Subject

Literary texts of the 20th century are not about the world “as it is.” They do not
“mirror” an assumed “reality.” They are, like the “new art” or “new drama” in
the words of Konstantin Treplev, the young playwright in Chekhov’s Seagull,
embodiments of “dreams.” Dreams, or the structure of dreams, are the form
and content of the new mode of representation, modeled on the psychoana-
lytic conceptualization of consciousness. According to Freud, consciousness is
only a small part of the psyche—das Psychische. The “submerged” part of this
large territory belongs to the Unconscious, which is the domain of desire, the
Other, (repressed) memory and the production of signification (thought and
language). These concepts belong to the model of the modern subject which

moment of the subject […] is the imaginary moi constructed […] early in childhood to
give the subject an identity that it really lacks“ (Lee 1991, 82).
9
The term jouissance is a key concept in Lacan’s psychoanalysis. It designates an
“excess[ive]” [in] enjoyment or pleasure, analogous to sexual orgasm, and having the
effect of transporting the subject beyond the limits of the Self without actually killing
him in the process, although jouissance is close to “death” (as evidenced in the French
synonym for orgasm, which is petite morte). Compare Ellie Ragland: “The subject lives
in the blind spot between his objectal being and the language that seeks to represent
this. Put another way, repression is repression of the fact that we are first and foremost
creatures of jouissance” (Ragland 1996, 195).
10
Ellie Ragland’s interpretation of jouissance as an “excess” bearing on language, and
thus not on bodily (sexual) but on “psychic” pleasure, carries, I think, the correct
emphasis (cf Ragland 1996, 195). Jonathan Scott Lee’s elaboration of Lacanian jouissance
in terms of male and female desire, and his distinction between “phallic jouissance” and
“jouissance proper” (what is this “proper” jouissance?), based, it would seem, exclu-
sively on Lacan’s cryptic Seminar XX, Encore 1972–73, is overdetermined through the
questionable polarizing of jouissance in relation to gender (cf. Lee, 1991, 179).
 Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse 105

grounds Modernist texts irrespective of their social, political, and historical

content, which emerges as it were between the lines of this huge psychoana-
lytic subtext.
The large territory of modern subjectivity is mapped in all Modernist
texts, and nowhere better than in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.11
Take a passage like the ruminations of Lily Briscoe, the artist and guest of
the Ramsay family during their summer holidays in the Isle of Skye. This is
in part 1, “Window,” where Lily has just been observing Mr. Bankes observ-
ing Mrs. Ramsay, from where her gaze wanders back to her own painting,
about which she thinks, “It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad!” (54).
From contemplating her unfinished painting, Lily’s thoughts wander to the
memory of what she intended to say to Mr. Bankes about Mrs. Ramsay before
she was struck by his gaze directed at Mrs. Ramsay, which Lily identifies as a
gaze of “rapture” and “love.” Lily is not jealous, in fact, the opposite: she feels
included in this “rapture” of a man for a woman and tries to hide her pleasure
by busying herself with the cleaning of her brushes: “She took shelter from the
reverence which covered all women; she felt herself praised” (54). Then Lily’s
inner dramatic monologue—for this is the form of the narrative at this point—
evokes the memory of Mrs. Ramsay’s movements, gestures, and even the shape
of a finger on her glove, but above all, Mrs. Ramsay’s imagined speech—repro-
duced as direct inner speech within Lily’s own inner dramatic monologue:

All this she would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, mov-
ing over to the window, in pretence that she must go,—it was dawn,
she could see the sun rising,—half turn back, more intimately, but still
always laughing, insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry,
since in the world, whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs.
Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (prob-
ably Mrs. Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened,
darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this:
an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. (55–56)

Lily’s narrative thus reconstructs the point of view of an other in its entirety,
rendering this point of view as inner speech or recit indirect libre (free indirect
speech), even including gesture or the performance of attitudes or—as I have
called it elsewhere—“verbal poses.”
Contrast this narrative structure with that of Victorian prose. In Dickens’s
Bleak House, thoughts of others are rendered by direct speech in dialogue.
Characters are situated in time, even if this is only the virtual time of Chancery

11
 All quotations are from this edition, with page numbers given in the text in
parentheses.
106 Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover

(the novel opens at the end of the Michaelmas Term) and in a concrete place,
even if this is always a little grotesquely distorted (too dirty, too dark, too idyllic).
By contrast, the setting of Modernist texts is not an outer, social space, but an
inner space of perception. This is what Treplev meant when he outlined the poet-
ics of the “new drama,” which is emblematic of the poetics of Modernist writing.
Life in Modernist art and writing is represented as it is envisaged by our inner
eye, which is called “the gaze” in psychoanalytic theory and phenomenology.
To the Lighthouse is constructed by or as a giant gaze or by/as myriads of
gazes which are embedded in each other, in endless perspectival repetition—
en abîme. There is no “central” narrative perspective, no narrator to guide the
reader through the maze of imagined scenes, emotions, inner monologues,
and pictures evoked before him or her. The text is like a giant weave, which
generates itself, self-propagates, is fecund—like Mrs. Ramsay.
This self-propagation of the text is contrasted with the labors of the artist,
Lily Briscoe. She finds it difficult to extract meaning from her material—color
and paint—and labors to fashion her thought into form. She succeeds only at
the end of the novel, in part 3, at the same time when another story in the novel
is accomplished: the Oedipal rite of passage of James Ramsay, now 16 years of
age. Thus Lily Briscoe, who worships Mrs. Ramsay (whether this “love” is an
allusion to Virginia Woolf’s relationship with Vita Sackville-West is immate-
rial to the discussion) while refusing Mrs. Ramsay’s recipe for life (marriage),
realizes her own ”destiny” through “unity,” first with Mrs. Ramsay and then
with Mr. Ramsay, in part 3. The Ramsays and Lily are two sides of the same
coin or two parts of the same coin: the sumbolon—the coin of recognition in
Antiquity. They are the signifier and the signfied of the sign or symbol which
is the basic unit of meaning, of thought. When the two parts come together,
discourse or meaning is born. The entire novel To the Lighthouse is a struggle
for this birth of meaning: the tension in the novel is not based on any social
or psychological situation (although both social and psychological situations
abound as embedded allusions), the tension is based—in terms of plot—on
Lily Briscoe’s attempt to finish a painting. When she does so, in part 3, we,
the readers, have the novel as a complete message, open to a retrospective
interpretation. For we can only ever “read in reverse” in order to understand
a text. Interpretation is like a secondary revision in dreams. Dreams have a
manifest and a latent content. What we remember is the manifest content,
which is a kind of linear plot of the dream. Then we must elucidate the latent
meaning of this linear plot by going back over it, literally in “reverse genesis,”
to obtain something that means, something meaningful. This is the structure
of all interpretation of texts: it is a hermeneutic gesture which all texts require
of the reader. Modernist texts have this hermeneutic demand encoded in their
 Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse 107

poetics and their structure. This is what distinguishes them by and large from
pre-Modernist texts like those of the Victorian authors.
Since the emergence of European Modernism at the end of the 19th–begin-
ning of the 20th century, literature has shown a trend towards ever greater tau-
tologization of genres—novels become poetry and poetry in free verse comes to
resemble rhythmic prose—which rely on circularity of the narrative structure
in place of a linear progression of narrative. “Reality” is problematized in the
Modernist poetics (see René Magritte’s “The Lesson of Objects”—film and film
script), “it” is portrayed as a construct, or as given states of affairs which are
“inner states” of consciousness. The Modernist aesthetics is best summed up
in the lines of a poem by the Russian Symbolist poet Alexander Blok, in which
nothing happens except that the lyrical heroine is “looking” into the same
“space” and that the “snow is bluer”; even the verb “to be” in the portrayal
of these “states of being” is missing, thus making for an elliptical expression:

You are looking with the selfsame captive soul

Into the selfsame dome—of stars…
And you look in sadness,
And the snow more blue…

Ty smotrish’ vse toi zhe plennoi dushoi

V kupol vse tot zhe—zvezdnyi…
I smotrish’ v pechali,
I sneg sinei…

"Snezhnaia viaz’." From the Cycle: Snezhnaia maska, 1907.

Blok’s poetics is grounded in ellipses and evocation of states of affairs—

psychic states, or states of “presence of mind” (Magritte). Virginia Woolf
spoke of “moments of being” in her manifesto-type eponymously titled essays
(Moments of Being, published posthumously 1976). These “moments” are not in
“real” time but in psychic time. It is this new temporality which defines the
structure of To the Lighthouse.

Narrative Structure

Woolf’s novel is narrated in the third person, by an omniscient and anony-

mous consciousness, capable of adopting the point of view of any character
portrayed through its medium. Thus the narrative perspective shifts con-
stantly, from the six-year-old James Ramsay, to an impersonal camera’s eye, to
the fifty-year-old Mrs. Ramsay, mother of eight, and then again to the female
108 Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover

painter and spinster, Lily Briscoe, and so on. Every character in the novel is
allowed to step into the narrator’s shoes and become a “secondary,” “tertiary,”
“quaternary,” etc. narrator. This is achieved through the syntactic mode of
“free indirect discourse” (also know as erlebte Rede or recit indirect libre), which
is thus the main structural and stylistic dominant of the work.
Into this embedded narrative of the omniscient narrator, some of the char-
acters are assigned an embedded or double perspective of their own. Thus Mrs.
Ramsay has an internal monologue with her own thoughts while she is carry-
ing on a conversation or reading a story-book to her son—simultaneously. Lily
Briscoe analyzes her attitude to her interlocutors at the same time as her inter-
locutory (or mute, gestural) act is in process. This personal embedded narra-
tive, to which every character is potentially privy, endows each character with
a kind of doubling up upon his or her own mind, his or her self, until the reader
becomes an initiate not into the overt actions of the characters, which serve as
the mere skeleton or pretext, but into a rich and secret life above or below the
surface of phenomena: this is what French Surrealist Georges Bataille called
“inner experience.” This “inner experience” manifests itself as a kind of “giant
simultaneity”—a timeless time which is the time of the Unconscious.
The narrative takes place literally along a kind of interface, a fold, which
could be regarded as the space of consciousness (or the unconscious) itself.
This space is genderless. It is pure internality, or, speaking with Foucault (com-
pare his essay “Foucault on Blanchot”—the French Surrealist and younger
contemporary of Woolf [Foucault 1987]), externality, because inside/outside is
as difficult to establish in psychic space as in the paintings of de Chirico (com-
pare his Dummies or The Evil Genius of a King).
The concept of space preoccupies the artist Lily Briscoe. It is with a spatial
problem (the tree on her canvas) that she enters the narrative and it is with a
resolution of that spatial problem that she exits, ending the narrative in the
process. The tree in the painting, or its concrete substitute, the “salt cellar,”
which Lily puts down “on a flower in the pattern in the table-cloth” (93), is like
the totem of the narrative. It is a narrative curiously empty of desire as passion,
even if much loving and courting goes on. Lily’s life also seems to be empty,
filled with her “work” (93), but nothing else. Thus the problem of placing an
object—an object which resembles a totem or the Master Signifier—in space
appears to be the sole problem and the ultimate content of the narrative. Lily
is merely a function of that action. She has no existence of her own in the nar-
rative, other than as the “painter” who is not one, who moves the object (the
symbol) into its proper space. This is what constitutes the relational structure
of meaning (discourse): meaning is a spatial structure—it is “extensive”—and
the analogy between signs in language and objects in space brings this rela-
tion to expression. For as the Modernist philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
 Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse 109

says, “Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of affairs. This
space I can imagine empty, but I cannot imagine the thing without the space”
(Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, paragraph 2.0131).12 And objects “make up the
substance of the world” (Tractatus, parag. 2.021), primarily because “space,
time, and color (being colored) are forms of objects” (parag. 2.0251).
To The Lighthouse has as its central theme the problem of painting a picture
in time and of situating an object in that picture in space and color. It is not in
order to situate the woman, Lily Briscoe, into a typical sociohistorical situation
of women at the turn of the 20th century, although the “woman” as subject
also scintillates through the interstices of the representation of the object in
space. This woman is a spinster, a kind of hanger-on to someone else’s family,
an “outsider”—an ideal observer. She observes not just the “outside” but seems
to “paint” the “inner experience” of the main character—the Ramsay child,
who is seen as an adolescent in the second part of the novel (ten years later).
The slotting of the signifier (symbol) in its proper place coincides with the
reaching of the lighthouse by some of the characters, who at the beginning
of the novel seemed minor and insignificant. Thus, at the end, the narrative
raises James Ramsay, now 16, into the central character of the novel. It is his
successful resolution of the Oedipus complex which takes place “during” the
boat journey to the lighthouse and ends in a laconic pronouncement of praise
from Mr. Ramsay, which becomes the central event of the novel. For very little
else happens “on stage” of the plot—just like in the “new drama” of Chekhov.
The narrative is not about Lily Briscoe, the emancipated woman (although
she is also all of that), for Lily Briscoe is the narrative. Contrary to appear-
ances, Lily Briscoe, the unmarried woman, who has “her work,” is not the
antinomy to Mrs. Ramsay, the symbol of fecund, nurturing womanhood, who
does not think, who does not read books (except children’s stories), and who
appears in the archetypal, mythological pose of the knitting, weaving woman,
Homer’s Penelope or one of the three Moirai—Clotho, the Spinner (the Parcae
or the Fates). For Lily Briscoe encompasses both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay or is
positioned in a relational field, in which she subsumes both of them.
If we take Lacan’s model of knowledge and subjectivity, as he outlines it
in the seminar on A Love Letter (published 1973), then Lily is the object petit a
(object small autre), “the agency which brings to life,” “whose agency animates
what?—it animates nothing, it takes the other for its soul” (Lacan 1982, 153).
It is because of her role as the “object small other,” which Lacan defines
further as “the cause of desire,” that the plot portrays Lily as a “living being”
only within the precincts of the Ramsays’ holiday house on the Hebridean
Island. The house, which seems to live and breath with its inhabitants, truly

12
 All quotations are according to this edition and are given in paragraphs (parag.
plus numeral).
110 Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover

appears to have “a soul.” But the character who is the prime mover of all the
life of the soul is Mrs. Ramsay. It is as the ghost of the house that Mrs. Ramsay
is hallucinated by Lily Briscoe after she is no more, when Lily returns to the
island after ten years.
Neither Lily nor Mrs. Ramsay are historical, typical portraits of women in
the sense of the Lukacsian (Georg Lukacs) poetics of Realism—as mirrors of
“reality.” Both images are structured according to the laws of a different poet-
ics, namely the non-mimetic poetics of Modernism. Both women characters
represent not female types, but situation types, or, more accurately, states of
affairs. These states of affairs embody a static drama of consciousness, in which
the various characters are assigned roles corresponding to different agents of
consciousness. The totality of characters is thus the totality of consciousness.
The drama which is played out for the reader is not a historical drama.
The “historical” events, such as the deaths of the various characters, including
Mrs. Ramsay’s, are narrated as by the way, some even in explicit parentheses
(Prue Ramsay’s death in childbirth), while the actual historical event of the
century—World War I—is represented only obliquely and through equally
fragmentary allusions in parentheses (Andrew Ramsay being killed by a shell
in France.) This is in keeping with the poetics of the “new drama” in Chekhov’s
Seagull. This barest of linear scaffolding of the action gives the impression of
a progression in time. But the resumption of action after World War I turns
out to have telescoped some six years, so that, by the time some of the major
characters are reunited again on the island, “ten years” is said to have elapsed.
This time gap is filled only perfunctorily and in the vaguest outlines.

Memory as Structuring Principle

What this gap achieves, and the end it really serves, is that it distances Lily
Briscoe from her original “experience” of the island, and in particular, of Mrs.
Ramsay. For Lily’s second visit to the island, after ten years, is an internal
lament—a passionate desire, in fact—for the late Mrs. Ramsay, whose being
fills the old house and who is hallucinated back to life by Lily.
Lily’s first experience of “reality” on the island, ten years earlier, is por-
trayed mainly through her relationship to her picture, which is intertwined
with her somewhat ambivalent relationship to Mrs. Ramsay. Her subsequent
portrayal transforms/distills her experience into memory. That it is not Lily’s
private experience of memory, but that memory is posited as the experience of
discourse, is announced by the cleaning lady, Mrs. McNab—a double of the
Chekhovian nurse in Uncle Vanya, who is endowed with inner speech! Mrs.
McNab’s physical preparations of the house for the new guests are accompa-
nied by a dynamic stream of consciousness, evoking the past.
 Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse 111

Memory thus becomes not only the content, but the structuring principle
of the second half of the novel, in which Lily’s ruminations become the con-
trapuntal, sonorous stream of consciousness underpinning the linear plot of
the story.
Her experience is now no longer that of immediacy and self sufficiency,
as Mrs. Ramsay’s had been, but is filtered through a time lag and a sense of
loss. The obliquely and tersely related details of Lily’s life—that she did not
marry—are not historically important, but are of consequence to the structure.
Lily cannot marry, because then the novel would have another Mrs. Ramsay,
or Prue or Minta.
But Lily is the objet petit a, the agency which “brings to life” objects in
order to set off the process of meaning. It is Lily’s memory which symbolizes
the narrative of the novel as a whole and which in a way—albeit in a tautolog-
ical way—”co-authors” the narrative with the impersonal agency of the omni-
scient narrator, into whose consciousness Lily’s is embedded. It is in this sense
that Lily imparts life to the Object, symbolized by Mrs Ramsay, with the effect
that the Object is Life (Hegel 1977, 168.106).13 But as Life, Mrs Ramsay is also
a field of Force. This she is through duplication—through her husband—of
whom she perceives herself as an unimportant function. But in fact the exact
opposite is the case. Hegel defines Force as “the movement of perceiving”
(136.82), “in which the two sides, the percipient and what is perceived, are
indistinguishably one in the apprehension of the True” (136.82).
Together with Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay symbolises this movement. That
is why both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are so “truthful,” neither are capable of
telling a lie.
But not only is Mrs. Ramsay not the inferior, silent partner of the duo (she,
in fact, always gets her way!), she is Force itself. At first, she as Force appears
to express herself in that she responds to something “other,” which is “the
substance of the unfolded ‘matters’ outside of Force” (Hegel 1977, 137.83). This
“other” “approaches it and solicts it” (137.83). On the plot level, Mrs. Ramsay’s
entire existence seems to turn around her sympathetic response to her hus-
band—her being there for him.
But Force, according to Hegel, must be substance and must express itself.
So, “since its expression is necessary, what is posited as another essence [as the
‘other’ outside Force] is in Force itself” (1977, 137.83).
Mrs. Ramsay, while appearing to be the disadvantaged female in a conven-
tional and linear reading of the plot,14 is in fact—with her unceasing talk, her

13
 Quoted here by paragraph and page number.
14
 Gayatri Spivak discusses the structure of the two parts of the novel, linked
by a copula (“Time Passes”). Thus for Spivak, To the Lighthouse is made up of
112 Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover

inability to hold anything back, her drive to express herself—the “duplication

into two” which makes Force “actual” (Hegel 1977, 141.85). The second or sec-
ondary partner in this duo is thus not Mrs. Ramsay, but Mr. Ramsay, as the
“other,” who “solicits” Force (and he “solicits” Mrs. Ramsay’s and then, unsuc-
cessfully, Lily’s sympathy in part 3). Without Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay is just
a hoary old empty and mute signifier, on the way to being displaced by the
new Master Signifier, the son who is emerging victorious from his Oedipus
complex at the end of the narrative.
The field of actualized Force is symbolized in the narrative by “marriage.”
Hence there are fields (“marriages”) in which Force is actualized (“successful
marriages”) and fields which founder (“unsuccessful marriages”). While all
Force is or produces difference (Hegel 1977, 136.82), all differences are equiva-
lent to pure forms, which are in themselves “superficial vanishing moments”
(136.82). These are symbolized in the narrative by the theme of aging, as well
as by the alleged inadequacy of Mr. Ramsay’s academic career. But beyond
that, these “superficial vanishing moments” constitute Life (the life of the
characters and the passing of their lives), as well as the structure of the narra-
tive in its entirety. The narrative is thus one of these moments. This is brought
home in the last sentence of the text, in which Lily speaks the words: “I have
had my vision.”
In this “full stop” to the whole novel, Life is categorized, retrospectively
(for the whole narrative is memory—inscription or memory trace), as a “rev-
erie,” constituted by “appearances produced by consciousness itself—to fill
the complete void of the ‘inner world,’ which is the simple or unitary univer-
sal” (Hegel 1977, 146.88–89). This simple or unitary universal is represented by
Lily Briscoe, who is in-and-for-herself, who is unresponsive to a “soliciting”
Other (Mr. Ramsay), and who exists in a spatial void except when circum-
stances allow her to take the “other” for its soul!

s­ ubject-copula-predicate. This form of the novel gives it a sexual charge, as in copula-

tion. Although much of Spivak’s reading relies on a basic psychoanalytic framework,
she always returns to the concrete (historical) content and autobiographical paral-
lelism in her interpretation. Thus, for example, she treats the Ramsays as a concrete
married couple, whose conjugal non-communication is the copula that makes their
marriage a success. Spivak emphasizes “the feminine” and “the domestic” as the true
content of the novel and speaks of Lily as the center of production, with her artistic
creation as her “wombing.” Ultimately, Spivak’s is a Feminist reading which dichoto-
mizes the feminine and the masculine, as she speculates on the nature of womb envy
that men have of women (cf. Spivak 1980, 310–21).
 Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse 113

Some Inferences about Structuralism and Psychoanalysis

And so it is that through a structural reading of Virginia Woolf’s text we have

arrived at the source of all discourse: the movement of difference. The sub-
jects or characters in this novel are not material—they do not materialize. In
a sense, they are all absent subjects, whether they are portrayed in the form
of “man” or “woman.” The characters are there only as consciousnesses, not
as social types, although they are this as well between the lines. Yet “noth-
ing exists in essence” according to Hegel—but what exists is “always only
an instance—of Being.” Such an “instance of Being” is captured by Woolf’s
novel, which is structured like an atemporal “moment,” and constituted as the
ephemeral inscription of memory or a memory trace.

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