Introductory Remarks Yes, of course, if its fine tomorrow, said Mrs. Ramsay.

But youll have to be up with the lark, she added. This is how in a dramatic way the novel opens. Mrs. Ramsay talking to her six year old child, James, to inspire his young heart with hope and joy by assuring him that the expected expedition to the Lighthouse is bound to take place the next day. But, said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, it wont be fine. And this is how Mr. Ramsay, who is incapable of untruth, dashes all the hopes of this young and sensitive child to the ground. But still Mrs. Ramsay persists that the weather may be fine; she expects it to be fine. Thus in the very opening chapter of the book it becomes crystal clear to us that Mrs. Ramsay stands in sharp contrast with her husband. Mr. Ramsay with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgment can never tamper with a fact, can never think of altering a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure and convenience of any mortal being. So with his caustic saying he does not hesitate to shatter young James dreams. But Mrs. Ramsay with her profound sympathy and understanding for children remonstrates with her husband and would still suggest that it may be fine the next day. Though she feels that the trip may be cancelled, Mr. Ramsay and Tansley may be correct in their assessment, yet she would never like to dishearten the young child or hurt his feelings in any way. Mr. Ramsay is extremely annoyed; the irrationality of her remark enrages him. His rude and rough behaviour shakes her to the extreme. To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other peoples feelings, to vend the thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed, and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jugged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There was nothing to be said. Two Kinds of Truth In fact To The Lighthouse expresses two kinds of truth and Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay represent two different approaches to reality; James Halley has very nicely elucidated this point. According to him, To The Lighthouse is really the story of a contest between two kinds of truthMr. Ramsays and Mrs. Ramsays. For him truth is factual truth; for her truth is the movement towards truth: since truth is always being made, and never is made, the struggle for truth is the truth itself. The form of this novel at once expresses and verifies Mrs. Ramsays truth. According to Bergson, certainty can follow only from factual extension of knowledge resulting in scientific order; such is the order which Mr. Ramsay seeks. Mr. Ramsay specializes knowledge. If thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into as many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters, one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say the letter Q. He reached Q. . . .But after Q What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something.

Here is a logical, scientific procedure toward truth. Mrs. Ramsay, on the other hand, knows by intuition rather than by analysis, and is, therefore, able to know realitymobility, qualitative rather than quantitative diversity, time instead of space, movement itself and not merely the path of movement in space. So far Mrs. Ramsay feeling for others, consideration and sympathy are the eternal truthstruths that never perish like the scientific and matter-of-fact truth sought by Mr. Ramsay. Certainty of Intuition It must be noted that Mrs. Ramsays apparent illogicality is, in fact, the certainty of intuition. For Mr. Ramsay her truth is a false truth, but without it he cannot survive. She knew thenshe knew without having learnt. Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. Her singleness of mind made her drop plumb like a stone, alight exact as a bird, gave her, naturally, this swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth which delighted, eased, sustainedfalsely perhaps. May be falsely because her perception is yet to be proved correct. She has been seen only through a window and the reader has seen her concept of truth only through the window of her own room. And then she has identified her truth with the Lighthouse. She strongly feels that there is a coherence in things, a stability: something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripples of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby... Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that remains for ever after. So we find that whereas Mr. Ramsays Z glimmers red in the distance the something that Mrs. Ramsay feels to be stable shines like a ruby. We find that her way of meeting it is different from her husbands way hers being really an end, and his a means. This is confirmed by her feelings when she needs not think about anybody, when she can be herself, by herself. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always same exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke.... Ironically enough we find the phrasesomeone had blunderedrepeated seven times in the first part of this novel. One of them must be wrong; and the remainder of the novel clearly reveals to us that it is none but Mr. Ramsay who had blundered. Attitude toward the Sea and the Land Let us see how Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay think and feel about the sea and about the land. Mr. Ramsay identifies himself with the land and thinks the sea to be a destroyer. But Mrs. Ramsay like Lily Briscoe believes that life is the sea and not land. And hence Mrs. Ramsay felt.that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so still that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream, and chairs, tables, maps were hers, were theirs, it did not matter whose, and (they) would carry it on when she was dead. But Mr. Ramsay thinks of the dark of human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand on. Hence Mr. Ramsay is afraid that people will forget him, that all his work will be the victim of times despotic claim. But Mrs. Ramsay does not draw a line around her individuality, and so does not fear time. Need of Assurance and Sympathy

In spite of all his intellectual superiority and his secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgment, Mr. Ramsay is very badly in need of sympathy and assurance from his wife. James Hafleys comments on this point is quite illuminating: Mrs. Ramsays truth is one that must tramp upon her husbands however; but his truthfactual truth is so short lived that she can distort or deny it without compunction. He himself realises its frigidity; in a generation, he thinks, he will be forgot; even Shakespeare will some day to be forgot. It is for this reason that his wife is so essential to him; although he exaggerated her ignorance, her simplicity, for he liked to think that she was not cleaver, not booklearned at all, he nevertheless wanted to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his sense restored to him, his barrenness made fertile and all the rooms made full of life.... He must be assured that he too lived in the heart of life,...Therefore, he must from time to time leave off his metaphysical and return to his wife, to life itself for sympathy. Time Passes: Testing of Mrs. Ramsays Truth The outstanding critics have hailed the second part of this novel, Time Passes,as a masterpiece of description. According to a very eminent critic: it would be hard to find anything in twentieth century English prose to surpass (this part). But Time Passes must not be taken simply as a sublime piece of impressionistic writing. In fact it is actually the testing of Mrs. Ramsays vision by Mr. Ramsays facts, and the apparent triumph of those facts. In it we get the description of the effects of ten years time upon the little deserted house in a lofty poetic prose. Every thing is slowly gravitating towards death and decay, The books become mouldy, weeds have usurped the garden and mice have invaded the rooms. Even Mrs. Ramsays truth, symbolised by the shawl she had wrapped around a frightening skull in the childrens room, cannot but fall a victim to the facts and the awful skull emerges as if to mock at Mrs. Ramsays illusions. It seems there is no eternity, no permanence; only dust, decay and death stare us in the face. And to accentuate all this Mrs. Ramsay herself dies during this ten years interval. Andrew James is also killed in the war and Pine dies of childbirth. All these seem to proclaim that Mr. Ramsay is correct confirming his pessimism and proving Mrs. Ramsays optimism illustory. Ultimate Triumph of Mrs. Ramsays Illusions But there was a force working; something not highly conscious; something that leered, something that lurched..They came with their brooms and pails at last, they got to work. All of sudden would Mrs. McNab see that the house was ready, one of the young ladies wrote.. So after days of cleaning and scrubbing and scything some rusty, laborious birth seems to take place and the birth brings the house back to what it was and we find the Ramsays. Lily Briscoe and Mr. Carmichael back to the old summer house after a lapse of ten years. The long night is over. Thus in the last part of the novel it is clearly revealed to us-that in the long run it is Mrs. Ramsay who is right and not Mr. Ramsay. She dominates the novel even after her death. And her lies are proved to be the truth that can refute Mr. Ramsays facts. Time passes but true time can never pass. It is the apparition of Mrs. Ramsay at the same window that enables Lily Briscoe to complete her picture. And at the very same moment Mr. Ramsay lands at the Lighthouse with James and Cam at the successful end of their expedition undertaken in the memory of his departed wife. So Mrs. Ramsays illusions are proved to be the reality in the long run.

Conclusion Undoubtedly, with her personal charms, with her kindness and compassion, with her affection for children and with her intuition and illusions, Mrs. Ramsay as the central character of the novel stands head and shoulder above all others including Mr. Ramsay and dominates the novel even after his death. Even then we may not be little the personality of Mr. Ramsay. With all his eccentricities and passion for facts and conceit for his own accuracy of judgment, Mr. Ramsay is definitely an eminent intellectual of his time. With his habit of self-dramatisation and play-acting he is neither a comic figure nor the villain of the piece. And when we close the book we are convinced that in spite of all his gloom and desperation, his despotic attitude towards his children he is, without any doubt, a kind-hearted gentleman, a loving husband and a truly affectionate father.

Introductory Remarks Lily Briscoe may say or do little in the course of the novel, but still her role in To The Lighthouse is really very significant. The truth of this view is greatly justified when we realise that through her the novelist has tried to express her own views on the problems of artistic creation and artistic sensibility. In fact, through her personality, Virginia Woolf is diving deep into the complex process of artistic creation. Lily is out and out an artist and her lifes mission is painting. So great is her devotion to art that she prefers to remain single discarding the joys and pleasures of a family life. A true artist, as she is, believes that a brush is the only ally in this life full of fret and hurry and rough and tumble of our daily existence. Lilys Painful Experiences as An Artist We have already mentioned that great importance of Lilys character in To The Lighthouse lies in the fact that the novelist has tried to express her own reflections on art through the various experiences of this major character. Lily is a devoted paintera true artist. From the very beginning of the book it is clearly revealed that she is acutely aware of the frustration of trying to translate moments of intensity into worthwhile art, to capture in her painting the thing itself before it has been made anything, In the very first part we find her experiencing a lot of difficulties while busy in painting Mrs. Ramsay sitting with the child at the window of her summer-house, It was a tough job for her to give expression to her ideas and impressions on the canvas with the help of paint and brush, It was in that moments flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. But still she never wants to play at painting and is determined to surmount all odds to give aesthetic expression to her creative urge to her supreme satisfaction. She is no doubt a painter, but her comments on the impossibility of recording the most evanescent of moments are sometimes expressed in terms that seem more appropriate to the man of letters. Art requires complete concentration and concentration comes when the artist has purged herself or himself from the various contradictory pulls in her or his mind. Lily knows that art requires a placidity of mind when the artist can put her or his heart and soul into the work. And this is precisely the state of mind that Lily Briscoe is not able to achieve until late in the novel. Four Separate Moments of Vision and Fulfilment All artists have their moments of vision and inspiration to undertake and complete a work of art. An artist has also to surmount tremendous odds and difficulties before giving shape to his or her dreams. And it takes four separate moments of inspiration over a period of many years for Lily to finish her picture. The first seems to have occurred before the action of the novel starts and is remembered as that vision which she had seen clearly once and now must grope for among hedges and houses and mothers and childrenher picture. While visiting the Ramsays during the first part of the book she is working on a view of their house, and at dinner in the evening she has had her second inspiration : In a flash she saw her picture, and thought, yes I shall put the tree further in the middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space. The full significance of this moment is not revealed until much later,

when we also learn that it had flashed upon her that she would move the tree to the middle, and never need marry anybody. But before Lily can carry out her intention everyone leaves the Ramsays summer house. Then Mrs. Ramsay died and Lily loses track of her picture, and ten years roll away. Lilys Third Vision After a lapse of ten years Mr. Ramsay quite unexpectedly comes back to their old summer house and invites the guests to visit the place once again. Lily is also there again. When she confronts the same scene she had been painting, Lily has her third moment of vision or inspiration when she recalls the previous one Suddenly she remembered, when she sat there last ten years ago there had been a little sprig or leaf pattern on the table cloth, which she had looked at a moment of revelation..She would paint that picture now. After some initial difficulty she carries on with her creative activity all the morning and by the moment Mr. Ramsay lands at the Lighthouse her new painting is almost complete. Fourth Vision Lily is then seen to pause a bit while she seems to share with Mr. Carmichael the same thoughts about Mr. Ramsay and what he has done, when, quickly, as it she were recalled by something over there, she turns to her canvas and takes up her brush. There it washer picture. She then looks at the steps of the house where she had earlier felt she could see an image of Mrs. Ramsay but they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there in the centre. It was done, it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. And with these words, which end the novel, it appears that Lilys dreams of capturing her fleeting inspiration and making of the moment something permanent are at last realised. Need of Complete Concentration Lilys delay and difficulties in realising her vision shows that she is really going through the pangs of creation. Art requires complete concentration, and concentration comes when the artist has purged herself or himself from the various contradictory pulls in her or his mind. In fact art requires a placidity of mind when the artist can put her or his heart and soul into the work. This is precisely the state of mind that Lily Briscoe is not able to achieve until late in the novel. She was not getting her picture right at all. She could not bring on the canvas what she vaguely thought and wanted to paint. In a way she was not very sure what she wanted to make of her picture. She was getting a whole host of hazy notions which she was unable to grasp and tame on her canvas. There was the problem of filling in one empty space on the canvas. She was afraid that if she carried out the proposed changes, the unity of the work might be destroyed. Seclusion and Isolation This also must have to be accepted that an artist has to work amidst people, amidst the ordinary commerce of life, however much one might yearn for seclusion, one has to live the life around. And a pertinent question to ask here is whether art created in isolation from the squalor and dirt of life, its joys and its sorrows, its pains and its failures, and the hopes and the aspirations of the people aroundcan such an art in isolation from these things be a truly authentic art? Is art the solitary contemplation of the artist or is it a reflection of life? The idea that art is purely the solitary contemplation

of the artist is absolutely erroneous. Such an art is bound to be pale and weak, subjective and eccentric. The life-blood of art is provided by the life actually led by the people and the artist must reflect the progressive urges of his times. Such an artist will be less likely to face frustrations and heart-breaks, which a painter like Lily has often to experience. To Identify with People around and Sympathise A true artist should be motivated not only by the genuine creative urges but by a cause greater than himself or herself. In the later part of the novel Lily Briscoe gathers up all her energies and makes up her mind to complete the picture. But it is only after she is able to sympathise with Mr. Ramsay after he has left for the lighthouse that the deadlock in Lily Briscoes painting is broken. Onset of the feelings of love and sympathy releases her creative parts. With a curious physical sensation, she makes her first decisive stroke. The brush descends on the canvas a second time and then a third. Pausing and flickering, she attains a rhythmical movement, as if the pauses were one part of the movement and strokes another. And all were related. So appeared the lines on the canvas that enclosed the nasty vacant spot. Thus we also get an idea of the artist at work as Lily paints. She loses consciousness of the world around being completely lost in her picture. And as she lost consciousness of everything around, her mind kept throwing up from its depth scenes, names, sayings, memories, and ideas like a fountain. Conclusion Lily Briscoe is by no means the main character in To The Lighthouse, but she has more moments of vision than any other figure in this novel. She is acutely aware of the frustration of trying to translate moments of intensity into worthwhile art, to capture in her painting the thing itself before it has been made anything. Art, whether it be poetry or painting, brings forth the life-blood of the artist. And it is hardly possible to know from the finished product the travails and tribulations, the frustrations and hardships that the artist has gone through in his attempt to bring the work to fruition. And finally it may be stated with assertion that Virginia Woolf has endeavoured to express through Lily Briscoe her views on the problems of creative activity, artistic sensibility and the relationship that exists between art and life.

Introductory Remarks Mrs. Ramsay, one of the finest creations of Virginia Woolf, is without the least shade of doubt the central figure around which action and movement in To The Lighthouse is built. She is definitely radiating through the entire novel and impregnating all the other characters, major or minor. From the very beginning of the novel, structurally or psychologically, she is the cohesive force and the source of unity in it. In fact the first part of the novel is completely dominated by the towering personality of this great lady. It is none but Mrs. Ramsay who holds together almost all the divergent characters and the various incidents of the novel. All the characters of the novel have gathered at the summer house of the Ramsays in the Isle of Skye. All have their own inhibitions and idiosyncracies and hence are incapable of establishing a rapport with one another. So she has to provide a cohesive force to bring the scattered stones together and to carve out a unified structure. Mrs. Ramsay: the Opening Scene In the very opening scene of the novel the focus is in on Mrs. Ramsay. She serves as the model for Lily Briscoe as is found sitting at the window that links the lawn with the interior. People come and people may go, but Mrs. Ramsays part is like that of a milestone in movement of various characters. Mr. Ramsay and Charles Tansley are first to come to Mrs. Ramsay. And Mrs. Ramsays impressions about them, as revealed in her stream of consciousness, fill out the scene for the readers. Then Mr. Bankes and Lily Briscoe come within the range of her vision. So Mrs. Ramsay becomes the centre around which all seem to be moving. A large variety of people with all their ideas and idiosynoracies take part in this novel. And the most remarkable thing is that Mrs. Ramsay with her great tact, sympathy and understanding holds them all together. The Dinner Party: Mrs. Ramsays Unifying Force Mrs. Ramsays great role as a unifying and cohesive force is superbly revealed to us at the dinner party that forms the climax of the first movement of To The Lighthouse. In this sense she performs very creditably her duty of connecting the different individuals. And for this she has also to engage herself with some of them. Lily and Charles Tansley are at opposite poles. Her look falls on Tansley and she strongly feels : Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if she did not do it nobody would do it,... Hence we find Mrs. Ramsay, simply by a look, compelling Lily to be considerate to Tansley. Thus she tactfully intervenes and Tansley is brought out of his isolation. He gets the required attention to make him feel at ease. Next Mr. Carmichael is also brought out of himself by the beauty of that yellow and purple dish of fruit placed on the middle of the table. Even old Mr. Bankes, who thinks it to be a terrible waste of time to attend such dinners, feels elated and reconciled after hearing from her that he has just relished a French recipe of her grandmothers. Thus it is clearly revealed to us that the whole effort of the merging and flowing and creating rested on her. Mrs. Ramsays Warmth and Compassion An emblem of Mrs. Ramsays compassion or power to heal is the nurse carrying a light across a dark room assuring a cross or fractious child; the light here stands for

what Mrs. Ramsay has it in her power to give to others. A similar kind of emblem is used by Mrs. Ramsay herself in her reflection on her own beauty and ability to succeed with people: She bore about with her, she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty. The light here is that quality to attract people which people respond to, and through which they find access to her compassion. The warmth and brightness of Mrs. Ramsays light creates the circle of life into which she can take her husband and make him secure. It fills the house too as she created drawing-room and kitchen, set them all aglow. It is responsible too for the almost golden world of the Ramsay children, or of the childhood which she fosters and cherishes. So she creates a sun-filled world, though it has its shadows. And in her world she wants men and women to be united and become fruitful like herself. She offers her protection to all. At the intellectual level she offers her protection and inspiration to both science and artto Lily Briscoe the painter, to Bankes the botanist, to Carmichael the poet, to Tansley the scholar and above all to her husband the philosopher. Thus she seems to have the whole of the other sex under her protection. For all this some critics suggest that Mrs. Ramsay may rather be taken as a symbol of the female principle in life. Two Kinds of Truth and Mrs. Ramsay James Hafley has rightly remarked: To The Lighthouse is really the story of a contest between two kinds of truthMr. Ramsays and Mrs. Ramsays. For him truth is factual truth; for her truth is the movement towards truth; since truth is always being made, and never is made, the struggle for truth is the truth itself. The form of this novel at once expresses and verifies Mrs. Ramsays truth. According to Bergson, certainty can follow only from factual extension of knowledge resulting in scientific order, such is the order which Mr. Ramsay sees. So it is evident that Mr. Ramsays is a logical scientific procedure toward truth. Mrs. Ramsay, on the other hand, knows by intuition rather than analysis and is, therefore, able to know reality-mobility, qualitative rather than quantitative diversity, time instead of space, movement itself and not merely the path of movement in space. This shows that Mrs. Ramsay knows that feeling for others consideration and sympathy, are the eternal truths which never perish like the scientific and matter of fact truth which her husband seeks. That is why we find that ultimately Mr. Ramsays truthfactual truthis short-lived and Mrs. Ramsays truth, which is the movement towards truth, prevails in the long run, in fact the second and final movement of To The Lighthouse clearly establishes that it is none but Mr. Ramsay had blundered and Mrs. Ramsays intuition inspite of its apparent illogicality has triumphed. Time Passes: Testing of Mrs. Ramsays Truth Time Passes, the second part of the novel, has been hailed as a masterpiece of description, probably unsurpassed in twentieth century English prose. But, in fact it is actually the testing of Mrs. Ramsays vision by Mr. Ramsays facts, and the apparent triumph of those facts, During the ten years time everything seems to be slowly gravitating towards inevitable doom and destruction. But there was a force working; something not highly conscious; something that leered, something that lurched..They come with their brooms and pails at last, they get to work. And slowly some rusty laborious birth seems to take place. And the birth brings the house back to what it was and we find the Ramsays, Lily Briscoe and Mr. Carmichael back to the old summer-

house after a lapse of ten years. The long night is over. And though she is no more in the land of the living, it reveals the ultimate triumph of Mrs. Ramsays illusions. Dominates even after Death The dominating personality and the imposing physical presence of Mrs. Ramsay is felt by us only in the first part of To The Lighthouse. In the second part all of a sudden we find: Mr. Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning, but, Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his arms out, they remained empty. Even then she pervades the whole book. Her influence on the important characters, specially on Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay, is really very significant. In the final movement of the novel Mrs. Ramsay is constantly presented through Lily Briscoes consciousness, and her full significance as a uniting force is clearly revealed. It is the apparition of this great lady, at the same window in the same summer-house, that enables Lily Briscoe to complete her picture after a lapse of ten years. And at the very same moment Mr. Ramsay, who under-took the journey to the lighthouse with Cam and James to fulfil one of Mrs. Ramsays cherished wishes, lands at his destination. This shows how Mrs. Ramsay dead is more powerful than Mr. Ramsay living. Conclusion So in the last part of the novel it is clearly revealed to us that it is Mrs. Ramsay who is right and not Mr. Ramsay. And her lies are proved to be the truth that can refute Mr. Ramsays facts. Mrs. Ramsays feeling for others, consideration and sympathy are the eternal truths truths that never perish like the scientific and matter-of-fact truth sought by Mr. Ramsay. .

Introductory Virginia Woolfs early novels were written in conventional chapters and the others either continuously- or without any break or in sections marked by a gap or a number as, within the parts, To The Lighthouse is. And To The Lighthouse happens to be the only novel of Mrs. Woolf which has a three-fold division. It is divided into three separate parts, each of which has been given a title: The Window, Time Passes and The Lighthouse. In the first part, The Window, we find Mrs. Ramsay planning a trip to the Lighthouse situated near-by their small island the next day for James, her youngest child who is so much eager for this expedition. But Mr. Ramsay with some secret conceit of his own accuracy of judgement and Mr. Tansley with his odious habit of saying disagreeable things dash the young childs hope to the ground. They tell bluntly that the weather is not likely to be good enough for the trip. And the journey is not made. In this section we also get, more or less, a full and varied view of the personality and character of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay through the eyes of Lily Briscoe, William Bankes, young James and the guests assembled in that summer-house in the Island of Skye in the Hebrides. Time Passes The second movement, Time Passes, is rather a short interlude that makes up part two. In this section we find memory beginning its task and this is very powerfully operative in the mind of old Mrs. McNab the charwoman. A period of ten years elapses. During this period the empty summer-house becomes a prey to ruin and decay. The actors of the piece grow in age and some of them, including Mrs. Ramsay, pass away from the stage of this world. The Lighthouse In the final movement we find people back to the old summer-house once again. Late Mrs. Ramsay is seen very powerfully and mysteriously through the eyes of Lily Briscoe. She is very much alive in the stream of consciousness of Lily and seems to influence the lives of other members more powerfully even after her death. And in the end we find Mr. Rarnsay landing at the lighthouse rock with Cam and James and Lily having her vision to complete the picture. Plan of Triple Arrangement Mrs. Woolfs diary reveals that the triple arrangement was in her mind almost from the first idea she had of the book. She has mentioned it there as father and mother and child in the garden, the death, the sailing to the Lighthouse. And she has further mentioned: I conceive the book in three parts: I. At the drawing room window; 2. Seven years passed 3. The voyage. Autobiographical Basis In fact this tripartite arrangement had is origin in one of Mrs. Woolfs characteristic trains of thought. The Pattern can be seen as a reflection of her own life. She had to experience periods of intense and exciting creative activity, followed by agonising depression after finishing a novel, and from this depression she could gradually recover with the help of rest and the attentions of her husband. So, in To The Lighthouse this pattern seemed particularly meaningful to Virginia Woolf, because of the personal

nature of the sources of her novel. It seems she turns into fiction her own attempts to come to terms with her obsession with the past and her father and mother, making an attempt both to see everything in perspective and also to represent it in art. Thus we find her doing this in the figure of Lily, who to some extent must reflect her own character, and whose vision at the end of the book embraces both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay: Mrs. Ramsay is manifested in the shadow at the window which brings the picture into harmony, and Mr. Ramsays arrival at the Lighthouse completes an adventure with which Lily has entered into imaginative sympathy. Relation of the Three Parts But we hardly require such autobiographical knowledge to understand the relationship of the parts of this novel. Lilys final vision has its full meaning in terms of the life of the Ramsays which has been presented to us in the book. In fact the symbolic movement has weight because of the cumulative effect of the three sections. So in The Window we see people going about their daily life, responding directly to the people and scenes around them, and also reflecting upon their quality. In Time Passes we find the novelist stepping back from the circle of activity until it seems a mere speck in the perspective of eternity. Ultimately in The Lighthouse we are brought back to mixture of action and reflection. Sense of Completeness At the end of the final movement of To The Lighthouse we find Lily and Carmichael, the painter and the poet, sitting on the lawn of the same old summer-house and absorbed in silent communication between the house and the sea. Lily turns from one to the other sending her thoughts back to Mrs. Ramsay as she looks at the house and outwards to Mr. Ramsay as she follows the course of the boat. Commenting on this Davenport has aptly remarked She thus forms a tenuous thread between past and present, between husband and wife, by recreation of past experience and of the spirit of Mrs. Ramsay, and the imaginative involvement with Mr Ramsays symbolic voyage, she unites the two in her mind, and so achieves her sense of completeness, of having seen it clearly, if only for a moment. The two actions, the arrival at the Lighthouse and the last stroke of the brush, are also united; both are acts of completion and it is obvious that they are meant to happen together. Conclusion: The Musical Analogy It may be noted that the ternary form, where the third section returns to the first is a basic form in music and as such may have had a rhythmic appropriateness of Virginia Woolfs ideal of her novel enclosing her subject, or forming a circle. And, in fact, she said of To The Lighthouse in her diary I feel as if it fetched its circle . pretty completely this time.

Introductory Remarks We have in To The Lighthouse a galaxy of fictional characters whose earnest endeavour is to establish, with varying degrees of success, happy and healthy relationship with the people around them. Accepting this as its main theme the novel may justly be called a study of the ways and means by which satisfactory human relationship might be established with the people around them. This is because human beings seemed to Mrs. Woolf isolated and communication between them partial and often far from satisfactory. Words are Inadequate In human society words are the main sources of communication between one person and another. Unfortunately words are very often inadequate for the purpose. And hence this is one of the main reasons for the failure to establish healthy and satisfactory human relationships. The difficulty is that very often words cannot express the full complexity of a characters thoughts and feelings. Then again what the words express is only a fraction of what a character thinks and feels, and as a result they become misleading. These aspects of verbal inadequacy were quite evident to Mrs. Woolf. And many of her characters reveal this inadequacy in a distinct manner. Lily feels this strongly as in the third part of the novel she is seen standing near to Carmichael on the lawn and trying to explain Mrs. Ramsay: And she wanted to say not one thing, but every thing. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it, said nothing. About life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsayno she thought one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed the mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches to low. Then one gave it up; For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? Silence is More Eloquent Very often it is found that silence is more expressive and eloquent than words. And Lily realises it fully. She feels in greater communication with Carmichael than if they had spoken. There sitting on the lawn in perfect silence they seem to understand each other perfectly well without exchanging even a single word. And in the final chapter of the novel Lily justly feels: They had not needed to speak. They had been thinking the same thing and he had answered her without, her asking him anything. Thus it is revealed to us that silence is often more expressive and more eloquent than words words that fall to express these emotions of the body, and leads to the establishment of happy human relationships. The Trival and its Importance In the novel we also find that how things trivial or of very little importance are greatly helpful in establishing congenial human relationships. In the beginning of the third or final movement of the book we find Mr. Ramsay the widower coming to Lily demanding sympathy. She really feels very helpless and words fail her in the beginning. Suddenly his boots catch her eyes and she praises his boots. This brings great relief and

Mr. Ramsay feels satisfied. Apparently Lilys remarks may seem silly or comic. But Mr. Ramsay smiled. His pall, his draperies, his infirmities fell from him. Thus it helped to establish perfect sympathy and understanding between Lily and Mr. Ramsay and Lily felt her eyes swell and tingle with tears. Need of Sympathy and Understanding Congenial and satisfactory human relationships are essential for happiness in our life. Logic, reason and intellect are of very little help to us for this purpose. It is through the emotions we can establish such relationships. Emotional understanding and a genuine sympathetic attitude are greatly needed for satisfactory relationships even between parents and children, and husband and wife. And in the very first scene of the novel we find how far the lack of these mental aspects Mr. Ramsay becomes an intolerable tyrant or a sarcastic brute in the eyes of his children. He tells James the dire truth it wont be finewithout caring a bit for a young childs dreams and desires. And James feels like gashing a hole in his fathers breast to kill him there and then. But Mrs. Ramsay with her loving soul and sympathetic understanding wins the heart of the children and is tremendously loved and admired by her children. She undoubtedly soothes them by telling them that the weather might change for the better. But it is only to make the world a better and happier place. Mrs. Ramsays great Role Virginia Woolf shows us in many ways that Mrs. Ramsay plays a very significant part in To The Lighthouse to establish communication between people. This is first revealed in her genuine attempts to get Paul and Minta as well as Lily and Mr. Bankes married. And it is shown very nicely and convincingly at the dinner party where she makes the most sincere effort to get people talking, to involve them and so to create something of the time they are together. In fact, almost throughout the novel we find the movements of characters towards one another from the state of isolation in which each one of us is trapped by his own sense of inadequacy or his private worries. In this respect Tansley is a very good example. His is the picture of a man who is sensitive with his feelings of social inferiority. He is poor and unattractive. That is why he wants to assert himself in a rude and rough manner. He repels and displeases almost all except Mr. Ramsay. Mrs. Ramsays ideas and feelings about him vary, but she is pictured as the rare person who can make others show their best side, and she draws from him simple and selfless behaviour and feeling, which are just as much part of her personality as rudeness. And this is nicely revealed when they are found walking together in the very opening scene of the novel. Then again in the dinner scene we find how Mrs. Ramsay prevails on Lily to help Tansley out of a very odd and unhappy situation. At the dinner party he is desperately trying to assert himself, to make an impression on the conversation without very little success. And this irritates him more and more. To Lily he is already repulsive and she wont help him in any way in the beginning. But when Mrs. Ramsay with her good sense and sympathetic understanding silently implores Lilys help in making the party comfortable, she accomplishes her task in rehabilitating the preverted person. And Tansley takes this opportunity and begins to blossom forth in talk; his egotism is now satisfied and he is able to shine in the company of the guests. So it is revealed to us that due to tact and good sense of Mrs. Ramsay satisfactory relationship between Tansley and others at the table is thus established and the party becomes a real success. This

happens in spite of the fact that there is a note of pretence and falsehood even in Lilys second invitation to Tansley to accompany her to the Lighthouse. But this may be justified as the necessities of polite social relationships demanded it. . Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay: Their Relationship There is a note of pretence and falsehood even in the husband-wife relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. Mrs. Ramsay cannot but praise Mr. Ramsay to his face just to booster up his confidence in a way she feels should not be necessary. He is in constant need of being reassured. His fear of failure, his resentment that he has achieved less than he should have and that his books will not last, pervert his judgement, leading him to see in praise of other mens works disparagement of himself. This undoubtedly puts a strain on his wife and she has to conceal things for him. Again on Mr. Ramsays, side too there is some sort of reserve. Mrs. Ramsays pessimistic conviction of the misery of life distresses him, and then he is unable to communicate with her in her moods of sadness. It saddened him and her remoteness pained him..He could do nothing to her. He must stand by and watch her. Indeed, the infernal truth was, he made things worse for her. But on the other hand, his dependence on Mrs. Ramsay and her respect and reverence for him balance these areas of difference between them. The first movement of the novel The Window, traces the pattern of their relationship very skilfully from one extreme to another. In the very first scene we find them at their farthest apart when their disagreement about going to the Lighthouse brings out their difference quite sharply in their attitudes to life. Mr. Ramsay is upset, is rather infuriated. The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of womens minds enraged him..and now she flew in the face of facts, made her children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies. Mrs. Ramsays Attitude: Final Reconciliation Mrs. Ramsay is also upset in her own way. With her loving heart and sympathetic bent of mind she wants to make people happy in this world and longs for protecting her children from losing the contented innocence of childhood. Hence her husbands irrational and stern attitude seems to her equally repugnant, to pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other peoples feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency. But very soon after this incident they begin to come together again. It starts with Mrs. Ramsays apology. And after this we find that the remaining sections of The Window move towards the moment at the end, when the firm asperity of the masculine mind, which she admires in him, curbs her gloomy thoughts and she is able, though indirectly, to assure him of her love. And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she has not said a word, he knew, of course that she loved him. Conclusion We may now rightly assert that To The Lighthouse very reveals a close study of the ways and means by which satisfactory and congenial human relationships might be established. And Mrs. Ramsay, who is the centre around which action and movement are built, plays the most significant role as a force by holding together almost all the characters and incidents of this great novel.

ntroductory Remarks In To The Lighthouse we find that Mrs. Ramsay opens the novel and Lily Briscoe closes it, as the stuff of life may be converted, through a particular medium, to a work of art. So, if life and art are viewed as polar opposites in To The Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe may be regarded as their respective exponents. And in our first view of Mrs. Ramsay she is already the subject of Lilys painting. The main reason for Mrs. Ramsay becoming the chief character of the novel is that as personification or as abstraction, life is longer than art. Probably, that is why Part I, in which life dominates, is almost twice the length of Part III, in which art is the focal centre. Art Needs Life to Nourish It It cannot be disputed that art can be nourished only in life. But whereas art needs life to nourish it, life is often unaware of the power of art to give it permanence. Thus, although Lily the painter is in love with Mrs. Ramsay and, we may add, with all her family and their diverse doings, she cannot take Lilys painting seriously. Thus, too, Mrs. Ramsays quite literal short-sightedness is played against Lilys vision. To Lily it seems ironic that Mrs. Ramsay presided with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand; Mrs. Woolf wants to suggest that life may be its own worst enemy, even as the artist may rebel against arts strict exigencies. Although it is only momentary, Mrs. Ramsay felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life. And Lily is drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people into the presence of the formidable ancient enemy of her....this form....roused one to perpetual combat. Mrs. Ramsay and Lily It may be noted that the two women are not monolythic symbols, but reveal vivid personalities behind their major meaning. Hence it is not artistic Lily but living Mrs. Ramsay, who is endowed with rare beauty. But both women have a slightly exotic qualityLily her Chinese eyes, and Mrs. Ramsay, a Hellenic face. And both women dress soberly in grey. Inspite of her easy, direct spontaneity, we never become familiar enough with Mrs. Ramsay to learn her first name. On the other hand, Mrs. Ramsay calls Lily by her Christian name, suggesting the pure virgin which by Part III, when she is forty four becomes a skimpy old maid holding a paintbrush. These humanizing details root the character to a literal ground, so that they never become figures of allegory, but rather magnetic poles for particular lines of force. Mrs. Ramsay Dominates Part I Completely In Part I we find that Mrs. Ramsay who is at the heart of all the busy, indiscriminate activities of her large family and her too numerous summer guests. With her masterfulness, her positiveness, something matter-of-fact in her enables her to manage superbly other peoples lives, from trivial to important aspect. On the other hand, Lily can barely manage to manipulate her paint brushes, and shrinks from anything strange on her canvas. And then by Part III Lily has become aware of a fundamental difference between herself and Mrs. Ramsay. Mrs. Ramsay might fall occasionally into meditation but she disliked anything that reminded her that she had been seen sitting thinking. But both in Lily the painter and Mr. Carmichael the poet there was some notion about the ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought.

Efforts to Render Her Actions Effective We find Mrs. Ramsay bending all efforts to render her actions effective. The most important of them is her endeavour to supply emotional sustenance for her husband and children and it is found that when she dies they are left in a chaotic confusion. This is clearly revealed in the opening of Part III. This is how Lily felt after coming back to that old summer-house after so many years: She had come last night when it was all mysterious, dark. Now she was awake..There was this expeditionthey were going to the Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James. They should have gone already-they had to catch the tide or something. And Cam was not ready and, James was not ready and Nancy had forgotten to order the sandwiches and Mr. Ramsay had lost his temper and banged out of the room. Mrs. Ramsay is a very ardent match-maker and she also feel protective towards the whole male sex. She is also eager to help the poor and the sick. And then she is found striving earnestly for the unity and integrity of social scenes such as her dinner party. Lily Briscoe also acknowledges Mrs. Ramsays manipulation of life. But, ironically, Mrs. Ramsay is seen making while Lily merely tried. But unfortunately Mrs. Ramsays efforts are doomed from the start; life cannot stand still; time must pass. It is only in another sphere can moments be given permanence. And the notable difference between the two is that Mrs. Ramsay has the rare beauty of ordering a scene so that it is, like a work of art, but it is Lily who creates a concrete work of art. Lily and Her Art From our first view of Lily in the first part of the novel, standing on the edge of the lawn painting to the significant final view, Yes, she thought laying down, her brush in extreme fatigue. I have had my vision-the insistence is upon her art. From the very beginning, inspite of all her doubts and diffidence, she is found painting with stubborn intergrity to her vision, in the bright colours which Mr. Pauncefortes pastels have rendered unfashionable. It is the resolution to move her tree to the centre of the canvas that sustains her through the dinner party, protects her against Charles Tansleys pronouncement that women cannot paint or write. And by Part III we find that Lilys paint brush has become for her the one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos and she seems more sure of her technique: the lines are nervous, but her brushstrokes are decisive. It is she who imagines the artistic creeds of Carmichael how you and I and she pass, and vanish; nothing stays all changes; but not words not paint. Yet even then, even to the final brush-stroke that brings the novel to a close, she continues to be haunted by the problematical and shifting relationship of art and life. Part III: Art and Life This relation of art to life has been most beautifully treated in Part III of the novel. The structure of this section is based upon the shuttling back and forth between Lily on the island and those in the boat watching the island, who in turn get further away. This is accompanied by the corresponding movement of those in the boat getting closer to the Lighthouse and Lily, getting closer to the solution of her aesthetic problem. And the determining factor of each is love (the art of life), which might perhaps be defined as order or the achievement of form in human relations through the surrender of personality. Lily finishes her painting as she feels that sympathy for Mr. Ramsay which she had previously refused to give. James and Cam give up their long-standing

antagonism towards their father. Mr. Ramsay himself, at the same time, attains a resolution of his own tensions and worries. Hence the two actions, the arrival at the lighthouse and the last stroke of the push are also united; both are acts of completion and it is obvious that they are meant to happen together.

Introductory Remarks To The Lighthouse shows Virginia Woolfs lyricism in a most enchanting manner and Time Passes, the second movement of the novel, superbly reveals her lyricism. Part II covers a span of ten years and is made of ten sections. The first section begins with the most unconventional and uncommunicative passage in the whole novel. But the comments from Mr. Bankes and Andrew, such as well, we must wait for the future to show and Its almost too dark to see introduce the two main themes of Part II, the theme of darkness, and the accompanying theme of waiting or hoping for a return of the light. Elegy on Darkness and Anguish of Human Life Section I concludes with the literal fact that all the lights of the house are put out. And section 2 begins with a lyrical mood: So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a down-pouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Sections 1 to 6 of this part, which together create an elegy on the darkness and anguish of life, conveying poignantly the pain of death and the horror of war, are written with an imaginative or poetic intensity. The tragic facts of transience and death have been depicted with a remarkable poignancy of appeal, but it may also be noted that they have been set against the antithesis of human energies or aspirations. Man is to Create a Nobler World Man should never be driven to a conclusion of despair by the cruel and unavoidable facts of nature. The weight of the novels aspirations have not been rested upon nature. The point is rather that, since the desired human order has no sanction or support in the external world, the responsibility for creating and sustaining it is thrown back upon man himself, and his nobler powers are summoned to action. And that had been Mrs. Ramsays responsea more determined effort to promote human relationships and individual fulfilment. But her efforts had seemed to be brought to nothing by her death. But in Part III, The Lighthouse, this appearance is refuted by an intensive demonstration of her persisting power. What she had achieved in her life continues to fructify in the lives of her children, and in the mind and art of Lily Briscoe. The latter especially complements and continues Mrs. Ramsay achievements, in the other sphere of art, and, under her inspiration, reaches towards the complete vision she had sought. Demands of Ordinary and Actual Experience It is found in the early sections of Part III that Lilys inadequacies in ordinary human relationship are markedly contrasted with Mrs. Ramsays gifts. But then, in her complementary activities, she is shown doing almost exactly what Mrs. Ramsay had done in Part I. As Lily begins her picture she exchanges the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting; and her pursuit of this other thing, this truth this reality at the back of appearances, while, it parallels Mrs Ramsays, is equally counteracted by the

insistent demands of ordinary and actual experience. For the most part we find her engaged in recalling and celebrating Mrs. Ramsay; and her thinking about her amounts to a accompany of her life, which brings a clear understanding of her achievements. But what emerges most clearly is that Mrs. Ramsay is not simply the object of her contemplation, but is in the fuller sense her inspiration. And the force of her inspiration for Lilys vision is what her active influences had been in life. This is how Lily recalls Mrs. Ramsay who is no more in the land of the living. That woman sitting there, writing under the rock resolved everything into simplicity; made these angers, irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together this and that and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness, and spite (she and Charles squabbling, sparring had been silly and spiteful) somethingthis scene on the beach for example, this moment of friendship and liking-which survived, after all these years, complete, so that she dipped into it to refashion her memory of him, and it stayed in the mind almost like a work of art. So, what Mrs. Ramsay had been in her life provides an answer then to Lilys questioning of life, and reveals how a human order may be established within the flux of nature. Harmonising the Opposed Masses Thus, ultimately we find that the key to the conclusion is the final stroke of Lilys painting, a line drawn in the centre, which relates and harmonises the opposed masses. The line suggests the Lighthouse which Mr. Ramsay has just reached, and which, as its title implies, the whole novel has been approaching. The Lighthouse, as the analogy of the line implies, has become the object in relation to which Mr. and Mrs. Ramsays opposed views of reality have been comprehended and related. The Exaltation of Inner Reality Over the Outer Still, at the end, as throughout the novel, there remains both the persistent division between the inner and external realities, and the exaltation of the former over the latter. But the conclusion is something less than a resolusion in the full sense. It is a relationship established almost entirely from the point of view of the intuitive imagination, and on the terms most to its advantage. It is symptomatic that the longer first and final parts of the novel are given over to the workings of that imagination, and that the chaotic energies of the natural world are abstracted and isolated in the brief middle sectionTime Passes. Whatever reality is not subjected to minds processes is not allowed its due weight and effect. In consequence, with all its excellence as a work of art, the novel is rather limited to sphere of art. No Art for Arts Sake A careful reading of the novel will clearly reveal that there is no art for arts sake aestheticism in this novel. The deliberate approach to the physical reality of Lighthouse rejects any temptation to make it an ivory tower. There is a consistent and strenuous attempt to relate the ideal to the actual, to accept life on the level of its necessary conditions, as well as on that of visionary aspiration. The attempt stops short of a final resolution of this divided, and limiting view of life. But it is a considerable advance beyond the near absolute division obtaining in the earlier novels; and a step towards the more engaged and mature achievements of The Waves and Between The Acts. Conclusion

Thus we find that the first few sections of Time Passes moves at first pessimistically echoing the thoughts of Mrs. Ramsayshowing us signs of futility and impotence. The ultimate meaninglessness and lack of purpose in life is represented in the death of Mrs. Ramsay. But the novel having reached its lowest point of despair, turns in Section 9 where the advances of nature, time and decay are stemmed once more by human activity. The house is to be reinhabited and from now on moves forward to its attempt in Part III to establish some positive answer to the question What remains? So came Mrs. MCNab, came Mrs. Bast. Mrs. MCNab groaned; Mrs. Bast creaked They came with their brooms and pails at last; they got to work. And very soon some rusty laborious birth seemed to be taking place. And according to N.A. DavenportThis birth brings the house back to what it was, and the people return; the long night is over and when Lily wakes up a community is again about to be established, and individual life to continue.

Introductory Remarks Virginia Woolf discarded both the first person and the third person narration in her novel because she found the method of narration known as multiple inner points of view as the best means to project her theme in the novel. Therefore, the mental processes of the characters seem to be presented without any interference from the author. The external world is depicted through its reflection in the observing consciousness. The effect of this narrative mode is to force the reader to-construct the world of the novel for himself and to apply his own judgments to that world. While the omniscient narrator at one end of the scale of narration guides the reader carefully through the fictional world and the values by which that world is to be assessed, the multiple inner viewpoint of novel provides no certain or reliable truths and forces the reader to become the novelists active partner in creating the novels fictional world. Another effect of this narrative mode is to concentrate the readers attention on how characters experience events rather than on what is experienced. Use of the Stream of Consciousness Technique The story, or plot, of To The Lighthouse is extremely simple. In the first part, The Window, we are introduced to the main characters and the central issue: whether or not the planned expedition to the lighthouse will take place. The second part, Time Passes, covers a passage of ten years and reveals the deaths of several members of the Ramsay family. The final section, The Lighthouse, recounts how the expedition to the lighthouse, which was planned ten years earlier, is finally accomplished. It is obvious from this bald description of the novels plot that the readers main interest in To The Lighthouse is not of the what happened next? The emphasis of this novel falls on how its events are experienced by those who participate, and the narration

is carried out through the multiple point of view method, in which the reader has access to the mental processes of the various characters. This narrative mode provides a rich and complex perspective on the events and world of the novel. To make a simple example: Mrs. Ramsay is variously presented as a tyrant, a heroine, uncompromising, pathetic, and lovable, depending on the angle of vision of the observing consciousness. Which impression is the right one? The answer is all, and none. Mrs. Ramsay is, in the world of this novel, all of these. Virginia Woolfs particular use of the multiple point of view technique in To The Lighthouse poses certain problems, however, for the reader. The uniformity of language and style in the novel makes it difficult to distinguish individual points of view. The language of the consciousness of the six-year-old James, for example, is remarkably similar in vocabulary and style to that of his eminent philosopher father. Sometimes Mrs. Woolf uses phrases or images which, through repetition, become associated with the consciousness of a particular character. Lily Briscoes perception of Ramsays intellect and its associations with the kitchen table, and Ramsays image of human knowledge as an alphabet, are examples of such a use of imagery. In addition to the difficulties of distinguishing one point of view from another, an additional problem is raised in the discrimination of these points of view from the voice of the omniscient narrator, which is frequently intermingled with the other voices. The material presented by the omniscient narrator can often be identified by its indefiniteness in time and space, its tendency to generalise about people and life, and its extended perspective. The omniscient narrators voice also presents stage directions such as he said, she thought, and so on. There are also certain characteristics both of style and tone which identify the omniscient narrator in To The Lighthouse. The reader will notice in the observation of the omniscient narrator a tone of hesitancy, of diffidence, which may lead him to question the omniscience of the narrator. The three parts of the novel are dominated by separate voices which provide a certain tone and attitude to those parts. The first part, The Window, is largely presented through the consciousness of Mrs. Ramsay as she sits by the window knitting, and later as she presides over the dinner party. The middle section of the novel, Time Passes, depends on the voice of the omniscient narrator. The third and final section, The Lighthouse, is presented largely through the alternate consciousnesses of Lily and those on board the boat. One effect of Virginia Woolfs choice of this multiple point of view narrative mode is immediately obvious when we examine the characters and characterisation of To The Lighthouse. Not only are these characters observed in action, or reflected in the consciousness of themselves and others, but their very perspective on external reality serves to define them. It is impossible, therefore, to make any clear-cut distinction between the characters in this novel and its narrative mode. Virginia Woolfs method of creating the characters in To The Lighthouse is, in a sense, a cumulative one. Our knowledge of the characters depends on the accumulated impressions of them we receive, both from their own reflections and observations and from the responses they elicit from the other characters. The Characters as a Vehicle of Virginia Woolfs Ideas The reader is obliged to recreate for himself the characters of this novel. The opening section of the novel gives us a clear impression of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. The two, as they are presented here, provide a study in contrasts; Mrs. Ramsay is portrayed

in images of softness and fertility the fountain, the flowering fruit tree while Mr. Ramsay is symbolised by the arid scimitar, the beak of brass. The husband-wife, malefemale polarity of this opening section is a theme developed through the novel, and is reflected in the contrasting qualities of intellect possessed by both. Mrs. Ramsay is portrayed as possessing instinctive, intuitive intelligence, while her husbands intellect is of the rational and orderly variety symbolised by his perception of human knowledge as a series of letters of the alphabet. To over-emphasise the symmetry of these characteristics is, however, to do an injustice to the complexity and suggestiveness of the novels characterisation. These symbolic intimations of characters are part of a larger scheme of characterisation which provides a psychologically realistic series of portraits. A fine example of the powerful juxtaposition of symbolic and realistic portraiture can be found in the description of Mrs. Ramsay as she sits with her husband after the dinner party. There is psychological realism in the description of her puzzling over her husbands desire for fame, and in the description of a mind drifting through association rather than logic from one idea to another. As Mrs, Ramsays is the dominating point of view in the early sections of the novel, the reader may easily be persuaded to take her side. She appears to represent feminity, maternity and sympathy, and we feel some aversion from the uncompromisingly severe truthfulness of Ramsay and Charles Tansley. Our sympathy is increased when we look through her eyes at her reflection in the mirror and see a fading beauty who is a model of unselfishness. This early limited version of her character and that of her husband is soon modified by her complex reflections about Charles Tansley, who arouses in her a mixture of maternal desire to please and protect and an equally strong feeling of repugnance based on his awkwardness. Her attitude towards the young student reveals social condescension and snobbery. When her husband corrects her forecast of the weather, she responds with strong anger to what she feels is a blindness to the feelings of others, and a sense of martyrdom and moral superiority. She dwells on their financial insecurity and her suspicion that his most recent book is not as successful as earlier ones. Another guest, Mr Carmichael, makes her feel uncomfortable because he makes no demands on her; her characteristic response is to feel pity for him. Yet she is aware of the ambiguity of her emotional response, however much she may try to evade personal responsibility. She wishes to keep her youngest son and daughter in a state of perpetual childhood, and she admits to herself that she prefers boobies to intelligent young men, for she can control children and boobies. This manipulative element in her character is alien to her perception of herself, and she is puzzled that Mintas mother should have accused her of alienating her daughters affections. Mrs Ramsay defends herself from this accusation by direct reference to her appearance, to her fading beauty and to the shabbiness of her clothes, all of which are made to reflect her internal self-sacrifice as a kind of theatrical costume signifying goodness and thereby absolving her of hostile criticism. Mrs Ramsay instinctively identifies herself with Lily the artist and with Carmichael the poet. Like them, she is a creator but her medium is human beings and her form, human relationships. The novel makes it clear that she is only partially successful in her art; the radiance of her dinner party may draw people together momentarily, but it is inevitably destroyed by time. Paul and Minta may have their courtship of intense happiness under her guidance, but time destroys their marriage. Mrs Ramsays attempts to shield her

children from the force; of mutability are defeated and she too is destroyed by her familiar antagonist, death. The complexity of Mrs. Ramsays character is revealed through her consciousness of reality and the language and images she uses to describe it. It is created also through her reflection in the eyes of the other characters. The three male guests-Tansley, Bankes and Carmichael show varying responses to her. Carmichael is emotionally self-sufficient and is aware of the degree of manipulation involved in Mrs. Ramsays self-sacrifice. Bankes, Ramsays longtime friend and colleague, responds to her mystery and beauty, but is also partially conscious of her destructive powers. Tansley also responds to her beauty but is even more attracted by her pity for him. The young couple, Paul and Minta, are completely under her spell and obey her wish that they should marry. The Ramsay children respond with love and with varying degrees of admiration, ranging from James who adores her unquestiongly, to Jasper who reflects that being his mother she lived away in another division of the world. Lily Briscoes perception of Mrs. Ramsay and how she responds is more complex than any of the other characters. She is fully aware of her friends ability to dominate through love and pity, but she also recognises her worth. Of all the characters in the novel, Lily is the one who fully grasps the ambiguities of her hostess character and comes to love the whole Mrs. Ramsay. It is Lily who has the final vision of Mrs. Ramsay, and it is Lily who makes that vision permanent through her art. Mr. Ramsay is, in many respects, the direct antithesis of his wife. He loves her very deeply, but can still be infuriated by her disrespect for factual truth. His worship of truth matters more to him than the feelings of his friends and family. His intellectual integrity gives him a quality of aloofness, but this is deceptive for he loves and needs his family more than his seemingly emotional but inwardly withdrawn wife. Unlike Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay gives little thought to his effect on others; he stalks around the garden reciting poetry aloud, contemptuous of the responses of his family and guests. He makes overt demands on the sympathies and emotions around him. These traits are quite different from his wifes acute self-consciousness and her covert manipulation of others. Like the character of Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsays is portrayed through his own consciousness and through the eyes of those who see him. An apparently contradictory web of images surrounds him: he is hard and arid like a scimitar, cruel as a beak of brass that gorges upon his wifes energy and fertility. Yet he is also an intrepid explorer the sailor who travels where lesser mortals do not care. He is a loving, protective paterfamilias who responds with warmth to the sight of a mother hen and her chickens, and who can be overwhelmed by admiration for his wife. The other characters, especially Bankes and Lily, flesh out the details of his portrait. Bankes remembers Ramsay as a young bachelor and, in accordance with Bankess own emotional aridity, regrets the domestic and emotional aspects of Ramsays life which he feels, have weakened his potential and destroyed their friendship. Yet Bankes envies his friend and sees him in a powerful image that combines elements of Ramsays intellectual integrity and domestic affection as the father with the child on his shoulder, looking at a picture of in eruption, Lily is, once more, the most astute and balanced of the observers, noticing his single-minded fidelity to the truth as well as his egotistical pursuit of sympathy and admiration, while acknowledging his tenderness and courage. In Virginia Woolfs portrayal of Mrs. Ramsay following the dinner party we noted a balance between symbolism and realism

in the very language and style of the novel. This equilibrium is apparent also in the depiction of the Ramsays as a couple. Their portrait is drawn in a manner which makes them credible in terms of psychological realism but they exist also as powerful, generalised symbols.

Introductory: Interpretations Differ To The Lighthouse is, without any shade of doubt, a very complex novel and hence there are different interpretations from different critics. Norman Friedmans comments on this point is worth noting: To The Lighthouse is a very complex novel, and different critics have read different meanings into it. While there is a general agreement that To The Lighthouse centres on questions of general order and chaos, male and female, permanence and change and intellection and intuition, the critics are far from unanimous in the actual tracing out of these themes. Thus, for example, it is clear that the simultaneous completion of Lily Briscoes painting and arrival of Mr. Ramsay, James and Cam at the Lighthouse are somehow functioning together to complete the book, but no two critics have agreed as to what the function means as an ending of what has gone before. One claims that Mr. Ramsay is undergoing a transition from his former intellectual personality to a newly discovered intuitive view, while another critic says that Lily is moving from a concern with form, that is art, to a concern with content, that is life. Another critic sees in the ending a shift from time to the timeless, while a fourth one sees here a shift from egotism to selflessness, and a fifth critic thinks of this simultaneous convergence as a clumsy device which solves no problem. We can multiply such examples, but it is evident that the dominant tendency is to interpret the thematic conflictwhatever it may beas an antithesis to two mutually exclusive terms, one of which must be rejected in favour of the other. In fact, the full significance of the trip to the Lighthouse is not grasped. It is, more or less, seen as a one way affair. But a closer study of the novel will reveal that this either-or strategy is hardly adequate for dealing with the multiplicity of points of view through which each character is seen in the first section, the descending and the ascending movement of the second section and the shifting simultaneity of events which shape the third. Relation of Self to Others It is mainly the first part of the novel that deals with the relation of self to others. Very soon it becomes clear that not one single trait or characteristic of a person can be seized upon and cherished in order to know him or her. Mrs. Ramsay for instance, is really a warm and beautiful woman, yet annoyingly concerned with ordering the lives of others. And this is quite clear from the resentment which many of her circle express against her mania for marriage. She is, no doubt, maternal. Mr. Ramsay Next, let us take the example of Mr. Ramsay. Often he shows himself as a selfdramatising domestic tyrant, but still he is to be admired as a lone watcher at the dark frontiers of human ignorance. He is, no doubt, a detached and a lonely philosopher, yet he cannot but crave the contact of his wife and children. He is grim, yet optimistic, austere, yet fearful for his reputation; petty and selfish, and yet capable of losing himself completely in a novel of Scott; alert, yet he thrives on the simple company and the humble fare of fishermen. Lily and Others In the same way Lily Briscoe is also a complex figure. She is a spinster disinterested in ordinary sexual attachment; she is nevertheless capable of a fierce outburst of love. She is, no doubt, an artist perpetually terrified by a blank canvas, but still she is able to

find a solution to the complex problem of art-life relationship. In the same way Mr. Bankes, Mr. Tansley, all are double beings or complex figures of the novel. And we find that the climax of the first section occurs at the dinner, a brilliantly dramatic communion meal where each ordinary ego, with its petty aggression and resentment, is gradually blended with the others into a pattern of completion and harmony. Thus it is clear that double vision or multiple perspective is very much necessary to know and understand human personality. And in this section we are able to have just such a perspective, as each character is presented from at least two points of view. Man to Nature We have seen how in the first section the relation of self to others has been dealt with. And Part II of the novel deals with the relation of man to nature. It does not portray merely the ravages of time and tide affecting the Ramsay family and their summer house. In addition the almost complete destruction of the house, we have also a chance to see its equally dramatic renewal. And then it is seen that its focus is on the comic-epic figure of Mrs. McNab, who lurches through the house wiping and dusting, breaking into a long dirge of sorrow and trouble, yet who feels, looking sideways in the glass, as if after all, she had some consolation, as if indeed there were twined about her dirge some incorrigible hope. Thus, it is she and her two helpers, Mrs. Bast and her son, who fetch up from oblivion all the Waverly novels, and who rescue the house from impending doom and destruction. Further, we find in this very section that the fortunes of the Ramsay family suffer so many setbacks. Mrs. Ramsay dies unexpectedly, Andrew is killed in the battlefield in France, and Prue dies of childbirth. Even then we are made to understand that Mr. Ramsays work will endure, for the fate of his books was somehow tied up with the Waverly novels. Also, as the next section proceeds to demonstrate the family continues to develop. Thus it is clearly evident that section two or the central section of this great novel, therefore, demonstrates not the victory of natural chaos over human order, but rather the reverse. Mans power and will to live ultimately prevail over death and destruction. Relation of Art to life Now, in the third section of the To The Lighthouse, the third level of the theme, the relation of art to life is treated. We find that the structure of this section is based upon the shuttling back and forth between Lily on the island and those in the boat watching the island, who in turn get further away. This is accompanied by the corresponding movement of those in the boat getting closer to the Lighthouse and Lily gelling closer to the solution of her aesthetic problem. And it must be noted that the determining factor in each case is love (the art of life), which might perhaps be defined as order or the achievement of form in human relations through the surrender of personality. Hence we find Lily brushing her painting as she feels the upsurge of that sympathy for Mr. Ramsay, which she had previously been stubbornly unable to give. James and Cam give up their longstanding antagonism towards their father. Mr. Ramsay, himself, at the same time, attains a resolution of his own tensions and worries. The point is not that they have made a one dimensional transition from this to that attitude, but that, since each is aware simultaneously both of what is receding and what is approaching, each has received in his way a sense of double vision.

Double Vision through Imagery A closer look at the imagery of the book, its figure of speech, its scene and plot may further demonstrate the presence of this double vision. To begin with, the Lighthouse itself as the most conspicuous image functions in two ways as something to be reached, and as source of flashing light. This means has a symbolic role to play. As a source of light, it appears in two connections, first, as it impinges upon the consciousness of Mrs. Ramsay in the first section after she had finished reading to James, and second, as it flashes upon the empty house in section two. Thus we find that Mrs. Ramsay, the busy mother of eight children often feels the need to be silent, to be alone. Often she muses upon the alternating flashes of light in a mood of detachment, peace and rest. And this musing gives her a sense of victory over life, and she identifies herself with the third strokethe long steady strokewhich becomes for her an image of purity and truth, of strength and courage, searching and beautiful. Her self, having shed its attachments, was free for the strongest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless ... Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir, and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this serenity, and pausing there she looked out to meet the stroke, of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three which washer stroke. Now this can be taken as the thesis of her emotional cycle, the antithesis is evoked as her mood soon changes into one of the grim recognition of inevitable facts of suffering, death, the poor, and she gradually descends from her state on triumphant freedom from the fact, the hurry and the stir by seizing upon the light from a different perspective, for when one woke, all ones relation changed. Looking now at the light, it is the remorseless, the pitiless. Reconciliation of Opposites Then it is found that only when these two moods become reconciled, will the cycle be complete. The second view seems so much here, yet so little hers, and then her meditations are crowned in their third phase by exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and she cries out, It is enough. It is enough. It seems to be apparent that by seeing the long steady flash of light in two different aspectsas an image of expansion and release and, then, as an image of contraction and confinement, she has received the final intuition of the truth about the nature of reality. And this intuition is that one must be both subjectively involved, and objectively detached from life, and that true happiness rests neither in the one sphere nor in the other exclusively, but in achieving a harmonious balance, however fragile, between the two. Now she can rest contented, if only for a moment. The second part or the middle section of the novel portrays the death and rebirth of the decaying and deserted house. Here the light makes its second appearance by gliding over the rooms gently as if it laid its cares arid lingered stealthily and looked and came lovingly again. It is clear from the sentence which follows immediately that this is one side of doubleness. But in the very lull of the loving caress as the long stroke leant upon the bed, the rock was rent asunder; another fold of the shawl loosened; there it hung, and swayed. And a few pages on, just before the arrival of the forces of renewal in the house, in that moment, that hesitation when dawn trembles and night pauses, the

Lighthouse beam as an image of expansion and release (life-love-hope) and contraction and confinement (death-destruction-terror) held in relation, entered the room for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter looked with equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw. So we find that the three moodsloving care, tearing apart and equanimity are well represented by the light, It may now be asserted that only by going through the opposing experience or multiple perspective one can get a comprehensive view of life. Lilys Experience: Doubleness of Reality In the third section of the novel, Lilys brush descends in stroke after stroke when she begins her painting for a second time. And so pausing and so flickering she attained a dancing rhythmical movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the stroke another, and all were related. Thus, in each of the lighthouse beam itself, her vision begins to emerge in stroke and pause in alternation, and the truth, the reality which suddenly laid hands upon her emerged stark at the back of appearance and commanded her attention. In other words, as the light flickers, as it goes and comes back, Lily begins to see the course that her painting was to take. This flicker, which to an ordinary observer is an endless dull repetition, holds Lilys mind and enables her to discover the truth and reality that the appearance signifies to her. The stroke and pause of the Lighthouse beam symbolise the problem of subject and object and the perception of nature of reality. Hence it may be concluded that reality has always a doubleness; and this can be understood only through a double vision. Subject, Object and Native of Reality We find this phrasesubject and object and the nature of realityin the first part of To The Lighthouse. Andrew Ramsay has used this phrase in answer to a question from Lily Briscoe about the content of his fathers books. And the words are significant and have underlying meaning also. In fact it is exactly this problem which works its way through the novel on three perceptible levelshuman relations, metaphysics and aesthetics. The novel can be seen to have been built around the problem of how the knower looks at the known, how one person looks at another, how man looks at nature and how the artist looks at life. These points have been discussed in detail in the foregoing paragraphs. We have shown how the main characters of To The Lighthouse look at the world in various ways. In fact three specific ways of seeing the object can be examined in To The Lighthouse through the eye of the artist (Lily Briscoe) through the eye of a child (James Nancy and Cam), and through the feminine creative eye of Mrs. Ramsay, whose vision might be solid to be that of a poet. Hence the characters see themselves and the world differently and very often bring the objective world into subjective consciousness. Conclusion To understand life and the nature of reality the need of double vision is essential. We may now conclude with the very apt comments of Norman Friedman on this point: A right understanding is achieved by those who try to understand the nature of reality simultaneously from two different stand pointssubjective and objectivethrough which one must pass in making the transition from one perspective to the other. From whatever view point we regard life, whether it be that of a detached philosopher ironically contemplating from a height or that of the busy mother and the house wife

frantically involved in the fever and fret of daily routine, one must give it up in favour of the other, becoming immersed in the waters of transition and emerging with a double perspective (synthesis). In other words, both an involvement in life and a certain detachment from it, are necessary to understand it fully. Doing only one of the two would naturally give a partial view of a life, which can be quite misleading. Hence the need for a double vision. One has to strike a balance, to lose which is to give way to the chaos, of a black and lovely darkness on the one side, and to the disorder of a terrifying and senseless force on the other.

To The Lighthouse shows Virginia Woolfs lyricism in the most enchanting manner. Discuss.
Introductory remarks To rigidly define the form of a lyrical novel is rather a baffling task. A lyrical novel is a blend of lyrical poetry and the novel in the usual sense. In it the usual scenery of fiction becomes a texture of imagery. It also shifts the readers attention from men and events to a formal design. It has generally a poetic style. But this is not all. Any novel may rise to such great heights of language or present its narrative in imagery. In fact the most important and distinguishing feature of a novel of this genre is that it transcends the casual and temporal movement of narrative within the framework of fiction. It rather uses the novel to perform the function of a poem. For such a novel it is not a matter of prime importance to reproduce external life truthfully. It discards the method of achieving objectivity through the dramatic and narrative form of the traditional novel, but combines the world in a strongly inward, yet an aesthetically objective norm. Thus its form is neither dramatic nor didactic, but poetic in the limited sense of being lyrical. And, generally speaking, a lyric is a short poem which a single emotion, usually personal, is expressed, although originally it was intended to be sung with the lyre. So it is musical and at the same time subjective, as it is built round a single mood, emotion or impression. Mrs. Woolf and Lyrical Novel Virginia Woolf was in quest of a meditative form through which she could convey simultaneously a picture of life and manners and a corresponding image of mind. In fact her essay Mr. Bennett and Mr. Brown opened the door of the novel to fresh conventions, foreshadowing a lyrical manner for the English novel through the conversion of characters and scenes into symbolic imagery. She sought to convey inner life and she realised that this could be best done in a lyrical manner. Finding that the conventional novel of motives and environment had proved insufficient she has suggested in one of her famous essays that its form should be such that it provides like poetry the outline rather than details, and stands further back from life in order to achieve the symbolic distance of impersonality. Lyrical Method Ralph Freedman has pointed out that in Virginia Woolfs search for a form in which the inner and the outer can be combined, she conceived of the moment as a concentration of the manifold elements of life into significant images or scenes. In addition to the literary use the moments also serve the epistornological function of clarifying the implication of consciousness for the artists experience of life, a version of the imagination. In fact, for Virginia Woolf the inner and the outer are included in a single whole. The thing is that consciousness combines disparate elements and form; these elements thus combined, the moment moves to associations and memories which expand perceptions into scenes. But when the perceptions are being expanded into

scenes, the consciousness always remains aware of the objects which feed its cognition, and realizes that for the time being these things are freed from their time-bound existance. So we find that Mrs. Woolfs lyrical narrative is based on a design in which various contents of consciousness are juxtaposed. David Daiches has rightly remarked that the method is to distil a significance out of the data discovered by the personal sensibility and by projecting that significance through the minds of others, to maintain an unstable equilibrium between lyrical and narrative art. And the unstable equilibrium between the lyrical and narrative art shows how Virginia Woolf brilliantly achieves the telescoping of the poets lyrical self and the novelists omniscient point of view. For Mrs. Woolf, poetry is a symbolic relationship between the individual self and its range of experience. So we find that the omniscient self of the poet-novelist is crucial to her concept of lyrical novel. Poetic Prose We already know that Virginia Woolfs aim was to convey inner life, to display life as an aspect and function of the mind. And she realised that the resources of ordinary prose were really inadequate for this purpose. Hence she had to adopt a very peculiar, a very individual style. Hers is a poetic style with poetic rhythms, repetitions and poetic imagery. We find her using vivid symbols and metaphors which carry a complex aura of associations and emotions just to enable her to enhance the expressiveness of the language. Hence her style becomes superbly allusive and suggestive. Rhythms, assonances, cadences and poetic refrains are the distinctive features of her poetic prose. R.L. Chambers apt remarks regarding this aspect of her style is worth noting: This prose that approximates to poetry is not a spurious or hybrid form, but a genuine and legitimate medium of expression in its own right. Virginia Woolf is in a great tradition, which includes the names of Plato and John Donne and Sir Thomas Browne and the translators of the authoriscal version of the Bible. Furthermore it is a fact that by writing a poetic prose, by borrowing from the technique of poetry, while retaining the essential prose rhythms, all these writers exercised a true artistic insight into the possibilities and limitations of their medium. They realised the enormous advantage that was to be had for their purpose in shunning as far as possible that extreme pole of prose. Virginia Woolf realised this better than anyone else who was writing prose in her time. Time Passes Its Lyricism The poetical character or the lyric note of Virginia Woolfs style is fully in evidence in the lyrical nature of Part II entitled, Time Passes in her To The Lighthouse. Jean Guiguet has very nicely dealt with a very beautiful analysis of the lyrical aspect of this chapter. The lyrical character of the Time Passes has been compared with the opening of chapter 5 of Orland. In these two passages Mrs. Woolf treats of her favourite theme, this impersonal thing, the flight of time. She has taken recourse to the same cosmic elements which bring about change-wind, water, light, shade, conceived of as mysterious powers, as an army of goblins attacking objects one by one to corrode them, to transform them, disintegrate them. Whether night in invading the Ramsays house or rainy gales assaulting the whole of England, the change of scale is scarcely noticeable, for the proportions of the opposing forces remain the same : man and his world on the one hand, and on the other the elfin army, unseen and immeasurable. The vision is the same in both cases.

The Lyricism is Impersonal In Time Passes the lyricism is essentially personal or subjective, hence doubts have been expressed if the lyrical quality of this chapter in this novel is genuinely lyrical. So Jean Guiguet has discussed this point in great detail. There is no character, no individual consciousness, no voice uttering the poetic words. There is only a scene taking place independent of any spectators, life pursuing its course independent of any living being. Is this depersonalization not antagonistic to the very essence of lyricism? If by lyricism we mean the expression of exalted feelings, as in Shakespeares sonnets, the Immortality Ode or Epipsychidion, it rather becomes difficult to accept Time Passes as a lyric. Nevertheless the presence of an I of an individual consciousness as the seat of such feelings, is perhaps only an accidental element in lyricism, a literary convention and all things considered, a superficial characteristic. In the poems above mentioned, we are scarcely concerned with the I, which has no distinct features and is only the transparent support for the emotionlove, anguish, nostalgia, aspiration which is the real substance of the poem. That Virginia Woolf did away with this support is not surprising; it follows logically from her principles. Abstraction in this Lyricism Evidently there is a degree of abstraction in this lyricism. Facing the cosmos, thinking about it and enduring it, we have only the anonymous human beings we, one, whoever, the indefinite subject of an infinitive verb. This degree of abstraction appears to be a characteristic of one aspect of Virginia Woolfs lyricism. Without passing through the intermediary of any individual experience it attempts to render directly the relations between the man and the universe. These are thus reduced to their most elementary form. The themes of traditional lyricism, nature, love and death are convenient labels for those fundamental complexities of which each poet creates his characteristic variant or blend. They are, in fact, so many questions without intelligible answer, whose mystery the artist tries to prove obliquely by means of a whole system of transpositions, whose evocative value and whose load of symbolism are destined to act on the sensibility and intelligence of the reader, so as to convey to him the inexpressible reality. And the two questions that absorbed Virginia Woolf and provided the matter for her lyric outbursts are the same as those which she asked and tried to answer under all the forms with which her art experimented in turn: time andpersonal identity. They are complementary to such an extent that one cannot be contemplated without the other. Abstraction made Concrete and Perceptible It is really creditable for Virginia Woolf to succeed in giving body and substance to what abstract thought had devitalized. She apprehends time in the form of the changes it brings about, just as an artist is recognised through his creation. But change is also an abstraction to make it concrete and perceptible to the sense, it is necessary to expand the present until it contains the past too, and to insert, between the two limits, mobility, or rather mutation, which includes permanence within change. And Jean Guiguet has pointed out that the opening of sections 3 and 9 of part I is quite significant in this connection. But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds night. The winter holds a pack

of them in store and deals them equally evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. The house was left, the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grams now that life had left it. The long night seemed to have set in; the trifling airs nibbling, the clammy breaths fumbling seemed to have triumphed. The saucepan had rusted and the mat decayed. Toads had nosed their way Idly aimlessly, the swaying shall swung to and fro. There is not a verb here, either standing alone or modified by an adverb, which fails to indicate some alteration: yet at the same time, under the change of aspect, of colour, of texture, we feel the enduring nature of night, of the house, of the wave, of the breeze, the saucepan or the shawl. This seems to be a description, although distended by time and undermined by mutability; but that which is describable, that which is seen, is only a means of expressing the indescribable, the invisible, that is contained within it. Surely this is described and precisely that abstract-concrete reality so necessary to Virginia Woolf. These images and sensations, merging together in the synthesis of an inner landscape over and above all their plastic value, have a lyrical quality or symbolic power which makes them linger in the mind. Words with Double Aspect It has also been explained that all the words in the two passages have a double aspect, night, the wave, the grain of salt, the wind, the toad, rustthese are agents of decay and destruction, the forces of time warning against the forces of life: the bird, the leaf, the house, the shawl...And so such passages expand into abstraction without a break, imperceptibly: the words, ruin, corruption, oblivion, insensibility of nature, which occur later are associated with so many images and sensations that they take on fresh life, an almost physical content. Meditation is superimposed on things seen, and it does not obliterate it, rather recalls it constantly. A few lines indeed can give no idea of the richness and artistry of these pages, in which words invoke and answer one another from one paragraph to the next, while awakening distant echoes from the books truest horizons. Their music moreover, adds to their incantatory power and perfects their poeti character. Conclusion Virginia Woolf undoubtedly chose prose for her medium of expression, but her prose is a poetic-prose, prose that approximates to poetry. In spite of her great achievements she is, in fact, not the originator of the stream of consciousness novel in England. Dorothy Richardson precedes her as the Path-finder. But she fully deserves the credit for poetising and musicalising the novel of subjectivity. Allusions and images, rhythm, refrain and metaphors all these combine to make Virginia Woolfs style poetic. The great novels of Virginia Woolf not only reveal the stream of consciousness of their characters but flow like a stream themselves soothing our soul with its musical murmur

Discuss Virginia Woolfs Theory and Practice in To The Lighthouse.

Introductory We have discussed in detail Virginia Woolfs theory of fiction and have also quoted extensively from her famous essay on contemporary fiction for our purpose. Mrs. Woolf has clearly expressed her view that the older novelists failed to portray life as they were preoccupied with the outside husk, seldom getting on to the inside kernel of life. By presenting the story chronologically they divorced themselves from life, which is equal to human consciousness, and consciousness, modern psychology had proved, as also one knows from ones own experience, does not move in a straight line. In fact, it is a fluid existing simultaneously at a number of points in a persons total experience. To Virginia Woolf life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end and hence it should be the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit..And though she tried the traditional forms in her first two novels, she abandoned them, as she realised that the traditional novels could never portray the fleeting impressions and the inner reality. And then she admired and appreciated Joyce of England and Proust of France, as she recognised in their innovations something that would help her realize her own ideal. To her Wells and Bennett are materialists, whereas Joyce and Proust are spiritualists for they try to capture the fleetingness of life. The Stream of Consciousness Technique When Virginia Woolf found that the conventional technique of narration was not at all suitable to express her own view of life, she had to adopt a new technique more suited to her purpose. Hence she had to adopt the stream of consciousness technique by freely exploiting the interior monologue of the different characters presented in To The Lighthouse. We are able to view each of the important characters through his or her own thoughts and actions as well as through the consciousness of different characters. We find the depicted consciousness serving as screen on which the material in this novel is presented. So the depicted consciousness of Mrs. Ramsay enables us to understand the true character of Mr. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe or Charles Tansley. In the same way the stream of consciousness of Lily Briscoe reveals to us the personality and the finer shades of the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay or of the odd and maladjusted personality of Tansley. There is very little external action or violent deeds; instead there is the interior monologue and the fluid mental states. Form and Pattern Then, in To The Lighthouse we no longer find the sequence of events leading to a climax. Virginia Woolf abandoned the convention of story also for the same reason that she abandoned the convention of character drawing, as neither of them could be made to express life as she saw it. The events noted by her are not the immediate causes or consequences of other events in her book. In fact, their importance depends upon their effect in the consciousness of her creatures rather than upon their functions in a plot. And her chief purpose, was to record what life felt like to living beings and then to communicate the impression made by one individual upon others. So there is no plotconstruction in the sense of a logical arrangement of incidents and events, leading chronologically to a catastrophe or denouement.

Mrs. Woolfs Practice: Her Deviations Virginia Woolf was undoubtedly one of the greatest novelists of this new school, who disregarded the convention of plot, tragedy, comedy, climax or catastrophe of the older novelists to capture the inner reality, the truth of life with remarkable skill. But still in most of her great novels, specially in To the Lighthouse she has not followed her theory in every detail. She was, no doubt, much impressed by the writings of Joyce and Proust, but their influence on Mrs. Woolf should not be over-emphasised. She is by no means a blind imitator of the great masters of the new technique or the psychologists who furnished the theoretical framework for the stream of consciousness novel. Her essential method is her own. Hence, whatever may be die opinion of some critics, Mrs. Woolfs To The Lighthouse is definitely a stream of consciousness novelbut with a difference. She knew that all art implied a selection and ordering of material. So, as Mrs. Woolf set herself to destroy the current form of the novel, she was also driven to invent one which would express her own vision of life. Hence there is some form and pattern in To The Lighthouse and there is some inner unity. And then the novelist is also playing the role of a central intelligence and is constantly busy, organising the material and illuminating it by frequent comments. She realised that simply the record of a characters impressions did not produce a novel superior to a more conventional story. Thus we find Virginia Woolf planning almost all her outstanding novels of the later period within a narrrow framework. And she achieved this either by confining the action to a brief period of time, or by limiting the foreground characters to a small number. And sometimes she employed both the devices. That is why in To The Lighthouse we find the action confined to a period of only two days with a gap of ten years in-between. There are only ten characters making any prominent appearance, but only seven of them, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, Lily, Mr. Bankes, Mr. Tansley, James and Camreveal themselves fully in speech and in silent soliloquy. And then we find that in To The Lighthouse the outward structure is quite simple consisting of three movements of unequal length and of two different kinds, as it were two acts linked by a chorus. Conclusion It may now be asserted that To The Lighthouse is definitely a stream of consciousness novel, but with a difference. A close study of the novel clearly reveals to us that there is a careful weaving together of the characters consciousness, the authors comments, and one characters view on another. Hence To The Lighthouse is neither chaotic nor incoherent like most of the novels of this genreit is more finely organised and more effective than anything else Virginia Woolf wrote. In fact her theory of fiction is very nicely revealed in this great novel. Elizabeth Drews comments on this point are worth noting and we may conclude by quoting her apt remarks: It is indeed a wonderful piece of workmanship. Her foundation of ideas is clamped together in the symbolic structure she chose to suggest it. At the same time the feathery, evanescent nature of consciousnessthe permeation of the present by the past, the outer by the inner, the currents uniting personalities and dividing them, the moments when things come together and fall apart, the intermingling of the emotions and the senses, all the hazy motions of reverieall this is vividly revealed. Her characters all come to life, as we see into their own minds and into their images in the minds of others. We constantly recognize the truth of her psychological insights. Her mastery of her medium and her riches, of concrete metaphorical suggestion are

everywhere. Unquestionably she was a professional, evolving a new form of fiction and creating a masterpiece in it.

To The LighthouseOutline Story

Part I: The Window To The Lighthouse opens rather dramatically with a few cheering words regarding their visit to the Lighthouse from Mrs. Ramsay to James, her seven years old favourite child. She told him that they all would be going to the Lighthouse the next day if the weather was fine. The Ramsay family with their six guests was spending a summer in their own summer house on the Island of Skye. Young James had looked forward to this wonderful expedition for years. But he was terribly upset when his father curtly announced there was hardly any possibility to make the trip as the weather would not be favourable at all. This enraged the highly excitable child. In fact all his eight children disliked him extremely for such cut and dry remarks. But it was not in the nature of Mr. Ramsay to hide the stern facts of life although it meant ridicule for his wife and disillusionment for their children. In spite of his good intentions the children resented it. But Mrs. Ramsay, an affectionate and a considerate mother, encouraged James by saying that she was expecting the weather to be fine. She was just knitting a pair of stockings for the sick child of the lighthouse keeper. And James was busy in cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of Army and Navy stores. Unfortunately Mr. Tansley, a student of Mr. Ramsay, came next to dishearten the children by supporting Mr. Ramsays discouraging remarks regarding the weather. For this habit of saying disagreeable things he was also much disliked and looked down upon by the children. It was hard for Mrs. Ramsay also to put up with such harsh and tactless habits. Sadly enough Tansley was always there to take the line of Mr. Ramsay. When all the children and their guestsLily Briscoe, William Bankes, Augustus Charmichael, Paul Rayley, Minta Doyleretired to their bedrooms, Mrs. Ramsay accompanied by Tansley went to the town on a dull errand. This flattered the poor young student much and he seemed to be mildly in love with elderly Mrs. Ramsay he felt much flattered to have the first chance in his life to walk with a beautiful woman by his side. Back to their house Tansley once more irritated both Mrs. Ramsay and the children by remarking that there was no chance of going to the Lighthouse the next day. Now it was Mrs. Ramsays turn to console poor James as the caustic remarks of Mr. Ramsay and Tansley regarding the weather had already dashed his spirits. The mother still maintained her optimistic view regarding the weather to cheer up young James drooping soul. It was a pleasing sight for Mrs Ramsay to find Lily Briscoe standing on the edge of the town and painting, but Mr. Ramsays clumsy movements disturbed her. Soon Mr Bankes, the unhappy old widower and a botanist, came and stood by her. They had some

sort of understanding between them, as Bankes appreciated Lilys merits. So when Mr. Bankes suggested taking a stroll she agreed although she felt reluctant to leave her picture. They strolled down to the place where they used to go every evening. They were happy and felt a common hilarity, excited by the moving waves. Looking at distant hills Mr. Bankes thought of Mr Ramsay and began to comment rather adversely on Mr. Ramsay and his affairs. And it was a wonder how the Ramsays could manage to feed eight children on philosophy and at the same time to entertain so many guests. It was rather sad that a man of his intellect could stoop so low. But Lily asked him to think of his work and of other great qualities of head and heart. Mrs Ramsay was still busy in knitting the stockings meant for the lighthouse keepers son. An amusing idea that they should marry flashed on her mind at the sight of Lily and Bankes strolling together. Then she measured the stocking using James legs as the measuring block. Meanwhile Mrs. Ramsay had a look around the room and the dirty and dilapidated condition of the room and the fumitute saddened her heart. But it was not possible to mend matters. In her sad and sober moments Mrs. Ramsay looked astonishingly beautiful. William Bankes greatly appreciated her beauty. Mrs. Ramsay was still in a sad mood. Still she persisted in her optimism regarding the weather and the possibility of visiting the Lighthouse. The extreme irrationality of her remark irritated her husband much, as he felt that she was making the children hope for what was utterly impossible. But Mrs. Ramsay had the highest regard for her husband; so she kept quiet, although his lack of consideration for other peoples feelings cut her to the quick. Mr. Ramsay also felt a bit repentant for his harsh manner and he relapsed into a retrospective mood. He realised that he had not yet achieved complete success. But the idea that only a very few in a million could achieve complete success and leave everlasting fame consoled his mind. Mr. Ramsay was badly in need of sympathy and encouragement from his wife. So he came up to her and stood there demanding her sympathy. And James hated his father more for this. Mrs. Ramsay sat there quite reluctantly engrossed in her needle work. But ultimately she had to give in offering him the expected sympathy and assurance. At that very moment Mr. Carmichael shuffled past. Mr. Carmichael moved on without making any response to Mrs. Ramsays query. He was a typical person. He seemed to have stained his beard yellow by taking opium. He was an unhappy soul. All this was due to his wifes harsh and heartless treatment. He came to them every year as an escape. Mrs. Ramsay tried her best to brighten his gloomy existence but he was still cold and unresponsive. Just for a bit of diversion Mrs. Ramsay began to read to James the story of the Fisherman and his wife. But then Mr. Ramsay came there and stopped by her. But soon he was absorbed in speculation. The question that was uppermost in his mind was whether the progress of civilization depended at all on great men like Shakespeare and others.

Mr. Ramsay was, undoubtedly, an erudite scholar, well-versed in the philosophy of Locke, Hume and Berkeley. But Lily and William Bankes disliked his timidity and some of his weaknesses. They felt that for this timidness he was venerable and laughable at the same time. Mr. Ramsay turned away. Mr. Bankes watched him go and observed that it was a great pity that he could not behave a little more like other people. But Lily disliked him for his narrowness and his blindness. But just then she saw Bankes gazing at Mrs. Ramsay with an astonishing and mysterious rapture. To her this love of a man of sixty seemed to be distilled and filteredlove that never desired to make any attempt to clutch its object. Lily was an old maid and she sadly felt that she probably missed the best part of life. Lily then thought of Mrs. Ramsay and tried to delve deep into her soul. But she realised that it was not humanly possible to enter the secret chambers of a human soul. Lily, as an artist was having some difficulties while painting her picture. She was not satisfied with her work. She was much concerned with the unity of the whole. Finally she gave up and took the canvas lightly off the easel. But Mr. Bankes had already seen her picture and had shared with her something profoundly intimate. Just then Cam dashed past them like a bullet. She stopped only when Mrs. Ramsay asked her to enquire if Minta and Paul Ravley had come back after their usual walk. Mrs. Ramsay was sure that they were going to marry each other. She would be much pleased if they did so. Next her thoughts turned to her children. She did not want them to grow older. She told her husband that the loss of childhood was irreparable. But Mr. Ramsay could not accept this gloomy view of life. She continued reading aloud that story to James and it was finished very soon. After that she had to disappoint James once more by telling him that there was no hope of making the trip to the Lighthouse the next day. Mrs. Ramsay was thinking that children never forgot such incidents. The children went to bed. When she was alone she became absorbed in deep thoughts about the miseries and misfortunes of life. Mr. Ramsay passed by and her remoteness pained him. Mrs. Ramsay also saw him and she felt that he wanted to speak to him. So she took her green shawl and went to him. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay went out for a stroll. They began to talk about their children and other affairs of their life. They never liked the idea that Prue should fall in love with and marry Charles Tansley. Mr. Ramsay told her that he was thinking of going off for a days walk alone. But she knew that it was not possible for him at that advanced age and so did not protest. Soon Mr. Ramsay was overwhelmed with emotion while walking up the path arm in arm. He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it fervently. All of a sudden they found Lily and William Bankes having their stroll together. She felt that they also should marry and this was quite an admirable idea to her. Lily and Bankes were talking about their visits to different countries of the world luring their quiet walk. Mr. Bankes said this gave him an opportunity to have a look at the masterpieces of the great artists of the world. They turned and saw the elderly couple. Lily began to think about the pains and pleasures of the life of this couple. Mrs.

Ramsay was anxious for Nancy and enquired if she had also gone for a stroll with Paul and Minta. In fact Nancy and Andrews accompanied Paul and Minta when they went out for their stroll. They left the couple alone to indulge in their own games. But from behind a rock Nancy, to her great embarrassment, found them in each others arms. It meant that they were going to be married soon. On their way back Minta was much upset to find that she had lost her only ornament, a brooch presented by her grandmother. Paul pacified Minta and decided to come back early next morning to resume the search. He also made up his mind to go to Edinburgh secretly to buy another brooch if he failed to find it out there. Finally, when they were back to the Ramsay household, all were getting ready for dinner. They were awfully late. Prue informed her mother that Nancy had accompanied Paul and Minta for a stroll. Mrs. Ramsay felt that they might not take any final decision as Nancy was with them. Meanwhile Mildred wanted to know if she should wait for dinner. Mrs. Ramsay replied firmly in the negative. When there were fifteen persons sitting down to dinner, any delay was out of the question. Next Mrs. Ramsay went through the usual ceremony of choosing her necklace for the dinner with the help of Rose. Accompanied by her children she started moving towards the dining hall. Just then she caught sight of Paul and Minta coming back. She was excited as well as annoyed for their delay. But then the clanging of the bell announced that all should assemble in the dining hall. Mrs. Ramsay took her place at the head of the table like a queen. In the beginning she felt somewhat gloomy and dejected thinking about her own self as well as about others. At the far end she found her husband sitting with a frowning look. She felt indifferent. But then she realised that nothing had so far merged and felt that on her rested the job of merging and creating. So she had to come to her own worldly self and started talking to others. She pitied Mrs. Bankes for his sad and lonely life and asked if he got his letters kept for him in the hall. Lily Briscoe had her own ideas about Mr Bankes. To Mrs. Ramsays query Mr Bankes replied that though letters hardly brought anything of importance to man yet all liked to have them. Mrs. Ramsay asked Tansley also if he was fond of writing letters. But to Tansley all such talks seemed absolutely useless and he decided to abstain from such talks. Just to assert himself he once more told Mrs. Ramsay that there was very little chance of going to the Lighthouse the next day. To Lily he seemed to be the most unattractive person she had ever met. He often asserted that women could hardly achieve anything great in this world. Just to take a little bit of revenge she jocularly requested him to take her to the Lighthouse with him. He was offended and replied rather rudely that it would be too rough for her to go to the Lighthouse. But he was ashamed of his rude manners before Mrs. Ramsay, who was talking to William Bankes about some people he had never heard of. He felt that it would have been much better for him to be alone in his room working among his books. While talking to Bankes, Mrs. Ramsay was breaking off from time to time asking the maid to do this or that. This was annoying to him. He also felt that it was not worthwhile

to come to dinner. The only thing was that his refusal would have hurt the feelings of one of his oldest friends. Tansley was much irritated once more as Mrs. Ramsay began to talk to Bankes in French which was Greek to him. Everything bored him badly. But still he wanted to assert himself. All were talking on various topics and nobody asked him his views. Only Lily Briscoe understood him. Just to ease the situation for him Lily asked him in a friendly way if he would like to take her to the Lighthouse. Mrs Ramsay also appealed to Lily to say something nice to him to soothe his strained nerves. So Lilys friendly move relieved him of his egotism and he became quite communicative and took part in their discussions. But in the most of all such talks Lily began to think of her painting and made up her mind to resume her work earnestly next morning. Mrs. Ramsay wanted that her husband should also take part in the discussions. But she found him in an angry mood, as Mr. Carmichael was wanting in table manners. But she was relieved there was no open outburst of his temper. All the candles were lit and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer. Very soon Paul and Minta also entered the hall and took their reserved seats. Minta told all of them about her missing brooch with a ring of sadness. Minta looked very charming and attractive. And Mrs. Ramsay concluded that they were surely engaged. Surprisingly she felt jealous of Minta. Sadly Mrs. Ramsay realised that she was growing old. Next the special dishBeouf en Daube-was served. And all were vociferous in declaring that French dishes were far, far superior and cookery in England was an abomination. Mr. Bankes rebshed and praised it highly. He became lively and all his love, all his reverence for Mrs. Ramsay had returned. Mrs. Ramsay also felt elated at this. The idea that it was she who finally brought about the engagement between Paul and Minta made her extremely happy. Mr Ramsays mind turned to Lily. She felt that nobody would care a bit for Lily with her Chinese eyes and puckered face. She thought that Bankes should marry Lily as he cared a lot for her. So she must see that they took long walks together so that they might come closer. The guests were talking on various topics. Bankes was praising the Waverly novel and Tansley began to denounce them vehemently. Someone then asked how long such works were expected to last. Mrs. Ramsay was afraid that a question like that might disturb Mr. Ramsays mind, as he needed encouragement. Next the children sitting in a row attracted Mrs. Ramsays attention. Looking affectionately at Prue she began to think that she should be much happier in life than Minta as she was her own child. Dinner was almost over. Mrs. Ramsay suddenly felt that she liked Tansley in spite of all his drawbacks. Meanwhile her husband repeated some lines of poetry. Augustus Carmichael began to chant something and bowed to her. And then Mrs. Ramsay got up and left the room. The dinner was really over and became a thing of the past. After the departure of Mrs. Ramsay from the hall some sort of disintegration set in. She went upstairs alone. It flattered her to feel that all would ever remember her and this eventful party. In the bedroom she found to her annoyance that the children were not yet asleep. There was a boars skull on the wall and Cam was unable to sleep because

of it. James wanted it to be there. Mrs. Ramsay managed the situation tactfully by covering it with her shawl. But before going to sleep James once more asked if they were going to the Lighthouse the next day. She had to answer in the negative. Sadly she realised that James would never forget this in his life. While moving out she wished that Tansley might not bang his books on the floor above to disturb their sleep. She still felt annoyed with him because of what he had said about the visit to the Lighthouse to the children. Mrs. Ramsay felt herself as happy as a girl of twenty. And when Paul took out his lovely gold watch out of a wash-leather case to tell her the time, once more she felt very proud thinking that it was she who brought their affair to a happy end. Finally she had to leave them and entered the other room where her husband sat reading. Looking at her husband she felt that he did not like to be disturbed. He was absorbed in reading something very interestingand it was nothing but one of old Scotts books. She started knitting. But then she felt the need of a book. She picked up one and started reading. Their eyes met, but none was in a mood to talk to each other. Scotts sane and forceful writing made him feel much relieved. Soon Mrs. Ramsay became conscious of her husband looking at her. In spite of her ignorance and simplicity she seemed to him astonishingly beautiful. Mrs. Ramsay took the chance to tell him that Paul and Minta were engaged. Promptly came his reply that he had already guessed it. Mr. Ramsay asked her if she was really going to finish the stocking that night. This pleased her and her answer was in the negative. But still he gazed at her and she felt that he very much wanted her to tell him that she loved him. But she could not bring herself to tell that she loved him. She just turned and looked at him and smiled. And Mr Ramsay realised that although she had not uttered a word she really loved him. Part II Time Passes This second part of To The Lighthouse covers a period of ten years. It is made up of ten sections. Mr. Bankes, Andrew, Prue and Lily were talking to one another in the old summer house. Andrew came up from the beach and remarked that it was too dark to see. Prue asked Andrew to put out the lights in the hall. Only Mr. Carmichael continued to read Virgil and kept his candle burning. A thin rain was drumming on the roof and immense darkness enveloped the whole house. It was past midnight when Mr. Carmichael put out his candle. Night succeeded night and winter followed autumn. Stumbling across a passage, one dark morning Mr. Ramsay stretched his arms out; but they remained empty as Mrs. Ramsay had died suddenly the night before. In the deserted summer house silence and loneliness prevailed. Only stray gusts of wind blustered in from time to time and stealthily moved from room to room. At last the silence was broken by Mrs. McNab who was directed to dust and clean the bedrooms. Mrs. McNab was the caretaker of the house. She was an old, unhappy woman bent with age. She rolled from room to room and was bowed down with weariness while doing her tough job.

Spring came and it was followed by summer. During the course of three years Prue Ramsay was married. But unfortunately she died in child-birth. Andrew Ramsay was also killed in the battlefield in France. The First World War had already started. Meanwhile Mr. Carmichael brought out his first volume of poems and it had an unexpected success. Night followed night. The seasons came and went with fine or foul weather. It was rumoured that the summer house would soon be sold out. It was really in a very shabby and dilapidated condition. Once the Ramsays were expected to come there, but they should not due to the war and other difficulties. Now everything was at sixes and sevens and the house with the garden was decaying slowly. Mrs. McNab worked very hard to save it from absolute rack and ruin, although she was too old to get it straight now. While dusting and cleaning old memories crowded in on her. Sadly she remembered Mrs. Ramsay, Prue and Andrew. All were dead and gone. Still the house remained deserted. It became so dilapidated that the whole thing might crumble down at any moment. It was beyond the power of one old woman to prevent it from absolute ruin. So Mrs. McNab had to requisit the services of another old lady, Mrs. Bast. And then, very unexpectedly she got a letter from one of the Ramsay daughters that they were coming for the summer. So they got to work in right earnest with their broom and pail, mopping and scouring and stayed the corruption and rot. Things were set in order at last. And then, one evening in September Lily Briscoe arrived. Mr. Carmichael also came by the same train. It seemed peace had come there once more. The house was also full again. Lily was tired due to the long journey and so went to sleep without any delay. Mr. Carmichael also fell asleep after reading a book for some time in candle light. The soft murmur of the sea soothed them in their sleep. And it was Lily Briscoe who opened her eyes first when the day was just breaking. Part III: The Lighthouse In part three, things are happening after a lapse of ten years. Lily Briscoe and others came back to the summer house after so many years. Mr. Ramsay was no more. So rising early on the first morning she was in a contemplative mood with a sense of wonder and perplexity. That very morning Mr. Ramsay, Cam and James were going to make their expedition to the Lighthouse. But still the children were not ready. And Mr. Ramsay was very much upset at this. Sitting alone at the breakfast table Lily felt herself to be a stranger there, as if the link that usually bound things together had been cut. Suddenly Mr. Ramsay passed by and looked, straight at her. To avoid him Lily turned to her cup of coffee. He wanted to get sympathy from her. Came and went old Mr. Carmichael. Everything seemed to be strange and symbolic. Lily wanted to devote herself exclusively, to her picture. She pitched her easel and got to work. But she could not proceed due to the disturbing presence of Mr. Ramsay. It seemed to Lily that Cam and James were prevailed on by Mr. Ramsay to go the Lighthouse. They consented reluctantly. James was sixteen and Cam seventeen. It pained her much to find the children coerced and subdued.

Lily tried her best to concentrate on her picture. But she could not, as all the while Mr. Ramsay was bearing down on her, demanding sympathy. Finally she could not but make up her mind to give him what she should. Still Mr. Ramsay behaved and talked in a manner that showed that his need for sympathy was really great. But still Lily had no words of consolation. She could utter only a few words praising his beautiful boots. Finally the party left for the Lighthouse. She watched the procession with Mr. Ramsay as the leader of the expedition. And then a genuine feeling of sympathy for the unhappy widower rose in her soul. But Mr. Ramsay had no need of it any more. The party left, Lily felt as if one part of her was drawn out there. She also felt sad for Mr. Ramsay. She decided to paint. But then she realised that there was a lot of difference between planning and making the first mark with the brush. But soon she seemed greatly inspired and made her first decisive quick stroke and went on with her creative work with great zeal. All the while her mind kept throwing up from its depths scenes and names and sayings and memories and ideas. There was silence; nothing stirred in the house. Lily remembered Mrs. Ramsay and thought of her great power of resolving everything into simplicity. But soon she walked to the end of the lawn driven by some curiosity. In the distance she could see the little boat sailing away into the wide sea. There was hardly any breeze to make the sails bulge, so the boat made very little movement. Mr. Ramsay was impatient and asked Macalisters boy to start rowing. The children were also unhappy as they were forced to come in spite of their reluctance. Silently they made up their mind to resist tyranny to death and wished the expedition to be a complete failure. But, very soon the wind was up and the boat shot off. Mr. Ramsay felt relieved. Now James was to keep his eye all the time on the sail, otherwise the boat would slacken. Old Macalister began to tell them all about a shipwreck during a great storm there. Mr. Ramsay relished it. But the children remained quiet and sullen. The speed of the fast moving boat seemed to hypnotize Cam. But James wanted to be relieved of his burden. Both of them had a sense of escape and exultation. Mr. Ramsay too felt excited. Suddenly he asked them to look towards the island. But every thing seemed vague and unreal to Cam. He tried in vain to show her the location of their house. He scolded her in a jocular manner. And then just to make her smile he thought of saying some simple easy thing. In fact Mr. Ramsay was demanding sympathy also from his daughter. James was upset thinking that Cam would give way and he would have to wage a lonely battle against tyranny. But soon Cam remained quiet and stopped responding to her father, although she felt sympathy for him. James was relieved as he felt sure that Cam wouldnt succumb to her feelings. She could never forget her fathers senseless tyranny and blind dominance over them all. Standing on the edge of the lawn Lily Briscoe could still spot their boat far away on the sea. She was still heavy at heart as she had failed to offer sympathy to Mr. Ramsay when he needed it. It disturbed her mood to paint. She had always found Mr. Ramsay difficult and could never praise him to his face; as a result their relationship was void of

any element of sex. She remembered Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay as she had seen them on the beach ten years ago. Lily took up her brush again. But she experienced some difficulties. She began to ponder over the problems of her art. She felt that a picture should, no doubt, be bright and beautiful on the surface but its fabric must be as firm as a rock. As she painted, memories from the past crowded in on her. She remembered the Raleys-Paul and Minta. After the first years of married life things had gone really wrong with them. She visualized their sad, quarrelsome and unhappy life in a series of scenes. Lily remembered that Mrs. Ramsay had a sort of mania to see other people getting married. She even wanted her to marry Mr. Bankes. Now, dead as she was she would never know that the married life of Paul and Minta was a sad failure. She remembered she was once struck by the splendour and power of love emanating from Pauls face when he was in love with Minta. But still she thanked her stars for being able to overcome such emotions and stick to her profession of an artist for good. Once Mr. Bankes told her that Mrs. Ramsay was a paragon of beauty at the age of nineteen or twenty. Once more she remembered Mrs. Ramsay and tried to visualise her astonishing beauty. She wanted to ask Mr. Carmichael all sorts of questions about life, about death and specially about Mrs. Ramsay. But he was half-asleep. The memory of Mrs. Ramsay brought tears to her eyes. Looking at her picture she felt that everything would pass and vanish but not the genuine work of art. In the boat Macalisters boy cut a piece out of the side of a fish. He threw the mutilated body back into the sea as it was no more of any use to him. Lily wanted to bring back Mrs. Ramsay from the land of the dead and continued to call her by name in vain. But the vision of Mrs. Ramsay with a wreath of white flowers on her forehead inspired her to paint Mrs. Ramsay on the canvas and helped her to solve some intricate problems related to her painting. Once more her eyes turned towards the sea. The sight of a brown spot in the middle of the sea attracted her attention. She felt that Mrs. Ramsay must be sitting there in the boat with his children. Cam thought that people on the shore could never feel the joys and thrills of such an expedition. But then suddenly the sails sagged and the boat came to a stop. There under the hot sky they all began to feel one anothers presence. And James felt that if his father spoke harshly and demanded anything unreasonable he would strike him to the heart with a knife. His fierce passion of childhood to stab and kill his father when he prevented them from making the journey to the Lighthouse was still alive in him. From the boat James had a look at the Lighthouse. The stern and straight tower barred with black and white was quite visible. But he missed the charm of that silvery and misty looking tower of his childhood days. Suddenly a wind rose and the boat began to move and every one felt relieved. Lily Briscoe continued to gaze at the sea. The sea was calm and spotless. Distance seemed to have some extraordinary power and all seemed to be swallowed up by the sea. Cam had never a chance before to have a look at their island from the sea. Now she thought herself to be the heroine of an imaginary story of adventure. Her heart was full of the joy of living. All trifling affairs of life faded away into the past. In her present

elated mood her father seemed to be a lovable and wise person although to James he was nothing but a sarcastic brute and an unbearable egotistical tyrant. Lily Briscoe was still standing and looking at the distant sea. Her feelings for Mr Ramsay changed as his boat seemed to recede further and further. All was calm and quiet. On her stream of conciousness began to float many figures and things of the past. She thought of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, their children, Mr. Carmichael and even of Mr. Tansley. Lily gazed at the moving boat and thought that the party was likely to reach the Lighthouse by lunch time. But she felt perplexed as she could not achieve the required balance between the two opposite forcesMrs. Ramsay and her picture. And that is why she could not pinpoint the problem she wanted to solve before proceeding with her painting. Standing before her easel she realised that for painting this human apparatus was an insufficient machine. Lily continued to think of Mrs. Ramsay and her various merits and demerits, her married life and her complex relationship with her husband and above all of the multiplicity of her personality. She concluded that it required more than fifty pairs of eyes to understand a complex personality like that of Mrs. Ramsay. All of a sudden she felt that somebody had come into the drawing room and was sitting in the chair where Mrs. Ramsay used to sit. She was in mood to paint. But after a while, to her great horror and excitement she found that it was none but Mrs. Ramsay herself quietly sitting in her chair and knitting. She could not but call Mrs. Ramsay quite loudly by her name. At such a moment Lily keenly wanted Mr. Ramsay to be close to her to share her strange and horrified feelings. Mr. Ramsay had nearly finished the book he started reading after stepping into the boat. To James he seemed to be loneliness person. They were now very close to the Lighthouse that stood stark and straight on a bare rock. And to James life also seemed to be stark and straight like that Lighthouse. Cam was rather tired of looking at the sea. But after having a look at their father both brother and sister vowed once more to fight tyranny to death. Mr. Ramsay could never understand their feelings. Suddenly Mr. Ramsay asked them quite loudly to have their lunch. He opened the parcel and shared out the sandwiches among them. Macalister praised James for doing his job of steering quite nicely. But this did not satisfy James as his father had never praised him. To Cam sailing so fast by the rocks was really exciting. Macalister pointed out the place where a ship had sunk and three persons were drowned. They were sailing very close to the rock. And then quite unexpectedly Mr. Ramsay praised James very highly for steering them like a born sailor. This is what James had been waiting far all the while. James joy and happiness knew no bounds. The rock was very close. Mr. Ramsay sprang on to the rock quite lightly like a young man. The children followed him gladly. Lily Briscoe, still standing on the lawn, felt that Mr. Ramsay must have reached the Lighthouse. Her anxiety for them had told on her nerves. She was relieved. She had a feeling that she had finally given Mr. Ramsay whatever she wanted to give him when he left in the morning. Old Carmichael came there and he also agreed with her that they

must have landed at the Lighthouse. Without speaking to each other both of them were thinking about the same thing all the while. All of a sudden Lily seemed to be recalled by something. And quickly she returned to her canvas. She took up her brush and with a sudden intensity she drew a line in the centre. And whatever she wanted to do was done. She laid down her brush and felt that she had had her vision at last.

The Stream Of Consciousness Novel: Virginia Woolfs Contribution

Introduction It is in the early part of the nineteenth century that the stream of consciousness novel, a new literary genre, began to appear in the realm of English literature. It was William James who first used the phrase, stream of consciousness in his Principles of Psychology in 1890 to denote the chaotic flow of impressions and sensations through the human consciousness. Then Freuds writings began to appear in English translations shortly after 1910. The ideas of Bergson and William James also began to have their impact in England. According to William James, Consciousness in an amalgam of all that we have experienced and continue to experience. Every thought is a part of the personal consciousness: every thought is also unique and ever-changing. We seem to be selective in our thoughts, selectively attentive or inattentive focusing attention on certain objects and areas of experience, rejecting others, totally blocking others out. Experience is remoulding us every moment and our mental reaction on every given thing is really a result of our experience of the whole world up to the moment. And this is also true not only of ideas but also of sensory perception as consciousness registers them. Edwardians and Georgians In fact the Edwardian writers saw people as simple, whole and definable, whereas the Georgians began to see them as complex, diverse and ineffable. The rise of this literary genre of the stream of consciousness, novel in the early twenties is but a reaction of the increasing inwardness of life consequent upon the breakdown of accepted values with the turn of the century and the outbreak of the First World War accelerated this process. The Georgians realised that if they were to explore the new territories, they required new tools. The new perspective needed a new technique. Mrs. Dorothy M. Richardson was, no doubt, the pioneer in this field in England. But Virginia Woolf was the most important protagonist of this new literary genre. Of course this was not just confined to England. On the eve of the First World War, three novelists unknown to each other, began their epoch-making works destined to have enormous influence on the fiction of the century. In France, Marcel Proust published the first two volumes of his Remembrance of This Past. And then in 1914 James Joyce, an Irishman, began publishing in serial form A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And the third novelist was Miss Dorothy Richardson. So between 1913 and 1915 was born the new novel, the psychological novel or the novel of the stream of consciousness. And the great thing is that the three novelists turned fiction from the external to internal reality.

All the three wrote from an acute need to pose inner problems and project their inner life before the world. Other Influences We may now assert that the modern psychological novel is modern in a way that it reflects the deeper and more searching inwardness of our century. And, in fact, this turning inward was promoted by the writings of Bergson and Freud besides those of William James. Bergson and Theory of Time The novelists of this new school were greatly influenced by Bergson who held that we all are remoulded constantly by experience and our consciousness in a process of endless accretions as long as mind and senses are functioning. The continuation of an infinite past in the living present is always there. Bergson divided time into Linner time or Duree; it may also be called psychological time. And the other is Clock time or mechanical time. Inner time is conceived as a flow, a continuous moving stream and hence the division into past, present and future as artificial and mechanical. In fact the past lives on in the present, in memory and its consequences, and hence it also shapes the future. Hence in the psychological novels there is a preoccupation with time. So in this type of novel we find the action moving backward and forward freely in time. There is no chronological forward movement which is a common feature of the traditional novel. There the movement is zig-zag, a sinuous movement from the past to the present, and from the present to the past. Thus we often find the novelists of this school making an hour seem like a week or a week like an hour. In this connection David Daiches comments are worth quoting The stream of consciousness technique is a means of escape from tyranny of the time dimension. It is not only in distinct memories that the past impinges on the present, but also in much vaguer and more subtle ways, our mind floating off down some channel, superficially irrelevant but really having a definite starting-off place from the initial situation, so that in presenting the characters reaction to events, the author will show us states of mind being modified by associations and recollections deriving from the present situation, but referring to a constantly shifting series of events in the past. And we find Mrs. Woolf showing great skill in the manipulation of time in her Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse. Human Consciousness: Its different Layers The great psychologists like Freud, Adler and Jung probed deeper and deeper into the human consciousness. They studied it very carefully and conceived of it as nothing static or fixed. To them it was something in a state of flux, constantly changing and becoming different, in response to sensations and emotions received from outside. And then deeper probings and careful researches by them revealed that there were layers within layers in the human consciousness. Beneath the conscious, there is the subconscious, and then the unconscious. And the epoch-making revelation is that the past lives in the sub-conscious and the unconscious and is brought up to the conscious level through memory and recollection. And the conscious is only a small part of the human psyche or soul. Hence human actions are bound to be determined more by the subconscious and the unconscious than by the conscious. Then Freuds concepts like mother-fixation or father-fixation or Oedipus complex have been freely exploited by the modern writers in their novels known as psycho-analytical novels. It may be noted

that the stream of consciousness novel carries the impression of all these theories and the result of careful researches. More Interested in the Inner than in the Outer Life The modern novelist of the new school is more interested in the inner than in the outer life of a character. And the aim of these writers is to render the soul or psyche truthfully and realistically and hence they use the stream of consciousness technique. They know and so they want to show that the human psyche is not a simple entity functioning logically and rationally, in a predictable manner. Hence, in their novels, in place of external action and violent deeds, there is the interior monologue and there are the fluid mental states. The novelist creates a world of his own with its own laws. Hardly any climax or a turning point is to be found in the story. It is the penumbra of the mind which becomes important. Hence the modern novelists of this new school are spiritual, as opposed to the Edwardian novelists. Hence these type of novels have mainly as their essential subject-matter the consciousness of one or more characters. The depicted consciousness serves as a screen on which the material in these novels is presented. There is very little of external action. But in its place we get the interior monologue and the fluid mental statesexisting simultaneously at a number of points in a persons total experience. Interior Monologue The interior monologue is, in fact, an integral part of the novels of this new literary genre. This internal or interior monologue is the silent speech of a given character, designed to introduce us directly into the internal life of the character without the authors intervention to explain or to comment. A well-known French novelist defined it as the speech of a character in a scene, having for its object the direct introduction of the reader into the inner life of a character, without an intervention by way of explanation or commentary on the part of the author; like other monologues, it has theoretically no organisation in these respects: in the matter of content, it is an expression of the most intimate thoughts, those which lie nearest the unconscious, in its nature it is a speech which precedes logical organisation, reproducing the intimate thoughts just as they are born and just as they come; as for form, it employs direct sentences reduced to the syntaxical minimum, thus in general it fulfils the same requirement as we make today for poetry. Thus we may say that this is a new technical device that enables the reader to enter the inner life of a character straightaway and to watch the flow of sensations and impressions as they rise without any logical organisation. Plot and Character In the psychological novel there is hardly any plot or story. Both plot and character in the conventional sense have decayed in the novels of this new genre. There is no set description of characters as in the older novel; there is a shift from the externals to the inner self of various personages. And then there is no plot-construction in the sense of a logical arrangement of incidents and events, leading chronologically to a catastrophe or denouement. And according to Virginia Woolf herself, in the novel of subjectivity there is no plot, no character, no tragedy, no comedy, and no love-interest as in the traditional novel. That is why she abandoned the convention of story for the same reason that she abandoned the convention of character drawing; neither of them could be made to

express life as she saw it. She ceased to draw characters in outline, she ceased to sum up men and women or to give her reader the illusion that they could be covered with a formula, or that their identity was constant or definable. As in her conception of human personality, so in her conception of human experience, continuity and fluidity is emphasized rather than boundary or definition. To the writers of this school a continuous action seems too unlike ordinary experience, with its freakish accidental interruptions, its overlapping of time and circumstance. According to them the sense of life is often best rendered by an abrupt passing from one series of events, one group of characters, one-centre of consciousness, to another. Hence they dont particularly care about neatly finishing off a given action, following it through to the fall of the curtain. They also feel that the imagination is stimulated and rendered more active, is actually exhilarated, by broken bits of information, as the nerves are stimulated by the discontinuity of an electric current. Thus the technique of these writers conforms more closely to the actual thought process, which is made up of a flux of sensations and impressions than does a connected chain of logical reasoning. In addition, their purpose is to turn the reader into an author by removing themselves from the scene. It was for achieving a full measure of realism that the novelist left, the characters alone to put forth their mind. It was an attempt to document the whole world of the sense in a minute and to catch fugitive thoughts in their progress through the mindcatch them as Joyce did in Ulysses in their movement or flux. For the first time these writers were trying to find words that would convey elusive and evanescent thought. They were seeking to express, moreover, the images of the inner world of fantasy, fusing with sounds and smell, the world of perceptual experience. So it must be carefully noted that the stream of consciousness technique is a way of rendering the psyche or the soul of the characters, accurately and realistically. And to know a character really or truthfully, we must know what is happening inside his mind, we must plunge into his pre-speech level of consciousness, and see what sensations and impressions are floating there uncontrolled and unorganised. Mrs. Woolf and the Stream of Consciousness Novel Undoubtedly Dorothy Richardson is the English writer who is the pioneer in this field and who presents stream of consciousness writing at its purest. But among the stream of consciousness novelists in England, Virginia Woolf is the most important name. Mrs. Richardsons work is in fact unbearably diffuse and an average reader finds her almost unbearable. In contrast with her Mrs. Woolf can tightly organise a novel. She realised that the tools and established conventions of the Edwardian novelists would mean sure ruin for the novelist of the new generation and hence she made continued experiments with the form of the novel. Her chief purpose was to record what lifes for living beings, and then to communicate the impression made by one individual upon another. She also aimed at revealing the human personality partly through its own selfconsciousness and partly through the picture projected by it on other minds. But she knew that art implies selection and ordering of materials. Hence she did not follow her theory in every detail in her great novels like Mrs. Dalloway or To The Lighthouse. There is definitely some form or pattern and some inner unity in these novels. Most of the novelists of this hardly cared for a closed and compact plot. As a result the novel in their hand became very often incoherent and shapeless and made unbearable for most of the readers. That is why they find even great works like Ulysses unreadable, freakish

and eccentric. But the credit of imparting form and discipline to the chaotic novel of this genre and making it acceptable to the average reader must go to Virginia Woolf whose contribution in this field is of far-reaching consequence. Of course the influence of Joyce and Bergson is considerable. But she is by no means a blind imitator of the great masters of the new technique or the psychologists who furnished the theoretical framework for the stream of consciousness novel. Her essential method is her own. That is why we find that the novelist is playing the role of a central intelligence in her outstanding novels and is constantly busy, organising the material and illuminating it by frequent comments. In fact Virginia Woolf was a great experimenter. She experimented with many methods and gave to the stream of consciousness technique so many twists and turns and finally achieved her complete success in Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse. Unquestionably she was a professional, evolving a new form of fiction and creating a masterpiece in it. Thus, for all her brilliant achievements in this literary genre of the stream of consciousness novel Virginia Woolf is the most important name among the novelists of the new school. And that is why Virginia Woolf belongs to literature and Miss Dorothy Richardson along with many other writers of this genre to the history of literature

The Chief Characteristics of Virginia Woolfs Art as a Novelist

Introductory We have already pointed out that Virginia Woolf was extremely dissatisfied with the current form of the novel as represented by the great Edwardians, Bennett, Wells or Galsworthy. The form of the novel that prevailed in the first quarter of this century seemed to her to obscure or even falsify her experience. She has very clearly and forcefully expressed her own views in her great essay, Modern Fiction. To her life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but it is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. And task of the novelist, according to her, is to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display.... And then there were the prominent literary developments of the age, which were making it impossible for a sensitive writer to remain in a fixed and narrow groove. And Virginia Woolf had the courage to discard the orthodox linear narrative of the Edwardians after her first two novels and used instead a distinctive impressionistic technique, characterised by lyrical intensity and subtle penetration into the stream of consciousness. And gradually she established herself to be one of those great English novelists who gave a new direction, a new form and a new spiritual awareness to the English novel. No Element of StoryRendering of inner reality As Virginia Woolf broke free from tradition, she had also to discard the current form of the novel. But then she was driven to invent her own technique which would express her own vision of life. And Mrs. Woolf had already expressed very strongly that if the novelist could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love-interest or catastrophe in the accepted style. Hence in most of her novels there is hardly any element of story. Mrs. Woolfs formula for the novel was not humanity in action but in a state of infinite perception. The novel in her hands is not just an entertainment, or propaganda, or the vehicle of some fixed ideas or theories, or a social document, but a voyage of exploration to find out how life is lived, and how it can be rendered as it is actually lived without distortion. Hence she concentrates her attention on the rendering of inner reality and gives subtle and penetrating inlets into the consciousness of her characters. She cares very little for narrating dramatic events. The World of Outer Reality not Ignored It is to be noted that because her main purpose as a novelist is to depict inner life of human beings, she has not ignored the world of outer reality, the warm and palpable life of nature. In fact, in her novels we find that the metaphysical interest is embodied in purely human and personal terms, that the bounding line of art remains unbroken, that the concrete images which are the very stuff of art are never sacrificed to abstraction, but are indeed more in evidence than in the work of such writers as Bennett and Wells. The essential subject matter of her novels is no doubt the consciousness of one or more characters, but the outer life of tree and stream, of bird and fish, of meadow and seashore crowds in upon her and lends her image after image, a great, sparkling and

many-coloured world of sight and scent and sound and touch. Herein lies the magic and miracle of her work. Emergence of an Art Form In Virginia Woolfs novels we find a rare artistic integrity and they display a welldeveloped sense of form. To communicate her experience she had to invent conventions as rigid or more rigid than the old ones that she discarded. And this she does in her best novels of the middle and the final periodMrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, The Waves and Between the Acts. In each case a small group of people is selected, and through their closely interrelated experience the reader receives his total impression. We also find that in each case certain images, phrases and symbols bind the whole together. So there are certain resemblances between them in structure or style. Apart from these general resemblances each of these novels is a fresh attempt to solve the problems raised by the departure from traditional conventions. So it is observed that each of her novels grows out of the preceding one and we see the germ of her later works in their predecessors. Another significant point is that in Mrs. Woolfs novels from Jacobs Rooms to The Waves there is far less scene-setting and novel of it is obvious; deliberate stage managing disappears, in fact concealed; hence the method is poetic, the unity is a poetic unity. But the unity is there and is deliberately achieved. Poetisation of the English Novel One of the most outstanding achievements of Virginia Woolf is that she represents the poetisation and musicalisation of English novel. Among the English novelists she is foremost in lyrical technique. She sets out on a quest for a mediating form through which she could convey simultaneously picture of life and manners and a corresponding image of minds. She aimed at conveying inner life and this could be best done in a lyrical manner. Hence it is found that in order to enrich her language, she used vivid metaphors and symbols which are peculiar to poetry. Her language is the language of poetry, her prose style has the assonances, the refrains, the rhythms and the accents of poetry itself. Virginia Woolfs lyrical narrative is based on a design on which various contents of consciousness are juxtaposed. The equilibrium between the lyrical and narrative art shows how Virginia Woolf brilliantly achieves the telescoping of the poets lyrical self and the novelists omniscient point of view. It is a case of unified sensibility, that is, a blending of the objective and the subjective, which is considered to be the best form of poetry particularly in modern poetry. Virginia Woolfs To The Lighthouse shows her lyricism in a superb manner and Time Passes, the second part of this novel, has been described by the novelist herself as particularly representative of her lyric vein. The Interior MonologueStream of Consciousness Technique To the novelists of the new school human consciousness is a chaotic welter of sensations and impressions; it is fleeting, trivial and evanescent. And according to Virginia Woolf, the great task of the novelist should be to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit. His main business is just to reveal the sensations and impressions to bring us close to the quick of the mind. He should be more concerned with inner reality rather than outer. This is what is known as the stream of consciousness technique. And we are introduced into interior life of a character by means of interior monologue. There is very little intervention in the way of explanation or commentary on the part of the novelist. And this has been done by Virginia Woolf by

a very skilful use of the interior monologue or the stream of consciousness technique. She has very successfully revealed the very spring of action, the hidden motives which impel men and women to act in a particular way. She has been able to take us directly into the minds of her characters and show the flow of ideas, sensations and impressions there. And thus Mrs. Woolf has been able to create a number of memorable, many-sided and rounded figures, such as Mrs. Ramsay or Mrs. Dalloway, which are among the immortals of literature. The Distinctive Nature of Reality It will be clearly evident to a discerning reader of Mrs. Woolfs novels that the reality that she deals with has a distinctness about it. Jean Guiguets comments on this are worth noting Her reality is not a factor to be specified in some question of the universe: it is the Sussex towns, the London streets, the waves breaking on the shore, the woman sitting opposite her in the train, memories flashing into the mind from nowhere, a beloved beings return into nothingness; it is all that is not ourselves and yet is so closely mingled with ourselves that the two enigmasreality and selfmake only one. But the important thing is the nature or quality of this enigma. It does not merely puzzle the mind; it torments the whole being, even while defining it. To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and the non- self. Artistic Sincerity and Integrity Virginia Woolf had her own original vision of life and she has ever remained truthful to her vision. And this truthfulness and this artistic integrity is due to her perfect detachment from all personal prejudices and preconceived notions or from any personal end. Literary traditions and conventions, or social and political problems of the day nothing could deter her from writing according to her vision, according to the ideal which exists in her mind with uncommon artistic sincerity and integrity. And then Mrs. Woolf was a naturalist as well as a contemplative. In the words of Bernard Blackstone, She observes new facts, and old facts in a new way; but she also combines them, through the contemplative act, into new and strange patterns. The outer is not only related to, it is absorbed into the inner life. Mrs. Woolf believed in the power of the mind and so she makes her reader think. Aestheticism We have already discussed in detail Mrs. Woolfs aestheticism. The significant thing about her is that there is nothing languid or academic about her aestheticism. She could find beauty as much in a scrap of orange peel lying in the gutter as in the Venus de Milo She was a great lover of beauty and this love of beauty guides her in her selection and ordering of reality. Womans Point of View; Feminisation of English Novel It would have to be accepted that Virginia Woolf was a woman and naturally in her novels she gives us the womans point of view. That is why we find her relying more on intuition than on reason. We also find in her a womans dislike for the world of societies churches, banks and schools and the political, social and economic movements of the day have hardly any attraction for her. As a sheltered female of her age she had hardly any scope to have any knowledge of the sordid and brutal aspects of life. Thus we find that her picture of life does not include vice, sordidness or the abject brutality of our age.

So it may be inferred that Mrs. Woolf thus represents the feminisation of the English novel. Limitations of her Range The limited range of Mrs. Woolfs characterisation is clearly evident in her works. Her characters are definitely convincing in their own way, but they are drawn from a very limited range. They mainly belong to the upper middle class life and to a certain temperament too. She could paint only certain types of characters. They tend to think and feel alike to be the aesthetes of one set of sensations. Being a woman of her times she avoids the theme of passionate love. She could not write of sex freely and frankly and so has avoided it altogether in her novels. But still she achieved greatness and artistic perfection by a clear recognition of these limitations, and by working within them. Conclusion Virginia Woolfs greatest achievement is that in her novels the stream of consciousness technique finds a balance. She knew that art required a selection and ordering of material. Hence her work has a rare artistic integrity. In fact she wonderfully succeeded in imposing form and order on the chaos inherent in the novel of subjectivity or the stream of consciousness novel. And it was Mrs. Woolf who was also one of the most forceful and original theorists of the stream of consciousness novel, and be her exposition of aesthetics of this kind of novel, she did much to throw light on its technique, and to bring out its superiority to the conventional novel.

THE EVOLUTION OF VIRGINIA WOOLFS ART AND TECHNIQUE

Introductory Virginia Woolf was totally dissatisfied with the current form of the novel as represented by the novels of the Edwardians like Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy. According to her in their novels life escapes, because life is not what they, especially Bennett, present in their famous novels. The form of the novel which prevailed in the first quarter of this century seemed to her to obscure or even to falsify experience. Then the prominent literary developments of the age were making it impossible for a sensitive writer to remain in a fixed and narrow groove. The new interpretations of consciousness as a continuous stream, the initiation of the movement of time as a pervading quality of reality shook the accepted bases of artistic formula. Some other novelists of this period also felt that existing technique of the novel had outlived its utility; it was no longer able to deal with the complex life of the times. Thus we find Virginia Woolf setting herself to destroy the current form of the novel and then driven to invent one which would express her own vision of life. And Virginia Woolf was a great novelist, and by adopting and developing the stream of consciousness technique to capture that uncircumscribed spirit, the fleetingness of life she advanced the frontiers of the English novel towards new horizons. Her skill in the use of this technique underwent gradual evolution and in some of her later novels her achievement was great and outstanding. First Two Novels: First Phase In fact Virginia Woolf started her literary career in 1905 when she began to write critical reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and a few other periodicals. But her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 and the second one Night and Day came out in 1919. Both the novels are largely traditional in technique. As regards The Voyage Out the texture of incidents on which the novel is embroidered is really thin. It lacks unity and it cannot be described as an example of the stream of consciousness technique. In her second novel, Night and Day, it seems she was earnest about making use of her own theories in her writing. But this novel is also an exercise in traditional technique. But in this novel we find her speaking of writing as that process of selfexamination, that perpetual effort to understand ones own feelings and express it beautifully or energetically in language. Night and Day seems to have more depth than the earlier novel and is also a more mature and finished work. The Middle Phase Virginia Woolfs three novels of this phaseJacobs Room, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouseclearly reveal that she is coming of age as a novelist. Jacobs Room was published in 1922. Certain features of this novel give a clear indication that Virginia Woolf was on her way to adopt the stream of consciousness technique. It is her first, real and successful use of this new technique. Here we find that the superfluous events have been rejected and the novelists entire attention is centred on characterisation through the impressionistic method. Mrs. Woolf sets out to relate the life and death of Jacob Flanders. But she has not followed the technique of the traditional novelists. She simply gives us an impression of the significance of Jacobs personality which is allowed

to emerge from a statement of a few incidents taken from different stages of life, and from what he thinks and says, and from what others think and say of him. There is very little development of the story Virginia Woolf has concentrated on the inner life of Jacob Flanders. Mrs. Dalloway was published in 1925. This novel shows how remarkably Mrs. Woolf has succeeded in adopting the stream of consciousness technique. She no doubt began using the stream of consciousness technique with Jacobs Room but it is in her next two novels, Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse, that this technique is carried to its highest level of achievement. In Mrs. Dalloway the action is limited temporarily to a single day in the life of its chief character, specially to a single place, London, and emotionally to the relations of Mrs. Dalloway with a few other people. But as the action is presented in the main through the minds of these few persons, and as the mind ranges without limitation of time and space, the novel is actually concerned more with the past of its characters than with the present of its single day, as much with other scenes as with London. Then the narration does not move forward in a chronological order, but there is much backward and forward movement. Then again just as the action moves in time and space, soon it also moves from one consciousness to another, and this movement throughout is an alternating one. From the consciousness of Mrs. Dalloway we move to the consciousness of Septimus, Rezia, Peter Walsh, Kilman, and others, and are then back again to the consciousness of Mrs. Dalloway. Hence according to R.L. Chambers, it is on this pattern that the whole structure of the book is carefully built up, and the interesting result is that out of a series of incomplete pieces a complete whole is constructed. Thus we find that in this novel Virginia Woolf has succeeded in imparting form and coherence to the apparently formless stream of consciousness technique. Virginia Woolfs next novel, To the Lighthouse, appeared in 1928 and it reveals greater maturity and even greater command over technique. It is a unique work of art and there is nothing second-hand about this novel. The convention in which it is written permit the novelist to convey with wonderful precision a certain intimate quality of felt life. The novel represents a prefect compromise between the need for formal clarity and the requirements of the stream of consciousness technique. In this outstanding novel, the stream of consciousness method achieves a balance which it had hitherto seemed to lack. That is why David Daiches justly remarked: To the Lighthouse is a work in which plot, locale and treatment are so carefully bound up with each other that the resulting whole is more finely organised and more effective than anything else Virginia Woolf wrote. The Last Phase The Waves and Other: Virginia Woolf was a tireless experimenter. In the last phase we get four more works of fiction from Virginia Woolf: Orlando in 1928, The Waves in 1931, The Years in 1937 and Between the Acts. The last one was published posthumously in 1941. Yet apart from Orlando which is a great book but not a great novel hardly indeed a novel at allnone of these can be said to follow by the logic of artistic development the lines laid down in the work of her middle period, from Jacobs Room to To the Lighthouse. So in her works of the last phase we find her striking into separate and unconnected byways instead of carrying the stream of consciousness method to its logical conclusions. Orlando

This is a fantasy-biography, rather a historical fantasy that moves in time from about 1586 to 1928. It belongs to a class by itself. It stands alone, a fantastic and recalcitrant tailpiece to the progress which began with Jacobs Room. That is why it has been given innumerable interpretations. A critic has called it a study in multiple personality, and a protest against the too narrow labelling of anybody; a dynamic fantasia on the history of Englands spirit; a learned parable of literary criticism. And according to some critics, Orlando seems not to be a novel in any rigid sense of the word. The Waves This is in every way an innovation and it was acclaimed by a few critics as the best work of Virginia Woolf. But the novel has its characteristic defect such as its pattern is excessively formal, even artificial and though it is nearest to poetic drama, its limited mould ignores the wider world of outer reality. The chief merit of this novel lies in its inwardness and its concentratedness. It consists wholly of the mental monologues of its six characters and in this way the novelist has tried to eliminate altogether the subjective element. But the stream of consciousness does not require complete elimination of the artist, but its peculiar beauty arises from its fluidity of atmosphere in which the authors and characters impressions are convincingly compounded. A balance between the two must be struck and it was struck as perfectly as it has ever been struck in Mrs. Dalloway and in To the Lighthouse, thereby reaching the logical conclusion of artistic development in her method. She aimed at going further in this novel and went beside the mark and thus injured the structure of the novel. The Years We find Virginia Woolf In The Years reverting to the manner of her earliest phase which is largely traditional. The presentation is no doubt objective, but it is very much lacking in life and vitality. The Years is a scenic novel, so that the reader remembers people and action rather than individual mood and attitudes. But in spite of its striking scenes and beauties of style, the novel, on the whole, seems to be a failure. Between the Acts Mrs. Woolfs last novel Between the Acts, published posthumously, has been described as the most symbolical of her novels. But it is also a baffling work, baffling in its symbolic significance as well as in its technique and construction. We have two central figures Isabella and Giles. The writer has presented the two characters through the stream of consciousness technique, but our knowledge of much else that is presented comes through objective description and straightforward statement by the author. And R.L. Chambers has justly remarked In this respect it is an improvement over the novels of the middle phase, and seems to be the logical and natural development of the stream of consciousness technique. But still the novel suffers from a serious fault of construction. It has two emotional centres, the pageant on the one hand and the mind of the characters on the other; but there is no inherent and necessary connection between the two. Even so, the excellence of the novel lies in its theme which is the ageless paradox between mans insatiable thirst for the ideal and his constant preoccupation with the trivial, the dateless limit of human history and the brief candle of an individual life. Conclusion

After the discussion it becomes crystal clear that Virginia Woolf was really a great experimenter. She experimented with many methods and gave the stream of consciousness technique many twists and turns and finally achieved complete success in Mrs. Dallaway and To The Lighthouse. Thus her achievement in the realm of English literature was great and outstanding and according to R.L. Chambers, she advanced the frontiers of the English novel by the mastery of a new and potentially fruitful technique; and so in the lists of great novelists, she will find a place perhaps not without honour.