The novel’s events take 24 hours, as in Ulysses, which she was reading as she wrote
it. Clarissa dominates the book, though what we are to make of her never becomes
clear, and is not meant to. For Virginia Woolf, reality is ambiguous, and life does not
readily yield meaning, which lies in regions below the external appearances, whose
evanescence she registers so delicately. In these regions are obscure images and
fantasies quite unconnected to social roles. Apart from Clarissa’s old flame, and the
suicidally alienated victim of shell-shock, the men in the book amount to no more
than their social roles – the men-about-town, Richard and Hugh, and the caricature
Doctors Holmes and Bradshaw. (Sherlock Holmes is Conan Doyle’s detective, foren-
sically expert on deducing the meaning of physical facts; Bradshaw compiled the
facts in railway timetables). The author felt both repelled and fascinated by the
conventional upper middle class to which, if to any class, she belonged.
To the Lighthouse
Woolf’s subjective apprehension of time is imposed through the tripartite structure
of her most successful work,To the Lighthouse (1927), in which two long days are
separated by ten short years. In the first act the Ramsay family are at their holiday
home on Skye. This is the opening of Part I, ‘The Window’, the first words of the
novel:
‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine to-morrow,’ said Mrs Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the
lark,’ she added.
To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled the
expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward,
for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch.
Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this
feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows,
cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn
in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon
which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures
from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a
refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The
wheelbarrow, the lawn-mower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain,
rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling – all these were so coloured and
distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret language,
though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, with his high
forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the
sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly round
the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and
momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs.The length and falling-forward gait of the long sentences either side of ‘It was fringed
with joy’ pull the reader into James’s six-year-old consciousness. We too see the joy-
fringed refrigerator, smiling at the adjective, and at his mother’s picture of him in the
future. James’s father now remarks that it will notbe ‘fine’ tomorrow. Mrs Ramsay,
we know, will try to shield James against this disappointment. Woolf ’s writing is
often as carefully flighted as this, informal yet composed, judiciously adding a detail
- much as, at the end of the book, the painter Lily Briscoe adds a brush-stroke to
co nsummate her painting, just at the moment when Mr Ramsay reaches the light-
house with James and his sister. Reality (for that, in some form, is what is conveyed
to a novel’s readers) is aesthetic in form.
‘MODERNISM’: 1914–27 359