English 101: English Literature

An overview of the plot, characters, and stylistic innovations in Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse.' We'll talk about Woolf's use of voices and perspectives of multiple characters and her fluid sense of time within the novel.

Overview of To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf described To the Lighthouse by calling it 'easily the best of my books' after she finished a draft of it. She published it in 1927, so she had a few good ones left in her after that - The Waves and Orlando. I think what she's saying is that, compared to things she'd written before, which were Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob's Room, she kind of feels like this one is really more of a fulfillment of her project, what she's trying to do. It's really a cool, weird, experimental work that's got a plot, which we'll go over, that's pretty slight and kind of easy to outline. But like with a lot of modernist work - like with a lot of Virginia Woolf, with Joyce, Elliot, everyone else - the plot is a thing to hang their experimental style and ideas about thoughts and memories and things. It's kind of a thing to hang that on, rather than the point.

Setting and Character Introduction

So basically what happens in Part One, which is called 'The Window,' the Ramseys are a family, and we meet them. They're kind of well-to-do, and they have a summer house on the Isle of Skye, which is in Scotland. Mr Ramsey is a philosopher, and he's a really smart dude. He and his wife Mrs. Ramsey have a bunch of people over to their house to stay and have a little dinner party. Some of the people they have over are Lily Briscoe, who's a painter, and this obnoxious dude named Charles Tansley, who's a philosophy student. He's kind of into Mr. Ramsey, kind of idolizes him a little bit. He says that women can't paint or write, which, coming from Virginia Woolf, you know that that guy's not a cool dude. She's not going to have someone say that who's right, because she's obviously writing. And then you have some other people, Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle. Mrs Ramsey has set them up, they're going to get married, and she's happy that she's managed to make that happen. There's a poet who comes to hang out. The Ramseys also have kids. James is their youngest son, Cam is their daughter, Prue is the oldest daughter. There's a bunch of others that don't really matter as much so we're not going to talk about them.

Plot and Character Development

The book opens with James, who is the son, the youngest son, and he's asking his father Mr. Ramsey if they can go to the lighthouse, which is the title. They're going to get in their boat and go to this lighthouse and Mrs. Ramsey says sure, if the weather is good. Mr. Ramsey says but it won't be good, and so James understandably thinks his dad's being mean and we get a nice little internal monologue from James. We all kind of know a Mr. Ramsey, you know, 'we'll be there in an hour if the traffic's good, but it won't be good,' 'we'll make it through the security line if it's short, but it won't be short.' That's kind of the dynamic that we see right away between Mr. Ramsey and Mrs. Ramsey, that she's kind of optimistic, living in the moment and he's more preoccupied. He's not going to let her say 'oh yeah, if it's good' because he knows, or he's pretty sure, that it won't be. So that's important to him, to kind of stay in the realm of the real rather than the possible or the present like Mrs. Ramsey.

And so we get some scenes of the afternoon. Lily is starting her painting, that becomes important later on, Paul and Minta get engaged, and then they have their big dinner party. Some of their guests are predictably obnoxious. Then the party is over, and Mrs. Ramsey starts reflecting on time and how things move forward, and how this dinner party is going to be remembered by people - by Paul and Minta, who got engaged right before it, how it's going to be for them. Then she and Mr. Ramsey have an interesting conversation where she finally agrees that the weather probably is going to be bad tomorrow. That's seen by him as a sort of implicit gesture of love from her, that she's kind of willing to say 'you know what, you're right, the weather is going to be bad.' And you can see right here that Woolf is interested in portraying relationships between people in a very idiosyncratic way. She doesn't have her characters just say 'I love you,' she's showing how people show love in all different kinds of ways, including just by saying that the weather is bad.

Woolf's Narrative Devices

Then we get to Section Two, which is very short. It's called 'Time Passes,' and you might be able to guess what happens in 'Time Passes' - it passes. We get sort of a general overview - the house is being maybe taken care of a little bit by housekeepers, nobody comes there. But the really interesting thing about it is that we get these violent things that happen, that are in brackets. So it'll be something like oh the house is being taken care of by so-and-so, and then we'll get 'Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they said, had promised so well.' So we just find out that Prude died, with no fanfare or anything, that's just sort of there. And also, Mrs. Ramsay dies, we find out sort of in a similar way.

So then we come back in Part Three, which is called 'The Lighthouse,' and you can guess what's going to happen now. This is ten years after part one. Mrs. Ramsay is dead, Prue is dead, and Mr. Ramsay and his son James and daughter Cam are going to go to the lighthouse. And Lily Briscoe is back as well; she's staying at the house and finishing her painting. So she watches them go out to the lighthouse and finds the thing to do the final stroke of her painting, and she says 'I have had my vision,' and that is how the book ends.

Shifting Perspectives and Woolf's Style

That plot, as you can see, there's not really much there that happens. The real star of the show is these shifting perspectives. You get to know all these people through their own thoughts. So Mr. Ramsay, the philosopher guy, he thinks about his own intellectual achievements in terms of the alphabet. So he thinks that he's gotten to R, and he wonders if he'll get to Q, and he wonders if anybody ever gets to Z. So he's kind of conceptualizing it in this way, and that's very different from Lily Briscoe's thoughts. She's thinking about how she can tell whether she's wearing her 'golden haze' by how men respond to her. So Woolf is able to get character across through these characters' own particular ways of thinking about things, and self concepts, and what they choose to think about. Mr. Ramsay is wrapped up in his own thoughts and his own achievements, and Lily Briscoe is really concerned with how she relates to other people, and maybe worrying about that - like why is it that she can only tell that she's wearing her 'golden haze' from men, and why can't she tell that by herself? So we get these internal thoughts that are used as characterization, and that's a huge part.

These shifting perspectives become so important that they get to be more important than a progression of time. So moments in this book become more defined by perception and interpretation than by the clock. So Mr. And Mrs. Ramsay's opening thoughts and discussion about whether it's going to be fine tomorrow or not fine tomorrow seem to demonstrate this. And this idea of time as something that can be sort of manipulated or preserved or dealt with at will is kind of epitomized in that opening, in those differing perspectives of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay.

We've talked about what else is going on, that it's all about these internal thoughts and the setting of this idea that time is based on perspective and thought and memory, and that it's not so much based on a strict progression from A to Z. All of that is hung on that bare-bones plot, and ends up making up an interesting novel that becomes about its own telling and its own perspective. And that's To the Lighthouse!