Authors: Ruth Gruber
This is the flaunt in the face of futility: “we remain”. There is no still-standing, life moves in Heraclitean waves of ebb and flow. There are moments when the house seems on the verge of destruction, when, as the toll of time, disintegration seems the only certainty. “The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains mow that life had left it. The long night seemed to have set in … ”
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But the forces of life are unceasingly at play.
“For now had come that moment, that hesitation when dawn trembles and night pauses, when if a feather alight in the scale it will be weighed down. One feather, and the house, sinking, falling,
would have
turned and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness. In the ruined room, picnickers would have lit their kettles; lovers sought shelter there, lying on the bare boards; and the shepherd stored his dinner on the bricks, and the tramp slept with his coat round him to ward off the cold. Then the roof would have fallen; briars and hemlocks would have blotted out path, step, and window; would have grown, unequally but lustily over the mound, until some trespasser, losing his way, could have told only by a red-hot poker among the nettles, or a scrap of china in the hemlock, that here once some one had lived; there had been a house.
“If the feather had fallen, if it had tipped the scale downwards, the whole house would have plunged to the depths to lie upon the sands of oblivion.”
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But the supposition is too morose, too nihilistic. The wave of existence must rise again. Everywhere Virginia Woolf perceives some hint of life, even if only the potential life residual in decay. “But there was a force working; something not highly conscious; something that leered, something that lurched; something not inspired to go about its work with dignified ritual or solemn chanting. Mrs. McNab groaned; Mrs. Bast creaked. They were old; they were stiff; their legs ached … Slowly and painfully, with broom and pail, mopping, scouring, Mrs. McNab, Mrs. Bast stayed the corruption and the rot; rescued from the pool of time that was fast closing over them now a basin, now a cupboard; … ”
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The dark shapelessness has been penetrated, and once more from the chaos, there is light. “The pool of Time” is symbolic of the whole philosophy of the novel, of Virginia Woolf’s return from the immediate subjective problems of Bergson and Joyce to the more fundamental meditations of Sir Thomas Browne. The writing encloses these thoughts of potential life like a swelling placenta. “Nothing it seemed could break that image, corrupt that innocence, or disturb the swaying mantle of silence which, week after week, in the empty room, wove into itself the falling cries of birds, ships hooting, the drone and hum of the fields, a dog’s bark, a man’s shout, and folded them round the house in silence.”
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Poetic rhythms become more than, as in “The Voyage Out”, the expression of subjective emotions, or of streaming thoughts as in “Mrs. Dalloway”. Like stage directions, they now convey the action: “As she lurched (for she rolled like a ship at sea) and leered (for her eyes fell on nothing directly, but with a sidelong glance that deprecated the scorn and anger of the world—she was witless, she knew it), as she clutched the banisters and hauled herself upstairs and rolled from room to room, she sang.”
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The form is the manifest clue to the content; the washerwoman, cleaning the house after its long decay, is described with the childlike rhythms of a popular ballad. All her simple mentality, all her consciousness, all her philosophy is implicit in the weary, sing-song rhythms, “how it was one long sorrow and trouble, how it was getting up and going to bed again, and bringing things out and putting them away again.”
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And yet, even to this common woman of the folk, to whom life is a monotonous pendulum of living and dying, there are moments of hope which make nihilism impossible. She has known sorrow, yet the memory of a joy somewhere, bars her as it bars Virginia Woolf, from pessimism.
“It was not easy or snug this world she had known for close on seventy years. Bowed down she was with weariness. How long, she asked, creaking and groaning on her knees under the bed, dusting the boards, how long shall it endure? but hobbled to her feet again, pulled herself up, and again with her sidelong leer which slipped and turned aside even from her own face, and her own sorrows, stood and gaped in the glass, aimlessly smiling, and began again the old amble and hobble, taking up mats, putting down china, looking sidewards in the glass, as if,
after all, she had her consolations, as if indeed there twined about her dirge some incorrigible hope. Visions of joy there must have been at the wash-tub, say with her children (yet two had been base-born and one had deserted her), at the public-house, drinking; turning over scraps in her drawers. Some cleavage of the dark there must have been, some channel in the depths of obscurity through which light enough issued to twist her face grinning in the glass and make her, turning to her job again, mumble out the old music hall song. Meanwhile the mystic, the visionary, walked the beach, stirred a puddle, looked at a stone, and asked themselves ‘What am I?’ ‘What is this’ and suddenly an answer was vouchsafed them (what it was they could not say): so that they were warm in the frost and had comfort in the desert. But Mrs. McNab continued to drink and gossip as before.”
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The structural counterpoint is closely reminiscent of “Jacob’s Room”. Many of the stylistic tricks of the earlier novel are repeated here, at times more pronounced, at others, suggested lightly, as though too fully consumed to need duplication. The conceit of showing death through the room which Jacob had charged with life, is here expanded to the house in which the Ramsays and their friends had moved. And progressing one step farther, Virginia Woolf shows the house after its decomposition, again inhabited with life.
She repeats the musical compositions, which in “Jacob’s Room” she had made of her paragraphs: closed structural units, ushered in and resolved by the same chord.
“Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.”
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The music, suggested in this structure, is later augmented, and from a Schubert melody becomes tumultuous, combining the Wagnerian elements of poetry and sound and action. “He shivered; he quivered. All his vanity, all his satisfaction in his own splendour, riding fell as a thunderbolt, fierce as a hawk at the head of his men through the valley of death, had been shattered, destroyed. Stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well, flashed through the valley of death, volleyed and thundered—straight into Lily Briscoe and William Bankes. He quivered; he shivered.”
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Her musical consciousness expands; she no longer limits it to suggestive harmonic structure, or, as in her first novel, to an objective exposition of the composers. Music becomes synthetic in her thoughts, molding her images as profoundly as her rhythmic style. “And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a bark, a bleat; irregular, intermittent, yet somehow related; the hum of an insect, the tremor of cut grass, dissevered yet somehow belonging; the jar of a dor beetle, the squeak of a wheel, loud, low, but mysteriously related; which the ear strains to bring together and is always on the verge of harmonising but they are never quite heard, never fully harmonised, and at last, in the evening, one after another the sounds die out, and the harmony falters, and silence falls.”
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Musical themes are carried through, echoed with renewed suggestiveness, as in a fugue. A scarf is perhaps the most vital melody in the composition of the novel. It is first introduced lightly, insignificantly: “What was the use of flinging a green Cashmere shawl over the edge of a picture frame? In two weeks it would be the colour of pea-soup.”
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But there is a note of fatalism which even now distinguishes the theme. It recurs again later, modulated, intensified, given reflected life. Mrs. Ramsay takes “the green shawl off the picture frame”
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and goes to walk with her husband. The theme is played twice with little variation: “She folded the green shawl about her shoulders.”
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The note of fatalism is later recaught with deep intimations of death. The shawl is wrapped over a boar’s skull in a bedroom, that the children may sleep without terror. “ ‘Well then’, said Mrs. Ramsay, ‘we will cover it up’, and they all watched her go to the chest of drawers, and open the little drawers quickly one after another, and not seeing anything that would do, she quickly took her own shawl off and wound it round the skull, round and round and round, and then she came back to Cam and laid her head almost flat on the pillow beside Cam’s and said how lovely it looked now; how the fairies would love it; it was like a bird’s nest; it was like a beautiful mountain such as she had seen abroad, with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing and little goats and antelopes … ”
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The shawl has
changed death into a poetic vision, yet beneath it lies the terrible reality: the skull, death. The theme of the scarf wavers between factual sincerity and illusion, and then reaches its climax as the symbol of life in the house’s decay. “Once in the middle of the night with a roar, with a rupture, as after centuries of quiescence, a rock rends itself from the mountain and hurtles crashing into the valley, one fold of the shawl loosened and swung to and fro.”
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Like the shawl, a knife-blade is used as a leit-motif. The professor’s son James, longs for a knife to kill his father who represents for him tyranny. James is another Stephan Daedalus, at heroic odds with the forces of life. Both are sullen, ungovernable, ready to fly at their fathers. The knife is their weapon of freedom. While Stephen is nicknamed, “Kinch the knife-blade”, James has a knife-blade fixation. “A rope seemed to bind him there, and his father had knotted it and he could only escape by taking a knife and plunging it … ”
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All through the last chapter come the words, played as the Wagnerian motif, “to resist tyranny to the death”. Like the knife-blade theme, other characters are even conceived as having melodies peculiar to themselves. So Lily “tried to start the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head.”
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Music, as an aesthetic and ideologic medium, is supplemented by painting. The external frame of “To the Lighthouse” is like a static canvas, with immobile chiaroscuro settings. “The Window” the first chapter is called, like the descriptive title below a painted scene. And through the whole chapter, this window forms the setting, enclosing Mrs. Ramsay, a typical Virginia Woolf figure of the Great Mother, reading a book of fairy-tales to her son James. All other life passes by that window, remolded by it like forms changed in the shadow of a tree. Reflecting Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Ramsay is the spirit of earth, attracting all about her, with magnetic urgency. She sits at the window with her child, looking out at the sea and the distant lighthouse, like a Renaissance painting of the Mother of God.
The importance which the possibilities of painting have assumed for Virginia Woolf is observed in her choice of a woman painter as one of her most profound characters in the novel. It is in painting that she attempts to objectify the problems which have disturbed her; from all the dark flowingness of time, to create one shape, one completed moment snatched from eternity. To Lily, hurling her questions at the universe, painting and art
hold a possible answer; they are suggestive mediums, just as for the normal woman, bearing sons holds a cosmic intimation. She pieces together her memories like a scholar, before setting to work, probing them for a solution to the riddles she has projected on canvas.
Recollecting a scene on the beach with Mrs. Ramsay and Charles Tansley, the Nick Greene who murmurs destructively, “women can’t paint, women can’t write”,
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she recreates the past “almost like a work of art”. “ ‘Like a work of art’, she repeated, looking from her canvas to the drawing-room steps and back again. She must rest for a moment. And resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying ‘Life stand still here’; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)—this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. ‘Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!’ she repeated. She owed this revelation to her.”
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Maturity has brought this “revelation” to Virginia Woolf; “in the midst of chaos there was shape”, moments when life becomes symbolic, when it stands still, a tangible form reflecting and explaining everything. It is painting which has brought this explanation of life, painting with its defined object and its limitations of static time. It is painting which creates a satisfying form within the uncertain fluency of life.