Discuss the use of time in the novel “To the Lighthouse”
Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1990) is structured in three parts and each, to an extent, displays a different use of time. In this essay I would like to look at each of these and discuss the ways that the author represents not only the movement and affects of temporality but also how its is perceived and shapes people’s consciousnesses.
The first section of the novel, The Window, concerns itself with the Ramsey family and the various holiday makers on a small island in the Hebrides and, as Bernard Blackstone suggests in Virginia Woolf: A Commentary (1949: 100), it is the house where they stay and the lighthouse that they wish to visit that binds the story and the characters together being, as they are, symbols of constancy and solidity in the flux of time.
In the first section the narrative flits between characters; we see Mr. Ramsey, the rather unsuccessful academician, Lily the painter, James Ramsey and the austere and bookish Charles Tansely. However, for the most part, the narrative concentrates on the stream of consciousness of Mrs. Ramsey, wife of Mr. Ramsey and mother to the eight children of the book.
It is through Mrs. Ramsey that we encounter Woolf’s first use of time in the novel, as the character’s thoughts and feelings co-mingle past memory and present sensation with future projections, as in this section from chapter ten, where Mrs. Ramsey anticipates her son’s future:
he kept looking back over his shoulder as Mildred carried him out, and she was certain that he was thinking, we are not going to the lighthouse tomorrow; and she thought, he will remember that all his life. (Woolf, 1990: 57)
Of course, as we discover in later sections, this prediction turns out to true, as James never fully rids himself of the resentment towards his father. The inner monologue of Mrs. Ramsey also contains references to the past, such as her reminiscences concerning her husband’s academic career or as her mind drifts to the banks of the Thames where she had been so very, very cold twenty years ago (Woolf, 1990: 81).
Woolf’s depiction of time in the first section of the novel concerns itself with how its passing is conceived and condensed in the individual psychology. Mrs. Ramsey exists in the past, in the present and in the future; flitting between each as her attention is drawn by events around her. We can see this idea of time as being condensed by the psychology of the individual, also in T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton where he states:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
(Eliot, 1989: 171)
The narrative of the first section covers only a day but, within this, depicts a wide variety of times, such as the section in chapter twelve, where Mr. Ramsey first reminisces about his own childhood:
One could walk all day without meeting a soul. There was not a house scarcely, not a single village for miles on end. (Woolf, 1990: 64)
then is brought, sharply into the present:
It sometimes seemed to him that in a little house out there, alone he broke, sighing. He had no right. The father of eight children (Woolf, 1990: 64)
Only to then project his thoughts into the future:
Andrew would be a better man than he had been. Prue would be a beauty, her mother said. (Woolf, 1990: 64)
Of course, this forward projection is also used as a means of heightening the tragedy of time passing in the section of the same name, as we learn of both Andrew and Prue’s deaths. The second section of the book is, in many ways, the most intriguing. Woolf conveys the notion of temporal flux and the rapid passing of time through impressionistic language interspersed with factual and brusque asides concerning the fates of the characters we have been introduced to in the first section. We learn that Prue gets married but dies after childbirth, that Andrew is killed during the war and that Mrs. Ramsey also dies. The use of time here is shocking and violent, the images however are natural and concern themselves with the manifestations of nature and the changing of the seasons:
As summer neared, as the evenings lengthened, there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind. (Woolf, 1990: 126)
As in this extract, much of the text of Time Passes is devoid of any distinct human presence. Woolf portrays the temporality that is beyond the human psychology; as the slow condensed nature of the first section gives way to a confusing but rich evocation of the speed with which years pass and events occur:
night after night, and sometimes in plain mid-day when the roses were bright and light turned on the wall its shape clearly there seemed to drop into this silence [A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsey. (Woolf, 1990: 127)
The characters’ lives are played out against the machinery of time passing and only the house and lighthouse remains intact, as symbols of both constancy and memory.
Woolf uses time in this section as a way of bridging the two parts of the novel. The earlier memories and aspirations of Mrs. Ramsey are contrasted, later in the book, with the actuality of the future. We are transported, through the temporal fast-forward of the middle chapters, to a time after a world war has changed the country and the minds of those within it irrevocably. The tragedy of events are made all the more so by the casual way that Woolf treats them; Prue’s death for instance, coming a few pages after mention of her marriage, adds a dramatic sense of abruptness to the impressionistic nature of the prose:
[Prue Ramsey died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said. They said nobody deserved happiness more.]
And now in the heat of summer the wind sent its spies about the house again@ (Woolf, 1990: 126)
The third section of the novel deals with yet another facet of time: the repetition. Whereas, in The Window, time was used in order to describe and portray the individual stream of consciousness and in Time Passes it was used in order to facilitate the tragedy of events, in The Lighthouse section, time is used in order to show how relationships change and yet remain the same. Like the first section, most of the narrative is described through the stream of consciousness of a woman, this time the Aunt, Lily.
Time and time again, in this section, we see reflections and echoes of the first chapters, such as here as Lily stares at her canvas with her Chinese eyes (Woolf: 150), a phrase that reminds us of Mrs. Ramsey’s descriptions of her in The Window:
She looked blankly at the canvas, with its uncompromising white stare; from the canvas to the garden. There was somethingsomething she remembered in the relations of those lines cutting across, slicing down, and in the mass of the hedge with its green cave of blues and browns. (Woolf, 1990150)
Scenes such as this remind us of the earlier parts of the novel as they remind the characters of the earlier parts of their lives. Woolf uses time to suggest not only the circular nature of things, the figure of Mrs. Ramsey becoming, in the next section, the figure of Lily, but also the way lives change but also stay the same, as indeed Mrs. Ramsey says through the memories of Lily:
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. (Woolf, 1990: 154)
In many ways, I think, this extract is representative of the whole use of time within To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf tries to examine the nature of this shape in the midst of chaos, the stability in the eternal passing and flowing of time. The house and the lighthouse provide us with the stability around which flows not only time but the lives of the characters who are victims of it.
We have seen how there are, in fact, a number of different uses of time in Virginia Woolf’s novel and these, to an extent, correspond to the different sections. Along with the different uses of time there is also, as we have seen, a number of different representations of time; we have, for instance, the notion of personal time, the moving of universal time that shapes events and lives and, ultimately, the relentless progression of time, moving forward irrespective of individual hopes and desires.
Woolf’s narrative uses time in order to suggest the fragility of humanity as it struggles for some form of stability in the temporal flux. There is an irony to the minor worries and concerns of characters such as Mr. Ramsey and Charles Tansley as they are shown as being played against the backdrop of time moving, ever onward, with scant regard for individuals.
References
Blackstone, Bernard (1949), Virginia Woolf: A Commentary, (London: Harcourt Brace and Company)
Eliot, T.S. (1989), The Complete Poems and Plays, (London: Faber and Faber)
Reid, Sue (ed) (1993), Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse: New Casebooks, (London: Macmillan)
Woolf, Virginia (1990), To the Lighthouse, (London: Vintage)
Tags: language, Lighthouse, Virginia Woolfe
