The following article is a short essay and review realised as part of a take-home exam for Postromantic Materialism course held at the University of Leuven in 2014-2015. You can also read an essay about NW by Zadie Smith, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach , The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai and The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen.
The focus on Lily Briscoe makes To the Lighthouse an instance of the so-called Künstlerroman. Read up on this genre and select and comment on
relevant passages from the text.
The idea of künstlerroman, the German expression for “artist’s novel”, proceeds from the more general bildungsroman, or “apprenticeship novel”. The künstlerroman focuses on “the development of an individual who becomes—or is on the threshold of becoming—a painter, musician, or poet” (see Encyclopædia Britannica Online). Tipically, the künstlerroman is related to the first author’s steps into the literature and to his literary autobiography. The difference between the bildungsroman and the künstlerroman also lies in the destiny the author imagines for his character. While the hero of the apprenticeship novel “often dreams of becoming a great artist but settles for being a mere useful citizen, the Künstlerroman usually ends on a note of arrogant rejection of the commonplace life” (see Encyclopædia Britannica Online). The most significant example is Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916), also because the aim of writing a künstlerroman is already explicit in the title of the novel.
The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails
Joyce, 1916, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young man,ch. 5
Other examples of künstlerroman can be Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Il piacere (1888), Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913), John Fante’s Ask the dust (1939) -just to allude to some other acclaimed novels from different countries.
As
regards Virginia Woolf’s oeuvre, To the Lighthouse is not her only
exemplification of bildungsroman or künstlerroman. The voyage out (1915) is the first Woolf’s novel and is considered
her first example of künstlerroman,since it outlines the life of Rachel
Vinrace, a musician who travels to South America and there finds her love, an
aspiring writer. Orlando: a biography
(1928) is another instance of künstlerroman:
the protagonist is young noble and aspiring poet of the Elizabethan period.
Some authors see Orlando more as a “satirical künstlerroman, exploring the gender politics of poetics and
subjectivity across the ages” (Goldman, 2002:319).
To the Lighthouse (1927) is “a self-reflexive, feminist künstlerroman” (Goldman, 2002:318). “To the Lighthouse is a novel about
memory and desire” (Raitt, 1990:23). A lot has been said about this highly
poetical and autobiographical novel by Virginia Woolf. Lily Briscoe is a young
woman, a painter, struggling in a post-victorian society for her identification
as an independent woman. She is invited to spend some time with the Ramsay’s
family in their summer home on the Isle of Skye, in the Hebrides, together with
other family friends. She stays at a window, trying to complete her painting of
Mrs. Ramsay and her son James, but throughout the first chapter she seems
unable to focus on her work. “It was in that moment’s 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” (Woolf, 1927: The Window, 4). For Lily Briscoe
the drawing is not a mere portrait, but the representation of a constant
conflict between herself and the contemporary society, represented by Charles
Tansley, a family friend: “Charles Tansley used to say that, she remembered,
women can’t paint, can’t write” (Woolf, 1927: The Lighthouse, 4). This feeling
of not belonging to the right situation prevent her not only from working at
the canvas, but also to express her real emotions to Mrs. Ramsay: “and it was
then too, in that chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced
themselves upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance”
(1927: The window, 4).
To the Lighthouse,an autobiography
It is easy to recognize To the Lighthouse as an autobiography. Lily Briscoe succeeds in completing the portrait ten years later, after the First World War and the death of Mrs. Ramsay and of her sons Prue and Andrew. Virginia Woolf accomplishes to recreate her complex family situation almost thirty years after her parents’ passing away. For her, “the ‘syllabing’ of To the Lighthouse was a process of involuntary recall as well as of literary creation, and was therefore doubly unexpected for Woolf” (Raitt, 1990:34). In her diary, Virginia Woolf wrote “I used to think of him & my mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse, laid them in my mind”(Bell, 1977:III, 28 November 1928, 208). The writing of To the Lighthouse and the conclusion of the painting are the final expression of artistic success. Virginia Woolf and her alter-ego Lily always wanted to deeply go through their suffering as women before as artists.
The “H” structure of the novel reminds to this idea of going through a journey to survive the internal struggles of oneself. The first part of the novel, The window, can be seen as the acknowledgement and the subsequent reflection about the obstacles that don’t allow to complete a piece of art, for Lily, or to easily live a normal life after facing parents’ death, for Woolf. The second part, Time passes, is the bridge of the “H” and the shortest chapter of the novel. The thinking shifts to the ineludible passing of the time which cannot help to solve any inner conflict. “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 to night” (Woolf, 1927: Time passes, 3). Part three, The Lighthouse, is the depiction of a new state of the mind, finally free from the sorrows of too much years spent in the shadows of thinking not to be in the right place. “Lily squeezed her tubes again. She attacked that problem of the hedge. It was strange how clearly she saw her, stepping with her usual quickness across fields among whose folds, purplish and soft, among whose flowers, hyacinth or lilies, she vanished” (Woolf, 1927: The Lighthouse, 8). This quote evokes the words of Woolf’s diary about her mother and father, gently faded out of her constant but distressing thoughts.
“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” (Woolf, 1927: The Lighthouse,
14). The painting is finally finished, the most confidential and painful novel
has come to its final dot. Both Lily Briscoe and Virginia Woolf have concluded
their masterpieces.
Bibliography
Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “Kunstlerroman”, accessed 15th
October 2014.
Document
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Goldman, Jane. “Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941).” British Writers: Retrospective Supplement
1. Ed. Jay Parini. Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2002. 305-323. Accessed on 17th Oct. 2014.
Joyce, J., A Portrait of
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accessed 15th October 2014. Document URL http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4217/4217-h/4217-h.htm
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