To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf - Jack F. Stewart (essay date 1977)
Jack F. Stewart (essay date 1977)
SOURCE: “Light in ‘To the Lighthouse,’” in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 23, No. 3, October, 1977, pp. 377–89.
[In the following essay, Stewart explores the various meanings of darkness and light in the three sections of To the Lighthouse.]
The essence of the Lighthouse symbol is Light itself. In “The Window,” Light is the positive force of visionary consciousness; in “Time Passes,” it is the negative counterpart of departed consciousness; and in “The Lighthouse,” it is the reanimation of consciousness in a creative rhythm that seeks spiritual and aesthetic Oneness.
At its first appearance in To the Lighthouse,1 the Lighthouse is a rigid vertical dominating horizontal planes of land and sea. It is seen by Mrs. Ramsay, as part of “the view … that her husband loved” (p. 25): “… the whole bay spread before them and Mrs. Ramsay could not help...
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