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 exclaiming, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men” (Ibid.). She is aware of a man-made, intellectual reality at the center of her landscape, but also of natural, imaginative aesthetic values, symbolized by the colors blue and green, and supported by feminine images (“soft low pleats”). On the verge of her field of vision is the “feminine” realm of emotion, fancy, intuition, dreams, and the unconscious, where spirit, or anima, rules serene.

The Lighthouse next appears not as a distant object, but as a source of light. As Mrs. Ramsay finishes reading the story of the Fisherman's Wife, she sees its beam palely reflected in James's eyes. “Turning, she looked across the bay, and there, sure enough, coming regularly across the waves first two quick strokes and then one long steady stroke, was the light of the Lighthouse. It had been lit” (p. 98). Mrs. Ramsay, who identifies with “the long steady stroke” (p. 100), sees a reflection of her own dreams in the boy's eyes. The beacon is a reminder of James's longing to go to the Lighthouse, and of his father's stern refusal, but its beam is transmuted by his mother into a maternal, sustaining light that casts its glow over the psychic voyage ahead. The child is put to bed, and Mrs. Ramsay sinks back “to being [herself], a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others” (p. 99). As Ernst Cassirer observes, “light and shadow go together. The light manifests itself only in the shadow it casts. …”²

Thus it is in darkness and solitude that Mrs. Ramsay achieves illumination, as she identifies her being with the Light. Through creative contemplation of the light, Mrs. Ramsay loses all sense of self, while Mr. Ramsay, who “had lost his temper over the Lighthouse” (pp. 102–03), stares “into the hedge, into its intricacy, its darkness” (p. 103), vainly trying to find truth in the labyrinth of self. He envies “the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the letters together in one flash—the way of genius” (p. 58), for his own “splendid mind,” driven by a relentless ego, cannot reach beyond Q in the intellectual alphabet. As he tries to force thought forward, “a shutter … flicker[s] over the intensity of his gaze … a flash of darkness” (p. 57)—like the wedge of darkness between the Lighthouse strokes. Mrs. Ramsay, however, exchanges “the fret, the hurry, the stir” (p. 100) of self for the freedom, peace, coherence, and stability of “letting be.” She withdraws from personal contacts into empathy with a transcendent source of light: “and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at—that light for example” (pp. 100–01). Activity is suspended in contemplation. “Ordinary experience” becomes “a miracle … an ecstasy” (p. 310), as the Lighthouse beam is spiritually transformed into pure Light and Being. Mrs. Ramsay experiences the intensity³ of light in solitary empathy; later Lily Briscoe has a vision of light in communion with Mrs. Ramsay's spirit—a frail white light that sheds illumination out of the past (Ibid.). But Mrs. Ramsay's fragmentary existence—as she ordinarily feels it to be—is enveloped in fullness of Being, as she puts on the spiritual reality of Light. According to J. E. Cirlot's A Dictionary of Symbols,⁴ “Light, traditionally, is equated with the spirit,” the superiority of which is known by its “luminous intensity”: “Its whiteness alludes to … a synthesis of the All,” and it “[emanates] from the ‘Centre,’ for light is also the creative force, cosmic energy, irradiation. … Psychologically speaking, to become illuminated is to become aware of a source of light, and, in consequence, of spiritual strength” (Ibid.).

This “essence of reality”⁵ is married to material reality, as the light of the Lighthouse to rock and tower, or as feminine intuition to “the admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence” (p. 164). (An aesthetic parallel is the marriage of lightness and weight, color and shape, that Lily strives for in her painting [p. 264].) Mrs. Ramsay trusts masculine strength and intellect to “uphold her and sustain her” (p. 164)—(as the tower upholds the Light)—although “she pitied men always as if they lacked something—women never, as if they had something” (p. 133). If Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are male and female archetypes, and the Light is God, Spirit, source of all human and cosmic energy, then the roles of Adam and Eve seem to be reversed. Mrs. Ramsay embraces the Lighthouse beam as an ultimate source of creative energy, and is filled with Light. Her family and friends approach the Lighthouse through her. She lives for Light, and they for Light in her. This is one meaning of “The Window,” where the Lighthouse is seen “through a glass darkly,” by all except Mrs. Ramsay, who sees it in a visionary sense, and identifies with its Light. She has no need to go to it, like the others who must see it “face to face,”⁶ for, looking along its beam, she can penetrate into self and others.

In another figure, Mrs. Ramsay is the sea encircling the rock with its waves, “this fountain and spray of life” (p. 62), that is the fons et origo of all male energies that “fabricate” a world of order. According to Josephine O’Brien Schaefer, “The real lighthouse of the novel … is the one which Mrs. Ramsay carefully sets glowing and which illuminates a space of life even after her death. This illumination becomes a triumph of the human spirit. …”⁷ In her Lighthouse roles of wife, mother, and creative anima, Mrs. Ramsay becomes an archetypal source of light and energy for others. To James, she is a source of peace and harmony, of “perfect simplicity and good sense” (p. 61), who encourages his hope of one day reaching the Lighthouse. James witnesses the act of sexual sympathy by which she restores his father to himself and to his world, “creat[ing] drawingroom and kitchen, set[ting] them all aglow …” (p. 63). Mrs. Ramsay's personal light is almost spent in sacrificing her energy for others. But, even in exhaustion, she feels “[throb] through her … the rapture of successful creation” (p. 64), a rhythm of expansion and contraction like that of the light. She is a creative spirit, who will remain a source of inspiration even when dead, embodied in the light at the window that helps Lily focus her composition so that she too, “in extreme fatigue,” can declare: “I have had my vision” (p. 320). Both women respond with all their being to the Light that is essential truth and energy. This is the experience of the Lighthouse, that goes beyond self, depleting and completing it.

Mrs. Ramsay's mood, after the Lighthouse “had been lit” (p. 98), and “All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated” (p. 99), is one of resignation—“We are in the hands of the Lord”—tempered by skepticism—“How could any Lord have made this world?” (pp. 101, 102). Above all, she seeks to root out bad faith and be authentic: “She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie” (p. 101). The light that probes her consciousness is a higher consciousness, “meeting,” “searching,” “purifying” self of all evasion and dishonesty. The central source of Being is symbolized by the radiating Light, for Light is the universal “symbol of consciousness and illumination.”⁸ Mystics are concerned with Inner Light, and so is Mrs. Ramsay: “She praised herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light” (p. 101). Mrs. Ramsay's ecstatic response to the Light is a celebration of her capacity to be, and to create, sustain, and transmit values. Her experience resembles that of certain Indian mystics for whom “the Light mystically perceived denotes transcendence of this world, of profane and conditioned existence, and the attainment of another existential plane—that of pure being, of the divine, of supreme knowledge and absolute freedom. It is a certain sign of the revelation of ultimate reality—of reality devoid of all attributes. This is why it is experienced as a dazzling white Light, into which one gazes blinded and into which one finally disappears, dissolving and leaving no trace. … One who reaches the Light and recognises himself in it reaches a mode of transcendent being beyond the reach of the imagination.”⁹ Mrs. Ramsay's experience of oneness with the Light symbolizes her achievement of transcendent being: detached from personal ego, she is filled with unlimited Being. That part of her which clings to gratifying illusions is burnt out, as she shares for a moment in the source of all energy and creation. The Lighthouse beam that evokes this deeper consciousness is a symbol that expresses Mrs. Ramsay more clearly than any amount of description could do. What it gives the reader is inner: an essence, a quality, a spiritual impression. “Mankind,” as Whitehead says, “has to find a symbol in order to express itself.”¹⁰

The pulsating rhythm of the Lighthouse beam produces trance-like effect, in which barriers between self and other, animate and inanimate, dissolve. Mrs. Ramsay's “invisible” being expands to embrace the visible world: her consciousness, liberated from social roles, finds renewal in nature: “It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to things, inanimate things … felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself” (p. 101). The Light expresses Mrs. Ramsay's feelings, not only to herself, but to the reader. Her love of the sentient world is associated with vague spiritual longings; she is truthful, but highly romantic. Her indirect interior monologue shows a trace of irony; she is aware of indulging a private mood of pantheism, and her response to the Light is expressed in Pre-Raphaelite imagery that would do credit to Burne-Jones: “There rose, and she looked and looked … there curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one's being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover” (pp. 101–02). Mrs. Ramsay balances freedom of imagination against firm desire for truth; her experience resembles that of the artist, but is more immediate. As her unconscious reaches out toward the Light, a marriage takes place between existence and being, self and cosmos. Peter and Margaret Harvard-Williams (p. 101) attribute this “spiritual triumph” to “The conscious mind's realisation of the unconscious, with all its emotional power.” The experience is not merely psychological or aesthetic, however; it is mystical. Mrs. Ramsay comes to know an “essence of reality” in which individual and universal are One. She is in love with the life that lies beyond self. Her sense of “losing personality,” her “triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity” (p. 100), may be a premonition of her personal death and sudden withdrawal from human concerns in “Time Passes.”

But if the Lighthouse beam is a symbol of truth, introspection, purification, bringing mystical transcendence of time and existence, it is also an “objective correlative” for the life-force itself. It is rhythm as well as light:

She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation … she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!

(pp. 103–04)

Mrs. Ramsay is subject to intermittent glimpses into the core of Being that lies beyond rationalizing ego. She has the courage to be, in the withering light of absolute truth that destroys illusions. She transmutes the Lighthouse beam into non-natural Light, that shines out of, as much as into, the darkness of her own being.¹¹ In order to know and be this Light, she must descend into the “wedge-shaped core of darkness” (p. 99) that is her deepest self. The beam that is a “steady light” of Truth is also a rhythmic “stroke” of Energy, fusing sense and spirit in a rapturous marriage of inner and outer, conscious and unconscious Being. Now according to Jung (p. 107), “The symbol is the primitive expression of the unconscious, but at the same time it is also an idea corresponding to the highest intuition produced by consciousness.” This is true of Mrs. Ramsay's self-expression through the symbol of the Lighthouse beam, for her response is at once yielding (the rapturous “swoon” of epiphany), and creative (her concentration on the light, in a sense, constitutes its value). Her response is thus essentially androgynous, like that of Lily Briscoe. Virginia Woolf herself says “some marriage of opposites has to be consummated,” in the mind of the artist, “before the act of creation can be accomplished.”¹²

Norman Friedman has examined the paradoxical dialectics of “Double Vision,” whereby Mrs. Ramsay is “both subjectively involved in and objectively detached from life,” and therefore able to see it whole.¹³ This harmonious balance and clear vision suggest the Tao, “the unity of … life and consciousness … whose symbol would be the central white light” (Wilhelm and Jung, p. 103). Summarizing the Golden Flower, Wilhelm (p. 64) describes the Tao as “the undivided, great One, which gives rise to two opposite reality principles, the dark and the light, yin and yang.” The Lighthouse, with its alternating strokes of light and darkness, clearly corresponds to this symbol of the Tao. By opening herself to Light-as-Eros, Mrs. Ramsay fills herself with a fountain of energy, from which she can reanimate her husband in his quest for Truth-as-Logos; her “fecundity” compensates for his “sterility.” The Ramsays embody complementary principles of Eros and Logos, yin and yang, that combine to make a whole human figure; their ultimate unity is symbolized by the revolving light-in-darkness of the Lighthouse. Yet to dichotomize thus is to oversimplify, because the yin and yang exist as “a central monad” in all beings, and would be most closely knit in a truly androgynous personality. In Taoism the Light symbolizes the inner harmony of the Way. It is Mrs. Ramsay's triumph in moments of illumination to overcome the separateness of self and cosmos, and to reconcile the poles of Eros and Logos in her own being—“for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light.”

Mrs. Ramsay “interrogates” the light as it has led her to interrogate herself, recognizes its transcendent quality, “[watches] it with fascination, hypnotized,” yields herself to its power, and is flooded with ecstasy. The light is a lover and she is its priestess or handmaid. In a tour de force of spiritual impressionism that penetrates silence and solitude, Virginia Woolf dramatizes the irradiation of consciousness by Being, as outer and inner, “subject and object,” fuse in rhythmic pulsations of One Light. Lyrical imagery flows from the metaphor of bride and lover, as sexual energy is transformed into spiritual, and soul meets Light. The image of “silver fingers” stroking “some sealed vessel” suggests the breaking of the membrane of consciousness, with its self-contained intactness, and the merging of unified Being with the light and movement of a spirit-centered cosmos. All this is skillfully symbolized by the Lighthouse beam that seems to beckon through the darkness. The wave image fuses objective scene (the waves make the light seem to roll across the water and break on the shore), with subjective response, or mental mirror, in which the visual image, dazzling to the eye, becomes an “objective correlative” of vision itself (“The ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind …”). Syntactic rhythms reinforce the dominant imagery, with a wavelike diversion and expansion of the sentence structure that culminates in sheer affirmation of Being: “‘It is enough!’” Mrs. Ramsay's Moment of insight involves a sense of liberation from Time and Self.¹⁴ The Lighthouse beam and her response symbolize disintegrative-integrative, destructive-creative loss of self and fulfillment of Being. The sensory impression which is the basis of this visionary experience is conveyed through images of color, movement, and touch, as well as inwardly felt in the kinetic tensions and relaxations of language.

Socially, Mrs. Ramsay's function is akin to that of the Lighthouse beam. At her “festival” dinner, she undertakes “the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating” (p. 131), orders the candles lit (p. 149)—“her face was all lit up—without looking young, she looked radiant” (p. 157)—and observes family and guests with “eyes … so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling” (p. 165). Her look is a radiating searchlight of truth, and she has the power to illuminate and to merge separate consciousnesses into One.

In “Time Passes,” Mrs. Ramsay, the focus of the group, dies, and the Lighthouse beam, “with its pale footfall upon stair and mat” (p. 197), becomes a ghost of departed consciousness. It explores the empty house like an unseeing eye, that merely posits the existence of objects, and of the consciousness that once invested them with meaning. Prying lights and airs inspect personal objects in bedrooms, “wearily, ghostily, as if they had feather-light fingers” (p. 197), suggesting dim traces of the scene in half-conscious recesses of memory. Virginia Woolf's impressionist technique dramatizes the attenuation of solid objects into lingering associations, cut off from sensory stimuli. Whereas the rationalist Mr. Ramsay explores “‘Subject and object and the nature of reality’” (p. 40), Virginia Woolf creates a phenomenological vision of space-time, unmediated by a subject, in which the Lighthouse beam substitutes for eye and brain. Images of “sliding lights” and “fumbling airs” convey a pervading sense of anthropomorphic consciousness. The blank stare neither sustains nor destroys: it reveals, in a kind of alienation effect, the otherness that seeps back into matter as consciousness ebbs.

The dwindling of consciousness with onset of night is dramatized in a ritual blowing out of candles, and withdrawal into sleep, that precedes absence or death. Yet the deserted house is haunted by stray wisps of consciousness. Light becomes transparent, void, a mere reflection of itself illuminating a bare wall: “Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its clear image on the wall opposite” (p. 200). Occurring parenthetically in the paragraph that follows Mrs. Ramsay's death, this elegiac image of self-reflecting light symbolizes the withdrawal of animating consciousness. The light that searches the empty rooms is like a bereaved lover. Light is defined by its opposite, shadow, as consciousness by the unconscious. Mrs. Ramsay herself is aware of this dualism in human nature—“Wherever they put the light … there was always a shadow somewhere” (pp. 176–77)—as is Lily in art—“A light here required a shadow there” (p. 85). Now: “Only the shadows of the trees … for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor” (pp. 200–01). These refractions of light in blank space suggest either the essential isolation of consciousness—“So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted” (p. 201)—or a mere abstraction from consciousness. This “random light” exposes but does not absorb, illuminates but does not observe. It is an empty, dehumanized focus. Existence is reduced to a nonhuman essence that cannot be thought or seen. Metaphorically, however, the ghostly light does constitute an unseeing eye that reveals an “invisible world.” This blank eye is the negative of consciousness, as nothingness is of Being. There is a surreal quality to such scenes, as in a di Chirico painting, that derives from the uprooting or distancing of consciousness. Distance, perspective, space, void are all-important in “Time Passes,” which is an elegy for that animated spirit that once embraced the Light as lover.

The Lighthouse is also associated, through Mrs. Ramsay, with “the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour … and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore” (p. 198). The power of light as stimulus depends on the subject's response, on that ecstatic marriage of inner and outer which is Mrs. Ramsay's triumph. Given a receptive consciousness, “the image … comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul” (p. 199); without it, the center cannot hold and things fall apart in confusion. “When darkness fell, the stroke of the Lighthouse, which had laid itself with such authority upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern, came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight gliding gently as if it laid its caress and lingered stealthily and looked and came lovingly again. But in the very lull of this loving caress, as the long stroke leant upon the bed, the rock was rent asunder; another fold of the shawl loosened; there it hung, and swayed” (p. 206). The “long steady stroke” of the Lighthouse, “which was her stroke” (p. 100), mingles with the “yellow harvest moonlight” in a cluster of images recalling Mrs. Ramsay's spiritual vision. These images are combined with anthropomorphic metaphors of order and love (“tracing its pattern,” “laid its caress”). The modulation of light suggests a prelude to returning consciousness, yet the loosening of the shawl implies a threat of death and disintegration, as forces that sustain civilization become unraveled by the “brute confusion” (p. 209) of Time and Nature.

From Mrs. McNab's instinctual point of view, the Lighthouse beam is Mrs. Ramsay's ghost: “She could see her now … (and faint and flickering, like a yellow beam or the circle at the end of a telescope, a lady in a grey cloak, stooping over her flowers, went wandering over the bedroom wall …)” (p. 211). This ghostly image “had wavered over the walls like a spot of sunlight and vanished” (p. 213). The Lighthouse beam, apart from its associations with Mrs. Ramsay, can be seen as the steady eye of an Other Reality,¹⁵ that reveals the encroachment of Nature on human civilization. It sustains an impartial focus on order (human habitation) and chaos (“the fertility, the insensibility of nature” [p. 213]): “Only the Lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat, and the straw” (p. 214). Unwittingly, Mrs. McNab, a comic archetype of human labor, transmutes the energy of nature into the order of civilization. In doing so, she is responding to Mrs. Ramsay's ghostly will embodied in the Lighthouse beam. In “Time Passes,” light is chiefly an “eyeless and featureless”¹⁶substitute for consciousness, fixed yet random in its movement. It posits what is not there—Mrs. Ramsay's spirit, whose presence-in-absence pervades “The Lighthouse.” Lily Briscoe responds to the spiritual force of the Lighthouse beam, as she sleeps: “tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids)” (p. 220). Lily is one of the dreamers whose return and reawakening symbolize reanimated consciousness.

As she paints, Lily moves between subjective involvement and aesthetic detachment,¹⁷ seeking the harmony that Mrs. Ramsay found with the Lighthouse beam. Lily's dimly apprehended vision of the Lighthouse reflects her own dual response: “She felt curiously divided, as if one part of her were drawn out there—it was a still day, hazy; the Lighthouse looked this morning at an immense distance; the other part had fixed itself doggedly, solidly, here on the lawn” (p. 242). Lily is struggling to bring her vision into focus. Space, which had been void of human consciousness in “Time Passes,” has become “virtual space” of Lily's canvas. This space “[looms] out at her,” like the waves over which she gazes, while the man-made form of the distant Lighthouse represents a challenge to her shaping vision.

Lily oscillates, at first, between attraction and repulsion. Soon the triple rhythm¹⁸ of her brushstrokes resembles the threefold rhythm of the Lighthouse beam: “she made her first quick decisive stroke. The brush descended. It flickered brown over the white canvas; it left a running mark. A second time she did it—a third time. And so pausing and so flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and all were related …” (p. 244). This rhythm arising from a “curious” tension of impulses is not only creative and celebratory (like Mrs. Ramsay's dance of the “two emotions,” p. 156); it is a magical dance of opposites. The brown and white colors are associated with Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, the stroke and pause of the brush with the light and darkness of the Lighthouse beam. These opposites are linked, in turn, with the rising-falling waves, which symbolize rhythmic recurrence.

As Lily becomes absorbed in the act of painting, she, like Mrs. Ramsay, begins to exchange “the fret, the hurry, the stir” of a driven ego for a deeper source of energy, a change reflected in the rhythm: “her brush was now heavier and went slower, as if it had fallen in with some rhythm which was dictated to her … by what she saw, so that while her hand quivered with life, this rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with it on its current. … And as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance … her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modelled it with greens and blues” (pp. 246–47). Lily seems subconsciously to identify the empty space of her canvas with the space defined by the distant Lighthouse, whose hazy presence dominates this palimpsest of imagery: “For the mass loomed before her; it protruded; she felt it pressing on her eyeballs” (p. 246). (One recalls the gentler pressure of light in her dream.) The rhythm of her painting begins to resemble “the long steady stroke” of the Lighthouse beam, with which Mrs. Ramsay identified her Being. Lily's mind, like Mrs. Ramsay's, is an ocean: as she begins to move creatively, its unconscious “depths” are stirred into life. The image of the “fountain spurting” recalls Mrs. Ramsay's “fountain and spray of life” (p. 62), while the “hideously difficult white space” of the canvas seems linked with Mr. Ramsay's “barren and bare” Lighthouse-of-intellect. Lily, like Virginia Woolf, is remodeling the Lighthouse in the colors of imaginative reality.

In “The Window” and “Time Passes,” the Lighthouse is a source of light; in “The Lighthouse,” it becomes a goal. In one form or other, however, the Lighthouse dominates every phase of the novel. As a symbol, it is doubly central: from it emanate lines of light; to it converge paths of voyage.¹⁹ Its power is both centrifugal and centripetal: like the mandala, it symbolizes psychic centering. Its meanings radiate through the mind, as a total range of possibilities stemming from a variety of contexts, but limited to none. The voyage to the Lighthouse is any activity of consciousness that reaches out toward the Light, follows a direction, seeks integration. If the reader never quite arrives at the Lighthouse, he sees it from many angles and from many points of view, and in it he seeks his own illumination.

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth Press, 1927; rpt. 1967). Subsequent references in my text are based on this edition.

2. “The Dialectic of the Mythical Consciousness,” The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim, II, 245. The “bursting forth of light out of darkness is the original symbol of creation in nearly all the myths” ( Ibid., p. 96).

3. Peter and Margaret Harvard-Williams, “Perceptive Contemplation in the Work of Virginia Woolf,” English Studies, 35 (1954), 111-12, interpret the Lighthouse beam as “a symbol of the heightened nature of the visible world as Virginia Woolf saw it,” and relate it to an intensity of “contemplation which [the artist] cannot sustain.”

4. Trans. Jack Sage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 179.

5. See Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1953; rpt. 1969), p. 101. Subsequent references in my text are based on this edition.

6. I borrow these biblical terms from F. L. Overcarsh, “The Lighthouse, Face to Face,” Accent, 10, No. 2 (Winter 1950), 107-23, without wishing to emulate Overcarsh's allegorizing.

7. The Three-fold Nature of Reality in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), p. 124.

8. Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series, 42 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), p. 104. Cf. Wilhelm and Jung, p. 98.

9. Mircea Eliade, “Experiences of the Mystic Light,” The Two and the One, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 44-45. Cf. R. M. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1901; rpt. New York: Dutton, 1969), pp. 9-11.

10. Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Macmillan, 1927), p. 62.

11. Cf. The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, trans. Richard Wilhelm, with a Foreword and Commentary by C. G. Jung (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1962), p. 55.

12. A Room of One's Own (1929; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1957), p. 181.

13. “The Waters of Annihilation: Double Vision in To the Lighthouse,” ELH, 22, No. 1 (March 1955), 67.

14. Cf. Jung, Commentary, pp. 106-07; Eliade, The Two and the One, p. 72.

15. Cf. Irène Simon, “Some Aspects of Virginia Woolf's Imagery,” English Studies, 41, No. 3 (June 1960), 190-92.

16. See Diary, p. 88.

17. See Mitchell A. Leaska, Virginia Woolf's Lighthouse: A Study in Critical Method (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 122-23.

18. Allen McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 177-206, examines the recurrence of three-part patterns in Woolf's style.

19. Cf. Jean Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her Works, trans. Jean Stewart (London: Hogarth Press, 1965), pp. 252-53.