SOURCE: “Mythic Patterns in ‘To the Lighthouse,’” in PMLA, Vol. LXXI, No. 4, September 1956, pp. 547–62.

[In the following essay, Blotner argues for a mythic reading of To the Lighthouse, maintaining that both a coherent narrative plot and the final meaning of the novel can be located in the character of Mrs. Ramsay, who, according to Blotner, embodies the myth of the “Primordial Goddess” that includes the triad of Rhea, Demeter, and Persephone.]

I

The impulses and convictions which gave birth to Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own carried over into Virginia Woolf's fiction. Their most powerful expression is found in To the Lighthouse. But something, probably her strict and demanding artistic conscience, prevented their appearance in the form of the intellectual and argumentative feminism found in the first two books. In this novel Virginia Woolf's concept of woman's role in life is crystallized in the character of Mrs. Ramsay, whose attributes are those of major female figures in pagan myth. The most useful myth for interpreting the novel is that of the Primordial Goddess, who “is threefold in relation to Zeus: mother (Rhea), wife (Demeter), and daughter (Persephone).” One of the major sources of the myth is the Homeric “Hymn to Demeter,” in which the poet compares Rhea with her daughter Demeter, and makes it clear that Demeter and her daughter Persephone “are to be thought of as a double figure, one half of which is the ideal complement of the other.”¹ This double figure is that of the Kore, the primordial maiden, who is also a mother. Also useful in interpreting the novel is the Oedipus myth.

In using myth as an approach to a work of literature, the critic can make one of two assertions: the artist knowingly used myth as a basis for his creation; or, all unaware, he used it as it welled up out of the subconscious layers of his psyche where it resided as forgotten material, as an archetypal pattern or a fragment of the collective or racial unconscious. But one of these assertions leads to a dilemma when it is applied to To the Lighthouse, and the other is fundamentally unsound for either fruitful criticism or sound scholarship. First, Virginia Woolf's diary shows that she read Greek, and “On Not Knowing Greek” shows that she venerated it. And, even had she not read Jung, Freud, and Frazer prior to 1927,² she would have known about them through other members of the Bloomsbury Group. However, there is no direct evidence that she consciously used myth in the writing of this novel. Therefore, to assert that she did would be only speculation. Second, because of the relatively large number of these patterns as presented by Frazer, Jung, and Freud, and because of the enormous number of variations into which they can be differentiated by particular cultures, one is able to find some sort of referent in them for major elements of many novels. Then, any parallel between the mythic pattern and the work of art, by virtue of invoking the supposedly forgotten, or the archetypal patterns in the artist's unconscious, is argued as sufficient basis for claiming that a causative relationship exists. Virginia Woolf in her diary reiterated the role of her, “subconscious” in the germination of a novel and noted “how tremendously important unconsciousness is when one writes.”³ However, this proposition is susceptible of neither proof nor disproof. These myths may well have risen from Virginia Woolf's subconscious to form the framework of her novel, but this can be shown by neither critic nor psychologist. There is, however, a third position. When meaningful, coherent, and illuminating parallels are discerned, the work may be interpreted in terms of the myth. Often what appears fragmentary or only partly disclosed in the work may be revealed as complete and explicit through the myth.

This method is used from the outside, so to speak. It is not an interior approach asserting that myth was present at the conception and execution of the work; it rather asserts that myth may be brought to the work at its reading. It is like laying a colored transparency over a sheet covered with a maze of hues to reveal the orderly pattern which otherwise resides within them unperceived. Thus, in To the Lighthouse the myths of Oedipus and the Kore, superimposed momentarily upon the novel, provide a framework within whose boundaries and by virtue of whose spatial ordering the symbolic people, passages, and phrases of the book can be seen to assume a relationship to each other which illuminates their reciprocal functions and meanings. But since one key may open several doors in a house while leaving several more still unlocked, the mythic approach will not be urged as a Rosetta Stone for fathoming all the meanings of To the Lighthouse. However, this interpretation has several advantages. It shows that this is not, as has often been asserted, a novel which is poetic but plotless.⁴ The poetry is certainly there but so is the plot, if one reads the novel with all its striking parallels against these myths which are so strong in plot. This is not to suggest that Mrs. Woolf is consciously or unconsciously indebted to The Golden Bough, Bulfinch's mythology, or the sources of these works for her plot, but rather that the mythic approach helps to show that this novel has in fact a clear and coherent narrative beneath its enchanting poetry and evocative prose. In this interpretation Mrs. Ramsay is not merely Goodness (Blackstone, p. 112), nor light, spirit, and spell (Roberts, p. 596). She is more than this and more than the mainspring of the novel: she is the meaning of the novel. This interpretation also relates this work, Virginia Woolf's finest as an artist, to her fundamental convictions as a woman.

Although it has been suggested that To the Lighthouse can be explained in terms of Christian myth,⁵ there is much evidence, both external and internal, which argues against this interpretation. Virginia Woolf's agnosticism appears on many pages of her diary. And Christian symbolism is quite as inappropriate for Mrs. Ramsay. When the phrase, “We are in the hands of the Lord,” enters her mind, she rejects it: “instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean.”⁶ This has been “an insincerity slipping in among the truths …” (98). The beam from the Lighthouse sweeps over her, “purifying out of existence that lie, any lie” (97). If there is a place in the novel for a male deity, he is not Christ, but Zeus. This deity would appropriately be he, linked with the hidden malevolence Mrs. Ramsay sometimes senses in life, for Zeus was the god who connived with Hades in the abduction of Persephone, and was himself the bridegroom by violence of Demeter.

That Mrs. Woolf's characters are symbolic is quite clear. Mrs. Ramsay and her husband stand watching their children when suddenly a meaning descends upon them, “making them representative … made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife” (110–111). But Mrs. Ramsay is a symbol of much more than this. She is a symbol of the female principle in life. Clothed in beauty, an intuitive and fructifying force, she opposes the logical but arid and sterile male principle. Her influence works toward the mating of men and women, toward their becoming fruitful like herself. Her function is the same on the intellectual level, for she gives her protection and inspiration to both art and science. To Lily Briscoe the painter she gives stimulus and understanding; to Carmichael the poet she gives haven from squalor and a shrewish wife; to Ramsay the philosopher she supplies love, comfort, and reassurance; to Tansley the graduate student she offers protection for a personality rubbed raw by insecurity; to Bankes the botanist she renders affection and respite from a widowed life and priestlike devotion to science. “Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain … finally, for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential …” (13).

II

Comparing her feelings upon completing The Waves with those she had when she finished To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf wrote that “What interests me in the last stage was the freedom and boldness with which my imagination picked up, used and tossed aside all the images, symbols which I had prepared [italics mine]. I am sure that this is the right way of using them—not in set pieces, as I had tried at first coherently, but simply as images, never making them work out; only suggest. Thus I hope to have kept the sound of the sea and the birds, dawn and garden subconsciously present, doing their work under ground” (Writer's Diary, p. 165). This penetrating introspection gives the keynote for interpretation of Virginia Woolf's use of image and symbol. One must not expect a point-for-point correspondence between symbol and referent, and, by implication, no exact parallel between character and plot on the one hand and mythic personage and mythic pattern on the other. However, there are surprisingly strong correspondences between the two.

Rhea was the oldest of the gods, the child of Gaea, Mother Earth, and Ouranos, Father Heaven. When her brother Cronos overthrew Ouranos, Rhea became Cronos' wife and queen of the universe. Since Gaea was not actually a divinity, however, nor ever separated from the earth and personified, her daughter Rhea is the primal pagan goddess antedating the male gods. Although Cronos was said to have brought in the Golden Age in Italy when he fled there from the victorious Zeus, he cuts a poor figure beside Rhea. Having attained power by mutilating and dethroning his father, he attempted to keep it by swallowing his children. This he did with each of the first five Rhea bore him, attempting to thwart the prophecy that one of his children would overthrow him. By contrast, Rhea is the completely good and loving mother. Wrapping a stone in swaddling clothes and substituting it for Zeus, she has the child spirited to Crete. It is he who later delivers his brothers and sisters by farcing Cronos to disgorge them.

Whereas Rhea has six children, three boys and three girls, Mrs. Ramsay has eight, four boys and four girls. Like Cronos, Mr. Ramsay was sometimes “like a lion seeking whom he could devour …” (233). He has power and authority: “Let him be fifty feet away, let him not even speak to you, let him not even see you, he permeated, he prevailed, he imposed himself. He changed everything” (233). In each family the youngest child, a male, is the one who opposes the father. Zeus, alone in his exile on Crete, might have reflected like James, “I shall be left to fight the tyrant alone” (250). As Rhea protected Zeus from physical harm, so Mrs. Ramsay tries to guard James from psychological wounds. When Mr. Ramsay declares that the weather will not permit the trip to the Lighthouse which James so passionately desires, Mrs. Ramsay tries to induce her husband to modify his pronouncement. She reflects that children never forget; “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” (95).

Mrs. Ramsay has many of the physical attributes of a goddess. To Lily's eyes she seems to wear “an august shape …” (80). She has a “royalty of form …” (47). Lily perceives that Mr. Bankes “worshipped” Mrs. Ramsay (75). When Mr. Bankes hears her voice, he visualizes her as “very clearly Greek” (47), and feels that “the Graces assembled seemed to have joined hands in meadows of asphodel to compose that face” (47). Augustus Carmichael bows as if to do her “homage” (167). When Charles Tansley glimpses her standing motionless, a picture of Queen Victoria behind her, he realizes that she is “the most beautiful person he had ever seen” (25). He visualizes her “stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair …” (25). And her glance comes from “eyes of unparalleled depth” (77). Even as he speaks of prosaic things, “one would be thinking of Greek temples, and how beauty had been with them there in that stuffy room” (291). Even her bearing is regal: “like some queen who, finding her people gathered in the hall, looks down upon them, and descends among them, and acknowledges their tributes silently, and accepts their devotion and their prostration before her … she went down, and crossed the hall and bowed her head very slightly, as if she accepted what they could not say: their tribute to her beauty” (124).

Mrs. Ramsay's psychic qualities are also those of a goddess. She is possessed of an intuitive knowledge and wisdom, and exercises a dominion over those around her, seeming almost to cast a spell upon them. Lily Briscoe, particularly sensitive to this aspect of her character, struggles with ambivalent feelings. She sees Mrs. Ramsay as “unquestionably the loveliest of people … the best perhaps” (76), yet she chafes at her imperiousness. Lily laughs at her, “presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand” (78). But at the same time she divines, in the heart of this woman “like treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything. …” (79). When Mrs. Ramsay exercises her powers, her domination, Lily is moved to reflect that “there was something frightening about her. She was irresistible” (125). Her perceptions are clearly psychic: “She knew then—she knew without having learnt. Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. Her singleness of mind made her drop, plumb like a stone, alight exact as a bird, gave her, naturally, this swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth. …” (46). Her grey eyes seem to penetrate the thoughts and feelings of others. Her domination pulls them all together, makes them interact as she wants them to do. But, “directly she went a sort of disintegration set in. …” (168).

III

If Mrs. Ramsay resembles Rhea, she appears almost an incarnation of Demeter. This divine being, the Goddess of the Corn, was the daughter of Cronos and Rhea and the sister of Zeus. But unlike him and the other Olympians, she was, with Dionysus, mankind's best friend. Hers was the divine power which made the earth fruitful. It was she “who was worshipped, not like the other gods by the bloody sacrifices men liked, but in every humble act that made the farm fruitful. Through her the field of grain was hallowed, ‘Demeter's holy grain’.”⁷ Even when the originally simple rites in her honor evolved into the Eleusinian Mysteries, their effect was still beneficent. The quality of these observances survived even the decline of Greece and the rise of Rome, for Cicero wrote that “among the many excellent and indeed divine institutions which. … Athens has brought forth and contributed to human life, none, in my opinion, is better than those mysteries. For by their means we have been brought out of our barbarous and savage mode of life and refined into a state of civilization, and as the rites are called ‘initiations,’ so in very truth we have learned from them the beginnings of life, and have gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope.”⁸

Symbols of fruitfulness cluster around Mrs. Ramsay. She plants flowers and sees that they are tended. The others, thinking of her, associate flowers with her instinctively. She adorns herself with a green shawl. Running throughout the book, through her own stream of consciousness, is an almost obsessive concern that the greenhouse shall be repaired and preserved. Many of the figures of speech used to describe her relate to nature. Concentrating, “she grew still like a tree. …” (177). In solitary meditation she reflects “how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one. …” (97). At times she even thinks in terms of myth. Contemplation of a cornucopia-like dish of fruit “made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune's banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus …” (146).

She is an ardent matchmaker, giving Paul Rayley the impetus and encouragement to propose to Minta Doyle, determining to marry Lily Briscoe to William Bankes. She insists that “Minta must, they all must marry … an unmarried woman had missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children and Mrs. Ramsay listening. …” (77). And her attitude toward marriage seems more pagan than Christian. The elaborate dinner over which she presides, coming immediately after Paul's successful proposal to Minta, gives her mixed feelings, a sense “of celebrating a festival, as if two emotions were called up in her, one profound—for what could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands” (151). And this mockery is not at all inconsistent with the character of Demeter. Kerényi writes that in the figure of the Kore “There is, for instance, the strange equation of marriage and death, the bridal chamber and the grave. Marriage in this connexion has the character of murder; the brutal ravisher is the god of death himself. On the other hand, marriage retains its proper and primary meaning as the union of man and woman. But not only does it call forth the lamentations of the celebrants, it also calls forth obscene speech and laughing at obscene actions” (pp. 179–180).

An important characteristic of Mrs. Ramsay in her Demeter aspect is her complete femininity. As Demeter was worshipped more by men than women, as the sacrifices to her were humble and restrained rather than fierce and bloody like those of men, so Mrs. Ramsay in all her aspects is feminine and opposed to that which is undesirable in masculinity. When she gives to Mr. Ramsay the sympathy and reassurance he begs, the action is symbolic: “into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare” (58). By this act, Mr. Ramsay is “taken within the circle of life … his barrenness made fertile. …” (59). This characteristic is not exclusively Mr. Ramsay's: “she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men …” (126). With her quick intuition, her special knowledge, she is at the opposite pole from them. Although she does not possess their analytical reasoning powers, she is far more perceptive than they. “How much they missed, after all, these very clever men! How dried up they did become, to be sure” (150). There is little doubt that these sentiments are inherent in Virginia Woolf's feminism. In Mrs. Ramsay's thoughts one finds an echo of those of her creator, who wrote, “the egotism of men surprises and shocks me even now,” who found that “the male atmosphere is disconcerting to me. … I think what an abrupt precipice cleaves asunder the male intelligence, and how they pride themselves upon a point of view which much resembles stupidity” (Writer's Diary, pp. 135, 12). Jung concludes his essay on the psychological aspects of the Kore with the comment that “Demeter-Kore exists on the plane of mother-daughter experience which is alien to man and shuts him out. In fact, the psychology of the Demeter cult has all the features of a matriarchal order of society where the man is an indispensable but on the whole disturbing factor” (p. 245).

Even the story of the Fisherman and His Wife, which Mrs. Ramsay reads to James, reflects this attitude. To perceive it, however, one must do what Virginia Woolf did in Orlando: change the sex of the principal character. In To the Lighthouse the individual who makes the insatiable demands is not the wife but the husband. Mr. Ramsay, the philosopher, has driven himself to the Q of mental effort and understanding. He is plunged into melancholy despair at his inability to reach Z. He is described as standing desolate in darkness on a narrow spit of land, the black seas nearly engulfing him. It is his wife who is content with that which they have already received, who accepts their portion and cherishes their gift of love.

The figures of Demeter and Mrs. Ramsay are linked in another important way. They are characterized not only by fruitfulness, but by sorrow as well. This element also serves to point up the transition from the Demeter to the Persephone component of this multiple myth. Demeter's sorrow is caused, of course, by her loss of Persephone. Mrs. Ramsay's sorrow is neither so continuous nor so specifically focused as that of Demeter. But when she falls prey to it, her sorrow is genuine and pervasive, and highly suggestive of that of the goddess: “Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from 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” (46). And this is not a simple weltschmerz, but a genuine reaction to a frightening vision of a real antagonist, for “she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance” (92). Another of Mrs. Ramsay's interior monologues might be that of the goddess implored to make the earth fruitful again: “Why, one asked oneself, does one take all these pains for the human race to go on? Is it so very desirable?” (134)

IV

In the familiar story, Demeter's only child Persephone was abducted by Hades and spirited down to the underworld to reign with him over the souls of all the dead. In her anguish for her daughter, the Goddess of the Corn “withheld her gifts from the earth, which turned into a frozen desert. The green and flowering land was icebound and lifeless because Persephone had disappeared” (Hamilton, p. 57). Finally compelled to intervene, Zeus sent Hermes to Hades with the order that Persephone must be released. Hades complied, but first forced her to eat a pomegranate seed, whose magical properties would insure her return to him for a third of each year. Zeus also sent Rhea to Demeter to tell her that Persephone would be released and to ask Demeter to make the earth fruitful again. Demeter, of course, complied. Edith Hamilton writes:

In the stories of both goddesses, Demeter and Persephone, the idea of sorrow was foremost. Demeter, goddess of the harvest wealth, was still more the divine sorrowing mother who saw her daughter die each year. Persephone was the radiant maiden of the spring and the summertime. … But all the while Persephone knew how brief that beauty was; fruits, flowers, leaves, all the fair growth of the earth, must end with the coming of the cold and pass like herself into the power of death. After the lord of the dark world below carried her away she was never again the gay young creature who had played in the flowery meadow without a thought of care or trouble. She did indeed rise from the dead every spring, but she brought with her the memory of where she had come from; with all her bright beauty there was something strange and awesome about her. She was often said to be “the maiden whose name may not be spoken.”

(pp. 53–54)

Many allusions in To the Lighthouse suggest the Persephone-Mrs. Ramsay correspondence. Barely nine pages into the novel one reads that she had “in her veins the blood of that very noble, if slightly mythical, Italian house, whose daughters, scattered about English drawing rooms in the nineteenth century, had lisped so charmingly, had stormed so wildly, and all her wit and bearing and her temper came from them …” (17).

Early in the novel Mrs. Ramsay has premonitions, foreshadowings of her departure from the green and flowering loveliness of the Isle of Skye, of her descent into the world of shades. As she sits in the gathering dusk, she looks out upon her garden: “the whitening of the flowers and something grey in the leaves conspired together, to rouse in her a feeling of anxiety” (93–94). Her mood deepens until “all the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others” (95). Yet at times these depths are briefly pierced by shafts of light. The sound of the waves on the beach “seemed of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, ‘I am guarding you—I am your support’” (27). It is as if Persephone, sensing the imminence of her rape and abduction, divined also that her salvation would come from her who had sung a cradle song, her mother Demeter, the goddess so close to nature.

Mrs. Ramsay's death is communicated to the reader with shocking suddenness and brevity, as though it were not the event itself which was important, but rather its consequences. In Lily Briscoe's reflections in “The Lighthouse” section of the novel, however, the reader is given Lily's special vision of Mrs. Ramsay's departure. And, of course, it is Lily who is most sensitive to Mrs. Ramsay, to her essence and her function. As Lily paints, the images sweep in on her mind: “It was strange how clearly she saw her, stepping with her usual quickness across fields among whose folds, purplish and soft, among whose flowers, hyacinths or lilies, she vanished. It was some trick of the painter's eye. For days after she had heard of her death she had seen her thus, putting her wreath to her forehead⁹ and going unquestioningly with her companion, a shade across the fields … all had been part of the fields of death” (269–270). When Persephone had wandered away from her companions, thus isolating herself for Hades' attack, she had been attracted by banks of narcissus, hyacinths, and lilies (Frazer, p. 36). As she was abducted, she dropped the lilies she had gathered.¹⁰ Thirty pages later in the novel, Lily's vision of Mrs. Ramsay's departure is resumed: “She let her flowers fall from her basket, scattered and tumbled them on to the grass and, reluctantly and hesitatingly, but without question or complaint … went too. Down fields, across valleys, white, flower-strewn … the hills were austere. It was rocky; it was steep. The waves sounded hoarse on the stones beneath. They went, the three of them together …” (299). The identity of the third figure is problematical. The daughter to whom Mrs. Ramsay is closest, the lovely Prue, follows her mother in death¹¹. It may be that Lily's unconscious mind has joined Prue to her mother in this symbolic vision. Since the unity of the two divine persons is central to the concept of the Kore, this is a workable hypothesis for this interpretation.¹² But in terms of the myth, Mrs. Ramsay's failure to question or complain does not seem apt. In view of the other detailed correspondences—the falling flowers, the rocky steepness so clearly suggestive of the chasm out of which Hades rose to seize his prey—this is perhaps one point upon which one might invoke Virginia Woolf's avowed intention of making her symbols work “not in set pieces … but simply as images, never making them work out; only suggest” (Writer's Diary, p. 165).

The very first pages of “Time Passes,” the middle section of the novel, may be seen as symbolic of the transformation of the earth when Demeter withheld her gifts: “a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness …” (189). There is not only darkness, but also dissolution as “fumbling airs” creep into the house; “wearily, ghostlily … they … blanched the apples … fumbled the petals of roses …” (191). “Divine goodness” displays the treasures which might be given to men if they deserved them, but “it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them … the nights are now full of wind and destruction …” (193).

Then, as this section of the novel progresses, vegetation springs up in the solitude as time passes. But there is a horror beneath this growth, now blind, purposeless, and even destructive: “the flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and so terrible” (203). The house becomes a moldering shell, in the process of dissolution. Finally, “If [a] 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” (209). This once pleasant place, now reft of the force which had made it beautiful, “would have turned and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness” (208). The time of catastrophes, private and public, has come; Andrew is killed by a piece of shrapnel; Prue dies in childbirth; and the first World War sweeps across the face of Europe.¹³

V

The reappearance of Persephone has its symbolic equivalent in the novel in the return of the force which Mrs. Ramsay represented. Mrs. McNab receives orders to have the house restored. The predominant activity in the last section of the book is the expedition to the Lighthouse, upon which Mr. Ramsay is determined almost as if it were a rite of propitiation toward Mrs. Ramsay's spirit. And clearly, her spirit has a profound effect upon Lily. In this, Virginia Woolf may have been influenced by A Passage to India, the novel of her intimate friend, E. M. Forster. This book, which she felt represented Forster in “his prime,”¹⁴ appeared three years before To the Lighthouse. The central female figure in Forster's novel is Mrs. Moore, an old Englishwoman. Through her influence, felt returning after her death, some of the wounds inflicted during the conflict between the British and the Indians in Chandrapore are healed. Earlier in To the Lighthouse Mrs. Ramsay has performed an act symbolic of Demeter's role in the rescue of Persephone. Going to the nursery, she has covered the boar's skull which has kept her daughter Cam awake until eleven o’clock at night—covered the skull with her own green shawl. The symbol of death is banished and obliterated by the symbol of fertility. In Lily's first night in the house after her return, she reflects that “peace had come” (213). If the guests were to go down to the darkened beach, “They would see then night flowing down in purple; his head crowned; his sceptre jewelled; and how in his eyes a child might look” (213). This dark and kingly deity, whose symbol had earlier frightened a child from sleep, has now been disarmed. The feminine principle, the Kore, has triumphed over the dark underworld with her release from it.

As the day passes, Lily invokes Mrs. Ramsay, fruitlessly at first. But then she feels her imminence. “‘Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!’ she repeated. She owed it all to her” (241). At times Lily's longing is so intense that “she called out silently, to that essence which sat by the boat, that abstract one made of her, that woman in grey, as if to abuse her for having gone, and then having gone, come back again. It had seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart thus” (266).

But finally, of course, as the boat reaches the Lighthouse and the rapport is achieved between James, Cam, and Mr. Ramsay, Lily completes her picture, becomes, in this individual work, fruitful as an artist. Just as Mrs. Ramsay's spirit has been the force which brings about the consummation of the trip to the Lighthouse, so her spirit brings about Lily's epiphany. In that famous passage, “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” (310). The return of Persephone is thus twofold. Mrs. Ramsay, in the Persephone aspect of the Kore, has returned as an almost palpable presence to the Isle of Skye from which she had been snatched by death. Persephone has also returned through Lily's final achievement of the artistic vision and triumph denied her ten years earlier.¹⁵ As clear as the existence of the relationship between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily is the function of this relationship: “Demeter and Kore, mother and daughter, extend the feminine consciousness both upwards and downwards. They add an ‘older and younger,’ ‘stronger and weaker’ dimension to it and widen out the narrowly limited conscious mind bound in space and time, giving it intimations of a greater and more comprehensive personality which has a share in the eternal course of things” (Jung, p. 225). Both the mother figure and the daughter figure are united in that they are artists—the one in paints and the other in human relationships—and in that they are bound to each other by psychic bonds which remain firm even beyond death. Demeter has effected the liberation of Persephone.

VI

Sigmund Freud's interpretation of the Oedipus myth is almost as famous as the myth itself. This pattern, Freud says, dramatized in the legend of the Greek youth who unwittingly kills his father, marries and begets children with his mother, and then blinds himself in atonement, is fundamental in human experience. It is so basic that “the beginnings of religion, ethics, society, and art meet in the Oedipus complex.” We are moved by Sophocles' play, Freud says, by the consciousness that Oedipus’ fate “might have been our own. … It may be that we were all destined to divert our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers; our dreams convince us that we were.”¹⁶

That the relationship between James, Mrs. Ramsay, and Mr. Ramsay reflects this pattern is so clear as to be almost unmistakable. The intense adoration which James cherishes for his mother has its opposite in an equally strong hatred for his father, “casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought) …” (10). Virginia Woolf says of Mr. Ramsay that “his son hated him” (57). This emotion is thoroughgoing: “Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it” (10). Mrs. Ramsay is solicitous and fearful for James as Jocasta might have been for the young Oedipus: “what demon possessed him, her youngest, her cherished?” (43).

James's jealousy and feelings of rivalry with his father are intensified by his perhaps unconscious knowledge of the sexual aspect of the relationship between his parents. He is made acutely aware of it in the episode early in the novel in which Mr. Ramsay comes to his wife for the sympathy and reassurance he demands. The imagery used to describe this action is patently sexual. James, standing between his mother's knees, feels her seem “to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy … and into this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare” (58). Then James feels shut out when, the demand complied with, “Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion … while there throbbed through her, like a pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation” (60–61).

Into the third section of the novel, across the space of ten years, James carries these same emotions undiminished in intensity. Of his mother he thinks, “She alone spoke the truth; to her alone could he speak it” (278). Contemplating his father, James realizes that “He had always kept this old symbol of taking a knife and striking his father to the heart” (273). The pattern is so strong that now James and his father compete in another triangle in which Cam has been substituted for Mrs. Ramsay. The two children have made a compact to resist their father's tyranny, but James feels that he will lose to him again just as he had before. As Mr. Ramsay begins to win Cam over, James acknowledges his defeat. “‘Yes,’ thought James pitilessly … ‘now she will give way. I shall be left to fight the tyrant alone’” (250). An instant later, the antecedent of the present experience is dredged up out of the recesses of his memory: “There was a flash of blue, he remembered, and then somebody sitting with him laughed, surrendered, and he was very angry. It must have been his mother, he thought, sitting on a low chair, with his father standing over her” (251).

Freud writes of the ambivalence the child feels toward his father, the conflict between tenderness and hostility. He concludes that unless the child is successful in repressing the sexual love for the mother and hostility for the father, while concomitantly allowing the natural affection for the father to grow, neurosis will be the result. Significantly, at the end of the finally accomplished journey to the Lighthouse, James experiences his rapport with Mr. Ramsay. Cam addresses herself silently to James: “You’ve got it at last. For she knew that this was what James had been wanting. … He was so pleased that he was not going to let anybody share a grain of his pleasure. His father had praised him” (306).

VII

The Oedipus myth is consonant with the Persephone myth in its application to To the Lighthouse and both are reflections of fundamental patterns of human experience. The two old antagonists testify to this judgment of their importance, Freud to the former and Jung to the latter. Appropriately, the symbol for one section of the novel, “The Window,” is female, and that for another section, “The Lighthouse,” is male. Exalting the feminine principle in life over the masculine, Virginia Woolf built her novel around a character embodying the life-giving role of the female. In opposition, she shows the male, both in the father and son aspect, as death-bearing—arid, sterile, hateful, and “fatal” (58). The female principle in life is exalted in all its aspects of love which are opposed to the harsh and critical aspects of the male principle, of fertility with its pattern of triumph over death in rebirth. What, then, becomes of the single obvious central symbol, the Lighthouse? Its use is simply this: in its stability, its essential constancy despite cyclical change which is not really change at all, this symbol refers to Mrs. Ramsay herself. This meaning is revealed to the reader explicitly: Mrs. Ramsay “looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and heart. … She praised herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light” (97). And just as there are three persons combined in the Primordial Goddess, so there are three strokes to the Lighthouse beam, and “the long steady stroke, the last of the three … was her stroke …” (96).

As Mrs. Ramsay gives love, stability, and fruitfulness to her family and those in her orbit, so the female force should always function. It serves to ameliorate or mitigate the effects of male violence, hate, and destructiveness. And should the physical embodiment of this force pay her debt to the world of shades, this is not an ever-enduring loss, for it returns through those whom it has made fruitful and thus drawn into the rebirth pattern. Or it may be sought, found, and embraced as, in their separate ways, James, Cam, and Mr. Ramsay experience it at the end of their ritual and symbolic voyage to the Lighthouse.

Notes

1. C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York, 1949), pp. 25, 152.

2. A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York, 1953), pp. 205-206. Leonard Woolf, in a recent letter, informs me that he doubts that Virginia Woolf ever read any of Freud's works, but that he (Woolf) had discussed them with her, having read them as he published them in England under the imprint of the Hogarth Press.

3. A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York, 1953), pp. 205-206. Leonard Woolf, in a recent letter, informs me that he doubts that Virginia Woolf ever read any of Freud's works, but that he (Woolf) had discussed them with her, having read them as he published them in England under the imprint of the Hogarth Press.

4. For a statement of this position see Bernard Blackstone, Virginia Woolf (New York, 1949), p. 99; Edwin B. Burgum, “Virginia Woolf and the Empty Room,” Antioch Rev., III (Dec. 1943), 596-611; and John H. Roberts, “Toward Virginia Woolf,” Va. Quart. Rev., X (Oct. 1934), 587-602.

5. F. L. Overcarsh, “To the Lighthouse, Face to Face,” Accent, X (Winter 1950), 107-123.

6. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace Modern Classics, 1927), p. 97. The pages from which further quotations are drawn are indicated in the text.

7. Edith Hamilton, Mythology (Boston, 1942), p. 54.

8. De Re Publica, De Legibus, trans. Clinton W. Keyes (London, 1928), pp. 414-415. (Laws II.xiv.36.)

9. “In ancient art Demeter and Persephone are characterized as goddesses of the corn by the crowns of corn which they wear on their heads and by the stalks of corn which they hold in their hands” (J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed., London, 1912, VII, 43).

10. The Reader's Encyclopedia, ed. William R. Benet (New York, 1948), p. 886.

11. Prue's death had come as a result of childbirth. This in itself suggests the inextricable connection of birth and death in the Kore myth.

12. Kerényi and Jung describe versions of the Persephone myth in which Demeter, as well as her daughter, was a victim of rape (pp. 170, 197, 251). Thus, in another variation, Mrs. Ramsay and her daughter would signify Demeter and her daughter.

13. In “The Eleusinian Festival” Schiller describes Demeter's wanderings:

    No refreshing corn or fruit
    Her distressing need await,
    Human bones the fanes pollute,
    And the altars violate.
    Wheresoe’er her footsteps turned
    Nought but sorrow could she scan,
    And her lofty spirit burned,
    Grieving for the fall of man.

    Poetical Works of Friedrich Schiller, ed. Nathan H. Doyle, trans. Percy E. Pinkerton (London, 1902), p. 198. Perhaps a better translation is that recited by Ivan to Alexey in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (N.Y.: Mod. Lib., 1950), p. 125.

14. Virginia Woolf, “The Novels of E. M. Forster,” Atlantic Monthly, CXL (Nov. 1927), 642-648.

15. There is another factor which confirms Lily's role as a Persephone figure in this interpretation. Mrs. Ramsay's characterization of her as prim and old-maidish is nothing more than emphasis and re-emphasis of a characteristic of Persephone, “whose salient feature was an elemental virginity” (Jung and Kerényi, p. 207).

16. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. A. A. Brill (New York, 1938), p. 308.