[In the following essay, Friedman argues in favor of multiple interpretations of the symbolism in To the Lighthouse,particularly because of Woolf's belief in the supremacy of the individual's inner life over any artificially imposed outer reality.]

So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea, which had scarcely a stain on it, … upon distance: whether people are near or far from us.

(To the Lighthouse, p. 284)¹

While there is general agreement that To the Lighthouse centers on questions of order and chaos, permanence and change, detachment and involvement, intellection and intuition, male and female, critical unanimity disappears in the actual tracing out of these themes and the analysis of the patterns of imagery evoking them. Thus, for example, it is clear that the simultaneous completion of Lily Briscoe's painting and the arrival of Mr. Ramsay, James, and Cam at the Lighthouse are somehow functioning together to finish the book, but no two commentators have agreed as to what that function means as an ending of what has gone before. S. H. Derbyshire claims that Mr. Ramsay is undergoing a transition from his former intellectual personality to a newly discovered intuitive view; Dorothy M. Hoare and John Hawley Roberts argue that Lily is moving from a concern with form (art) to a concern with content (life); Dayton Kohler sees a shift from time to the timeless; F. L. Overcarsh traces an allegory of Christ's Ascension, involving a movement from the God of wrath to the God of mercy; David Daiches analyzes a transition from egoism to selflessness; while D. S. Savage and Deborah Newton think of this simultaneous convergence as a clumsy device which resolves nothing.² These examples could be multiplied, but the dominant tendency is clear: to interpret the thematic conflict, whatever it may be, as an antithesis of two mutually exclusive terms, one of which must be rejected in favor of the other. The trip to the lighthouse, in other words, is too often seen as a one-way ride.

But since the symbolism of the book as well as its structure suggests a rather different set of possibilities, there still seems to be room for an interpretive framework comprehensive enough to embrace them. A single view, an either-or strategy, will hardly prove adequate for dealing with the multiplicity of points of view through which each character is seen in the first section, the descending and ascending movement of the second section, and the shifting simultaneity of event which shapes the third. In order to discern here the intricate web of image, attitude, and idea which Woolf has woven on her four-dimensional loom, the critic must develop a more complex tactic.

I

We are dealing here, in other words, with those tentative and hovering effects which are characteristic not only of modernist literature in general but also of the novels of Woolf in particular, and therefore an even greater burden is placed on the critic to interpret in context than ordinarily. In this case, that context may be seen on three successive levels: particular moments and sequences of moments of thought and feeling experienced by characters in situations, the images and recurrences of images in terms of which these moments are embodied, and the overall plot structure as a whole.

To begin with, since the action and its significance lie so much within the feelings and thoughts of the characters, and since these feelings and thoughts keep shifting in attitude from moment to moment, we must pay close attention to moods, mood shifts, and mood cycles if we are to avoid being prejudicially selective in our use of the evidence and imposing a more abstract pattern of meaning upon the book than that intended by the whole. Woolf, as we know, assumes that human reality resides in our inner life; and she conceives of that life as fluid, tenuous, and ambivalent. We must be careful therefore not to make our interpretation simpler than the book.

Secondly, since we are treating ambivalent internal states, we would expect them to be embodied in and expressed through external and tangible images whose symbolism will be many-sided and ambiguous. We must interpret both the general meaning of these symbols as well as their particular evaluations, at least to begin with, primarily in terms of intrinsic relationships and associations—those accumulating on the one hand from moments and sequences of moments of thought and feeling, and on the other from the overall plot structure. And we must try, in looking for symbolic patterns, to do justice to all the significant recurrences of a given image rather than just those which seem to fit a preconceived pattern. Some of these images may indeed verge upon universal symbols and even archetypal patterns, especially in terms of general meanings (water imagery, for example), but I think we will find that the nature of the case calls for an especially solid base in the text. Not only will it turn out that water imagery has a wide range of particular evaluations in various contexts, but also that other key images (the lighthouse itself, for example, and its flashing light) depend almost entirely upon the text not only for particular evaluations but also for general meanings. It is best, that is, when working with semitransparent envelopes of this sort, to work from within outward rather than from outside inward.

The freedom and ambiguity of these moods and the images they are associated with are structured, finally, by a principle of development and resolution which organizes moments and sequences of moments, images and image patterns into a plot, form, or intelligible whole. Although it would seem that the plot, if there is one, is buried beneath the associative patterns, in that the second part of the book forms a hiatus between the first and third, and several of the main characters disappear in between, it is nevertheless also the case that the third fulfills the first, and that therefore we are not confronting simply shifting mental states and ambiguous patterns of image clusters. We have here a plot with a group protagonist (compare The Nigger of the “Narcissus”) comprised of Lily, Mr. Ramsay, and James, and whose form is their simultaneous change in thought and feeling as Mr. Ramsay comes to experience greater ease about the fragility of life (an education plot), Lily and James achieve a resolution of their tensions in relation to Mr. Ramsay (an affective plot), and Lily finds that her painting is finished (an education plot). The fact that the still-living influence of Mrs. Ramsay helps bring about this resolution provides additional structural continuity.

The basic problem can now be seen as one of determining more precisely just what the nature of that resolution is; and I think that, if we consider what has been said so far about tenuous moods and ambivalent images, we will be careful not to allow our analysis of structure to overstructure our interpretation—either as archetypalists or Aristotelians. While it is true that the journey to the Lighthouse finally does represent a transition from one mental state to another and that this transition does involve such polarities as detachment and involvement, it is also true, as I hope to show, that this change is more a matter of integrating the polarities than of dichotomizing them. Development and resolution embody a double vision in which Lily and James proceed, not simply from detachment to involvement, but rather complexly from detachment vs. involvement to detachment cum involvement.

Detailed attention to moments and sequences of moments, then, will help us to understand the images in which they are embodied, just as detailed attention to the images will help us to understand the moments and sequences of moments they embody. And just as these analyses will help us to understand the plot, so too will understanding the plot help us to understand them. Thus there is a reciprocal pattern of mutual support in interpretation, one approach leading to, checking, and limiting another. The final principle in terms of which the whole is organized, however, in contradistinction to the manner in which we may come to grasp it, is the principle according to which Lily, Mr. Ramsay, and James move from a state of puzzlement, confusion, ambivalence, and frustration, to one of harmony, clarity, balance, and integration. And it is this principle, ultimately, which should guide, control, and limit our interpretation of any of the parts.

II

“Subject and object and the nature of reality,” Andrew had replied to Lily's question about the content of his father's books (p. 38), and it is exactly this problem which works its way through the novel on three perceptible levels: human relations, metaphysics, and aesthetics. Thus, although Mr. Ramsay's problem is technically an epistemological one, the novel itself can also be seen to have been built around the problem of how the known looks to the knower: of one person to another, of nature to man, and of life to the artist. Further, the overall quality of this relationship may be subsumed under the headings of order—a triumph over life's meaningless flux—and chaos—a giving way to its all but irresistible force, or a blank confrontation of its stark emptiness.

The point is, as we shall see, that a dialectic order is achieved by those who manage to focus their apprehension of the nature of reality simultaneously from two different perspectives—that of subject, or involvement in flux, and that of object, or detachment therefrom—and that the nature of reality, through which one must pass in making his transition from one perspective to the other, finds its image in water as a symbol of surrender. From whatever viewpoint one regards life (thesis), whether it be that of the detached philosopher ironically contemplating from a height man's smudge and his smell, or that of the busy mother and housewife frantically involved in the fever and fret of daily routine, one must give it up in favor of the other (antithesis), becoming immersed in the waters of transition, and emerging with a double perspective (synthesis). To lose this perilous balance, to keep out of the wet, is ultimately to give way to the chaos of a black and lonely darkness on the one side or to the disorder of a terrifying and senseless force on the other.

An interesting passage in which this theme of the double vision and its accompanying water imagery occurs is found almost halfway through the book:

Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, … and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down. … And then, letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above the pool and rest on that wavering line of sea and sky, … she became with all that power sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing, hypnotised, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever, to nothingness.

(Nancy: pp. 114–115)

Section 1 deals chiefly with the first level, the relation of self to other, and it soon becomes evident that no one single trait or characteristic of a person can be seized upon and cherished as a way of knowing him or her. Mrs. Ramsay, for example, is a charmingly warm and beautiful woman, yet annoyingly concerned with ordering the lives of others (many of her circle resent her mania for marriage); although she is maternal, intuitive, involved in life's common cares, and capable of an unreasoning fear when she allows herself to dwell upon the tragic fragility of human life, she nevertheless is capable also of a triumphantly mystical detachment wherein life's inscrutable mystery appears ordered and revealed. And the significance of her portrayal, as it emerges from the attitudes of others toward her as well as from her own broodings, is that the truth about Mrs. Ramsay encompasses both these aspects of her personality.

Or consider Mr. Ramsay: he is a self-dramatizing domestic tyrant, yet he is also admirable as a lone watcher at the dark frontiers of human ignorance. A detached and lonely philosopher, he nevertheless craves the creative contact of wife and children; he is grim, yet optimistic; austere, yet fearful for his reputation; petty and selfish, yet capable of losing himself completely in a novel by Scott; aloof, yet capable of thriving on the simple company and fare of humble fishermen.

Lily likewise is a complex figure: a spinster uninterested in ordinary sexual attachments, she is nevertheless capable of a fierce outburst of love; an artist perpetually terrified by a blank canvas, she still manages to approach a solution to the complex problem of the art-life relationship. Mr. Bankes, to consider another, is an unselfish friend and a dedicated scientist, yet also a cranky food faddist; a self-sufficient bachelor, he is nevertheless a lonely widower craving the affection of children. Or again, Charles Tansley is an irritating and self-centered pedant, yet also a sympathetic human being—a complexity which Mrs. Ramsay herself sums up: “Yet he looked so desolate; yet she would feel relieved when he went; yet she would see that he was better treated tomorrow; yet he was admirable with her husband; yet his manners certainly wanted improving; yet she liked his laugh” (p. 174).

The climax of the first section occurs at the dinner, a brilliantly dramatic communion meal where each solitary ego, with its petty aggravations and resentments, is gradually blended with the others into a pattern of completion and harmony.

Personality, then, can be known only in terms of a multiple perspective: “One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with. … Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with” (p. 294). Section one provides just such a perspective. Including his or her own interior monologues, each character is presented from at least two points of view: Mr. Ramsay is seen chiefly through the eyes of Mrs. Ramsay, young James, Lily, and Mr. Bankes; Mrs. Ramsay through those of Lily, Tansley, and Mr. Bankes; Mr. Bankes himself through those of Lily; Lily herself through those of Mrs. Ramsay; and Tansley through the eyes of Mrs. Ramsay and Lily. It is by this technique of alternation that each is rendered more or less in the round.

Section 2 deals mainly with the second level, the relation of man to nature; and it does not, as has been frequently supposed, portray merely the ravages of time and tide afflicting the family and their summer home. In addition to the almost complete destruction of the house, we are also shown its equally dramatic renewal. Its focus is on the comic-epic figure of Mrs. McNab, who lurches through the house dusting and wiping, breathing a long dirge of sorrow and trouble, yet who leers, “looking sideways in the glass, as if, after all, she had her consolations, as if indeed there were twined about her dirge some incorrigible hope” (p. 197). It is she and her helpers who fetch up from oblivion all the Waverley novels and who rescue the house from annihilation.

The fortunes of the family undergo several severe setbacks: Mrs. Ramsay dies, Andrew is killed in the war, and Prue dies in childbirth. Yet we are given to understand that Mr. Ramsay's work will endure (the fate of his books was somehow tied up with that of the Waverley novels) and, as the next section proceeds to demonstrate, the family continues to develop and mature. The central section of To the Lighthouse therefore dramatizes not the victory of natural chaos over human order, but the reverse: the forces of destruction are defeated by man's power and will to live.

Section 3 is concerned chiefly with the third level of our theme, the relation of art to life, and continues in the knowledge of loss as well as the achievement of gain. Its structure is based upon the shuttling back and forth between Lily on the island watching those in the boat get farther away, and those in the boat watching the island in turn get farther away. This is accompanied by the corresponding movements of those in the boat getting closer to the Lighthouse, and of Lily getting closer to the solution of her aesthetic problem. The determining factor in each case is love (the “art” of life), which might perhaps be defined as order or the achievement of form in human relations through the surrender of personality: Lily finishes her painting as she feels the upsurge of that sympathy for Mr. Ramsay which she had previously been stubbornly unable to give; James and Cam surrender their long cherished antagonism toward their father as they reach the Lighthouse; while Mr. Ramsay himself attains at the same time a resolution of his own tensions and anxieties. The point is not that they have made a one-directional transition from this attitude to that, but that since each is aware simultaneously both of what is receding and of what is approaching, each has received in his way a sense of what I have called the double vision.

III

The presence of this duality can be further demonstrated by a closer look at the particular imagery of the book: its figures of speech, its scene, and its plot. The Lighthouse itself as the most conspicuous image functions literally in two ways: as something to be reached, and as the source of a flashing light. The former aspect is to be considered when we discuss plot; the latter suggests that the Lighthouse has a symbolic role of its own to play. In this aspect it appears in two connections: first as it impinges upon the consciousness of Mrs. Ramsay in section 1 after she has finished reading to James and is sitting quietly alone for a moment, and second as it flashes upon the empty house in section 2.

The busy mother of eight children, a woman of grace and ease who delights in social intercourse, and one who visits the poor as well, she often feels the need “to be silent; to be alone.” As she sits knitting, the relief of abstraction from “all the being and doing” grows upon her; it is in this mood that she muses upon the alternating flashes of the light. It is a mood of detachment, peace, rest, and of triumph over life; she identifies herself with the third stroke, the long steady stroke, which becomes for her an image of purity and truth, of strength and courage, searching and beautiful: her “self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. … Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; 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.”

This is the “thesis” of her emotional cycle; the “antithesis” is evoked as her mood soon modulates into one of grim recognition of the inevitable facts of “suffering, death, the poor,” and she gradually descends from her state of triumphant abstraction from the fret, the hurry, and the stir, by seizing upon the light from a different perspective, “for when one woke at all, one's relations changed.” As she looks now at the steady light, it is “the pitiless, the remorseless.”

But the cycle is not yet complete until these two moods become synthesized. The second view seems “so much her, yet so little her”; and then her meditations are crowned, in their third phase, by “exquisite happiness, intense happiness,” and she cries inwardly, “It is enough! It is enough!” As if, by seeing that long steady flash in two different aspects—first as an image of expansion and release, and then of contraction and confinement—she has received a final intuition of the essential truth of the nature of reality: that one must be both subjectively involved in and objectively detached from life, and that true happiness rests neither in the one sphere nor in the other exclusively, but in achieving a harmonious balance, however fragile, between the two. Now she can rest, if but for the moment, content. And to her husband, who is striding up and down the terrace outside the window behind which she sits, “She was aloof from him now in her beauty, in her sadness” (pp. 94–100).

In the middle section, portraying the death and rebirth of the deserted house, the light makes its second appearance by gliding over the rooms “gently as if it laid its caress and lingered stealthily and looked and came lovingly again.” That this is only one side of its doubleness is evidenced by the sentence immediately following: “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” (pp. 199–200). A few pages on, just preceding the arrival of the forces of renewal in the house, in “that moment, that hesitation when dawn trembles and night pauses” (p. 208), the Lighthouse beam, as an image of expansion and release (life-love-hope) and contraction and confinement (death-destruction-terror) held in relation, “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” (pp. 207–208).

Finally, it is worth noticing in section 3 that as Lily begins her painting a second time (while those in the boat are embarking for the lighthouse), her brush descends in stroke after stroke: “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.” Thus in echo of the Lighthouse beam itself, her vision begins to emerge from stroke and pause in alternation, and “this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands upon her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention” (p. 236).

IV

Having seen that the Lighthouse beam—stroke and pause in alternation—symbolizes quite clearly that the problem of subject and object and the perception of the nature of reality is a matter of opposites held in dialectic relation, we may now proceed to investigate more closely the specific embodiment of the objective-detachment and subjective-involvement themes in the water imagery which obviously permeates the novel on both the literal and figurative levels as scene and as metaphor. And as this theme and this imagery begin to take root together and grow as one, we shall see a second, more pervasive symbol emerging: the act of immersion as surrender and transition.

The fact is, as we have seen, that whatever his attitude toward life may be, whether objectively detached or subjectively involved, each character must immerse himself in the doubleness of reality by making a transition to the opposite attitude, and that this process in one way or another usually finds its image in water. Taking the three or four chief characters in their apparent order of importance, we may begin with Mrs. Ramsay.

Searching for a picture in the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores for James to cut out, Mrs. Ramsay suddenly becomes aware that the gruff murmur of talk out on the terrace has ceased and that now, coming to the foreground of her consciousness, the waves are falling monotonously on the beach. Stationed as she is in a moment of domestic involvement, this sound at first “beat a measured and soothing tatoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, ‘I am guarding you—I am your support.’” The passage continues, however, through the dialectic of transition: “but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, [it] had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea.” And the cycle is complete as this sound is once again accompanied by that of her husband's voice chanting poetry: “She was soothed once more, assured again that all was well, and looking down at the book on her knee found the picture of a pocket knife with six blades which could only be cut out if James was very careful” (pp. 27–29).

As the Lighthouse beam had come to her when she was in a state of detachment and had spoken to her of triumph and fulfilment, and then of failure and frustration, thereby annihilating her abstracted bliss and bringing her back down to the sphere of life's fretful involvements, so too the sea—reversing the process—comes to her when she is in a state of involvement and speaks of consolation and sympathy, and then of terror and remorseless power, thereby annihilating her contented involvement and carrying her up to the sphere of blank and meaningless abstraction. The synthesis which ensues, however, in each case produces a sense of equanimity, peace, and rest. Thus the double vision involves indeed a two-way process: depending upon which direction you are going, whether from subject to object or vice versa, detachment is either joy or fear, involvement either consolation or despair. And, also depending upon the direction, the water imagery becomes now a symbol of the search for human contact and warmth, or of the brute force of the natural cycle, now a symbol of the search for intellectual stability and certitude, or of the bottomless ignorance of the race of men and the profound vanity of their puny knowledge.

Thus, proceeding chronologically through the book, we discover another aspect of the water imagery in connection with Mrs. Ramsay—that of the fountain as a symbol of feminine creativity to which the male must resort in order that his fatal sterility be redeemed. The intellectual husband becomes immersed in the waters of human sympathy and devotion figuratively issuing from the intuitive wife. Emotionally exhausted and depleted, however, by this effort of consolation, she sinks back down into herself, her fountain pulsing feebly; and hearing “dully, ominously, a wave fall,” she doubts all that she had said to him (pp. 58–61).

Reading the tale of “The Fisherman and his Wife” to James, she senses some relation of the story to her concurrent meditations, for the tale “was like the bass gently accompanying a tune, which now and then ran up unexpectedly into the melody” (p. 87). In the fairy tale, the sea becomes increasingly more turbulent each time the poor fisherman arrives to deliver his wife's insatiable demands upon the enchanted fish. How much, after all (Mrs. Ramsay might be thinking), can one ask of the sea? For if one presses it too far in one direction, forgetting the necessity of giving oneself up in turn to the sea in exchange for its gifts, one will lose everything.

Hearing at dinner of the Mannings, old friends she has not seen or thought of for many years, she broods over the relation of past to present, the stasis of the former being imaged as a placid lake and the flux of the latter as water shooting down into the room in cascades. In so far as we are out of the past, we are detached and the water image is a static one; in so far as we are in the present, we are involved and the image is a dynamic one. A few pages later, however, the present also achieves form—in terms of the harmony of all those at the table—so “that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily” (p. 147). Here it is the human order as dry land which is being opposed to natural flux as water. We shall see below how Lily comes to feel the necessity of deserting the land for the sea.

Finally, as the perfection of this moment becomes in turn a thing of the past, the party disperses and Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are in the study reading. Thinking of her husband's anxiety over the fragility of his fame, and of her concern over encouraging him, she feels once more a sense of detachment as she knits and watches him read Scott: “It didn’t matter, any of it, she thought. A great man, a great book, fame—who could tell?” (p. 177). Then, “dismissing all this, as one passes in diving now a weed, now a straw, now a bubble, she felt again, sinking deeper, … There is something I want—something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed” (p. 178). Brooding over snatches of poetry, she picks up a volume and reads of love lasting and time passing: “her mind felt swept, felt clean. And then there it was, suddenly entire; she held it in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here—the sonnet” (p. 181: Shakespeare's number 98). Once again the emotional cycle is complete, and she has reached a point of stability (the aftermath of the meal) by alternating from involvement (her anxious preparations for the meal) to detachment (the consummation of the meal and the resultant separation from natural flux), the transition being imaged as an immersion in water.

V

Mr. Ramsay's uncompromising honesty and unflinching courage in the face of the perennial mystery of life and the tragic incapacity of the human mind is imaged as a stake driven into the sea to guide the frail barks which founder out there in the darkness: “It was his fate, his peculiarity, whether he wished it or not, to come out thus on a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away, and there to stand, like a desolate sea-bird, alone” (pp. 11, 68). His masculine detachment from the commonplace—he doesn’t notice little things, the shape of a flower, the texture of a sunset—is here a positive act, a gesture of defense against the tides of time and ignorance. Yet as we have seen, this standpoint becomes ultimately sterile without a periodic immersion in the feminine waters of life. Or to take it the other way round, his withdrawal from the life around him into his abstracted solitude finds its image also in immersion: “and then, as if he had her leave for it, with a moment which oddly reminded his wife of the great sea lion at the Zoo tumbling backwards after swallowing his fish and walloping off so that the water in the tank washes from side to side, he dived into the evening air” (p. 52).

Or again, his children and his domestic attachments (which somehow signify to Mr. Bankes a betrayal of their friendship), rather than his philosophical solitude, seem to provide the buttress against the floods: “That was a good bit of work on the whole—his eight children. They showed he did not damn the poor little universe entirely, for on an evening like this, he thought, looking at the land dwindling away, the little island seemed pathetically small, half swallowed up by the sea” (p. 106). He needs both the sense of involvement and of detachment, and the water imagery functions now in one direction, now in the other. His demand for the sympathy of women, we may notice, pours and spreads itself in pools at their feet, and Lily Briscoe, resenting him, draws her skirts a little closer around her ankles for fear of becoming wet—of becoming involved (p. 228).

And lastly, as if he has reached a more complex state of mind than hitherto, Mr. Ramsay thinks to himself, as the boat nears the Lighthouse and while he and Macalister are discussing the local shipwrecks and drownings: “But why make a fuss about that? Naturally men are drowned in a storm, but it is a perfectly straightforward affair, and the depths of the sea (he sprinkled the crumbs from his sandwich paper over them) are only water after all” (p. 306). Having cast his bread upon the waters and surrendered to the “destructive element,” his anxieties as to his fame, and his courage in the face of the inevitable dissolution of human endeavors, are resolved in one final symbolic gesture. Cast your bread upon the waters: for you shall find it after many days. He that observes the wind shall not sow; and he that regards the clouds shall not reap. In the morning sow your seed, and in the evening withhold not your hand: for you know not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good (Eccl. 11: 1, 4, 6).

VI

For Lily, likewise, the water imagery functions in its double capacity as destroyer and preserver. She and Mr. Bankes stroll down to the shore, drawn regularly by some need. “It was as if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief.” And they both feel a common hilarity, a sort of exhilaration at the sight. But characteristically, the mood turns, “and instead of merriment [they] felt come over them some sadness—because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest” (pp. 33–34).

To Lily, the old-maid painter, the great mystery is love: “Love had a thousand shapes. There might be lovers [i.e., artists] whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays” (p. 286). But the lover in art cannot help being fascinated by the artists of life who do achieve a wholeness in their lives; so Lily, vicariously seeing the world through the eyes of human love—the love of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay—feels “how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach” (p. 73).

She resented Mrs. Ramsay's judgment that an unmarried woman has missed the best of life, and “she would urge her own exemption from the universal law; plead for it; she liked to be alone; she liked to be herself; she was not made for that” (p. 77). Yet the love of Paul and Minta is keenly felt as a contrast to her own barren state: “How inconspicuous she felt herself by Paul's side! He, glowing, burning; she, aloof, satirical; he, bound for adventure; she moored to shore; he, launched, incautious; she, solitary, left out” (p. 153). So coming back on that evening ten years later, Lily goes to sleep lulled by the sound of the sea, for “Messages of peace breathed from the sea to the shore.” And she feels, “why not accept this, be content with this, acquiesce and resign?” (pp. 213–214).

But the next morning she stubbornly sets up her canvas and starts to paint. Like Mr. Ramsay, the philosopher confronting the mystery of nature, she too, the artist confronting life, is imaged as a figure isolated and facing the sea of mystery and chaos alone: “Out and out one went, further and further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over the sea” (p. 256). But as she gives herself up to her art, as Mrs. Ramsay did to her husband, she loses consciousness of outer things, “her name and her personality and her appearance,” and her mind throws up from its depths images, memories, ideas, “like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modelled it with greens and blues” (p. 238). While her ego is held in abeyance, the creative waters of life, welling up within her, help to shape her picture.

She thinks of Mrs. Ramsay, who died in the interval between the two visits, and she remembers Mrs. Ramsay's mania for marriage. Suddenly she recalls Paul and Minta, whose marriage has not worked out well after all, and thinks of the glow which love had caused to shine from their faces: “It rose like a fire sent up in token of some celebration by savages on a distant beach. She heard the roar and the crackle. The whole sea for miles round ran red and gold.” She feels a headlong desire to fling herself down into this sea and be drowned. But the mood shifts, “and the roar and crackle repelled her with fear and disgust, as if while she saw its splendour and power she saw too how it fed on the treasure of the house, greedily, disgustingly, and she loathed it” (p. 261).

The cycle, however, has yet to be completed. She continues her meditation while painting, and thinks again of Mrs. Ramsay. She sees something stir in the window where Mrs. Ramsay used to sit, and has a poignant sense of her living presence there beside her. Her tears well up in an anguish of love and grief, and she cries aloud, “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!” Called out of her reverie by the unexpected sound of her own voice, she looks around embarrassed. “She had not obviously taken leave of her senses. No one had seen her step off her strip of board into the waters of annihilation. She remained a skimpy old maid, holding a paint-brush” (pp. 268–269). But she has taken the plunge.

Some further light is cast upon the key phrase, “the waters of annihilation,” in this passage by its recurrence in another work by Woolf which will perhaps help to clinch our definition of the symbolic function of the water imagery in To the Lighthouse. That work is a little book of less than thirty pages, which appeared just three years after To the Lighthouse, entitled On Being Ill, wherein she speaks of how “tremendous” is “the spiritual change” which illness effects: “how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, … how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers.”³ Clearly here the act of immersion is a symbol of rebirth, or, as we have styled it, of transition from one state to another—in the novel under examination, of transition from the single view, whether it be that of objective detachment or subjective involvement, to the double vision which apprehends the nature of reality simultaneously from both points of view.

VII

It now remains to tie our strands together by analyzing the significance of the alternating points of view around which the final section of the novel is built. As we have seen, its structure is determined by the double vision of Lily on the island watching the boat approach the Lighthouse while she finishes her painting, and of those in the boat watching the island recede from view while they near the completion of their trip. “So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea which had scarcely a stain on it, … upon distance: whether people are near us or far from us; for her feeling for Mr. Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay” (p. 284).

Similarly James in the boat thinks, as they get closer to their destination, of his childhood and of the time he had hated his father for saying they would not be able to go to the Lighthouse next morning:

The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now—

James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it?

No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too.

(pp. 276–277)

Dramatically, there is a double tension to be resolved here, each aspect somehow centered around the gaunt figure of Mr. Ramsay. First there is in Lily a curious feeling of frustration due to her longstanding inability to give Mr. Ramsay the feminine sympathy he craves—probably because this would entail performing a more sexually oriented role than she will allow in her desire to keep her artist-spinsterhood intact—and this is somehow tied up with the trip to the Lighthouse and the completion of her painting. As the third section proceeds, “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 fixed itself doggedly, solidly, here on the lawn” (pp. 233–234). She is seeking that “razor-edge of balance between two opposite forces; Mr. Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary” (p. 287).

So too James, in league with Cam, is stubbornly trying to keep a firm hold on his long-standing resentment against his father, to resist tyranny to the death. But “Cam looked down into the foam, into the sea with all its treasure in it, and its speed hypnotized her, and the tie between her and James sagged a little. It slackened a little” (p. 246).

Back on the island, Lily continues her painting, raising in her mind the question of artistic detachment from the common sympathies of life and the consequent lack of emotional stability which has been haunting her all along: “No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower in the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?—startling, unexpected, unknown?” (p. 286). As James's childhood resentment against his father prevents him from yielding to his father's emotional demands, thereby standing in the way of the son's identification with the father and consequently blocking his normal growth toward maturity, so too Lily's aloofness from life's routine involvements prevents her from yielding to Mr. Ramsay's demand for feminine sympathy, thereby standing in the way of her acceptance of her sexual role and consequently blocking her achievement of artistic maturity.

Meanwhile James, who has been steering the boat, nursing his resentment, is praised for his navigational skill by his father just as they reach their goal. “There! Cam thought, addressing herself silently to James. You’ve got it at last. For she knew that this was what James had been wanting, and she knew that now he had got it he was so pleased that he would not look at her or at his father or any one.” Mr. Ramsay sits expectantly, waiting to disembark: “What do you want? they both wanted to ask. They both wanted to say, Ask us anything and we will give it to you” (pp. 306–308).

Similarly Lily, as a result of the parallel course run by her emotional cycle, the progress of her painting, and her awareness of Mr. Ramsay in the boat reaching the Lighthouse, feels her tension resolving at the same time:

“He must have reached it,” said Lily Briscoe aloud, feeling suddenly completely tired out. For the Lighthouse had become almost invisible, had melted away into a blue haze, and the effort of looking at it and the effort of thinking of him landing there, which both seemed to be one and the same effort, had stretched her body and mind to the utmost. Ah, but she was relieved. Whatever she had wanted to give him, when he left her that morning, she had given him at last.

“He had landed,” she said aloud. “It is finished.”

(pp. 308–309)

Mr. Carmichael stands beside her, the aging poet “looking like an old pagan god, shaggy, with weeds in his hair and the trident (it was only a French novel) in his hand,” and repeats: “‘They will have landed.’” She feels that this is a moment of communion—one to match, we might add, the similar moment which occurred during the meal in section 1—and she thinks: “He stood there as if he were spreading his hands over all the weakness and suffering of mankind; she thought he was surveying, tolerantly and compassionately, their final destiny. Now he has crowned the occasion, she thought.” And, under the spell of this benediction, “Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was—her picture” (p. 309).

James has come into manhood by identifying himself with his father's attitude of grim and solitary acceptance of the uncompromising reality: “So it was like that, James thought, the Lighthouse one had seen across the bay all these years; it was a stark tower on a bare rock. It satisfied him. It confirmed some obscure feeling of his about his own character. … He looked at his father reading fiercely with his legs curled tight. They shared that knowledge. ‘We are driving before a gale—we must sink,’ he began saying to himself, half aloud, exactly as his father said it” (pp. 301–302).

Finally, Lily has come to see the need of holding art and life in relation by means of the double vision: “One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy” (pp. 299–300). And this complex perspective, we recall, was gained by both James and Lily, as well as Mr. Ramsay, by means of a yielding—whether literal or figurative—to the watery element of transition.

Notes

1. All page references to the novel are to the Harbrace Modern Classics ed. (New York, 1927).

2. Derbyshire, “An Analysis of Mrs. Woolf's To the Lighthouse,” College English, 3 (1942), 353-360; Hoare, Some Studies in the Modern Novel (London, 1938), pp. 53-61; Roberts, “‘Vision and Design’ in Virginia Woolf,” PMLA, 61 (1946), 835-847; Kohler, “Time in the Modern Novel,” College English, 10 (1948), 15-24; Overcarsh, “The Lighthouse, Face to Face,” Accent, 10 (1950), 107-123; Daiches, Virginia Woolf (London, 1945), pp. 84-88; Savage, The Withered Branch (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1950), pp. 87-96; Newton, Virginia Woolf (Melbourne, 1946), pp. 37-40. Cf. also Irene Simon, “Some Aspects of Virginia Woolf's Imagery,” English Studies, 41 (1960), 180-196; Thakur, Symbolism of Virginia Woolf, chap. 5; Leaska, Virginia Woolf's Lighthouse; Morris Beja, ed., Virginia Woolf: “To the Lighthouse”: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1970); Thomas A. Vogler, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of “To the Lighthouse” (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970); Latham, Critics on Virginia Woolf; Jean O. Love, Worlds in Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), chaps. 11-12; and Claire Sprague, ed., Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1971).

3. Printed and published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1930, p. 9. Grateful thanks are due to my colleague Mr. Edward W. Manchester of the University of Connecticut for the loan of this valuable book, one of a limited edition of 250 copies signed by the author, who also set the type. It was reprinted in The Moment and Other Essays (1947), and is now to be found in Collected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1967), vol. 4, pp. 193-203. I realize, of course, that the context of the image in the essay, unlike that in the novel, is rather witty and ironic, but it seems to me that its basic meaning remains much the same, even though the tone and effect are different.