Critical Evaluation
The entry in Virginia Woolf’s diary for November 2, 1932, contains a reference to the novel that was eventually published as The Years. In the beginning, it was to be called “The Pargiters,” an essay-novel into which she planned to pour the total sum of her experience in the narrative of the experiences of a single family through several generations. The pattern was not to follow that of family chronicles such as John Galsworthy and Hugh Walpole had written; instead, it was to jump chamoislike across gaps in time between 1880 and 1937. A domestic story, The Years lacks the bold technical brilliance of To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931). The work may appear at first reading like a reversion to the style of Woolf’s earlier books such as Night and Day (1919), but nothing could be further from the truth. The Years is more than the story of the frustrations, ambitions, triumphs, joys, tragedies, and defeats of a middle-class family. In its episodic pattern, the novel represents an effort to record the process of time passing and to capture in fiction that sudden flash of recognition, the moment of perception, that in earlier periods was the function of poetry alone. In the separate divisions of the novel, descriptions of the seasons and the flowing movement of the prose convey the sense of change and recurrence that Woolf in her later novels tried to dredge from the depths of human consciousness.
In her essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf describes a young man and woman getting into a taxi together to exemplify her artistic ideal: the “androgynous mind” that unites both male and female principles. The same symbol—here the two are alighting from a taxi—is found at the end of The Years and strikes one of the few hopeful notes in the book.
The novel covers roughly the time period of Woolf’s own life, a sixty-year span that witnessed massive historical changes. It is this period—the period of late nineteenth century colonial expansion, World War I and the ensuing disillusionment, and the depression and cynicism of the 1930’s—that is narrated through the lives of three generations of Pargiters. Although social milieu is more important here than in any previous novel, Woolf does not merely provide a historical chronicle but also explores such themes as uniting the one with the many, bringing order to chaos, and seeing with the androgynous vision. The Pargiter family remains a unit despite the infrequent reunions that occur.
Eleanor Pargiter is perhaps the most important character in the novel, a young woman of about twenty years at the beginning, more than seventy years old at the end. As of the mother’s terminal illness, Eleanor is the element that holds the family together. Throughout, her thoughts and situations are given more prominence than those of the others, and she is often shown in the contact she has with the other family members. Woolf makes note of Eleanor’s jottings, as when she makes an “I” with lines radiating from that center. This image suggests the ego at the center of each person’s perceptions; different events become known from different characters’ perspectives. Only the reader is able to see the pattern of the whole.
Eleanor typifies the woman who sacrifices her own ambitions and desires for the good of her aging father. Woolf often commented on this kind of woman, remarking that it was a blessing that her own parents died when she was relatively young, leaving her free to pursue her writing. By the time Colonel Pargiter dies, it is too late for Eleanor...
(This entire section contains 1165 words.)
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to begin her own life.
The themes seen in Woolf’s earlier books are found in The Years, but the imagery has darkened considerably. Characters are often compared to animals or parts of nature that are gross or horrible: Uncle Edward looks like the shell of an insect; Patrick’s face looks like a red gooseberry with a few hairs, and his hands are like bear paws; Milly’s fat arms draped with beads remind North of pale asparagus. The idea of the animal in human beings is emphasized by observations about people being “nasty creatures” with “uncontrollable lusts.” North characterizes marriage as thirty years of “tut-tut-tut and chew-chew-chew.” Such radical dehumanization dominates the book but is most prevalent in the last “Present Day” section. It suggests a fundamental pessimism about human possibilities: Because human beings are purely animal, “progress” is an illusion.
The constant association of progress with death and aging emphasizes this pessimistic outlook. Nicholas, for example, who speaks of a New World in 1917, expounds a similar idea in 1937, by which time there is the sense that optimistic words are empty and meaningless: After his attempted speech, Nicholas brings his glass down, and it shatters; two children sing for the party, but their words are incomprehensible; Eleanor realizes that people know nothing, even about themselves. At the end, when the old Pargiter brothers and sisters are grouped together by a window, the next generation regards them as “unreal” as statues. True communication, self-knowledge, and human progress all seem to be lacking.
The book’s structure reinforces the theme of decay and entropy: People grow old and die, and little else changes or improves. The first section is divided into ten parts, each treating a day in a particular year from 1880 to 1918. Historical events—the death of Parnell or Edward VII, air raids during World War I, Armistice Day—are used as a means of bringing together different characters; the historical and social situations are always in the background. The second section, titled “Present Day,” encompasses the final quarter of the book.
Throughout the novel, such natural phenomena as rain, moon, wind, sun, and snow are used to connect places and people. Sometimes these phenomena recur from one year to another, so that each subsequent mention gains associations from the earlier ones. The way the sunlight shines through the trees, for example, is noted in both 1910 and 1914. The same objects and actions are periodically mentioned, giving a large network of recurrences to the book, where everything has a place in an order and where nothing happens by chance. Flames, sparks, and smoke are mentioned often, evoking memories of previous thoughts in the characters’ minds. The fraying of the wick under the slow teakettle, the spotted ink-stained walrus, and the cooing of pigeons are some of the repeated images that provide links between the years.
Eleanor herself finally realizes that some sort of pattern for the whole exists, and this awareness makes her happy, but she wonders, “Who makes it? Who thinks it?” Eleanor’s vision of the pattern brings a note of hope to the ending of the book that counteracts the dark, dehumanized quality of foreboding prevalent in the 1937 section. It is questionable, however, whether her final optimistic image of the young couple and the new day overcomes the pessimistic tone that dominates most of the rest of the book.