Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse

• Set out to write a novel that mapped the psychological unconscious. Instead of detailing the many things characters say and do to one another, she concentrated on the innumerable things that exist below the surface of speech & action - stream-of-consciousness is key to this.
• High modernist
• split in 3 parts
• stream of consciousness, but jumping characters - heads
• Ramsey Mr. Ramsey phiosophy prof made career in youth, trying to recapture that in adulthood. super greedy. Almost like a child. Requires sympathy from family, esp. Mrs. Ramsey
• Main focus is on Lily Briscoe - someone who takes care of family - she's a painter
• Entire story is about them
• Novel set in their summer home
• Nothing happens, no characters involved
• Psychological surreal passage of time, examining how time moves
• Like really intense poetry
• Intro, 10 years pass during that section, including WWI, 2 children die, Mrs. Ramsey dies. Mr. Ramsey grows more needy
• Comes back to summer house after 10 years, decide to go to the lighthouse. James, Cam, Mr. Ramsey
• Cam has realization about her father in this section that she actually admires him, instead of resenting him
• Lily completes her painting of the lighthouse here
• Majority of characters female, but Mr Ramsey so needy of these women, always interrupting them, so doesn't take their needs into consideration.
• p 35. Mr. Ramsey's deep musings about intelligence, fame, and how long it lasts, the bleak reality about the rock outlasting Shakespeare, his "little light"
• p36, right before "VII" unfamiliar, isolation, waste of ages
• p36-37 - James hatred for his father
• pg 36-37 - Mr. Ramsey's requirement of sympathy, needy
• p37 - Mr. Ramsey's want of sympathy - "fatal sterility" wants his barrenness made fertile"
• p37 - Mrs. Ramsey trying to give him symapthy "creating" the rooms in the house where can find ease, metaphor for soothing him - knitting, flushing needles
• p38 - James feels all her strength leaving as she gives him sympathy, "to be drunk & quenced be the break of brass, the arid, scimitar of the male"
• p38 - Mrs. Ramsey only a shell to know herself by
• she's exhausted, feeling "The rapture of successful"
• p39 - her dissatisfaction, her lying to him about his most recent book
• p40 - "inadequacy of human relationships"
• p41 - She needs to be needed, self-satisfaction in helping
• p42 - pettiness of herself and human relations, flawed, and despicables
• p44 - Fate to be alone, desolate, waste away on spit of
• p45 - Deceptive appearance, "It was a disguise"
• p46 - Mr. Ramsey, fows on self "absorption in himself"
• p50 - Deceptiveness of appearnace, half truths
• Gender roles brought into question in novel, predominately pivoting on Lily Briscoe
• Lily rejects gender conventions
• Has no plans to marry - odd at time, questioned by Mrs. Ramsey
• Plagued by artistic self-doubt, a similar self-doubt to Mr. Ramsey, through his is a doubt about his professional work & Intelligence
• Lily's self-doubt is fueled by Transley's idea that women can't (or weren't meant to )paint or write.
• But Mrs. Ramsey (on the otherhand) taken on the conventional role of wife and mother and accepts the plans that go along with that
• but at the same time she realizes how strongly she influences people (matchmaker, supports her husband, Tansley is basically in love with her etc)
• Mr. Ramsey muses that his wife and 8 children are a fine contribution to "the poor little universe" 
• very modernist (bleak, pessimistic) look at the world
• Woolf tried to show with this novel that life's intellectual psychological or emotional shakes can be as high in the dining room/lawn as they are in the bedroom/battlefield
• Goes against subject matter of the Victorian novels with their complex ploys in mostly exotic/important places
• Woolf's novel focuses away from WWI, Mr. Ramsey's philosophy etc, & instead focuses on the character's mind
• At the dinner, heart of the novel, each guest impressions are given and each is remote "rough & isolated & lonely" much like each character in As I Lay Dying.
• At the dinner, the chaos becomes (momentarily) in harmony as Mrs. Ramsey is present, but when she leaves someg uests scatter and the harmony is lost
• P97, when the candles are lit & everyone is sitting there, Mrs. Ramsey uses her uneasieness & things are in order, as opposed to outside which appears rippled, having
• When Mrs. Ramsey leaves, Lily notices the disentigration of the group
• Time passes
• Whereas "the window" a 120 page section, essentially encompasses 1 day "Time passes" encompasses a time span of 10 years, during which time any things happen
• Mrs. Ramsey dies
• WWI takes place, Andrew Ramsey dies in war (France)
• Prve Ramsey (the beautiful one) dies in childbirth
• The house isn't visited by anyone (except a house maid) for 10 years, during which time the house succumbs to the ravages of time (mold, dust, weeds, etc) - but is brought back to life by 2 maids before Lily returns
• Woolf depicts the passage of time here as cruel & relentless - everything sinks into oblivion
• Human beings are secondary concerns here for instance, Mrs. Ramsey's death is barely mentioned and moved on from, whereas Victorian novels would spend ample time on the deathbed scene & human sentiment
• Lily attempts to finish painting, attempts to provide the sympathy for Mr. Ramsey that he desires, can't and therefore feels like a failure. She pities him deeply
• Mr. Ramsey, James, & Cam finally voyage to the lighthouse
• With Mrs. Ramsey dead, Mr. Ramsey turns to Lily and his children to satisfy his need for sympathy
• Mrs. Ramsey lives on through Lily's memory
• Cam grows to respect her father & longs to show him she loves him without betraying James, as they both agreed to travel in silence to spite their father
• Image of the mutilated fish thrown back to sea by the fisherman (boy) is important:
• Very modernist image
• symbol of the paradoxical modern world: very cruel, yet possible to live in 
• Calls back to the deaths of Mrs. Ramsey, prove Andrew
• By the end of the novel, Lily has finished her painting. She doesn't care what its fate is; hung up, in the attic, or destroyed – so long as she had her vision captured 
• James' view that one would need 50 sets of eyes to truly see someone, both represent woolf's technique in writing the novel: only by presenting a collection of varied subjective character views could she capture a true likeness of her characters & their world
• Distance is the key to reconciling competing impressions: James now has a more complete view of the lighthouse & Lily, having had 10 years to think about Mrs. Ramsey, sees her more fully: recognizes her dated ways and her manipulation
• Focuses on the small stuff, mundane
• Mrs. Ramsey is always exhausted from giving
• look for knife scene
• her heart gives out symbolic
• Chaos ensues because Mrs. Ramsey is gone
• Lighthouse - male
• Bay - female

Themes/modernism

• stream of consciousness, fragmentation
• Whole 2nd section very poetic & complex, very modernist
• questions of individuality
• Very long sentences, like Faulkner, lengthened by semicolons
• p5 - atheist translations
• p 7 bleak pessimistic language
• p19, Lily's inadequacy insignificance
• p20 Ramsey's natural air of solitude
• p25 the inner workings of Lily's mind - the gnats & kitchen table
• Some one had blundered - p18, 25, 30, 33
• p30, Mrs. Ramsey understands the meaning of those words (epiphany) but still doesn't know what he was referring to
• p30 stream of consciousness of Mr. Ramsey, on walking in on Lily & Mr. Bankes
• p31. James hates his father, "folly of woman's minds" enrages Mr. Ramsey
• 32 Mrs. Ramsey "nothing but a spouse sopped full of human emotion" - her feelings about her children using her, feeling of insignificance found her husband
• p33, Mr. Ramsey happy about solitude, his "splendid mind" children divinely innocent, defenseless against a doom he perceived
• p33-34 alphabet as representation of scale of human intelligence, most people don't even make it to Q, which is where he's stuck
• p34 "r" out of reach, failure
• p34-35, 2 classes of men
• p35, death wish, but he'll die standing