Smt. S.B. Gardi
Department of
English
Assignments
Name:- Rathod Neha R.
Class:- M.A. Sem-3
Roll No:- 28
Email Id:- neharathod108@gmail.com
Year:- 2015-2016
Paper No:- 9
Topic:- What is the main theme of the novel?
Name:- Rathod Neha R.
Class:- M.A. Sem-3
Roll No:- 28
Email Id:- neharathod108@gmail.com
Year:- 2015-2016
Paper No:- 9
Topic:- What is the main theme of the novel?
( To the light house)
What is the main theme
of the novel?
Introduction
of Novel
To The Lighthouse is 20th
century novel which is written by Adline Virginia Woolf. She was an
English Author, writer, publisher, essayist and short story writer. She is
regarded as a famous figure of that era.
1) Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
2) To The Lighthouse (1927)
3) Orlando (1928)
These are a famous novel of Virginia
Woolf.
To
The Lighthouse
This novel is
published on 5th May – 1927. The novel is landmark of high
modernism. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf used the language of
psychoanalysis. Reader can find stream of consciousness during reading the
novel. The novel set on duration of 10 years (it deals with the year - 1910 to
1920). The centre of the novel is Mr. and Mrs. Ramsays and their visit to the
Isle of Skye in Scotland.
Virginia Woolf wrote about this novel
that – “I suppose that I did this work for myself.”
The novel
captures its readers with its characterization of Ramsay family and their guest
who meet at their holiday home on Isle of Skye, an island near the Scottish
mainland. As know that novel is set on a ten years period of time,
1) The novel’s first section
taking place on a day before the First World War,
2) A Middle period in which all
the action happens “off stage” during the war
3) Last section taking place on a
day after the First World War.
The theme of To The Lighthouse is
concerned with subject and object and Nature of reality.
Introductory:
Interpretations Differ
To
The Lighthouse is, without any shade of doubt, a
very complex novel and hence there are different interpretations from different
critics. Norman Friedman’s comments on this point is worth noting: “To The
Lighthouse is a very complex novel, and different critics have read
different meanings into it.
While
there is a general agreement that To The Lighthouse centres on questions
of general order and chaos, male and female, permanence and change and
intellection and intuition, the critics are far from unanimous in the actual
tracing out of these themes. Thus, for example, it is clear that the
simultaneous completion of Lily Briscoe’s painting and arrival of Mr. Ramsay,
James and Cam at the Lighthouse are somehow functioning together to complete
the book, but no two critics have agreed as to what the function means as an
ending of what has gone before. One claims that Mr. Ramsay is undergoing a
transition from his former intellectual personality to a newly discovered
intuitive view, while another critic says that Lily is moving from a concern
with form, that is art, to a concern with content, that is life. Another critic
sees in the ending a shift from time to the timeless, while a fourth one sees
here a shift from egotism to selflessness, and a fifth critic thinks of this
simultaneous convergence as a clumsy device which solves no problem.”
We
can multiply such examples, but it is evident that the dominant tendency is to
interpret the thematic conflict—whatever it may be—as an antithesis to two
mutually exclusive terms, one of which must be rejected in favour of the other.
In fact, the full significance of the trip to the Lighthouse is not grasped. It
is, more or less, seen as a one way affair. But a closer study of the novel
will reveal that this either-or strategy is hardly adequate for dealing with
the multiplicity of points of view through which each character is seen in the
first section, the descending and the ascending movement of the second section
and the shifting simultaneity of events which shape the third.
Relation of Self to
Others
It
is mainly the first part of the novel that deals with the relation of self to
others. Very soon it becomes clear that not one single trait or characteristic
of a person can be seized upon and cherished in order to know him or her. Mrs.
Ramsay for instance, is really a warm and beautiful woman, yet annoyingly
concerned with ordering the lives of others. And this is quite clear from the
resentment which many of her circle express against her mania for marriage. She
is, no doubt, maternal.
Mr. Ramsay
Next,
let us take the example of Mr. Ramsay. Often he shows himself as a
self-dramatising domestic tyrant, but still he is to be admired as a lone
watcher at the dark frontiers of human ignorance. He is, no doubt, a detached
and a lonely philosopher, yet he cannot but crave the contact of his wife and
children. He is grim, yet optimistic, austere, yet fearful for his reputation;
petty and selfish, and yet capable of losing himself completely in a novel of
Scott; alert, yet he thrives on the simple company and the humble fare of
fishermen.
Lily and Others
In
the same way Lily Briscoe is also a complex figure. She is a spinster
disinterested in ordinary sexual attachment; she is nevertheless capable of a
fierce outburst of love. She is, no doubt, an artist perpetually terrified by a
blank canvas, but still she is able to find a solution to the complex problem
of art-life relationship. In the same way Mr. Bankes, Mr. Tansley, all are
double beings or complex figures of the novel. And we find that the climax of
the first section occurs at the dinner, a brilliantly dramatic communion meal
where each ordinary ego, with its petty aggression and resentment, is gradually
blended with the others into a pattern of completion and harmony. Thus it is
clear that double vision or multiple perspective is very much necessary to know
and understand human personality. And in this section we are able to have just
such a perspective, as each character is presented from at least two points of
view.
Man to Nature
We
have seen how in the first section the relation of self to others has been
dealt with. And Part II of the novel deals with the relation of man to nature.
It does not portray merely the ravages of time and tide affecting the Ramsay
family and their summer house. In addition the almost complete destruction of
the house, we have also a chance to see its equally dramatic renewal. And then
it is seen that its focus is on the comic-epic figure of Mrs. McNab, who
lurches through the house wiping and dusting, breaking into a long dirge of
sorrow and trouble, yet who feels, ‘looking sideways in the glass, as if after
all, she had some consolation, as if indeed there were twined about her dirge
some incorrigible hope’. Thus, it is she and her two helpers, Mrs. Bast and her
son, who fetch up from oblivion all the Waverly novels, and who rescue the
house from impending doom and destruction.
Further,
we find in this very section that the fortunes of the Ramsay family suffer so
many setbacks. Mrs. Ramsay dies unexpectedly, Andrew is killed in the
battlefield in France, and Prue dies of childbirth. Even then we are made to
understand that Mr. Ramsay’s work will endure, for the fate of his books was
somehow tied up with the Waverly novels. Also, as the next section proceeds to
demonstrate the family continues to develop. Thus it is clearly evident that
section two or the central section of this great novel, therefore, demonstrates
not the victory of natural chaos over human order, but rather the reverse.
Man’s power and will to live ultimately prevail over death and destruction.
Relation of Art to
life
Now,
in the third section of the To The Lighthouse, the third level of the
theme, the relation of art to life is treated. We find that the structure of
this section is based upon the shuttling back and forth between Lily on the
island and those in the boat watching the island, who in turn get further away.
This is accompanied by the corresponding movement of those in the boat getting
closer to the Lighthouse and Lily gelling closer to the solution of her
aesthetic problem. And it must be noted that 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.
Hence we find Lily brushing 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 give up their longstanding antagonism towards their father.
Mr. Ramsay, himself, at the same time, attains a resolution of his own tensions
and worries. The point is not that they have made a one dimensional transition
from this to that attitude, but that, since each is aware simultaneously both
of what is receding and what is approaching, each has received in his way a
sense of double vision.
Double Vision through
Imagery
A
closer look at the imagery of the book, its figure of speech, its scene and
plot may further demonstrate the presence of this double vision. To begin with,
the Lighthouse itself as the most conspicuous image functions in two ways as
something to be reached, and as source of flashing light. This means has a
symbolic role to play. As a source of light, it appears in two connections,
first, as it impinges upon the consciousness of Mrs. Ramsay in the first
section after she had finished reading to James, and second, as it flashes upon
the empty house in section two.
Thus
we find that Mrs. Ramsay, the busy mother of eight children often feels the
need ‘to be silent, to be alone. Often she muses upon the alternating flashes
of light in a mood of detachment, peace and rest. And this musing gives her a
sense of victory over life, and 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 strongest 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 serenity, and pausing there she looked out to meet the stroke, of
the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three which was—her
stroke.’
Now
this can be taken as the thesis of her emotional cycle, the antithesis is
evoked as her mood soon changes into one of the grim recognition of inevitable
facts of ‘suffering, death, the poor’, and she gradually descends from her
state on triumphant freedom from the fact, the hurry and the stir by seizing
upon the light from a different perspective, ‘for when one woke, all one’s
relation changed’. Looking now at the light, it is the remorseless, the
pitiless.
Reconciliation of
Opposites
Then
it is found that only when these two moods become reconciled, will the cycle be
complete. The second view seems ‘so much here, yet so little hers’, and then
her meditations are crowned in their third phase by ‘exquisite happiness,
intense happiness’, and she cries out, ‘It is enough. It is enough’. It seems
to be apparent that by seeing the long steady flash of light in two different
aspects—as an image of expansion and release and, then, as an image of
contraction and confinement, she has received the final intuition of the truth
about the nature of reality. And this intuition is that one must be both
subjectively involved, 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 contented, if only for a moment.
The
second part or the middle section of the novel portrays the death and rebirth
of the decaying and deserted house. Here the light makes its second appearance by
gliding over the rooms gently as if it laid its cares arid lingered stealthily
and looked and came lovingly again. It is clear from the sentence which follows
immediately that this is one side of doubleness. ‘But in the very lull of the
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’. And a few pages
on, just before the arrival of the forces of renewal in the house, in ‘that
moment, that hesitation when dawn trembles and night pauses’, 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 room 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.’
So we find that the three moods—loving care, tearing apart and equanimity are
well represented by the light, It may now be asserted that only by going through
the opposing experience or multiple perspective one can get a comprehensive
view of life.
Lily’s Experience:
Doubleness of Reality
In
the third section of the novel, Lily’s brush descends in stroke after stroke
when she begins her painting for a second time. ‘And so pausing and so
flickering she attained a dancing rhythmical movement, as if the pauses were
one part of the rhythm and the stroke another, and all were related. ‘Thus, in
each of the lighthouse beam itself, her vision begins to emerge in stroke and
pause in alternation, and ‘the truth, the reality which suddenly laid hands
upon her emerged stark at the back of appearance and commanded her attention’.
In other words, as the light flickers, as it goes and comes back, Lily begins
to see the course that her painting was to take. This flicker, which to an
ordinary observer is an endless dull repetition, holds Lily’s mind and enables
her to discover the truth and reality that the appearance signifies to her. The
stroke and pause of the Lighthouse beam symbolise the problem of subject and
object and the perception of nature of reality. Hence it may be concluded that
reality has always a doubleness; and this can be understood only through a
double vision.
Subject, Object and
Native of Reality
We
find this phrase—subject and object and the nature of reality—in the first part
of To The Lighthouse. Andrew Ramsay has used this phrase in answer to a
question from Lily Briscoe about the content of his father’s books. And the
words are significant and have underlying meaning also. In fact it is exactly
this problem which works its way through the novel on three perceptible
levels—human relations, metaphysics and aesthetics. The novel can be seen to
have been built around the problem of how the knower looks at the known, how
one person looks at another, how man looks at nature and how the artist looks
at life. These points have been discussed in detail in the foregoing
paragraphs. We have shown how the main characters of To The Lighthouse look
at the world in various ways. In fact three specific ways of seeing the object
can be examined in To The Lighthouse through the eye of the artist (Lily
Briscoe) through the eye of a child (James Nancy and Cam), and through the
feminine creative eye of Mrs. Ramsay, whose vision might be solid to be that of
a poet. Hence the characters see themselves and the world differently and very
often bring the objective world into subjective consciousness.
Conclusion
To
understand life and the nature of reality the need of double vision is
essential. We may now conclude with the very apt comments of Norman Friedman on
this point: “A right understanding is achieved by those who try to understand
the nature of reality simultaneously from two different stand points—subjective
and objective—through which one must pass in making the transition from one
perspective to the other. From whatever view point we regard life, whether it
be that of a detached philosopher ironically contemplating from a height’ or
that of the busy mother and the house wife frantically involved in the fever
and fret of daily routine, one must give it up in favour of the other, becoming
immersed in the waters of transition and emerging with a double perspective
(synthesis). In other words, both an involvement in life and a certain
detachment from it, are necessary to understand it fully. Doing only one of the
two would naturally give a partial view of a life, which can be quite
misleading. Hence the need for a double vision. One has to strike a balance, to
lose which is to give way to the chaos, of a black and lovely darkness on the
one side, and to the disorder of a terrifying and senseless force on the
other.”
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