How does To The Lighthouse challenge the conventions of the novel?
By Maddie Langlinais
Trigger Warning: passing description of gore, death.
The Modernism movement of the early 1900s was defined by a surge of experimentation within the world of the arts. Everyone was racing to test the waters with new technology, materials, political views, leading to the discoveries and inventions of a great number of new techniques, ideologies, and forms of expression. Painters and other physical artists were working with abstract forms and contrasting colors, and composers were working in time schemes and with instruments that had never been used before. Writers, in particular, were experimenting with all sorts of different styles. Voices and dialects, linear and non-linear story lines, hyper-detailed prose, even the punctuation was being used in ways that had never been seen before. Virginia Woolf, a brilliant writer of her time, was one of these authors. In writing her novel, To The Lighthouse, she employed many functional techniques that changed the way we think about the novel as a medium and what it can do.
The first of Woolf’s techniques we should cover is the unorthodox use of chapters.
The average novel was (and still is) usually written in a way so that the story is evenly divided into chapters of more-or-less equal length. An average chapter ranges to about thirty-ish pages, and the action of the plot rises and falls with the end and beginning of the chapters. This is so the readers get just enough of a pause between plot points to not get bored or overwhelmed. Sometimes the chapters themselves will be divided into acts or parts, which may cover different periods of time, or even switch between point-of-view characters. However, with To The Lighthouse, Woolf takes a different approach. In place of the chapter, Woolf uses numbered sections of varying lengths, some from different perspectives than the ones before. Delving deeply into the interior minds of its characters, these sections are composed as frozen moments in time, sometimes independent of each other, sometimes interrupting each other, but all of them weaving together to capture a single shared memory; less like a novel and more like a poetry collection.
[…] For one moment [Lily] felt that if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing could be hid might speak, then beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ she said aloud ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ The tears ran down her face.
VII
[Macalister’s boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still) was thrown back into the sea.]
VIII
‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ Lily cried ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ But nothing happened. The pain increased. That anguish could reduce one to such a pitch of imbecility, she thought! Anyhow the old man had not heard her. […]
(Pg. 134, Part 3. Sections VI, VII, and VIII.)
As you can see, the third section is a continuation of the first, and both show Lily coming to terms with her grief, but the second is different. It takes place miles away from Lily and her garden lawn, on the boat Mr. Ramsay and his kids are taking to the lighthouse. While at first this scene seems like an unprompted interruption, it actually serves as the perfect metaphor for Lily’s emotional epiphany: that her experience with the, to quote exactly, “feeling of wanting and not having,” has left her alive but empty, like a half-gutted fish released back into the water, slowly dying, a chunk of itself missing. This method of splicing a separate scene into the middle of an emotional moment works well for the way the story is told. Where another novel would continue the scene as one long passage, or maybe as two paragraphs printed closely together, Woolf’s separation of the scene between sections gives the reader more room to rest visually. It also helps to better describe how Lily is processing her own emotions. Your average novel would bring up the fish metaphor within the prose of the story, leading the reader to believe that Lily is coming to terms with that metaphor personally, describing herself as the mutilated fish, while in Woolf’s method it is the book itself that gives us the metaphor, describing for us what Lily herself cannot put into words.
Another important technique to talk about is the unorthodox use of parentheses within the prose of the novel. Now, usually your average novel doesn't use parentheses often, if at all. Mostly it would only be used to describe a body of in-story writing that uses parentheses (a letter for instance, or a sign). Less often it can be used within dialogue, but Woolf uses her parentheses for many different things, as seen in the passage above and below.
Why, the dressing table drawers were full of things (she pulled them open), handkerchiefs, bits of ribbon. Yes, she could see Mrs. Ramsay as she came up the drive
with the washing.
‘Good evening Mrs. McNab,’ she would say.
She had a pleasant way with her. The girls all liked her. But dear, many things had changed since then (she shut the drawer); many families had lost their dearest. So she was dead; and Mr. Andrew killed; and Miss Prue dead too, they said, with her first baby; but everyone had lost someone these years.
(Pg. 101, Part 2, Section VIII.)
Your average novel would use the body of prose to describe the action—the physical—of the story, but Woolf does the opposite. She uses the prose to explain Mrs. McNab’s thoughts, quietly bubbling away the less important physical actions in parentheses. This emphasizes for the audience how absorbed in thought Mrs. McNab is, and gives them the feeling of being totally immersed in the memory of Mrs. Ramsey. It also muffles the sound of the physical parts of the scene, so the reader’s concentration stays on the introspection. Brackets are also used, though in a slightly different way.
But slumber and sleep though it might there came later in the summer ominous sounds like measured blows of hammers dulled on felt, which, with the repeated shots still further loosened the shawl and cracked the tea cups. Now and again some glass tinkled in the cupboard as if a giant voice had shrieked so loud in its agony that tumblers stood inside a cupboard vibrated too. Then again silence fell; and then, night after night, and sometimes in plain midday when the roses were bright and light turned on the wall, it’s shape clearly there seemed to drop into the silence, this indifference, this integrity, the thud of something falling.
[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsey, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]
(Pg. 99, Part 2, Section VI.)
Notice how the top paragraph details the emotional imagery of the event, weaving vivid, beautiful prose to describe how the house changes with the passage of time. We see the calm and beauty of a summer home be subtly undone by this muffled far off sound, so powerful and devastating that it can crack the glasses in the house from miles away. Then, in smaller, franker, bracketed words, Woolf tells us what that noise is: The First World War, with all its devastating, family-shattering power, taking Andrew, one of the Ramsay’s sons, with it. It’s the quietness of the second passage’s impact that makes the first passage so devastating. Simply putting the bracketed bit into the prose (maybe in the same paragraph as the first, or as a second one) would leave both events at the same volume level, and would risk the first passage being drowned out or ignored by the second. By using the parentheses and brackets to separate the physical from the emotional, Woolf makes the silent moments louder, and the more physical moments just as loud as they need to be.
Finally, there’s Woolf’s use of quotation marks; or, sometimes, the lack thereof. Usually, novels use the double-hook quotation marks (“”) for dialogue that happen in the present of the story. Single-hook quotation marks (‘’) are also used, but these are usually saved for when one character is requoting the words of another character within the dialogue. Woolf, of course, takes a different approach, deciding to use only the single-hook marks to note her dialogue, or, sometimes, uses no quotation marks at all.
Jasper and Rose said that Mildred wanted to know whether she should wait for dinner.
‘Not for the Queen of England,’ said Mrs. Ramsay emphatically.
‘Not for the Empress of Mexico,’ she added, laughing at Jasper; for he shared his
mother's vice; he, too, exaggerated.
(Pg. 57-58, Part 1, Section XVI.)
By using the single-hook marks in place of the double-hook marks, the dialogue becomes softer, less striking to the eye. Not only does this mean the dialogue comes off as having a quieter, softer ‘sound’ or volume when read by the reader, but it also means that the visual words of the dialogue seem to fade into the prose a bit more, which adds a dream-like feel to the storytelling, as if the entire novel was a collection of memories recalled from some distant point in the future.
This is emphasized even more when Woolf writes dialogue directly into the prose, going without quotation marks entirely.
Mrs. Bast (she had never known them; had lived in Glasgow at the time) wondered, putting her cup down, whatever they hung that beast’s skull there for? Shot in foreign parts no doubt.
It might well be, said Mrs. McNab, wantoning on with her memories; they had friends in eastern countries; gentlemen staying there, ladies in evening dress; she had seen them once through the dining room door all sitting at dinner. Twenty she dared say in all their jewelry, and she asked to stay help wash up might be till after midnight.
Ah, said Mrs. Bast, they’d find it changed. She leant out of the window. She watched her son George scything the grass.
(Pg. 104, Part 2, Section IX.)
There’s a quiet and a distance added to the scene above, where the events of the ‘present’ blend together with the events of the distant past, divided just barely by semicolons and commas. It’s almost like watching a scene through a haze, or a veil, or a thickly-paned window of some kind: you can hear and understand what is being said, but not the exact words; as if this is a moment that is being remembered many weeks after the fact, and the memory of the conversation is fading together with the memories that were being recalled during the conversation itself. Much like the brackets and parentheses, Woolf’s quotation mark method is used as the perfect means of volume control within the storytelling. It allows for the old lady’s conversation to be at the perfect volume level for the benefit of the story; whereas the traditional novel would either separate the dialogue with the double-hook marks, making it more obvious to the reader and therefore louder in their mind’s eye; or it would simply describe the entire scene in prose, only revealing the conversation in descriptions within the prose, which would mute the conversation entirely.
In conclusion, Woolf used many unorthodox techniques—be they in form, volume, or punctuation—to control the tone of the story she wanted to tell. These techniques manipulated the prose of her story in ways that were new and exciting, and inspired many other writers to explore these methods in their own writing.
Bibliography To The Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf. Wordsworth Classics Edition.
Author Bio
Maddie is a graduate of the University of Evansville with a bachelor's degree in creative writing. Her passions lie in reading fiction, specifically fantasy and science fiction pieces with intricate world-building and social commentary, as well as writing critical reviews in music, movies and television. She has written several poems and short stories, though she has yet to publish any of them in an official capacity, and have aspirations to work in the fields of literature and publication.
This piece was written in the author's freshman year of college for a class on 20th Century British Literature.