Journal Articles
Adams, Kate. “Root and Branch: Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse.” San Jose Studies 9.2 (1983): 93-109.
Allen, William Rodney. “Woolf's To the Lighthouse.” Explicator 47.3 (1989): 37-38.
Focuses on the act of cutting in Chapter 6 of the final section of To the Lighthouse, that is,. Allen claims that cutting is an
important symbol and illuminates the father-children relation of James and Cam with their father. Besides, Allen demonstrates that as a comment on the human need to order reality through art, chapter 6 is also related to Lily.
Ansari, A. A. “Structure of Correspondences in To The Lighthouse.” The Aligarh Journal of English Studies 7.2 (1982): 248-252.
Asher, Evelyn Westermann. “The Fragility of the Self in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Christa Wolf's Nachdenken uber Christa T.”
Neohelicon: Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum 19.1 (1992):
219-47.
Barr, Tina. “Divine Politics: Virginia Woolf's Journey toward Eleusis in To the Lighthouse.” Boundary-2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 20.1(1993): 125-45.
Discusses the way Woolf turns the modernist “mythical method” to personal and feminist purposes in To the Lighthouse. Among the parallels between character and mythic figure, Barr identifies Mrs.
Ramsay with Demeter with reference to the correspondence between Woolf’s description and the celebration of the Grater Mysteries at Eleusis. Also, Lily Briscoe is identified with Persephone, but significantly Woolf works on the reversal of the roles since at the end Lily is identified with Demeter, a mother to art and Mrs. Ramsay is invoked as the daughter, Persephone. Barr claims that Woolf’s appropriation of the myth not only enacts women ’s self-determination and self-empowerment but also transforms her own family conflict into mythic arena and thus achieves what Kristeva calls “sublimatory solution” to inner crises. Barr stresses that Woolf’s use of the mythical method examines the mother-daughter relation from a woman ’s point of view and provides a conception of the literary subject which is plural.
Barzilai, Shuli. “The Politics of Quotation in To the Lighthouse: Mrs.
Woolf Resites Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Cowper. ” Literature and Psychology 41.3 (1995): 22-43.
Examines the functions of reiterative quotations in To the Lighthouse in terms of biographical and sociocultural circumstances. Drawing on Freud’s theory on daydreams, Barzilai suggests that Mr. Ramsay ’s citation of Tennyson’s and Cowper’s poems reflects his self-indulgence in phantasies which contrast with actuality.
Furthermore, Barzilai argues that for the narrator and the author, the play of quotation communicates an ethics of social and familial responsibility in a satiric, humorous way. According to Barzilai,
Woolf not only cites but also subverts Tennyson’s poem in order to call into question the male-dominated militarism and the Victorian institutional values. Besides, Barzilai points out the difference between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay in reading.
Bassoff, Bruce. “Tables in Trees: Realism in To the Lighthouse.” Studies in the Novel 16.4 (1984): 424-434.
Defines To the Lighthouse as a realist novel about psychological states of desire, dependency and conflict. Bassoff argues that the crucial problem of realism is “the relation between subject and mediator the Other who mediates our relation to the world” (425).
Bassoff further discusses the relations between the characters in terms of influence, difference and desire. According to Bassoff, Woolf’s characters demand from the Other the wanted prestige, the desired gaze and the stability, and however, the relationships between subject and the Other is inevitably perplexing and underlined by hostility. Bassoff’s conclusion that to see truly is to see the world as it is colored by others demonstrates clearly the relationships between subject and mediator, the Other.
Bate, Jonathan. “Arcadia and Armageddon: Three English Novelists and the First World War.” Etudes Anglaises 39.2 (1986): 151-162.
Beeman, Robin. “Reading a Voice.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 39 (1992 ):
7.
Beer, Gillian. “Hume, Stephen, and Elegy in To the Lighthouse.” Essays in Criticism 34.1 (1984): 33-55.
Bell, Ilona. “'Haunted by Great Ghosts': Virginia Woolf and To the Lighthouse.” Biography 9.2 (1986): 150-175.
Bell, Quentin. “The Biographer, the Critic, and the Lighthouse. ” Ariel 2.1 (1971): 94-101.
Boren, Lynda S. “The Performing Self: Psychodrama in Austen, James and Woolf.” The Centennial Review 30.1 (1986): 1-24.
Explores Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Boren suggests that the three authors employ dramatic conventions, devices and audience manipulation in their portrayal of self. Boren finds that all of the works are concerned with life as drama and with the intermingling of woman’s condition and artistic creativity. Boren shows that each character in To the Lighthouse is performing, seeking attention, and
attempting to define self.
Boyd, Elizabeth F. “'Luriana, Lurilee'” Notes and Queries 10 (1963):
380-381.
Brett, Sally Alexander. “No, Mrs. Ramsay: Feminist Dilemma in To the Lighthouse.” Ball State University Forum 19.1 (1978): 48-56.
Brivic, Sheldon. “Love as Destruction in Woolf's To the Lighthouse.”
Mosaic 27.3 (1994): 65-85.
Discusses the destructive effect of love on oneself and the other in To the Lighthouse. Brivic finds that Woolf also explores the unfairness of gender and family systems, which contribute to the harmful effect of love. As Brivic puts it, the fact that masculine and feminine depend on the opposition each provides for the other leads to the paradoxical aspects of love. Brivic specifically analyses the relations of Mrs. Ramsay to other men and the mother-daughter relation to show how love can hurt others.
Significantly, Brivic claims that the destructive tendencies of Mr.
and Mrs. Ramsay’s love are shaped by the gender stereotypes. Brivic shows that Woolf proposes an interaction between two opposing impulses, two genders within each individual.
Burling, William J. “Virginia Woolf's 'Lighthouse': An Allusion to Shelley's Queen Mab?” English Language Notes 22.2 (1984): 62-65.
Suggests Woolf’s appropriation of Shelley’s image, the lighthouse, in Queen Mab. Burling emphasizes that Shelley is placed in the central position in Woolf’s aesthetic views. Although Woolf renounces that the image of the lighthouse has special meanings, Burling contends that the lighthouse has a function in the design of the novel.
Burt, John. “Irreconcilable Habits of Thought in A Room of One's Own and To the Lighthouse.” ELH 49.4 (1982): 889-907.
Questions the dissonance between form and content and focuses on A Room of One's Own and To the Lighthouse to examine the formal and ideological contradictions. Burt suggests that in A Room of One's Own the postwar and progressive arguments modify each other and thus two irreconcilable assessments of the past are juxtaposed.
Similarly, in To the Lighthouse the opposing forces are manifest.
Burt specifically demonstrates the discontinuities within the content and the form of To the Lighthouse and further defines Woolf ’s concept of androgyny as dual resistance.
Bush, Glen P. “Mrs. Ramsay as the Archetypal Guide in Virginia Woolf's
To the Lighthouse.” Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association (1988): 13-20.
Corner, Martin. “Mysticism and Atheism in To the Lighthouse.” Studies in the Novel 13.4 (1981): 408-423.
Discusses mysticism and atheism in To the Lighthouse. Corner defines two kinds of mystical experiences: “fusing” and “facing.” According to Corner, Mrs. Ramsay’s experience of the mystical unity with the world, the blending of the self and the object, belongs to the former kind, with which Woolf contends. On the other hand, Lily’s recognition and acceptance of the otherness of the world demonstrate Woolf’s view of the facing variety of mystical experience. As to atheism, Corner compares Tansley’s superficial atheism with Mr.
Ramsay’s achieved atheism in the end of the novel, which parallels the facing variety of mysticism.
Corsa, Helen S. “To the Lighthouse: Death, Mourning, and Transfiguration.” Literature and Psychology 21 (1971): 115-31.
Applies the psychoanalytic approach to the process of mourning in To the Lighthouse. Corsa discerns that the novel moves at two levels;
the level of the action shows the process of mourning the characters work through in the novel while the narrator’s voice reveals the primary process which has been reactivated by the action.
Specifically, Corsa focuses on James Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, both of whom work through the mourning of Mrs. Ramsay’s death and along with the process comes the resolution of grief and the acceptance of loss. According to Corsa, James ’s fantasy of the phallic mother and his castration anxiety are resolved as he arrives at the lighthouse. Lily must resolve the libidinal attachment to the lost mother and her desire of reincorporation in the mother so that she can be freed from the infantile fear of destroying and can transform the desire into her art object. Corsa explains that the real loss in the death of the beloved mother revives the primal loss, and both are worked through in the inner voyage. Corsa suggests that the characters’ resolution of mourning is also Woolf’s.
Crater, Theresa L. “Lily Briscoe's Vision: The Articulation of Silence. ” Rocky Mountain-Review of Language and Literature 50.2 (1996):
121-36.
Daugherty, Beth Rigel. “'There She Sat': The Power of the Feminist Imagination in To the Lighthouse.” Twentieth Century Literature 37.3 :(1991): 289-308.
Demonstrates the mother-daughter relationship in To the Lighthouse.
As Woolf has claimed to kill the Angel in the House, Daugherty brings the question how a female tradition can be developed as the female tradition is the Angel Woolf needed to kill. Daugherty argues that Woolf distinguishes the Angel from the mother clearly in To the Lighthouse. Specifically, the patriarchy imposes the interlocking Mary/Eve myths on women, who thus comply. Mrs. Ramsay is a good example of women’s self-sacrifice in order to be the Angel in the House and be revered. However, Daugherty argues that killing the Angel is not a denial of women but an act to free mothers and daughters to be themselves, whose complexity is negated in the patriarchal society.
Dekoven, Marianne. “History As Suppressed Referent in Modernist Fiction.” ELH 51.1 (1984): 137-152.
Dick, Susan. “The Restless Searcher: A Discussion of the Evolution of 'Time Passes' in To the Lighthouse.” English Studies in Canada 5 (1979): 311-29.
Compares three versions of “Time Passes” in To the Lighthouse. Dick points out the additional and revised parts in the final published version. Especially, as Dick suggests, the addition of the bracketed facts reinforces the tension between the perception of beauty and values in life and the antithetical conviction of a destructive element underlying every achievement. Also, Dick focuses on the revision of the figure of the restless searcher in the final version of “Time Passes.” Dick claims that this revision sheds light on the process of Woolf’s as well as the characters’ search for self-integration, the existence of the soul. Given that the restless searcher is less prominent and treated more obliquely in the final version than in earlier ones, Dick argues that the recognition of nature’s indifference to human quest and the tension between order and fragmentation are foregrounded in the final version.
Donaldson, Sandra M. “Where Does Q Leave Mr. Ramsay?” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 11.2 (1992): 329-36.
Makes use of the notation system in the syllogism to explore Mr.
Ramsay’s dilemma in To the Lighthouse. Donaldson suggests that Mr.
Ramsay’s speculation on the symbolic logic reveals his being overwhelmed by mortality. Observing that Lily’s resolution of her dilemma is to take the whole all together, Donaldson considers that it might help Mr. Ramsay escape the prison by “mixing mathematical and alphabetical discourses into an inclusive, non-hierarchical, non-linear metaphor” (333).
Doron, Edit. “Point of View as a Factor of Content.” Cornell Working Papers in Linguistics 10 (1991): 51-64.
Doyle, Laura. “‘These Emotions of the Body’: Intercorporeal Narrative in To the Lighthouse.” Twentieth Century Literature 40.1 (1994): 42-71.
Applies Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concept to Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Doyle indicates that the point of intersection between Woolf and Merleau-Ponty is their attention to the palpable and their recognition of the inanimate and nonhuman phenomena as alternative grounds of human narrative and temporality. According to Doyle, for Merleau-Ponty the visible and the invisible intertwine, so do the emptiness and fullness for Woolf in To the Lighthouse. Doyle further remarks that such intertwining generates the ‘emotions of the body.’ Specifically, Doyle uses Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intercorporeality to analyze Woolf’s novel, especially its thematic and structural levels at which Woolf’s politically situated intercorporeality unfolds.
Emery, Mary Lou. “'Robbed of Meaning': The Work at the Center of 'To the Lighthouse'” MFS 38.1 (1992): 217-34.
Applies the concept of Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism to To the Lighthouse. Emery claims that dialogically To the Lighthouse provides a critique of English colonialist patriarchy and also repeats colonialist assumptions about “Englishwomen.”
Specifically, the hierarchical opposition of masculine/feminine is reversed in Part One where the masculine sphere of activity is removed. While the making of women is questioned, Emery claims that the construction of a Modern Woman requires another Other. Indeed, as Emery suggests, Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast figure the colonized women, where the feminine Otherness is projected. Moreover, Emery also discerns the indeterminancy in Mrs. McNab who absorbs the opposing gender qualities. Further, Emery relates Havelock Ellis ’s and Edward Carpenter’s sexology to the making of a Modern Woman and suggests that Mrs. McNab protects Lily Briscoe from the sexological stigma. Though the alliance between Lily Briscoe and Mrs. McNab, the colonized woman, is suggested in the novel, Emery finds it suppressed eventually and suggests that Mrs. McNab’s voice is deprived of the meaning in the process of subject-positioning. Emery concludes that Mrs. McNab “works structurally at the center of the novel to reposition an ideological dichotomy of private and public ” so that a new female subject can be constructed (233).
Ender, Evelyne. “Feminist Criticism in a Double Mirror: Reading Charlotte Bronte and Virginia Woolf.” Compar(a)ison: An International Journal
of Comparative Literature 1 (1993): 83-106.
Deals with the meaning of sexual difference reflected in the act of reading, writing and criticizing. Particularly, Ender focuses on Lucy’s encounter with the picture of Cleopatra in Charlotte Bronte ’s Villette and Lily Briscoe’s attempt to paint in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The former is the image of a woman reading her self in a painting and the later is the image of the woman painter writing into the painting the figure of a lost mother, and above all Ender, as a woman reader and critic, uses the mirroring of both texts to decipher and create the conditions of femininity in the act of reading and writing. Ender claims that Lucy breaks out of her position as an object of men ’s reading-viewing to become a reading subject on her own terms, while in the modernist era the question of women’s creativity and ability to generate representations has been foregrounded in To the Lighthouse. As Ender explicates, Lily’s painting presents aesthetic as well as affective dimensions of creation and offers a likeness to the critic’s text.
Ferguson, John. “A Sea Change: Thomas De Quincey and Mr. Carmichael in To the Lighthouse.” Journal of Modern Literature 14.1 (1987): 45-63.
Examines the connection between Mr. Carmichael and Thomas De Quincey in To the Lighthouse and explains why Mr. Carmichael is important to both Lily and Woolf. Ferguson points out the parallels between the depiction of Mr. Carmichael and De Quincey ’s life and character and suggests that Woolf’s reading of De Quincey’s work and her appraisal of his prose style confirm the transformation of De Quincey into Mr. Carmichael. As De Quincey becomes a prose model for Woolf, so Mr. Carmichael is an ally at the moment of Lily ’s vision. Also, Ferguson analyzes the sea metaphors by which Woolf represents Mr.
Carmichael. In his analysis, Ferguson claims that Woolf transforms not only De Quincey’s opium-maddened visionary but also her own inner ocean of depression into Mr. Carmichael, who plays a significant part in Lily’s artistic accomplishment. Thus, as opium-addiction provides De Quincey with the access to dreams, poetry and alternative senses of time and space, so Woolf’s depression becomes the source of her art. Ferguson concludes that Woolf’s relationship with De Quincey is personal and profound and suggests a psychological kinship between them as an artist.
Fleishman, Avrom. “'To Return to St. Ives': Woolf's Autobiographical Writings.” ELH 48.3 (1981): 606-618.
Examines Woolf’s autobiographical writings in her artistic creation.
Fleishman suggests that the return of Woolf ’s childhood memories is apparent in her fiction, especially in To the Lighthouse. Fleishman
points out the autobiographical elements in To the Lighthouse, despite the historical and geographical shifts. Importantly, in writing To the Lighthouse Woolf succeeds in allaying her haunting ghosts and transforming them into esthetic objects. Also, as Fleishman indicates, Woolf’s memoirs not only serve as a series of footnotes to her fiction but also explain the significance of the past, which backs present life for Woolf. However, it seems to Fleishman that Woolf’s autobiographical writings pose a danger of joining with the ghosts after raising them.
Flint, Kate. “Virginia Woolf and the General Strike. ” Essays in Criticism 36.4 (1986): 319-334.
Discusses how Virginia Woolf responded to the General Strike which took place in the middle of Woolf’s writing of To the Lighthouse.
Referring to Woolf’s diary, Flint points out Woolf’s ambivalent attitudes toward the Strike; while being fascinated by the Strike ’s novelty and excitement, Woolf also reveals her disquiet about disturbance. Flint believes that Woolf’s anxiety is rooted in her repulsion from confronting with the working classes en masse.
Further, Flint claims that the issue of reestablishment of social order is the pivotal point to draw links between “Time Passes” and the General Strike. Specifically, Lily Briscoe ’s artistic question, which is also Woolf’s, is that of unity, of the relationships of parts to the whole. Flint also indicates the images of violent destruction in this section. However, Flint affirms female efforts to counter the patriarchal destructive force and the dangers of impersonality.
Flint contends that class positions are re-affirmed at the end. Flint concludes that the fear of losing a sense of structure, the search for unity is central to the novel.
Fokkema, Douwe W. “An Interpretation of To the Lighthouse: With Reference to the Code of Modernism.” PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory 4 (1979: 475-500.
France, Peter. “The Commerce of the Self.” Comparative Criticism 12 (1990): 39-56.
Fromm, Harold. “To the Lighthouse: Music and Sympathy.” English Miscellany: A Symposium of History, Literature and the Arts 19 (1968): 181-195.
Gliserman, Martin. “Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: Syntax and the Female Center.” American Imago 40.1 (1983): 51-101.
Analyzes the formal pattern of To the Lighthouse, which provides the
text with an aesthetic cohesiveness and is rooted in Woolf ’s way of perceiving and her traumatic experiences. Gliserman suggests that the thematic motif of the novel is concerned with the relationship of the center to the frame. Further, Gliserman indicates four pattern variants: the female and male models of behavior, the structure of the novel and the structure of Lily ’s painting. Gliserman’s analysis shows that Mrs. Ramsay figures as the emotional center to nurture, protect and unify. In contrast to Mrs. Ramsay ’s female center is the male center represented by Mr. Ramsay, who intrudes, shatters, explodes and castrates. Also, Lily ’s relations to the male and female
text with an aesthetic cohesiveness and is rooted in Woolf ’s way of perceiving and her traumatic experiences. Gliserman suggests that the thematic motif of the novel is concerned with the relationship of the center to the frame. Further, Gliserman indicates four pattern variants: the female and male models of behavior, the structure of the novel and the structure of Lily ’s painting. Gliserman’s analysis shows that Mrs. Ramsay figures as the emotional center to nurture, protect and unify. In contrast to Mrs. Ramsay ’s female center is the male center represented by Mr. Ramsay, who intrudes, shatters, explodes and castrates. Also, Lily ’s relations to the male and female