EngLit

Loredana Pop · Dunker Data inscrierii: 18/Noi/2008 Mesaje: 16

This novel is about a big family consists of Mr and Mrs Ramsay. They have 8 children: Prue, Andrew, Jasper, Roger, Nancy, Cam, Rose, James. Mrs Ramsey has care of the children. She is bringing them together. All the other characters are resonating with Mrs Ramsay which is loved by everyone.
Another important character is Lily Briscoe which is a passionate artist. She is always worried about her paintings because Charles Tansley discourages her saying that women can neither paint nor write. The colors used by Lily are describing in details as the reader to se almost the painting. She uses strong colors and strong lights. This shows the contrast between the new vision of art of impressionism and traditional art. In Lily’s painting the nature is based on fugitive effects of color and light.
“The jacmanna was bright violet; the wall was staring white. She would not have considered it honest to tamper with the bright violet and the staring white, since she saw them like that, fashionable through it was, since Mr Paunceforte’s visit, to see everything pale, elegant, semi-transparent. Then beneath the colour there was the shape. She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that whole think changed. It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work us dreadful us any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself-struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: ‘But this is what I see; this is what I will see’, so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best pluck from her.”(27-28)
In the end Lily finished the painting that she tried to paint.
The thoughts of Lily differs by others characters. She is very lyrical; she describes the nature like a painting:
“‘It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat,’ she said, looking about her, for it was bright enough, the grass still a soft deep green, the house starred in its greenery with purple passion flowers, and rooks dropping cool cries from the high blue. But something moved, flashed, turned a silver wing in the air. It was September after all, the middle of September, and past six in the evening.”(28-29). Lot of senses are reflected here: the touch of the wind, the reflection of the light in the eyes and the power of the colors, the sound of the crying rooks.
The entire novel is based on thoughts of the character’s mind. Their mind process several ideas and then they lose interest. Each character speaks with himself. This represents the interior monologue which not fragments the text like the stream of consciousness. The narrator narrates at III rd person that is often lyrical that gives fluency. Somehow becomes subjective but is not living the III rd person.
The character not thinks in a straight way. That is way the narrator joggling with in and out. Woolf moves from the exterior of the character to inside the character. The reader has access to the most intimate thoughts of the characters.
“Looking at the far sand-hills, William Bankes thought of Ramsay: thought of a road in Westmorland, thought of Ramsay striding alone a road by himself hung round with that solitude which seemed to be his normal air. But this suddenly interrupted, William Bankes remembered (and this must refer to some actual incident), by a hen, straddling her wings out in protection of covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping, pointed his stick and said ‘Pretty-pretty’, an odd illumination into his heart, Bankes had thought it, which showed his simplicity, his sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if their friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsay had married. After that, what with one thing and another, the pulp had gone out of their friendship. [..]
Yes. That was it. He finished. He turned from the view. And, turning to walk back the other way, up the drive, Mr Bankes was alive to things which would not have struck him had not those sand-hills revealed to him the body of his friendship lying with the red on its lips laid up in peat-for instance, Cam, the little girl, Ramsay’s youngest daughter. […]
She would not ‘give a flower to the gentleman’ as the nursemaid told him. No! no! no! she would not! She clenched her fist. She stamped. And Mr Bankes felt aged and saddened […].”(30-31)
Mr Bankes is thinking first to Mr Ramsay than to Mrs Ramsay and his friendship, and than he pass to Cam which did not want to give him a flower. The narrator reflects his thoughts from the inside and then he show us the emotion and the attitude took from outside.
Woolf capture every ocazie of the characters: how Mrs Ramsay look at her husband, how she see him, what worries they have and what thoughts. All these are about time and how fast time flow. Nothing is lasting.
“[…] warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing offer another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow” (24). “[…] human relation how flawed they are, how despicable, how self-seeking at their best” (58). These insignificant moments of their life will remember in their past life.
All these are not the biggest moments in the characters’ life but are significant for the moment and for the past. They are felt with strong intensity and this makes them to last. They bring harmony in life. Woolf tried to show us that life is complex and he tried to capture every tiny moment: relation in the family, intellectual tensions, moments that make us happy or sad, feeling life as it is. Dead is not meaningful, life is.
I liked very much the lines that Mrs Ramsay read it:
“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be
Are full of trees and changing leaves.”(149)
The quotes are from: Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford University Press: Oxford,2000.