Art
and Life in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse - New Literary History 32:2 New
Literary History 32.2 (2001) 375-389 Embodied Form: Art and Life in Virginia
Woolf's To the Lighthouse Randi Koppen A focus on art's basis in life hardly
represents a new departure in Woolf criticism, particularly so when the
semiautobiographical To the Lighthouse is the object of study. Critics reading
this novel in light of Woolf's own retrospective commentary in her diaries and
memoirs generally acknowledge the novel's therapeutic dimension and its
closeness to biographical material. In her introduction to the Penguin edition,
Hermione Lee writes that Woolf knew very well what she was doing for herself in
writing To the Lighthouse, explaining it on at least two occasions: "I
used to think of [my father] & mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse
laid them in my mind." "I suppose that I did for myself what
psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply
felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to
rest." The cases of psychobiography apart, critical approaches to the
life-art relationship in this novel tend to focus on perceived relations of
equivalence between emotional experience and aesthetic (con)figuration, between
"life" on the one hand, and shape, trope, structure on the other.
Woolf herself pointed to such a relation in the therapeutic process of writing
To the Lighthouse: "I...
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Virginia Woolf wanted to think about what it's like to think about
nothing special, about ordinary things. "To feel simply, that's a chair,
that's a table ... and yet at the same time, it's a miracle, it's an
ecstasy," she writes in To the Lighthouse.
Every so often, gazing at a fruit, at a flower, a bee, a friend, we all
know what she means. Moments for no good reason can become extraordinarily
beautiful, hauntingly so.
But Woolf wasn't concentrating on special moments. She wanted to convey
the flow and tumble of ordinary sensations over a whole day — and so she
created Clarissa Dalloway, a woman who lives in London, has just recovered from
a bad bout of influenza (a bad, bad influenza that was then sweeping the globe)
who is about to host a party. Nothing special.
Thinking About Nothing…
Woolf thought, and thought hard, about how a mind processes all that it
sees, hears, feels, tastes, remembers. "The mind receives a myriad of
impressions," Woolf wrote. "From all sides they come, an incessant
shower of innumerable atoms," and she wanted to describe that process.
Novelists, Woolf stated, should "record the atoms as they fall upon
the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however
disconnected and incoherent…"
And so Woolf created minds in action. Clarissa Dalloway in her novel
Mrs. Dalloway, and Mrs. Ramsay from To the Lighthouse are portrayed from the
inside out. They are all mind — jumbles of thoughts, memories, faces, objects,
peeves, joys — all disconnected and incoherent. And yet, out of all that blabber
there emerge very distinctly, real personalities.
How did that happen? "If the mind is so evanescent," Lehrer
writes, "how does the self arise?"
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93184407
WORK
0.
.
Woolf began writing professionally in
1905, initially for the Times Literary
Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family.[7]
Her first novel, The Voyage Out,
was published in 1915 by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth
and Company Ltd.
.
This
novel was originally entitled Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the
draft. An earlier version of The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by Woolf
scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the intended
title. DeSalvo argues that many of the changes Woolf made in the text were in
response to changes in her own life.[8]
.
Lytton
Strachey and
Virginia Woolf at Garsington,
1923.[5]
.
Woolf went on to publish novels
and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular success. Much
of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press. She has
been hailed as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and one
of the foremost modernists,
though she disdained some artists in this category.
.
Woolf is considered one of the
greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with
stream-of-consciousness
and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters.
Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her eminence was
re-established with the surge of Feminist
criticism in the 1970s. After a few more ideologically based
altercations, not least caused by claims that Woolf was anti-Semitic and a snob, it seems that a critical consensus
has been reached regarding her stature as a novelist.
.
Her work was criticised for
epitomizing the narrow world of the upper-middle class English intelligentsia.
Some critics judged it to be lacking in universality and depth, without the
power to communicate anything of emotional or ethical relevance to the disillusioned
common reader, weary of the 1920s aesthetes. She was also
criticized by some as an anti-Semite, despite her marriage to a Jewish man. She
wrote in her diary, "I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the
Jewish laugh." However, in a 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth quoted in Nigel
Nicolson's biography,Virginia Woolf, she recollects her boasts of Leonard's
Jewishness confirming her snobbish tendencies, "How I hated marrying a
Jew- What a snob I was, for they have immense vitality."
.
Virginia Woolf's peculiarities
as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is
arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are
highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is
refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive
consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world
overabundant with auditory and visual impressions.
.
The intensity of Virginia
Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings - often
wartime environments - of most of her novels. For example, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to
organize a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren
Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War
bearing deep psychological scars.
.
To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart.
The plot centers around the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon
a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary
themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter
Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The
novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the
midst of war, and of the people left behind.
.
The Waves (1931) presents a group of six friends
whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior monologues
proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to
a plot-centered novel.
.
Her last work, Between the Acts (1941)
sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life
through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time
and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation - all set in a
highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English
history.
.
While nowhere near a simple
recapitulation of the coterie's ideals, Woolf's work can be understood as
consistently in dialogue with Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency (informed
by G.E. Moore, among others)
towards doctrinaire rationalism.[citation needed]
.
Her works have been translated
into over 50 languages, by writers of the calibre of Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite
Yourcenar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf
VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE ARTS
A provocative collection of papers culled from the sixth annual conference on Virginia Woolf at Clemson University, explores new ground in Woolf studies. Papers in this volume cover diverse topics, allowing readers to go behind the lens with the directors of the award-winning Woolf documentary The War Within as well as to explore Woolf's connections to other artists such as Carrington, Rebecca West, and Ethel Smyth. Contributors also describe three exciting Virginia Woolf projects on CD-ROM, challenge Julia Kristeva's version of Woolf, examine Woolf's outrageous consumer politics, study her legacy to contemporary women playwrights, discuss connections between Woolf and chaos theory, explore Woolf's mysticism, and examine virtual space in Between the Acts. These and other essays in the volume combine to make Virginia Woolf and the Arts important for any serious Woolf scholar.
