Woolf, Virginia - The stream of consciousness

Virginia Woolf

She was born in London, being a woman she didn’t have the chance to go to university, she became an intellectual and a prolific writer herself. Among her novels the most remarkable are Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, works where she shows the influence of the theories of Sigmund Freud.
Like Joyce, VW used the “stream of consciousness” technique in her novels. Unlike Joyce she pushed it in different directions, Woolf’s novels are like mental voyages which centre around the contrast between inner life and external reality.

“To the Lighthouse”

The novel consists of three parts. The first part of the novel is set during the FWW. Mrs and Mr Ramsay are spending their summer holidays with their eight children in a house on an island. James (the son) wants to reach the lighthouse that he can see from the window, but his father tells him he can't because the weather is likely to be bad.
The second section condenses ten years, during these years the Ramsay's house is abandoned and Mrs Ramsay dies. The third section opens 10 years after the moment when the novel starts: the living Ramsays return to the house on the island and Mr Ramsay decides it is time for them to take their trip to the lighthouse.

“To the Lighthouse” is centered around one single character: Mrs Ramsay, she embodies all the qualities and the roles traditionally attributed to women. Everything and everybody in the novel revolves around her, she is the source of consolation and her husband is a traditional Victorian man.
What is unusual about Mrs Ramsay is that she remains a constant presence throughout the novel even after her death. Her physical absence doesn’t erase her from the memory of her children. In this sense Mrs Ramsay can be associated with the lighthouse of the novel, for her family she is a source of light and inspiration.

“To the Lighthouse” is a Modernist novel and is characterized by a great deal of narrative experimentation and psychological insight. The novel is narrated by an external narrator who adopts the technique of the indirect interior monologue to render the characters’ thoughts visible and understandable. This allows the poet to give importance to the inner reality of the characters.
The first part of the novel takes place on one day, but is longer than the second one, which includes a time span of several years.

Contrasts and symbols: The novel revolves around a series of dichotomies, the contrast between male and female characters, the juxtaposition between life and death, the dichotomy between light and darkness and contrast between the inner and the outer world.
The novel is also characterized by the massive presence of symbols, the strongest one is the lighthouse, which acquires a variety of meanings. It is both the symbol of something that is longed for but never acquired, and an illuminating presence, a source of light and inspiration, the spring of human desires and hopes, and the key to understanding the life of the novel’s characters. The preposition “to” suggests the idea that reaching the lighthouse is not just what the characters of the novel desire, but also the ultimate aim of the reader, whose act of reading is a journey towards truth.