Woolf and the Great Subjective

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

No novel (aside from Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu) has had a greater, more lasting influence on my thinking and writing than Woolf’s 1927 paean to the griefs and glories of the subjective mind. Beginning just before the onset of the Great War and ending a few years after the war has ended, the novel is composed of three discrete glimpses of the Ramseys, a cultured middle class English family passing their summers in a modest house on the rugged coast of Scotland. 

At the heart of the novel is the bright, maternal Mrs. Ramsey whose acute, nearly omnipotent perspective defines the first and longest section of the book, setting the mold and tone for everything to come. As Eudora Welty writes in her introduction: “From its beginning, the novel never departs from the subjective… The interior of its characters’ lives is where we experience everything.”

Whereas in most novels the internal, subjective world of its characters is balanced (if not checked) by the evidence of an objective, material world, in To the Lighthouse the realm of wars and cities and trains is all but effaced, overwhelmed, by the force and primacy of the characters’ thoughts and impressions, that is, by the essential modernist problem of seeing. Writes Welty: “Inside, in this novel’s multiple, time-affected view, is ever more boundless and more mysterious than Outside.”

Part of the brilliance and challenge of this novel is the way that the narrative perspective switches without warning, often without the aid of conventional cues, so that the reader is swept along on the turbid current of the various characters' feelings. It is just one of the ways that Woolf blurs the boundaries of the world we know (or thought we knew) in a manner that reminds me of those traditional Japanese houses designed with moveable walls to create the illusion that inside and outside are one. She strove, in writing this novel, and after hours of tracking her own restless thoughts, to simulate the way an individual actually thinks and sees, the way ‘reality’ itself is constructed—a billion times a day—in the depths of every human brain. 

Peter Adam Nash