COMMENTARY: To the Lighthouse (1927)
The following are thoughts and reactions I had while reading To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf. They do not reflect my overall post-reading opinion of the work. For self-study purposes, there may also be extensive summaries of the plot in these notes. In short…
⚠️ MAJOR SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD ⚠️
P1 - The Window, 19 chapters, 121 pages. P2 - Time Passes, 10 chapters, 18 pages. P3 - The Lighthouse, 13 chapters, 64 pages.
Part One
- P1C1 - why do literary authors like writing about annoying people so much? We got us a Charles Tansley here… who turns every topic and subject into something about him and then manages to insult everyone else’s opinion of it in the process. I suppose vexing characters are true to life and make all our lives all that more unnecessarily interesting. The gristle for gossip.
- P1C1 - why did you invite him to this errand run if you knew he was going to be so fucking annoying?! Ok. You never went to the fucking circus as a kid. I got it. Now shut up.
- The prose, the prose. This is so lovely.
- P1C4 - a chapter on what Lily and Bankes thinks about the Ramsays. Cool cool.
- P1C5 - what is up with this kid and cutting furniture out of a catalogue and why is his mom encouraging this behavior?
- P1C6 - is this dude gamifying his ambition abstractedly using the alphabet as his names for the different levels of achievement? What.
- P1C7 - so we got an insecure male who needs a lot of reassurance, needs to have Mrs. Ramsay pick things up, hide his failures (the book and the expense) and generally protect his emotions for him. Emotional labor, basically. And the boy wants to murder him. My favorite internal monologue.
- P1C8 - ok, so I don’t know and obviously can’t tell if Mrs. Ramsay is actually as hot as she thinks she is… but given how unhinged and absurd her husband’s interior monologue is… can I assume Mrs. Ramsay is a bad judge of her own beauty too? I dunno. Maybe she is as hot as she thinks she is and people around her swoons and go from the “multiplicity of things” and “allowed themselves with her the relief of simplicity” (this prose is so beautiful it hurts me).
- P1C9 - the love/hate emotions that Lily has for Mrs. Ramsay is so visceral. She hates her because she seems like this admirable beacon of calm and power… but hates her for the exact same reason. Definitely a class thing too… but it’s so rich and dense and fluctuating, which makes it so real. Because when we look at pretty successful and or rich people… we can’t help but be drawn to them… but we don’t even know why. Do we ascribe their success and worldly possessions and qualities to them because of who they actually are as people… or is it purely luck and genetics? They won the genetic lottery and they got a wonderful generous portion in life and they’re not actually all that secure or confident or even at all that intelligent or good at handling people… but the status and titles and good looks give them that illusory power.
- P1C10 - oof. This chapter struck hard. This feeling I’ve shared with my wife, she preceded me in her anxiety and dread first years ago during the pandemic, but had spread to me shortly after… this awful feeling of seeing them grow up and no longer these creatures you need to monitor and take care of and attend to.
- P1C11 - no notes. So good. Interiority be interioring.
- P1C12 - the topic of conversation that takes up 80% of parents? Kids. The other 20%? Gossip about others. And the conversation they should be having but avoid? Money.
- P1C16 - JFC, does nothing ever change? Teenager out late and ruining dinner that needs to be served precisely.
- P1C16 - that but where she lets Rose pick her jewels, and knows it’s important for her to have this ritual of indecision, and then feeling sad about it. I teared up a little. It’s such a beautiful small moment that you can have with your daughter. To let them do this one small thing for you and to sit in that consideration. It’s giving them agency. That’s what it is. This one small iota of agency for a child.
- P1C17 - wait. So Briscoe is single? Is he a widow? I’m confused. Had to flip back. He mentioned a wife in poor health while talking about all the art he’d seen with Lily. So I guess he had a dead wife?
- P1C17 - re: Tansley from Briscoe’s POV: “Everything about him had that meagre fixity, that bare unloveliness”. :D
- P1C17 - oh that’s interesting. Both Tansley and Bankes don’t care for this dinner and just want to get back to work.
- P1C17 - lily knowing she should help from a decency and manners, societal expectations POV, but then chooses not to. 😂
- Pg. 92 - oh. This is a long one. I love how literary novels make a dinner into the battleground of a great important conflict. Related to this, my favorite single issues of comics are the dinner ones. X-Men (2019) #4, Ultimate Spider-Man (2023) #4, Avengers (2023) #21.
- Oof. The head hopping is a lot more challenging in this dinner scene. We got Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe, Charles Tansley, William Bankes, and Mr. Ramsay.
- P1C17 - the amount of projection, assumptions, and presumptions we make about others as we have conversations. Woolf captures it so well here.
- P1C17 - JFC, that annoying, constant insertion, opinions no one asked to, this insecurity of identity without a stable base, a wife, or a job, all of this that is the insufferable bore that is Tansley… is me twenty years ago isn’t it? Fuck.
- P1C18 - I like how Mrs. Ramsay has such complex feelings for Tansley and looks for the positive in him, and thinks of the nice things she could do for him. And find ways to say that maybe he’s not all that bad. This is in contrast to my shallow Manichaeistic either/or philosophy of hate/love. I need to grow up.
- P1C19 - love how Woolf depicts two people, married at that, sitting in the same room as each other, their interiors making up all these assumptions and presumptions about what the other is thinking about, what they’re upset about, what they’re troubled with… and they’re both in their own little la la land and it’s completely wrong what they think the other person is thinking about. And then they talk, and it’s about absolutely nothing. Just a repeat of things that happened that day.
Part Two
- P2C3 - is Woolf going to wax poetic on nighttime?
- P2C3 - wait. Did Mrs. Ramsay die in story present… or is this a future thing that Woolf is indicating here? What?
- P2C6 - oh ok. Square brackets means flash-forwards. Cool device.
- P2C7 - oh the rest of this part is all flash forward to the war.
- P2C8 - an abandoned ramshackle house with a sole caretaker. This is depressing.
- P2C9 - the sad image of an abandoned house continues. It’s hitting me like if I went to my childhood home and if it had been abandoned, unkempt, unkept… just a ruined house. That would affect me. It’s like that episode in Breaking Bad in its last season when he goes home and there’s detritus and junk and graffiti everywhere. It’s a powerful way to invoke that violation of something cherished, something loved, something we hold in our hearts as that very special place where we first formed and shaped who we are today. It’s the destruction of the shire. It’s the loss of this perfect version of our childhood.
- P2C10 — wait…. This isn’t a flash forward is it? This is literally the next sequence of events and James literally never got to go to the lighthouse, the war happens, and people die????
Part Three
- P3C1 - oh. It is the next sequence of events. This is unbearably sad. And that first paragraph. What does it mean? What does it all mean? Nothing nothing nothing. To be back after all these years. Damn.
- P3C1 - ten years? Ten years! TEN YEARS???!?!?!
- P3C1 - the dynamic between Mr. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. Damn. Such an oppressive and demanding man. Just permeating this unnecessary urgency all over, demanding attention for no purpose other than to be attended to.
- P3C2 - the unwanted attention and neediness of this man. The boot comment though. That’s lol funny.
- P3C4 - these Chinese eyes and puckered face on Lily Briscoe… what is that? I mean… does she look like fucking Renee Zellweger or something?
- P3C4 - _”One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must be run; the mark made.”
- P3C5 - such a big empty hole left by Mrs. Ramsay. The nexus, the center, the fulcrum.
- P3C8 - ten years later and he still gets impulses to murder his father. It’s funny. I chuckled. like the water under their boat.
- P3C11 - you can know one by distance, you can know one by their outline, one can know them half as grotesque while flattering them to their face.
- P3C11 - Mrs Ramsay the attention whore, who with fifty pairs of eyes on her still isn’t enough.
- P3C11 - I still don’t know why Lily Briscoe is here a decade later. Narratively, she’s great as an outsider and external POV, serving as someone for us to reflect on the Ramsay’s and especially the dead wife. I suppose, POV wise as well, we get to see her talk about her art and i suspect her tangents into the craft of her work is a bit of a self-insert for Woolf, since nobody else here has any artistic sensibilities. But plot wise, and character wise. Why did she come back? Her object of obsession is dead. Mrs. Ramsay’s children are grown, or dead. She’s annoyed by Mr. Ramsay… doesn’t want to lend him any ounce of sympathy… and yet by the end of the chapter, she wants him? Because she wants to be Mrs. Ramsay? Because by taking on her role, maybe, she too can acquire the same strength and je nais sais pas that she has? To be paid attention to, to have power, to be admired and loved… but she also thinks through the toxic abuse of managing a man-child. Why did she agree to come???!
- P3C12 - 71yo father and 16 and 17yo teenaged children, and the amount of power he wields over them, or at least they project and give to him and believe he wields over them. I suppose at that age, you still look up to a parental figure. At what age does one get out from under their parents overwhelming sphere of influence? Some never do. Some go through a lot of therapy or processing to get out. A lot of my friends in the past few years — all around my age — so mid thirties to mid forties, have just broke out and saw the toxicity for what it is. That’s a long time to be shackled to this all encompassing relationship. But like I said, some never do.