Who's Afraid....

This semester I was enrolled in a class which discussed the nature of happiness, joy, sorrow, and melancholy, and how these states relate to ethics, aesthetics, and knowledge.From August to December, we worked our way through various works of philosophers, poets, novelists, and filmmakers. My personal focus for the class was on Virginia Woolf, and specifically her novel, To the Lighthouse. Having never read Woolf previously, I will say that To the Lighthouse was not an easy read the first time through. However, after plowing through a fair amount of supplementary readings, both in books and journal articles, and frequently revisiting the text, I found To the Lighthouse offers a rich and satisfying literary experience. Woolf was born in London, in 1882, to a well-to-do, educated family. Her mother died when she was thirteen, her father died when she was twenty-two. To the Lighthouse was published when she was forty-five; it was her fifth novel; she completed nine. She was very clear that To the Lighthouse was where she laid to rest the ghosts of her parents. The work is complex; in it, one can find meaningful and interesting parallels to any number of themes: feminist theory, aesthetics, societal issues, gender roles, theology. The two papers and class presentation that I prepared on the novel looked at the symmetrical structure of the novel, the ways in which Woolf placed dichotomies together, and in particular the sacramental symbolism of the important dinner scene at the centerpoint of the book. In the dinner scene, the primary figure of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay reaches a moment of transcendence as she serves Boeuf en Daube (a rustic French beef stew) to her dinner guests.

"Just now she had reached security; she hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly...Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all around them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity" (To the Lighthouse, 104-5; Harvest/Harcourt edition).

Here, Woolf is drawing out a beautiful polarity between the everyday act of serving beef stew and an ethereal, meaningful moment. If you read the sentence carefully, you will see what else Mrs. Ramsay is serving. When I realized that this passage sits at dead center in the book (page 105 out of 209), I had my own little moment of transcendence.

For me, the most lovely passage in the book follows on page 106, as we are drawn from the dinnertime chatter and clangor into Mrs. Ramsay's inner thoughts: "...her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling. So she saw them; she heard them; but whatever they said had also this quality, as if what they said was like the movement of a trout when, at the same time, one can see the ripple and the gravel, something to the right, something to the left; and the whole is held together...For the moment, she hung suspended." I think Woolf does a marvelous job of immersing the room into eternity.

I like this quote about the dinner scene, from Mitchell Leaska in Virginia Woolf's Lighthouse: A Study in Critical Method: "Like a kaleidoscope being slowly rotated, each piece - each thought, each reverie - slips into its appropriate place to design a poised pattern of stresses and strains, an exquisite balance of human relationships" (107).