On death and restoration: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Lydia Dye-Stonebridge | 10 July 2021

One occupational hazard when leading a book club is choosing a book that doesn’t turn out to be what you expected. I admire Virginia Woolf – due, in part, I’m sure to our mutual infatuation with English peculiarity - but I rather guiltily hadn’t read To the Lighthouse. I assumed the maritime theme would make for a great choice for our Guilty Readers book club as we approached summer.

To the Lighthouse is an elegy. Mrs Ramsay, the central character, dies. Her daughter, Prue, dies. Her son, Andrew, dies. There are dead people at the bottom of the ocean. There are dead plants in the garden. Childhoods die; ways of living die; affection dies; innocence dies.

It was not a sunny read.

“It’s so bleak,” one book club participant observed. “I can’t see hope in there. Is there hope in there?” Others commented on the surreal ghastliness, on the gothic, on the unsettling detachment of the jarring second part. We talked about how certain themes – immersion, sublimation, rapture, completion – strongly associated with Woolf’s own suicidal bent.

Woolf did, however, write the book as a catharsis to an enormously painful past. Her mother, father and half-sister all died while she was young enough to be vulnerable, but old enough to understand what was happening. She was also sexually abused by her half-brothers, the collective trauma leading to a series of breakdowns that would debilitate her for life. Then there was the First World War, the dead collecting in watery and sodden graves.

To the Lighthouse, published in 1927, was set in a period of personal restoration for Woolf. Vita Sackville-West proved to be a nurturing partner, both sexually and intellectually. Woolf had meaningful work, co-running her and her husband’s publishing house, and she had realised some success with Mrs Dalloway, published two years earlier. The long-standing disenfranchisement of women, as well as prohibitive social strictures, were beginning to give way. This is the context in which Woolf began to unpick how death had shaped her life.

Just as the second part of To the Lighthouse is about death, the third section is about restoration. The summer house, the stage for much of the action, is physically restored. Mr Ramsay makes good on his now-adult son James’s childhood aspiration to visit the lighthouse. James receives longed-for praise from his father, going some way to restore their bond. The seas calm; the red-hot pokers in the garden flourish. The lighthouse guides them safely into harbour.   

Is hope present at the end of the novel, though? Maybe; who is to say what will happen between Lily, the creative artist, and Mr Ramsay after a moment of intimacy. James, his sister Cam, and Mr Ramsay might have a happier familial relationship. They might all be able to move on with their lives.

The waves, however, continue to exert an erosive gravity on the shore, pulling into it pearl brooches and legacies in equal measure. So while there might be cause to hope, Woolf is cautious not to conflate restoration with happy-ever-after – just a kinder sort of stability.

The pandemic is our second part of To the Lighthouse. Our daily death count is the terse summation of unfathomable misery. We have not gathered for dinner. We have not played puppet-master in sun-dappled rock pools. We are unable to appraise deterioration; rather, we are fatalistically bound to it.  

There will be a period where we emerge, and To the Lighthouse instructs how to begin to set things to rights. Honour the dead. Rebuild. Follow through on promises. Mend old wounds. Create. Complete.

Restore.

This post only reflects the views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of the London Association of Phi Beta Kappa or Phi Beta Kappa.