In the early 1900's, along with the death of the Queen and subsequent diminution of the Victorian Era, British novelists became dissatisfied with idealized linear plots and optimistic moral values that typified their period. Authors were no longer interested in transition, progress, or the social organization that dominated Victorian literature and instead began to focus on new concepts of consciousness, the self, and the movement of time. These Modernist authors, such as Virginia Woolf, accepted the fundamental failure of language and responded by shifting from conventional omniscient narration to fragmented points of view guided by an individual's inner awareness. Woolf's To the Lighthouse uses these techniques to explore the nature of the human condition and the capability to transcend death through the separation of the subject from the object.

Lily Briscoe explains the philosophy, "Subject and object and the nature of reality," using the metaphor: "a kitchen table, […] when you're not there" (23). Her paradigm suggests that the subject is not dependent on the object and can exist independently from it. Therefore, the table can subsist with or without a perceiver, as well as in a different form: "lodged […] in the fork of a pear tree" (Woolf 23). The logic suggests a split between reality: the object, and the subconscious: the subject. Since the subconscious, like the table, can exist independently without observation and in absence of its physical form, Woolf questions reality and suggests that "Absence may blur the distinction between those who are dead and those who are away," making death subjective and surmountable (Beer 71).

However, Mr. Ramsay is too egotistical and self absorbed to see past physical experience in order to transcend his mortality. His "love of the active life, of the world of fact and masculine intelligence, makes him self-pitying and obsessively fearful of passing time and death," which pushes him into isolation from others as well as the world (Naremore 137). On the other hand, Mrs. Ramsay is overly selfless and lives "an immersed, passive life without any sense of personality or time, a watery world of emotion and feminine sensibility which makes of all experience a great unity" (Naremore 135). While she constantly searches for a means to escape her life, she has intense moments of inner peace in which she connects with nature-- typically the ocean-- and unifies with eternity:

Not as oneself did one find rest ever, […] but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity (63)

Julia Briggs suggests that her "absence of or detachment from the self" enables her to transcend death and fuse with perpetuity; however, Naremore more accurately concludes that "she has drawn closer to an essential self which can only be defined negatively, as a vast dark realm which everyone has in common, apart from the external personality, what you see us by" (Briggs 75; Naremore 139). Experience, therefore, is a constant rhythmic flow, unified by emotional consciousness, and "death can be a kind of embrace […] of the self with the world outside and beyond" (Mittal 142). Mr. Ramsay, even though he subdues his egotism and reaches self equilibrium, will never be able to transcend death as Mrs. Ramsay does because he cannot disconnect from his external personality.

To the Lighthouse confirms that Woolf believes consciousness does not diminish with the body, but that it has potential to inspire long after death. Her work is one of the most important produced during the Modernist period and, for her, is a "supplanting of the traditional novel, and a kind of inactive elegy for it: a recognition of its death," a striking transition that expunges all previously conceived traditions of Victorian literature (qtd. in Stevenson 177).

Works Cited

Beer, Gillian. "Hume, Stephen, and Elegy in To the Lighthouse. Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse. New Casebooks. Ed. Sue Reid. New York: St. Martin's, 1993.

Briggs, Julia. "The Novels of the 1930s and the Impact of History." The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. The Cambridge Companions to Lit. Eds. Sue Roe, Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 72-90.

Mittal, S. P. The Aesthetic Venture. Ajanta Ser. On Aesthetics 4. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1985.

Naremore, James. The World Without a Self. London: Yale UP, 1973.

Stevenson, Randall. "But What? Elegy?: Modernist Reading and the Death of Mrs. Ramsay." The Yearbook of English Studies. 21.3 (1996): 173-186. JSTOR. Gale. Longwood University Lib., Farmville, VA. 22 Oct. 2007 .

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927. San Diego: Harcourt, 1955.

Works Consulted

Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Women in Culture and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Blackstone, Bernard. Virginia Woolf: A Commentary. New York: Harcourt, 1949.

Hill-Miller, Katherine. From the Lighthouse to Monk's House: A Guide to Virginia Woolf's Literary Landscapes. London: Duckworth, 2001.

Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.