The End of the novel ‘To the Lighthouse’

Assignment Paper E-C-301 The Modern Literature

Topic- The End of the novel ‘To the Lighthouse’

Rajyaguru Mansi D

M.A. Part – 1

SEM- I

Roll No -12

Year – 2010-11

Department of English

v Author Biography:

The coldest one of the city in the world which Virginia wool started this novel “To the lighthouse in 1926. When she was 44 years old. Before present years approx 84 years ago. When she was 44 years old. She has been wrote this novel and published it in 1927, Hogarth press.

Virginia Woolf’s mother was the famous daughter of William Thackeray and also she was hostess. Woolf’s father Leslie Stephen, was a Victorian critic, philosopher, biographer and scholar and also the edition of t he dictionary of National biographer, England’s most prestigious literacy family’s daughter who was born in 25^th of consciousness style.

v Stressful life of best author:

Her mother died when she was 13 years old in 1895

Her Father died when she was 22 years in 1904.

Virginia Stephen married Leonard woolf when she was 30 years old in 1912,In 1913 she published her first novel, “The voyage out” she had a third breakdown, which lasted for four years. In 1917, the Wolf’s bought a hand press and  founded hearths press in their home It published not only some of wolf’s novels but also T.s Eliot’s perms and other important works. In he third book, Monday and Tuesday, wolf experimented with form. She perfected the style of using stream of consciousness narration through he next two novels Jacob’s room in 1922 when she was 40 years old and Mrs. Dalloway in 1925 when she was 43 years old.

In describing her next novel, To the  he lighthouse, Wolfs used the language of psychoanalysis. She wrote “ I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patient. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotions and in expressing it I explained in and then laid it to rest” and also wood write that she found herself  in “ a position where it was easier the whole  to be eminent than abs cure.

v Learned person suicide:

On March 28, 1941 when she was 59 years old, she wrote her husband a note stating that  she did not wish to spoil his life by going mad she then drowned herself in the river ouse and committed suicide.

Stream  of consciousness

1.   A literacy technique that presents the thoughts and feelings of character as they occurs.

Psychology the consciousness experience of an individual regarded as a continuous, following  series of images and ideas running through the mind.

Stream – ‘ Of – Con’scious .ness

(Str^em^av-k^on’sh^as-nis)adj

v Definitions :

Stream of consciousness is literacy technique which ws pioneered by dorthy Richardson, Virginia woolf, and James Joyce,  Stream of consiousness is characterized by a flow of thoughts and images, which may not always appear to have a coherent structure or cohesion. The plot line may weave in and out of time and place carrying the render through the life span of a character or further along a timeline or further along a timeline to incorporate the lives (and thoughts) of charters from other time periods.

Writers who create stream of cosiciousness works of literature focus on the emotional and psychological processes that are talking place in the minds of one or more characters important character  traits are revealed through an exploration of what is going on in the mind

The first thing a reader must deal with on reading Virginia woolf’s To the lighthouse it its experimentation with from woolf uses stream of consciousness narration, a style of narration which is based on the free association of thought. A character might be looking at a boat out at sea and a memory will be triggered which talked her back ten years to a particularly Vivid Emory of a person. Tat memory, in *** might trigger another  thoughts which might take the character to another memory and so on stream of consciousness narration is unlike traditional line.

v Modernists a period of literacy production that reached its peak in the 1920s.

Virginia wolfs was a leading modernist. The modernist saw themselves as writing in radically different ways than the writers of the preceding generations they left behind the more traditional forms of representing reality to attempt to get at reality as they saw it for writers of stream of conscious ness the mind does not  evenly divide thoughts up into neat segments and the mind does not experience memory and the past chronologically , Woolf wrote, “ Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day . The mind receives a myriad impression ,fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steal…  Life is not a series of gig lamps  symmentrically arranged; but a heinous  halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to he end it is not the task  of the novelist to convey this varying , this unknown and uncircumcised spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible “ Woolf was writing of a very different kind of novel The traditional novel spent most of its time on the external and let the reader infer the internal, what the characters through and felt. The modernist novel challenges the reader by violating many expectations readers bring to novel in regards to plot, character development, and time.

Woolf’s writing bears the mark of her literacy pedigree as well as her straggle to find meaning in her own unsteady  existence written in a poised understated, and elegant style, her work examines the structure of human life, from the nature of relationship to the experience of time yet her writing also addresses issue relevant to her era and literacy  circle. Throughout her work she celebrates s and analyzes the Bloomsbury values of aestheticism, feminism, and independence . Moreover , her stream of consciousness style was influenced  by , and responded  to, the work of the French thinker henri Bergson and the novelties Marce Proust and James Joyce.

This style allows the subjective mental process of Wollf’s character s to determine the objective content of her narrative in to the lighthouse (1927) one of he most experimental works, the passage of time for example it modulated by the consciousness of the characters rather than by the clock. The events of a single afternoon constitute over half the book, while the events of the following ten years are compressed  into a few dozen pages. Many readers of to the lighthouse , especially those who are not versed in the traditions of modernist fiction, find the novel strange and difficult . Its  language is dense and the structure amorphous . Compared wit the plot driven Victorian novels that came before it to the lighthouse  seems to have little in the way of action. Indeed  almost all of the event take place in t he character’s minds. Although to the lighthouse  is a radical  departure from the nineteenth century novel , it is like its more traditional counterparts , intimately  interested in developing characters and advancing both plot and themes woolf’s experimentation has much to do with the time in which she lived : the turn of the  century ws marked by bold scientific developments , Charles Darwin’s theory  of evolution undermined on unquestioned faith in god that was  until that point , nearly universal, while the rise of psychoanalysis, introduced the idea of an unconscious mind such innovation in ways of scientific thinking  had great influence on the styles  and concerns of contemporary artists and  writers like those in the Bloomsbury group , To the lighthouse exemplifies Woolf’s style and many of her concerns as a novelist with its characters based  on her  most autobiographical fictional statement and in the characters of Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay, and Lily Briscoe, Woolf offers some of her most penetrating explorations of the workings of the human consciousness as it perceives and analyzes feels and interacts,. 

   Submitted to Dr Dilip Barad,

   Department of English,

   Bhavnagar University.