3

J A NE GOLDMAN

To the Lighthouse’s Use of Language

and Form

One of the reasons To the Lighthouse is a modernist “monument” is its

virtuoso use of form and poetic language. Woolf delighted in the novel’s
language and, upon reading the proofs, marveled “how lovely some parts of
The Lighthouse are! Soft & pliable, & I think deep, & never a word wrong
for a page at a time” (D3 132). This chapter will explore some of Woolf’s
aesthetic ideas and how they manifest in this novel overtly concerned with
art and representation. Speciically, the chapter addresses the novel’s triadic
structure; its highly stylized and playful formal patterns, constructed through
rhythmic repetition of multivalent images and words; its richly allusive, cita-
tional, fragmentary texture; and its teeming collations of lyric exclamations
with historical, material facts. To the Lighthouse, at every turn, sets in play
these complex codings while simultaneously self-consciously mocking the
pursuit of its own systematic hermeneutical and epistemological ordering
into hierarchies of meanings. We cannot reduce or prioritize anything in
the novel, not least its larger structuring form, to “simply one thing” (286).
That said, the aesthetic formalism of Bloomsbury, Roger Fry’s and Clive
Bell’s theories of postimpressionism, cannot be ignored in any discussion of
Woolf’s use of form. There are many informative rehearsals of their inluen-
tial theories of “plastic form” and “signiicant form” and numerous critical
readings of Woolf in Bloomsbury formalist terms.1 This chapter draws on
one key formalist concept as theorized by Fry and practised by Woolf’s sis-
ter, the artist Vanessa Bell: mosaicking.

Two Blocks Joined by a Corridor

Among her earliest drafts, Woolf drew the shape of her projected novel in
simple diagram: “two blocks joined by a corridor”2 (see Figure 1). That initi-
ating form starkly survives in the published work. The two blocks may corre-
spond to the irst and third parts of the published novel, “The Window” and
“The Lighthouse,” the corridor to the one linking them, “Time Passes.” Each
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 To the Lighthouse’s Use of Language and Form

Figure 1. Reprinted from Woolfonline.com: Gallery – To the Lighthouse – Berg Materials –

Notes For Writing Item 5: www.woolfonline.com/?node=content/image/gallery&project=1&p
arent=6&taxa=16&content=732&pos=4.

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 J ane Goldman

part in turn divides into numbered subsections. Each subsection is further

rhythmically subdivided by the highly stylized use of parentheses, round and
square brackets, which at some points enclose entire subsections, at others
merely phrases or clauses within sentences. The cryptic, emblematic origin of
To the Lighthouse in Woolf’s H-shaped diagram may be the work’s very alpha
and omega. As readers, inside or outside the academy, as commentators, crit-
ics, editors, and annotators,3 we cast out for the shimmering shoals of possible
historical referents, cultural allusions, literary intertexts, aesthetic analogues,
and bring in our glistening but necessarily limited haul, all the time with our
backs to this inscrutable sphinxlike diagram winking at us from the archives.
And rather like Mrs. Bast and Mrs. McNab, salvaging and laying out on the
lawn the relics of the entire run of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels “fetched
up from oblivion” (215), every reader of To the Lighthouse is encouraged to
curate, almost in the manner of an editor of a recovered ancient inscription,
the text of the novel in all its numbered fragments and parentheses, its frames
within frames. Every such reading, every such curation, is unique.
Yet the text is its own origin. Looking behind or beyond it for a singular
prior origin, we are lost. Its governing form is not the static noun image of
the title but its transitive syntax suggesting the elusiveness of the object of
knowledge, celebrating open process over inite arrival. To the Lighthouse is
a highly stylized textual space: a passage of printed pages between two gold-
embossed blue boards in the irst UK edition (green in the irst U.S. one),
sporting a dust jacket decorated by Woolf’s sister the artist Vanessa Bell, the
irst of numerous works of visual art inspired by To the Lighthouse or cho-
sen to adorn its covers.4 That highly stylized textual space, irst published
by its author’s own press with considerable care and attentiveness to its
material form, nevertheless luctuates with every subsequent edition, every
reprinting in book form, every reformatting via electronic platforms.
More readers than ever before may now access the material archive of the
novel’s composition, in the form of its avant-textes, extant manuscripts, type-
scripts, proofs, and variant editions, all now electronically reproduced and
available online.5 The Cambridge Edition of the novel, cross-referenced to
this resource, systematically maps in its apparatus all extant textual variants
in the novel’s publication history from proofs through all editions published
in Woolf’s lifetime. Textual variants are of course formal variants, and the
substantive variants introduced by Woolf’s own hand to the simultaneously
published irst UK and irst U.S. editions of To the Lighthouse, as discussed
in Chapter 12, are important for any consideration of the novel’s formal
strategies. However, this chapter touches on some of the key questions of
form opened up by attention to such matters. Taking the irst UK edition as
its copy text (from which all variants are mapped), the Cambridge Edition
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 To the Lighthouse’s Use of Language and Form

nevertheless (inevitably) also renders the text in a new material printed

form that carefully attends to spacing and typographical layout as impor-
tant formal signiiers, yet without ixing it into the anachronistic constraints
of facsimile. Such matters cannot be ignored in reading the novel with due
care and attention. Woolf’s formal artiice as a writer partially derives and
develops out of her experience as printer and publisher.6 In this respect too,
To the Lighthouse raises to new heights the stakes of formal textual self-
consciousness.
Let us now consider some possible sources for Woolf’s “two blocks joined
by a corridor.” Thinking irstly of the novel’s preoccupation with modern
visual art, we might understand Woolf’s diagram as in keeping with the
abstract forms of avant-garde art, whose lineage may be traced to Paul
Cézanne’s dictum, “treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, cone.”7 Just as
Lily Briscoe conceives of the igure of mother and child as a “triangular pur-
ple shape” (84), so the novel in which she is represented painting that avant-
garde triangle is conceived in primary geometric shapes. Along with those
great abstract artists who came in Cézanne’s wake (Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo
Picasso, Henri Matisse), we might also invoke Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, in
her pioneering phase of pure abstraction around the eve of the Great War,
when she painted works such as Abstract (1914). Comprising six rectangular
color patches in a monochrome yellow ield, it is one of the earliest pieces of
modern abstract art in Europe.8 If such works may be understood as purely
formal, refusing interpretation, other abstract works of the period in which
To the Lighthouse was composed were openly understood as invested with
clear political valences, such as El Lissitzky’s famous lithographic Soviet
propaganda poster, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919).9 As well as
abstracting to pure form the traditionally received Renaissance pyramidal
composition of Madonna and Child, Briscoe’s purple triangle may also be
understood simultaneously to turn the red wedge to suffragette purple.10
Bloomsbury’s aesthetic formalism, then, may explain Woolf’s initial con-
ception of the novel, not in words but as a simple abstract shape, capable
too of further avant-garde transformations. Yet that same shape, the “two
blocks joined by a corridor,” may be read as itself irstly a letter of the
alphabet, even a word. Woolf’s drawing resembles the letter “I” on its side,
perhaps, or a slightly elongated letter “H”. Read as a letter of the alphabet,
it speaks to the alphabetical mind of the philosopher Mr. Ramsay; but it
may also be decoded as a feminist toppling of the signiier of patriarchal
subjectivity, rendering in landscape rather than portrait form the letter “I”,
the “dark bar” that overshadows the reader Phoebe in A Room of One’s
Own,11 a work Woolf seems to have drawn from the same well as To the
Lighthouse. Woolf’s note directly above the diagram, envisaging the work
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 J ane Goldman

to be “all character – not a view of the world,”12 encourages interpretations

of it as a signiier of subjective personality.
The same triadic design, on the other hand, its carefully numbered sub-
sections, its idiosyncratic deployment of square and round brackets, may be
rooted in science, mathematics, or logical philosophy rather than in painting,
inding analogues in Venn diagrams, algebra, quadratic equations, syllogisms,
and the like, self-relexively manifest not least in its comedic accounts of
that same academically trained, alphabetical mind of Mr. Ramsay, who inds
himself stumbling at Q, which precedes his own initial: “He reached Q. Very
few people in the whole of England ever reach Q [. . .] But after Q? What
comes next? [. . .] Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still
if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q” (56–57).
Has the stumbling Mr. Ramsay knocked over his letters, trapped now in the
conines of a toppled letter “I”? The “two blocks joined by a corridor” may
suggest a numerical equation – one minus one – which also speaks to the
loss at the center of its elegiac movement.
Spatially, the “two blocks joined by a corridor” proffer an architectural
plan, a room plan of the house at the book’s center, or a geographical map.
Woolf claimed, in retrospect, to have made up To the Lighthouse all in one
go. It simply came to her “one day [. . .] in a great, apparently involuntary,
rush,” while, in the manner of a visionary poet, she was “walking around
Tavistock Square,” London, in 1926. “One thing burst into another,” she
explains. “Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd
of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind, so that my lips seemed
syllabling of their own accord as I walked” (MB 81). So perhaps Woolf’s
diagram is a map of Tavistock Square and environs, the primal scene of its
own conception? Alternatively, Woolf may have taken partial inspiration for
her novel set on Skye, in the Hebrides, from a diagram in J. Sands’s (1878)
guide to the Hebridean island of St. Kilda, which was in her library. Sands
describes “the form of St Kilda [as] steep hills, arranged like the igure 4 as
it is written, or, if we include the island called Dun, like the letter H roughly
formed. [. . .] The space below the bar of the H is the bay, and the space
above it Glen Mòr.”13 Sands’s guide opens with his stay in Dunvegan, Skye,
from where he began the last leg of his journey to the more remote St. Kilda.
It is one of many works on Woolf’s shelves that offer accounts of Skye, the
Hebrides, and Scotland and that she may have plundered.
Thinking temporally, Woolf’s diagram both sketches a chiastic sequence in
history, linking two eras before and after the ravages of the Great War, and
marks a rhythm or beat, like a musical score or poetic scansion. Or are we
to understand the three parts of this triptych as occurring simultaneously?
And what about the numbered subsections? Some of them, at least, may
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 To the Lighthouse’s Use of Language and Form

represent simultaneous events, such as those juxtaposing Briscoe at her easel,

in Part III, with the boating party out on the bay. Yet we might pay careful
attention to Woolf’s actual numbering of subsections, particularly because
of their apparent misnumbering in Part III in the UK irst edition, which fol-
lows subsection 1 with subsection 3. Reading the inal number of each part,
we ind nineteen in the irst, ten in the second, fourteen in the third. Is this
arbitrary, or do these numbers (19, 10, 14) represent the key years before the
Great War the novel relects on? If so, renumbering the subsections in Part III
to thirteen destroys this formal representation of historical context. (Editors
and printers have resolved this question in different ways.)14
A diagram of the textual form and temporal movement, then, the “two
blocks joined by a corridor” demarcate a particular historical passage; but
they also simultaneously inscribe an abstract lyric pulse that indeed may rep-
licate the eclipsing dactylic pulse of elegiac meter, also echoed by the pulsing
movement of the lighthouse beam itself. Mrs. Ramsay in Part I “look[s] out to
meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three,
which was her stroke [. . .] this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke”
(100). This mesmerizing repetition of “stroke” gets the reader counting in
threes. Mrs. Ramsay may be mistaken. If the novel, in which she understands
herself to be attached to the third stroke, is itself in three strokes, then the
reader cannot help notice it is the irst of them (this one) that is the longest in
duration (of pages) and most obviously Mrs. Ramsay’s stroke, since her living
presence dominates it, and it is where she is having this very thought. Abruptly
cut short in the second stroke of the novel, she leetingly haunts the third.
Elegy is a mutable poetic genre with no strict form, but its basic move-
ment is an eclipse, in its transition from light to loss in darkness, to consoling
light;15 likewise, the form of To the Lighthouse: “The Window,” suggesting
the framing of a natural means of illumination, represents one (prewar)
day and a candlelit, moonlit evening; a “down-pouring of immense dark-
ness” (195) engulfs “Time Passes”; “the Lighthouse,” suggesting illumina-
tion, artiicially generated not passively received, describes one (postwar)
day heralding consolatory vision and enlightenment. Perhaps the darkest
passage in the dark corridor that is “Time Passes,” connecting the block
of light and color of “The Window” with that of “The Lighthouse,” is the
parenthetical sentence in which Mrs. Ramsay dies, the moment of eclipse on
which the novel hinges, what Woolf later called its “central line” (L3 385).

A Butterly’s Wing
This mosaic of parenthetical tesserae laid out over the triadic structure may
correspond to the painterly techniques of postimpressionism, as practised
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 J ane Goldman

by Briscoe in the novel itself, where her painting is a coterminal analogue

of the very text in which it is made. Indeed, Vanessa Bell, a possible model
for Briscoe, described her own technique as a form of “mosaicing [sic]”:
“considering the picture as patches each of which has to be illed by the
deinite space of colours as one has to do with mosaic or woolwork, not
allowing myself to brush the patches into each other.”16 Bloomsbury’s pio-
neer of aesthetic formalism, Roger Fry, in his inluential account of “The
Artist’s Vision,” in Vision and Design (1920), explains the artist does not
distinguish individual objects as “separate unities” but as “so many bits in
the whole mosaic of vision.”17 To the Lighthouse may be a printed, verbal
“mosaic of vision,” a ield of patches that cannot be conined by the con-
ventional bounds or units of signiication, and constantly therefore reframes
itself, just as Fry observes: “Every solid object is subject to the play of light
and shade, and becomes a mosaic of visual patches, each of which for the
artist is related to other visual patches in the surroundings.”18 Again, Woolf’s
text makes self-relexive reference to its own mosaicking technique in its
deployment of butterly imagery, itself another analogue for the triadic form
of two blocks joined by a corridor (two sets of wings hinged on a body):
“She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butter-
ly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral” (78). Here the dyadic clausal
form of the sentence hinged by the semicolon, in Woolf’s signature virtuosic
construction, in turn resembles the butterly form. The architectonic color
planes of Bell’s paintings were described by Fry, in his 1922 review, in terms
that anticipate Woolf’s: “She shows, indeed, a keen sense of the underlying
architectural framework [. . .] But it is as a colourist that Vanessa Bell stands
out so markedly [. . .] Her colour is extraordinarily distinguished. [. . .] if any-
thing the force of colour is understated, and yet, so perfect is the harmony of
these softened notes, that the whole effect is resonant and rich. [. . .] However
apparently neutral or unimportant a tone of grey shadow may appear, its
pitch is as exactly found as if it were a piece of brilliant local colour.”19 In
1925, Woolf wrote of Marcel Proust’s literary technique in similar terms:
“The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with
the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterly shades to the last grain.
He is as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterly’s bloom. And he will I
suppose both inluence me & make me out of temper with every sentence of
my own” (D3 7). This imagery, irst encountered in I.9, where Lily’s prewar
attempt at a painting is given, is repeated in III.6, where her postwar paint-
ing takes up in a new composition from where she had left off:
Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one
colour melting into another like the colours on a butterly’s wing; but beneath
the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to be a thing
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 To the Lighthouse’s Use of Language and Form

you could rufle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a
team of horses. (264)

Again, Woolf reprises her artist friends’ sense of forceful yet delicate colors
laid over powerful architectonic forms. We may imagine the symmetrical
design of repeated motif, in 1.9 and III.6, in turn as a kind of butterly art
technique in which Part II of the novel acts as the centerfold, a hinge enabling
the printing of Part I’s winged verbal forms and colors onto the blank can-
vas of Part III. Or perhaps this butterly is also a lighthouse, clamped on
rocks, its wings beams of color and light?

A Central Line
Yet the sheer proliferation of such multiple codings in Woolf’s text, while
keeping its readers’ minds headily active, deies its reduction to the status of
a mathematical equation or a cryptic crossword puzzle that can ultimately
be solved. There is no inal hermeneutical destination, as its title reminds
us, and its author keenly endorses with regard to its dense, self-conscious
layering of metaphor and symbolism, including its governing eponymous
image. Writing to Fry, after publication, in the terms of the formalist aesthet-
ics he had made famous, she declared:
I meant nothing by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the
middle of the book to hold the design together. I saw that all sorts of feelings
would accrue to this, but I refused to think them out, and trusted that people
would make it the deposit for their own emotions – which they have done,
one thinking it means one thing, another another. I can’t manage Symbolism
except in this vague, generalised way. Whether its right or wrong I don’t know,
but directly I’m told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me. (L3 385)
Simultaneously refusing to engage in art as meaning making, in celebra-
tion of the plasticity of form, Woolf also acknowledges a democratic open-
ness to the work of symbolic and aesthetic form. Her writing may thus
enable an empowering writerly jouissance in her readers, refusing closed or
totalizing authoritarian interpretations, yet inevitably “accruing” more and
more meanings. The enormous, augmenting volume of critical interpreta-
tion of the lighthouse image, alone, produced since her novel’s publication,
is testimony to its symbolic hospitality. It has become for numerous readers
its own “wedge of hope [. . .] hope for a new perspective opening the pos-
sibilities for new values.”20 My own book on Woolf’s feminist aesthetics,
indeed, sought to explore just how amenable Woolf’s visual aesthetics, usu-
ally read through the ilter of Bloomsbury postimpressionism, might also be
to the ilter of suffragist aesthetics, with which Woolf was likewise familiar.
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 J ane Goldman

There may be more to Woolf’s painterly analogies than the purely “aesthetic
emotions” she voices to Fry”21; in telling him she “meant nothing by The
Lighthouse” (L3 385), Woolf nevertheless presents to him a silence that in
other contexts, from other perspectives, speaks volumes. To the Lighthouse
does not merely regurgitate wholly undigested Bloomsbury formalism: Mrs.
Ramsay, for example, serves up at her prewar nuptial banquet “Boefe-en-
Daube” (152–163), one of Fry’s culinary specialties,22 a dish the postim-
pressionist painter Briscoe, nevertheless, in her opposition to her hostess’s
promotion of marriage, inds dificult to swallow.23
Woolf’s worrying over the ethics of a symbolism designed to host what-
ever emotions or meanings its readers might choose to deposit, furthermore,
rehearses Fry’s terms in “Art and Socialism,” which posits art as “symbolic
currency,” or universal cultural capital, an instrumentality from which artists
themselves are exempt. In “a world of symbolists,” they are “the only people
who are not symbolists. They alone are up against certain relations which do
not stand for something else, but appear to have ultimate value, to be real.”24
Yet Woolf’s terms “deposit” and “accrue” have a inancial edge, open to the
concepts Fry scorns, in imagining a fairer world in which “a picture would
not be a speculation, but a pleasure, and no one would become an artist in
the hope of making a fortune.”25 Meanwhile, the novel in which no such
hopes delude the woman artist Briscoe – “It would be hung in the attics,
she thought; it would be destroyed” (320) – certainly brought commercial
success to its author, who rejoiced in buying a car on the proceeds of its irst
edition (D3 147). It seems against the poetic, elegiac project of the novel, nev-
ertheless, to crudely reduce its central “minus” line to a inancial bottom line.
But this prompts consideration of the form of the central line that closes the
novel, in that inal paragraph depicting Lily’s inal brushstroke:

There it was – her picture. Yes, with all its green and blues, its lines running up
and across, its attempt at something. [. . .] With a sudden intensity, as if she saw
it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was
inished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have
had my vision. (319–320)

Is this line “there, in the centre” yet only accessible here in the words at the
very boundary of the text, a vertical line? Or is it horizontal, or diagonal;
is it even straight? If vertical, does it represent the tree that Briscoe before
the war was going to put “further in the middle” (132) of her irst picture?
Perhaps it represents the lighthouse? Is it a feminist reappropriation of the
irst person? If horizontal, is it the toppled tree, the toppled irst-person sig-
niier? Or does it return us to the central corridor that joins the two blocks
in Woolf’s initiating diagram? This absent yet present formal “central line”
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 To the Lighthouse’s Use of Language and Form

is a punctuation mark in the middle of a painting at the end of a book that

somehow returns us to an imagined spine, a “central line down the middle
of the book to hold the design together,” even at its margins.

Parentheses
The design holds together in a painting, according to Fry’s formalism, by vir-
tue of rhythmic repetition of form, orchestration of line and color. Woolf’s
verbal text mimics that design principle, deploying its own rhythmic rep-
etition of words, phrases, images, and tropes. There is such a shimmering
lyric density to Woolf’s verbal orchestrations that tracing the novel’s design
through the tessellated repetitions and variations of any one word, phrase,
image, or trope in her mosaic that catches the eye might exhaust even a
monograph and is certainly the stuff of numerous essays, chapters, and arti-
cles. Yet the armature of her design is most starkly available in the stylized,
self-conscious repetition of forms that are not strictly verbal: Woolf’s stra-
tegic use of blank spaces, her virtuosic deployment of punctuation marks,
her hinging semicolons, and her corralling and excising parentheses.26 This
is never more apparent than in the hinging parenthetical sentence in which
Mrs. Ramsay dies, a parenthesis that also exists in “most puzzling diver-
gence”27 in two versions in the irst editions. Whereas the stumbling syntax
differs in its awkwardness, both irst editions share the common feature
of those notorious death-dealing square brackets, enclosing the image
of Mr. Ramsay’s outstretched arms, empty. The UK irst edition reads:
“[Mr. Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark
morning, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before he
stretched his arms out. They remained empty.]” (199–200). The U.S. irst
edition reads: “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning,
stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the
night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]”28
Just as Mr. Bankes is shocked by Lily’s representation of Mrs. Ramsay,
so Woolf’s readers may be shocked by the novel’s representation of Mrs.
Ramsay’s death in either form. This is the low point of “Time Passes.” There
are other deaths recorded here, each in square-bracketed parenthesis – the
fall of a son in the Great War, the loss of a daughter after giving birth. But it is
the death of the novel’s central character, Mrs. Ramsay, so casually reported,
that most shocks.29 The notorious stumbling sentence in which the patri-
arch, Mr. Ramsay, reaches out for his faithful, self-subordinating wife only
to clasp thin air has given readers (and editors) considerable trouble, espe-
cially because of the irst U.S. edition’s substantive variant. In a sense, com-
parison between the two compounds the torment, as if to emphasize the
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 J ane Goldman

indifference of the square brackets to whatever the form of syntax in which

Ramsay discovers his loss – in two jarring sentences, or one. Both versions
report the death of Mrs. Ramsay in the hanging construction of the past
participle, suspended without punctuation markers in a parenthesis of its
own: “Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before.” Later
editors/printers sometimes intrude commas in order to bracket this clause
more securely; but this intrudes a boundary marker that ruins the sense
of sudden, almost invisible departure. The use of square brackets, the tool
of textual editors for restoring or marking absent matter, takes on a poetry
of its own here.30
Compare Orpheus and Eurydice: a husband losing his wife at the gates
of Hell. Like Mrs. Ramsay, Eurydice vanishes into thin air. Virgil and Ovid
describe this very moment. In 1916, both were published in Loeb paral-
lel translation. Whereas, in Metamorphoses X, Ovid’s focus is the hus-
band, Virgil’s, in the Georgics IV, is the wife. (Tantalizingly, the Virgil of
Carmichael’s midnight reading in II.1 is not speciied.) In Ovid’s “brac-
chiaque intendens prendique et prendere certans / nil nisi cedentes infelix
arripit auras” (“He stretched out his arms, eager to catch her or to feel
her clasp; but, unhappy one, he clasped nothing but the yielding air”),31
Orpheus’s literal “stretching,” in standard translation of sequential actions,
becomes the inite “stretched.” But Virgil gives the dying irst-person cries of
Eurydice, “feror ingenti circumdata nocte / invalidasque tibi tendens, heu!
Non tua, palmas” (“I am swept off, wrapped in uttermost night, and stretch-
ing out to thee strengthless hands, thine, alas! No more”).32 Virgil’s Orpheus
bereft, like Ovid’s Orpheus and Woolf’s Ramsay, reaches out to grasp noth-
ing; but Virgil’s focus and sense of agency are with the disappearing wife
(viz. her inite active verbs), who “straightway from his sight, like smoke
mingling with thin air, vanished afar, and vainly as he [was clutching] at the
shadows and yearn[ing] to say much, never saw him more.”33
Woolf’s text follows Ovid’s but is haunted by Virgil’s. Ovid and Woolf
show subtle, searching syntactic awareness of the impossibility of the hus-
band’s attempts to take hold of wifely absence, the very nub of the wider
elegy’s formal dilemma. And “those fumbling airs” (197), eerily roam-
ing “Time Passes,” may blow with the “yielding airs” meeting Orpheus’s
unhappy embrace. Mrs. Ramsay, like Eurydice, dies twice, becomes a reiied
absence.34
Ovid plays “certans” and “cedentes” (“eager”/“striving (for)” and “yield-
ing”) against the inality of “arripit.” The latter means “seize” but also “take
possession of.” So Orpheus seizes yielding air, a metaphor, standing in place
of the disappeared woman, whose construction in the accusative case still
objectiies her in her dramatic absence. Such objectiication of the absent,
40

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 To the Lighthouse’s Use of Language and Form

dead woman is not, however, communicated by Woolf’s syntax in her cru-

cial parenthetical sentence. Her Virgilian touch employs an equivalent of the
Latin ablative absolute (Ovid does not): “Mrs. Ramsay having died rather
suddenly the night before.” The action is not performed by anything present
in the main sentence. The past participle is syntactically possible where, in
Latin, the absent, dead Mrs. Ramsay would be in the accusative and would
be the object of the verb, literally “the out-stretching arms clasped the miss-
ing-and-having-died-the-night-before Mrs. Ramsay”; but this communi-
cates her presence nevertheless. Woolf’s ablative absolute trips and shocks
the reader, just as Ramsay himself goes through the motion of reaching out
for his already absent wife. She is not in the main sentence. The ablative
absolute, furthermore, gives her a strong sense of agency, even in commu-
nicating her death. In Latin, whatever the construction (past participle or
ablative absolute), punctuation is in any case redundant. Woolf’s ablative
absolute similarly needs no commas. Their absence enhances the semantic
slippage between clauses in “the night before” and “he stretched.” (The dead
Mrs. Ramsay is her husband’s absent, prior feminine origin.) The absence
of commas, further, reminds us the collage-like juxtaposition of phrases in
this experimental, avant-garde text (this mosaic of juxtaposed sections and
parentheses) may sometimes be grounded in the syntactical form of its clas-
sical sources.
Mr. Ramsay seems to have stumbled into Andrew Marvell’s famous carpe
diem: “The grave’s a ine and private place, / But none, I think, do there
embrace.”35 But there is cold comfort too in the choice of sharp-edged edito-
rial square brackets to embrace this terse notice of Mrs. Ramsay’s missing
form causing her husband’s outreached arms to remain in empty embrace.
This instance of square brackets is the second of only nine in the entire book,
which might be said to resemble the conines of cofins. Although there are
numerous round-bracketed parentheses in Part I, and these persist through-
out the text, there are no square brackets in Part I. They are noticeably irst
intruded in Part II, the irst instance constituting the inal short paragraph
of subsection 1: “[Here Mr. Carmichael, who was reading Virgil, blew out
his candle. It was past midnight]” (198). Is this a cue to expect further extin-
guished lames marked by this newly intrusive form of square bracket? The
speciication of Virgil leaves us to wonder whether it is his epic or pastoral
or elegiac poetry that Carmichael reads; this one brief Virgilian allusion, in
this irst shift of Woolf’s design to square brackets, seems to carry enormous
weight. If we understand these stylized areas of bracketed text in the terms
of postimpressionist mosaicking, whereby patches of color are orchestrated
to unify the design, we might well pull them out for special scrutiny as a set
of connected or entombed utterances that form a narrative, or fragmented
41

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 J ane Goldman

narrative, a central line, within the larger work. We are at least prompted to
consider the effect of the design that unites them in the same form.
Mrs. Ramsay’s death notice closes II.3. There are four square-bracketed
announcements in II.6, on Prue Ramsay’s marriage, her death after childbirth,
then Andrew Ramsay’s death in the trenches. It closes with Carmichael’s
poetry publication:
[Prue Ramsay, leaning on her father’s arm, was given in marriage that May.
What, people said, could have been more itting? And, they added, how beauti-
ful she looked!] [. . .] [Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected
with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said. They said nobody
deserved happiness more] [. . .] [A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men
were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mer-
cifully, was instantaneous.] [. . .] [Mr. Carmichael brought out a volume of
poems that spring, which had an unexpected success. The war, people said,
had revived their interest in poetry.] (204, 205, 207, 208)
The penultimate subsection of “Time Passes,” II.9, closes with the inal
instance in that corridor of text that may be understood as a form of paren-
thesis itself: “[Lily Briscoe had her bag carried up to the house late one evening
in September. Mr. Carmichael came by the same train]” (219). Paradoxically,
poet Carmichael and painter Briscoe are coupled in this inal square-bracketed
parenthesis of “Time Passes” yet kept apart too. Sharing “the same train,”
they occupy distinct sentences. But the information hardly makes the reader
linch. What do we make of the unifying formal design whereby these return-
ing two artist igures, and the bedtime reading and published work of one,
share the same harsh bracketed embrace as the various bereavements of
Mr. Ramsay – his widowing, his daughter’s marriage and death, his son’s war
death? The reader almost certainly does linch at the next instance of square
brackets, which enclose the entire matter of III.7: “[Macalister’s boy took one
of the ish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated
body (it was alive still) was thrown back into the sea]” (277–278).
This powerfully visceral, self-relexive analogue for the excising work of the
square brackets encourages us to look back to the other instances as them-
selves some kind of textual bait, and the mutilated and living remains of such
as a kind of inaccessible remnant that nevertheless informs and structures
the present writing. The paradoxical statement embraced by round brackets
within the square “(it was alive still)” toys with the status of the ish as both
living and dead, in that “still” may be understood as an adjective denoting both
mortality as well as the deadening ixity of an artistic still life. Further, within
the round brackets, it may suggest the stilling afirmative effect of a maternal
embrace that signals hope, just like Mrs. Ramsay’s yeses discussed in the next
section of this chapter, even where there is none (how can the mutilated ish
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 To the Lighthouse’s Use of Language and Form

possibly survive?). And how are we to read the inal instance of this formal
design where the full text of III.10, just like that of III.7, is in square brackets?
The perspective has changed on the sea that now contains the mutilated ish,
something the reader knows but the artist Briscoe does not know.
[The sea without a stain on it, thought Lily Briscoe, still standing and looking
out over the bay. The sea stretched like silk across the bay. Distance had an
extraordinary power; they had been swallowed up in it, she felt, they were
gone for ever, they had become part of the nature of things. It was so calm; it
was so quiet. The steamer itself had vanished, but the great scroll of smoke still
hung in the air and drooped like a lag mournfully in valediction.] (289)

The images of stain, silk, scroll, smoke, steam, and lag may all be under-
stood as self-relexive signiiers of artistic making as much as similes or
metaphors for the view experienced by the artist; and “the great scroll of
smoke [that] still hung in the air” can be an analogue for the mortality even
of art itself. The inal square-bracketed text in the sequence of nine, are we
to understand this valedictory passage as some sort of lyric consolation for
the elegiac matter that informs the other “visual patches” that make up this
sequence of square-bracketed utterances?
Following the cubist gesture of Macalister’s boy, or the scissor-wielding
James on the opening page, we might further make our way through To the
Lighthouse by “cutting out” (11) and laying out for scrutiny only what we
ind in the possibly more compliant round brackets, too. There are more than
two hundred such parentheses between the irst in I.1 – “(James thought)” –
to the last in III.14 – “(it was only a French novel)” (12, 319).

Yes
Are these brackets indeed as afirmative as Mrs. Ramsay’s embracing “yes”
that inaugurates the novel? “Yes” in fact opens the irst and inal sentences
of the novel, uttered and thought respectively by Mrs. Ramsay and Lily
Briscoe: “‘YES, of course, if it’s ine to-morrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay. ‘But
you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added. To her son, these words con-
veyed an extraordinary joy [. . .] Yes, she thought, laying down her brush
in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision” (11, 320). These two bracket-
ing yeses, two blocks joined by the intervening text’s corridor, constitute
another form of parenthesis, framing its matter.
The inaugurating Yes of To the Lighthouse is uttered by the patriarchal
wife, Mrs. Ramsay, to mollify her son – for rather like James Joyce’s cel-
ebrated Molly Bloom, Mrs. Ramsay is a Penelope-like wife who likes to
say yes. Woolf is surely satirizing the yessing Molly Bloom’s afirmative,
orgasmic recollection of her marriage acceptance (“yes and his heart was
43

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 J ane Goldman

going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes”)36 when she has Lily imag-
ine Mrs. Ramsay’s own acceptance of Mr. Ramsay’s hand: “Yes, she would
say it now. Yes, she would marry him. And she stepped slowly, quietly on
shore. Probably she said one word only” (304–305). In To the Lighthouse,
“yes” is also sometimes followed by “but” (see 11, 106); and it is instruc-
tive to trace the varying and nuanced deployment, contexts, and voicing of
“yes” throughout. Mrs. Ramsay repeatedly says “Yes” to her husband: “Her
husband was so sensible, so just. And so she said, “Yes [. . .]” (105); “He
would like a little solitude. Yes, she said. It annoyed him that she did not
protest” (109). The closing words of Part I are hers in victorious uxorial self-
subordination: “‘Yes, you were right. It’s going to be wet to-morrow.’ She
had not said it, but he knew it. And she looked at him smiling. For she had
triumphed again” (191). Mrs. Ramsay’s “Yes” is deployed in hostile afirma-
tion of patriarchal matrimony at every turn. Subsection I.15, for example,
comprises only one sentence, spoken by the patriarchal daughter (who will
die in childbirth in the parentheses of “Time Passes”): “Yes,” said Prue, in
her considering way, answering her mother’s question, “I think Nancy did
go with them” (124).37 It is productive to follow the deployment of “yes” in
the mouths of the surviving characters after Mrs. Ramsay’s death.38
Briscoe implicitly refuses the widowed Mr. Ramsay and inally says yes,
not to a man but to her own art, in the novel’s closing paragraph, itself
rhythmically punctuated by two yeses. One major transition in the novel has
been that in the gendered performance of “yes” – from its irst rupturing,
destabilizing utterance by the subordinate patriarchal wife to its inal lyric
declaration by the self-afirming woman artist. A change in parenthesis (a
change of frame) has occurred. But “yes” may also function as a component,
or tess, a rhythmically orchestrated formal color in the design, operating as
a unifying, structuring line or corridor, yet simultaneously a destabilizing
and fragmentary force, right through the text; it can no longer be read off as
signifying anything permanent, afirmative or otherwise, merely pegging a
central line through the narrative patchwork, like the lighthouse, the butter-
ly’s wing, the round and square brackets: “Yes, with all its green and blues,
its lines running up and across, its attempt at something” (319–320).

NOTES

1 See Suzanne Bellamy’s chapter on the visual arts in the present volume. Anthony
Uhlmann takes as his focus To the Lighthouse, in his chapter, “Bloomsbury
Aesthetics,” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed.
Maggie Humm (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
2 Woolf, To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, ed. Susan Dick
(Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1982 [hereafter TLH]), p. 3. See Woolf

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 To the Lighthouse’s Use of Language and Form

Online.com: Gallery – To the Lighthouse – Berg Materials – Notes For Writing

Item 5: www.woolfonline.com/?node=content/image/gallery&project=1&paren
t=6&taxa=16&content=732&pos=4
3 I am editor of To the Lighthouse for the Cambridge University Press Edition of
Woolf’s works.
4 See Victoria and Albert Museum: www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/5606: Virginia
Woolf, “To the lighthouse,” Illustrator, Vanessa Bell London: Hogarth Press
1927: AAD/1995/8/3236. See Suzanne Bellamy, “Painting the Words: A Version
of Lily Briscoe’s Paintings from To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf: Turning the
Centuries, eds. Anne Ardis and Bonnie Kime Scott (New York: Pace University
Press, 2000), pp. 244–251.
5 See Woolf Online: www.woolfonline.com
6 See Laura Marcus, “Virginia Woolf as Publisher and Editor: The Hogarth
Press,” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 266: “Woolf’s multifarious relationships to
the work of the Press and its publications – as a reader, editor, translator, printer,
publisher – became inseparable from her own creative practices as a writer.”
7 Paul Cézanne, Letter to Emile Bernard, 15 April 1904, Paul Cézanne: Letters,
trans. Marguerite Kay, ed. John Rewald (London: Bruno Cassirer, 1941), p. 234.
8 See Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-
Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), p. 146; Vanessa Bell, Abstract (1914), Tate Gallery: T01935: www.
tate.org.uk/art/artists/vanessa-bell-731
9 El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919). See Bridgman: image
number CH659509: Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (The Red Wedge
Poster), 1919 (lithograph): www.bridgemanart.com/en-GB/asset/659509/lis-
sitzky-eliezer-el-markowich-1890–1941/beat-the-whites-with-the-red-wedge-
the-red-wedge-poster-1919-lithograph
10 Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf, p. 172.
11 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), p. 150.
12 See Woolf Online.com: Notes for Writing Item 5.
13 J. Sands, Out of the World; or, Life in St. Kilda, 2nd Ed. (Edinburgh: MacLachlan
and Stewart, 1878), p. 41. See Goldman, “Who is Mr. Ramsay? Where Is the
Lighthouse?: The Politics and Pragmatics of Scholarly Annotation,” Woolf
Editing/Editing Woolf: Selected Papers from the Eighteenth Annual Conference
on Virginia Woolf, ed. Eleanor McNees and Sara Veglahn (Clemson, SC:
Clemson University Digital Press, 2009), p. 193; Goldman, With You in the
Hebrides: Virginia Woolf and Scotland (London: Cecil Woolf, 2013), p. 23.
14 Hans Walter Gabler also notes this “printing error” in his chapter on the tex-
tual genesis of the novel in the present volume (note 5). Some editions correct
the numbering so that Woolf’s thirteen subsections read from one to thirteen,
following the irst U.S. edition; at least one (the Everyman’s Library edition
of 1938) manufactures a fourteenth subsection by splitting the irst of Woolf’s
original thirteen so that the numbering runs correspondingly one to fourteen
without misnumbering. The Cambridge edition retains the misnumbered thir-
teen subsections of the irst UK edition and all Hogarth UK printings in Woolf’s
lifetime (it was “corrected” to thirteen in the posthumous 1943 printing).
15 Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf, pp. 168–169.

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 J ane Goldman

16 Vanessa Bell, The Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, ed. Regina Marler (London:
Moyer Bell, 1998), p. 119.
17 Roger Fry, “The Artist’s Vision,” Vision and Design (London: Chatto & Windus,
1920), p. 34.
18 Ibid., p. 34.
19 Fry, “Independent Gallery: Vanessa Bell and Othon Friesz,” The New Statesman
(June 3, 1922), A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 348, 349.
20 Judy S. Rees, Recasting Social Values in the Work of Virginia Woolf (Selingsgrove,
PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1996), p. 133.
21 Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf, p. 168. For further discus-
sion of Woolf and suffrage aesthetics, see also Goldman, “Virginia Woolf and
Modernist Aesthetics,” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the
Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 35–57.
22 Frances Spalding, Roger Fry: Art and Life (London: Harper Collins, 1980),
p. 128.
23 Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf, pp. 168–169.
24 Fry, “Art and Socialism,” Vision and Design (London: Chatto & Windus, 1920),
p. 47.
25 Ibid., p. 51.
26 See Elena Minelli, “Punctuation Strategies in the Textualization of Femininity:
Virginia Woolf Translated into Italian,” New Voices in Translation Studies 1
(2005), pp. 56–69.
27 Margaret Drabble (ed.), To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Oxford
University Press [Oxford World’s Classics] 1992), p. 200.
28 Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), p. 194.
29 See Jane Goldman and Randall Stevenson,“‘But What? Elegy?’: Modernist Reading
and the Death of Mrs Ramsay,” The Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996)
(Strategies of Reading: Dickens and After Special Number), pp. 173–186.
30 See Susan Solomon, “Editorial Deletion: Presenting Absence in To the
Lighthouse,” Woolf Editing/Editing Woolf, eds. Eleanor McNeeds and Sara
Veglahn (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2009), pp. 25–28.
31 Ovid (Met. X. 58–59), Metamorphoses, 2. vols, trans. Frank Justus Miller
(London: Heinemann, 1916), pp. 68–69.
32 Virgil (Georg. IV. 497–498), Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, 2 vols., trans.
H. Rushton Fairclough (London: Heinemann, 1916), Vol. 1, pp. 230–231.
33 My modiied version of Fairclough’s translation of “ceu fumus in auras / com-
mixtus tenuis, fugit diversa, neque illum / prensantem nequiquam umbras et
multa volentem / dicere praeterea vidit,” Virgil, p. 231.
34 Ovid, Metamorphoses, pp. 68–69.
35 Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” The Complete Poems, ed. George de F.
Lord (London: Everyman, 1984), p. 25.
36 James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Urban Romantics Interactive Media, 2013),
p. 657.
37 See also To the Lighthouse, pp. 113, 142, 163.
38 See also To the Lighthouse, pp. 228, 230.

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