Back to Virginia Woolf Seminar Home PageCreated June 5, 2002 from material supplied by Katherine Childers, Srirupa Dhar, Christie Lamon-Burney, and Kim Provost McBee
"On the novel’s poetic plane, the Lighthouse is a source of light which does not become a source of illumination until after Mrs. Ramsay’s death. Accordingly, we might conceive of it as a goal of creating harmony from the dissonance of inadequate human relationships."
"In the first section of the novel, the Lighthouse as a symbol of the goal of human harmony is ironic, because the expedition to the Lighthouse becomes a goal which is frustrated."
In "Time Passes" the Lighthouse "illuminates the indifference of nature to human effort, as seen in the destruction of the house and all of those things which once had meaning for the Ramsay family."
"In the third section, the trip is made; and as the boat approaches the Lighthouse, the problem of harmony approaches resolution" (Leaska 153-154).
"[A] deliberate portrait of the processes of the psyche as described through sexual imagery. [T]he column in its erection and life-giving powers suggests a quest into the innermost reaches of Mrs. Ramsay’s psyche, a consummation through her taking on both male and female sexual characteristics in response to Mr. Ramsay’s infantile asexuality" (Pratt 425).