Assignment
Name: Maheta Arati R.
Class: M.A.-2
Semester -3
Roll No. -2
Paper: - 9(The Modernist Literature)
Topic: Mythic Patterns
in To the Lighthouse
Submitted to: Department
of English
(MK Bhavnagar University)
Guided by: Dr .Dilip
Barad
Batch: 2013-15
Year: 2014-15
Words:
Introduction
v Of the Novel
This novel is published
on 5th May – 1927. The novel is landmark of high modernism. To the
Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf used the language of psychoanalysis. Reader can find
stream of consciousness during reading the novel. The novel set on duration of
10 years (it deals with the year - 1910 to 1920). The center of the novel is
Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and their visit to the Isle of Skye in Scotland.
Virginia Woolf wrote about this
novel that – “I suppose that I did this work for myself.”
The novel
captures its readers with its characterization of Ramsay family and their guest
who meet at their holiday home on Isle of Skye, an island near the Scottish
mainland. As know that novel is set on a ten years period of time,
1)
The
novel’s first section taking place on a day before the First World War,
This novel is published on 5th May – 1927. The novel is landmark of high modernism. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf used the language of psychoanalysis. Reader can find stream of consciousness during reading the novel. The novel set on duration of 10 years (it deals with the year - 1910 to 1920). The center of the novel is Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and their visit to the Isle of Skye in Scotland.
Of the writer
| Born | Adeline Virginia Stephen 25 January 1882 Kensington, Middlesex, England |
|---|---|
| Died | 28 March 1941 (aged 59) River Ouse, near Lewes,Sussex, England |
| Occupation | Novelist, essayist, publisher, critic |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | King's College London |
| Notable works | To the Lighthouse Mrs Dalloway Orlando: A Biography A Room of One's Own |
| Spouse | Leonard Woolf (m. 1912–1941; her death) |
Mythic
patterns in this novel
The impulses and conviction which
gave birth to ‘Three Guineas’ and ‘A Room of One’s Own carried into Virginia
Woolf ‘s fiction .Their most powerful expression is found in’ To the Light
house’. But something ,probably her
strict and demanding artistic conscience ,prevented their appearance in the form of the
intellectual and argumentative feminism
found in the first two books .In this novel Virginia Woolf’s concept of woman’s
role in life is crystallized in the character of Mrs.Ramsay,whose attributes
are those of major female figures in ‘PAGAN MYTH’.
1)
The most useful myth for interpreting the novel
is that of the Primordial Goddess, who ‘’is threefold in relation to Zeus. One
of the major source of the myth is the Homeric ‘’Hymn to Demeter in which the
poet compares Rhea with her daughter Demeter and makes it clear that Demeter
and her daughter Persephone ‘’are to be thought of as a double figure, one half
of which is the ideal complement of the other.’’
In using myth as an
approach to a work of literature, the critic can make one of two assertions:
the artist knowingly used myth as a basis for his/her creation; or all unaware,
he used it as it welled up out of the subconscious layers of his psyche were it
resided as forgotten material as an archetypal pattern or a fragment of the
collective or racial unconscious .But one of these assertions leads to a
dilemma when it is applied to ‘To the Lighthouse’ and the other is
fundamentally unsound for either fruitful criticism or sound scholarship .
First, Virginia Woolf’s diary shows that
she read Greek, and “On Not Knowing Greek” shows that she venerated it. And, even had she not read Jung, Freud, and
Frazer prior to 1927, she would have known about them through other members of
the Bloomsbury Group. However, there is no direct evidence that she consciously
used myth in the writing of this novel. Therefore, to assert that she did would
be only speculation. Second, because of the relatively large number of these
patterns as presented by Frazer ,Jung
and Freud and because of the enormous number of variations into which they can
be differentiated by Particular culture .one is able to find some sort of
referent in them for major elements of many novels. Then, any parallel between
the mythic pattern and the work of art, by virtue of invoking the supposedly
forgotten, or the archetypal patterns in the artist’s unconscious, is argued as
sufficient basis for claiming that a causative relationship exists. Virginia
Woolf in her diary reiterated the role of her “subconscious” in the germination
of a novel and noted “how tremendously important unconsciousness is when one
writes.” However, this proposition is susceptible of neither proof nor
disproof. These myths may well have risen from Virginia Woolf’s subconscious to
form the framework of her novel, but this can be shown by neither critic nor
psychologist. There is, however, a third position. When meaningful, coherent,
and illuminating parallels are discerned, the work may be interpreted in terms
of the myth. Often what appears fragmentary or only partly disclosed in the
work may be revealed as complete and explicit through the myth.
Introduction od Homeric Hymns
''Pagan Myth''
‘To the Lighthouse can be explained in
terms of Christian myth there is much evidence, both external and internal,
which argues against this interpretation. Virginia Woolf’s agnosticism appears
on many pages of her diary. And Christian symbolism is quite in appropriate for
Mrs Ramsay.
(F.L.Overcarsh,’’To the Light house, Face to
Face’’ Accent x)
When the phrase,’ ’We are in the hands of the Lord,’ ’enters her mind,
she rejects it : ‘’instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that .Who
had said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not
mean’’
(V. Woolf, To the
Lighthouse p-97)
This has been ‘’an insincerity
slipping in among the truths……(98).The beam
from the Lighthouse sweeps over her, ‘’purifying out of existence that
lie, any lie’’(97) .If there is a place in the novel for a male deity, he is
not Christ but Zeus. This deity would appropriately be he linked with the
hidden malevolence Mrs .Ramsay sometimes senses in life, for Zeus was the god
who connived with Hades in the abduction of Persephone, and was himself the
bridegroom by violence of Demeter.
That Mrs Woolf’s characters are
symbolic is quite clear. Mrs Ramsay and her husband stand watching their
children when suddenly a meaning descends upon them,’’making them
representative ……made them in the dusk standing, looking the symbols of marriage,
husband and wife’’ (p-110-11). But Mrs Ramsay is a symbol of much more than
this .She is symbol of the female principle in life. Clothed in beauty, an
intuitive and fructifying force, she opposes the logical but arid and sterile
male principle. Her function is the same on the intellectual level, for she
gives her protection and inspiration to both art and science.
i. Mother( RHEA)
 |
RHEA was the oldest of the gods she was the child of Gaea,
Mother Earth and Ouranos, Father Heaven .When her brother Cronus overthrew
Ouranos ,RHEA became Cronus’s wife and Queen of universe . Since Gaea was not
actually a divinity, however nor ever separated from the earth and personified her Daughter
Rhea is the primal pagan goddess antedating the male gods. Although Cronos was
said to have brought in the Golden Age in Italy when he fled there from the
victorious Zeus, he cuts a poor figure besides Rhea.
Rhea is the completely good and
loving mother .Wrapping a stone in swaddling clothes and substituting it for Zeus,
she has the child spirited to Crete .It is
who later delivers his brothers and sister by forcing Cronos to disgorge
them.
Whereas Rhea has six children,
three boys and three girls, Mrs. Ramsay has eight, four boys and four girls.
Like Cronos Mr .Ramsay was sometimes’’ like lion seeking whom he could
devour….’’(Pg-233).He has power and authority: ‘’Let him be fifty feet away,
let him not even speak to you ,let him not even see you he permitted , he prevailed ,he imposed
himself. He changed everything’ ’ (Pg233).
In each family the youngest child a male is the one who opposes the father.
Zeus alone in his exile on Crete might have reflected like James, I shall be
left to fight the tyrant alone’’ (Pg-250)As Rhea protected Zeus from physical
harm so, Mrs Ramsay tries to guard James from psychological wounds .when Mr.
Ramsay declares that the weather will not permit the trip to the Lighthouse
which James so passionately desires ,Mrs Ramsay
tries to induce her husband to modify his pronouncement. She reflects that children never forgot; ‘’ she
was certain that he was thinking we are not going to the Lighthouse tomorrow
and she thought he will remember that all his life (Pg-95)
Mrs Ramsay has many of the
physical attributes of a goddess. To
Lily’s eyes she seems to wear ‘’an august shape…’’ (Pg-80).She has a royalty of
form…’’(Pg-47). Lily perceives that Mr. Banks hears her voice he visualizes her as ‘’very clearly
Greek’’ (Pg. -47) and feels that ‘’the Graces assembled seemed to have joined
hands in meadows of asphodel to compose that face’’(Pg-47).Augustus Carmichael
bows as if to do her ‘’homage’’(167)When Charles Tansley glimpse s her standing
motionless a picture of Queen Victoria
behind her he realizes that she is the most beautiful person he had ever seen
‘’(25).He visualizes her ‘’stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast
buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen ;with the stars in her
eyes and the wind in her hair…..(25) And her glance comes from ‘’eyes of unparalleled depth’’(77). Even as he speak s of prosaic things ‘’one would be thinking of Greek Temples and how beauty had been with them there in that stuffy room ‘’(291).Even her bearing
is regal:’’ like some queen who finding her people gathered in the hall looks
down upon them and descends among them
and acknowledges their tributes silently and accepts their devotion and their
prostration before her…she went down and crossed the hall and bowed her head
very slightly as if she accepted what
they could not say: their tribute to her beauty’’(124).
Mrs Ramsay ‘s psychic qualities are also those of a goddess .she is
possessed of an intuitive knowledge and wisdom, and exercise a dominion over those around her
seeming almost to cast a spell upon
them. Lily Briscoe particularly sensitive to this aspect of her character
struggles with ambivalent feelings. She sees Mrs. Ramsay as ‘’unquestionably
the loveliest of people …the best perhaps’’ (76),yet she chafes at her
imperiousness .Lily laughs at her ,’’
presiding with immutable calm over
destines which she completely failed to understand ‘’(78).But at the same time
she divines in the heart of this woman ‘’like treasures in the tombs of kings
tablets bearing sacred inscriptions which if one could spell them out, would
teach one everything…’’(79).When Mrs. Ramsay exercises her power her domination
Lily is moved to reflect that ‘’there was something frightening about her .She
was irresistible ‘’(125).Her perception are clearly psychic ; she knew then-
she knew without having learnt . Her simplicity fathomed what clever people
falsified. Her singleness of mind made her drop, plumb like of the spirit upon
truth….(46). Her grey eyes seem to penetrate the thoughts and feelings of
others. Her domination pulls them all together makes them interact as she wants
them to do. But ‘’directly she went a sort of disintegration set in …..’’(168).
ii.Wife (DEMETER)
If Mrs Ramsay resembles Rhea , she
appears almost an incarnation of Demeter
. This divine being ,the Goddess of the Corn, she was the Daughter of Cronus
And Rhea and sister of Zeus. But unlike him and the other Olympians she was
with Dionysus, mankind’s best friend. Hers was the divine power which made the
earth fruitful. It was she ‘’ who was worshiped, not like the other gods by
bloody sacrifices men liked, but in every humble act that made the farm
fruitful. Through her the field of grains was hallowed, Demeter’s holy grain’’
(Edith Hamilton, Mythology p-54)
Even when the originally simple
rites in her honor evolved into the mysteries mysteries, their effect was
still beneficent. The quality of these observances survived even the declines
of Greece and the rise of Rome, for Cicero wrote that’’ among the many
excellent and indeed divine institutions which ….Athens has brought forth and
contributed human life, none in my
opinion is better than those mysteries. For by their means we have been brought
out of our barbarous and savage mode of life and refined into state of
civilization and as the rites are called ‘initiations’ so in very truth we have
learned from them the beginnings of life and gained the power not only to live happily
but also to die with a better hope’’.
Symbols of fruitfulness cluster
around Mrs. Ramsay. She plants flowers and sees that they are tended. The
others thinking of her associate flowers with her instinctively. She adorns
herself with a green shawl. Running throughout the book through her own stream
of consciousness is an almost obsessive concern that the green house shall be
repaired and preserved .Many of the figures of speech used to describe her
relate to nature. Concentrating ‘’she grew like a tree …’’(177).In solitary meditation
she reflects ‘’ how if one was alone one leant to intimate thing s; trees,
streams flowers felt they expressed one felt they became one ,felt they knew
one in a sense were one…’’(97)
An important characteristic of Mrs
Ramsay in her Demeter aspect is her
complete femininity. As Demeter was worshiped
more by men than women, as the sacrifices to her were humble and restrained
rather than fierce and bloody like those of men so Mrs Ramsay in all her
aspects is feminine and opposed to that which is undesirable in masculinity. When she gives to Mr. Ramsay the sympathy and
reassurance he begs the action is symbolic: ‘’Into this delicious fecundity
this fountain and spray of life the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself
like a beak of brass barren and bare’’(58) by this act Mr. Ramsay is ‘’taken
within the circle of life…his barrenness made fertile…’’(59)
The
figures of Mrs Ramsay and Demeter are linked in another important way. They are
characterized not only by fruitfulness, but by sorrow as well. This element
also serves to point up the transition from the Demeter to the Persephone
component of this multiple myth. Demeter’s sorrow is caused of course by her
loss of Persephone. Mrs Ramsay’s sorrow is neither so continuous nor so
specifically focused as that of Demeter. But when she falls prey to it her sorrow
is genuine and pervasive. Another of Mrs Ramsay’s interior monologues might be
that of the goddess implored to make the earth fruitful again: ‘’Why one asked
oneself does one take all these pains for the human race to go on? Is it so
very desirable’’ (134) i.
3. Daughter
(PERSEPHONE)
In familiar story,
Demeter’s only child Persephone was abducted by Hades and spirited down to the
underworld to reign with him over the souls of all the dead. In her anguish for
her daughter the goddess of the Corn ‘’withheld her gifts from the earth, which
turned into a frozen desert. The green and flowering land was icebound and
lifeless because Persephone had disappeared ‘’ ( Hamilton p-57) Finally
compelled to intervene ,Zeus sent Hermes to Hades with the order that
Persephone must be released .Hades
compiled but first forced her to eat
pomegranate seed whose magical properties would insure her return to him for
a third of each year. Zeus also sent Rhea to Demeter to tell her that
Persephone would be released and ask Demeter to make the earth fruitful again.
Many allusions in this novel the
Persephone and Mrs Ramsay correspondence. Barely 9 pages of the novel one reads
that she had ‘’ in her veins the blood of that very noble, if slightly mythical
Italian house whose daughters scattered about English drawing rooms in the 19th
century had stormed so widely and all
her wit and bearing and her temper came from them….’’(17) .
Early in the novel Mrs Ramsay has premonitions, foreshadowing of her
departure from the Green and flowering loveliness of the Isle of Skye, of her
descent in to the world of shades. As she sites in the gathering dusk she looks
out upon her ‘’ the whitening of the flowers and something grey in the leaves conspired together to rouse in her
feeling on anxiety’’(93-94). Her mood depends until ‘’all the being and the
doing expensive glittering vocal evaporated and one shrunk with a sense of solemnity to being one self a wedge
shaped core of darkness something
invisible to others’’(95) Yet at time these depths are briefly pierced
by shafts of light. The sounds of the waves on the beach ‘’ seemed of some old
cradle song murmured by nature, ‘’I am guarding you- I am your support’’ (27).
It is as if Persephone
sensing the imminence of her rape and abduction ,divined also that her
salvation would come from her who had sung a cradle song, her mother Demeter,
the goddess so close to nature. When Persephone had wandered away from her
companions thus isolating herself for Hades attack she had been attracted by
banks of narcissus, hyacinth, and Lilies (Frazer, p -36) As she was abducted
she dropped the lilies she had gathered( The reader’s Encyclopedia. William R.
Benet) 30 pages later in the novel
Lily’s vision of Mrs Ramsay’s departure is resumed ‘’ she let her flowers fall
from her basket scattered and tumbled them on to the grass and reluctantly and
hesitatingly but without or complaint… Went too. Down fields across valleys,
white flower strewn… the hills were austere. It was rocky it was steep. The
waves sounded hoarse on the stones beneath. They went the three of them together…’’(299)
'' Myth of the kore(Persephone)''
.jpg)
In the psychological aspect of the kore Jung highlights the
anima. Here archetypal image of daughter are restricted to a more or less erotic,
troubled, undeveloped anima like feminine such as Aphrodite, Helen. Jung place
the Demeter Kore myth the connection between mother and maiden in the center of
the feminine psyche in that it allows a
woman to live as both mother and daughter backward and forward
time.
The daughter to
whom Mrs Ramsay is closest, the lovely Prue follows her mother in death (Prue,s
death had come as result of childbirth. This in itself suggests the
inextricable connection of birth and death in Kore Myth). It may be that Lily’s
unconscious mined has joined Prue to her mother in this symbolic vision. Since
the unity of two divine persons is central to the concept of the Kore, this is
workable hypothesis for this interpretation. (Kerenyi and Jung describe vision
of the Persephone myth in which Demeter as well as her daughter was a victim of
rape (pg-170,197,251). Thus in another variation Mrs Ramsay and her daughter
would signify Demeter and her Daughter.
In the conclusion of this Myth In that
famous passage ‘’ 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 finished.-Lily Briscoe.
Yes she thought laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision
‘’(310). The return of Persephone is thus two fold. Mrs. Ramsay in the
Persephone aspect of the kore has returned as
an almost palpable presence to the Isle of Skye from which she had been
snatched by death. Persephone has also returned through Lily’s final
achievement of the artist vision and triumph denied her ten years earlier.
(There is another
factor which confirms Lily’s role as a Persephone figure in this
interpretation. Mrs Ramsay’s characterization of her as prim and
old maidish is nothing more than emphasis and re- emphasis of a characteristic
of Persephone, ‘’whose silent feature was an elemental virginity’’-Jung and
Kereny p-207).
As clear as the existence of the
relationship between Mrs.Ramsay and Lily Briscoe is the function of this
relationship: ‘’Demeter and Kore mother and daughter extend the feminine
consciousness both upwards and downwards. They add an older and younger , stronger and weaker,
dimension to it and widen out the narrowly limited conscious mind bound in
space and time, giving it intimation of a greater and more comprehensive
personality which has a share in the eternal course of things’’(Jung p-225)
Both the mother figure and
daughter figure are united in that they are artist- the one in paints and the
other in human relationships and in that they are bound to each other by
psychic bonds which remain firm even beyond death. Demeter has effected the
liberation of Persephone.
Myth of Oedipus''
It is really good you also used some images and also used video about myth.So thank you for this.
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