Mythic Patterns in To The Lighthouse

PMLA ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 71 (4-Part-1) ◽  
pp. 547-562 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph L. Blotner
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
The Ideal

The Impulses and convictions which gave birth to Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own carried over into Virginia Woolf's fiction. Their most powerful expression is found in To the Lighthouse. 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. The most useful myth for interpreting the novel is that of the Primordial Goddess, who “is threefold in relation to Zeus: mother (Rhea), wife (Demeter), and daughter (Persephone).” One of the major sources 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.” This double figure is that of the Kore, the primordial maiden, who is also a mother. Also useful in interpreting the novel is the Oedipus myth.

“La marquise sortit à cinq heures”

PMLA ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 84 (6) ◽  
pp. 1644-1648
Author(s):  
Albert Chesneau
Keyword(s):  
Structural Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Nouveau Roman ◽  
The Ideal

Simple structural analysis applied to passages cited from the works of André Breton elucidates the reasons for his condemnation of the statement La marquise sortit à cinq heures (see his Manifeste du surréalisme, 1924) as non-poetic. This study demonstrates the opposition existing between the above-mentioned realist sentence, essentially non-subjective (third-person subject), non-actual (past tense predicate), contextual (context can be supposed), and prosaic (lack of imagery), and on the other hand a theoretic surrealist sentence, essentially subjective (first-person subject), actual (present tense predicate), and non-contextual, producing a shock-image. In reality, Breton's surrealistic phrase does not always contain all of these qualities at once. However, in contrast to the condemned phrase which contains none at all, it does always manifest at least one of these characteristics, the most important having reference to the evocative power of the shock-image. A final comparison with a sentence quoted from Robbe-Grillet, the theoretician of the “nouveau roman”, proves that even though it may appear objective, the surrealist phrase is really not so. In conclusion, the four characteristics of the ideal surrealist sentence—subjectivity, actuality, non-contextuality, and ability to produce shock-images—create a poetics of discontinuity opposed to the classical art of narration as found traditionally in the novel. (In French)

The “estate topos” of Russian symbolism in the ego-documentary prose by Andrei Bely

2020 ◽  
pp. 48-66
Author(s):  
Elena V. Glukhova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Ideal

The article discusses the modification of the “estate topos” of Russian sym- bolism in Andrei Bely’s memoir prose. The estates Shakhmatovo, Dedovo, Serebrianyj Kolodez played a key role in the cultural history of Russian symbolism. The peculiarity of Bely’s “estate text”, on the one hand, is that he found an original neo-mythological mode in the image of these estates, on the other hand, gave them heterotopic properties. The article shows how the tonality of his memoirs about Alexander Blok changes from the first edition in journal “Notes of Dreamers” (1922) to the last part of his memorial trilogy “The Beginning of the Century” (1932). If in the first version “Shakhmatovo” appears in neo-mythological meaning and a number of significant symbolic universals are realized, then in the latter version this way of representing the estate is practically erased. The image of Alexander Blok as a spiritual and symbolic center of estate cul- ture is changing: if originally he had the folklore features of Ivan Tsarevich, the ideal symbolist poet on a background of nature, and his wife was Tsarevna, the embodiment of Sophia the Wisdom of God, then later Blok appears as a Lord, carried away only by the issues of managing the estate, and his wife gets the features of an ordinary woman. The estate Serebrianyj Kolodez appears as a heterotopic space, and the features of the estate Dedovo are recognizable in the novel “The Silver Dove”.

Only Relations: Vision and Achievement in To the Lighthouse

PMLA ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 99 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas G. Matro
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aesthetic Design ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The One ◽  
Narrative Progression

Roger Fry's notions of the artist's unique vision and of the aesthetic design that captures that vision have long been acknowledged as primary influences on To the Lighthouse. Consequently, for most commentators, the novel's closing events signify the achievement of a transcendent “oneness” or a perceptual balance captured in art but rarely experienced in life. Examination of repeated patterns of style and narrative progression shows that the design of the artist Lily's vision—one of unresolved ambivalence and estrangement rather than unity—is no different from that of the other characters, and this vision is the one caught in Lily's painting and reflected in all aspects of the novel. Woolf exploits Fry's theories to probe the desire for unity or “oneness” in personal and aesthetic relations, but she finds refuge, finally, in the act, not the result, of invention, in perception itself “before anything is made of it.”

Renewed Diary Experiment

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Lounsberry
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
General Strike

Woolf expands her 1926 diary. In February, she begins “a new convention”: starting each entry on a new page, her “habit in writing serious literature.” In May, she reaches outward toward public history with a diary of the General Strike. She then turns inward for eleven titled “State of Mind” probes: probes of the boundaries between sense, thought, and art. In October, she imagines “an endeavour at something mystic, spiritual; the thing that exists when we aren’t there.” The diaries she reads propel her toward this place. Across the year Woolf returns often to Beatrice Webb’s memoir My Apprenticeship, woven around diary extracts. These extracts supply notions for To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Flush, and Three Guineas—and especially for A Room of One’s Own and “Professions for Women.” In September, Woolf reviews the Journals of Thomas Cobden-Sanderson. His questing journals encourage Woolf’s search for “the mystical side of this solitude,” she writes, or what Webb calls the great Unknown. Soon after, Woolf reviews the Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, from his Autobiography and Journals. Haydon’s Journals offer her a memorable moment for To the Lighthouse and matter for A Room of One’s Own—and more.

The Philosophy of Nature in Diderot and Rousseau

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-141
Author(s):  
Tili Boon Cuillé
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Denis Diderot ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ideal Model ◽  
Histoire Naturelle ◽  
Moral Sensibility ◽  
Alternate Forms ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Ideal

Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were avid readers of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle and active participants in the quarrels prompted by Rameau’s operas. To date, scholarship has focused primarily on their theorization of physiological and moral sensibility. Chapter 2 investigates Diderot’s and Rousseau’s response to the spectacle of nature, focusing on the affinity between the inspiration of the artist and the identification of the spectator. Jan Goldstein has characterized “enthusiasm” and “imagination” as eighteenth-century smear words. These terms are recuperated in Diderot’s writings on painting and the theater and Rousseau’s writings on opera and the novel, however. Enthusiasm, like pity, necessitates a movement outside oneself that facilitates union with the other and the forging of the ideal model. The chapter concludes by considering the alternate forms of natural spectacle that Diderot and Rousseau envision in their writings.

scholarly journals “Nothing is any longer one thing”:

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Juno Raine
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
True Nature ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Personal Philosophy ◽  
Room Of One's Own

Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando challenges the very validity of socially constructed ideologies by allowing its titular character to transcend not only the boundaries of physical sex, but also those of time and space. Thus, through the character of Orlando, Woolf explores the farcical nature of ideology by affording them a four-dimensional experience of their own life that exposes their own true nature at the same time as it establishes their connection to capital-N-Nature. Through a close reading of Orlando, interspersed with secondary scholarship and framed with reference to three of Woolf's other works—To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own, and Three Guineas, this essay situates Orlando's four-dimensional phenomena within Woolf's larger personal philosophy as it is articulated across her body of work.

Virginia Woolf

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Sellers
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Room Of One's Own

This chapter traces Virginia Woolf’s development as a writer of non-fiction, focusing on her prolific output as an essayist. It sees close links between her ongoing experimentation with the novel form and the evolving form of her essays, and argues that her alterations in style were an integral aspect of her attempt to articulate a response to her largely Victorian inheritance, to the seismic shifts taking place in society and understanding in the early decades of the twentieth century, and to the politics and culture of the 1930s dominated by the rise of fascism. While the chapter ranges across all of Woolf’s essays, there is particular discussion of her 1920 A Room of One’s Own and her 1938 Three Guineas.

Patterns: Rosamond Lehmann

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vike Martina Plock
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fashion Industry ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Fashion Magazines ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
Rosamond Lehmann

This chapter analyzes the role of fashion as a discursive force in Rosamond Lehmann’s 1932 coming-of-age novel Invitation to the Waltz. Reading the novel alongside such fashion magazines as Vogue, it demonstrates Lehmann’s awareness that 1920s fashion, in spite of its carefully stylized public image as harbinger of originality, emphasized the importance of following preconceived (dress) patterns in the successful construction of modern feminine types. Invitation to the Waltz, it argues, opposes the production of patterned types and celebrates difference and disobedience in its stead. At the same time, the novel’s formal appearance is nonetheless dependent on the very same tenets it criticizes. On closer scrutiny, it is seen to reveal its resemblance to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). A tension between imitation and originality determines sartorial fashion choices. This chapter shows that female authorship in the inter-war period was subjected to the same market forces that controlled and sustained the organization of the fashion industry.

Margaret Mahy: An Adlerian Reading

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-199
Author(s):  
KATHRYN WALLS
Keyword(s):  
Young Female ◽  
The Other ◽  
Individual Psychology ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Alfred Adler ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Magical Power ◽  
Margaret Mahy ◽  
The Individual

According to the ‘Individual Psychology’ of Alfred Adler (1870–1937), Freud's contemporary and rival, everyone seeks superiority. But only those who can adapt their aspirations to meet the needs of others find fulfilment. Children who are rejected or pampered are so desperate for superiority that they fail to develop social feeling, and endanger themselves and society. This article argues that Mahy's realistic novels invite Adlerian interpretation. It examines the character of Hero, the elective mute who is the narrator-protagonist of The Other Side of Silence (1995) , in terms of her experience of rejection. The novel as a whole, it is suggested, stresses the destructiveness of the neurotically driven quest for superiority. Turning to Mahy's supernatural romances, the article considers novels that might seem to resist the Adlerian template. Focusing, in particular, on the young female protagonists of The Haunting (1982) and The Changeover (1984), it points to the ways in which their magical power is utilised for the sake of others. It concludes with the suggestion that the triumph of Mahy's protagonists lies not so much in their generally celebrated ‘empowerment’, as in their transcendence of the goal of superiority for its own sake.

NEUROTIC SYMPTOMATICS RELATED TO PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS IN YOUTH

2019 ◽  
pp. 2014-2019
Author(s):  
Milen Dimov
Keyword(s):  
Personal Characteristics ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Responsiveness ◽  
Training Process ◽  
Self Assessment ◽  
School Year ◽  
Real Behavior ◽  
Low Levels ◽  
The Ideal

The present study traces the dynamics of personal characteristics in youth and the manifested neurotic symptoms in the training process. These facts are the reason for the low levels of school results in the context of the existing theoretical statements of the problem and the empirical research conducted among the trained teenagers. We suggest that the indicators of neurotic symptomatology in youth – aggression, anxiety, and neuroticism, are the most demonstrated, compared to the other studied indicators of neurotic symptomatology. Studies have proved that there is a difference in the act of neurotic symptoms when tested in different situations, both in terms of expression and content. At the beginning of the school year, neurotic symptoms, more demonstrated in some aspects of aggressiveness, while at the end of school year, psychotism is more demonstrated. The presented summarized results indicate that at the beginning of the school year, neurotic symptoms are strongly associated with aggression. There is a tendency towards a lower level of social responsiveness, both in the self-assessment of real behavior and in the ideal “I”-image of students in the last year of their studies. The neurotic symptomatology, more demonstrated due to specific conditions in the life of young people and in relation to the characteristics of age.

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