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Mythic Patterns in To The Lighthouse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Joseph L. Blotner
Joseph L. Blotner*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 71 , Issue 4-Part-1 , September 1956 , pp. 547 - 562
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956

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References

1 C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New-York, 1949), pp. 25, 152.

2 A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York, 1953), pp. 205–206. Leonard Woolf, in a recent letter, informs me that he doubts that Virginia Woolf ever read any of Freud's works, but that he (Woolf) had discussed them with her, having read them as he published them in England under the imprint of the Hogarth Press.

3 For a statement of this position see Bernard Blackstone, Virginia Woolf (New York' 1949), p. 99; Edwin B. Burgum, “Virginia Woolf and the Empty Room,” Antioch Rev., iii (Dec. 1943), 596–611; and John H. Roberts, “Toward Virginia Woolf,” Va. Quart. Rev., x (Oct. 1934), 587–602.

4 F. L. Overcarsh, “To the Lighthouse, Face to Face,” Accent, x (Winter 1950), 107–123.

5 Virginia Woolf, To the Ligktkottse (New York: Harcourt, Brace Modern Classics, 1927), p. 97. The pages from which further quotations are drawn are indicated in the text.

6 Edith Hamilton, Mythology (Boston, 1942), p. 54.

7 De Re Publico, De Legibus, trans. Clinton W. Keyes (London, 1928), pp. 414–415. (Lam ii.xiv.36.)

8 “In ancient art Demeter and Persephone are characterized as goddesses of the corn by the crowns of corn which they wear on their heads and by the stalks of corn which they hold in their hands” (J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed., London, 1912, vii, 43).

9 The Reader's Encyclopedia, ed. William R. Benet (New York, 1948), p. 886.

10 Prue's death had come as a result of childbirth. This in itself suggests the inextricable connection of birth and death in the Kore myth.

11 Kerényi and Jung describe versions of the Persephone myth in which Demeter, as well as her daughter, was a victim of rape (pp. 170, 197, 251). Thus, in another variation, Mrs. Ramsay and her daughter would signify Demeter and her daughter.

12 In “The Eleusinian Festival” Schiller describes Demeter's wanderings:

No refreshing corn or fruit

Her distressing need await,

Human bones the fanes pollute,

And the altars violate.

Wheresoe'er her footsteps turned

Nought but sorrow could she scan,

And her lofty spirit burned,

Grieving for the fall of man.

Poetical Works of Friedrich Schiller, ed. Nathan H. Doyle, trans. Percy E. Pinkerton (London, 1902), p. 198. Perhaps a better translation is that recited by Ivan to Alexey in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (N. Y.: Mod. Lib., 1950), p. 125.

13 Virginia Woolf, “The Novels of E. M. Forster,” Atlantic Monthly, cxl (Nov. 1927), 642–648.

14 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 salient feature was an elemental virginity” (Jung and Kerényi, p. 207).

15 The Bask Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. A. A. Brill (New York, 1938), p. 308.