To the Lighthouse: Initial Thoughts

I'm just more than half-way through the novel.  It's very good; I tend to think  I would be more gushing about it if I hadn't already read Mrs. Dalloway and a few of Woolf's essays and short-stories.  Her voice and narrative style cut so directly to the heart of her characters' thoughts and feelings, and create such a complex and believable world from so many perspectives, that I would probably recognize it without knowing who the author is, at this point.  Because of this, though, I fear the initial awe I felt when I got into Woolf almost a year ago could only be felt once.  

Another factor both contributing to and limiting my enthusiasm is the similarity between To the Lighthouse and Middlemarch.  It seems, thus far in the novel, that Woolf expanded upon a crucial idea that Eliot suggested; namely, that reality is inherently subjective, nothing is morally clear, and every character is so limited by his or her singleness of perspective that this lesson is difficult to learn.  Each work deals with this fact, however, in vastly different ways.  Though Eliot-the-realist uses an omniscient narrator who drops into the thoughts of each character, holds them up for us, and says "but you can't judge them, reader, because we're all just humans," Woolf-the-modernist uses only subjective narration the entire time, allowing the ideas she puts forth to come clear in themselves, without the interpretation from an objective narrator.  

A striking aspect of To the Lighthouse is the focus on "vague desires," a topic that catapults me back a month in time to my Nunokawa lectures on Eliot.  Each of the characters in To the Lighthouse (like, literally, all of them) seems to suffer this same problem that Dorothea Brooke made famous.  If you refer to my most recent Facebook quote, you'd find a relevant one by Lily Briscoe, as she is overcome with emotion while attempting to paint a scene of the Ramsay's yard.  She says of Mrs. Ramsay, "...but what could one say to her?  'I'm in love with you.'  No, that was not true.  "I'm in love with this all," waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children.  It was absurd, it was impossible."  Lily's overcome by emotions for everything she sees at this one ecstatic moment in time, but she doesn't know what the object is.  A similar idea, though less dramatic, comes up later in the novel as the narrator examines the feelings of William Bankes for Mrs. Ramsay: "He was not 'in love' of course; it was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many."  When I read that, it was clear that "unclassified affections" and "vague desires" were almost synonymous (damn that's hard to spell).  Looks like Woolf learned quite a bit from Eliot.

Claire: you should read To the Lighthouse at some point in the near future.  With Middlemarch fresh in your mind, the dialogue between the two of them could really great.

Dana: having read both, tell me what you think, at some point in our lives.  

Here's to Summer '08.  WooOOooOooh.