Stream of Consciousness in the novel ‘ To The Lighthouse’

Paper              The Modernist Literature

Topic                          Stream of Consciousness in 
                       the novel ‘To The Lighthouse’

Name              Avani N. Dave  

Roll No.           2

Class               M.A. Sem. 3

Submitted to    Dr. Dilip Barad  

                       Department of English

                       MK.Bhavnagar University

                  

     

 Introduction

                        Virginia woolf, one of the prominent representative Of Modernist novelist in England, has contributed significantly to the development of modern novel in both theory and practice. She abandoned traditional fictional devices and formulated her own distinctive techniques. The novels of woolf tend to be less concerned with outward reality than with the inner life. Her masterpiece, to the Lighthouse, serves as an excellent sample in analyzing woolf’s literary theory and her experimental techniques. 

Origin of the Word

                                  The phrase “Stream of Consciousness” was coined by William James 1 to describe the flow of thoughts of the waking mind. Subsequently his phrase began to be used in a literary context to describe the narrative method by which certain novelists have described the unspoken thoughts and feelings of their characters, without resorting to objectives description or conventional dialogue. James Joyce was a pioneer in using this technique in his novels of which the best known are Ulysses and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And this technique was also used by Virginia Woolf. The related phrase “interior monologue” is used to describe the inner movement of Consciousness in a character’s mind. A famous example of the interior monologue is the opening pages of Mrs.  Dalloway. The use of devices of the stream of Consciousness and the interior monologue marks a revolution in the form of the novel because through these devices the author can represent the flux of a character’s thoughts, impressions, and emotions and reminiscences, often without any logical Sequence.

        

 Virginia Woolf and To The Lighthouse

                                   When we mention Virginia Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse’, it’s very natural to talk about her stream of consciousness technique. In this novel, the structure of external objective events is demised in scope and scale, or almost e completely dissolved. It is composed of the continual activity of characters’ consciousness and shower of impressions. External events occupy little space in the novel the writer as an omniscient narrator has almost completely vanished and almost everything stated appears by the way of reflection in the consciousness of the dramatic characters and the novel does not progress on “what – happens – next” basis, but rather moves forward through a series of scenes arranged according to a sequence of selected moments of consciousness and the techniques to which Mrs. Woolf mainly employs are interior and free association. 

Interior Monologue in ‘To The Lighthouse’

                                  Virginia Woolf, among the stream of consciousness writers relies most on the indirect interior monologue and she uses it with great skill. In ‘To the Light House’ Virginia Woolf succeeds in producing a much subtle effect through the use of this technique. This novel contains a great deal of straight, conventional narration and description but the interior monologue is used often enough to give the novel its special character of seeming to be always within the consciousness of the chief characters. Virginia Woolf says in her essay Modern Fiction:

“Let’s record the atom as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall. Let’s stress the pattern however disconnected and incoherent in appearances, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.”

This is the best description in her method. Let’s examine the following passage in the first chapter of part one. 

 

                            For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? She would ask; not to know how your children were if they were ill, if they had fallen down and broken their legs or arms; to see the some dreary waves breaking weak after weak and then a dreadful storm coming and the windows covered with spray, and birds dashed agonized the land and the whole place rocking, and not able to put your nose out of doors for fear of being swept into the sea? How would you like that she asked?

                     

                                     The passage above is represented in the manner of straight narration by the author but it is clearly what the character feels and thinks and it reflects the character’s consciousness and inner thoughts. In this passage Woolf facilitates the indirect interior monologues with her unique skills. Firstly, she uses the conjunction “for” as an indication of the beginning of this monologue and produces an easy and natural swift from objective description to the character’s interior monologue, secondly, she presents Mrs. Ramsay’s consciousness by guiding phrases “She would ask” and “She asked” to make the reader wonder about unheard in Mrs. Ramsay’s consciousness. Thirdly, here she employs semicolons to indicate the continuation of the consciousness. The use of semicolons is characterized Woolf’s skill in dealing with indirect interior monologue, as she also shown in this novel.

                                      In the case of indirect interior monologue the omniscient author’s continuous intervention is essential to guide the reader in reading and the character’s mind. The use of frequent parenthesis can be signals of digression and of simultaneity as this one:

             “Teaching and preaching human power, Lily suspected.(She was putting is beyond away things.)”Parenthesis can also be little aside, explanations, pointers to what is going on. Lily in this passage is thinking about Mr.Bankes:

        “I respect you (she addressed him silently). In every atom; you are not vain: you are entirely impersonal; you are finer than Mr.Ramsay. You are the finest human being that I know; you have neither wife nor child (without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherish that loneliness) you live for science (involuntarily section of potatoes and rose before her eyes); praise would an insult to you; generous, pure hearted heroic man!”

        Here the parenthesis signal sudden and momentary switches in perspective, the narrative is thrown backward and forward.

                        With her unique devices, such as guiding phrases, semicolons, and parenthesis embroidered to her interior monologue, Virginia Woolf successfully overcomes the short comings of stream of consciousness novel of being incoherent and chaotic, and achieves great explicitness, coherence, vividness and surface unity in presenting the character’s inner world. However, it should be noted that her presentation of the character’s interior monologue is not only coherent in meaning, but also conventional in appearance. 

Free Association

Virginia Woolf rightly speaks in the support of her technique in these words:

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

 

Free Association in To the Light House

               In To the Light House, woolf usually encloses free association into the indirect interior monologue to represent the psychic process of her characters. We may take the 7.10^th chapter of the first part of To the Light House as an example.

                          The continuity of the section is established through an exterior occurrence involving Mrs. Ramsay and James: Mrs.Ramsay tells James the story of the Fisherman’s wife. After consoling her despair-stricken husband, Mrs. Ramsay began to read the story to James. Here her narration of the incidents is not coherent and she describes the events of her life without having the continuity and order of the actions. At that time, the stroke of the lighthouse came into her eyes. Then Mildred came into fetch them and here chapter 10 ends.

There are some Sources of unity which helps the Story they are:

Isolation

                        A number of devices have been used to impart structural unity to the novel. First, she has introduction only a limited number of characters, and they have been isolated in a remote island away from society. Further, out of this isolated group, she has focused attention only on two or three personalities, and exploited their stream of Consciousness alone. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, and lily Briscoe are the main figures. Other is only of a Secondary importance.

The Role of the Central Intelligence

                    

                      Secondly, the readers are not placed directly within the minds of characters, as in the modern psychological novel, but the central intelligence of the novelist is constantly at work as the narrator, controlling and organizing the material, and illuminating it with its comments, and order emerges out of chaos.

Lily’s Painting

                                          Lily’s painting is another device by which the novelist has patterned her material. The novel begins with Lily her easel and her paints and brush on the laws of the Ramsay’s Summer House, and it ends with her having her vision and completing her picture.

The Lighthouse

                

                                The Lighthouse is another important source of unity in the novel. It shines throughout at a distance, and all the lines of the novel Converge towards it. The expedition to the lighthouse is planned in part I, and it is actually undertaken in part.III.

Emotional Unity

                                   To the Lighthouse may not have a logical unity, a logical sequence of Cause and effect, it is have a unity of a higher and stronger kind i.e. emotional unity. Jean Guiguet has considered the point in detail, and we may be excused for quoting from him at length;

                                     

                        “Lily Briscoe, painting on the lawn, from time to time costs a glance towards the bay to watch the boat on which Mr. Ramsay, James and Cam are sailing. But this link is purely eternal; the real unity of the sections lies in the Coincidence of Project and thought me the Completion of Lily’s Canvas, the fulfillment of James’ plan. It is not so very important that Lily sees the sails fall and Flap; what common is their common immobility: “Life stands still here, and “The boat made no motion at all.”

                       And further on, the mixture of charm and tyranny in Mr. Ramsay occupies the thoughts of Lily, and so on the end, where Mr. Ramsay’s unexpressed vision is identified with Lily’s- his defeat and triumph. The brackets enclosing the brief section 7 and 10 irresistibly recall the events inserted in the same fashion in Time Passes. Like these, they are hard kernels of a different nature to the flux out of which they emerge. The mutilated fish interrupting Lily’s tragic cry, the sea having apparently swallowed up the little boat and obliterated the lives of the passengers while, all the time, James, Mr. Ramsay and Cam purse their own train of thought. But heterogeneous as they are, these observations, like the events in time passes, have a secret relationship with the context that they seem to interrupt. The mutilation and survival of the fish is, at the same time, the survival of Mrs. Ramsay and the mutilation of Lily’s universe peace evoked by the scene she is contemplating emphasize the remoteness of the past which the occupants of the boat are remembering and the feeling of reconciliation which is doing amongst them at this movement.

  Conclusion:

                             Thus, seeing all the characteristics of the novel ‘To the Light House’ and comparing it with all contents of the stream of consciousness technique. It is clearly noticeable that Mrs. Ramsay has used the stream of constructional lines of one person to that of another. There is very little complication ‘To the Light House’ is a masterpiece of construction. Woolf has given form and coherence to her material all the characters also proven all This by their interior monologue and their behavior.