1.2Introduction to To the Lighthouse

Woolf’s mother died when she was thirteen, her description about her mother’s image stayed in her brain all the time. Mother’s behavior and words, hobbies and life habits were survived in Woolf’s brains with deep impression. At the age of 22, Woolf’s father died, her father’s image stayed in her brain forever. Such profound image made Woolf entangled and confused all the time. Therefore, Woolf decided to write a novel for tidying up her mother and father’s images as well as her own emotion. Woolf’s mother and father were prototype of Mr Ramsay and Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. While Woolf was writing this novel, her body gradually became healthy, and in her novel creation process, she gave vent to her emotions as much as possible, she revealed all of her memories for years at rapid speed. In To the Lighthouse, she conducted a lot of different images, except Mrs Ramsay and Mr Ramsay, there were Lily and James, Roger and Cam, and so on. These different characters appeared in Woolf’s life and had different connections with her. 

    The novel took the action of going to the lighthouse as central line, it wrote about Ramsay’s family and several guests’ life experience during the First World War. Mr Ramsay’s younger son James wanted to go to the lighthouse, despite of the bad weather, his wish failed to come true. Afterwards, the First World War erupted, Ramsay family experienced hardships and disasters. After the war, Mr Ramsay brought his son and daughter to the sea by boat and reached to the lighthouse at last. Lily, who was sitting by the coast for picturing, finally made a picture which surpassed herself to become a real artist at the moment of Ramsay family’s arrival at lighthouse. To the Lighthouse is taken as the peak of Woolf’s novel writing. Woolf consciously integrates female utterance and role as well as consciousness into work. The times of To the Lighthouse was a times with worship in patriarchy and oppression in feminism. Woolf writes such a book to express her dissatisfaction in women’s position at that time. Meanwhile, Woolf calls up women to unify together to fight for legal right and benefits to create a harmonious and happy life, and in this way, it can lay foundation for establishing a harmonious society with equality in everyone. 

Woolf once thought that the potential trend of modernism literary should let women “write women”.(Virginia Woolf 104) However, facing historical background of modernism at her times, female writers’ works were difficult to gain approvals from critics and readers in the literary wave, or to set up self narration authority in the oppression of mainstream male narration authority. Under the dual oppression from male narration authority and the marginal consciousness of feminism consciousness, Woolf became female writer with approvals from patriarchy critic world with unique narration strategy, that was the stream of consciousness.

Chapter Two  The stream of consciousness and To the Lighthouse

2.1 Stream of consciousness 

In the traditional novel, male centered consciousness was in the dominant position, there were story plots with beginning and peak and ending, there were important events, and this kind of novel used behaviors to conduct images. While in To the Lighthouse, there were almost no story plots, and the only plot was “to the lighthouse” at the beginning and the end of the novel, there was no behaviors to conduct images. The male-centered and strict logic as well as linear development outer plot description gave way to female detailed psychological description. Important events like pass-away of Mrs Ramsay, the First World War, death of Andrew were all put in one blanket. The middle part of this novel, which was the emphasis of traditional novel, was full of poetic emotion without characters. The character image retirement was the extreme irony against traditional novel which based on characters. At the same time, Woolf’s language also reflected the so-called feminized characteristics. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf abandoned the omniscient view and applied third person view to a great degree, and frequently carried out multiple view transformations to reflect the subjectivity of narration. In tradition, it uses indirect narration by using the word “she”. In Woolf’s writing, he described characters’ self consciousness activities and their reflections in others to mutually conduct abundant character image. For instance, the image of Mrs Ramsay was conducted through her son James and her husband as well as Tasmania. Through dual transmission of narration angle, Woolf stressed perceive of directness and enlarged the narration scope to make the whole novel supplemented 伍尔夫《到灯塔去》女性主义思想的现实意义(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_43112.html