This presentation is on a few major symbols used in stream of consciousness novel 'To The Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf.

1. Symbolism in Virginia Woolf’s
To The Lighthouse
Compiled by
Dilip Barad
M.K. Bhavnagar University
dilipbarad@gmail.com

2. What is Symbolism?
• In the broadest sense a symbol is anything which signifies
something; in this sense all words are symbols.
• In discussing literature, however, the term "symbol" is
applied only to a word or phrase that signifies an object or
event which in its turn signifies something, or has a range of
reference, beyond itself. Some symbols are "conventional"
or "public": thus "the Cross,” "the Red, White, and Blue,"
and "the Good Shepherd" are terms that refer to symbolic
objects of which the further significance is determinate
within a particular culture. (M.H.Abram ‘A Glossary of
Literary Terms)

3. What is Symbolism?
• Poets, like all of us, use such conventional symbols; many
poets, however, also use "private" or "personal symbols."
• Often they do so by exploiting widely shared associations
between an object or event or action and a particular
concept; for example, the general association of a peacock
with pride and of an eagle with heroic endeavor, or the
rising sun with birth and the setting sun with death, or
climbing with effort or progress and descent with surrender
or failure.
• Some poets, however, repeatedly use symbols whose
significance they largely generate themselves, and these
pose a more difficult problem in interpretation. (M.H.Abram
‘A Glossary of Literary Terms)

4. What is Symbolism?
• . . . the artistic method of revealing ideas or truths
through the use of symbols
• Microsoft® Encarta® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
• Many novels have two layers of meaning. The first
is in the literal plot, the second in a symbolic layer
in which images and objects represent abstract
ideas and feelings. Using symbols allows authors
to express themselves indirectly on delicate or
controversial matters.
• Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

5. Modernist Literature and Symbolism
• The Modern Period, in the decades after World War I, was a
notable era of symbolism in literature.
• Many of the major writers of the period exploit symbols which
are in part drawn from religious and esoteric traditions and in
part invented.
• Some of the works of the age are symbolist in their settings, their
agents, and their actions, as well as in the objects they refer to.
• Instances of a persistently symbolic procedure occur in lyrics
(Yeats' "Byzantium" poems, Dylan Thomas' series of sonnets
Altarwise by Owl-light), in longer poems (Hart Crane's The
Bridge, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Wallace Stevens' "The
Comedian as the Letter C"), and in novels (James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury

6. Symbolism in
‘To The Lighthouse’
• Lighthouse: Titular
Significance
• Lily’s Painting
• Ramsay’s Summer House
• The Sea, the Storms, the rock,
reefs and shallow water
• The Boar’s Skull
• Rose’s arrangement of the
grapes and pears
• Refrigerator
• Fisherman & his Wife

7. Lighthouse
It stands alone and tall in both light and
darkness and it, along with its beacon, is
a focal point which Symbolizes strength,
guidance and safe harbor; it is Spiritual
hermit guiding all those who are
traveling by sea.
Mrs. Caroline Ramsay stands as guiding
star and harbours emotional safety to
other family/guest members visiting
Summer House. She is the spiritual
bridge between other humans in the
novel.
Metaphorically, as the element of Water
represents the emotions,
the Lighthouse is a Symbol for the
Spiritual Strength and Emotional
Guidance which is available to us during
the times we feel we are
being helplessly tossed around in a sea of
inner turmoil.
Mrs. Ramsay stands strong like the
lighthouse amidst emotionally shattered
beings; viz., Michael Ramsay, James, Lily,
Carmichael, etc.

8. Lily Briscoe’s Painting
• Symbolizes woman’s struggle in patriarchal
society.
• Against gender convention: “Women can’t paint
or write”.
• Desire to express (repressed) critique of Mrs.
Ramsay’s essence (as an ideal wife and mother)
in the painting.
• her vision depends on balance and synthesis:
how to bring together disparate things in
harmony; this mirrors Woolf’s writing creed –
“ the novel is a both a critique and a tribute to
the enduring power of Mrs. Ramsay.

9. Ramsay’s Summer House
• Symbolizes collective consciousness of . . .
• The physical condition of the house represents
psychological condition of the characters.
• During her dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay sees her house
display her own inner notions of shabbiness and her
inability to preserve beauty.
• In the “Time Passes” section, the ravages of war and
destruction and the passage of time are reflected in
the condition of the house rather than in the
emotional development or observable aging of the
characters.
• Even during the ‘expedition’, Mr. Ramsay, James and
Cam gazes house from the boat rowing towards the
lighthouse.

10. The Sea, the Storms, the rock,
reefs and shallow water
• Storms consist of both wind (air) and
rain (water). And as air is the element
representing the mind, and water is the element
representing the emotions, storms symbolize agitated
thoughts and emotions. Metaphorically, storms are
our Inner Demons which torment both our mind and
our Subconscious.
* The rocks, reefs and shallow waters symbolize the final
dangers and miseries which seem to accompany the
end of any turbulent voyage. Just as the saying, "its
always darkest before the dawn", things always seem
the most dangerous and hopeless as we reach the end
of an emotional turmoil. This is the point when we feel
like tossing up our hands and giving up.

11. The Boar’s Skull
• The presence of the skull acts as a disturbing reminder that
death is always at hand, even (or perhaps especially) during
life’s most blissful moments. It reminds of grave digging
scene from ‘Hamlet’.
• Symbolizes transient nature of art and life.
• Mrs. Ramsay’s covering it with her shawl represents her
desire to preserve life, or that of Mr. Ramsay & Lily to be
immortal through work/art.
• The presence of the skull acts as a disturbing reminder that
death is always at hand, even (or perhaps especially) during
life’s most blissful moments.
• It symbolically presents Mrs. Ramsay’s understanding
nature and enduring power to suffer for others – as she
wraps it with her shawl

12. Rose’s arrangement of the
grapes and pears
• Rose arranges a fruit basket for her mother’s dinner party
that serves to draw the partygoers out of their private
suffering and unite them.
• Although Augustus Carmichael and Mrs. Ramsay appreciate
the arrangement differently—he rips a bloom from it; she
refuses to disturb it—the pair is brought harmoniously, if
briefly, together.
• The basket testifies both to the “frozen” quality of beauty
that Lily describes and to beauty’s seductive and soothing
quality.
• The absence of fruit basket in 3rd part, signifies the
transitory nature of beauty, art and truth.
• Symbolizes Mrs. R’s desire to make her daughters like her. . .

13. Refrigerator in Army and
Navy Stores catalogue
• On the one hand it is a tool for conserving food,
and as such a symbol of preservation.
Refrigerators slow down and stave off decay.
• Against that, the refrigerator is also a symbol of
change, of technology changing and presumably
improving human culture. The refrigerator is an
instrument of science, and it occupies the same
sphere as the lighthouse. It could be viewed as a
domestic lighthouse of sorts.
• http://patremoirpress.com/blog/?p=1140

14. Refrigerator in Army and
Navy Stores catalogue
• James is guided in his choice by Mrs. Ramsay.
• and it should therefore be associated with her,
and with her role as a preserver and shaper of
culture
• Mrs. Ramsay is repeatedly shown as someone
who is training and shaping her children’s minds,
and her approach to her daughters differs from
her approach to her sons. She wants her
daughters and the women around her to support
and sustain men, while she wants the men to be
a success in the public sphere

15. Refrigerator in the Catalogue:
Army and Navy Stores
• The catalogue in To the Lighthouse does not have a date, but
it does have a name
• War and consumption are linked in the same object
• Consumerism: there may be a cricket cry of consumer
criticism in making a catalogue the playground for James’s
scissors.
• V Woolf was very much aware of the importance of money
and appreciated the delights of consumerism, she very
rarely saw consumerism as a cause for concern. Money and
the having of money in most of her writing—think of Mrs.
Ramsay’ greenhouse concerns or of Virginia’s thoughts on
the education of women—is a balm to be desired rather
than a poison to be feared.
• http://patremoirpress.com/blog/?p=1140

16. Fisherman and his Wife
• the parallel between the fisherman’s
wife and Mrs. Ramsay. Both make unreasonable
demands upon their husband.
The wife keeps asking her husband to return to the
sea and request more and more from the
flounder–while, in opposition to Mr. Ramsay’s
rejecting the possibility of a sea excursion, Mrs.
Ramsay repeatedly and unreasonably insists on
the possibility of fair weather.
In her desire to protect James’s sensibilities, she
opposes hopes and wishes against Mr. Ramsay’s
“accuracy of judgment”

17. Fisherman and his Wife
• V Woolf use of the fairytale seems to be ironic. She is
subverting the misogyny of the fairytale.
• Mrs. Ramsay is acting from empathy. She has much more
in common with the empathetic and reasonable fisherman
than with his wife. On the other hand, Mr. Ramsay and
Charles Tansley, despite the truth of their assertions, are as
uncompromising and as unreasonable (on a moral
emotional level) as the fisherman’s wife.
• Interpreted this way, the presence of the fairytale in the
novel challenges the myth about the dangers of
unopposed female will and desire. The real danger seems
to be the male need for self-assertion and for insisting on
literal truth.

18. Fisherman and his Wife
• the casual cruelty shown towards the fish can easily be
interpreted as a comment upon male violence–
thoughtless male violence engendered by lack of
empathy. Where the fisherman in the tale took pity on
the flounder and released it, the boy cuts a square out
of the mackerel’s side and throws the still living,
mutilated body back into the sea.
• The fairytale is subverted and instead of the dangers of
female willfulness and desire we are faced with the
dangers and horrors of male willfulness and desire.

19. Fisherman and his Wife
• by having Mrs. Ramsay tell such a misogynistic
tale Virginia is also indicting Mrs. Ramsay. By
showing Mrs. Ramsay as transmitting and
perpetuating harmful myths about female will
and desire, Virginia is criticizing and attacking
the way in which women are complicit in
limiting their ability to fully realize themselves.

20. Reference
• Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899, reprinted
• 1958); Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (1936); C. M. Bowra, The Heritage of Symbolism
• (1943); Kenneth Cornell, The Symbolist Movement (1951); Edward Engelberg,
• ed., The Symbolist Poem (1967); and Anna Balakian, ed., The Symbolist
• Movement in the Literature of European Languages (1982). For attempts to decode
• William Blake's complex symbolism, see S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary:
• The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (1965), and Northrop Frye, Fearful
• Symmetry (1947).
• W. B. Yeats, "The Symbolism of Poetry" (1900), in Essays and Introductions
• (1961); H. Flanders Dunbar, Symbolism in Medieval Thought (1929); C. Lewis, The Allegory of
Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936); Elder Olson,
• "A Dialogue on Symbolism," in R. S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism (1952);
• W. Y. Tindall, The Literary Symbol (1955); Harry Levin, "Symbolism and Fiction,"
• in Contexts of Criticism (1957); Isabel C. Hungerland, Poetic Discourse
• (1958), chapter 5; Maurice Beebe, ed., Literary Symbolism (1960).
• http://www.aseekersthoughts.com/2010/01/lighthouse-as-symbol.html
• http://www.jim-sherry.com/screenplay_writing.html
• http://patremoirpress.com/blog/?p=1140

21. Acknowledgement
• For Images:
– http://classroompark.edublogs.org
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_boar
– http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/2759477
– Alan Stevenson: Biographical Sketch of the Late
Robert Stevenson: Civil Engineer. W. Blackwood,
1861.
– Collin Greg, Dir. ‘To The Lighthouse’ (movie). Hugh
Stoddart, screenplay.