To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
ContextVirginia
Woolf was born on January 25, 1882, a descendant of one of Victorian
England's most prestigious literary families. Her father, Sir Leslie
Stephen, was the editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography and was married to the daughter of the writer William Thackeray. Woolf
grew up among the most important and influential British intellectuals
of her time, and received free rein to explore her father's library. Her
personal connections and abundant talent soon opened doors for her.
Woolf wrote that she found herself in “a position where it was easier on
the whole to be eminent than obscure.” Almost from the beginning, her
life was a precarious balance of extraordinary success and mental
instability.
As a young woman, Woolf wrote for the prestigious
Times Literary Supplement, and as an adult she quickly found herself at the center of England's
most important literary community. Known as the “Bloomsbury Group” after
the section of London in which its members lived, this group of
writers, artists, and philosophers emphasized nonconformity, aesthetic
pleasure, and intellectual freedom, and included such luminaries as the
painter Lytton Strachey, the novelist E. M. Forster, the composer
Benjamin Britten, and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Working among
such an inspirational group of peers and possessing an incredible talent
in her own right, Woolf published her most famous novels by the
mid-1920s, including
The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and
To the Lighthouse. With these works she reached the pinnacle of her profession.
Woolf's
life was equally dominated by mental illness. Her parents died when she
was young—her mother in 1895 and her father in 1904—and she was prone
to intense, terrible headaches and emotional breakdowns. After her
father's death, she attempted suicide, throwing herself out a window.
Though she married Leonard Woolf in 1912 and loved him deeply, she was
not entirely satisfied romantically or sexually. For years she sustained
an intimate relationship with the novelist Vita Sackville-West. Late in
life, Woolf became terrified by the idea that another nervous breakdown
was close at hand, one from which she would not recover. On March 28,
1941, she wrote her husband a note stating that she did not wish to
spoil his life by going mad. She then drowned herself in the River Ouse.
Woolf's
writing bears the mark of her literary pedigree as well as her struggle
to find meaning in her own unsteady existence. Written in a poised,
understated, and elegant style, her work examines the structures of
human life, from the nature of relationships to the experience of time.
Yet her writing also addresses issues relevant to her era and literary
circle. Throughout her work she celebrates and analyzes the Bloomsbury
values of aestheticism, feminism, and independence. Moreover, her
stream-of-consciousness style was influenced by, and responded to, the
work of the French thinker Henri Bergson and the novelists Marcel Proust
and James Joyce.
This style allows the subjective mental processes of Woolf's characters to determine the objective content of her narrative. In
To the Lighthouse (1927), one of her most experimental works, the passage of time, for
example, is modulated by the consciousness of the characters rather than
by the clock. The events of a single afternoon constitute over half the
book, while the events of the following ten years are compressed into a
few dozen pages. Many readers of
To the Lighthouse, especially
those who are not versed in the traditions of modernist fiction, find
the novel strange and difficult. Its language is dense and the structure
amorphous. Compared with the plot-driven Victorian novels that came
before it,
To the Lighthouse seems to have little in the way of action. Indeed, almost all of the events take place in the characters' minds.
Although
To the Lighthouse is a radical departure from the nineteenth-century novel, it is, like
its more traditional counterparts, intimately interested in developing
characters and advancing both plot and themes. Woolf's experimentation
has much to do with the time in which she lived: the turn of the century
was marked by bold scientific developments. Charles Darwin's theory of
evolution undermined an unquestioned faith in God that was, until that
point, nearly universal, while the rise of psychoanalysis, a movement
led by Sigmund Freud, introduced the idea of an unconscious mind. Such
innovation in ways of scientific thinking had great influence on the
styles and concerns of contemporary artists and writers like those in
the Bloomsbury Group.
To the Lighthouse exemplifies Woolf's style
and many of her concerns as a novelist. With its characters based on
her own parents and siblings, it is certainly her most autobiographical
fictional statement, and in the characters of Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay,
and Lily Briscoe, Woolf offers some of her most penetrating explorations
of the workings of the human consciousness as it perceives and
analyzes, feels and interacts
الرئيسية
البوابة
أحدث الصور
التسجيل
دخول
العاب فلاش مباشرة
العاب فلاش مباشرة 2
طقس الاردن
موقع حلو للأطفال
موقع تعليمي للأطفال.jpg "القرآن الكريم"){kind=small}
القرآن الكريم
لوحة مفاتيح عربية
الجمعة سبتمبر 19, 2014 5:12 am من طرف هيثم مومني
