The Cambridge Companion to TO THE LIGHTHOUSE To the Lighthouse is one of the most important of Virginia Woolf s modernist achievements. Written by leading international scholars of Woolf and modernism, this companion to To the Lighthouse will be of interest to students and scholars alike. Individual chapters explore the biographical and textual genesis of the novel; its narrative perspectives and use of form; its thematic and formal attention to time and space; and its representations of feminism and gender as well as generational change, race, and class. Complete with a chapter on the novel s critical history, a chronology, and a guide to further reading, this volume synthesizes To the Lighthouse s major ideas and formal innovations while also summarizing and advancing critical debate. Allison Pease is Professor of English at the City University of New York s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury British literature and culture, gender and sexuality, and aesthetic theory. She is the author of Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity and Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom. A complete list of books in the series is at the back of this book.
the Cambridge Companion to TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO TO THE LIGHTHOUSE EDITED BY ALLISON PEASE John Jay College of Criminal Justice
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. Information on this title: /9781107682313 Cambridge University Press 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data The Cambridge companion to To the lighthouse / edited by Allison Pease. pages cm (Cambridge companions to literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-05208-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-107-68231-3 (paperback) 1. Woolf, Virginia, 1882 1941. To the lighthouse. I. Pease, Allison, editor. PR 6045. O 72 T 665 2014 823.912 dc23 2014020963 ISBN 978-1-107-05208-6 Hardback ISBN 978-1-107-68231-3 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URL s for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
CONTENTS List of Contributors Acknowledgments Chronology List of Abbreviations page ix xiii xv xix Introduction 1 Allison Pease 1 To the Lighthouse in the Context of Virginia Woolf s Diaries and Life 6 Anne E. Fernald 2 Narrative Perspective in To the Lighthouse 19 Michael Levenson 3 To the Lighthouse s Use of Language and Form 30 Jane Goldman 4 Time as Protagonist in To the Lighthouse 47 Paul Sheehan 5 Movement, Space, and Embodied Cognition in To the Lighthouse 58 Melba Cuddy-Keane 6 Reality and Perception: Philosophical Approaches to To the Lighthouse 69 Emily Dalgarno 7 Feminism and Gender in To the Lighthouse 80 Gabrielle McIntire vii
Contents 8 To the Lighthouse and the Art of Race 92 Urmila Seshagiri 9 Social Class in To the Lighthouse 110 Kathryn Simpson 10 Generational Difference in To the Lighthouse 122 Ana Parejo Vadillo 11 The Visual Arts in To the Lighthouse 136 Suzanne Bellamy 12 From Memory to Fiction: An Essay in Genetic Criticism 146 Hans Walter Gabler 13 To the Lighthouse : The Critical Heritage 158 Jean Mills Guide to Further Reading 173 Index 179 viii
CONTRIBUTORS SUZANNE BELLAMY is an internationally exhibiting Australian studio artist, writer, and researcher whose work comprises image/text fusions and performance work on Woolf/Stein/modernism, including Am I Blue? (London 2005), Woolf s Pageant (Glasgow 2011), A Sketch of the Past (Ohio 2007, South Carolina 2012), Woolf and the Chaucer Horse (University of Glasgow 2014), and Two Saints in One Act (Chicago 2014). Her essay Woolf and the Arts: Homage, Afterlife, and the Originating Text appeared in Virginia Woolf in Context, Bryony Randall, Jane Goldman, eds. (2012). She is currently completing a book on Virginia Woolf, Australia, and international modernism (website: suzannebellamy.com). MELBA CUDDY-KEANE is Emerita Professor, University of Toronto-Scarborough, and an Emerita Member of the University of Toronto s Graduate Department of English. Her publications include Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (2003), the Harcourt annotated edition of Woolf s Between the Acts (2008), contributions to The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (2nd ed., 2010) and Virginia Woolf s Bloomsbury, Volume 2: International Influence and Politics (2010), and, coauthored with Adam Hammond and Alexandra Peat, Modernism: Keywords (2014). EMILY DALGARNO is an emeritus professor of English at Boston University. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Visible World (2001), Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language (2012), as well as articles on Conrad, Faulkner, Hurston, and Woolf. ANNE E. FERNALD is the author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (2006); editor of the Cambridge University Press Mrs. Dalloway (2014); editor of a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on women s fiction, new modernist studies, and feminism; and the author of many articles and book reviews. She teaches at Fordham University s Lincoln Center campus. ix
Contributors HANS WALTER GABLER is Professor (retired) of English literature and editorial scholarship at the University of Munich, Germany, and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, London University. From 1996 to 2002 in Munich, he directed an interdisciplinary graduate program on Textual Criticism as Foundation and Method of the Historical Disciplines. He is editor in chief of the critical editions of James Joyce s Ulysses (1984/1986), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Dubliners (both 1993). A strong present concern is genetic criticism on foundations of writing processes digitally edited. JANE GOLDMAN is author of The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual (1998) and coeditor of Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (1998). Her recent publications include Modernism, 1910 1945: Image to Apocalypse (2004) and The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (2006). She is general editor (with Susan Sellers) of the Cambridge University Press Edition of Woolf s works and volume editor of Woolf s To the Lighthouse for Cambridge. She is currently writing a book, Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog. MICHAEL LEVENSON is William B. Christian Professor of English at the University of Virginia; author of A Genealogy of Modernism (1984), Modernism and the Fate of Individuality (1990), The Spectacle of Intimacy (with Karen Chase 2000), and Modernism (2011); and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (2000, 2nd edition 2011). Professor Levenson has published essays in such journals as ELH, Novel, Modernism/modernity, The New Republic, Wilson Quarterly, and Raritan. GABRIELLE MCINTIRE is Associate Professor at Queen s University, Canada, and is the author of Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (2008) and of articles on Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Nella Larsen, and Joseph Conrad in journals including Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/modernity, Narrative, and Callaloo. She has also published poetry in journals and collections such as The Literary Review of Canada, The Cortland Review, Van Gogh s Ear, and Kingston Poets Gallery. JEAN MILLS is the author of Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism (2014). She is an associate professor of English at John Jay College, City University of New York. ALLISON PEASE is Professor of English at the City University of New York s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and culture, gender and sexuality, and aesthetic theory. She is the author of Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (2000) and Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom (2012). x
Contributors URMILA SESHAGIRI is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee and the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination (2010). Her work has appeared in several journals and edited collections, including PMLA, Contemporary Literature, Modernism/modernity, Cultural Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, and Woolf Studies Annual. PAUL SHEEHAN is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence (2013) and coeditor of a special issue of Textual Practice on The Uses of Anachronism (2012). In addition to recent essays on J. M. Coetzee and W. G. Sebald, he has published chapters on Ralph Ellison and Cormac McCarthy, as well as several pieces on Samuel Beckett. is Programme Director for English Studies at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She has published extensively on Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, including two books, Gifts, Markets, and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf (2008) and Virginia Woolf: A Guide for the Perplexed (2014). She is also coeditor of Virginia Woolf: Twenty-First-Century Approaches (2014). KATHRYN SIMPSON ANA PAREJO VADILLO is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research interests are predominantly in the fin de si è cle, particularly on decadence and aestheticism. Her publications include Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (2005); Michael Field, the Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials (2009, with Marion Thain); and Victorian Literature: A Sourcebook (2011, with John Plunkett, Regenia Gagnier, Angelique Richardson, Rick Rylance, and Paul Young). She is also the coeditor of a special issue on literary culture and women poets for Victorian Literature and Culture (2006, with Marion Thain) and the coeditor of science, literature, and the Darwin legacy for 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century No. 11 (2010, coedited with Carolyn Burdett and Paul White). She is currently working on a book titled Cosmopolitan Aestheticism. xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their excellent essays and thoughtful cooperation during the editing process. For their advice in conceptualizing the volume, I am especially grateful to my colleague, Jean Mills, and my two modernist coconspirators, Celia Marshik and Laura Frost, who make every draft a celebration, quite literally. For her fact-checking and editorial support, I am supremely grateful to Dominika Szybisty. xiii
CHRONOLOGY 1878 Parents Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth (n é e Jackson) marry 1879 Sister Vanessa Stephen born 1880 Brother Thoby Stephen born 1882 Adeline Virginia Stephen born at 22 Hyde Park Gate, London (25 January). Stephen family spend the first of their summers at Talland House in St. Ives, Cornwall. Leslie Stephen begins working on the Dictionary of National Biography 1883 Brother Adrian Stephen born 1894 Stephen family spend their last summer at Talland House 1895 Julia Stephen dies 1897 Begins her first extant diary 1904 Leslie Stephen dies 1905 Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian spend summer holiday at Carbis Bay, near St. Ives, visit Talland House 1906 Thoby Stephen dies 1910 First Post-Impressionist exhibition opens Virginia Stephen volunteers for the women s suffrage campaign 1912 Virginia Stephen marries Leonard Woolf 1914 Britain declares war on Germany; World War I commences 1915 Duckworth publishes The Voyage Out Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs (first volume of Pilgrimage ) xv
Chronology 1916 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1917 Hogarth Press publishes The Mark on the Wall 1918 World War I ends The Representation of the People Act gives propertied women over thirty years of age the right to vote and universal male suffrage Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians 1919 Duckworth publishes Night and Day Hogarth Press publishes Kew Gardens 1920 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle Roger Fry, Vision and Design D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence 1921 Hogarth Press publishes Monday or Tuesday (all subsequent publications are with Hogarth Press) Katherine Mansfield, Bliss 1922 Jacob s Room Meets Vita Sackville-West T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land Herman Hesse, Siddhartha James Joyce, Ulysses 1923 Jean Toomer, Cane Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id 1924 Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown Records in diary first hint of plan for To the Lighthouse (October) E. M. Forster, A Passage to India Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair 1925 Publishes The Common Reader and Mrs. Dalloway Sketches shape and plot of To the Lighthouse in notebook Begins affair with Vita Sackville-West Willa Cather, The Professor s House T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby xvi
Franz Kafka, The Trial Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans 1926 General Strike in Britain Finishes draft of To the Lighthouse Charles Mauron s translation of Le temps passe published in Paris Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises Franz Kafka, The Castle 1927 To the Lighthouse (5 May) Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion Martin Heidegger, Being and Time 1928 Awarded Prix Femina for To the Lighthouse (April) Publishes Orlando Lectures on Women and Fiction at Girton and Newnham colleges, Cambridge (October) All women over twenty-one granted right to vote in UK D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley s Lover 1929 A Room of One s Own Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front 1931 The Waves 1932 A Letter to a Young Poet and The Common Reader: Second Series 1933 Flush 1937 The Years 1938 Three Guineas Chronology 1941 Finishes typescript of Between the Acts Dies (28 March) Between the Acts published posthumously xvii
ABBREVIATIONS D The Diary of Virginia Woolf E Essays of Virginia Woolf L Letters of Virginia Woolf MB Moments of Being PA A Passionate Apprentice: Early Journals, 1897 1909 All unmarked parenthetical references are to the original 1927 Hogarth edition of To the Lighthouse. The above abbreviations refer to the editions listed under Works by Virginia Woolf at the start of the Guide to Further Reading. xix