“For Nothing Was Simply One Thing:” Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse

“So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing” (Woolf 186). 

Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse may tell the story of a family longing to visit a lighthouse in Skye, Scotland, but more than that, Woolf has illustrated the complexities of the individual and human relationships through a typical family dynamic. Woolf’s novel Beautifully captures a variety of individual perspectives while telling of the Ramsey family’s vacation. 

I wondered what brought Virginia Woolf to tackle these complexities in people and perspective the way that she does in such an almost mundane, or simply ordinary, setting (despite historical events, such as WWI, taking place— the purpose of the family travelling lacks a ton of action). The more I thought about Woolf’s intentions, the more my attention was brought to whom she was writing this novel for— who is the audience? 

As a reader and part of the audience, we typically identify with the characters we read of. Woolf’s characters provide very different perspectives, each one that can be easily identifiable with a reader. Many may identify with Mrs. Ramsey, who tries her hardest to enjoy the life she lives. As a reader relating to Mrs. Ramsey, I think one would see the novel actually more melancholic than others, since Mrs. Ramsey strives for this life and achieves such balance, despite the fact that she could never truly live for herself because of her role in society at the time. Mr. Ramsey, who has almost an entirely opposite perspective as his wife, see’s the world differently in which he fears his mortality— he lives his life cautiously and it dictates his future. Mr. Ramsey, in the end after the death of his wife, overcomes this fear when faced with mortality. He realizes that constant fear only restricts how we live and it’s a shame to not live your life to the fullest.

After reading Peter Rabinowitz “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences,” I learned that there are more audiences to take into account than I had believed. There’s the actual audience, there’s the authorial audience and there’s the narrative audience. Rabinowitz describes the actual audience as “the flesh-and-blood people who read the book” (Rabinowitz). The author has no control ofin the actual audience as it is simply anybody who picks up the book. However, the authorial audience the author writes for ideally— this is a “hypothetical audience.” This audience is whom the author assumes has specific knowledge or beliefs already. Rabinowitz uses Demby’s The Catacombs to describe the assumptions an author makes in regards to an authorial audience— he wrote, 

“Demby‘s The Catacombs, for instance, takes place during the early sixties, and the novel achieves its sense of impending doom only if the reader knows that John F. Kennedy will be assassinated when the events of the novel reach 22 November 1963. Had Demby assumed that his audience would be ignorant of this historical event, he would have had to rewrite his book accordingly. Since the structure of a novel is designed for the author’s hypothetical audience (which I call the authorial audience), we must, as we read, come to share, in some measure, the characteristics of this audience if we are to understand the text” (Rabinowitz 126). 

Virginia Woolf is a well-known feminist yet her, seemingly, main character, Mrs. Ramsey, is not a liberated woman. On the contrary, as she was written to illustrates the typical housewife at the time (1910-1920). Woolf’s authorial audience is assumed to understand that Mrs. Ramsey is a typical housewife during this time period, and Woolf is not conforming to norms but rather illustrating reality. She writes the character Lily, who is close to the Ramsey family—Mrs. Ramsey in particular,— which challenges the gender ideology at the time since she wishes to pursue her creative passions before she wishes to follow societal construction of marrying a man and taking care of children at home. Mrs. Ramsey is an intelligent woman and she acknowledges her own submissiveness to her role as a woman, though she does not challenge it as Lily does. Despite Mrs. Ramsey’s positive and empathetic nature, her suppressed emotions seem to take a toll on her as she had never had the opportunity to be herself to her fullest potential. She fit her role and it left her without much of herself left. In the first part of the novel, the narrator says, “They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge stopped full of human emotions.” Mrs. Ramsey knew her role and wanted to fit it, no matter the degree to whichway it drained her.

While playing the part of the authorial audience we understand the different norms and their place in the novel, the narrative audience, on the other hand, is a different role for the reader in which we read as if we are living within the world and among the characters. This is the narrator addressing the audience. However, the narrator in this novel isn’t a consistent one— Woolf used an omniscient narrator who shiftsgives the perspective fromof character to character throughout the novel. The narration is rather confusing, yet intentionally so. This narration forces the reader to stay on their toes as they shift from one person’s perspective to the next, and in doing so allows the reader to fully emerge in the complexity that is an individual’s human experience. 

The authorial audience understands Woolf’s intentions, while the narrative audience experiences what it means to live through the eyes of different perspectives. Mrs. Ramsey and Mr. Ramsey parallel each other in a way. Mrs. Ramsey complies to her role and Mr. Ramsey does the same. Mrs. Ramsey is not ignorant, yet she lives despite her awareness. Mr. Ramsey, on the other hand, I believe is ignorant in ways that he does not understand the world in the same way Mrs. Ramsey does, and he cannot live as freely as she does. Mrs. Ramsey, ironically, but necessarily, dies in part two of this novel, and the tragic change in dynamic might have been the best thing for the Ramsey family. Mr. Ramsey had to learn how to live without his wife, and the love and validation he received, and thought he needed, from her— and he did. In part three of this novel, Mr. Ramsey and his son, James, finally make it to the lighthouse, in spite of Mr. Ramsey’s pessimism in the beginning of the novel. They experienced the lighthouse differently this time— “So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing” (Woolf 186). As a reader, this quote stuck out to me long after I had continued to read on. For nothing was simply one thing. Much like Woolf’s story as a whole, it was not simply one story about a family visiting a city in Scotland, it was just more than that, it was an illustration of human experience and relationships and the complexities among them. The authorial audience is assumed to understand what is beyond, while the narrative audience is told step by step in the experience.