Nine days after finishing To the Lighthouse, the book lingers in sleepless hours. What returns most often: the boar’s skull, flinty and bleached, wrapped in Mrs. Ramsay’s green shawl.
“Well then,” says Mrs. Ramsay, “we will cover it up,” and they watch her take her own shawl and wind it round the skull, round and round, until she returns to the bed and says how lovely it looks now; “how the fairies would love it; it was like a bird’s nest; it was like a beautiful mountain such as she had seen abroad, with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing and little goats and antelopes…”
The image casts its shadow across the book. That soft, almost maternal gesture, the shawl covering what is hard and dead, sits quietly at the centre; the same impulse that leads Mrs. Ramsay, touching James’s hair, to think “he will never be so happy again,” then to stop herself, knowing the thought angers her husband. Tenderness and severity, bound together in a single object, made symbolic without explanation.
The novel’s evocation of childhood, like Lily’s painting, is built in layers. Part of its power comes from knowing this is a kind of fictionalised memoir. In A Writer’s Diary, Woolf wrote: “I used to think about him [her father] and mother daily; but writing the Lighthouse laid them in my mind. And now he comes back sometimes, but differently. I believe this to be true; that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; and writing of them was a necessary act.”
At thirty-six, she imagined building her memoirs from her diaries: “If Virginia Woolf at the age of fifty… is unable to make a phrase as it should be made, I can only condole with her and remind her of the existence of the fireplace… But how I envy her the task I am preparing for her. There is none I should like better.”
She never wrote those memoirs. But To the Lighthouse is the glimpse, and it is enough.
>I absolutely love that you bring up the boar's head and the cashmere shawl – one of my favorite images in To the Lighthouse…how Mrs. Ramsay is seen somehow making one object two different things to James and Cam, and how we then see that it may never have been two different things at all, as it gradually unwraps over time. Brilliant. Thanks for the beautiful post!
>Emily – Thank you for your kind words. There is sufficient depth in To the Lighthouse for a lifetime of rereading.
>The skull! What a great plot point – I liked how it reappeared in the middle section to puzzle and frighten the cleaning ladies. I have a feeling that I'll be thinking about this book for awhile too.
>continues to haunt me in idle moments, particularly when I lie sleepless at four in the morningThis has been happening to me too, I must admit. Thinking back on the scene with the skull, it seems to me Cam and James, as seen through their interactions with Mrs. Ramsay, already have the same fundamental qualities they will have in the final section on the boat with Mr. Ramsay. Cam is fidgety, nervous, and just wants to be comforted in a fairly superficial way (Mrs. Ramsay repeating nonsense, Mr. Ramsay bringing up the puppy), while James is already more aloof, particular, and of course strongly prefers his mother to his hated father.
>Sarah – The whole section covering the house's decay is bordering on poetry. The rats in the attics. The banging doors. The toads. Poor old Mrs. McNab must have been scared witless.
>Nicole – That's a great point. Those childhood emotions endure.
>Love that you pulled the quote with Mrs. Ramsay kissing James and observing upon their future happiness. Goes back to all the treatment of time. She knows that she cannot stop it. Also think that perhaps she is idealizing the children's happiness as she seeks to hold them here in time as her relation to them in childhood partially defines her. Great post!
>I must admit that the image of the boars head stayed with me too! I was left wondering what happened to it and the shawl…
>Frances – That is a pivotal point isn't it. It is not just the idealisation of her children's happiness but how that defines her. Her death, the decay of the house etc juxtaposed with the loss of innocence of Cam and James.Of course, before and around the time of this novel Woolf and her contemporaries were reading (and publishing via Hogarth) a lot of Freud. You can see the side-effects.
>Karen – It is a powerful image, as the house lies empty and decays, wind gets in and unravels the shawl from the skull. The existence of the skull, which scared Cam so much when she was young, is then revealed, mouldy. After the house is cleaned up I am not sure it is mentioned again?
>Anthony, thanks for posting that last quote from her diaries. I am now so sad that she should have written her diaries in preparation for a possible memoir. I, too, days after reading TTL, am left still mulling over it. I think your comment to Emily above is too apt:"There is sufficient depth in To the Lighthouse for a lifetime of rereading."
>Clare – As I read elsewhere Woolf's novels comprise a form of memoir, some consolation to readers, but not to the future selves Woolf continually addressed in her diaries, at least in the form I read in A Writer's Diary.
>I just today finished this book and dreamt of it last night. Will have to wait and see if it influences thoughts in the future. Thank you for an insightful post.
>Care – This novel is still weaving its way through my thoughts. I am certain I shall have to reread before the year's out.