Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was one of the greatest writers of the age. Her novels were experimental. She told her stories from the inner perspectives of the characters, laying bare their emotions, psychological impulses, desires, wishes, and insecurities in a propulsive style. Woolf put a magnifying glass to British Victorian and Edwardian society, especially to its domestic culture and the role of women in that culture, and, by contrast, the role of a kind of pathological masculinity. The First World War, for Woolf, put the shortcomings and deep problems of this culture into stark relief. What British Victorian and Edwardian culture valued most, its ideals of masculinity, adventurousness, colonialism, hard work, professional and social hierarchy, industry, and codes of conduct, proved to be a potent cocktail of self-destruction.
In the 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, Woolf tries to understand the connections between British social values and the destruction of WWI through the inner lives of members of the Ramsay family and their guests at their summer home on he Isle of Skye. The beginning of the novel takes us into an evening at the Ramsays’ house. They are hosting "distinguished" guests. The mother and wife, Mrs. Ramsay, controls the domestic space, including her husband’s tempers. The male guests are portrayed as outwardly conceited but inwardly insecure. They are rational on the surface but almost childish in their emotional reactions. They are concerned with professional success and status. All parties at the house, men and women, are preoccupied with social conventions, etiquette, and manners. The novel, after a brief middle section (which is wonderful) concludes with a similar scene after the war. The Ramsay’s eldest son Andrew has been killed on the front in France. Mrs. Ramsay has died during the war, perhaps due to stress or grief – we don’t know exactly. The postwar scene is a pale reflection of the earlier one. The guests seem lost, more interior. The fulcrum of their social world, the wife/mother, is gone. The break between the prewar world and the postwar world seems insurmountable. The Victorian era, Woolf tells us, as hard as people might try, cannot be recreated in the 1920s. The war has taken too much, called too much into question, shaken the very foundation of British society.
In the 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, Woolf tries to understand the connections between British social values and the destruction of WWI through the inner lives of members of the Ramsay family and their guests at their summer home on he Isle of Skye. The beginning of the novel takes us into an evening at the Ramsays’ house. They are hosting "distinguished" guests. The mother and wife, Mrs. Ramsay, controls the domestic space, including her husband’s tempers. The male guests are portrayed as outwardly conceited but inwardly insecure. They are rational on the surface but almost childish in their emotional reactions. They are concerned with professional success and status. All parties at the house, men and women, are preoccupied with social conventions, etiquette, and manners. The novel, after a brief middle section (which is wonderful) concludes with a similar scene after the war. The Ramsay’s eldest son Andrew has been killed on the front in France. Mrs. Ramsay has died during the war, perhaps due to stress or grief – we don’t know exactly. The postwar scene is a pale reflection of the earlier one. The guests seem lost, more interior. The fulcrum of their social world, the wife/mother, is gone. The break between the prewar world and the postwar world seems insurmountable. The Victorian era, Woolf tells us, as hard as people might try, cannot be recreated in the 1920s. The war has taken too much, called too much into question, shaken the very foundation of British society.
