Self-Reflective Structure in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
Presenter Type
UNO Undergraduate Student
Major/Field of Study
English
Advisor Information
Kristin Girten
Location
MBSC306 - U
Presentation Type
Oral Presentation
Start Date
24-3-2023 9:00 AM
End Date
24-3-2023 10:15 AM
Abstract
The character of Lily Briscoe, and her painting, are central to the interpretation and understanding of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. The novel is structured as “two blocks joined by a corridor”, according to Woolf—just as the journey of Lily’s painting is structured by two paintings aiming at a culminating vision, separated by a period of pause. This vision of Lily’s is mirrored with the reader’s own “vision”, a revelation and understanding of the novel’s content of the characters and the Isle, and of the lighthouse and its centrality in creating a convergence of time, as the mirrored and overlapping structure of the novel break the rules of chronology and superimpose the past onto the present. Time is rendered spatially, and as the characters return to the Isle of Skye in the novel’s third part, the past becomes simultaneous with the present. The novel’s mirrored structure becomes three-dimensional, not as two separate parts loosely connected by quiet the passage of time, but as two parts of a whole running parallel along each other and connected by a traversable corridor. To achieve this analysis, I build on and complicate existing scholarly criticism: Paul Goring’s “The shape of To the Lighthouse: Lily Briscoe's painting and the reader's vision”, Henda Ammar-Guirat’s “Impersonality Theory as Spatial Imagination in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse”, and Shkola et al’s “Impersonality Theory as Spatial Imagination in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse”.
Scheduling
9:15-10:30 a.m., 10:45 a.m.-Noon, 1-2:15 p.m.
Self-Reflective Structure in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
MBSC306 - U
The character of Lily Briscoe, and her painting, are central to the interpretation and understanding of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. The novel is structured as “two blocks joined by a corridor”, according to Woolf—just as the journey of Lily’s painting is structured by two paintings aiming at a culminating vision, separated by a period of pause. This vision of Lily’s is mirrored with the reader’s own “vision”, a revelation and understanding of the novel’s content of the characters and the Isle, and of the lighthouse and its centrality in creating a convergence of time, as the mirrored and overlapping structure of the novel break the rules of chronology and superimpose the past onto the present. Time is rendered spatially, and as the characters return to the Isle of Skye in the novel’s third part, the past becomes simultaneous with the present. The novel’s mirrored structure becomes three-dimensional, not as two separate parts loosely connected by quiet the passage of time, but as two parts of a whole running parallel along each other and connected by a traversable corridor. To achieve this analysis, I build on and complicate existing scholarly criticism: Paul Goring’s “The shape of To the Lighthouse: Lily Briscoe's painting and the reader's vision”, Henda Ammar-Guirat’s “Impersonality Theory as Spatial Imagination in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse”, and Shkola et al’s “Impersonality Theory as Spatial Imagination in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse”.