Because every reader bears his or her own exclusive cargo of self into the reading experience, individual reader response criticism has arisen as a resolution to the subjective nature of the enterprise. In this form of analysis, evaluation depends upon a particular individual’s reaction to reading a particular piece of literature. By supplementing to it his or her own distinct perspective, the reader deepens the inherent meaning of the text, while simultaneously allowing the text to reshape the original perspective. Every single act of reading contains a dimension inimitable to the isolated event.
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse lends itself to a reader response approach to criticism. It enters the individual psyches of several characters, tests their reactions to the reality that encompasses them, and extracts from these separate samples a shared essence. Critiquing this book from an individual reader response approach parallels the thrust of the book itself, which reveals that the selfhood of each character results in singular reactions to identical circumstances. Such an analysis has worth for everybody, in that it appeals to an experience common to all: the struggle to mine reality for meaning and fellowship. Because of this, my response to To the Lighthouse, although exclusive, can still profit others by appealing to the humanity (or, in Christian terms, the image of God) in all of us.
I choose to dwell upon the theme of this text that most impressed me: the paradox of the self, which craves and requires interaction with others, and yet cannot achieve true fellowship because of the very structures created to facilitate it.
Woolf creates a small society to people her novel, and, from the perspective of various individuals, records the efforts of the various members to connect to each other. The movement of the novel is primarily associative, tracing an emotional chain of reaction between the characters that is fashioned out of both verbal and physical communication. Mrs. Ramsay occupies a pivotal role in this mystical chemistry experiment: she is a catalyst for many of the reactions that take place, including those between James and Mr. Ramsay, Lily and Mr. Bankes, and Minta and Paul. Lily depicts “Mrs. Ramsay presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand” (Woolf 50). Her life is a battle to connect people, to assert “their common cause against that fluidity out there” (Woolf 97).
The dinner party scene illustrates this most clearly. As Mrs. Ramsay approaches the simple act of hosting a meal, she feels that “the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her” (Woolf 83). Throughout the entire dinner scene, she forces people to connect, even against their wills. Bankes must be her guest and sample the Boeuf en Daube. Lily must succumb to Mrs. Ramsay’s pressure and speak kindly to Tansley. At the close of the meal, Paul and Minta enter, engaged as a result of Mrs. Ramsay’s influence. Lily describes her hostess’ powers thus: “She was irresistible. Always she got her own way in the end…. She put a spell on them all, by wishing” (Woolf 101). Even Mr. Carmichael, the man over whom Mrs. Ramsay exerts the least control, shares a moment of unity with her as they both admire the platter of fruit. “Augustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit,” Mrs. Ramsay notices, remarking that, although “his way of looking” was “different from hers”, nevertheless “looking together united them” (Woolf 97). At the close of the meal, when her husband begins to recite the poem, she takes delight in the fact that “every one at the table was listening to the voice…with the same sort of relief and pleasure that she had, as if this were, at last, the natural thing to say, this were their own voice speaking” (Woolf 111). From the moment that she enters the scene until the moment she leaves, Mrs. Ramsay unites her guests—achieving, at the very end, a sense that this joint listening, this participation in the lone voice, was natural, and expressive of their own individual selves. Thus far, society and fellowship, communion of souls.
And yet, this unity that Mrs. Ramsay achieves is ultimately both superficial and fleeting. She, the binding force, must conquer her own desire to remain “out of the eddy” of interaction, to sink into herself and find “rest on the floor of the sea” (Woolf 84). Her first address to Mr. Bankes reveals that she really isn’t connecting with him: she pities him out of “one of those misjudgments…that arise from some need of her own rather than of other people’s” (Woolf 84). In the same way, all of the characters interact with each other in order to fulfill their own private needs, or out of a code of behavior that determines the roles that men and women must assume. Tansley speaks in order to “assert himself.” Lily at last succumbs to the pressure to “go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve…his urgent desire to assert himself” (Woolf 91). In so doing, she makes sure that they will never know each other—which, after all, is true fellowship. Thus, in forcing them to connect, Mrs. Ramsay actually ensures that true connection can never take place. Throughout the evening, the characters suppress their true selves in order to interact with each other. In the midst of the conversation, every participant feels that “something [is] lacking,” and worries lest their boredom be exposed (Woolf 94). Mr. Ramsay’s inability to conceal his genuine displeasure at Mr. Carmichael’s second helping of soup bothers his wife. When the candles are lit and “some change” passes through the party that makes them “conscious of making a party together” (Woolf 97), attention nevertheless is given to the “mask-like look of faces by candlelight” (Woolf 98). Mrs. Ramsay contemplates her children with puzzlement, wondering what was “hoarded behind those rather set, still, mask-like faces,” and noting that “they did not join easily” (Woolf 109). The party ends with the triumphant unity of the guests in Mr. Ramsay’s recitation…and then fades into the past. Even such unity as was achieved is only temporary, for it is always necessary “to carry everything a step further” (Woolf 111).
The dinner scene illustrates this paradox of the self. Lily describes the dilemma of living with the Ramsays (and, one might extrapolate, participating in society), as that of being “made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel, was the other” (Woolf 102). Lily reflects on the “extreme obscurity of human relationships” with the despairing question, “Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy?” (Woolf 171) She expresses the act of relating in these terms: “Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface, and that is what you see us by.” For all of Mrs. Ramsay’s efforts to create fellowship between people, she regards her own life as “something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband” (Woolf 59).
Despite this frustration with the inadequacy of human interactions, the various characters seek each other’s company. The motives for this are, at a first glance, selfish: to fulfill some inner craving, to puzzle out meaning in a life that seems chaotic, or to fashion permanence out of fluidity. Yet these selfish motivations do not take into account that without society the self would perish, because it would have no way to access its potential, no standard against which to measure itself. All the characters in this novel crave fellowship, strive to know and be known by others, even when they feel the futility of such a quest and dislike being forced to compromise their inner self in order to attain even the superficial bonds they create. The entire novel hangs upon this tension, between the private selfhood of each person, and the inescapable necessity of interacting with other private and alien Selves.
How then, Woolf seems to ask, does one live? Out of this tension emerges the task of reconciling our Selves to living in a world that seems indifferent, that will not last…and perhaps, even through the hopeless incoherence of our relationships with other Selves, attaining something meaningful and lasting.
As an individual responding to Woolf’s novel, seeking to express the ways that it has impacted my Self, I engage the world. Accepting that this blundering medium, language, has clouded as much as it has distilled, I yet maintain the importance of striving for community through such arts. I know that without such relationships, without engaging the world and others through art, my Self would die. This knowledge leaves me with a challenge: to pursue integrity relentlessly, so that the relationships that connect my Self with the universe will harbor Truth.
Like Lily Briscoe, I have had my vision.
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