Abstract
Amy Smith argues that Woolf’s To the Lighthouse engages with and revises Matthew Arnold’s beloved Victorian poem “Dover Beach,” which poignantly dramatizes man’s frailty in a universe being rapidly claimed by science. Woolf’s novel examines her parents’ troubled marriage within its cultural context as she critiques the intersection of the Victorian crisis of faith with the cult of domesticity. Mrs. Ramsay, who embodies both Arnold’s despairing male speaker and a divine female substitute for a lost God, illustrates the dangers of seeking consolations for religious anxieties in romance.
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Notes
- 1.
On May 14, 1925, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary about a novel she was planning, To the Lighthouse, in which she planned “to have father’s character done complete in it; & mothers; & St Ives; & childhood.” On November 8, 1928, Virginia Woolf wrote of her parents, “I used to think of him and mother daily; but writing the Lighthouse laid them in my mind…(I believe this to be true – that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; and writing of them was a necessary act)….” (1977–1984, 3: 18, 208). Indeed, as Jane Lilienfield and Anne Fernald argue, Woolf fictionalizes herself and her parents in the novel; Mr. Ramsay shares much with Leslie Stephen, Mrs. Ramsay with Julia Stephen, Cam occupies the same position in the Ramsay family that Virginia did in her own, and Lily Briscoe suggests an analogue for Virginia herself, albeit in the form of an adult artist looking at the parents who died in Virginia’s childhood. See Lilienfield (1977), Fernald (2014), and Hussey (1996).
- 2.
- 3.
Woolf’s engagement with Arnold has been discussed by a few scholars, usually focusing on Arnold as a critic. Mary Schneider analyses Woolf’s references to Arnold’s criticism and poetry in The Waves ; Donald Childs explores Woolf’s revisions of Arnold’s critical precepts in Mrs. Dalloway ; Eleanor McNees elaborates on Woolf’s critical adaptation of Arnold’s critical precepts in her own essays; and Emily Dalgarno briefly touches on Arnold’s and Woolf’s attitudes towards Socrates. See Childs (1997), Dalgarno (2016), McNees (2015), and Schneider (1983).
- 4.
All references are to the Macmillan edition of New Poems (1867).
- 5.
For instance, on Mrs. Ramsay as Demeter, see Barr (1993), Hoffman (1984), Love (1970), Blotner (1956), Marcus (1988), Tyler (1994), and Richter (1970). On Mrs. Ramsay as Themis, see Carpentier (1988). While not explicitly identifying Mrs. Ramsay as Demeter, Lise Weil reads her relationship with Lily through the lens of the Triple Goddess and the mother–daughter relationship celebrated at Eleusis. See Weil (1997).
- 6.
- 7.
On the association of Thomas Carlyle with the lighthouse, see Tarr (2001).
- 8.
The original German word is pissput, literally a “piss pot,” but most translations euphemistically translate the word. Some options have included “hovel,” “miserable hovel,” “chamber pot,” “pigsty,” and “filthy shack.”
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Smith, A.C. (2019). Virginia Woolf Reads “Dover Beach”: Romance and the Victorian Crisis of Faith in To the Lighthouse. In: Groover, K. (eds) Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32568-8_5
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