Paper no - 9 The Modernist Literature.

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                                    Name: Mital M. Raval      

                                            Roll No: 19

                                          M.A. SEM: 3

                                     Batch Year: 2016 – 2018

                             Enrollment No: 2069108420170026

                            Email Id: ravalmital5292@gmail.com

                          Paper Name: The Modernist Literature

        Assignment Topic: Mythic patterns in ‘To the Lighthouse’

                                   Submitted to: Dr. Dilip Barad

                                           Smt. S. b. Gardi

                                        Department of English

                                    M .k. Bhavnagar University

About the Author:

 

                           

                            

           Virginia Woolf’s full name is Adeline Virginia Woolf. She was born in January 25, 1882 London, England and died in March 28, 1941 Lewes, England to committing suicide. She was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a famous scholar and philosopher. She married with a brilliant young writer and critic Leonard Woolf.  She was an English novelist, critic and also essayist who were considered one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. She belongs to Bloomsbury group. She pioneers the use of stream of consciousness narrative technique. Her notable works are Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. (Wikipedia)

About the novel: 

                                

                                  

   “To the Lighthouse” is, in many ways, a revolutionary book. Writing in the 1920, Virginia Woolf was attempting quite new in the English novel. She wanted to capture, in words, the nature of human consciousness – what it actually feels like to be alive. She wasn’t particularly interested in telling a story, and this, of course, is one of the things which may make To the Lighthouse seem very different from other novels you have read. One isn’t always hurrying to turn over the page, urgently wanting to find out what happens next.  (Woolf)

             ‘To the Lighthouse’ novel is published on 5^th May 1927. This novel is landmark of the high modernism. The narrator of the novel is anonymous. Tone of the entire novel is elegiac, poetic, rhythmic and imaginative. In this novel Woolf used psychoanalytic language. She uses the stream of consciousness technique in entire novel. The center of the novel is Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and their visit to Isle of Skye in Scotland. This novel is divided in to three parts.

1. The Window (before world war) 
2. Time passes (middle of world war) 
3. The Lighthouse (after world war)

         
       In this novel we see use of so many myths. So, first of all we understand what the myth is.

What is the Myth?

“Myth are symbolic tales of the distant past that concern cosmogony and cosmology, may be connected to belief systems or rituals, and may serve to direct social action and values.”  (Magoulick)

“The Form of Folklore: Prose narrative” where myth are defined as that myth are tales and it believed as true, usually sacred, set in the distant past or other worlds or parts of the world, and with extra human, inhuman, or heroic characters. 

Mythic pattern in To the Lighthouse:

         In The novel ‘To the Lighthouse’ we see the use many Greek and Roman mythology like, myth of pagan, myth of polytheist, myth of Rhea, myth of Demeter, myth of Persephone, myth of Cronus, Myth of Oedipus, Fisherman and his wife etc….  In the novel Woolf directly not used any myth but it may well have risen from her subconscious mind. So let’s us we analyse all this myth one by one with the help of novel To the Lighthouse. 

Myth of pagan: 

                                             

                                      

                                 

         In this novel Virginia Woolf’s concept of woman’s role in life is crystallized in the character of Mrs. Ramsay, Whose attributes are those of major female figure in pagan myth. The most useful myth for interpreting the novel is that of the primordial Goddess, who ‘is threefold in relation to Zeus: mother (Rhea), wife (Demeter) and daughter (Persephone). One of the major sources of the myth is the Homeric “Hymn to Demeter,” in which the poet compares Rhea with her daughter Demeter, and her daughters Persephone “are to be thought of as a double figure, one half of which is the ideal complement of the other.” This double figure is that of the Kore, the primordial maiden, who is also a mother. Also useful in interpreting the novel is the Oedipus myth. 

Myth of Rhea:

                                       

           Rhea was the oldest of the gods, the child of Gaea, Mother Earth, and Ouranos, Father Heaven. When her brother Cronos overthrew Ouranos, Rhea became Cronos' wife and queen of the universe. Since Gaea was not actually a divinity, however, nor ever separated from the earth and personified, her daughter Rhea is the primal pagan goddess antedating the male gods. Although Cronos was said to have brought in the Golden Age in Italy when he fled there from the victorious Zeus, he cuts a poor figure beside Rhea. Having attained power by mutilating and dethroning his father, he attempted to keep it by swallowing his children. This he did with each of the first five Rhea bore him, attempting to thwart the prophecy that one of his children would overthrow him. By contrast, Rhea is the completely good and loving mother. Wrapping a stone in swaddling clothes and substituting it for Zeus, she has the child spirited to Crete. It is he who later delivers his brothers and sisters by forcing Cronos to disgorge them.

Mrs. Ramsay resembles to Rhea:

                                 

                                                  

   Rhea has six children, three boys and three girls, and Mrs. Ramsay has eight children, four boys and four girls. In myth of Rhea, Rhea was good and loving mother and Mrs. Ramsay was also good and loving mother. As Rhea protected Zeus from physical harm, so Mrs. Ramsay tries to guard James from psychological wounds. When Mr. Ramsay declares that the weather will not permit the trip to the Lighthouse which James so passionately desires, Mrs. Ramsay tries to induce her husband to modify his pronouncement. She reflects that children never forget; "she was certain that he was thinking, we are not going to the Lighthouse tomorrow; and she thought, he will remember that all his life"

      Mrs. Ramsay has many of the physical attributes of a goddess. For example, When Charles Tansley glimpses her standing motionless, a picture of Queen Victoria behind her; he realizes that she is "the most beautiful person he had ever seen". Mrs. Ramsay's psychic qualities are also those of a goddess. She is possessed of an intuitive knowledge and wisdom, and exercises a dominion over those around her, seeming almost to cast a spell upon them.

Myth of Demeter:

                                         

    Demeter was the Goddess of the Corn; she was the daughter of Cronos and Rhea and the sister of Zeus. She was unlike Zeus and the other Olympians. She was always with Dionysus, who was mankind's best friend. Hers was the divine power which made the earth fruitful. It was she "who was worshipped, not like the other gods by the bloody sacrifices men liked, but in every humble act that made the farm fruitful. Through her the field of grain was hallowed, 'Demeter's holy grain'. Even when the originally simple writes in her honor evolved into the Eleusinian mysteries, their effect was still beneficent.

Mrs. Ramsey resemble to Demeter: 

                               

 

      Mrs. Ramsay and Demeter both are looks like similar in one level. Symbols of fruitfulness cluster around Mrs. Ramsay as like Demeter. She plants flowers and sees that they are tended. The others, thinking of her, associate flowers with her instinctively. An important characteristic of Mrs. Ramsay in her Demeter aspect is her complete femininity. As Demeter was worshipped more by men than women, as the sacrifices to her were humble and restrained rather than fierce and bloody like those of men, so Mrs. Ramsay in all her aspects is feminine and opposed to that which is undesirable in masculinity. When she gives to Mr. Ramsay the sympathy and reassurance he begs, the action is symbolic: "into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare". The figures of Demeter and Mrs. Ramsay are linked in another important way. They are characterized not only by fruitfulness, but by sorrow as well. This element also serves to point up the transition from the Demeter to the Persephone component of this multiple myth. Demeter's sorrow is caused, of course, by her loss of Persephone. Mrs. Ramsay's sorrow is neither so continuous nor as specifically focused as that of Demeter.

Myth of Oedipus:

         

     

          Oedipus was a mythical Greek king of Thebes. He was tragic hero in Greek mythology. Oedipus accidentally fulfilled a prophecy that he would end up killing his father and marring his mother.  He has having sexual impulses toward mother and impulses of hatred and violence towards father. Character of James is similar like Jocasta.

Jocasta: “What demon possessed him, her youngest, her cherished?”

James: “Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it.”  

       The relationship between James, Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay reflects this pattern is so clear as to be almost unmistakable. The intense adoration which James cherishes for his mother has its opposite in an equally strong hatred for his father ‘’ casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought)…..’’(10). Virginia Woolf says of Mrs. Ramsay that ‘’ his son hated him’’ (57). This emotion is thoroughgoing: Had there been an axe handy, or a poker any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him there and then James would seized it’’ (10) Mrs. Ramsay is solicitous and fearful for James as Jocasta might have been for the Young Oedipus: what demon possessed him, her youngest, her cherished?’’(43)

     James’s jealousy and feelings of rivalry with his father are intensified by his perhaps unconscious knowledge of the sexual aspects of the relationship between his parents. He is made acutely aware of it in the episode early in the novel in which Mr. Ramsey comes to his wife for the sympathy and reassurance he demands. 

Myth of Persephone: 

                                
                                    

 

       Persephone was only child of Demeter. Persephone was abducted by Hades and spirited down to the underworld to reign with him over the souls of all the dead. In her anguish for her daughter, the Goddess of the Corn "withheld her gifts from the earth, which turned into a frozen dessert. The green and flowering land was icebound and lifeless because Persephone had disappeared" (Hamilton, p. 57). Finally compelled to intervene, Zeus sent Hermes to Hades with the order that Persephone must be released. Hades complied, but first forced her to eat a pomegranate seed, whose magical properties would insure her return to him for a third of each year. Zeus also sent Rhea to Demeter to tell her that Persephone would be released and to ask Demeter to make the earth fruitful again. Demeter, of course, complied. 

      Many allusions in To the Lighthouse suggest the Persephone-Mrs. Ramsay correspondence. Early in the novel Mrs. Ramsay have premonitions, fore shadowing’s of her departure from the green and flowering loveliness of the Isle of Skye, of her descent into the world of shades. As she sits in the gathering dusk, she looks out upon her garden: "the whitening of the flowers and something grey in the leaves conspired together, to rouse in her a feeling of anxiety". The reappearance of Persephone has its symbolic equivalent in the novel in the return of the force which Mrs. Ramsay represented.

        In the conclusion of this Myth In that famous passage ‘’ with a sudden intensity as if she saw it clear for a second she drew a line there in the center. It was done it was finished.-Lily Briscoe. Yes she thought laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision ‘’(310). The return of Persephone is thus two fold. Mrs. Ramsay in the Persephone aspect of the Kore has returned as  an almost palpable  presence  to the Isle of Skye from which she had been snatched by death. Persephone has also returned through Lily’s final achievement of the artist vision and triumph denied her ten years earlier.

Fisherman and his wife: 


                                           

                                

      The story of the Fisherman and His Wife, which Mrs. Ramsay reads to James, reflects this attitude. To perceive it, however, one must do what Virginia Woolf did in Orlando: change the sex of the principal character. In To the Lighthouse the individual who makes the insatiable demands is not the wife but the husband. Mr. Ramsay, the philosopher, has driven himself to the Q of mental effort and understanding. He is plunged into melancholy despair at his inability to reach Z. He is described as standing desolate in darkness on a narrow spit of land, the black seas nearly engulfing him. It is his wife who is content with that which they have already received, who accepts their portion and cherishes their gift of love. (Bloltner)

Conclusion:

          So, at the concluding part we can say that this all myths are interwoven to each other. Character of Mrs. Ramsay is like all woman character of Pagan myth. In To the Lighthouse novel Woolf not use intentionally all these myth but it gave significant meaning to the novel.  

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Works Cited

Bloltner, Joseph J. Mythic Patterns in to the Lighthouse. Modern Language Association, 1956.

Magoulick, Mary. what is myth. n.d.

Wikipedia. Virginia Woolf. n.d.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Ed. Kate Flint. Longman group uk limited, 1992.