I don't think this post will do justice to this novel.
There is just too much in it. Each moment in the story is so full and rich that if I were to unpack it and try to line it out systematically, it would require three times the original number of words. How does Woolf pack so much emotion and nuance into something as ordinary as a walk in the garden or a dinner with friends? She must have been keenly attuned to life to be able to put so much into so few words.
Woolf is a nothing less than an expert on human behaviour. She is uncannily observant and is able to decipher the motives behind what people do and say. For example, she describes how a husband goes to his wife with the benevolent intention of "doing homage to the beauty of the world" (45), but is really just demanding sympathy. This is how she describes the wife giving the husband what he wants:
"Mrs Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm, braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and 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. He wanted sympathy....
He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyong a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried himself or climbed high, not for a second should he find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy." (44, 45)
Wow. Woolf later describes the husband as "filled with her words, like a child who drops off satisfied", while Mrs Ramsay "seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm's fairy story, while there throbbed through her, like the pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation." (45, 46)
Wow. Woolf uses so many words to describe something invisible, yet does it so perfectly that you know exactly what she means.
From the passage above, it is also apparent that one of the themes of this book is the divide between men and women. It is really quite a feminist piece of work, with one of the whiney characters declaring "women can't paint; women can't write"; yet, the entire novel is described as "a vision" of a middle-aged, single woman who struggles through her painting. It mustn't be overlooked that author herself was female.
This novel treats life as fragile and temporal. Decay, rot and change are prevalent themes too: the greenhouse needs a new roof, the boar's skull hanging by the door, wrapped in the mother's shawl, the shocking news given to the readers abruptly in brackets, the rabbits running amock in Mrs Ramsay's garden...
Woolf suffered from depression and eventually drowned herself because she was afraid of another attack of mental illness. It troubles me that such a sensitive person took her own life. It is as if the foreboding melacholy that is found in this novel won after all, and that all we have left are words, just words...
I would rather believe otherwise.
