Miss Adeline Stephen

 

“Lighthouses are endlessly suggestive signifiers of both human isolation and our ultimate connectedness to each other.” – Virginia Woolf

Fancy a lighthouse. A gleaming illuminant on the edge of the sea. A solitary sailor, facing the tumultuous waves with its anchor fixed in place. 

We all are solitary sailors likewise, traversing the raging storms from our lonesome confinements..

"For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn?" wrote Virginia Woolf, in her beautifully iridescent novel, To The Lighthouse.

Mrs. Ramsay, a mother to eight, struts and frets about her offspring's lives... She yearns to be loved, yet the 'stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets' leave little undone to endear her to the hearts of all... She is married to an irascible philosopher, whose only amusement in life is remorseful musings and ill-meant chidings of his children's hopes. His only wish in life is to be deemed revolutionary, to reach the 'R', when he has passaged to 'Q' in the alphabet of life..

Charles Tansley, a self-made, obnoxious man, yearns for Mrs. Ramsay (even though he admits that she is fifty years of age and is a mother to eight) and recognition. Viewer disclaimer: his sexist views may put the feminist members of the audience at ease (I mean, what's a post- world war 1 novel without gender discrimination?)

William Bankes, Mr. Ramsay's friend, despises family life, but still envies Ramsay's children and yearns for filial love.

The most intriguing desire in the novel, however, is James'... His pining to visit the lighthouse is the longing that sculpts all the characters into functioning pieces of the menagerie. His object is in plain sight, but still out of reach...(Like we do... Our object being freedom- freedom to roam, to run, to visit the places we love without fear..)

'To the lighthouse' shifts perspectives in unexpected, unmitigated ways but still manages to reclaim a voice of its own. The soliloquys all have different tunes, but they maintain the solemn note of yearning. And don't we all yearn for something or the other? Isn't the fool's hope gnawing at your heart-strings even now? Doesn't this undying hope symbolize al of humankind? Why do we hold our Elpis close even when doom seems inevitable? The dawning despair never makes its way to our hopeful countenances... We learn to live in the wake of chaos.

Chaos...

I wonder what Virginia thought when she put her stylus to the pages that are now encased in a bookworm's shelf. 

She thought of the pessimism which binds Mrs. Ramsay to the reader's heart... She must have thought of it a lot... Why, then, did she only find solace in the embrace  of the waves she romanticized so tenderly?

~March 28 1941

I have yet to read it all, but there are only three things in the world which affect someone so greatly: words, love and death. I have come to love the words Virginia wove into the tapestry of her Lighthouse...I mourn her death. No one mastered the art of insight as Miss Adeline Stephen did...

⚜