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Elegiac Form and Imagery in Three Modernist Works by Finuala Dowling

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Elegiac Form and Imagery in Three Modernist Works by Finuala Dowling Elegiac Form and Imagery in Thl?'ee Modernist Works Town Submitted by Finuala Rachel Dowling in fulfilment of the requirements:-_ef the degree Master of Arts,Cape on April l , 1986. of Supervised by Peter Knox-Shaw Universityin the Department of English The University of Cape Town has been given the right to reproduce this thesis in whole or in part. Copyright Is held by the author. The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University i ABSTRACT Elegiac Form and Imagery in Three Modernist Works by Finuala Dowling T. s. Eliot's The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and D.B. Lawrence's The Rainbow were conceived or written within the same decade 1915 - 1925, and to a large extent their shared elegiac mood is based upon the events of these years. At the start of this period, as England turned increasingly to the notions of nationhood and social cohesion, these writers reflected instead a sense of disintegration and spirituality. They were sensitive to the disruption caused by the war and to the radical changes that had taken place in cultural life. This thesis probes the elegiac mood that characterized their reac­ tion, a mood distinguished by nostalgia for a shattered past, and the drive to reconst rue t. We find in their works a tendency to treat the present as a mere interval: fraught with ii indecision, ambiguity and instability. Caught between the phantom of a fertile past and the chimera of a better or at least more bearable future, the protagonists of these three works suddenly, even miraculously, discover the bridge of art. Consolation is achieved through the creative efforts of those in the abyss, and with it comes a renew~d sense of connection, of the relation between things. The sense of nostalgia, disintegration and indecisiveness also invited the.metaphoric transference of i'death 11 to an historical period. For T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and O.H. Lawrence, the paradigm of dea:th was a useful ohe, corresponding both to external events and to their personal feelings. That these writers perceived death as having ti occurred is evident in their appropriation of the various materials of the elegy - its structure constituted in descending .and ascending movements; its thematic concerns·. constituted in the plastic rendering of decay, disintegration and vacancy, the exploration of the symbolic role of nature and the preoccupation with the question of irnlilortality. In each case some scaling down of the historical landscape was necessary "If'•'' •: ),°1." ·,'• ,.'< 1:'.J,·' ~ ' ,' .: . :· i ·:;· · I '~ ': ' I:· · • iii in order to accommodate it within an elegiac mode. By metaphoric extension the deaths of Mrs Ramsay and Tom Brangwen come to represent the novelist's sense of the death of an era. In T. s. Eliot's poem, the correlation between a parched landscape and a generalized dessica­ tion echoes the pastoral elegy's convention of imitative nature. The tendency towards simplification is also present in the imagery of The Waste Land, To the Lighthouse and The Rainbow. The historical movement from Victorian to modern spiritual beliefs, aesthetic perceptions, and sexual mores that the three works document is described in images .of water and flooding. The flood which overcomes Tom Brangwen and Phlebas the Phoenician, and which accompanies Mrs Ramsay's death, is exchanged for navigable seas in The Waste Land and To the Lighthouse, and for an over-arching rainbow in The Rainbow. In ·Eliot's poem, the drought is spiritual in orig in; in To the Lighthouse the st retch of sea between mainland .and beacon is representa­ tive of both an aesthetic and a familial distance; in The Rainbow, the driving rain and galloping horses are sexual forces. The three creative impulses reflected in these • • iv images of drought, sea and rain, all derive from an identical source - water as the symbol of the unconscious. Thus the three works approach consolation via the same element, water, to the same end, creativity. If the most important thematic projection of their elegiac mood is a contemporary failure in personal relations, then the most significant consolation that Eliot, Woolf and Lawrence .. offer is a reaffirmation of love. This is reflected in the oracular commands of the thunder, in the rapprochement of Mr Ramsay and his children, and in Ursula's willingness at the novel's conclusion to embrace rather than to embattle. This consolation in love is achieved only after an arduous journey has been undertaken, a journey that is at once that of the sun-hero beneath the sea, of the questers in search of the Grail, and of the mourner as exile. I at tempt to show the similarities between The Waste Land and the pastoral elegy through direct comparison. For the purposes of this comparison, Thomas P. Harrison's The Pastoral Elegy provides most of the primary sources in translation. To the Lighthouse is examined v within its autobiographical context, and apart from the diaries, a volume of unpublished auto­ biographical writings under the title Moments of Being, and Leslie Stephen's Mausoleum Book, have proved valuable. The Rainbow is approached in the context of Lawrence's critical writings, his poetry and novels. The Introduction fur­ nishes a brief introduction to the term elegy, and to some of the anthropological sources of the pastoral elegy. vi CONTENTS Page List of illustrations vii Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 I. The Waste Land 18 II. To the Lighthouse 55 III. The Rainbow 105 Conclusion 165 Endnotes Bibliography vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Page Figure 1: The Journey of the Sea Monster 7 Figure 2: The Elegiac Movement 16 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Financial assistance rendered by the Human Sciences Research Council towards the cost of this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed or conclusions arrived at are those of the author and are not to be regarded as those of the Human Sciences Research Council. 1 INTRODUCTION It should be made clear from the outset that my intention in this thesis is not to redefine The Waste Land, To the Lighthouse and The Rainbow as elegies. The titles of these works present us with no corpse, nor is their subject the death of one individual. Even Mrs Ramsay's death cannot account entirely for the sense of loss and dispersal that pervades the last two sections of To the Lighthouse. Thus I have rather tried to argue for an elegiac mood, based on just this generalized sense of loss and dispersal, which is transformed by an artistic process into a consolation. Herein lies an elegiac sleight of hand, since out of the very depths of despair must be extracted both the reason for joy and the means of renewal. And in spite of the spiritual and intellectual battles that are fought in order· to win that consolation, the ultimate effect of the words nshantih shantih shantihn, of the line drawn on Lily's canvas, or of the rainbow arching over Beldover, is comparable in deftness and .facility to the twitching of a 2 mantle, the sudden turning to 0 fresh woods, and 0 pastures new • Although I am arguing for no more than an elegiac mood, some introduction to the term "elegy" is essential, since it has never enjoyed uniformity of use. In addition, such an introduction must necessarily return to the original sources of the pastoral elegy, which will in turn clarify what is meant by elegiac form and imagery. The ancient Greeks traced the etymology of the word "elegos" to a phrase meaning "to speak well of the dead 0 .1 While scholars have quibbled over this derivation, and poets have not always used the term uniformly, its strong associations with mourning and the commemora­ tion of the dead have remained. The problem stems partly from the fact that the earliest extant "elegies" we have are almost without exception not about the honoured dead, so that a scholar like C.M. Bowra would define the elegy by purely technical criteria: as a two line stanza of an hexameter followed by a pentameter.2 But as M.Alexiou points out, this couplet, which can stand freely on its own, lends itself to instructive and commemorative 3 purposes, as well as to extemporizing, and these factors; combined with the idiomatic Greek expression •to speak well, as of the dead•, indicate the strong possibility that the met re did once carry a message about the dead.3 Alexiou suggests that the elegos was originally an after-supper song, passed around the table by the men, but always serious in content, and ideally suited to social and political themes ·as well as to the praise of individual men and events. This vein of serious social comment and gnomic wisdom seems to have been retained in the elegiac tradition, and is to be found in Lycidas and the Anglo- Saxon elegies respectively. From the start, the identification of elegy by tone has been as important as its definition according to met re. In the words of A. E. Harvey I nit becomes possible to understand how the non- threnodic elegy may have grown out of the threnodic: the mood of both is similar, that of advice, exhortation and reflection•.4 Coleridge outlined the peculiar attraction of the elegy, and some reasons for its wide range of uses, in this way: Elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind.
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