Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Karolína Zlámalová The Depiction of Parenthood in To the Lighthouse Bachelor's Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D. 2017 / declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. Karolína Zlámalová I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D., for his guidance. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Family in the British Context 4 1. 1 The Victorian Family - The Stephen Family 11 1. 2 A Different Family 15 Chapter 2: The Depiction of Family in Woolfs Novels 19 2. 1 The Voyage Out 20 2. 2 Night and Day and Mrs Dalloway 23 2. 3 Orlando 25 2. 4 The Waves and The Years 27 2. 5 Between the Acts 29 Chapter 3: The Family in To the Lighthouse 31 3. 1 The Ramsays 31 3. 2 The Stephens & the Ramsays 40 Conclusion 48 Works Cited 55 Summary (English) 59 Resume (Czech) 60 Introduction The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now— James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too (Woolf, To the Lighthouse 200-201). In the final part of the novel To the Lighthouse, the reader sees James comparing the idealized memory of the lighthouse, distanced both physically and metaphorically, with the cold reality he now faces as an adult. When forty-four-year-old Virginia Woolf was writing a novel on family and childhood, she might have had to similarly deal with the duality of the actual events and her memories of them. To the Lighthouse has a specific place among Woolf s novels not only because it deals with family life, but also because of strong presence of an autobiographical element. It is often presented as a fact that the main couple of the novel, the Ramsays, is based on Woolf s parents, mainly because of the references Woolf herself made in her diaries. However, when reading the novel itself and learning more about Woolf s parents and the family situation from different sources than her own diary, one sees that explaining everything in terms of autobiography is a simplistic way of dealing with this issue, which can cause a misinterpretation of this novel. This bachelor diploma thesis will try to put the novel into context and analyse the portrayal of parenthood and family life there from three different angles: the reality of family life in the British context at the time; the depiction 1 of parenthood and family in other novels written by Woolf; and the family life of the Stephen family. The thesis aims to answer the following questions: to what extent does the model of the family depicted in To the Lighthouse fit into the traditional image of the family at the time; to what extent does it fit into the context of other Woolf s novels; and what are the extent and the character of the autobiographical aspect in the novel. Apart from the primary text of the novel and other works by Woolf, the thesis will mainly draw from Hermione Lee's biography of Woolf (1999), Ann Ronchetti's The Artist-Figure, Society, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf s Novels (2013) and Sara Ruddick's "Learning to Live with the Angel in the House" (1977). The first chapter will deal with the image of the family in the British context during the lifetime of Woolf s parents and during her life and with its transformation. Woolf s parents were people of the Victorian era; a period often stereotypically associated with stability and domesticity, but also with conservatism and moral hypocrisy. The Victorian family alone is a topic extensively dealt with in literature by both its supporters and opponents (among whom Woolf belonged), some of whose opinions will be mentioned. This chapter will mainly concentrate on what the Victorian upper middle class family looked like and will also deal with the phenomenon of "the Angel in the house". Then the changes in family life during Woolf s adult life, the first half of the 20th century, will be briefly discussed. Lastly, to give some idea of Woolf s background and to show a specific example of the Victorian upper middle class family, the Stephens' family life will be described, and to show what kind of families Woolf encountered during her adult life, some often nonstandard families of the members of the Bloomsbury group, with whom Woolf was in a close contact, will be mentioned. 2 The second chapter will show how Woolf dealt with a family and parenthood in her other novels. It will deal individually with her novels, except for Jacob's Room in which parenthood plays very little role. It will show how much attention she gave to family life in her works and how she depicted it. Additionally, it will analyse the impact parenthood has on male and female characters in Woolf s novels and consider the complicated issue of mothers-artists which keeps reappearing in her works. Lastly, it will show whether there was any development in way Woolf approached this topic during her career, and it will show how surprisingly small a role she gave to child characters. After putting the topic into the wider context, the last chapter will concentrate on parenthood and family life in To the Lighthouse. The aim of this chapter is to provide an analysis based on extracts from the primary text, and to show how exactly and to what extent the novel is autobiographical and which parts should rather be considered Woolf s artistic intention. First, the individual family members will be introduced. The family relationships will then be analysed based on the interactions among characters. It will be also mentioned how the reader learns about the individual characters - whether from the description of the others, from their own inner thoughts or from their actions and utterances - and how this influences the way one perceives the characters and the story. Moreover, the chapter will concentrate on the amount of attention given to the child characters and see whether the author 'treats' her child characters differently than the adults. The last subchapter will address the character and the extent of the autobiographical aspect in To the Lighthouse. It will present some scholarly positions on this issue and analyse the text with the help of secondary sources, and see in which aspects are the characters of the Ramsays based on Woolf s parents. 3 Chapter 1: Family in the British Context This chapter aims to briefly describe family in the British context during the lifetime of Virginia Woolf and her parents. Specifically speaking, the lifetime of her parents means the period from 1832, when Leslie Stephen was born, until his death in 1904, which almost exactly corresponds with the Victorian era. Virginia Woolf was born during the Victorian era, in 1882, but spent most of her adult life in 20th century England. She lived through the Edwardian period, the First World War and died only during the Second World War, in 1941. Therefore, the period to be discussed here is more than a hundred years. The chapter will concentrate mainly on the family life of a similar social group as was the Stephen family, the upper middle class, which should also correspond with the Ramsay family in To the Lighthouse. A lot of what will be stated did not apply to aristocracy, and also the experience of working class differed significantly. Except for the general outline of family life and its changes, the chapter will also mention the Stephens' family life and family lives of those close to Virginia Woolf during her adulthood. The word "Victorian" involves a lot of connotations. Many imagine the Victorian society as an uptight and conservative one. Speaking about family, 'domesticity' is one of the terms often associated with this period. As Claudia Nelson in Family Ties in Victorian England (2007) points out, Queen Victoria often stressed that she herself was a mother of a big family and presented the "family devotion as the answer to the woes of public life" (6). For a Victorian person, family was supposed to be a safe place of retreat from the outside world. Yet the word 'person' might be slightly misleading here, because this applied to one specific group of people more than to the others. 4 Victorian society was still very much oriented on men; according to Stephen Marcus in The Other Victorians (2008), the Victorian ideals were "manliness, solidity, certitude of self, straightforwardness, sincerity and singleness of being" (263). In this period, the spheres of influence for genders in the middle class were strictly divided: "Woman's appropriate sphere of influence was seen as domestic, and with this a clear line was drawn between the 'female' values expressed in the well-run Victorian Christian middle-class home and the 'male' public values of a fast-expanding capitalist economy" (Hogan and Bradstock 1). Bearing this in mind, the interpretation of what was written above may be the following: a man was the one entering the outside, and woman's role was to create a perfectly functioning place aimed at his recreation.