Anchoring the Past in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Abstract

As a modernist writer, Virginia Woolf was influenced by Marcel Proust in terms of structuring her writing around the concept of time and memories. Unlike Proust, who questions the validity and fluidity of past remembrances and tries to make a confession by writing his memories, Woolf tries to find a balance between the past and present through the use of memories. In her article A Sketch of the Past, she mentions that writing about the past helped her face and settle accounts with it. She calls small remembrances of the past when she could realize herself as “moments of being” and they help her anchor and stabilize her past with the present. In her writing, places like a clock tower or a lighthouse turn into sites of memory where she could see the looming presence of the past over the present and navigate around it to form the present. As sites of memory, these colossal structures let her navigate through the nebulous presence of time where exterior events lose their hegemony and help her to understand herself her location in space and time. To the Lighthouse is an important source for understanding Woolf’s concept of memory. In this novel, she fuses the past and the present; the objects and people in order to find a harmonious balance of life. This paper aims to investigate the impact of sites of memory and the relationship of the past and the present on the formation of identities of individuals in To the Lighthouse.