Color in To the Lighthouse

Abstract

According Virginia Woolf, painting and writing ... have much in common. novelist after all wants make us see .... It is a very complex business, mixing and marrying of words that goes on, probably unconsciously, in poet's mind feed reader's eye. All great writers are great colourists... . While sound and sight seem make equal parts of [her] first impressions, Woolf stresses their painterly quality.2 In To Lighthouse, Woolf's search for spiritual essences is expressed in light and color.3 Johannes Itten's metaphysic of light and color illuminates relation between creative source (Mrs. Ramsay/the Lighthouse) and creative artist (Lily Briscoe/the painting) in Woolf's novel.4 Itten (AC, p. 153) further affirms that the end and aim of all artistic endeavor is liberation of spiritual essence of form and color and its release from imprisonment in world of objects. Woolf's art does not reach so far toward abstraction, but she does imply that luminous halo of consciousness should be conveyed through equivalents of form, and notes that fiction is given capacity deal with 'psychological volumes.' 5 Roger Fry thought literature should parallel painting: The PostImpressionist movement ... was by no means confined painting.... Cezanne and Picasso had shown way; writers should fling representation winds and follow suit. But he never found time work out his theory of influence of Post-Impressionism upon literature-as Woolf ironically remarks (RF, p. 149). She herself accepted challenge of designing a literary art closer plastic values of painting. While Fry championed post-impressionists' 'attempt express by pictorial and plastic form certain spiritual experiences' (RF, p. 154), Woolf urged novelists to convey this varying, this unknown and uncir-