Reconstructing the internal parents in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Abstract

This paper considers the nature of creativity in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, in which she said she had finally ‘laid the ghosts’ of her parents, after many years of being obsessed with them, her mother in particular. Woolf was very familiar with the psychoanalytic concepts of her day, owing to the social milieu and publishing context of the ‘Bloomsbury’ intellectual circle. She acknowledged that all her writings were in some sense autobiographical. Despite periods of severe depression, she preferred not to have an analysis but to pursue her own self-analysis through her writings. This paper pursues in detail the evolution of the image of ‘internal parents’, known in modern psychoanalysis as the ‘combined internal object’ (Klein, Meltzer) and taken to be the key source of an individual’s creativity. The aim is to distinguish the realistic portrayal of external parents from the creative story that is told and indeed discovered by the writer, focussing on its experiential and experimental evolution within the structure of the novel itself. Woolf spoke of the ‘androgynous’ nature of creative work, and this, it is suggested, refers not simply to the aesthetic interweaving of complementary qualities represented in the story, but to the sense of a governing aegis of parental bisexual objects who work towards and achieve a constructive relationship in the inner world, capable of repairing defects that exist in the external world. Woolf preferred not to interpret her own works symbolically but suggested that readers may do so. The family journey to the Lighthouse is often seen in terms of a spiritual journey, as well as an artistic one, and can also be interpreted in psychoanalytic terms of an internal reconstruction or reparation.