Male barrenness is also a reminder of the war, fought by men to the detriment of women, mothers, and life itself. Ramsay in particular) are the ones who most rely on women’s assurances. Woolf draws attention to the barrenness of men, who believe in nothing, especially not in the desultory comforts of women- though in a perverse form of justice, men (and Mr. Ramsay’s “spray of life” (Woolf, Lighthouse 43). Her husband denies her this hope, reaffirming that a storm will come, and “the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare” into Mrs. Ramsay insists that “Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow” (Woolf, Lighthouse 19) in order to comfort her youngest and most sensitive child, James. Ramsay, backed by the atheist Tansley, points out that the barometer indicates a storm. Ramsay asking if the weather will be fine enough to go to the lighthouse. Ramsay is the protagonist of the first part of the novel set before the war. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe-their polar approaches to life, specifically life as women, respectively designate them as representations of the pre-war and post-war human character. I will be examining this theme in relation to two central characters of the novel, Mrs. In her diary Woolf expressed the desire to write a new form to go with the novelty of the age, and the word that came to her mind was “elegy.” In this essay, I will argue that To the Lighthouse is both an elegy to the lost time before the war, as well as a search for new meaning in an age when seemingly nothing can be certain.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is a novel that rises in response to this crisis. The simultaneous failure of European non-aggression pacts, previously thought to be unassailable, and the gruesome nature of trench war engenders an epistemic crisis, as old certainties could no longer be counted on. The breakout of the Great War in 1914 finalized this split between past and present.

More importantly for Woolf, the standard for art was also changing, as post-impressionism gained momentum in Europe, either expressing the shift in human nature or rising as a symptom of it.

By the 20th century, Victorian society and its rules for interpersonal relationships were in decline. Virginia Woolf once famously observed that “on or about December 1910 the human character changed” (Woolf, “Mr.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf