Woolf's gorgeous modernist novel, To the Lighthouse, is more a meditation on the meaning of art and life than a page-turner. Still, there is the single suspenseful question that lingers throughout, as announced in Woolf's title: Will they make it to the lighthouse?
Woolf's text also places death at the center of life. Freud's "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" are totally hovering somewhere in the background. The same world that produced Freud's reflections on the First World War, in other words, made To the Lighthouse possible.
And we're here to tell you that Woolf's and Freud's world of war and death-desire is still very much our own. So let's briefly reconsider this text through a psychoanalytic lens.
- Woolf is often associated with a stream of consciousness writing style. How might Freud's idea of the unconscious complicate this understanding of Woolf's work?
- What's up with Lily Briscoe's repeating Mrs. Ramsay's name? (To help you get there, consider this other question: What would it mean to read To the Lighthouse alongside Beyond the Pleasure Principle?)