DEMETER AND POSEIDON: FUSION AND DISTANCE IN "TO THE LIGHTHOUSE"

Abstract

To the Lighthouse considers the problem of creating meaningful form, living without drowning in the chaos of nature. Largely through Lily, who struggles with the pull to extremes through the novel, one can define a series of polar opposites that structure the text. At its most abstract, the tension is between form and chaos, but it permeates all levels of the novel and can be articulated in terms of separation and fusion, singleness and marriage, the life of the artist and that of the family, impersonality and personal involvement, and, on a mythic level to which I shall devote my attention, Poseidon and Demeter. Mr. Carmichael and Mrs. Ramsay are identified with these pagan deities in ways which elaborate the system of the text and enable us to understand more fully the dilemma of its artist-protagonist. I shall comment on the development of the final form of the novel out of the manuscript, for the revisions that Woolf made suggest her growing awareness of this central structure and how it might best be articulated.1 Lily is the artist in the process of becoming, a task which involves mediating her relationship to the waves, the familiar attempt to find some balance between immersion and dry sterility. Mr. Carmichael, craggy sea god, points the way to an answer; it is appropriate that he carry his French novel as if it were a trident, for, as tamer of the waves, he embodies the solution that art offers?the control and mediation of distance that are neces?