Understanding Lily for Woolf's "To the Lighthouse"

Understanding Lily Understanding Virginia Woolf’s mind within the weaving prose of To the Lighthouse is an undertaking that forces the reader to step back and consider, and indeed, reconsider everything that has just been read, assuming of course, that everything within her evolving story is remembered and comprehended. Woolf is known to challenge her readers with her unstructured worldview as to how an individual appears as people perceive the world around them. She uses her novels for more than just telling stories, but her stories are not merely a method in which to ultimately tell a moral. Both the story and the messages that can be taken from them are integrally important to Woolf’s literature. To the Lighthouse shares a similar message to Mrs. Dalloway, another one of Woolf’s better known works. Lily Briscoe reveals this particular message well when she muses that “fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with” (Woolf 198). This is to say, Mrs. Ramsay could not be understood from fifty different perspectives, let alone one. For Woolf, labeling someone, or choosing to view a person from only one viewpoint is a narrow understanding of an individual and is a discredit to mankind. This applies to how her books are perceived too, for it would seem that Woolf hated the idea of having her readers only come away with only one collective impression. Therefore, the moral of being sure to view an individual with many different viewpoints is only one part of To the Lighthouse, and assuming that it is the only viewpoint of this story would do injustice to Woolf’s intentions. However, it is a central part to the development of Lily Briscoe, the frustrated artist staying with the Ramsays; trying to paint what she sees. Woolf includes changing elements to all of her characters, but her major characters are especially diverse, a trait that ensures that no one viewpoint can be generalized about any of them. Lily plays a central part to the story, a

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