The concept of society is one aspect from many aspects that can be analyzed in the fiction particularly in novel,

as will be demonstrated in the analyze of sociological aspect of Virginia Woolfs novel, To The Lighthouse, therefore, only depict a vision of reality insofar as Woolf herself defines and perceives it. In making this claim a number of things must be considered within the text and in the production of the text itself. This analyze will consider Woolfs approach to her art, claims made of her art in this text and then claims made of the text in and of itself as a piece of literature. In this exploration of concepts this writing will demonstrate that Woolfs To The Lighthouse it written to display reality as subjective to the individual, with the imposed emphasis of the artist as Woolf herself injects, through her autobiographic narrative, a sense of individualistic self-importance into the text. Woolfs intentions with her art are the first that must be taken into account in the discussion of reality in To The Lighthouse. It must be understood that the text was written under the paradigm of the modernist movement in Literature, and the implications of that fact must be explored. Modernism, in and of itself, was a school of thought depicted different ways by different media. Sociologist George Simmel considers: The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. (Simmel, 1903)

Modernist Literature was as much as response to the notions of the time, and the movements similar in other forms of art, as it was a movement away from and in critique of Realist Literature. In Modern Novels, an essay that Woolf wrote in 1919 (eight years before she published To The Lighthouse), Woolf makes the distinction between writers of her ilk and mostly any other as spiritualists and materialists. The spiritualists, her people, were looking for reality in unconventional ways. In this essay she considers that which we seek for in Literature as: life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. (Woolf, 1919) Woolf argues that reality in Literature is something that we all seek, but that until this point Literature could not provide. She criticizes the science fiction of H.G Wells and she challenges the Realist prose of Henry James. She calls it materialist. She argues, wholly, that this Literature is lacking in what the spiritualists in what she can give it: individualism. To understand what can be meant by this, To The Lighthouse must again be taken into consideration. The inner workings of its prose must be analyzed here. The text demonstrates its narrative with little employment of the omniscient narrator instead opting to allow readers to construe it through the reading of ever shifting steams of consciousness. In a moment we can be reading the mind of Mr. Ramsay, begging inwardly and outwardly for sympathy for he is lacking, for he is unread and for he can never think past that letter R and in the very next we

can be flung into Lily Briscoe concerned wholly with how pathetic Mr. Ramsay is for depending so heavily on the sympathies of women, while in the next thought being made to feel inadequate by the echoes of words long since said by Charles Tansley. The narrative structure does very little to adhere to a typical sense of space and time, the narrative is eternally in flux: shifting through minds, jumping from perspectives and fluctuating in pacing: Part One: The Window is twice as long as Part Two: Time Passes but, as the titles suggest, much more time passes in the latter. In many ways, Woolf challenges the preconceptions of the reader indeed: she hopes to challenge the preconceptions set in the reader by those she would label materialists. She weaves her narrative through the minds of characters because she hopes to challenges the materialistic paradigm of reality in this way: that reality is not what is happening, but the how and why and, then, the ways in which what is happening is thought. Reality in To The Lighthouse is the inner workings of her characters minds. Consider now Mrs. Ramsay and her encounter with the pulsing light of the titular Lighthouse. When life sunk down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.(p71) She knits and she thinks, she supposes, one after the other (p71) The circumstances of various other characters, quickly becoming entirely selfless in thought and then entirely selfish and shifting back and forth again. The mind is fluid, ever-changing and almost autonomous without the control of the thinker.

Indeed, as the Lighthouse pulses with its last long steady stroke (p72) Her mind began to weave and think until finally a thought she cannot claim crosses it: We are in the hands of Our Lord. (p72). The argument of the modern world being in the modern text can be seen here again: the individual fighting against social forces, externally imposed cultural ideas. Who had said it? not she: she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean. (p.72) One could argue that Mrs. Ramsay had found herself trapped by the conditioning of an externally religious culture, that it had imposed itself upon her mind and in lapse she had allowed its ideas to emanate from her. Geoffrey Hartman argues: This is Mrs. Ramsays mind knitting, and she knows that she has gone too far, hypnotized by her own rhythm. (p51, 1970) This suggests that the individual, Mrs. Ramsay, losing herself in the moment is as much her own fault as it could be the fault of externally imposed ideas. It also suggests that a notion of modernism could be the individual struggle for

autonomic individuality against the mind itself: control over these stray thoughts. But despite the argument made, an idea remains constant: that Mrs. Ramsays mind is knitting. That in saying something that she does not like, she retroactively disassociates herself her mind from that thought. Who thought it, why it was thought ultimately these are all ideas condemned to irrelevancy. What matters is that Mrs. Ramsay disowns it. What matters is that Mrs. Ramsay defines a tiny aspect of her reality despite what objectively happened. This subjectivity makes the crux of another of Hartmans arguments: It is the artist, this person at the window, who affirms a world where there is none. (p.47, 1970) Mrs. Ramsay is, during the vast majority of Part One: The Window, the artist. She is the character watching the novel and she is the point from which the reader ascertains the bulk of the narrative. It is her perceptions of the children, of Mr. Ramsay and even of the relationships between characters that influence the thinking and understanding of the reader. Indeed, Mrs. Ramsays perceptions enact themselves such to impose their influence upon the narrative itself. She is the matchmaker, of Paul and Minta and, she hopes, of Lily and William. She draws these connections between these characters for their own implicit narratives, for their sake as stories. The artist, at this point, is clearly a Prospero figure. (Hartman, p.47, 1970). It is now that it becomes pertinent to consider reality and its individually disparate definitions. Mrs. Ramsay imposes her perception of her reality upon that of the

other characters: she sees that Paul and Minta should be wed, and so she sees that they are. She sees Tansley as a tolerable human being, she sees that he and Lily could be at times friends and so, in her presence, at times they are. Mrs. Ramsay defines her reality and imposes those definitions upon it. She is the artist and the analogy to Prospero becomes interesting: Prospero, the lead protagonist1 of William Shakespeares The Tempest, can be considered a literary allegory for William Shakespeare himself2. If the artist in To The Lighthouse truly is a Prospero figure then, as Prospero, the artist must be a literary avatar for the author. Literary criticisms suggest further motive for Woolf in her writing of To The Lighthouse beyond simply an exercise in Literary Modernism; Panken suggests that Woolf began her novel with father as model her mothers personality prevailed to a considerable degree, in a complex, predominantly idealised portrait. (p.141, 1987). That is, to say, that Woolf wrote her novel initially to explore her unresolved childhood issues. Abel continues a similar argument, further stating that Lily Briscoe is Woolfs closest3 fictional representative. (p.1, 1989). Indeed, considering Lily Briscoes painting at the end of Part Three: The Lighthouse was produced with Lilys mind dancing around the memories of Mrs. Ramsays personality and the most recent encounter of hers with Mr. Ramsay, the allusion is not a difficult argument to make. Furthermore, considering Lily as the artist as the Prospero figure is to consider her artwork, the painting made in that final act, as an avatar for the novel itself. The art within the art; the text within the text.

But Abel is suggesting that Lily is Woolfs prominent avatar suggesting that Lily is the artist and both Abel and Panken are suggesting that Mrs. Ramsay is an avatar for Woolfs mother and is, therefore, not the artist. Indeed, the Prospero comment was made not of Lily, but of Mrs. Ramsay. Briggs, in her introduction to the novel, helps us solve this tension in the argument by suggesting that at times Mrs. Ramsay must assume her role as their creator by providing appropriate conditions for them. (p.xi, 1991) but she also suggests that she is continuously framed within the boundaries of Lilys painting or in the window through which Lily sees her. (p.xv, 1991) And so it becomes that Lily is the artist at the window, she whom Hartman suggests affirms a world where there is none. Lily becomes the individual that is struggling to individually disassociate herself from the external suggestions of the world: of The Atheist Charles Tansley telling her that she cannot paint and of Mrs. Ramsay telling her that she should marry someone whom she has no interest in marrying. All of these characters impose their reality upon the world, upon their surroundings and upon their peers and Lily must deal with that she must struggle to affirm her perception over the others, without it becoming too muddied up by the others. She fails, effectively, during the first part of the novel. She does not succeed until the painting is painted and that closes the novel. And so we see the process of art within art we see art by a Prospero figure. We see a painting that is a literary allusion to the novel that paints it. We see that art labors to make whole what is incomplete, to supplement by an act of imagination the fragments

and scraps of life. (Briggs, p.x, 1991). We see reality in a novel that is as Woolf creates it: a creation of the artist and an imposition of the mind.