Liminality and the Lighthouse

I just finished To the Lighthouse, and now that it has been wrapped up (or maybe more rounded off, since there wasn't really any clear resolution), it's interesting to look at the novel as a whole. It left a big impression on me, and no matter what people thought of the novel, I think everyone can agree that it was nothing like the novels we're used to. A big part of what struck me about it was the heavily visual style of it - it felt almost like reading a painting more than a story, if that makes sense. When we talked in class about the concept of liminality, I starting noticing more and more how space is used to describe characters and images in the novel. The term liminality refers to the period of being at a threshold, of being neither here nor there - emphasizing the blurred  in-between space instead of a clear location. This idea helped me understand the characters in a new way, and got me thinking that maybe one of the points of this novel (if there are any clear points), is the emphasis of the characters being in this liminal state - not entirely sure how to define where they are in life, they always seem to be searching but not quite getting there.

One way the idea of liminality appears in the novel is the emphasis on distance between objects or people. This comes up a lot in the scene at the dinner table, where the space between people sitting is mentioned frequently. Sometimes the space between people is portrayed positively, as a means of connection. When Mrs. Ramsay first walks into the room, she notices, "Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her" (Woolf 126). There is a tension at dinner for a while, everyone feels something is lacking, there is an inability to connect. When the fruit plate is brought out however, and the candles are lit, everyone is brought together by the space between them being filled: "Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candlelight, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table" (Woolf 146). In this case the space between characters needs to be turned into a threshold, a channel through which people across distances can feel like they can reach each other. The creation of this in-between force in turn established boundaries, provided comfort in making clear what is "here" and what is "there": "inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily" (Woolf 147).

Along with being portrayed as a uniting force, liminality is also portrayed as a source of vitality - the uncertainty of being in an in-between state creates a sort of freedom, a potential for make things happen, to decide how and what will be reached on the other side. This appears at the dinner as well, when everyone is waiting for Paul and Minta to come in: "Lily Briscoe, trying to analyze the cause of the sudden exhiliration, compared it with that moment on the tennis lawn, when solidity suddenly vanished, and such vast spaces lay between them; and now the same effect was got by the many candles in the sparsely furnished room" (Woolf 147). In the final scene when Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James are on the boat, Cam experiences this sense of excitement in being on the sea, in between the home island and the lighthouse: "What then came next? Where were they going? From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there)" (Woolf 280). Cam seems to be tired of her father and James worrying so much about destinations - Mr. Ramsay worrying over compass points, James determined to prove a point to his father - Cam seems to want to be free from this worry and relish in the possibilities that lie in being in an in-between state. To Cam, being on the boat, in between, makes her realize the value of that space: "The sea was now more important than the shore" (Woolf 284).

Here is a photograph of the lighthouse from Upton Towans Beach that is said to have been the inspiration for
Woolf's novel - apparently a small stretch of it was auctioned off for $129,336 back in 2009.

Cam serves as a contrast to most of the other characters though in how they feel about being in this in-between space - for most of them are consumed by how to get from one place to another. Mr. Ramsay is stuck between Q and R, and sees himself as on a heroic expedition to make it through the in-between space to reach R and maybe one day Z. Lily's search throughout the whole novel is to find a way in her painting to connect the masses on the left with the masses on the right. The ultimate destination however, is the lighthouse. There is a great build-up around reaching the lighthouse, but once the lighthouse is reached, it doesn't seem to live up to its anticipation: "So it was like that, James thought, the Lighthouse one had seen across the bay all these years; it was a stark tower on a bare rock" (Woolf 301). The relief of simply reaching the destination seems to overshadow the destination itself: "For the Lighthouse had become almost invisible, had melted away into a blue haze, and the effort of looking at it and the effort of thinking of [Mr. Ramsay] landing there which both seemed to be one and the same effort, had stretched her body and mind to the utmost" (Woolf 308). Ultimately, Lily's vision leads her to drawing a line in the center of the painting in order to finish it.

And this is what I think maybe the overarching point of the novel is - the realization of the importance of the space in between instead of simply the destination. What the Lighthouse represents is another investigation entirely, but I do think that the Lighthouse might represent more a general meaning that the characters are searching for in their lives - they are searching for a way to reach the state of having meaning, to find meaning, to understand it, but maybe the search itself is what is more important than whether or not the destination is ever reached - that may be why the novel is entitled to the lighthouse. The passage I found that sums this up the most is when Lily is talking about how life is like a work of art:

"What is the meaning of life? That was all - a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark" (Woolf 240).
The novel seems to be arguing that maybe life shouldn't be seen as revolving around getting from here to there, but instead relishing in the threshold, in the liminality, and what we can create from this space.