Fatality and Bereavement in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Abstract

Virginia Woolf reconsiders the conventional traditions of the Victorian novel in a variety of ways. One of the traditions she tries to break up with is the expression of fatality and mourning, the themes that find a broad expression in the Victorian novel. In this paper, we will examine the available literature on these themes and present different views of a large number of critics on death and mourning in modernist novel, and then in To the Lighthouse, in particular. Virginia Woolf supposed the novel to be an elegy from the very beginning when she decided to get rid of her mother’s haunting image and dedicate the novel to her. However, her presentation and expression of death and mourning are so different from those of other modernist writers that we thought to examine the subject matter at length. Critics agree on the elegiac character of the novel. Here, the novel shows what makes it really elegiac, and which works had a considerable influence on her while writing the novel. On the other hand, the novel exhibits a number of characteristics of the pastoral elegy.