Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse turns our attention to the themes of the present and the past and memory. ATI’s 40th anniversary also elicits our awareness, perhaps too acutely, on the same themes: the present, the past and memory. In my comments I will explore how Woolf’s novel expands our understanding of time passing and attempts at creative transformations of this experience.
To The Lighthouse begins as a mother attentively watches her child cutting out images from a magazine, all the while being viewed through a window as a model for a painting. The novel ends with the same painter returning ten years later and finding just the right brush stroke to complete a painting she had struggled with for years. Time passes.
These artistic endeavors serve as bookends and display Woolf’s ability to convey emotion, in this instance of time passing, through aesthetic form. Roger Fry, her one-time lover, and long-time friend, wrote extensively about form in art as primary and the need to distinguish it from content. The implications of their contributions for our work will be explored.
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