Reconstructing the internal parents in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Abstract

Abstract

This paper considers the nature of creativity in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, in which she said she had finally ‘laid the ghosts’ of her parents, after many years of being obsessed with them, her mother in particular. Woolf was very familiar with the psychoanalytic concepts of her day, owing to the social milieu and publishing context of the ‘Bloomsbury’ intellectual circle. She acknowledged that all her writings were in some sense autobiographical. Despite periods of severe depression, she preferred not to have an analysis but to pursue her own self-analysis through her writings. This paper pursues in detail the evolution of the image of ‘internal parents’, known in modern psychoanalysis as the ‘combined internal object’ (Klein, Meltzer) and taken to be the key source of an individual’s creativity. The aim is to distinguish the realistic portrayal of external parents from the creative story that is told and indeed discovered by the writer, focussing on its experiential and experimental evolution within the structure of the novel itself. Woolf spoke of the ‘androgynous’ nature of creative work, and this, it is suggested, refers not simply to the aesthetic interweaving of complementary qualities represented in the story, but to the sense of a governing aegis of parental bisexual objects who work towards and achieve a constructive relationship in the inner world, capable of repairing defects that exist in the external world. Woolf preferred not to interpret her own works symbolically but suggested that readers may do so. The family journey to the Lighthouse is often seen in terms of a spiritual journey, as well as an artistic one, and can also be interpreted in psychoanalytic terms of an internal reconstruction or reparation.

Keywords:

• Klein
• Meltzer
• reparation
• combined object
• aesthetic
• bisexual

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

(1) A Writer’s Diary (1925 [1954]: 78).

(2) See for example: Linstrum (2014); Endo (2006), and Woolf’s essay ‘Old Bloomsbury’ (2002b).

(3) Her brand of mystical idealism is, like all the poets, and like Bion, set firmly in the neoPlatonic tradition, despite her suspicion and critique of academic philosophy; see Steinberg (1988).

(4) A Writer’s Diary (1954 [1921]); Sketch of the Past (2002a: 85, 92); ‘Thoughts on peace in an air raid’, Collected Essays (2021), 486.

(5) Tina Barr traces classical mythological roots in ‘Virginia Woolf’s journey towards Eleusis in To the Lighthouse (1993).

(6) Woolf notes her own mother was against the suffrage movement, saying that women had enough to do in their own home (2002a: p. 126).

(7) Woolf perceives the pathos beneath the Victorian patriarchal superego that was much criticised in her circle in psychoanalytic terms (see Endo, 2006).

(8) ‘The leaning tower’, 1940 talk to the WEA (Collected Essays 1954).

(9) Woolf, ‘On illness’ (Collected Essays, 1954).

(10) See Koppen (2001) on perpetual re-making of the vision; and Walsh (2009) on the elegiac mode in Woolf and Rilke.

(11) These complementarities are of course traditional in aesthetics; as noted in Rojas (2009), pp. 457–58.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Meg Harris Williams

Meg Harris Williams has published many books and articles on the relation between psychoanalysis, art and literature. She teaches internationally and is a visiting lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic and for AGIP, and an honorary member of the Psychoanalytic Center of California. She is editor of The Harris Meltzer Trust. Her books include The Apprehension of Beauty (with Donald Meltzer; 1988), The Vale of Soulmaking (2005), The Aesthetic Development (2010), Bion’s Dream (2010), The Art of Personality in Literature and Psychoanalysis (2017), and Dream Sequences in Shakespeare (2021). Website: www.artlit.info.