Lord Of The Lighthouse By William Woolf Essay

Language has been used in many writing’s to convey the authors point. In the memoirs, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) the author uses many rhetoric in the passage such as allegory, anecdote, and rhetorical question. The author uses rhetoric to write the passage so that she can convey the last significance of the moments of her pass.

The Ramsey Summer House remains abandoned during those ten years, decaying slowly, groaning and weeping as it remembers the tenants it once possessed and the movements they made “how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again” (Woolf 1927, 339). The house bore witness to every breath and every argument; it absorbed fluttering eyelashes, clapped hands, and footsteps; drowned in laughter and in tears; the house was enraptured by the Ramsey’s and remembers them fondly as their images haunt its halls (Wisker 2011, 6).

Margaret Atwood’s collection of poems, Morning in the Burned House, could just as easily have employed morning’s homonym—mourning—in the title. The overriding theme of loss and some of its sources and consequences—aging, grief, death, depression, and anger—permeate this collection and, in particular, Section IV which is a series of elegiac poems about Atwood’s father.

The use of foreshadowing to describe the changes in Emily physical and emotional life is subtler and relies heavily on symbolism. The descriptions of the decaying house symbolize Miss Emily's physical and emotional decay, and as well as her mental problems. It foretells of her downfall,  "a fallen monument" (507). The house is full of dust and dark shadows, "It smelled of dust and disuse-a close, dank smell", and symbolizes the death-filled environment that Emily lives in (508).

“Loneliness is a common emotion when someone feels alone, separated from others or unsupported and distressed” (Kennedy). A common occurrence of many great authors is to make a theme regarding loneliness or isolation for example, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”. “The Fall of the House of Usher”, comparatively speaking, is a very challenging read for most, whereas “The Yellow Wallpaper” is more of a relaxed read. There are many differences between “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”, however, there is a common occurrence that links the two, loneliness. Throughout the two short fiction pieces both characters, Roderick Usher from “The Fall of the House of Usher and Jane from “The Yellow Wallpaper”, are isolated from the outside world, both characters have an illness that keeps them in isolation, and both characters in some way turn to a form of literature to pass time . All of these aspects contribute significantly to loneliness.

The narrator comes to the House to aid his dying friend, Roderick Usher. As he arrives at the House he comes upon an “aura of vacancy and decay… creating a pathologically depressive mood” (Cook). The state of the House is daunting to the narrator – he describes it with such features as “bleak walls”, “eye-like windows”, “rank sedges”, “decayed trees”, and “an utter depression of the soul”. These images foreshadow a less than pleasant future for the narrator and his dear friend Roderick. Poe continues to foreshadow the narrators turn of events with a description of the House’s “dark” and “comfortless” furniture. The House becomes a living hell for the narrator as he watches Roderick’s condition evolve and struggles to understand the mystery tying unfortunate events together. However, as the narrator gradually becomes more enveloped in Roderick and the House’s malady, he seems to develop a malady of his own. While the narrator’s illness is less prominent than that of Roderick and his sister Lady Madeline, the sicknesses are one in the same.

In both, Nathanial Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” the protagonists, Young Goodman Brown and the narrator experience a journey into the subconscious. Both stories have an overlap that blurs the boundaries of reality and fantasy. It is truly the supernatural aspects of these two stories that force the protagonists and the reader to delve into the realm of the subconscious and to scrutinize good versus evil and real versus imaginary.

Have you ever wondered what you would do without your family? Family plays a very important role on peoples’ lives. “Family isn’t just about whose blood runs through your veins. It’s about who never left your side, stood up for you, and believed in you.”- Adrian Brody. Not only does your family help you throughout your life, but they always believe, encourage, and support you regardless, even in difficult times. In The Light in the Forest, Mary Jemison’s personal narrative, and from my personal experience, there are many situations when your family never leaves your side, stands up for you, and believes in you!

In Virginia Woolf’s feminist essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf argues that “a woman must have money and a room of her own” (16) if she is to write fiction of any merit. The point as she develops it is a perceptive one, and far more layered and various in its implications than it might at first seem. But I wonder if perhaps Woolf did not really tap the full power of her thesis. She recognized the necessity of the writer’s financial independence to the birth of great writing, but she failed to discover the true relationship to great writing of another freedom; for just as economic freedom allows one to inhabit a physical space---a room of one’s own---so does mental freedom allow one to inhabit one’s own mind and body “incandescent and

Woolf in Time Passes lets Mrs Ramsey slip away in her sleep, gives Prue Ramsey a wedding, then tears her from the novel screaming and bloody as she dies while giving birth, and obliterates Andrew Ramsey in the barracks of France during World War One (Groover 2014, 223). The Ramsey Summer House remains abandoned during those ten years, decaying slowly, groaning and weeping as it remembers the tenants it once possessed and the movements they made “how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again” (Woolf 1927, 339). The house bore witness to every breath and every argument; it absorbed fluttering eyelashes, clapped hands, and footsteps; drowned in laughter and in tears; the house was enraptured by the Ramsey’s and remembers them fondly as their images haunt its halls (Wisker 2011, 6).

“The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future.”(Roosevelt). Memories are a phenomenon that brings both good and bad thoughts of the past back into one’s reality. This comes to show that an individual is a product of her past but is not a prisoner of it, due to it being her history and not her present. Margaret Atwood speaks in her poem, “Morning in the Burned House”, as a child who is reliving her past, although, that is perceived to her as her reality and she becomes a prisoner of that memory. This poem illustrates the message that the past is not one’s reality in that moment; it is history that tends to repeat itself in one’s mind. In this poem, Atwood expresses her thought and message through the specific imagery she uses of the five senses and the fire. Atwood uses the five senses imagery as a way to make one feel as if she is beside the child, reliving that memory with her. She uses the fire imagery as a way to set the tone for the poem, that perhaps something bigger and more life changing happened to the child. As well, Atwood uses the theme of illusion versus reality as a way to portray what is the child’s truth and what is a memory.

Edward “Teddy” Daniels, a U.S. Marshal in 1954 is heading to Shutter Island - a remote island accessible only by boat, home to Ashecliffe, a secure psychiatric facility- with his newly assigned partner Chuck, to search for a missing patient. As Teddy looks more into the disappearance of the patient, strange things begin to happen all around him. After his partner’s disappearance, he then comes across a former doctor living in a cave on the side of the island, who tells Teddy that the doctors are performing experimental surgery in the island’s lighthouse. This causes Teddy to take precarious measures to investigate the lighthouse. Upon reaching the lighthouse, Teddy is met by the lead psychiatrist and his “missing” partner, and is told that this was an elaborate role-play, and that he suffered from mental illness following the death of his children and him murdering his own wife. Teddy comes back to reality as Andrew Laeddis and decides he cannot live with his reality.

To the Lighthouse most appropriately fits this latter definition, where Woolf’s own discourse suggests a similar understanding of the term (Zwerdling 180). In a diary entry of 1928, Woolf notes her reluctance to consider To the Lighthouse a novel, describing it instead as a final act of remembrance: “I used to think of him [father] and mother daily” she recalled, “but writing The Lighthouse laid them in my mind.” In another entry the same year, Woolf describes To the Lighthouse as a burial rite, a cathartic elegy in which she “expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion…and in expressing it explained it, and then laid it to rest.” Contemporary scholars of Woolf’s work have similarly affirmed the importance of the concept of elegy within To the Lighthouse, asserting as Eavan Boland does that the true text of To the Lighthouse is undoubtedly Mrs. Ramsay, a figurative representation of Julia Duckworth Stephen, Woolf’s mother (Boland 10). In a letter sent to Woolf after reading the novel, Vanessa Bell further reinforces Mrs. Ramsay’s connection to Julia, noting that Woolf had created in Mrs. Ramsay “a portrait of mother which is more like her to me than anything I could have ever conceived of as possible.” Through Woolf’s own comments as well as those familiar with her life, it therefore

So, as I mentioned earlier that Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” is characterized with stream of consciousness literary techniques that is in the presence of third-person pronouns and past tense, which correspond with the form of narrative report, and on the other hand, it is also characterized with symbolic methods such as multiple point of view, use of time montage, shift of characters

As we read, Woolf’s novel, to the Lighthouse we see different aspects of art being used and how it is being used. Lily Briscoe plays a huge role in art in the story. She is working on a painting throughout the book but she does not want anyone to see it (Woolf 17-18). She feels that it is not good enough. However, Mrs. Ramsay, William Bankes and Charles Tansely seem to have different opinions about the painting. During Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party, Lily realizes what she needs to do to fix her painting but does not until the end of the story. The painting itself grows and changes throughout the book, just as Lily grows and changes as a person as she lives her life (Woolf 102).