Again, Eliot’s work leaves me at a loss for words as I grapple for meaning—as I attempt to connect his four pieces to make a whole—as I attempt to peel back the layers of meaning. I believe to really understand Eliot’s poem, I need to better understand his Anglican perspective, the meaning behind Eastern religion (Hinduism and Buddhism), and his personal involvements with certain others (Emily Hale, Vivien Leigh, and Jean Verdenal). It is also necessary to know Dante’s works as Eliot strives to create a masterpiece that could possible live up to the standards of the one he so greatly admired throughout his life. All of these philosophies and people found their way into Eliot’s prior works, so how is this one different? He incorporated Hale into nearly all of the works we’ve discussed in this course. He has woven Dante’s words into “Prufrock” and “The Wasteland”—and countless others, I’m sure. Eliot has taken everything he has learned and everything he has come to know and not know and carefully crafted his timeless piece. I just wish that I could truly derive ultimate meaning. At this point, I cannot. Through reading the required materials to accompany Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, excerpts from Lyndall Gordon’s biography on Eliot and Peter Middleton’s essay, I have only come to better understand bits and pieces and themes that seem to run consistently throughout the poem.
In “Burnt Norton” the reader is taken into “time past” where “Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose-garden” (lines 11-14). Here, Eliot seems to be recalling an unexplored relationship with Emily Hale—as she is often incorporated in his garden images within his poems. This brings me back to something that I posted on several weeks ago regarding his futile wave imagery in connection with Hale in “Prufrock” as it seemed to connect to an image in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. This same connection could be made in Eliot’s first of “Four Quartets” when considering Shakespeare’s “…pale primroses, / That die unmarried” (lines 122-3). A floral setting is placed around Shakespeare’s character, Perdita, just as Hale is in Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”. There is also a reference to garlic and kissing in Shakespeare’s play, which makes me wonder about Eliot’s first line in part two of BN: “Garlic and sapphires in the mud.” I can only extract meaning by reflecting on Middleton’s essay when he “suggests that the ‘garlic and sapphires in the mud’ of Burnt Norton might be allusions to Verdenal (the association of sapphire with hope and garlic with both exorcism and lust adds to the force of this connection” (84). When taking the Shakespeare reference into consideration (as it really seems to have uncanny connections at times—to East Coker as well) and combining the notion of “hope” and “lust,” I can’t help but attach this memory to Emily Hale. Eliot’s reflection recognizes a hope and a lust that is past—“empty” even “[b]ut reconciled in the stars” (BN ii line 15). I do realize that Eliot is incorporating more than just a memory of his past. He also incorporates his other layers of history, philosophy and religion.
Although Harold Brooks “clarif[ies]” the major religious thread that is woven throughout the four pieces, I think it would be unfair to assess the poem as simply religious as a whole. I do believe he incorporates past elements that we saw in “The Wasteland”—only, this time, a little more clearly. “The Wasteland” fit into the Christian myth and parabola, and I see “The Four Quartets” performing a similar operation. Brook asserts, “The Quartets represent four ways of experiencing reality, or God, in three different kinds of time, and in a timeless dimension” (140). “Reality” and “God” are both important elements to consider, and they seem to be interchangeable as Brooke states. This concept of merging reality and God is further confirmed as Dr. Sparks noted, “Ib [is] a vision, lyrical,, often Edenic—always marked by a kind of merger of self with the surrounding environment” (Freewrite 1).
Another element, which I have often envisioned Eliot and Woolf discussing, is the meaning of time in this poem. I felt as though the end result of Eliot’s “Quartets” were similar to Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” There’s the common element of memory and what one chooses to do with it. There is also the question of how one will choose to move forward in his/her given situation. In the character Lily Briscoe’s case, she seems to come to terms with her present and accepts herself regardless of what the future holds as she will be unable to determine exactly what it will hold—that’s up to future generations to determine. Similarly, Eliot, in his final “Quartet,” “resonates into a future beyond the poem which is our future as much as the poet’s” (Gordon 386).
I am unsure if I will ever “come to terms with the quartets,” but I will continue to try, for I have found an appreciation for Eliot that I never thought I would. With this poem, I believe he found a peace that he hadn’t discovered within his other pieces. With “Prufrock,” there seemed to be this underlying torment because of his sexual conflict and general disturbance with a disjointed environment. With “The Wasteland,” he seemed to suffer despair because of a failing relationship compounded by a lack of overall control (over himself and his environment). He was only broaching his Christian conversion but had not wholly arrived (as discussed in class). He seems to revisit all of this in “The Four Quartets” but is accepting of it and relinquishes control because of his religious foundation.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Monday, April 7, 2008
Intertwining Fact and Fiction in the Lighthouse
I am fascinated by many scenes that Woolf paints within her To the Lighthouse as many have been, are, and will be for generations to come. “Each generation must read everything over again for itself,” Woolf is noted for stating in Hussey’s introduction of her novel (lxv). Based on all of the critical analyses of her novel, which encompasses the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and today, I would say that these “generations” have read and re-read her 1927 masterpiece and presented their present day critique on the varying meanings that Woolf crafted upon writing her book. In addition to reading Hussey’s introductory essay, I also read Jane Lilienfeld’s essays, which were written (I believe) 26 years a part. In reading these essays, I find myself interpreting the text through biographical means.
I am the first to admit that I cling to an author’s biography and surrounding history in order to better understand his/her writing. However, I have also learned that as much as the author’s life and history may be incorporated into his/her works, there is also the craft of fiction. I have to allow myself to let go of the biography a bit. I have an extremely hard time doing this with Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and I am not the only one. Her fiction was intertwined with her reality it seems. Hussey asserts, “In any case, To the Lighthouse is the creation of a writer who had thought long and deeply about the relations between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction,’ and specifically about the dubious nature of claims to veracity made by the traditional biography” (liv). Both Hussey and Lilienfeld refer to Woolf’s essay “A Sketch of the Past” as a means to compare Woolf’s life memories with her fictional portrayals. Lilienfeld pulls from “A Sketch of the Past” as she incorporates Woolf’s factual encounter with incest and suggests that this encounter with a masculine violent attack threads through the novel’s fictional portrayal of abuse through James Ramsay’s eyes. Lilienfeld contends: “The use of James Ramsay as a fictionalized surrogate figure for the six-year-old Virginia Stephen would have provided the verbal “wall” that Woolf declared was necessary to stave off self-indulgent deployment of the biographical self…” (115). She further notes Woolf recalling in her “Sketch” essay, “ ‘At times I can go back to St. Ives…I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there….” (115). Lilienfeld connects Woolf’s reality with her fiction.
She ties the Modernist author’s life history into her novel once more as she examines the Victorian marriage that existed between Julia and Leslie Stephen versus Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. “To [Sir Leslie] Stephen it was natural law that a wife should have no legal rights, no right to her own property or money, no training for any job, nor any hope for obtaining one. Though he bound Julia Stephen tightly, she resisted covertly” (Lilienfeld 151). The reader sees examples that compare to the fictitious couple throughout. Mrs. Ramsay has an “untrained mind” (Woolf 13) and Mr. Ramsay achieves “Q” (Woolf 37). At the end of the first section of the novel, however, Mrs. Ramsay “triumph[s] again,” and we are told that Mr. Ramsay “knew” that she had prevailed (126). This victory for Mrs. Ramsay and veiled resistance on Julia Stephen’s part stemmed from “mid-Victorian revolt…advocating marriage reform, the widening of women’s roles, political action for women, and an end to sex-role imprisonment for men as well as women” (Lilienfeld 150). We see a specific response to this “mid-Victorian revolt” in the lives of the younger characters.
The Ramsay girls “had brewed for themselves of a life different from [their mother’s]…; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other;…” (Woolf 10). Lily Briscoe was an artist who was disturbed by Charles Tansley’s admission, “Women can’t paint, women can’t write…” (Woolf 51). With the ellipsis at the end, one is left to wonder what else Mr. Tansley thought women incapable of doing and performing. Initially, I likened Lily to Virginia, but I believe she is a biographical blend of Virginia and Vanessa. Moreover, Lily, allegorically, represents a women’s ability to have an autonomous mind and an overall liberty to pursue whomever and whatever she wishes. Lily’s thoughts are independent and seek answers. She is bothered by the masculine perspective that deems women incapable. She presents a moment of discouragement as she imagines it “would be hung in the servants’ bed-
room…[or]…[would] be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa” and questions “What was the good of doing it then, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them” (Woolf 162). It’s as if Woolf wanted to show her readers that all women were stifled by the unlabeled (albeit the reader understands it stands for men’s voices during her time) voice who repeats what a woman cannot do and, if she does, will not be recognized regardless. Fortunately, Lily’s perspective evolves and she ceases to care where her picture will eventually be hung—“…she thought it would be destroyed. But what did that matter” (Woolf 211). Seemingly, she reached a peace—a sense of autonomy that outweighed what her world wanted to convey to her—as she “had [her] vision” that considered the past and her present (211).
I am the first to admit that I cling to an author’s biography and surrounding history in order to better understand his/her writing. However, I have also learned that as much as the author’s life and history may be incorporated into his/her works, there is also the craft of fiction. I have to allow myself to let go of the biography a bit. I have an extremely hard time doing this with Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and I am not the only one. Her fiction was intertwined with her reality it seems. Hussey asserts, “In any case, To the Lighthouse is the creation of a writer who had thought long and deeply about the relations between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction,’ and specifically about the dubious nature of claims to veracity made by the traditional biography” (liv). Both Hussey and Lilienfeld refer to Woolf’s essay “A Sketch of the Past” as a means to compare Woolf’s life memories with her fictional portrayals. Lilienfeld pulls from “A Sketch of the Past” as she incorporates Woolf’s factual encounter with incest and suggests that this encounter with a masculine violent attack threads through the novel’s fictional portrayal of abuse through James Ramsay’s eyes. Lilienfeld contends: “The use of James Ramsay as a fictionalized surrogate figure for the six-year-old Virginia Stephen would have provided the verbal “wall” that Woolf declared was necessary to stave off self-indulgent deployment of the biographical self…” (115). She further notes Woolf recalling in her “Sketch” essay, “ ‘At times I can go back to St. Ives…I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there….” (115). Lilienfeld connects Woolf’s reality with her fiction.
She ties the Modernist author’s life history into her novel once more as she examines the Victorian marriage that existed between Julia and Leslie Stephen versus Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. “To [Sir Leslie] Stephen it was natural law that a wife should have no legal rights, no right to her own property or money, no training for any job, nor any hope for obtaining one. Though he bound Julia Stephen tightly, she resisted covertly” (Lilienfeld 151). The reader sees examples that compare to the fictitious couple throughout. Mrs. Ramsay has an “untrained mind” (Woolf 13) and Mr. Ramsay achieves “Q” (Woolf 37). At the end of the first section of the novel, however, Mrs. Ramsay “triumph[s] again,” and we are told that Mr. Ramsay “knew” that she had prevailed (126). This victory for Mrs. Ramsay and veiled resistance on Julia Stephen’s part stemmed from “mid-Victorian revolt…advocating marriage reform, the widening of women’s roles, political action for women, and an end to sex-role imprisonment for men as well as women” (Lilienfeld 150). We see a specific response to this “mid-Victorian revolt” in the lives of the younger characters.
The Ramsay girls “had brewed for themselves of a life different from [their mother’s]…; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other;…” (Woolf 10). Lily Briscoe was an artist who was disturbed by Charles Tansley’s admission, “Women can’t paint, women can’t write…” (Woolf 51). With the ellipsis at the end, one is left to wonder what else Mr. Tansley thought women incapable of doing and performing. Initially, I likened Lily to Virginia, but I believe she is a biographical blend of Virginia and Vanessa. Moreover, Lily, allegorically, represents a women’s ability to have an autonomous mind and an overall liberty to pursue whomever and whatever she wishes. Lily’s thoughts are independent and seek answers. She is bothered by the masculine perspective that deems women incapable. She presents a moment of discouragement as she imagines it “would be hung in the servants’ bed-
room…[or]…[would] be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa” and questions “What was the good of doing it then, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them” (Woolf 162). It’s as if Woolf wanted to show her readers that all women were stifled by the unlabeled (albeit the reader understands it stands for men’s voices during her time) voice who repeats what a woman cannot do and, if she does, will not be recognized regardless. Fortunately, Lily’s perspective evolves and she ceases to care where her picture will eventually be hung—“…she thought it would be destroyed. But what did that matter” (Woolf 211). Seemingly, she reached a peace—a sense of autonomy that outweighed what her world wanted to convey to her—as she “had [her] vision” that considered the past and her present (211).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)