Table of Contents
- “The Pleasure of Vexing and Soothing”: The Subversive and Transgressive Power of Jane Eyre’s Erotic Pendulum
- “Spin, spin, circle of fire!”: The Uncanny Unmasking of Madness in Nathaniel’s Poem from E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman”
- Water Flows, Time Passes: The Nature of Time and the Search for Meaning in To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
“The Pleasure of Vexing and Soothing”: The Subversive and Transgressive Power of Jane Eyre’s Erotic Pendulum
Since its 1847 publication, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has blossomed forth as a garden of thorns and roses, igniting an enduring debate over whether the novel charts a proto-feminist trajectory of liberation or remains tethered to the very patriarchal chains it seeks to shatter. At the heart of this impassioned discourse lies its enigmatic and unsettling erotics, enmeshing readers and critics alike in its Gothic web of pain and love, dominance and submission, and labyrinthine psychosexual dynamics. Infused with sadomasochistic tensions of power, Jane Eyre channels the sublime interplay and uncanny dissolutions of normative boundaries characteristic of the Gothic to forge a radically transgressive erotics of power. Within the mysterious and murky recesses of the Gothic tradition, heroines like Jane Eyre embody disconcerting dualities and distinctive demeanors that infuse their desires with dissonance and their loves with disquiet as their narratives teeter on the precipice between liberation and constraint, and they frolic in the darkness.
Sexuality, desire, and love in the Gothic tradition are often unfurled as knotted webs of despair, fatalistic passion, and sadomasochistic perversion, prompting feminist critics such as Michelle A. Massé to denounce the genre as one where women “seeking recognition or love, learn to forget or deny that they also wanted independence and agency,” ultimately “internaliz[ing] and replicat[ing] the dynamics of oppression” through masochistic submission (Massé 3-4). As a Gothic tale that foregrounds a woman marching toward liberation while entangled in a complex love affair interlaced with pain and pleasure, dominance and submission, and patriarchal undercurrents, Jane Eyre is no stranger to these critiques. While many critics acknowledge the incandescent erotic flame that flickers in Brontë’s narrative heart, they disparage it as an “immature daydream” that reproduces “the asymmetrical power structures of the patriarchal family” (Mitchelle 44; Wyatt 201). Echoing Massé’s disapproval of Gothic masochism, Bette London critiques the novel’s narrative arc, asserting that “instead of the exhilaration of freedom, the novel offers the pleasures of submission,” tracing Jane’s journey as “a movement not from bondage to freedom but through increasingly powerful and interiorized forms of discipline” (London 199-200). Similarly, Anthony Michael D’Agostino identifies “Jane’s desire for Rochester” as a desire to be like Rochester, situating the novel’s sadomasochistic undercurrents as a means of constructing “a new self through the integration of the other’s desired traits” (D’Agostino 158). Yet, diverging from London, D’Agostino reframes Jane’s “assimilation to Rochester” not as a capitulation but as a reimagining of submission as “ the apotheosis of power itself” (D’Agostino 167). On the other end of the spectrum, scholars such as Mary Ann Davis have described Jane Eyre’s erotics as a “strategic erotics,” operating through sadomasochism’s “erotics of form” to articulate “an interdependent relationship between erotic power dynamics, female agency, and xenophobic and colonial rhetorics” (Mary Ann Davis 120). Feminist Victorian scholar Sandra M. Gilbert underscores the novel’s radical potential, describing its erotics as a “furious lovemaking,” a fiery “yearning not just for political equality but for equality of desire,” locating the novel’s subversive power in Jane’s “hunger, rebellion and rage” (Gilbert 357).
Unlike the Feminist critics who seek to “escape from the Gothic labyrinth,” Brontë integrates the proto-feminist narrative architecture into the confining spaces and murky atmospheres of the Gothic structures themselves (Massé 10). Within this labyrinth, each Gothic space serves as a symbolic topography mapping Jane’s evolution, charting her “process of becoming” while tracing it through the transgressive circuits of her eroticism (Nyman 147). The Gothic labyrinth of Jane Eyre unwinds inextricably entwined with its erotics, where untangling its knots and kinks unravels the text’s subversive power. Whereas for Davis, “multiple social rhetorics…produce her erotic agency,” and for Gilbert, it flares from a fierce rebellious sexual fervor, the merging of pain and desire that surfaces in the red-room and resurfaces in the liminal thresholds of Thornfield Hall exposes Jane Eyre’s erotics as a dialectical interplay of sadism and masochism (Davis 121). In contrast to D’Agostino’s vision of self-other fusion, the interplay of gazes and reconfigured power dynamics that culminate at Ferndean expose the novel’s ability to fracture the patriarchal hegemony it allegedly reproduces. This evolution begins in the red-room, where dominance and submission form a dialectic, later metamorphosing into a charged erotic interplay within the liminal spaces of Thornfield Hall and, ultimately, within the barren vacancy of Ferndean, transfiguring into a reciprocal love and equilibrating eroticism. The thorns and roses that blossom within the botanical bosom of Jane Eyre are not antagonistic but mutualistic: it is from “the pleasure of vexing and soothing” that Jane constructs her erotic desire, reconstructs her trauma and agency, and deconstructs her patriarchal subjugation (Brontë 183). Contrary to Massé’s notion of the Gothic as a “nightmare” of female entrapment, Brontë entwines the Gothic’s labyrinthine structures with the proto-feminist yearnings of her heroine, unraveling both the transgressive potential of female desire and the subversive power of the female Gothic.
From the opening pages of Jane Eyre, the red-room casts its spectral shadow as a primordial locus – a Gothic womb where the seeds of Jane’s lifelong negotiation with power, submission, and desire are sown. If the early chapters reveal Jane’s “two central longings – to be independent and to be loved,” the prominence of the red-room in her narrative suggests the emergence of a third longing: the desire to reconcile freedom with servitude (Yeazell 129). Imbued with “the mood of the revolted slave… still bracing [her] with its bitter vigor,” Jane laments: “Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, for ever condemned? Why could I never please?” (Brontë 18). This paradoxical self-portrait of a “revolted slave” yearning to please unveils the dualistic desire pulsing within her heart – a longing for “freedom” paradoxically intertwined with “servitude,” as later articulated at Lowood in her desperate entreaty: “I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer … ‘grant me at least a new servitude!’” (Brontë 102). Jane herself encapsulates this paradoxical puzzle as she reflects on her relationships with Mr. Rochester and St. John Rivers, framing her lifelong struggle as a pendulous oscillation, swinging incessantly between rebellion and submission:
I know no medium: I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt. I have always faithfully observed the one, up to the very moment of bursting, sometimes with volcanic vehemence, into the other; and as neither present circumstances warranted, nor my present mood inclined me to mutiny, I observed careful obedience. (Brontë 462)
The pendulum of desire, ceaselessly swaying between “absolute submission and determined revolt,” bursting “with volcanic vehemence” into one another, reflects a tremulous desire that reverberates through her psyche, rooted in the red-room. As Davies observes, this flux “characterizes later significant domestic spaces” and is birthed in the “violent dynamic of crimson and white, intimating blood, erotic love, and death” that materializes in the red-room (Davies 545).
In his essay “In the Window-Seat: Vision and Power in Jane Eyre,” Peter Bellis observes how Jane’s nascent longing for independence manifests as a yearning for visual power. Bellis contends that the early scenes at Gateshead “establish a pattern that the text will revise and ultimately reverse: Jane withdraws into a marginal spectatorship, only to be drawn out and exposed by an authoritative male gaze whose power is asserted through a culminating deprivation of vision” (Bellis 640). This dynamic is first magnified in Jane’s retreat to the window-seat, a “transitional space” where “her subjectivity is infused by possibility” (Nyman 146). Crouched in this space, she fantasizes about flying like a bird and gazing freely upon the earth – a fleeting daydream of autonomy that abruptly shatters when she refuses to acknowledge John Reed as her master and defiantly exclaims: “Master! How is he my master? Am I a servant?’” (Brontë 15). Her rebellion against John Reed provokes a patriarchal punishment enacted through the matriarchal agent, Mrs. Reed, who cruelly banishes her to the red-room. This morbid chamber, where her Uncle John Reed “breathed his last” breath, is described as “chill, because it seldom had a fire … silent, because [it was] remote,” and “solemn because it was known to be so seldom entered” (Brontë 17). The room’s blood-red and mahogany furnishings – its “bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany,” the table “covered with a crimson cloth, and the “darkly polished mahogany” chairs – evoke the “vacant majesty” of an empty tomb, charged with an eerie, hellish eroticism (Brontë 17). Imprisoned within the red-room’s “massive pillars of mahogany” and “curtains of deep red damask,” Jane is entombed in a space where death, punishment, and the shadow of her uncle’s patriarchal legacy intertwine with subtle erotic undercurrents (Brontë 17). These furnishings, simultaneously forbidding and sensuous, symbolize the grave of Jane’s autonomy while embedding the dynamics of punishment and pleasure into her psyche, forming a lifelong dialectic between rebellion and submission that reverberates within her relationships and suffuses the domestic and transitional spaces she roams.
As punishment for “the look [she] had in her eyes” – a gaze symbolizing her longing for independence – Mrs. Reed, as an agent of patriarchal subjugation, strips Jane of her all external vision by confining her to the red-room, where the window blinds are “always drawn down” (Brontë 17). Within this Gothic chamber, Jane’s only visual outlet is mediated through “subdued, broken reflections” in the wardrobe, the “muffled windows,” and a foreboding and illusory “great looking glass” (Brontë 17). The room itself is imbued with symbolic representations of authority, evoking through descriptors like “tabernacle” and “pale throne,” which summon what Hanly describes as a “traumatic and sadomasochistic œpidal fantasy,” wherein Jane imagines the spectral paternal energy of her deceased uncle as both punisher and avenger against the matriarchal tyranny of Mrs. Reed (Hanly 1052). In her attempt to reclaim some semblance of her dispossessed visual power, Jane fixes her “fascinated eye towards the dimly gleaming mirror,” only to encounter a distorted vision of herself as a “strange little figure” from one of Bessie’s fairy tales – ” a “tiny phantom” seemingly returned to haunt the Reed family (Brontë 18). This spectral image that casts her as both victim and avenger catalyzes the traumatic rupture that reverberates throughout the narrative. The traumatic weight of this event overwhelms her, leading her to feel “oppressed, suffocated … endurance broke down,” culminating in a “wild, involuntary cry” that shatters the oppressive silence of the household (Brontë 21). However, her defiance is swiftly punished as Mrs. Reed “abruptly thrusts [her] back and locked [her] in,” leaving Jane to spiral into a “species of fit” that provokes a loss of consciousness (Brontë 22). Yet paradoxically, the Gothic chamber’s punitive confinement becomes the crucible for Jane’s resistance. The red-room initiates Jane’s recognition of the oppressive structures of pain and authority that govern her early life. Her anguish cry of “‘Unjust! – unjust’” becomes a catalyst, signaling what she describes as a “strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable oppression” (Brontë 19). The red-room thus emerges as a site of simultaneous subjugation and resurrection, externalizing the dynamics of power and punishment that Jane will later confront and reconfigure within the shadowed corridors of Thornfield Hall and within the stark barrenness of Ferndean. The convergence of patriarchal subjugation, paternalistic vengeance and salvation, and the spectral interplay of pain and pleasure – as embodied in the red-room’s erotic crimson hues and tomb-like stillness – foreshadows “the darker aspects of her passion with Rochester later on,” intertwining dominance and submission, the punitive and the pleasurable, into the fabric of her desire (Hanly 1052).
As the next pivotal narrative space where Jane Eyre’s erotics of power unfurl, the shadowed corridors and secret chambers of Thornfield Hall emerge as both a microcosm of patriarchal dominance and a mutable arena. This liminal Gothic setting becomes the threshold where Jane transmutes the intertwined threads of trauma and desire she first encountered in the red-room into a subversive erotic interplay that destabilizes the very foundations of dominance. With its labyrinthine halls, sealed attic, and the looming presence of hidden horrors, Thornfield Hall embodies what Michelle A. Massé describes as “the Gothic nightmare,” a space steeped in female oppression and captivity. Yet, within these confines, Jane stages a sadomasochistic interplay that challenges and reconfigures power itself. Micki Nyman identifies Thornfield’s “thresholds or portal images” as symbolic of “transformative space[s]” imbued with imaginative and intuitive possibilities (Nyman 145). By crossing the “pair of gates” at Thornfield, Jane steps into a liminal zone, untethering herself from the rigid constraints at Gateshead and entering an intermediary space where she finds immense pleasure in her solitary wanderings, roaming “along the corridor…backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude [that allows her] mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it” (Brontë 129). This liminal solitude grants her an imaginative freedom where she creates and narrates “a tale that was never ended… quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that [she] desired and had not in [her] actual existence” (Brontë 126). Thorfield, as a Gothic threshold, becomes a labyrinth for her imagination to roam, enabling her to construct the “fire [that she] desires” (Brontë 129). As her nascent autonomy and subjectivity begin to bloom within these liminal spaces, she reflects that “all sorts of fancies bright and dark tenanted [her] mind,” leading to her revelation: “Women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts…they suffer from too rigid a restrained, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer” (Brontë 130). Michel Foucault’s theory of sexuality as “a part of our world freedom” and a “possibility for creative life” resonates as Jane’s imaginative autonomy and subversive erotics converge to articulate a vision of freedom from within the confines of Thornfield Hall (Foucault 163). In her nocturnal wanderings through the dim, serpentine hallways, the spiraling staircases that coil like a serpent, the tangled-ivy moonlit garden, and the warm, glowing hearth of the drawing room, Jane navigates the transitional space of Thornfield Hall as a site of latent erotic possibility, where “bright and dark” fancies pulse within her, waiting to emerge in what she later transforms as a transgressive and reciprocal erotics of power.
When Jane encounters Rochester at Hay Lane, the moment resonates with the spectral and paternal energies that haunted her in the red-room, reframing its imprisoning echos into the dynamic seeds of an erotic interplay. Arising like a phantom under a “moon waxing bright,” Rochester, along with his imposing “great lion-like” dog, is described as having a “dark face, with stern features, and a heavy brow,” an image doused with patriarchal authority that mirrors that phantasmal imagery of the red-room (Brontë 132). He glides forth from the shadows of dusk, incarnating a figure both enigmatic and authoritative that evokes Jane’s earlier memories of Bessie’s mythic tales, as she imagines him to be “a North-of-England spirit” which “sometimes came upon belated travellers, as this horse was now coming upon [her]” (Brontë 132). Yet, the dynamic between these elements is immediately more fluid and reciprocal than the fixed domination of the red-room, as Jane isn’t the only one who summons fantastic fairy tales and spectral imagery to describe this nocturnal moment. Rochester himself invokes the intangible mythic air of their encounter when he later tells Jane, “When you came on me in Hay Lane last night, I thought unaccountably of fairy tales and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse” (Brontë 143). The moment at Hay Lane, therefore, subverts the red-room’s paradigm of dominance where Jane is silenced and cowers beneath patriarchal punishment and instead unfurls as its inversion; this time, it is Rochester who feels unsettled by an inexplicable bewitching essence and falls under the enchantment of Jane.
Rather than recoiling from his brusque and commanding demeanor, Jane appears enticed and enraptured by it, remarking, “Had he been a handsome, heroic-looking young gentleman, I should not have dared to stand thus questioning him against his will” (Brontë 134). The dominance and patriarchal authority he exudes paradoxically draws her closer, transforming it into an erotic seduction. She confesses the magnetic tension he arouses within her: “If he had put off my offer of assistance gaily and with thanks, I should have gone on my way … but the frown, the roughness of the traveller set me at my ease” (Brontë 134). Assuming the role of the commanding observer, she claims she “felt no fear of him” and yet oscillates between asserting and wielding, relinquishing and surrendering power – a shifting balance that exemplifies the nascent erotics of power that will come to define their relationship (Brontë 134). She instructs him to remain in place until she sees he is fit to mount his horse, yet when he orders her to grab the bridge, she obeys without hesitation, admitting, “I should have been afraid to touch a horse when alone, but when told to do it I was disposed to obey” (Brontë 134-5). She identifies two primary traits when she attempts to grasp the nature of his mysterious, enchanting aura: “firstly, because it was masculine; and, secondly, because it was dark, strong, and stern” (Brontë 136). The invocation of masculinity evokes the patriarchal specter reminiscent of the red-room, while his “dark, strong, and stern” features signify a shift away from childhood trauma toward a more complex, erotically charged desire. Unlike other authority figures in her life, Rochester’s dominance is marked by a playful oscillation that invites her into a flirtatious contest, an intoxicating dialectical game of power and submission where either player can win. The transformative encounter alters her perception of Thornfield, which now glimmers and glistens with desire; upon her return, she observes, “Thornfield Hall was a changed place,” finally imbued with the erotic desire she had long yearned for: “It had a master; for my part, I liked it better” (Brontë 139).
For Jane, the fanciful and fleeting allure of words like “Liberty, Excitement, Enjoyment,” which she describes as “delightful sounds truly, but no more than sounds,” ultimately resounds hollow, “so hollow and fleeting that it is a mere waste of time to listen to them” (Brontë 102). In contrast, she seizes the pragmatic appeal of “A new servitude! There is something in that…that must be a matter of fact,” a tangible framework that Rochester provides (Brontë 102). The tension between her yearning for liberty and her prayer for servitude is far less contradictory than it initially appears, as it is unraveled and reconciled continuously within the nuanced complexities of their erotic bond. For Jane, “servitude” transcends the idea of a static submission, becoming a mutable force, a fluid flux of power and desire capable of assuming a myriad of forms over the course of a lifetime – unlike the transient pleasures of “excitement” or “enjoyment.” Her inclusion of “Liberty” in this spectrum reflects her radical reimagining of it – not as an abstract, unattainable ideal, but as an active, sustained strategy that intertwines power and pleasure to offer her the potential of both. Rochester himself perceives this potency, remarking upon the “genuine contentment in [her] gait and mien, [her] eye and face, when [she is] helping [him] and pleasing [him],” which underscores how Jane derives erotic power from her acts of servitude (Brontë 250). This dynamic resonates with Michel Foucault’s assertion that sadomasochistic relationships embody “a perpetual novelty, a perpetual tension and a perpetual uncertainty, which the simple consummation of the act lacks” (Foucault 235). For a woman who “must have action” and cannot be “satisfied with tranquility,” someone who burns with desire for “fancies bright and dark,” the dialectical dynamic offers Jane an inexhaustible source of stimulation and fulfillment (Brontë 130). The ceaseless exchange fosters a sublime pleasure that resists stagnant stability, shielding her from “the viewless fetters of a uniform and too still existence” (Brontë 130).
From their initial interaction, Jane derives not only pleasure but also a profound sense of agency from serving Rochester. She reflects that she is “pleased to have done something” that, although momentary, “was yet an active thing,” emphasizing her rebellion against “an existence all passive” by reframing a supposedly subservient act as one imbued with intentionality and strategic agency (Brontë 136). As Margaret Ann Hanly observes, “Jane’s sexual love for Rochester is expressed through the imagery of slave and master,” a framework that she actively deploys because, unlike the despotic dominance of John Reed, who attempted to force her to call him “master” through sheer tyranny, Jane consciously and authoritatively chooses to serve Rochester on her own terms (Hanly 1052). From the moment she offers her service to assist his fall off his horse, she begins to exult this agency, eventually confessing: “I like to serve you sir and to obey you in all that is right” (Brontë 250). As their dynamic develops and deepens, Rochester discards conventional terms of endearment such as “love” and “darling” and instead adopts nicknames like “provoking puppet,” “malicious elf,” “sprite,” and “changeling,” each laden with playful provocation, and, more importantly, imply animacy (Brontë 315). These terms may appear imbued with sadistic undertones but resonate with Jane because they reject the inert passivity of a “beautiful doll” archetype in favor of fictions that possess vitality, intent, and mischief. Similarly, when Rochester’s “caresses” transform into “grimaces; for a pressure of the hand, a pinch on the arm; for a kiss on the cheek, a severe tweak of the ear,” Jane is not unsettled but rather pleased, asserting: “It was all right: at present I decidedly preferred these fierce favours to anything more tender” (Brontë 315). Through these moments, Jane illustrates her preference for these distortions of tenderness because, despite any sadistic tinge, they foreground her active participation in the dynamic while simultaneously arousing her erotic fire.
Jane’s surrender to Rochester is thus inextricably intertwined with an underlying sense of agency, revealing that at any moment, she maintains the capacity to refuse, revert, or subvert the very structures of their erotic architecture. When he boldly inquires whether she agrees he has “a right to be a little masterful, abrupt, perhaps exacting,” she immediately contests the claim (Brontë 157). Similarly, when he assertively commands her to speak, she disarms him with silence, “instead of speaking, [she] smiled,” a smile that she notes is “not a very complacent or submissive smile either” (Brontë 159). Their game of defiance and provocation continues as Rochester playfully yet menacingly warns her before their wedding: “It is your time now, little tyrant, but it will be mine presently…I’ll just – figuratively speaking – attach you to a chain like this” (Brontë 312). Disappointed by the “earnest, religious energy” in her tone and the “faith, truth, and devotion” in her gaze, he reveals to her the key to ignite his passion: “Look wicked, Jane: as you know well how to look: coin one of your wild, shy, provoking smiles; tell me you hate me — tease me, vex me; do anything but move me” (Brontë 325). Similarly, when he praises her as a “delicate and aërial beauty” with “fairy-like fingers,” she interrupts his romanticized rhetoric with astute defiance, exclaiming, “For God’s sake, don’t be ironical!” and commanding him to address her as his “plain, Quakerish governess,” rather than a whimsical ideal (Brontë 299). As their relationship evolves, Jane progressively unearths the intricacies of Rochester’s sadistic tendencies and their mutual desire for erotic transgression. She reflects: “I knew the pleasure of vexing and soothing him by turns; it was one I chiefly delighted in, and a sure instinct always prevented me from going too far; beyond the verge of provocation I never ventured; on the extreme brink I liked well to try my skill” (Brontë 183). This admission illuminates the back-and-forth dance of their bond, in which the two thrive on “the extreme brink” of teetering power. Jane discovers Rochester does not actually want her to be completely submissive any more than she actually wants to be unmitigatedly dominated, but instead, it is in their mutual negotiation of power that their erotic pleasure finds its most potent source.
As John Kucich observes, Jane and Rochester’s relationship is “always constituted as a battleground – but a battleground with power flowing alternately in two directions” (Kucich 932). This oscillating pendulum of power, “the reversibility of power relations” itself, generates their mutable pleasure and solidifies Jane’s agency and subjectivity (Kucich 931). For Jane, the significance of these master/slave oscillations lies in their capacity to “pluralize and confuse the configurations of power to such a degree that contest-which defines isolation and distance becomes endless and illimitable, rather than frozen in some kind of permanent structure of relationship,” inciting her to assert a liberation that is self-determined and never fixed (Kucich 934). Jane admits that Rochester’s gae “mastered [her]” and took her feelings “from [her] own power and fettered them into his,” yet Rochester similarly confessed: “I never met your likeness. Jane, you please me, and you master me—you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart. I am influenced—conquered” (Brontë 203, 301). This intricate dans of domination and submission deny conventional power structures, creating instead what Kucich describes as an “atmosphere of combat and competition” where “no one is actually mastered” (Kucich 934). Instead, their dynamic operates within what Foucault terms “the eroticization of power, the eroticization of strategic relations” (Foucault 163). As Foucault elucidates, “Of course, there are roles, but everybody knows very well that those roles can be reversed. Sometimes the scene begins with the master and slave, and at the end, the slave has become the master” (Brontë 169). Jane Eyre and Rochester’s bond thrives precisely because of this irreversibility and instability. In sark contrast, St. John embodies a rigid, oppressive authority that extinguishes the very flame igniting her existence. She recognizes that by marrying him, he would control her entirely, subjecting her to constant physical and emotional confinement and constraints, where she would suffer as “attached to him only in this capacity: my body would be under rather a stringent yoke, but my heart and mind would be free,” but only in so far as it is “forced to keep the fire of [her]nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital,” and that, above all else, is what “would be unendurable” (Brontë 470). For Jane, “fire of her nature” is not merely a metaphor for her passion but the very medium from which she configures, conceptualizes, discovers, and articulates her selfhood, eroticism, and freedom. As she wars, joining him would completely annihilate her subjectivity: “I abandon half myself,” reflecting that, if he dims or extinguishes her flicker, she will inevitably “go to premature death” (Brontë 466).
When Thornfield erupts into flames, it dismantles not only the ensnaring spatial confines of its patriarchal corridors but also ignites a symbolic purging of the suffocating structures that have long repressed Jane’s agency and concealed her erotic, visual, and narrative power. As Sandra Gilbert asserts, “many critics… have seen Rochester’s injuries as a symbolic castration,” yet this castration signifies not merely the diminishment of Rochester’s patriarchal power but a profound erotic reconfiguration where Jane assumes visual authority and spectatorship, transforming her subjugation in the red-room into a mutualistic vantage point (Gilbert 802). The flames that devour Thornfield not only annihilate the mansion’s physical edifice but dissolve the social, material, and corporeal privileges that sustained Rochester’s dominance, scorching his wealth and rendering him blind, positioning Jane as the arbiter of their newly formed role reversal. The fire’s wild, uncontrollable flames, like the hellish crimson of the red-room, carry an eroticized charge – disruptive and purgative – that mirrors the burning intensity of their passion and the scorching agency sprouting from Jane. The inferno at Thornfield allows Jane to reclaim the visual power and agency she lost in the crimson drapes of the red-room, and in doing so, fulfills her three central longings: independence, love, and a fiery, subversive, transgressive eroticism that resists Victorian constraints. Whereas Jane was once a bird caged within the red-room, her vision clipped and autonomy suffocated, Rochester becomes “the caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished,” a reversal that empowers Jane as both seer and interpreter (Brontë 498). Rather than simply a destructive symbolic castration, the fire blazes forth as a redemptive recalibration.
From the ashes of Thornfield, Ferndean rises as the narrative apotheosis – a space of recalibration and relational renewal where the oscillating interplay of dominance and submission evolves into a symbiotic equilibrium. In stark contrast to the menacing and ominous Gothic grandeur of Thornfield, Ferndean is described as “a building of considerable antiquity, moderate size, and no architectural pretensions, deep buried in a wood,” its bare isolation and unadorned simplicity symbolizes a detachment from the economic and societal hierarchies that previously dictated and characterized Jane and Rochester’s dynamic (Brontë 496). Within the “uninhabited and unfurnished” voids of Ferndean, Jane finally heals from the suffocating trauma of the red-room and breaks away from the confines of Thornfield, while Rochester relinquishes his patriarchal dominance, allowing the pair to rearticulate their erotic bond unmediated by external constraints (Brontë 496). Yet, this inversion of power does not settle into stasis; Rochester’s blindness renders him dependent on Jane as “his vision” and “the apple of his eye” and reasserts her visual power and pleasure (Brontë 519). She asserts, “I will be your neighbour, your nurse, your housekeeper. I find you lonely: I will be your companion,” signaling a delicate equilibrium of agency and mutuality, maintaining both patriarchal reduction and the complete effacement of their previous roles (Brontë 519). When Jane invokes the phrase “my dear master,” she reinscribes the erotic tension within their recalibrated relationship, where power remains fluid and contestable. It is within Ferndean’s stripped-down simplicity, empty spaces, and vacancy that Brontë reconfigures the Gothic dialectic of dominance and submission into a mutualistic, subversive, and transgressive interplay Jane’s proclamation, “I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine,” does not signify her capitulation to Victorian marital conventions, nor does her final substitution of “husband” for of “master” signify the dissolution of their erotic systems (Brontë 519). Instead, it marks their union as one forged through a sadomasochistic interplay of intimacy and transgressive, both mutualistic and defiantly transgressive (Brontë 519). Critics who contend that Jane Eyre remains rooted in the oppressive structures of dominance and submission are not entirely mistaken but often fail to grasp the unfathomable complexity of female eroticism and Gothic narrative subversion. The subversion of Bronte’s narrative is not about eradicating power but about transmuting it into a fluid, relational, and mutualistic framework that allows Jane to emerge not as an idealized Victorian woman nor as a conventional feminist icon, but as a transgressive Gothic heroine who forges her identity from the embers of her erotic passion. As the flames of Thornfield fade into the quiet isolation of Ferndean, the fire of the female erotic endures. Through Jane crumbles the Gothic walls that once confined her, Brontë’s narrative of thorns and roses, vexing and soothing, never truly ends, perpetually burning with potential.
Works Cited
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— “Plain Jane’s Progress.” Signs, vol. 2, no. 4, 1977, pp. 779–804. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173210.
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“Spin, spin, circle of fire!”: The Uncanny Unmasking of Madness in Nathaniel’s Poem from E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman”
His annoyance at Clara’s cold, prosaic disposition grew greater, Clara was unable to overcome the ill humour with which his obscure, gloomy and boring mysticism filled her, and thus without noticing it they became more and more estranged from one another. The figure of the repulsive Coppelius had, as Nathaniel himself was constrained to admit, grown dim in his imagination, and in his tales, where Coppelius appeared as a malign agent of destiny, it often required an effort to bestow life and colour upon him. At length he hit on the idea of making his gloomy foreboding that Coppelius would disrupt the joy of his love into the subject of a poem: he depicted himself and Clara as united in true love; but now and then it was as if a black hand reached out over them and erased their feelings of joy; at last, as they were standing before the marriage altar, the terrible Coppelius appeared and touched Clara’s lovely eyes, which sprang out like blood-red sparks, singeing and burning, on to Nathaniel’s breast; Coppelius then seized him and threw him into a flaming circle of fire which, spinning with the velocity of a tempest, tore him away with a rushing and roaring; there was a commotion, as when the hurricane whips up the foaming waves of the sea and they rear like white-haired giants in furious combat, but through this commotion he heard Clara’s voice: ‘Do you not see me? Coppelius has deceived you: those were not my eyes which burned into your breast; they were glowing-hot drops of your own heart’s blood – I still have my eyes; you have only to look at me!’ Nathaniel thought: ‘That is Clara, and I am hers for ever’ – and the thought seemed to interpose itself into the circle of fire, so that it came to a stop and the hubbub subsided into the depths; Nathaniel looked into Clara’s eyes, but it was death which gazed at him mildly out of them.
E.T.A. Hoffman, “The Sandman” (1816), Tales of Hoffman, pp. 104-105
In one of the strangest yet most fascinating scenes of E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman,” the poetic and dreamy Nathaniel opens up to his rational and pragmatic fiancée, Clara, by sharing with her a poem he wrote portraying his fears regarding the enigmatic character of Coppelius/Coppola, who he believes to be the mythical figure of the Sandman. The poem – far from being a conventional romantic lament – causes Clara to recoil away in disgust from what appears to her as the disturbed and delirious ramblings of a near madman. After she tells him to “throw the mad, senseless, insane story into the fire” and promptly disregards the episode as nonsense, the story marches on and leaves the reader with an impression of the poem as a vague and bizarre moment of absurdity – that is, until the end of Hoffman’s tale, when Nathaniel’s tragedy culminates in a scene that parallels, mirrors, and even reenacts the peculiar happenings of Nathaniel’s artistic foreboding (Hoffman 106). “The Sandman” concludes without offering the reader any satisfactory explanation for whether or not the Sandman was real or merely a figment of Nathaniel’s imagination. Was Nathaniel, in actuality, a raving lunatic consumed by a traumatic fixation on his most profound childhood fear? Or, was the Sandman a real, malignant supernatural being that tore down, taunted, and traumatized Nathaniel until he went utterly insane? Hoffman does not just refrain from answering this question for the sake of mystery. Rather, the disorienting uncertainty and perplexing hesitation the reader encounters when faced with the ambiguity of the blurred boundaries between fantasy and reality is essential to deciphering Hoffman’s tale. It is from this inability to distinguish between the real and the imaginary that the uncanny crawls forth, and it is this uncanny obfuscation of metaphysical boundaries that thrashes Nathaniel into madness and ultimately drives him to suicide. The scene describing Nathaniel’s poem, when read as an allegorical representation of what unfolds within Nathaniel’s psyche when the imaginary and the real become befuddled, unearths the true source of his madness: his narcissistic impulse to breach the realm of the fantastic. When met with the unyielding rationality of society keen on adhering to empirical and objective reasoning, this transcendent desire deforms Nathaniel’s perception of reality until his artistic pursuits become deceptive mimesis, and the imagined becomes his truth. His artistic sensibility impels his narcissistic compulsion inwards toward his imagination, which, despite his instinctive attempts to repress, surfaces again and again in the shape of the Sandman.
Apart from himself, the two characters Nathaniel writes into his poem personify the two opposing views of reality that Nathaniel vacillates between. While Clara epitomizes a perspective grounded in logic and reason, the Sandman incarnates the alluring and bewitching magnetic pull of the fantastic. The enigmatic “dark force” mentioned repeatedly throughout the narrative corresponds to the darkness that looms over Nathaniel’s inner compulsion to surrender to his repressed desires. The recurring motif of the eyes, as evinced in his poem when he realizes that it is his “own heart’s blood” touching his eyes, symbolizes his waning grasp on reality and dwindling ability to differentiate between fact and fiction (Hoffman 105). This progressive loss of perception, triggered again and again by his aesthetic penchant for falling into contrived mimesis that he mistakes for art and love, begets unrelenting chaos in his psyche. This repetitive descent into disorder, permeated with imagery that evokes raging fires and ravenous beasts, takes shape in the recurring metaphor of “the circle of fire” that ensnares Nathaniel on multiple occasions throughout the story. Each time his unconscious narcissist inclinations urge Nathaniel to escape the mundane and venture into the imaginary, frenzied pandemonium and uncanny horror materialize in the figure of the Sandman. Nathaniel’s madness is, therefore, rooted in a force far more terrifying than any fabled monster: his own unconscious. Foreshadowing his dark fate with his own plume, the poem, far from being nonsensical, unmasks the tumultuous teetering and tottering movements of his unconscious as he attempts to reconcile his repressed narcissist desires with a society opposed to romantic inclinations towards the fantastic.
The poem scene commences by drawing attention to the escalating rupture alienating Nathaniel, who is inclined towards the fantastic, away from Clara, who is inclined towards the rational, simulating the same tug and pull that eventually ruptures Nathaniel’s psyche. Clara’s “cold, prosaic disposition” and Nathaniel’s “obscure, gloomy […] mysticism” that characterize their two distinctively discordant perspectives cause them to become increasingly “more and more estranged from one another” (Hoffman 104). Feeling unseen and misunderstood by Clara’s austere rationality, Nathaniel falls back on his poetry to substantiate the narcissistic compulsion he molds around his aesthetic and romantic aspirations. Mistaking his fantastic fervor for aesthetic transcendence, he turns inwards to rummage through the recesses of his mind for artistic inspiration, where he is instead met with the haunting image of Coppelius, who has come to embody his obsession with the fantastic that he, albeit “constrained to admit,” longs to breach (Hoffman 105). Thus, the second that “the figure of the repulsive Coppelius had […] grown dim in his imagination,” Nathaniel foregoes his fright for the sake of his aesthetic enterprise and deliberately exerts “an effort to bestow life and colour upon him” to make “his gloomy foreboding that Coppelius would disrupt the joy of his love into the subject of a poem” (Hoffman 105). The Sandman/Coppelius, inextricably linked in this passage with Nathaniel’s poetic ability, suggests that at some point in his life, Nathaniel inadvertently bound up the Sandman with the artistic channeling of his imagination. Nathaniel pinpoints this pivotal moment earlier in the narrative when he recalls how “the sandman had started [him] on the road to the strange and adventurous,” which subsequently inspired him to “draw the strangest and most hideous pictures of him on tables, cupboards and walls everywhere in the house,” thereby attaching his earliest artistic vocation, alongside his infatuation with the fantastic, to the presence of the Sandman (Hoffman 88). Paradoxically drawn to the mythical and monstrous embodiment of his imagination, the Sandman becomes immortalized in his psyche as his sole access to the imaginary realm he itches to enter. Born out of “the primordial narcissism that dominates” his mind, the Sandman’s deceptive promise of transcendence offers Nathaniel “an insurance against the extinction of the self, […] a defense against annihilation” (Freud 142).
Nathaniel pictures himself as the underappreciated, misunderstood poet overcome by an inexplicable, omnipotent force that both propels and thwarts his aesthetic and romantic aspirations. Love and art for Nathaniel, since they are profoundly entrenched in his fantastic yearning, lack genuine substance and therefore become confounded in a hazy emptiness that fogs up his ability to discern reality. Within the poetic space he fabricates out of misplaced romantic delusions, he depicts “himself and Clara as united in true love,” when all of a sudden, a mysterious “black hand […] reached out over them and erased their feelings of joy” (Hoffman 105). Unaware that the Sandman is a concocted manifestation of his own psyche, he is eager to place the blame on “the terrible Coppelius,” who arrives at the exact moment when “standing before the marriage altar,” Nathaniel is about to merge with Clara and presumably subsume her rationality. At the precipice of symbiosis between the imaginary and the real, personified in his marital union with Clara, the “black hand” symbolizing the uncanny resurfacing of what “has been repressed and now returns,” without warning “threw him into a flaming circle of fire” (Freud 147; Hoffman 105). As a metaphor representing the chaotic and cyclical nature of the psychological process, the circle of fire disorients his perception of reality and leaves him “spinning with the velocity of a tempest,” thereby flinging him downwards on a spiral toward madness (Hoffman 105). To put into words the unrestrained chaos of the uncanny interior discombobulation that tyrannizes his psyche, Nathaniel invokes in his poem imagery that conjures up violently blazing fires, tempestuous warzones, and barbaric, ruthless beasts. The Sandmad enflames a fire in his psyche that “tore him away with a rushing and roaring” (Hoffman 105). He compares “furious combat” and “commotion” of reality and imagination warring in his head to a “hurricane” that “whips up” the “foaming waves” of his perceptive faculties and perplexes them into madness (Hoffman 105). Amidst all “this commotion,” he discerns a faint murmur of reason when “he [hears] Clara’s voice,” and she draws his attention to his psychological descent: “Do you not see me? Coppelius has deceived you” (Hoffman 105). Although he initially assumes his internal imagination to be more profound than his external reality and thereby mistakenly believes that Clara’s eyes were the ones touched and affected by Coppelius, Clara reveals to him that it was not her eyes that “sprang out […] singeing and burning on to Nathaniel’s breast” but, instead, “glowing-hot drops of [his] own heart’s blood” (Hoffman 105). The poem, therefore, climaxes with Nathaniel’s momentary realization that it is not some strange, inexplicable force of the fabled Sandman/Coppelius that distorts his perception. Instead, his own “heart’s blood,” his repressed desires, catapult him into “the circle of fire,” where he fails to reconcile his fantastic yearning with his grasp on truth.
As the poem concludes, Nathaniel’s momentary realization that it is his own unconscious that summons the Sandman seems to “interpose itself into the circle of fire, so that it came to a stop and the hubbub subsided into the depths” (Hoffman 105). However, the primordial narcissism that he fails to surmount blocks him from any sort of reconciliation between his inner and outer worlds. When “Nathaniel looked into Clara’s eyes […] it was death which gazed at him mildly out of them,” foreshadowing his later plunge into madness and suicide (Hoffman 105). He is entirely deaf to the ominous warning of his own poem; hence, when “he had finished the poem and read it aloud to himself, he was seized with horror and exclaimed: Whose dreadful voice is this?” (Hoffman 105). His romantic and aesthetic ventures are exposed as hollow and futile, for his inability to contend with his repressed desires resurfacing precludes him from gleaning any valuable meaning from his poem (Hoffman 105). As Hoffman’s narrative closes, the prophetic poetic warning comes true. On the precipice of a fortunate marriage with Clara, his unconscious bubbles to the surface to tug and pull at his sanity once again. As he gazes through Coppola’s telescope and sees Clara “standing before the glass,” he is flung back into “the circle of fire,” and his fantastic yearning finally manages to devour him entirely (Hoffman 124). No longer able to repress anything at all, “fire seemed to flash and glow behind” his eyes as they “began to roll” (Hoffman 123). His submission to a muddled and disconcerted perception of reality launches him into pure insanity as he repeats the same phrase first articulated in his poem: “Spin, spin, circle of fire!” (Hoffman 123-4). Spinning round and round in the circle of fire that he can no longer escape from, Nathaniel jumps over the parapet to his death. Lying lifeless on the pavement with “his head shattered” and his psyche fragmented, his madness that had materialized as the final phantasm of the Sandman/Coppelius “disappeared into the crowd” and vanished right there beside him from existence (Hoffman 124). Nathaniel’s poem and Hoffman’s tale come to an end when, while looking into Clara’s eyes, a brief glimpse of a mundane existence ignites the once subdued sparks of his unconscious, and, incapable of any further extinguishing, he “merrily” spins into delirium as the gaze of his deathly desire watches him burn.
Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. 1919. Translated by David Mclintock, Penguin Books, 2003.
Hoffman, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. “The Sandman.” 1816. Tales of Hoffman, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1982, pp. 85-125.
Water Flows, Time Passes: The Nature of Time and the Search for Meaning in To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
In her essay “Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf writes, “life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” Within this halo, the past, the present, memory, emotion, reality, and consciousness continuously flow and interact like waves in an evanescent ocean. In the sea of chaos that is existence, human beings endeavor to disentangle and entwine the threads of existence like puzzle pieces. This longing for unity, the search to discover a pattern in the shadows of the halo, weaves together the fabric of To the Lighthouse. At the time To the Lighthouse was written, a harsh confrontation with reality ensued from the violence and suffering that perpetuated the early twentieth century. As writers and artists like Woolf were forced to reinterpret the human condition within the context of an unfathomable world, unconventional perspectives on the nature of existence emerged. Abandoning the traditional tenets of literature and philosophy, Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce sought to capture and embrace the complexity and mutability of reality and the human condition. Ideas such as the relativity of time and the subjectivity of human perception changed the way literature and art explored what it means to be human. To be human is to travel through the ineluctable passage of time, which came to be conceived as a complex phenomenon of different temporalities and fluctuations rather than as a series of separate points. To the Lighthouse, along with other Modernist literature, interpreted the universe as an inexplicable kaleidoscope of inextricable layers. Within this kaleidoscope, existence, time, and memory seamlessly drift into each other like the gleaming waters beneath a lighthouse, “for nothing was simply one thing.”
The transience of life and the endless search for order amid chaos permeate To The Lighthouse, manifesting within a narrative framework that connects the concepts of memory, change, and death to dismember the questions that haunt the characters, such as the meaning of life or the passage of time. In To the Lighthouse, time acts like a living entity that the past, present, and future endlessly interpenetrate. Time moves through the novel like “clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating [the] questions — ‘Will you fade? Will you perish?” Woolf subverts the orthodox, chronological notion of time as a series of successive events and instead adopts a dualistic theory of time that considers time to be like water – flowing, permeable, and indefinite. This idea of time as a dualistic, dichotomous form embodies the philosophy of Henri Bergson, which argues that two different kinds of time exist. The conventional notion of time considers time to be a linear, chronological connection between the past, present, and future; however, in Bergson’s philosophy and in To the Lighthouse, time can also be a psychological construct of human thought and imagination – a continuous flow of experiences that amalgamates into an absolute unified form. Likewise, in To the Lighthouse, reality is seen as dualistic and hybrid as well. Thus, evoking Bergsonian philosophy, time and reality are dualistic, multifaceted entities that comprise one integrated and inseparable whole that consists of linear time, psychological time, objective reality, and subjective reality. Woolf expresses the idea that reality, and existence as a whole, is like a unified space between truth and illusion, between the real and the unreal.
In To the Lighthouse, Woolf unveils this unified space to reveal the aspects of life that often appear to be invisible, to express the inexpressible, and to understand the incomprehensible. The innermost realization of truth that Woolf endeavors to bring to light is expressed in a particular moment when Mrs. Ramsay, through embracing her solitude, or “nothingness,” undergoes a transcendental experience into a sublime form she describes as “being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.” As she stares out the window and contemplates life, she looks out towards the lighthouse and experiences a momentary loss of self, or, a moment in which her being is no longer separated from the rest of the world; time and reality seem to become one harmonious entity. In this moment of reflection, Mrs. Ramsay feels as though she has become one, integrated whole with the universe; “she felt herself; this self having shed its attachments.” Along with her sense of self, time and reality also unify into this idea of one, harmonious being. In the transient moment experienced by Mrs. Ramsay, “the range of experience seemed limitless”. Through dismissing her sense of sense, she transcends her separation from the rest of the world and for a fleeting moment, experiences a feeling of pure, limitless harmony. Woolf continues to describe the experience, “there was freedom, there was peace. Losing one’s personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity.” For that brief moment, as Mrs. Ramsay feels everything come together and become one – nature, life, art, reality, humanity – it is as if she momentarily discovers the meaning of life.
Thus, for that moment, Mrs. Ramsay momentarily captures the elusive idea that all of the characters search for throughout the entire novel. Each character in To the Lighthouse ultimately longs to answer the same question; Mrs. Ramsay questions, “What was the value, the meaning of things?” while Lily repeatedly asks “What does it mean?” and Mr. Ramsay dedicates his life to searching for an elusive philosophical truth. The characters in To the Lighthouse are driven by an immense desire to find some sort of significance in life, “to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.” At the heart of the novel is the same question that lies at the heart of the human condition: “What does it all mean?” As the characters stare out the window as if looking for an answer, the ocean water continues to flow, the lighthouse continues to beam, and time continues to pass them by. No matter how desperately the characters long to continue searching, time inevitably catches up to them and terminates their search.
Time ineluctably ensnares human beings in their search for meaning. Therefore, there is an inseparable bond between time and the human search for meaning. Time in To the Lighthouse embodies the philosophy of Henri-Louis Bergson, a philosopher with a profound influence over Modernist literature and early twentieth century intellectual thought. In To the Lighthouse and in Bergsonian philosophy, existence takes place in an ever-changing, present which is influenced at every moment by moments that took place in the past; thus, every experience is influenced at every moment by memory. Therefore, the past and present – like experience and memory – are inextricably bound together. Humans cannot perceive the present without having first perceived the past; thus, the past inexorably influences human perception and experience. An experience therefore resembles a form of unification – a connection between past moments and present moments that manifests through one’s memory.
In his book Time and Free Will, Bergson explains the dualistic conception of time and reality that To the Lighthouse captures. For Bergson, just as time can be perceived chronologically, reality can be perceived intellectually. Similarly, like time can be perceived psychologically – a phenomenon he refers to as duration (la durée) — reality can be perceived intuitively; therefore, Bergson, like Woolf, considers existence to be ineluctably dualistic. When one perceives time intellectually and chronologically, time is spatialized and separated into artificial units of quantity, such as minutes, hours, days, and years. Alternatively, the intuitive and psychological perception of time – duration – is more akin to quality, considering time to be like a collection of disparate moments that form a unified whole; “pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.” Memory prevents true separation between the past and present; past moments always trail behind present ones like an inescapable shadow. Bergson suggests that duration – the cohesive flow of time and existence – is the vital force of human life, or what he calls the élan vital. The essence of existence is therefore this unity between the flux of reality and the fluidity of life: “flux is reality and it is the flow of time, it is the very flux of the real that we should be trying to follow.”
Since “the intellect dislikes what is fluid… it turns away from the true vision of time.” Thus, chronological or intellectual time – the time we observe through a clock – is artificial and cannot be considered truth. The intellectual understanding of time remains “concentrated on that which repeats, solely preoccupied in welding the same to the same.” Furthermore, it “retains of the moving reality only eventual immobilities, that is to say, views taken of it by our mind. It symbolizes the real and transposes it into the human rather than expresses it.” Bergson continues, claiming that by associating “the idea of a certain quantity of cause with a certain quality of effect,” the idea is transformed into “the sensation, the quantity of the cause into the quality of effect” and thus, the “intensity, which was nothing but a certain shade or quality of the sensation, becomes a magnitude,” and thus, a copious amount of meaning and significance is lost in intellectual perception. Time and existence can only possess some form of meaning and significance when understood as inner time, or duration, which flows like a “continuously moving stream.” According to Bergson, “The divisions into past, present and future are artificial. The past lives in the present in memory and in its consciousness, and it is in this manner that it shapes the future.” Time is therefore: “the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it a distinct form of the ceaselessly growing image of the past or more probably, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still the heavier load we drag behind us as we grow older.” For Bergson, time is to be considered a dualistic, whole, and continuously moving entity, like the water in To the Lighthouse. Within the “flux of time is reality;” and within reality, life itself “progresses and endures in time.”
Through perceiving time psychologically (time as duration), an attempt to unify the myriad of different moments that reside within one’s consciousness occurs. The attempt is a continuously flowing process, one with no end points and no beginning, in which time becomes heterogeneous, dynamic, and qualitative – like an incessant, unpredictable motion of constant movement and change. In Creative Evolution, Bergson writes: “The existence of which we are most assured and which we know best is unquestionably our own, for of every other object we have notions which may be considered external and superficial, where- as, of ourselves, our perception is internal and profound,” thus suggesting that existence, meaning, and significance, like time, can only be understood through human psychological perception and experience rather than through rigid, static, and artificial constructs such as quantities.
Since humans experience the world through human consciousness, experience presupposes perception. Bergson writes, “no matter how abstract a conception may be it always has its starting point in perception.” Human experiences are therefore like images that exist within the space between perception and reality, between matter and memory. Reality is therefore neither objective nor subjective; reality is nothing without one’s perception of it. Time, seen as duration, is therefore dependent on human perception and the actualization of reality. When one perceives reality, or matter, it becomes “real” and therefore exists, becoming actualized in memory, in the past, and thus, in time. To be human is to exist, to exist is to change, and to change is to endure from moment to moment within the flowing stream that is time – the unified whole of the past, present, and memory. In To the Lighthouse, the sense of purpose in life that the characters seek can be grasped in certain transcendental moments in which the past, present, and future merge into one. In these moments, one encounters the harmonious unification of time and existence and endures an experience so intense that it is portrayed as inexpressible.
To be human is to exist in duration, to traverse through the movements of time, to flow through its streaming waters. It is to pass through every wave, and to live each moment moving closer to death. As the characters in To the Lighthouse traverse through time, continuing to search for meaning, they encounter certain ephemeral moments in which they feel like they temporarily grasp what they have been searching for. These moments of transcendence appear like a vision, epiphany or sublime awakening, and unveil, in an ephemeral glimpse, what seems like a cure for their longing – a fleeting interaction with what feels like the meaning of life.
As Lily Briscoe attempts to paint a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay, she remembers one of these moments of revelation that she had experienced years ago at a dinner party. Her epiphany is sparked when at the dinner party, witnessing the events and experiences happening around her, she realizes that each event is “vanishing even as she looks,” each second is vanishing into a memory, the present is vanishing into the past. After leaving the room, Lily looks back and realizes that “it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past,” thus forcing her to simultaneously witness duration, contemplate the fleeting nature of every moment, and grasp the interconnectedness of time. Similarly, Lily in the present recollects a moment in the past that, through memory, is currently shaping her present reality; she realizes that the interconnectedness of time is inescapable. As the memory of the past penetrates her present mind, she experiences a similar epiphany that allows her to finally finish her painting in the present. Her past and present epiphanies thus merge into one continuously flowing moment that embodies the act of duration itself. Lilly “stepped back into perspective” to contemplate the picture and as she “dipped into the blue paint, she dipped too into the past,” the waves of the past and present simultaneously crashed into each other. Thus, for Lily at that moment, “life has changed completely.”
As Lily paints the portrait of Mrs. Ramsay, the present moment ceaselessly fades into the past, and the past pours into the present through the vessel of memory, the past and present continually disrupting and interrupting each other. As the ripples of time flow into each other, the “piling up of the past upon the past” illustrates what Bergson writes: “in reality, the past is preserved by itself; automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it.”
In “A Sketch of the Past,” an essay from a collection titled Moments of Being, Woolf writes: “The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but it is then that I am living most fully in the present,” describing the same ephemeral epiphany that Lily experiences when she observes the fragments of life unify. This evanescent and transcendental moment, which appears like a confrontation with pure duration, is what Woolf refers to as a “moment of being.” Woolf continues to illustrate these moments:
I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start. But the peculiarity of these two strong memories was that each was very simple. I am hardly aware of myself, but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture.
For Woolf, a “moment of being” occurs when an experience becomes so powerful that a human being temporarily transcends the human condition. In these moments, memory and matter become each other, and the fragmented puzzle pieces of life – past, present, emotion, reality – merge into the sublime “luminous halo of life.” One loses one’s sense of selfhood entirely, and instead becomes the halo itself. The puzzle pieces of life disintegrate and transform into a one unified puzzle – and existence itself metamorphosizes into an endlessly pulsating glow from which the fragments of life itself seem to emanate from. The glow feels timeless, limitless, and euphoric, as if shining light on what it means to be infinite, on the interconnectedness of all. In the midst of continuous change, separation, and chaos, there exists a timeless unity; existence is like striving for a harmonious fusion. When the stars burst into dust, the meaning of life disseminated and scattered as stardust – every speck in the universe longs to become a star once more. Therefore, when the self transcends and merges with reality, when the limits of the physical world disintegrate, and when two specks of life become closer to being a star, a “moment of being” occurs.
While it appears as though the characters are driven by an inexorable search for meaning, they are rather driven by an obscure longing to encounter those moments of being, a desire that they are unaware of that longs for unity. For Woolf, “the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art….we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.” Although it seems like Lily paints to search for the meaning of life, she paints the aching of the human condition – the yearning for fusion. Lily associates the idea of union with the idea of marriage, an association inevitably implanted into her unconscious mind as a consequence of the patriarchal societal norms she desperately tries to escape. She conceals any shred of this desire for unity, reinforcing that “she liked to be alone; she liked to be herself; she was not made for that,” convincing herself that she prefers the opposite of unity – isolation. Yet, her harmonious desires are inevitably exposed when she asks herself: “What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one?” Eventually, the essence of her being is unveiled, “for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired… nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge.” Lily, like the other characters in To the Lighthouse, does not search for a solid answer or a concrete truth as she may believe she does; rather, she searches for those ephemeral moments of unity – for the light that shines from the halo above.
While many moments of being occur in To The Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay is perhaps the character that encounters them the most. Mrs. Ramsay, like Lily and Mr. Ramsay, constantly meditates on life and its fragment, and yet, her reflection possesses a distinctive quality that allows her to continuously transcend into moments of being. Mrs. Ramsay sees her life as a myriad of interconnected images in which the past, present, and future coexist at any time. She sees time as an inextricable labyrinth of layers, and therefore perceives eternity all around her. While Mr. Ramsay and Lily search everywhere for a glimpse of immortality and infinity, Mrs. Ramsay sees time, and therefore life itself, as inexorably eternal. For Mrs. Ramsay, immortality exists through memory:
There it was, all round them…a specially tender piece of eternity… There is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out…in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby, so that again tonight she had the feeling of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.
In this passage, her thoughts seamlessly flow and transform into a moment of being, for a moment of unity is a moment of eternity. In her mind, the passage of time appears like images that resemble the “ripple of reflected lights,” she glances at from the window. Mrs. Ramsay comes closer to unity and thus infinity because she perceives time and reality through the Bergsonian lens of intuition, whereas those around her are ensnared in their intellectual perception.
Mrs. Ramsay comes closest to reaching immortality and eternal significance because she perceives the universe intuitively rather than intellectually, personifying the Bergsonian conception of time and reality. Likewise, time within the narrative framework along with the structure of the novel itself can be considered a personification of the Bergsonian conception of time as duration. The novel is divided into three parts – “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The Lighthouse,” all of which contain a paradox that subverts traditional, linear understandings of time, or what Bergson refers to as the intellectual, quantitative perception, and embodies the Bergsonian idea of duration – a flowing stream of moments in which memory inevitably permeates and thus influences. “The Window” and “The Lighthouse” are the longest sections of the novel, and contain the shortest amount of narrated time, both sections taking place over the course of one evening. Paradoxically, the section in between, “Time Passes,” takes place over ten years, and barely comprises one tenth of the novel. The unconventionally fluid movement of the structure itself therefore depicts the two types of Bergsonian temporality. Woolf abandoned the linear temporality of physical time and instead depicts the psychological temporality of inner time, or the different, immeasurable, experience of temporality of the mind, embracing the Bergsonian conceptualization of time.
To emphasize the psychological and mutable nature of duration, time and memory are treated like free flowing entities that possess an almost tangible form that resembles consciousness, attempting to convey how the passing of time is conceived through human perception. The first section “The Window,” describes the events and moments that occur on one particular evening in the summerhouse of the Ramsay family. As time passes and the evening plays out, the characters experience the events, emotions and moments of the evening distinctively – each person perceives and remembers everything differently; the flow of time is depicted through the character’s internal perspectives. Although a relatively short amount of time passes in the first section, the complexities of human perception create a continuous narrative flow. Memory allows humans to experience the past again, juxtapose the past with the present, and allow the past and present to interact with each other. For instance, ten minutes for one character can feel like ten hours for another. In “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf illustrates the dichotomies of the psychological perception of time; she writes, she can practically relive moments from her childhood but not remember what she discussed with her husband at tea,” certain moments are remembered as more powerful, and perhaps longer, than others. Likewise, time in “The Window” is not measured, but instead treated as it is felt and experienced by the characters who are influenced psychologically and therefore perceive every moment differently, suggesting that time can not be understood objectively. Time is like a continuous flux of perceptions and moments, existing differently for every human being.
The section that follows, “Time Passes,” acts like the opposite of “The Window,” depicting time in an objective, distant manner devoid of human perspective and involvement altogether. To emphasize the lack of emotional interference, significant events, such as death and marriage, are narrated in square brackets and thus depicted as inconsequential, implying the insignificance of human life. The death of Mrs. Ramsay – one of the most significant characters if not the most significant – is briefly mentioned and described as if it were a simple, insignificant matter. As Mr. Ramsay stretches his arms out to embrace his wife, “his arms, though stretched out, remain empty,” and he remembers that she is no longer there, “having died rather suddenly the night before.” The death of the Ramsay children are described with a similar harshness and distance, “Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth,” and “twenty or thirty men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.” While the events of “The Window,” are described with emotionally evocative, highly descriptive, and powerfully profound language, the events in “Time Passes,” are described oppositely. In “Time Passes,” an event as consequential as a death is described in one short sentence, whereas in “The Window,” a quick glance out of a window is described in multiple pages; thus the difference between subjective time and chronological time is laid bare. In “The Window,” time and human existence and perception coexist in unity. The “moments of being” are described with such detail and portrayed as very intense because they possess unity and therefore possess meaning. Mrs. Ramsay stares hypnotically at the lighthouse, “watching with fascination, hypnotized… with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness… and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!” The “moment of being,” although seemingly simple and inconsequential, thus holds immense significance because it is a moment of unity. Alternatively, “Time Passes” portrays time separate from human existence; there is no unity and thus no significance.
The once vibrant and lively summerhouse of the Ramsay family descends into disorder, decomposition and destruction. As time passes, “certain airs, detached from the body of the wind” wander through the house void of human presence as decay permeates the air. Without human perception, time appears to pass with an incomprehensible temporality. If a moment is not perceived, memory ceases to exist; without memory, time leaves behind nothing but decay and entropy. Time without human existence is thus whittled down to nothing more than entropy – a descent into nothingness; if time is not duration, it is destruction.
The third section, “The Lighthouse,” seems to pick up where “The Window” left off, James and Mr. Ramsay on a journey to the lighthouse, as if the decade depicted in “Time Passes” has no consequential significance or meaning. Despite the time that passes in between the two sections, duration and memory allow the past and present to exist simultaneously and interact with each other, linking the events in the two passages together to portray time as a continuously flowing stream rather than a chronological succession of independent events. Memories of the past pervade the minds of the characters as they attempt to make sense of the passage of time and search for some glimpse of significance and meaning within the passage. To remember is to “search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down,” remembering means reliving and reconstructing. After coming across the unfinished painting of Mrs. Ramsay, Lily remembers her “moment of being” at the dinner party. The memory thus links together the past, the “moment of being” she experienced at the dinner, and the present, the “moment of being” she experiences as a direct consequence of the past. As Lily paints, she remembers Mrs. Ramsay in the past while she simultaneously paints her picture in the present, existing in a moment that becomes “a drop of silver in which one dipped and illuminated the darkness of the past.” The continuity lies within the fusion of the different fragments of time. Through memory, the link between the past and present, another “moment of being” is created, experienced by Lily, and transformed into another creation – art. Within the entangled web of time, the past creates the future.
The characters in To The Lighthouse continue to row the boat and paddle down the river of time asking, “what does it mean,” over and over again. Hopelessly entangled in the question itself and chained to the idea of an elusive yet tangible meaning, the characters continuously miss the meaning that glides down the river before them; over and over again, they are too lost in contemplation to experience the attainable pleasure of swimming down the river and embracing the bonds that surround them. The essence of the novel, the quest to the lighthouse, is not an impermanent search for truth, but an endless pursuit of unity. In “The Lighthouse,” Lily endeavors to search for truth through her art by attempting to capture the subtleties of reality and the evanescent nature of time.
As she finally finishes the painting that she started at the beginning of the novel and finishes at the end, she thinks to herself: “It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I had my vision,” At the same time, Mr. Ramsay and the children finally arrive at the lighthouse, the other endeavor that began at the start of the novel and concluded at the end. Throughout “The Lighthouse,” there is a recurring back and forth movement between Lily on the island watching Mr. Ramsay’s drift towards the lighthouse and Mr. Ramsay watching his boat drift away from the island. As Lily moves closer towards the “moment of being,” the vision of unity that allows her to create her painting, Mr. Ramsay grows closer to approaching the lighthouse. In the end, Lily finishes her painting at the same moment that Mr. Ramsay reaches the lighthouse.
The “moments of being” that Lily encounters in To The Lighthouse are what allow her to create art. Memory, the interaction between the past and present, lies at the foundation of these epiphanies, or the visions that ignite creation, such as the vision that Lily has towards the end of the novel. In her endeavor to capture reality, Lily inevitably attempts to unify the subjective (the invisible fragments of existence) with the objective (the visible fragments of existence); she must merge her vision – her subjective memory and “moment of being” with an objective form – the painting itself. Lily attempts to see what she saw ten years ago when she first started the painting, to reclaim the past through her art – to find timelessness in lost time. As “The Lighthouse” continues and her painting progresses, she realizes that lost time can never be lived again, and that “the vision must be perpetually remade.” As she moves towards her final epiphany, the “moment of being” that is her vision, she realizes that the reality she captures through art is ultimately a unification between the world of objects that she perceives and of the recollections and recapturing of the past. Art is therefore the manifestation – or the unification – of matter and memory; it is the palpable manifestation of a “moment of being”; it is a vision of harmony.
The vision of harmony that Lily sees in her painting confronts her question: “What does it mean then, what can it all mean?” To seek unity is to find “some relation between those masses – the wall, the hedge, the tree.” Lily’s vision at the end of the novel thus resembles Mrs. Ramsay’s epiphany in the first section. Staring at the lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay sees a vision herself: “triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steaking stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke,” thus, the epiphanies of Lily and Mrs. Ramsay resembles each other, as a long, steady stroke is the final movement of Lily’s painting. Lily and Mrs. Ramsay ultimately see the same sight: the transfiguration of time in which the scattered fragments of existence, such as dream and truth, or the real and the unreal, merge into one unified whole that is represented through the symbol of the lighthouse.
The lighthouse represents the idea of an “absolute” that lies at the heart of the novel’s philosophy – a synthesis of time and unity that mirrors the unification of physical time and mind time that Bergson refers to as a transfiguration of space-reality and time reality. In “The Lighthouse,” the lighthouse symbolizes the creative, cyclical rhythm of life that longs for unity and a sense of oneness. Upon gazing at the lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsey feels a sense of timelessness and repose – a sense of wholeness. Mrs. Ramsay, as if in a trance, stares into the light and feels “a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out … in the face of the flowing, the fleeting”, and this luminous point she has reached.”
Through the creative recollection that is her painting, Lily recovers lost time through her artistic vision. As she makes the movement with her brush that unites the fragments of her vision, she translates her sense of time into art. She transcends spatial and temporal conceptions and perceives the world through her intuition. She starts to see things as a remnant of the past – a fragmentation of duration. As she turns to her canvas, she reaches her final moment of being at the end of the novel:
There it was – her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the center. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.
In one final stroke, Lily draws, at the center of her painting, the center of her vision – the symbol of the lighthouse. As the passage of time continues throughout the novel, the lighthouse – a symbol of eternity and unity – effortlessly endures. Within the line she paints, Lily catches a glimpse of “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark,” that evoke the same sublime feelings Mrs. Ramsay felt earlier in the novel while staring at the lighthouse herself. In her final stroke, Lily unites the lighthouse and the sea, the dualisms of duration and timelessness, the objective world and the subjective world, and the gap between artistic representation and recollection. As she finishes her painting, everything comes together in a single line, a glimpse of unity, a gimmer of eternity, all of which come together as one symbol: the lighthouse.
Lily discovers that her dream of discovering an existential purpose is nothing but a dream, an impossible desire. The line she draws symbolically represents her realization that meaning will forever elude those who search for it. As the lighthouse emerges at the end of the novel, Lily sees an image of fatality, of the brevity of human existence, and of the transience of life. Upon seeing this existential reflection, she unites these ideas into one final stroke that embraces the concluding sense that life is meaningless. Not only does human life lack a palpable purpose, but human beings, like the characters in To the Lighthouse, are bound to a constant search for an absolute unity, even though it may never be found. Despite endeavoring to transcend their separation and transfigure into some human absolute, the characters in To the Lighthouse are ultimately forced to come to terms with the limits of the human condition. Lily’s vision is the epiphany that life “progresses and endures in time”; she realizes the same revelation that Henri Bergson comes to in Creative Evolution: “Like the universe as a whole, like each conscious being taken separately, the organism which lives is a thing that endures. Its past, in its entirety, is prolonged into its present, and abides there, actual and acting.”
Lily sees the same vision as Bergson – to exist is to endure the lack of visible meaning in life. For Lily, the answer to “What does it mean?” is, therefore, “Nothing…that she could express.” For Woolf, meaning is not a concrete answer but an elusive feeling; while one cannot grasp meaning itself, one can endure it. As time continues to pass by and flow like water, humans endure its waves, hoping to experience a moment of being – to catch a glimpse of the lighthouse. Amidst life’s transient, flowing chaos, Lily feels something harmonious, permanent, and eternal; she catches a glimpse of the lighthouse. Therefore, the epiphany in To the Lighthouse is that meaning is not something that is understood, but something that is felt, and for those who feel it, it feels like unity.
Works Cited
Bergson, Henri, and F. L. Pogson. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. London: George Allen and Unwin; etc, 1959.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. London: Macmillan, 1911.
Bergson, Henri. Matter and memory. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. London: Marshall Cavendish, 1988.
Woolf, Virginia, “Modern Fiction,” (1925), in McNeillie, Andrew, ed., The Essays of Virginia Woolf, cit., vol. IV, 1994.
Woolf, Virginia, and Jeanne Schulkind. Moments of being. 1985.
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter 