Re-Creating the Past: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and the Poetics of Loss, Grief, and Reconciliation
Abstract
The article explores Virginia Woolf’s poetics of loss, grief, and reconciliation in her novel To the Lighthouse. Woolf uses her meticulously structured narrative to examine the implications of humanity’s propensity and exigency to revisit the past. The retrieval of the bygone permeates the novel in multifarious ways: through memory’s meandering pathways, sorrowfulness, fantasizing, meditation, regret, and spiritual pain. Above all, Woolf invites us to embark, alongside her characters, on two recollective journeys: aesthetic, via a creative process, and a psychical-physical trip to the place of one’s dreams. Both aesthetic and physical voyaging prompt a possibility to reconsider the past; to examine, interpret, and understand. This essay draws upon diverse angles of vision to hermeneutically and, thus, inclusively investigate the theme of nostalgia in the novel. It draws on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of facticity and aletheia alongside Paul Ricoeur’s conceptualization of promise. The essay also uses Svetlana Boym’s distinction between reflective and restorative nostalgia. Employing these perspectives furthers the still underdeveloped study of the poetics of nostalgia in Woolf’s oeuvre.
Keywords:
Heidegger, Ricoeur, Woolf, Boym, loss, grief, nostalgiaReferences
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