The endlessly delightful Heather from section 305 generously agreed to share this gem of a hebdomadal responding to the prompt about epiphanies in To the Lighthouse. (She sent it a few weeks ago, of course, though I just read it yesterday.) One of the pleasures of reading so many hebdomadals in a row has been the chance to run into so many gob-stopping readings: I really want to thank all of you for the work you put in to really thinking through some of the philosophical and stylistic underpinnings of the work we've read this semester -- there are too many excellent essays to feature them all here without drowning people in glorious analysis. Consider Heather's work here as a tribute to the good work so many of you have done these past few weeks.
Epiphanies allow for insight not only into the minds and lives of specific people in the story but more general truths as well. Epiphanies also allow for the stream of consciousness form to have meaning. Without epiphanies, stream of consciousness would just be a jumble of thoughts and ideas, personal and about the external world. Narrative events are different from epiphanies because they have no internal power or outlook. Narrative events are purely external. They create the frame, the setting, the place in the outside world where epiphanies occur. Narrative events drive the narrative and create the skeleton of any story. Epiphanies fill in the gaps, the meat of the story in characters’ thoughts, emotions, feelings, etc…Epiphanies depend on events, are created in and through events. Without events, epiphanies could not be. Lily’s epiphany about marriage comes years after the actual event when Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay have eight children. “So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball…And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife” (72). Not only is the event related to this moment from years ago, the actual marriage, but also an event in the present, Prue and Jasper throwing a ball. Epiphanies bring together, in this instance, past (Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s marriage), the present (Prue and Jasper’s game), and the future (Lily’s possible marriage to William Bankes).
Though events set the stage for epiphanies, many times the epiphanies come at different times in relation to certain events. When we learn of the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, Prue, and Andrew, there are no epiphanies relating to the events themselves and the events that surround it until later in the story. The significance of events is to tell the audience what has happened in the characters’ lives we’re reading about. I think it’s important Lily is the only one who gets epiphanies because she is outside the spheres of influence, outside the sphere of connections, more accurately. She is not married like Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay or about to be like Minta and Paul. Her parents aren’t in the story and she’s not one herself. She is not like anyone else in the story. She has no great work completed or fame achieved in the external world. She has few friends, few acquaintances. She seems to always be on the outside, separated from the bias that could affect what she sees and how she sees it. Because she is not connected, she is able to see more, experience more, because she is not closed off or tied down. Her last epiphany, possibly the greatest, is seen at the end and deals with watching Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James finally reaching the lighthouse. “‘He has landed,’ she said aloud. ‘It is finished’… It was done; it was finished…I have had my vision” (208-209). If Lily had been in the boat with Mr. Ramsay, James, and Cam she would not have had the ability to see what she saw. If she had been part of the Ramsay family or gotten married, she would not have seen what she saw. It is her disconnectedness that allows her to step back and see the bigger picture. Not only does she see the bigger picture but she can see where all the smaller scenes fit into that bigger picture. Making herself separate makes her aware.
In Middlemarch, many different people have epiphanies, symbolizing how disconnected the people in Middlemarch are from their own lives. Dorothea receives hers when she realizes it is neither a sin nor a crime for her to marry for love. She realizes she loves Will and the notion comes as an epiphany because she had not known it before, had not realized it was ok to love and to marry for love and not just for duty or honor. Lydgate experiences his epiphany when he realizes he has lost all control of his life and it’s falling down around him. He tried so hard to please others, mostly his wife, to fit it, and do what was good for society that he forgot to live for himself. When that happened, his life got worse and worse, and farther out of his control. His epiphany grounds him again and by then it’s too late to do anything to save himself which he also realizes. The epiphanies seen in “The Dead” are very personal to Gabriel, about him and seen (realized) by him. There is a much more narrow scope of vision in “The Dead” and though the epiphanies cover a wide array of characters, there is still a single voice they focus on and a specific person, not the world or more general life questions that is affected and/or changed. In To the Lighthouse, the audience also knows what the epiphanies are, to whom they occur and are about, and what they pertain to. There are questions posed throughout the story that the epiphanies give answers to. In Heart of Darkness, the epiphany that comes is very abstract and general, never quite pinned down. Though we, as the audience, can assume that any epiphany will deal with what the heart of darkness actually is we never know. We may get some ideas but nothing is ever made concrete or obvious. In To the Lighthouse, we see the buildup and resolution, or conclusion to almost every epiphany. They reveal secrets of life to the characters themselves and to the world which would otherwise remain forever hidden from view.
