"I meant nothing by The Lighthouse": Virginia Woolf's Poetics of Negation

Virginia Woolf's recurrent "glooms" and the experience of "non-being" (her terms)—the dark aspect of her lifelong struggle with bipolar mental illness—are reflected in her fiction through a distinct and recurrent negative vocabulary. I argue that the marked meanings of nothing and its variants occur frequently and across a number of epistemological registers in her now-canonical To the Lighthouse. Negative diction functions not simply as a syntactical element that appears to a greater or lesser extent in all discourse, literary and otherwise, but as a concentration of linguistic cues that underscore and advance the narrative's thematic concerns. What I term the poetics of negation may be understood in semantic, psychological, historical, and formal senses, not only exemplifying Woolf's close acquaintance with negation but further securing her semantic links to modernist preoccupations.