An Agnostic's Daughter's Apology: Materialism, Spiritualism, and Ancestry in Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Described by its author as "the most difficult abstract piece of writing,"¹ the "Time Passes" section of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse has long puzzled readers. But no one has yet addressed what is most peculiar about it—the way it seems to flout Woolf's own prescription for composing a novel. When Woolf began formulating her aesthetic in the early 1920s, she promoted her vision of the modern novel by defining it against the materialistic fiction of Edwardian authors like Arnold Bennett.² Whereas Woolf wanted to write fiction that captures "life itself," the unfettered spirit of her characters,³ she tells us that Bennett's fiction captures only the surface of life: his novels, like his characters, resemble houses in which no one is at home.⁴ To theLighthouse, in so many ways, fulfills Woolf's vision of a modern novel; and "Time Passes"—as the most daring element in the novel, and one that looks ahead to the visionary quality of The Waves—would seem far removed from Bennett and the Edwardians. And yet, the outstanding feature of "Time Passes" is nevertheless an empty house; in Woolf's own words, "I have to give [in "Time Passes"] an empty house, no people's characters, the passage of time, all eyeless & featureless with nothing to cling to."⁵

How can we make sense of this? What is Woolf's emblem of degraded materialism—which she had apparently turned her back on to write novels like To theLighthouse—doing in the heart of this defiantly modern novel? One is tempted to conclude that Woolf, uneasy with the materiality of the abandoned house, makes time pass so quickly in this section so that she may rush past its deadening effect.⁶ But such an interpretation does not explain why Woolf felt she had to draw this symbol of materialism into her novel, or how the lyricism of "Time Passes" is compatible with it. We also need an interpretation that can explain the empty house's centrality in Woolf's narrative—for the design of To theLighthouse makes "Time Passes" stand between the failures and successes of her characters. When Lily Briscoe returns to the house in part three of the novel, "The Lighthouse," she is finally able to complete the painting she had left unfinished in part one, "The Window," while the trip to the lighthouse that James had desired ten years earlier is also completed by surviving members of the family. Where does the difference lie, if not in the empty house in part two?

The success Woolf's characters experience in "The Lighthouse" in fact depends on the fortune of the house in "Time Passes," but to understand how this is so we first need to trace Woolf's debate with Bennett back to a surprising cultural context. When Woolf opposes her writing to that of the materialists, she is essentially aligning herself—and modern art—with the position that spiritualists in the nineteenth century staked out against scientific naturalism and materialism. The idea that Woolf may be using this aging cultural debate to promote her modern aesthetic may seem unlikely, but the link is confirmed by the manuscripts of "Time Passes"; here Woolf resumes the debate she had earlier conducted with the Edwardian materialists, but in the meantime the empty house in her novel has clearly become a token of the materialist universe: a world without a knowable god, in which evolution (time passing) changes the living without any certain divine guidance, and in which people are probably bodies without immortal souls. It was precisely this view of the universe that so strongly moved her parents' generation; and it is the specter of Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, that ultimately haunts the materialism Woolf first criticizes in her Edwardian forebears and later monumentalizes in the...