So today we move on from the depth psychology of Sigmund Freud to Virginia
Woolf.
One of the great novelists of the twentieth century, a writer who expanded
the boundaries of her genre, a writer whose, whose sensitivity to politics and
to family life, and to aesthetics and philosophy was really extraordinary.
While at the same time her ability to tell a story that was intensely moving and eye
opening, is rare, has rarely been seen in the history of literature.
Certainly, To The Lighthouse, one of the, one of the great books of the 20th century
and a book for our purpose one of the reasons we read it sure it's experimental
and formal.
I hope you have had a chance to read it and see some of the experiments with form
a point of view.
But we also read it because it, it represents a chan, a shift away from the
concerns of modernism of finding the really real, by digging deeper and deeper
to some foundation toward understanding of, of knowledge as intimacy.
Rather than finding the really real, finding the thing that you can be closest
to the person you can be closest to the phenomena that you can have intimacy with.
I hope this becomes clear as we move through the novel.
Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf was part of a group that has stimulated the
imagination of historians and literary critics for a long time, the Bloomsbury
group.
And you can go various places online and find out different things about
Bloomsbury.
It was an extraordinary group of, of, of intellectuals, and artists and writers who
in the ver, beginning decades of the twentieth century came together out of
friendship and shared political convictions.
That is they wanted a society with greater equality and less violence.
And, but most importantly they, they shared a commitment to the arts and to
aesthetic principles and, and friendship.
Some of the people involved in that were of course Virginia Woolf and her husband
Leonard, Clive and Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keens probably the person's name
most familiar to most of you from his work In economics, a EM Forster and Lytton
Strachey.
A, a whole group of artists who, who defied convention in order to expand their
art.
They, they saw, middle class morality as hypocritical in many cases.
And they wanted to go beyond that, although they were very much middle class
people almost all.
They wanted to go beyond middle class morality, bourgeois morality.
Go beyond convention in terms of friendship, in terms of sexuality, in
terms of art making, to find something that would be more meaningful and less
violent and less hypocritical.
So Bloomsbury was a nest for Virginia Woolf, a place where she found sustenance
and support, and they found some ideas that certainly link the members of this
group together.
And, and the ideas seem to come mostly from a philosopher named G.E Moore.
G.e Moore, who wrote in early days of analytic philosophy, that is a philo, a
philosophy that tries to clarify things by showing what we can count on and what we
can't, what, what is an illusion.
And more along with Bertrand Russell who certainly intersected with folks in this
group too.
Moore and Russell and others, we'll read some Wittgenstein next week.
They were re, responsible for moving philosophy on the whole toward the
sciences, towards logic and mathematics, and towards more precision.
But that part of the philosophy [laugh] wasn't what attracted the Bloomsbury
group.
What attracted the, the Bloomsbury group to Moore was Moore's ethics and asthetics.
Because Moore made the, the argument that no scientific or logical deduction of the
good would be compelling, would be correct, that the, that the idea of the
good was primary.
You couldn't deduce it from other things.
And so the ethics for Moore was not empirical and not, not scientific.
And intrinsic goods, the goods, things that are good in themselves, they don't
have to be interrelated, they're not systematic.
That's what Moore, and, and to that ex, the other analytic philosophers did, they
showed you what things fell apart as systems, and what things held together as
systems.
And Moore said, ethics and aesthetics, they don't actually hold together as
systems, at least the intrinsic goods, the ones that hold together as a system.
But that doesn't, here's where Moore was attractive to Bloomsberg, that doesn't
make intrinsic goods any less valuable, any less good.
And In fact the, the intrinsic goods like friendship, like beauty, like, art, that
these, love, that these intrinsic goods stood on their own.
And a commitment to them structured your other beliefs, rather than your other
beliefs leading you to have a commitment to friendship or love or beauty.
So Moore was an analytic philosopher.
But one of the things he tried to show was that and no matter how much precision you
use, and no matter how much scientific, scientifically, organized argument you
use, you could not actually define the good.
Every time we define the good, we actually, we're just substituting one
thing we liked for the concept of the good.
And so for Moore, that was a liberating analysis, because it allowed you to, to
say that not approving her notion of the good was right, but to articulate why you
held the notion you did, because it could not be disproven by any logical means.
It was a, it was an, an assertion of preference, not an empirical observation
and not a logical deduction.
Goodness is indefinable, goodness is not de, reducible to anything else.
And you held some things as intrinsically good, but they didn't have, actually have
to cohere into a system.
And so for Moore, in his ethics, and he's, he's one of the founders of what is now
called meta ethics.
For Moore, friendship, love, and art became he articulated as core values, core
expressions of the good.
And for Bloomsbury this was this, remember, this, this, this was the, the,
the mother's milk.
The, the, the friendship held them together, not because of ideology, not
because of religion, but just for friendship, because they loved each other.
Love was not reducible to anything else, not to happiness, not to pleasure, love
was its own thing.
And aesthetics stood alone, aesthetics wasn't reducible to anything else.
And that the love of art didn't have to satis, didn't have, didn't have to show
you that if you, if you did art, it would make you better at math.
As like we do in America now.
Right?
If you, if you, look, if you learn how to play the piano as a child, you do well on
your math SAT's.
Right?
Rather than saying well, learning to play the piano is a good in itself, oh no, no,
no.
We, we, we do that because it helps you get a job one day, so you can be hap,
unhappy for the most of your life rather than like, say learning to drive actually
is a good insight.
No, learning to drive helps you think, it helps you think, solves problems, solves
problems, makes it good for a corporation, corporation will hire you, and then you
can be unhappy.
[crosstalk] But, but, but for these guys learning to draw, or learning to play the
piano, or learning to read a poem, didn't happen to be justified in terms of how
much money you would make later on.
Because actually, no one actually says that making money is the highest good,
even in America.
They just act as if there importance.
And Moore and the Bloomsbury group said no, no, art is its own thing, it doesn't
have to be justified in other terms, so too friendship, so too love.
The beginning of, To the Lighthouse, as you do remember, I'm, I'm going to read
mostly from this, this edition, the Harcourt a, book addition, the, the very
beginning of the, of the novel is this, Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow,
said Mrs. Ramsay.
But you'll have to be up with the lark, she added.
If it's, yes, if it's fine tomorrow.
Her, the mo, mother, Mrs. Ramsay, reassuring her son, reassuring her
son, James, that yes, we will go to the lighthouse tomorrow, if it's fine.
And the sense of yes, I the mother will give you what you need, this reassurance,
this comfort, he wants so desperately to get in a boat.
He's a little boy, go out to the lighthouse.
And, she provides him with hope, with connection, with assurance, with truth.
I mean, she does, he does say, conditionally, if it's fine if it's fine,
but, she knows, she's supporting his belief, she's supporting belief.
And then on this first page of the novel along comes Mr Ramsey, the patriarch of
the, of the book, a philosopher and Mr. Ramsey says but it won't be fine tomorrow,
but it won't be fine tomorrow.
Here is the voice of science the voice of knowledge and the voice of disappointment.
And that is the structure of the novel.
Mrs Ramsay, the maternal voice is the voice of reassurance, of belief, of
support, of intimacy.
The boys are standing between her legs right in the beginning.
She's, they're, they're close physically.
And Mr Ramsay, he's walking around, he's, he's, he's striding, often has his pipe.
Mr. Ramsey's the voice of knowledge, of, of
objectivity and this is the struc, these are the structures of the family.
Daddy is the voice of reason and law, Mommy the voice of intimacy.
You don't have to be Freud to see the, the oedipal dynamics at play here.
Right?
And Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, were actually the publishers of
Freud in English and in, in, in, in England for a long time.
And still today their edition is known as the standard editions.
Be that as it may, let's go back to the beginning of the book.
The, the, the mother, this, this figure of intimacy let me just show you a picture of
her.
She this is a picture of Julia Steven, Virginia Woolf's mother.
Now, she is not Mrs. Ramsey exactly, but she is certainly a
model for Mrs. Ramsey.
And you see Julia Stevens.
This is a photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, a great Victorian photographer.
Julia Stevens looks like a pre-Raphaelite beauty here, does she not?
She's with her flowing hair and, and kind of inviting personage.
But just, just, just to, you'll get a sense of the structuring device when I
show you the next photo here.
Of, of Mr. Steven, Virginia Woolf's father, Leslie
Steven.
Yeah.
He looks scary, he's a scary looking guy and there are lots of pictures you can
find on the web.
He, himself was writing philosophy or philosophically oriented books, and was a
scholar and was left to raise the children when, when Leslie Steven died at a young
age.
So, these are like structure Virginia Woolf's life, and what structure ta, to
the lighthouse.
I want to go through ja, ju, just by talking with you a little bit about some
of the key characters, and what they are meant to represent for us in terms of the
themes of our course.
And one of the first characters we are introduced to is, is Mr.
Tansley.
You remember Tansley?
He's, he's a lower class person.
He, he always reminds us.
Right?
I am from the lower classes.
I don't have all the advantages that these Ramsay children have.
There are many of them.
Right?
There are many of these Ramsay kids.
I had to work my way up, I had to work my way up.
And, this is really important in, in my class here at Wesleyan, when we talk about
this, I try to get our students to say, what does this, what does class division
mean to you today where at, at Wesleyan, and, and students talk about the different
levels of wealth.
Here we have a lot of students on scholarship and, who are able to go to
school without paying high tuition.
But still when they're here, there are differences of, of social class,
differences of wealth.
But most of the time those are obscured by social life at the university.
When you're at a residential university th, things often work that way.
But in England at the time this novel was written social class was, was, was, was
much more visible, and for Tansley it means, I have to work for a living.
[laugh] I don't have an independent income, an independent income is what sets
somebody else free.