Colour and Vision in "To The Lighthouse " ( Assignment Paper no - 9)

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  Name :- Parmar Darshna V.                Roll No :- 6
  Year :-  2017-2019
  M. A. :- Sem -3
   Paper Name :-  (9) Modernist
                                 Literature     Assignment topic :- Colour and             Vision in 'To The Lighthousevl Email ID :-     parmardarshna1997@gmail.com
      Submitted to :- Smt. S. B.. Gardi
             Department of English
        M. K. Bhavnagar University




Introduction........


     


     
        To The Lighthouse'  is written by Virginia Woolf in 1920. It is a revolutionary book. Woolf was attempting something quite new in English novel. She wanted to capture, in words , the nature of human consciousness - What it actually feels to be alive.
       
        The novel at some extent - It is a biography of writer herself - Virginia Woolf. readers can feel during reading novel that...                                 
" One  isn't always hurrying to turn over the page, urgently wanting to find out what happens next."
     '
        To The Lighthouse' is in the category of the 20th century literature. So, we may assume that what is it about. Obviously reading modernist literature do not provide the pleasure or delight but it creates anxiety and  it constantly hammering on readers mind.
     
        Thought story of novel is too short, the novel is full of length. One can describe the plot and the main concept of the novel in short also.
     
           To The Lighthouse ' is the unequal lengths of the time covered by each of three sections. The first and the third - " The Window and The Lighthouse "  each occupy less than a day. On the other hand , the middle section " The Time Passes " deals with a span of about ten years.

            Writer - Virginia Woolf attempts to represent the workings of the representation of what was to her most fragile ,dangerous and existing of processes life itself.
Human beings have emotions and feelings. Sometime it is hard and difficult to hide whatever it is.....Hate, Love, Disgust, Sorrow, etc.. The same way , Colours also reflect the instinct emotions and feelings which is more powerful than the word.
     
       At one level, Life is colourful. It is mixture of multicolour but it has one main object and colour which is stood throughout the time. So, each character reflects one colour in the novel : ' To The Lighthouse.
              ' So, let's discuss Colour and Vision in the novel. Colour in ' To The Lighthouse ' by Jack. F. Stewart and Vision in the Lighthouse by ' Glenn Pedersen's articles are base of my assignment.
   
 Colour In To The Lighthouse :
     
        Literature is also considered as art. In literature has pictorial quality through words and words are able to  create images in mind. The word colour is direct connect with the 'Painting.' According to Virginia Woolf ...................

              In the novel - ' To The Lighthouse '  writer Woolf tries to search for spiritual essences which is expressed in light and colour. We find two major perspective to define light and colour :  Creative Source and Creative Artist. Mrs. Ramsay may be introduced as " Creative Source " and Lily  Briscoe as " Creative Artist."

            Colour  is used  as various way like... symbol, radiance, vibration of some feelings etc.. But in ' To The Lighthouse ' Woolf 's art goes beyond impressionism and symbolism towards a flexible form that " does not shot out. "

What Colour reflects ?
 
      Colour indicates the personality, individual qualities of characters. We can understand the nature , and behaviour of characters through colour. The experience of colour relations is more than optional sensation. It is a complex experience hard to put into words, a stimulus and revelation.
     
       " Colour is a sensitive medium for expressing both individual and universal experience."
     
          Mrs. Ramsay identifies with the light with prism through this character this charactec, others are able to stand in their position Lilly Briscoe "do not seek to imitate form, but to create form, not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life."
       
          So many different colours are used in the novel like.. Red, Green, Yellow, Blue, Purple, Black, etc....we find the mixture of colours in one, Through colour, reader can feel positive and negative vibration of the characters.
 
           If  Mrs. Ramsay consider to light as essences , Lily Briscoe consider to  color as the contingent substance of reality and art Through the each part are may come across the detail how each part is portrait with different colour.

     The Window             :- Symbol of.       light

     The Passes              :-darkness.            and silence

     The Lighthouse       :-Mrs. Ram say's spiritual light into voyage and form and colour in Lily's painting.

          It is no doubt that the word ‘Lighthouse’ in the title To the Lighthouse mirrors a symbolic meaning.

        Red and Brown Mrs. Ramsay had a color confusion which reflected her fragmentary mood torn between “the red light of emotion”  and the brown light of “reliability and practicality”.
Mrs.Ramsay described with 'Red'.-His Red-hot pokers, red geraniums. and reddish-brown hedge; the reddish-brown stocking that Mrs, Ramsay is knitting for the lighthouse. Keeper's Son ; her image of James 'all red and ermine on the Bench"; Paul Rayley's blaze of amorous passing ;and Charles Transley's red raucousness. Red color ascribes the male egotism.
 
        Reader  constantly heard  the background sound of Sea which is associated with the Blue colour. Green is associated with Green - illusion and imagination.
Grey-White-Black  Lily Briscoe, while she was trying to complete her picture after Mrs. Ramsay’s death, she always dreamt her as usual lady in a grey cloak” (Lighthouse 204). The reason to portray Mrs. Ramsay in grey is to mirror her neutrality and objectivity through the entire lifespan of her own. To Goethe’s Theory of Colors, “colors throughout are to understanding of the disorder.

       
        Blue is darkness made visible."  - agree with the tonal range of blue from height to depth . Sky to Sea, " bright steel to soft purple" and blue -white to blue-black." The dual extremes of palest and darkest blue relate to the light/darkness duality extremes of palest Mrs.Ramsay being.
   
          Mrs. Ramsay's Spiritual experience is mediated by image of light and darkness. So, Mrs.Ramsay is associated with a whole range of colour. Blue ,may be used as a background to show off other colour.

              In the colour coding of  Ramsay's blue is associated with distance , imagination, short-sightedness; red with closeness , rationality , farsightedness. The long view is free of complexity but unfocused - " Blue and Purple become hopelessly lost to blur in darkness and distance."
           
           In To The Lighthouse, red becomes constructive only under the aegis of Mrs. Ramsay who gives the order to " Light the Candles."
   
        Mrs. Ramsay’s green shawl folded around her shoulders does not just signalize a natural sense of security, but also represents the direction of her chaste as a sign of purity and cleanliness, because “chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life.The representations of colors change from a culture to another, though the green color stands for ‘nature’ all over the world.the green color is frequently addressed. In Christianity, surprisingly, the green color also symbolizes ‘money’. Though Virginia Woolf “was brought up with an aggressive, humanistic atheism” , it is observed that she does not completely represent an anti-religious identity in To the Lighthouse.
 
        Yellow the most luminous colour. None other might wear a yellow garment; yellow was symbol of supreme wisdom and enlightenment. Yellow will be seen as the nearest and largest of colours; Augustus, " drinking soup , is very large and calm in the failing light, and monumental and contemplative.

Vision in to The Lighthouse 
   
            Here, we discuss the vision in " To The Lighthouse" .Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe both are totally opposite to each   other . At the surface level it is considered that novel is the tribute of Mrs. Ramsay . As we all already know the stereotypical Indian culture Mrs. Ramsay is presented as same as Indian women presented in their literature.
             
  Woman can't paint and write."
      
      She does that and prove women's identity as intellectual as man. Both are remarkable characters in the novel because Mrs. Ramsay is alive because of her woman hood only and Lily Briscoe for her art. Both have their vision. - some extent it is different then even at some level it is similar.
was now bearing down upon her she gazed steadily until his closeness revealed to her that something had happened, someone had blundered. But she could not for the life of her think what". Mrs. Ramsay is repeatedly described as being short-sighted; she often sees in error, or not at all. But on the contrary, at the end of the novel Mr. Ramsay looked back at the island from the sea "with his long-sighted eyes ".
     

          Both Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay live in the presence of its reality. Symbolically, their perceptions of reality are usually interlocked with the Lighthouse, in her mystical experience; Mrs. Ramsay identifies the experience with the third stroke of the Lighthouse. For Lily Briscoe, as for Mrs. Ramsay, the Lighthouse symbolizes her vision of life. When Mr. Ramsay lands on the shore of the Lighthouse, Lily simultaneously finishes her painting which expresses her vision of life. Fulfillment of Lily Briscoe's vision completely establishes the nature of the Ramsay family, and added leitmotivs and images of window and lighthouse, land and sea, repeat the theme on the symbolic level until at the end the unity of the painting is complete when Lily Briscoe has had her vision. Mrs. Ramsay is alienating her son from his father and seeking to divert her husband's attention away from James. James's Oedipus complex is clearly nurtured and encouraged by his mother.

               Lily finishes her picture and puts the tree in the very middle of the picture. The tree placed in the middle indicates that Lily, the representative of women independence, has managed to restore the truth: Woman is the real mother of the world, but not man. Women should and can learn to write their history in their own discourse. That the blankness of the picture is finally filled means that women eventually learn to express themselves in their own way. It is Lily’s perseverance and self-sacrifice that make her picture complete. Lisa Williams says that “Lily is like a bee drawn to the intangible…Lily’s unfulfilled lesbian longing for this Mrs. Ramsay, the icon of Victorian womanhood, leaves her completely

isolated.

Thank you
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