Virginia Woolf’s To the Light House: Revelation of Sublime in Privileged Moments

Abstract

Woolf’s narrator, in To the Lighthouse experiences the privileged moment in line with the sublime of Longinus, the epiphany of Joyce, and the Wordsworth’s concept of spot of time. The closure of Woolf’s fiction coincides with Lily’s completion of the painting with a flash of vision, and with the family’s arrival to the lighthouse, an ultimate destination of the excursion. The family excursion to the final destination of the lighthouse corresponds to the artist’s final stroke and the novelist’s closing line, and thus, marking an experience of the privileged moment of sublime that an individual can experience in his or her living process. The article qualifies the concept of sublime while exploring it in To the Lighthouse.