Dialectic of Knowledge and Intimacy: Reading Virginia Woolf's ‘To the Lighthouse’ in the Time of Pandemic ‘New Normal’

Abstract

Virginia Woolf is perhaps should be most celebrated for her experimentations in the form of the novel and her playing with time, stream of consciousness and narrative point of view, all of which are very sophisticated in To the Lighthouse and change the novel from straight storytelling to a much more experimental and a multidimensional of a literary form. What interests in this paper that she does that formal experimentation, while at the same time dealing with some of the key themes of scepticism and human connection of intimacy and knowledge that are important as modernism unfolds in the early 20th century. It is an attempt to examine some of those ideas and how they are 'consumed' in her fiction To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf was considered 'the ordinary' or 'the everyday' and she did so by focusing on family dynamics to underscore the key issues afflicting European society at the beginning of the 20th century. The moments of sadism and alienation of World War I and Spanish flue as depicted in To the Lighthouse can be juxtaposed to the horrors of Covid-19 Pandemic time. It is worth revisiting the philosophical inclinations of To the Lighthouse.