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Comparing Dubliners and To the Lighthouse
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Comparing Dubliners and To the Lighthouse
In Dubliners and To the Lighthouse, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf explore the depressing results of lives devoid of growth or meaning versus those who dare to live their lives in spite of all strife and adversity. Joyce and Woolf are both concerned with the meaninglessness of stagnant lives, the first operating in pre-WWI Ireland, the second in England during and after the war. "The Dead" and To the Lighthouse both reveal the despair of lives that occupy but do not fill the short span of time between birth and inevitable death.
With "The Dead", Joyce brings his lament for Ireland's plight to its depressing yet strangely peaceful conclusion. Like all the previous stories in Dubliners, "The Dead" gives the reader a heavy dose of the social depravity of an Ireland torn by internal war. Everyone in the story seems so caught up in remembering the faded glory of the past that the living have become even more stagnant and perished than the dead themselves. Aunt Julia appears first as a faded flower: "her hair...was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face. ...[She had] the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was or where she was going" (187-188). Even this initial description seems to be of one near or even past death. Even while singing more beautifully than she ever had (202-203), she seems more prepared for her funeral than "Arrayed for the Bridal". She has both authored and, for every Christmas party she has ever thrown, performed this song about a wedding, and yet has never herself married or produced children. Her life, though intermittently beautiful while it has lasted, will soon end in obscurity, fruitless, childless, "wasted", as her ...
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...ort of lasting meaning. What the lamented heroes of old had, and the zombie-like characters of the present generally lack, is the knowledge that the formation and maintenance of emotional bonds between human beings are the only meaningful enterprise of the human spirit and the only worthwhile endeavor of the human life. Both authors make it clear that those who spend their lives going through the motions of an unemotional society waste their lives as slowly and painfully as their bodies waste away. For them, the only way to truly live one's life is to follow the feeling, the passion of the soul.
Works Cited:
Benstock, Bernard. Critical Essays on James Joyce. G.K. Hall & Co. Boston, Massachusetts: 1985.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Washington Square Press, 1998.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989.
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