SOURCE: “Language, Subject, Self: Reading the Style of ‘To the Lighthouse,’” in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 2, Winter, 1993, pp. 192–213.

In the following essay, Saunders discusses Woolf's style in To the Lighthouse and its relation to the notion of self that she constructs.

I. Preliminary Considerations

The project of this paper is to investigate the relationship of Virginia Woolf's style in To the Lighthouse to concepts of the self—both to establish the significance of this style to the individual “selves” within the novel and to investigate the notion of self in abstracto that is constructed by way of this style. I would emphasize two things from the outset: first, that this is not a paper about how style “parallels” meaning, but about how style itself means and, second, that Woolf's style, like a garden of forking paths, will lead us in various and suggestive directions which...