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12 - To the Lighthouse and biblical language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2014

By
James Wood
Edited by
Hannibal Hamlin  and
Norman W. Jones
James Wood
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Hannibal Hamlin
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
Norman W. Jones
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Summary

The Rainbow (1915) and To the Lighthouse (1927) are the most religious of modern secular English novels. But whereas D. H. Lawrence expressly mobilizes a host of biblical motifs (Creation, Eden, the Flood, Resurrection, the Trinity), Virginia Woolf’s novel is stealthily biblical, and its visionary power all the stronger for the submersion and ghostliness of its biblical allusions.

Perhaps the central question of To the Lighthouse is “what will endure”? In different ways, the Ramsay family, along with various guests, ponder again and again the hopes and anxieties of one of the greatest of the Psalms, 90, the text that most canonically measures man’s limited lease on life (“threescore years and ten”) against God’s cosmic tenure (“For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night”):

So teach us to number our days …

Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil.

Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children.

And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

(Ps. 90:12, 15–17)
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Chapter
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The King James Bible after Four Hundred Years
Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences
 , pp. 253 - 268
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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