ELIZABETH ANDREWS MCARTHUR

 FOLLOWING SWANN’S WAY: TO THE LIGHTHOUSE 

IN HER UNPUBLISHED reading notebooks, Virginia Woolf reveals her awe at the "tremendous sensibility & curiosity & intelligence" of the early volumes of Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche de Temps Perdu. She writes that Proust "Notices every thing: the suppleness, the fluidness—as if he can’t keep pace," and she is especially impressed with his ability to "make everything concrete. Even touchable." Proust has an enormous influence on Woolf’s writing, one that extends from her first reading of his early work in 1922 until at least 1934, when she mentions she has delayed finishing the Recherche "for years" because it is "so magnificent." Throughout this period, Woolf’s diaries, letters, and essays are filled with references to Proust, and display what scholars have called a "mixture of fascination and dread" and a profound "anxiety of his influence." In a 1922 letter to Roger Fry, Woolf writes: "Proust so titillates my desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry . . . Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me; it becomes an obsession."

This "obsession" worries Woolf: she claims that Proust is so "persuasive" that she can’t read him while correcting her own work and that her 1925 masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway achieves "nothing . . . compared with Proust." Despite this, Woolf remains immersed in reading Proust throughout the mid-1920s as she composes To the Lighthouse, which bears a strong resemblance to Swann’s Way, the first volume of Proust’s Recherche. This essay argues that rather than merely imitating Swann’s Way, To the Lighthouse interrogates several of its assumptions, particularly those made about the position of women, the relation of an individual to society, and the limitations of narrative voice. Regarding the first category, Woolf endows her female characters with an interiority largely lacking in Swann’s Way by giving her feminine-maternal archetype (Mrs. Ramsay) and her feminine-non-maternal archetype (Lily Briscoe) strong interior voices, extensive imaginative vision, and creative agency. Regarding the relation of an individual to society, Woolf replaces Proust’s steeple of Combray with the image of an isolated lighthouse to demonstrate some of the potentials of individual existence outside the parameters of the social hierarchy. Finally, regarding narrative voice, Woolf transforms Proust’s description of an empty church existing in the fourth dimension of time into a narrative about a house in which time passes observed only by airs, and as such creates a narrative structure that does not require the presence of a human observing subject.

To understand Proust’s influence on Woolf, it is helpful to know which volumes (and editions) Woolf read at the time she composed To the Lighthouse. According to Clive Bell, whose Proust was published in 1928 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the French version of Du Côté de chez Swann was first published in 1913 "at the author’s expense, and fell as flat as a pancake." Although Gallimard republished the novel in 1917, Bell didn’t obtain his first copy until 1919. Woolf’s close friend Roger Fry received a copy a year earlier than Bell and began reading Woolf selections in 1918. However, as late as 1922, Woolf still has not begun reading on her own. In January she tells E.M. Forster: "Everyone is reading Proust. I sit silent and hear their reports. It seems to be a tremendous experience." When she does finally start, she is astounded. In an October letter to Fry, Woolf declares it is "as if a miracle is being done before my eyes . . . One has to put the book down and gasp."

Why did Woolf wait so long to begin reading Proust? 1922 is the year of C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s publication of the first English translation of Swann’s Way. Contrary to Floris Delattre’s assumption that Woolf read Proust in the original, Woolf’s French does not seem sufficient in the early 1920s to appreciate the complexity of Proust’s evocative allusions or his use of tenses. In a 1923 letter to the French painter Jacques Raverat, Woolf asks, "But how does one learn the language? I must and will. I want to know how the French think." A year later she writes Molly MacCarthy that she is still "pining to speak." Early evidence that Woolf is able to compose basic French sentences comes in a 1925 letter to Vanessa Bell in which Woolf shares some gossip in the present tense, with only one reference to the past, written in the simple form. This passage also contains several small grammatical errors.

Based on this evidence, it seems highly unlikely that Woolf would have appreciated Proust in French in 1922. Furthermore, Woolf’s unpublished reading notes in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection contain line references that correspond exactly with the page numbers in the first edition of Moncrieff’s 1922 translation. Indeed, as I show below, Woolf appropriates entire phrases from the Moncrieff translation of Swann’s Way into To the Lighthouse, phrases which likely would have been worded differently had she translated them herself.