SOURCE: “Mythic Patterns in ‘To the Lighthouse,’” in PMLA, Vol. LXXI, No. 4, September 1956, pp. 547–62.

In the following essay, Blotner argues for a mythic reading of To the Lighthouse, maintaining that both a coherent narrative plot and the final meaning of the novel can be located in the character of Mrs. Ramsay, who, according to Blotner, embodies the myth of the “Primordial Goddess” that includes the triad of Rhea, Demeter, and Persephone.

I

The impulses and convictions which gave birth to Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own carried over into Virginia Woolf's fiction. Their most powerful expression is found in To the Lighthouse. But something, probably her strict and demanding artistic conscience, prevented their appearance in the form of the intellectual and argumentative feminism found in the first two books. In this novel Virginia Woolf's concept of woman's role in life is crystallized in the character of...