SOURCE: “The Waters of Annihilation: Symbols and Double Vision in ‘To the Lighthouse,’” in Form and Meaning in Fiction, The University of Georgia Press, 1975, pp. 340–58.

In the following essay, Friedman argues in favor of multiple interpretations of the symbolism in To the Lighthouse, particularly because of Woolf's belief in the supremacy of the individual's inner life over any artificially imposed outer reality.

So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea, which had scarcely a stain on it, … upon distance: whether people are near or far from us.

(To the Lighthouse, p. 284)¹

While there is general agreement that To the Lighthouse centers on questions of order and chaos, permanence and change, detachment and involvement, intellection and intuition, male and female, critical unanimity disappears in the actual tracing out of these themes and the analysis of the patterns of imagery evoking them. Thus, for example, it is...