the Lighthouse” by Patricia Jewell

Shocks of the Past: Attending to Childhood Trauma in Virginia

Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse

Patricia Jewell, Smith College

In her autobiographical essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf reflects on the most vivid memo-

ries of her childhood. In the process, she realizes that “many of these exceptional moments brought with them

a peculiar horror and a physical collapse; they seemed dominant; [herself] passive” (Woolf 72). Her young,

fictional characters frequently experience similar moments of passivity in the face of horror. Traumatic epi-

sodes mar childhood memories in Woolf’s memoirs and novels. Woolf scholars acknowledge this pattern in her

memoirs, but they tend to steer away from the horror that the fictional children in her novels endure—perhaps

because it would be too easy to slip into the trap of imposing Woolf’s personal narratives onto her fiction. For

the purposes of my argument, I do read Woolf’s own childhood history alongside her fictional narratives of

early trauma, but instead of consigning her fiction to the realm of veiled autobiography, I argue that the parallels

in Woolf’s memoirs and her fiction share a fixation on how we act out and work through childhood trauma later

on in life.

By putting these moments into words, Woolf demonstrates a rather adult capacity to diminish the shock

of childhood trauma through articulation. Instead of romanticizing childhood, Woolf exposes its darker sides

with the wisdom of a retrospective narrator. She foregrounds premonitions of death, feelings of fear, and har-

bingers of inevitable horror among the distractingly wholesome activities of childhood. In my texts of interest,

Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse, children repeatedly fall victim to intensely unpleasant emotional expe-

riences. Many of these episodes bear notable resemblances to Woolf’s own childhood memories, but I do not

simply want to read Woolf’s biography onto her fiction. To do so would be an injustice to the larger interests

of her work. Rather, I draw these connections to illuminate how Woolf reenacts (as much in her fiction as her

autobiographical work) the retrospective impulse to make sense of seemingly senseless childhood horror from

74 Before I begin my analysis, I want to re-emphasize that it can be misleading to insert too much of a writ-

er’s personal life into their fiction (or vice versa). Drawing such connections can be enlightening at times. How-

ever, making inferences about a piece’s intentions based on biographical parallels runs the risk of ignoring craft

and reducing a writer’s fiction to disguised personal narrative. By making these connections, I do not intend to

shed light on what Woolf’s “true” feelings might have been about her youth. Instead, I argue that the resonanc-

es between Woolf’s personal and fictional narratives elucidate Woolf’s preoccupation with the permanence of

extraordinary childhood experiences in the psyche and why we feel compelled to articulate them.

To illustrate this analytical distinction, I point first to setting in Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse. The

characters in these novels spend much of their early lives in coastal locations. Woolf scholars have generally

agreed that the writer’s own childhood trips to St. Ives in Cornwall heavily inspired the backdrops in her fic-

tion. While I honor this observation, I will elaborate on it by contending that Woolf’s textual returns to St. Ives

(whether fictional or non-fictional) bespeak more than simple nostalgia. In her memoir, “A Sketch of the Past,”

Woolf’s most enduring memories of St. Ives range from shame at looking in the household mirror, her alarm

upon overhearing that a man named Mr. Valpy had committed suicide, a sense of “hopeless sadness” (Woolf 71)

while fighting her brother, Thoby, and finally, “a feeling of desolation...as she saw the clouds darkening over

the waves” (Lee 105). Initially these disparate memories appear to share no common ground, but after further

exploration Woolf observes that she reacted to all of them with inarticulate horror as a child. For this reason,

it seems too simple to dismiss Woolf’s revisitations to St. Ives in her fiction as merely sentimental. In Woolf’s

memory, St. Ives also serves as an epicenter for childhood trauma. Its invocation provides a channel by which

to articulate the “exceptional moments” that her younger self and fictional children endure. She goes beyond

the personal and speaks to the larger impulse to act out and work through visceral childhood trauma via retroac-

tive articulation. Thus, the coastal settings in Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse do not merely gesture to her

youth; they also function as entryways through which to return and attend to childhood trauma from an adult

perspective.

Woolf adopts an omniscient persona to reflectively narrate childhood trauma in both novels. She can

claim benefits like hindsight and language that an adult might wield to master their childhood traumas later on

in life from this perspective. We see this narrative advantage at work in the opening scenes of Jacob’s Room and

To the Lighthouse alike; in both, children experience intense emotional shock. These moments explicitly upset

reader through the practice of reclaiming power over memories of childhood trauma by giving them language.

In the case of Jacob’s Room, we enter the novel only to find its titular character ironically and worry-

ingly absent. Concern about his whereabouts quickly escalates into a search that his younger brother, Archer,

initiates. On the page, Archer’s shouts quite literally expand out into the blank space without any internal

elaboration on Archer’s part (see pages 4 and 5). The narrator’s interpretation of Archer’s voice soon follows:

“[it] had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary,

unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded” (5). Like the splintered text of the novel, Archer’s hyphen-

ated pronouncement of ‘“Ja-cob!”’ quite literally breaks up his brother’s name as if it were bashing against the

rocks on the shore. Fragmentation frequently features in trauma narratives, as does non-linearity, both of which

characterize the writing style in Jacob’s Room and Woolf’s writing in general. The omniscient voice that nar-

rates Jacob’s Room, however, sutures these fragments together with the thematic thread of trauma in order to

make it legible as a narrative whole.

The omniscient and functionally adult narrator here also takes responsibility for explaining why Archer’s

voice embodies “an extraordinary sadness” rather than Archer himself. The speaker attributes it to the horror

of the silence that follows and what such silence might imply—that the specter of death haunts Jacob and the

novel as a whole. At the novel’s conclusion, this underlying anxiety becomes a reality: Archer’s reverberating

refrain returns when one of Jacob’s friends, Bonamy, reenacts the unanswered calls after Jacob has died in the

war. Woolf’s choice to bookend the novel in this manner asks us to return to Archer’s experience as a child and

read it with a pair of eyes that have now witnessed the war alongside the characters. Thus, across the span of the

novel, we move from the position of a child struck dumb by uncontextualized shock to an adult who now has

the language to explain that trauma’s impact.

To facilitate the reader’s own experience of this simulated movement through trauma, Woolf often steps

into her texts to connect the dots of her younger characters’ psyches where they themselves fail to do so. These

seemingly compulsory interjections align with her claim in “A Sketch of the Past” that “as one gets older one

has a greater power through reason to provide an explanation; and that this explanation blunts the sledge-ham-

mer force of the blow” (72). This applies more obviously To the Lighthouse since scholars consider it to be

Woolf’s most autobiographical work of fiction. In the novel, we can trace numerous moments of childhood ter-

ror back to Woolf’s own years. Through the omniscient voice, Woolf exercises her newfound ability to articulate

76 father at the beginning of the novel, the narrator can speak on his behalf. Briefly, Woolf transfers us from James’

mind to that of the narrator’s, who reasons that “Mr. Ramsay excited [extremes of emotion] in his children’s

breasts by his mere presence” (4). The narrator blames James’ rage on the pleasure Mr. Ramsay appears to take

in “disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife” and “some secret conceit” that he enjoys “at his

own accuracy of judgement” (4). Only as James grows older does he attempt to articulate why his father’s be-

havior awakens such violent sensations in him, an instinct which, as Woolf proposes in “A Sketch of the Past,”

becomes more powerful as one ages.

To justify his visceral hatred for his father, James creates an image for his abstract (albeit intense) expe-

rience. He envisions the cause as a “fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold and

hard, that struck and struck at you” (184). Even syntactically, the sharp repetition of the stressed “c” and “k”

sounds in this sentence forcibly assault the reader. The imagery and consonance in this sentence reproduce the

“violent shocks” which Woolf herself endured as a child and remembered for the rest of her life. It also reflects

her theory that even if she continues to suffer emotional blows into her adulthood, “it is not, as I thought as a

child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation

of some order...and I make it real by putting it into words” (72). Likewise, James seeks “an image to cool and

detach and round off his feeling in a concrete shape” (185), or as Woolf might put it, to take away “[the blow’s]

power to hurt me” (72). Woolf “detach[es]” James from his inner turmoil by transcribing it into external imag-

ery. Both James and the reader can then more readily access and observe James’ trauma in a tangible and articu-

lable form.

Much could be said about the parallels between Mr. Ramsay’s interactions with his son and Woolf’s

own complicated relationship with Leslie Stephen, but I resist this biographical imposition. Regarding one of

her other coastal novels, The Waves, Woolf writes ‘“This shall be Childhood; but it must not be my childhood”’

(Lee 25). Her declaration rings true for Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse as well. Details as small as James’

request to journey to the lighthouse echo Adrian Stephen’s own frustrated desire to go to Godrevy lighthouse

(an anecdote that the Stephen children published in their family newspaper). Woolf used these personal allu-

sions to write more generally about why certain events strike us as children and stick with us long afterwards.

Particularly in To the Lighthouse, Woolf takes the opportunity to show us that the “exceptional” memo-

ries linger long after they have passed. Powerful as she may be, Mrs. Ramsay remains cautious about what she

one said, and what one did” (62). When she must break the heart wrenching news to her son that he cannot go to

the lighthouse, she laments that “he will remember that all his life” (62). Ultimately, James forgets his mother’s

more sensitive response and retains the memory of his father’s much harsher delivery. Years after both parents

reject his request, James still recalls his father saying ‘“It will rain… You won’t be able to go to the Light-

house”’ (186) but not his mother. The tone, approach, and even the language of Mr. Ramsay’s answer certainly

lends itself to a shocking effect. Mrs. Ramsay, on the other hand, entertains the possibility of James’ wish for a

considerable amount of time, often padding her responses with conditional qualifiers such as ‘“if it’s fine to-

morrow”’ (3) and “it may be fine—I expect it will be fine” (4) to leave options open. Meanwhile, Mr. Ramsay

frames his reply as if it were already fact. He insists that it “will rain” and that James “won’t be able to go to

the Lighthouse.” The infuriating assurance of his answer and its brevity pack a sudden punch for us as much as

James. Of moments like these, Woolf writes

As a child then, my days, just as they do now, contained a large proportion of...non-being. Week after

week passed at St. Ives and nothing made any dint upon me. Then, for no reason that I know about, there

was a sudden violent shock; something happened so violently that I have remembered it all my life. (71)

Mr. Ramsay’s answer to James’ entreaty wreaks a similarly violent shock upon his son’s system and it endures

in his memory even as his mother’s response, differing only in tone, fades away.

Though Woolf sees these “things one does not remember” as just “as important; perhaps...more im-

portant” (69) as their “exceptional” counterparts, she does grant that the latter prove especially valuable to her

writing. She even dares to declare that “the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer” (72). Thus, it

seems no coincidence that her fiction pulls from her repository of childhood memories. Hermione Lee eloquent-

ly expresses this in her comprehensive biography of Woolf: “all her life she gives herself to pleasure by finding

the “revelation of some order” through such “moments of being.” So, she masters her memories by structuring

them like fictions” (105). By shaping memories and impressions from her early life according to a narrational

agenda, Woolf is also able to control the significance they hold for her audience. Avrom Fleishman turns to the

symbolic namesake of To the Lighthouse in order to argue this point:

Despite or because of her ignorance about lighthouses, Woolf is free to make the Godrevy light of her

childhood summers into a dramatic focus of desire and fulfillment, and into a shadowy emblem of reality

of the past than they are choices made in the interest of arriving closer to the truth of personal experi-

ence. (609)

By these means, she can produce literature which lifts the burden of violent shocks from her consciousness

without having to implicate herself as a victim, a useful tactic for processing trauma. In the words of Fleishman,

she demonstrates a “dual impulse toward personal memories and toward impersonal generalization” (612).

Biographically inspired anecdotes assist Woolf in unveiling a more universal truth: A framework of

violent blows supports the “cotton wool” of “non-being,” of daily life. She accomplishes all of this without

directly acknowledging that she draws from her own life to render these exceptional moments in her fiction. In

the process, she shifts attention away from how these autobiographical fragments might reflect on her own life

and redirects it towards a more general message about being and horror—how they entangle with one another as

early as childhood. We only lack the ability to make sense of that relationship as children.

Woolf further intensifies and reworks personal memories to serve a symbolic purpose in Jacob’s Room.

A passage that describes Jacob catching moths and butterflies subtly serves as a roundabout gesture to Jacob’s

own inevitable death. Additionally, it draws from Woolf’s own experiences. As a child, Woolf also spent her

nights gallivanting with her siblings in search of Lepidoptera. Of all her family rituals, “night-time moth hunt-

ing...was one which most haunted her imagination” (Lee 31). For many years afterwards, she still “remembered

the smell of seaweed mixed with the smell of camphor from the butterfly boxes,” (32) an unlikely combination

which she also mentions in Jacob’s Room. 3 She also recalls with equal parts wonder and revulsion capturing a

red underwing, the very same specimen which Jacob fails to acquire. For Woolf, bug-hunting evokes “a mixture

of intense pleasure, excitement, and some fear and disgust” (Woolf 32). Though Jacob cannot not fully form his

own opinion of the experience as a child, the external narrator reports a sense of conflicting beauty and horror

similar to what Woolf describes in her own recollections. The text’s description of “blues settl[ing] on little

bones lying on the turf...and the painted ladies and the peacocks feast[ing] upon bloody entrails dropped by a

hawk” (27) stuns us as much as it does Jacob.

Although this gory image appears to arrive out of nowhere, an attuned close reading proves it to be the

severed part of a larger thematic whole characterized by “the omnipresence of sudden violence and senseless

horror” (Freeman 68). Abrupt interjections like these, derail the more whimsical depictions of young Jacob

bug-hunting, appropriately inducing a violent shock in the reader as well. Immediately after charming us with

an image of Jacob chasing “pale clouded yellows” (Woolf 25), the narrator circles back to Rebecca, the Flander

family’s servant, who “had caught the death’s-head moth in the kitchen” (26). If its name weren’t enough to put

the casual reader onto the scent, readers familiar with Lepidopteran lore will recognize this particular specimen

for the unusual skull-like marking on its thorax and its cultural significance as a symbol of death. The text’s fix-

ation on death becomes increasingly clear, and other fragments of foreshadowing do not seem quite as disjoint-

ed. Against this backdrop of morbid motifs, we recognize a metaphor that likens the sound of a tree falling to a

“volley of pistol-shots” (26) as a ghostly foreshadowing of Jacob’s death in the war. Like the narrator’s passing

reference to Jacob’s red underwing, one of Woolf’s own childhood experiences inspires this fragment:

The glory of the moment was great. Our boldness in coming so far was rewarded, and at the same time it

seemed as though we had proved our skill against the hostile and alien force. Now we could go back to

bed and to the safe house. And then, standing there with the moth safely in our hands, suddenly a volley

of shot rang out, a hollow rattle of sound in the deep silence of the wood which had I know not what of

mournful and ominous about it. It waned and spread through the forest: it died away, then another of

those deep sighs arose. An enormous silence succeeded. “A tree,” we said at last. A tree had fallen. (248)

Like her fictional manipulation of Godrevy lighthouse, Woolf twists her memory of the tree’s collapse to serve

her narrative needs. Even as she disguises her personal stake in the material of her fiction, Woolf “heightens the

parallel between inscription and observing oneself: as an exercise in reflecting upon and observing those as-

pects of her life she cannot forget” (Freeman 74). Freeman notes this in Woolf’s autobiographical writing, but I

propose that she practices the same observational and inscriptional processes in her fictional work. The nature of

autobiographical writing, like “A Sketch of the Past,” obligates Woolf to acknowledge her own presence in the

memories that she recalls. Fiction, on the other hand, permits Woolf to partake in a certain degree of self-dis-

guise, thus diverting attention away from what the writing might or might not say about Woolf’s personal life

and towards her larger concerns about the nature of early memories. Memories of her own childhood provide

the material for the capitalized and universal “Childhood” that she sets out to illustrate in The Waves, that is,

“those aspects of her life she cannot forget.” Through her generalized re-imaginings of childhood, Woolf sets

out to interrogate how we process early memories. Why do specific moments become “moments of being,” and

tween these fragments resist interpretation and description in childhood?

To answer that last question, I turn to a rather macabre motif that darkens the pages of both Jacob’s

Room and To the Lighthouse. While Archer desperately searches the sandy shore for his younger brother, Jacob

stumbles across “a whole skull—perhaps a cow’s skull” (7). The skull seems to strike Jacob, and he latches

onto it: “Sobbing, but absent-mindedly, he ran farther and farther away until he held the skull in his arms” (7).

The skull makes a second appearance in To the Lighthouse—nailed to the wall of the Ramsay children’s room.

Mrs. Ramsay observes that “Cam couldn’t go to sleep with it in the room, and James screamed if she touched

it” (114). In both novels, children lack the language to vocalize their fear; it simply exists unarticulated. The

involuntary and irrational quality of this fear comes through when Woolf describes Jacob “Sobbing, but ab-

sent-mindedly” (emphasis mine). Her word choice suggests that no intellectual reasoning prompts Jacob to cry.

As Woolf states in “A Sketch of the Past,” children endure the same horrors that adults experience, but they

lack the vocabulary to convey it. By initially refusing to justify her younger characters’ reactions to exceptional

moments, Woolf fulfills her tendency “to write not just about childhood but as if a child” (Lee 23). At times, I

agree with Lee, but I also complicate her claim by positing that the omniscient narrator present in both novels

is an implicitly adult narrator—if not in identity then at least in function. Woolf’s fiction neither entirely lacks

an adult voice nor the more mature instinct to structure seemingly random moments of shock into an orderly

whole. Though she leaves the reader to do the work, she conveniently compiles all of the fragments into one

piece in order to make connections between “moments of being” possible. As early as Jacob’s, James’, and

Cam’s childhoods, the external narrator insistently illuminates patterns of fear, horror, and death. Nothing can

shelter childhood completely from these realities, and the same goes for adulthood. If we are to believe Woolf’s

writing, we do, however, gradually learn to vocalize and structure these violent shocks in order to disentangle

them. In doing so, we can render unattended trauma less distressing.

Such moments routinely shattered Woolf’s own childhood, not least her mother’s death when Woolf was

thirteen. Woolf became painfully aware of the horrific quality of the world from a young age and later recount-

ed it in her writing. To be sure, she describes moments of rapture, too. In “A Sketch of the Past,” several of the

critical memories Woolf describes bring her peace: the rhythmic sound of the waves at St. Ives, a brief respite

in her mother’s lap, and a glimpse of a flower to name a few. Nevertheless, the majority strikes her psyche

violently in one way or another. These encounters with senseless horror translate into her writing, including her

that necessitate the act of writing” (Freeman 69). Outside of the immediate moment, she can better assess why

particular childhood memories never leave even after time has passed, and in writing about them, she proves the

very act of writing to be a transmission of shocks in and of itself.

By employing the omniscient standpoint in her fiction, Woolf is able to take up the retrospective per-

spective and reclaim traumas that once made her a victim, instead rising above them to become the victor. By

reassembling these moments into a narrative whole, Woolf renders shocks of the past constructive for both her-

self and the reader. Her written and fictionalized ree nactments of them provide a therapeutic method for acting

out, working through, and ultimately healing from early trauma.

Works Cited

Fleishman, Avrom. “‘To Return to St. Ives’: Woolf’s Autobiographical Writings.” ELH, vol. 48, no. 3, 1981, pp.

606–618. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2872916.

Freeman, Barbara Claire. “Moments of Beating: Addiction and Inscription in Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Sketch of the

Past.’” Diacritics, vol. 27, no. 3, 1997, pp. 65–76. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1566334.

Lee, Hermione. “Childhood” Virginia Woolf, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, 95-112. Print.

——. “Houses” Virginia Woolf, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, 21-50. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past” Moments of Being, edited by Jeanne Schulkind, New York and

London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, 61-139. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room, edited by Kate Flint, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

——. To the Lighthouse, edited by Eudora Welty, Orlando: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1981. Print.

“Embrace,” Sara Mitchell, University of Wisconsin-Madison