ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

Lighthouse’s middle continues to scramble temporality through the layering of
multiple scales of the passage of time (day, season, historical and personal event) as
well as through the use of discourse that is lyrical both in its atemporality and in its
use of rhetorical and metaphorical language.
The section is framed primarily by the passage of seasons, which does not
have a clear relationship to the passage of years or the bracketed events that constitute
the continuity of the section with the narrated world of “The Window” and “The
Lighthouse.” Section three has introduced the winter, which seems to share
metaphoric space with the night. Section six, however, begins with the spring: “The
spring without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity,
scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields wide-eyed and watchful and entirely
careless of what was done or thought by the beholders. [Prue Ramsay, leaning on her
father’s arm, was given in marriage. What, people said, could have been more fitting?
And, they added, how beautiful she looked!]” (131). Spring here appears to be both a
particular spring in which Prue has been married, but also a metaphorical spring: the
renewal of nature made consonant with the renewal of the traditional family and its
attendant narrative. Spring is also, notably, anthropomorphized roughly in the manner
of a Renaissance allegory. This very narrative act of anthropomorphization—which
makes spring comprehensible in the conventional language of narrative—is used to
emphasize the season’s distance from human minds. This is explicitly not the
figuration of any particular person or group of persons—but a figuration unaware of
human consciousness. Nevertheless, nature’s very ignorance of human thought is rehumanized
by the narrator—not only in the sense that this ignorance is figured in an
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