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

emptying out of all other humanity makes them visible to a narrator sensitive to any
narrative possibilities. What Minow-Pinkney calls “the formerly excluded Otherness”
emerges not only, as she argues, with the figurative breaking of the mirror through
which the seekers on the beach hope to see humanity reflected in Nature, but with the
removal from the scene of a familiar bourgeois humanity to be reflected (Minow-
Pinkney 100). It is the nonhumanness of the narrative of “Time Passes,” and of its
fixed location, that makes the inclusion of the working class possible in To the
Lighthouse. At the same time, the working class is available only as an agent of the
bourgeois against nature and as a symbol for the bourgeois of nature. This is true both
on the level of the narrator, who repeatedly positions working-class people in relation
to nature, and also on the level of the story, in which Mrs. McNab, Mrs. Bast, and her
son appear only at the behest of the Ramsays. The stable location of To the
Lighthouse is owned by the bourgeois whose consciousnesses serve as the narrative’s
model. Working class people enter the narrative space only when permitted by its
bourgeois owners, and only to maintain the space as a bourgeois space, as a refuge
from chaotic nature, from death, from work, from war. Thus, with the arrival of Lily
Briscoe at the end of section nine, the working class figures disappear from the
narrative. They have served their transitional function: bringing day to night,
nonhuman space to human space, indeterminate time to the modernist time of human
consciousness.
The transition is completed in the final section of “Time Passes,” as the
narrative intermingles the methods of sections one and two. The tenth section
announces, “Then indeed peace had come” (142). This refers, on the one hand, to the
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