Every year, 4chan.org (an online meeting place famous for birthing the “alt-right”) releases a ranking of their top 100 books of all time. To say that this year’s list is male-dominated is an understatement: there are only two books written by women on the list, and both of them are by Virginia Woolf—The Waves (#85) and To the Lighthouse (#73). Although it might be easy to disregard the list as another symptom of the cultural mindset that got Trump elected, it does raise the question: why did Virginia Woolf, and only Virginia Woolf, break through the posturing of a famously misogynistic internet community? Not having read her in the past, I bought a copy of To the Lighthouse in order to better understand.
To the Lighthouse follows the Ramsay family, who are vacationing at their cottage on England’s southern coast. Woolf is not delicate with her characters’ feelings; the slightest mishap in the Ramsay family often results in an anxious spiral of thought that can be dizzying to read. Take, for example, the sensitive James Ramsay who, when we are first introduced to him, falls into an Oedipal fantasy in response to a perceived slight from his father. This is the first hint into the appeal of the novel to disaffected male readers; Woolf’s unrelenting and oftentimes harsh readings of her characters’ most personal thoughts exposes a world of heartbreakingly misdirected masculinity. Later in the novel, we are introduced to Charles Tansley, a graduate student of philosophy who is staying with the Ramsays. He’s prone to mocking those he deems intellectually inferior to him, especially women, and Woolf explains his behaviour as Tansley’s expression of a need for reassurance—here disclosing the confused psychology of a man who sees himself as underappreciated in his time.
The irony of all this, of course, is that it requires a distinctly female perspective to gaze past the outwardly aggressive behaviour of these young men and understand it for what it really is: a desire for affection, for sympathy. By bravely venturing into the struggles of each of her characters, Woolf uncovers the fragility that lies just underneath their rancour, and suddenly it becomes clear why To the Lighthouse is as piercing a cultural note now as it was to readers of its day.
