Complete Map

Compared with other novels in the corpus, and realist novels in particular, the volume of topoi in To the Lighthouse is relatively slim. This is because the text is more concerned with the manifold human impressions of life rather than life’s externalities. In line with this, the complete map indicates how none of the novel’s key spaces are named. Instead, they are known, domestic and local spaces such as the ‘drawing-room’, ‘beach’ or ‘town’. The dominant topoi are the lawn, the drawing-room and the dining-room, but jutting out from these are a variety of toporefs – referenced places – ‘Balliol’, ‘Marlow’, the ‘Indian Empire’. Such toporefs not only help establish the novel’s intellectual, class and political context, but relocate the characters’ mental landscape far beyond the immediate setting. Where the local setting is often vague – ‘some rock or other off the Scottish coast’ – the clarity of the projected, imagined or recalled landscape reinforces the sense that the internal trumps the external.

What is also immediately clear is that, although the book is nominally about the Lighthouse, the house is spatially dominant. The Lighthouse provides a point of reference rather than a place of being. These two structures, then, dominate the graph; the house, through the topoi – occupied spaces – and the Lighthouse through the toporefs. From the shore the Lighthouse is out of focus, imagined, and projected. Viewed from afar it is ‘hoary’, distant, austere’; a ‘silvery, misty-looking tower’. It is romanticised, an illusory structure. When viewed close up, from the boat and the rock, it becomes a ‘tower, stark and straight’, a place of practical and pedestrian labour.