Diana Bodnarchuk
Kamianets-Podilsky Ivan Ohienko National University
Scientific Supervisor: Matkovska M. V.
‘Blue’ asthe semanticindicatorofemotional state of a person (on the material ‘to the lighthouse’ by v. Woolf)
The article deals with the semantic peculiarities of lexemes with colour component “blue” based on material “The Lighthouse” by V. Woolf. The author focuses on the importance of the study of colour as an indicator of emotional state. This paper examines how an individual’s emotional state influences his or her preferences for colors that have either congruent or incongruent emotional tones.
Key words: semantics, colour, blue, emotional state, V. Woolf, “To the Lighthouse.”
Commonly discussed as a product of the emotional and spiritual pain, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse has been also observed to be a representational vehicle employed to discuss the meaning of life through Woolf’s distinctive and subtle skill to use colors – which are external indicators of her inner realities, evoking various experiences and sensations. The connection between color and words is frequently addressed by Woolf in To the Lighthouse in which the size and movement of color shapes, explains, and intensifies the narrative. In the novel, the colors are perfect reflections of emotional state of a person. Jack F. Steward, Shaun McCarthy, Bernard Blackstone and Harold Bloom made great contribution in the development of this issue.In her diary, on 27 June 1925, while making up To the Lighthouse, Woolf intentionally states that “the sea is to be heard all through it” [4, p. 34], and according to Janet Beer and Elizabeth Nolan “it is, there through all the weave of characters’ shifting thoughts and feelings” [ 1, p. 88]; however, it is not just the waves of the sea that Woolf yearns for“the blue waters of the bay looked bluer than ever”, but “the great plateful of blue water” [4, p. 21], as well. Woolf’s employment of blue color in a planned way is an indicator through which these shifting thoughts and feelings are observed to be the reminiscences of Lily Briscoe’s longing for Mrs. Ramsay; because, Lily “as she dipped into the blue paint, she dipped too into the past there”[4, p. 254] wishing strongly to perfect her picture. Each of the “hillocks of the blue bars of the waves”[4, p. 268] was going far as though it went back through the past and came back carrying with it the past. And “by some instinctive need of distance and blue”[4, p. 268], Woolf continuously wanted to depict her mother and to keep her very much alive in a way to be able to withstand the ravages of her death agony. Her longing for her mother was not just an emotional expression; it was also a literary need which she always yearned for. Given her words that, “for we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help”[3, p. 75], this need turns out to be more concrete. In every way, she wanted to feel her mother next to her. “For most people, in practice if not always in theory, life is made meaningful by their relationships with those closest to them…” [2, p. 88].
Alternatively, most commonly preferred by men, the color blue symbolizes calmness and serenity. Mr. Ramsay, with “his little blue eyes” [4, p. 9] and as a man “incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being” [4, p. 9], seems calm throughout the novel. Observing the life through his blue eyes, he summarizes the meaning of life through this statement: “one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure” [4, p. 9].
In To the Lighthouse, “first, the pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue, and the heart expanded with it and the body swam”[4, p. 36]. Optically blue opens a space for perception and meditation; as a substantive, the word blue conveys a substance (atmosphere or pigment) as well as inviting an imaginative response. Johannes Itten describes the optical and spiritual vibrations of blue:“As red is always active, so blue is always passive, from the point of view of material space. From the point of view of spiritual immateriality, blue seems active and red passive . . . Blue is a power like that of nature in winter, when all germination and growth is hidden in darkness and silence. Blue is always shadowy, and tends in its greatest glory to darkness . . . In the atmosphere of the earth, blue appears from the lightest azure to the deepest blue-black of the night sky. Blue beckons our spirit . . . into the infinite distances of spirit”.[4, p. 135–136]
Lily Briscoe, the painter, feels an “instinctive need of distance and blue”[4, p. 279] as she struggles to give plastic form to memories and sensations. Similarly Woolf, in “Phases of Fiction,” feels a “desire for distance, for music, for shadow, for space” [4, p. 65]. Like Cezanne, Lily has to transform perception into vision and design without modifying the truth of what she sees. In Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique, with its interacting colors, the vision of space reflects the viewer. Mrs. Ramsay’s vision is pervaded by blue set off by a marginal green:“For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men” [4, p. 451].
During the voyage, perspectives alternate as characters look onward to the lighthouse on the rock, whose reality they will affirm, and backward to the island that is a spatial symbol of their past lives and memories. The forward movement in space takes precedence over the backward movement in time; lived reality and spatial locality dissipate in a blue spell. Cam’s speculation about what her father sees as he looks at the island underlines the relativity of perception. Mr. Ramsay is long-sighted, able to see clearly at a distance, but his view is often blocked by obstacles at close range. Determined to see the thing in itself, but unable to do so because he sees himself in the thing, he cannot deal with the distorting or illuminating powers of vision.
Distance and blue are spatial or plastic equivalents for memory, emotion, and vision:“So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea which had scarcely a stain on it, which was so soft that the sails and the clouds seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought, upon distance . . . for her feeling for Mr. Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay. . . . He and his children seemed to be swallowed up in that blue, that distance”[4, p. 293–294].
It is also interesting to note the extreme importance of the color blue, and how Woolf makes the majority of the male characters eyes blue. He argues that “blue may be used as a background to show off other colors, and it also gives other colors their vibration”[4, p. 446]. This notion holds true in Mrs. Ramsay because not only is she the “energy in her marriage”, but she brings out the brightness and energy of the people who she is surrounded by. Mrs. Ramsay “provides a visionary ‘background’ of Woolf’s novel, its sense of spiritual space and depth, but her wavelike outpourings of energy in support of others exhaust her individual ‘chroma’, leaving her to seek light and darkness beyond the human spectrum” .
It is no coincidence that Virginia Woolf had manic depressive psychosis (bipolar disorder). The main point here is that she addresses to the human emotion and portrays her swinging inner realities. Virginia Woolf, from the very beginning of her writing career to the very end of it, echoed her inner facts without a need to
conceal her changing mood, though unintentionally. The result was outstanding.
To the Lighthouse was Woolf’s meaning of life; the colors in the narration represent a quest for values, and the establishment of personal relationships with those around Woolf. She uses blue colour to express her longing for her mother that was an emotional expression, symbol of past life and memory. The colour blue also symbolizes calmness and serenity.
REFERENCE
- Beer J., Nolan E. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening: A Sourcebook. / J. Beer, E. Nolan. – London:Routledge, 2004. – 160 p.
- Eagleton T. The Meaning of Life. / T. Eagleton. – New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. – 106 p.
- Woolf V. A Room of One’s Own. / OR. V. Woolf .ed. M. Hussey. – Orlando : Harcourt, 2005. – 148 p.
- Woolf V. To the Lighthouse. / V. Woolf. – London: Hogarth Press, 1927. – 478 p.