by Rebecca King

Created on: January 28, 2009

James and the Lighthouse:
A Look Into Oedipal Sexuality

Today, sexuality is a hot topic for discussion. People are often encouraged to open their minds in order that they may acknowledge and explore the truth about their sexuality so they may live more enriched lives. This has not always been the case. For Virginia Woolf, author of To The Lighthouse, even the Twentieth Century was more often than not, unforgiving in her openness to explore her own sexuality. Virginia Woolf would have fit well into today's society; however she was born much too soon and her activities were frowned upon, not only by the religious sect, but also by everyday citizens.

In To The Lighthouse, sexuality is the heart of the novel; however, it is not the open sexuality of today or the constrained sexuality of Woolf's time, but sexuality of the repressed and controversial variety which psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud believed all humans must experience to become mature adults. In To The Lighthouse, it is the Lighthouse which stands as a stagnant reminder of James Ramsay's Oedipal dreams not becoming reality and it is through the process of understanding the significance of the Lighthouse to James that this hidden sexuality becomes fully observable, if not understandable.

Though James is a little older than Freud's ideal child for the Oedipal tendencies, it is possible for some children to not correctly follow through the phases and remain stuck in this stage which, through normal growth and development, is usually repressed. At the age of six it is evident that James hates his father, not because his father abused him or anything like that, but because he gets in between James and Mrs. Ramsay.

Throughout "The Window" portion of the novel, the unattainable goal for James is to reach the Lighthouse. The question which now needs to be addressed is-why the Lighthouse? A lighthouse is a tall, phallus penetrating the heavens. For James, the lighthouse represents an Oedipal desire for the penetration of his mother, Mrs. Ramsay. The Lighthouse is the destination for James to go, and his father's insistence that the weather was not "fine" for a trip to the Lighthouse only increased his Oedipal hatred to the extent that "had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it" and with his father,

lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, ... with the pleasure of disillusioning

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