ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the case study of Virginia Woolf. In the beginning Woolf says: the father is to be at the centre of the Lighthouse. Thus, Woolf writes for the Lighthouse: facing towards that light, and thanks to that light. What she writes for that light is also a gift. The Lighthouse is at the centre of the novel, as a place with which contact—if not the gaze turned towards it—is denied. Woolf, like Lily Briscoe, does not aim at representative realism: she does not wish to paint a portrait based on resemblance. With Jacob's Room and Mrs Dalloway, Woolf has already demolished the very notion of "objective representation". For Virginia Woolf, there is the strong, acute, precise sensation of something beyond the power of language, beyond the realistic dimension of the word, its time—which is the time dimension of conversation, upon which the realistic novel is sustained.
