Water Agency from Virginia Woolf to Jane Urquhart, Piloted Across the Atlantic by Rachel Carson

“To the lighthouse! If it’s fine tomorrow!"

Abstract

Moving from Rachel Carson’s studies on Atlantic oceanic currents – which have proven to be disastrous once they crash against the coasts of Great Britain in their circulatory movement from north to south and back eastwards, to the point of creating massive damages to human-made infrastructures, including lighthouses  – this contribution analyzes first how this juncture is evoked in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927), and second how this same theme is presented in the novel by Canadian author Jane Urquhart, Sanctuary Line (2010). Ever since Virginia Woolf iconized weather reports and weather conditions as indispensable frameworks for a day trip to a local lighthouse on the coasts of Britain, certainly long before climate change became a concern and nevertheless anticipating today’s ecological reasonings in an ingenious way, lighthouses have undergone major transformations. For instance, from being man-maintained – if not family maintained, as in Woolf’s novel – lighthouses have been computerized and completely deprived of human presence; above all, they are more and more targets to oceanic – increasingly devastating – surges, as happens in Urquhart’s novel. This matter-of-fact evidence necessitates to be discussed through the framework of the Blue Humanities.  Amitav Ghosh with his essay The Great Derangement (2019), Rachel Carson with her Sea Trilogy, and particularly The Sea Around Us ([1950] 2021), and ecocritical blue ecology (Mentz 2024; Oppermann 2023; Regazzoni 2022) are among the references here considered for an ecocritical approach to the texts. This approach corroborates and reinforces Rachel Carson’s intuitions of seventy years ago, while showing their urgency nowadays. In conclusion, the interaction between oceans and lighthouses in the novels here analyzed, particularly if read through the lens of the Blue Humanities, inevitably leads to a new consciousness and a breach in our imagination of rising sea-level and on its more and more serious effects on our coasts.