prize8-9, Exercise 3: A work that uses a lighthouse

Model answer (check the details), using Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927):

What it shows about how lighthouses are imagined: the lighthouse is a distant, shining goal, seen across the water from a house, and a symbol of desire, family tension and the passing of time. It stands for something not quite reachable. The visit to the lighthouse is delayed for years, and when it happens the meaning has changed.

What it cannot show about how lighthouses worked: it does not describe the lamp, lens, keepers' duties, the supply of the station or the engineering of the tower. The lighthouse is a setting and a symbol, not a subject of history. A reader who took it as evidence of lighthouse life would be misled.

How to use it: as evidence of the image of the lighthouse in the 1920s and of a literary use of the symbol, alongside the logs, memoirs and engineering records that show how lighthouses really worked (Chapter 6).

Care: the same distinction applies to paintings, poems and films. They are sources for the image and not for the operation.