Artistic Creation as a Mystical Transmutation in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

This paper deals with the mystical experiences in Virginia Woolf's artistic creation. Woolf denies any form of modernism that cannot transcend reality. There are moments, where reality is never what it is but a visiona perspectivewhose meaning is beyond the graspable. Reality, thus, becomes un-realitya halo, and the artist becomes a contemplatora devotee to such visionary manifestation. Virginia Woolf does not make an exception to this rule. She is par excellence a mystic. The artistic design of her novels, mainly, To the Lighthouse, is of transcendental dimension. Both, Mrs Ramsay's and Lily Briscoe's perceptions of life are beyond the palpable: their selves merge within a process of sublimation comparable to that of mysticism. In other words, art (mainly fiction) becomes a process of change from the factual to the transmutable.