Characterization
in To the Lighthouse
Kathryn B. Stockton, Associate Professor of English,
Univ. of Utah
The characters
in this novel function as intersecting zones of consciousness. In reading
this work, we could consider various of these intersections. For example,
how might we interpret the first four paragraphs of the text, in which
we as readers hover between the thoughts and statements of Mrs. Ramsay,
Mr. Ramsay, and James? What is the significance of beginning this text
on such an Oedipal note? How does Lily's entrance into the narration pick
up this initial relation, situating us once again between the parental
figures of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay? How are these parental "zones" rendered?
How do they differ? Why is Mr. Ramsay associated with truth, facts, and
the insistent tendency to puncture his children's hopes? Why, in the paragraph
that follows these associations, is Mrs. Ramsay represented as knitting
and meditating on the welfare of the lighthouse keeper and his boy? How
does "the atheist Tansley" function, and why is he labelled from the first
that we meet him? The text's introduction of Lily Briscoe provides a rich
example of how the narration traverses various zones:
Suddenly
a loud cry, as of a sleep-walker, half roused, something about
Stormed
at with shot and shell
sung
out with the utmost intensity in her ear, made her turn apprehensively
to see if any one heard him. Only Lily Briscoe, she was glad to find; and
that did not matter. But the sight of the girl standing on the edge of
the lawn painting reminded her; she was supposed to be keeping her head
as much in the same position as possible for Lily's picture. Lily's picture!
Mrs. Ramsay smiled. With her little Chinese eyes and her puckered-up face,
she would never marry; one could not take her painting very seriously;
she was an independent little creature, and Mrs. Ramsay liked her for it;
so, remembering her promise, she bent her head.
Lily
becomes a dominant zone of consciousness in this text, yet here she is
introduced, one paragraph before we are positioned in her thoughts, through
the eyes of Mrs. Ramsay, as "only Lily Briscoe," and marginalized further
by her position "on the edge of the lawn." Before we have crossed into
Lily's zone, we are told "one could not take her painting very seriously"
and are perhaps predisposed to trivialize her vocation by thinking her,
along with Mrs. Ramsay, "an independent little creature." Even so, it is
Lily who is framing Mrs. Ramsay in the window--a frame within the narrative
frame*. (1)
The
Construction of Woman in To the Lighthouse
Kathryn B. Stockton, Associate
Professor of English, Univ. of Utah
One can read Mrs. Ramsay as a representation
of the grand Victorian domestic goddess who is also deemed an artist, her
medium the people and relations that surround her. For Mr. Ramsay, his
son James, Mr. Tansley, and Lily in particular, Mrs. Ramsay is the mother
and wife who wears the face of God, taking upon herself all of their projections
of wisdom, power, comfort, mystery, and a certain unattainability:
Indeed, she had the whole of the
other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for
their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties,
ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself
which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful,
childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man
without loss of dignity, and woe betide the girl--pray Heaven it was none
of her daughters!--who did not feel the worth of it, and all that it implied,
to the marrow of her bones!
The text opens out onto the power
and denigration that such an elevation simultaneously betokens--namely,
the burden of "woman" who is so precariously placed both "above" and "below"
"the other sex." The Ramsay daughters, and Lily in particular, represent
zones of consciousness that question this domestic ideal:
She was now formidable to behold,
and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had
spoken so severely about Charles Tansley, that her daughters, Prue, Nancy,
Rose--could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves
of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always
taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds a mute
questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian
Empire, of ringed fingers and lace, though to them all there was something
in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their
girlish hearts, and made them, as they sat at table beneath their mother's
eyes, honour her strange severity, her extreme courtesy, like a Queen's
raising from the mud to wash a beggar's dirty foot.
And it was then too, in that chill
and windy way, as [Lily] began to paint, that there forced themselves upon
her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance, keeping house
for her father off the Brompton Road, and had much ado to control her impulse
to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at Mrs.
Ramsay's knee and say to her--but what could one say to her? 'I'm in love
with this all,' waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children.
Yet, as is evident in this passage,
the relation between Mrs. Ramsay and the other young women is a complex
mirroring: Mrs. Ramsay represents, on the one hand, an image of woman that
they themselves might be and whom they still wish to embrace as mother--the
secret to their own unconscious desire; on the other hand, Mrs. Ramsay
represents a past ideal of woman that they would like to distinguish from
themselves, being women in a new historical moment. This mirroring leads
Lily to frame Mrs. Ramsay in the window of her portrait and to model from
her a new madonna (as we later learn). This text, then, can be read as
an intricate negotiation between the construction of "woman" (and mother)
according to the Victorian domestic ideal and those new constructions being
attempted by the daughters who are reading and interpreting this cultural
icon. How do the "masculine" zones of consciousness construct or reconstruct
Mrs. Ramsay and Lily? Scenes one might analyze: 1) Mrs. Ramsay and Charles
Tansley go together to town; 2) Lily and Mr. Bankes walk down by the sea;
3) Mr. Ramsay gazes at his wife and son in the window.(2)
(1)http://landow.stg.brown.edu/c32/woolf/char1.html
(2)http://landow.stg.brown.edu/c32/woolf/women.html