Virginia Woolf Lecture 1 - aesthete or feminist revolutionary?

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English 315 Part I                                                                           2004

Virginia Woolf Lecture 1

aesthete or feminist revolutionary?

In this lecture I want to:

1) offer a very brief sketch of Woolf's life

2) look closely at Lily Briscoe, the artist figure in the novel, and compare her to Mrs Ramsay

3) consider the dinner party

4) consider the relations between politics and art in the novel

1) Basic biography

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born 1882 into an upper-middle class intellectual family, part of the Victorian intellectual aristocracy.  Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a man of letters, responsible for the Dictionary of National Biography.  Virginia was self-educated, mainly by way of her father's large private library.  Her mother was a great beauty who died when Virginia was 13.  Two years later her sister died.  These deaths, perhaps like those that marked Janet Frame's childhood, sparked mental instability that would remain with her throughout her life.  Throughout her life she suffered from manic depression, although the name of the condition was not then known.  She committed suicide in 1941.

Leslie Stephen died in 1904 and the siblings moved into a house in Bloomsbury, then considered bohemian, where they set about distancing themselves from the Victorian legacy of thought, values and habits, even to the extent of exchanging Victorian furniture styles of heavy, highly decorated objects for plainer, simpler and modern styles.  They also began to cast out the Victorian reticence about sexuality, favouring openness and frankness in conversation.  Around them they collected many of the important liberal and modernist intellectuals writers and painters of the day. 

To the Lighthouse is at least in part an elegy for Woolf's childhood and for her mother.  It is a mourning and an affirmation of the lost loved one, as elegies are.  However, it is also critical of the mother figure.  Mrs Ramsay emerges very sympathetically, especially by comparison with her egotistical, somewhat pompous husband.  But she is herself part of the Victorian world from which the Stephen children set about distancing themselves.  She constructs a series of myths — of harmony, marriage, family life, love — which are limited in the face of time and history, and which cannot sustain a modern woman like Lily Briscoe.  The novel traces the failure of these ideals in the wrecked marriages of the next generation, the deaths of children, the war that broke up the Victorian-Edwardian world.  It also tests the adequacy of Mrs Ramsay's faiths by way of Lily Briscoe, whose sense of the artist involves a more profound and direct confrontation with fragmentation, and a more critical stance towards social pieties like marriage than Mrs Ramsay is capable of.

    The memory of her mother was formative in the writing of the novel.  See Laura Marcus, Virginia Woolf, 1997, p. 93, bottom.

2) Lily Briscoe

Sue Roe sees Lily Briscoe as the one who makes sense of the disconnected threads of the novel and casts the controlling eye on Mrs Ramsay's woolyheadedness, anthology, p. 112:I, para 2.

Lily does see the limits of Mrs Ramsay.  She does not view her as a saint of Victorian values, because of her own detachment from those values, especially marriage.  Lily uses Mrs Ramsay to solve a formal problem related to her painting,  p. 93.

She also serves as a foil to Mrs Ramsay, one representing life, the other art.  Vogler, Intro to 20th C Interpretations of To the Lighthouse, p. 7.  Lily Briscoe and Mrs Ramsay thus become versions of Sancho Panza (life) and Don Quixote (art).  But this simplifies.  Lily Briscoe sees the ridiculousness and the beauty of love.  Mrs Ramsay is an engine of evolution, but also celebrated for her beauty and life-centredness.

Lily’s opposite, however, is not Mrs Ramsay but Mr Tansley, whose idea of civilisation is wholly masculine and who believes that women can't write, women can't paint (p. 94).  Mr Tansley resents women for not taking him seriously, yet he is flattered by Mrs Ramsay's beauty.  Lily Briscoe sees him without Mrs Ramsay's instinct for forgiveness; instead with the artist's vision, p. 99.

Perhaps also it is important not to see Lily in too sharp an opposition to Mrs Ramsay if this indicates that Woolf sees art and life as wholly opposed orders.  Woolf certainly believed that it was necessary for modern writers to break with what she called the materialism of Edwardian writing and to try to capture the spiritual, inner workings of life.  But this doesn't mean that she believed spirituality to be removed from ordinary existence.  The spiritual is what makes us experience life most fully and it involves not simply mental or transcendental states, but mind and matter trying to find some temporary balance.  The key here is imaginative perception, especially that of the artist.  Vogler discusses this in his introduction to the 20th Century Interpretations, p. 28.   What Woolf aims at, then, are decorated processes of thought, the colouring of physical objects by emotion.  To the Lighthouse is a poetic novel rather than a realist one in the Edwardian sense of the world.  It employs an excess of metaphorical language to catch not one true reality but many partial ones.  Nevertheless, in doing so it takes us closer to the way we experience reality, not as something fixed, objective, out there, but as what we move towards, seem almost to grasp, then find it has slipped away. 

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Lily also should not be seen as wholly opposed to Mr Ramsay.  Unlike Mrs Ramsay she opposes his demands, does not negate herself in order to supply his vast egotistical needs.  His very presence thwarts her ability to paint and to think through the formal problems that confront her as an artist (p. 163).  Yet in a sense she joins together his logic and Mrs Ramsay's vision to produce an aesthetic fusion: McLaurin, Virginia Woolf, 1973, p. 184, para 2.  If we accept this, then it is wrong to binarise the masculine and feminine elements in the novel too fiercely.

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