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.
Lily Briscoe refuses to act out Mrs Ramsay's role of the soothing woman. But she takes from Mr and Mrs Ramsay complementary ways of seeing the world and gains insights into how she will organise the painting, p. 217, middle.
Mr Ramsay's philosophy is never defined, but a rather vague idea of it stands behind much of the speculation in the novel. Andrew explains it to Lily on p. 29, bottom. Cam returns to this in the little boat with her father, p. 181. Lily effects the balance, p. 208, para 2.
Each sees the problem differently. There is no single reality. 'On or about December, 1910, human nature changed', anthology, p. 116:II, middle. The artist's responsibility, then, is to enter sympathetically into these various ways of seeing the world, and bring them into a harmony in the work of art. That harmony is not final or absolute, but a necessary fiction, see final para of novel. Lily Briscoe sees the shape beneath colours, p. 25, middle, p. 185, bottom para.
Certainly, spirituality in Woolf's understanding does not involve a religious sense. Mrs Ramsay asks 'how could any Lord have made this world? p. 71. Bertrand Russell once remarked that the world can be understood as the result of accident and muddle but if it is the outcome of a deliberate purpose the purpose must be that of a fiend.
Yet Mr Tansley's atheism is mocked because it is not felt and is too abstract. The question, as for Lawrence, is how to bring together the sense of the world as deserving awed attention and the sense of the richness of human imagination, value of beauty, talk, harmony, all of which have been so long attached to ideals. Yet to do so while accepting utterly the absoluteness of death, and the arbitrariness of things. In Time Passes the house, abandoned during the war has only the form of loveliness, lacking the warm living component, an image that recalls Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’: p. 141, para 2. It preserver is the old cleaning lady, a figure of comedy and resilience, p. 143, top. Mrs McNab and Mrs Bast ‘stay[] the corruption and the rot’ and rescue bits and pices from ‘the pool of Time’ (p. 152). Their efforts manage to evoke the sense of some ultimate harmony lying behind the disorder of the world, to which Keat’s alludes in his Ode (p. 154) (It is interesting to compare Mansfield’s portrait of a similar woman in ‘The Life of Ma Parker’).
Lily Briscoe is an artist of the real, not of ethereal romantic visions, p. 55. She seeks to collect the moments and impressions of the ordinary and confer some unity as an effort of her tentative mind; she does not seek to make permanent the ordinary world, to translate it into static and transcendent art, as Stephen Dedalus does. In this sense she speaks for the novel, the key is the underlying structure, Drabble, Intro to Oxford edition, p. xxviii. At times the narrative seems to meander in a kind of internal poetic impressionism, p. 127, bottom para. Yet a frail unity is conferred on the shifting viewpoints and unlocatable voices of the narration by theme, imagery, moment of contemplation, symbol. The threads are knitted together, or nearly.
Lily Briscoe's revelation, p. 175, owes to Mrs R who gives shape to chaos, but it comes after her death. Mrs Ramsay's desire to make the moment permanent, to make life stand still, to freeze the lovers in the parody of marriage. Keats's Ode to a Grecian Urn.
Lily is also an artist of the body, p. 193).
The dinner party
Let's look at the dinner party in To the Lighthouse, pp. 105-6 ('Now all the candles....'). What does the dinner party signify: civility, conversation, multiplicity, community, the physical (food), the ordinary made special and significant. It is true that much of the time we are inside the heads of the guests and their separateness remains. Nevertheless, the ritual of exchange of words and food does modify their private preoccupations. The sense of coming together experienced by the diners even produces a kind of epiphany. Scattered impressions are drawn together in a moment of excited consciousness. But it is not an individual epiphany, as in A Portrait. It is a collective recognition of common purpose. The civility of the dinner party achieves an ordered balance, a momentary resolution of differences. This resolution is temporary; it cannot overcome the privateness of the guests, or even their prejudices. In a sense it is an aesthetic perception in the mind of Mrs Ramsay. Mr Tansley does not repudiate his view that women's talk and their 'silliness' makes civilisation impossible (p. 94). Yet the moment is in contrast to the Bridge Party in A Passage to India where attempts to build bridges lead to terrible misunderstandings and tragedy. A fragile, temporary harmony is achieved. Smith quotes Woolf’s response to reading Mansfield’s journal after her death, KM and VW, p. 18.
The fact that Woolf has chosen a dinner party to represent a point of value in the novel is significant. Dinner parties involve conversation, and for all their egotism and differences of perspective, the guests do, rather erratically, achieve this. Compare this to the monologue of the sermon in A Portrait of the Artist. It is true that the sermon is opposed, partially, by Stephen's accepting/resisting consciousness, but there is no equivalent exchange of voices in Joyce's novel. Even the family dinner is divided along warring lines and focused though the young boy's mind. Stephen's conversations with his fellow students towards the end of the novel are presented from within his consciousness or his diaries.
Moreover, the physical act of eating is celebrated in Woolf's novel; even the arrangement of plates, candles and food has an aesthetic quality. See p. 105. This is quite different to the depictions of eating in Joyce's novel where Stephen's gluttony after his sin represents the Catholic division of experience into spirit and flesh, mind and body. In To the Lighthouse the ordinary world is made special and significant for a moment. Mrs Ramsay aims to achieve this moment of being by way of her dinner party; she wishes for a time to arrest the chaos of life, but she does not seek to translate common experience into an aesthetic version of the divine — imperishable art — as Stephen does in A Portrait. She is interested in harmony, not substitute religion. And this distinguishes her also from Lawrence who wants to take all the old fervour religion directed at the transcendent and fix it on the actual and the momentary.
In To the Lighthouse there are a multiplicity of viewpoints and centres of consciousness. It is Mrs Ramsay who seeks to bring them together, to harmonise, pp. 113-4. The party is her equivalent of Lily Briscoe's painting. Mrs Ramsay is anxious at the outset. But what have I done in my life?' The room is shabby, there no beauty in it. Nothing has merged. She feels that the whole effort rests in her (pp. 91-2). Yet by the end it is a kind of triumph, even if no permanence is achieved p. 120. The dinner party, then, is Mrs Ramsay's work of art. There is a reference to Keats' poem, 'Ode to a Grecian Urn’ in that last quotation, and references to the poem run through the whole novel ('led her victims', p. 110). The difference between Mrs Ramsay and the artist is that Mrs Ramsay does not seek to achieve permanence. Yet perhaps this is not a sign of inferiority
Keats is also important because of his notion of negative capability, which applies to both Woolf and Mansfield. See Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf p. 60.
Now I want to turn to another work of art, this one produced after To the Lighhouse, and itself influenced by Woolf. You may know about a famous work of feminist sculpture by Judy Chicago called 'The Dinner Party'. See photograph on the cover and the series of plates following p. 159 of The Dinner Party, by Judy Chicago (Penguin, 1996). The Dinner Party was completed and exhibited in 1979. The sculpture consists of a triangular table with settings for famous women from Western intellectual history. It was prompted by a professor at UCLA who told his undergraduate class: 'Women's contributions to European intellectual history? They made none'. (Chicago, 1996, p. 3) You may think of the remark made to Lily Briscoe by Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse that women can't paint, can't write (p. 99) or Arnold Bennett's judgement on Woolf in a review: 'Can't create character, can't tell a story' (Margaret Drabble, Intro, To the Lighthouse, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. xxi).
Chicago's table settings incorporate china paintings and embroidered textiles and one of her objects was to break down the abritrary and hierarchical relations between craft and art that have placed women's artistic activities below those of men. By constructing the sculpture as a dinner table with three wings that form a triangle rather than a single long table with two heads and seats facing each other, Chicago indicates an ongoing and equal conversation among the women artists and thinkers. There is no hierarchical lineage. Virginia Woolf's plate is alongside Georgia O'Keefe's (last 3 plates of Section Three, Chicago, 1996). Here is what Chicago says about Woolf: 'Like the beacon emanating from the lighthouse in To the Lighthouse ... Woolf illuminated a path toward a new, woman-formed literary language' (Chicago, 1996, p. 151).
Woolf in her dinner party keeps the patriarchal structure intact in terms of the layout of the table. Moreover, To the Lighthouse is a deliberate work of high art. Nevertheless, she draws on the common world of women continually in the novel and this has structural importance. The brown stocking, for example, that Mrs Ramsay knits, may be compared to the way the narrative proceeds by picking and unpicking threads, rather than in a linear fashion.
I now want to step back a little from this rather utopian view of Woolf's novel which belongs in the sexual politics of 1970s feminism. Like Kate Millett's 1970 book, Sexual Politics, (which attacks D.H. Lawrence and other male writers for their phallocentrism) Judy Chicago is advocating 'a polemical politics oriented around "our system of sexual relationship ... [as one] of dominance and subordinance"' (Amelia Jones, ed, Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, UCLA, 1996, p. 22). Woolf is valued because of her difference from male writers, her discovery of a specifically female way of writing, her speaking to a separatist politics for women.
What is useful about this kind of approach? It reverses some of the antagonism towards Woolf in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s when Woolf's critical stock was low. There was a strong antagonism to Bloomsbury in the war and post-war atmosphere. F.R. Leavis championed Lawrence as the great and vital modern novelist, while Bloomsbury was seen as a detached and irrelevant world of upper-classes aesthetes. Soon after her death, as Su Reid points out, Leavis 'attacked her whole career as one misguidedly directed towards writing about vague experiences in the mind' (Reid, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, 1993, p. 1). Woolf's upper-class feminism seemed dated in the face of fascism and world war.
Feminism was crucial to her revival from the 1970s. Here was a woman writer at the centre of the modernist movement who wasn't a reactionary. Moreover, her writing was complex enough to sustain interest from the first wave of polemical feminism to the later more theorised kinds. Woolf as a Bloomsbury novelist of refined sensibilities, gives way to the explorer of female subjectivity and finally to a novelist of intersubjective or language-centred feminism (See Laura Marcus, Virginia Woolf, 1997 p. 2). One of the most challenging theorised readings of her work is by Toril Moi in her 1985 book, Sexual/Textual Politics. A section is printed in Su Reid's Casebook: ‘Through her conscious exploitation of the sportive, sensual nature of language, Woolf rejects the metaphysical essentialism underlying patriarchal ideology, which hails God, the Father or the phallus as its transcendental signified’ (Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, p. 87). Lawrence, on the other hand, substitutes the phallus for the Father, and a semi-religious language of moral strenuousness for Woolf’s ‘sportive’ language use.
Woolf also benefited from the revival of interest in Bloomsbury, an interest reflected in the huge number of biographies, histories and films in recent years. The Woolf we read now is a different writer from that read at the mid century (Laura Marcus, 1997, p. 1). Marcus, writing in 1997, is interested in the 'Virginia Woolf who wote about the city and the cinema, the Woolf of "modernity". I am taken up with her radical explorations of gender and identity, of subjectivity and selfhood, of patriarchy and militarism, of history and of the present moment, or "now-time"', Marcus, p. 2.
This seems an appropriate moment to turn from Woolf to Mansfield. The links between the two, both personal and literary, were strong. Smith analyses these closely. I want to look as well at the differences. Compare, for example, the dinner party in Mansfield’s Bliss (Collected Stories of KM, p. 93, top) to the descriptions in To the Lighthouse, pp. 105-6. Compare also the pear symbolism in the two works: To the Lighthouse, p. 117, Bliss, 96. Modern art in Mansfield is often satirised for pretention and coldness rather than celebrated.
Sue Roe in your anthology observes the shift in understandings of feminine identity enacted in the novel, anthology, p. 108:II, top. Reid focuses on the novel's treatment of the 'artistic process and its grounding in sexuality', anthology, p. 107:I, para 1. This usefully locates the novel's politics in its understanding of art, especially the problems for women artists in a patriarchal society. The value of this approach is that it doesn't separate politics and art, condemning the novel because it fails to take a political position. Reid allows for the complex way politics inform the novel.
Reid, however, seems to me a little hard on Mrs Ramsay in respect of her complicity in Victorian culture, anthology, p. 108:I, para 3. It is true that Mrs Ramsay is Victorian in most of the negative senses: she supports her husband’s sense of his importance. She believes that on men fall the important tasks of ruling empire (p. 12). She notes that Julia Stephen was anti-suffrage. It is true that Lily Briscoe as an artist has to distance herself from Mrs Ramsay's total assimilation into the Victorian male-centred society. But we need to see the ambivalence of Mrs Ramsay's portrait in the novel. She isn't an artist proper, but her attempts to make her dinner a kind of work of art are not merely ridiculous. The dinner is a sign of her role in the patriarchy and of her potential artistry. Her constructing of a myth of order and harmony in the dinner is limited but also potentially part of female creativity, if recognised. Mrs Ramsay seen ambivalently and the Victorian world with her. Marcus, 1997, p. 95, bottom.
Kaplan claims that Mansfield, coming from New Zealand, didn't have to struggle against the fathers, as did Woolf. She claims that experimentation for KM would never have the sense of being a transgression, an assault on the father. It's true that she didn't have to rebel against an intellectual tradition of fathers, as Woolf did, and that her sexual experimentation was her form of rebellion against the father. (Anthology, p. 143:II, para 1) But surely the identification with Wilde and the Decadents, which lies at the basis of KM's modernism, as Kaplan acknowledges, was a gesture of rebellion against the father, and an intellectual or at least a stylistic one against the weight of colonial propriety.
Compare the figures of Mr Ramsay and Stanley Burnell. Consider also the figure of the young woman as a new woman, taking over some of the features previously reserved for men. Mrs Ramsay’s daughters and Kezia in ‘Prelude’. See Marylu Hill, Mothering Modernity, p. 4.
There is also the sheer sense of the loss of her physical being experienced by Lily, a loss which lies at the heart of the book's ambivalence. It is true that Mrs Ramsay's harmonising principle veils fractures and disparities. But she also, as Reid allows, indicates a new kind of female creativity: anthology, p. 115:II, middle.
One other point about Reid's article needs to be noted. I said that the dinner party lies at the centre of the novel. This is true as a visual image and in terms of Mrs Ramsay's place in the novel. Reid, however, observes that the Time Passes section is the centre. This is true structurally, and it also changes our perception of Mrs Ramsay: anthology, p. 111:I, bottom.
3) Politics and art
November 1910, Post-Impressionist Exhibition opened in London, signalling the change from Edwardian to Georgian age. Roger Fry organised the exhibition and entered Bloomsbury, later in 1910. In the same year E.M. Forster declared his love for Syed Ross Masood.
1910 the 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica appeared, based on the underlying assumption that progress was a matter of the acquisition of new facts. The Encyclopedia was the triumph of positivism’ (On or About 1910, p. 169).
This is a novel concerned with art, not with growth of the artist but with how the artist renders life. This is not directly political, but a formal problem. Overt politics are boring, p. 102. Formal decisions are intuitive and incidental but are informed by the search for a way of balancing various elements, including the political. In these terms 'reality' is found neither in thought nor in things. What art seeks to realise is not material or spiritual, but the mind's fragile being in time and place. Art attempts to last forever, p. 194, middle, yet cannot solace against the loss of Mrs Ramsay, pp. 194-5. Moreover, Lily Briscoe's continual worrying about the formal problems of her painting is not a sign of irresponsible aestheticism; it is her means of holding together the pressures and fractures of life and it responds to her experience of the family and the politics moving through it, to do with generational change, women, sex, marriage.
At the heart of Woolf's novel is a sense of the shifting ungraspable nature of the world, which causes sadness and occasional elation. Even this is not a retreat from the world. It is a sense exaccerbated by war (p. 145).
The politics that is rejected is the heavy, obvious repressive one of the Victorian writers with their confidence that they alone represented reality. Woolf's novel opposes this with its poetic prose, its shifts of viewpoint, its meandering narrative.
Finally, the Victorian certainties about sexual difference are political in an ugly, limiting senses. This is what the novel leaves behind, p. 120, and with it the notion that words have a fixed relation to things, that our being in time is simple and linear. The politics of the novel is not simple and fixed, a set of fully finalised ideas transmitted to us as readers directly. They derive from her own ambivalent reflections on her parents, on writing and gender, on the struggles of individuals to make selves. Margaret Thomas in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, ed., Su Reid, p. 130.
Consider the struggle of the children, Cam and James, against the tyranny of Mr Ramsay, and Woolf’s drawing attention to the difficult Oedipal decisions Cam must make (pp. 178-9). Elizabeth Abel discusses this in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, p. 116. Marylu Hill, Mothering Modernity, p. 4.
Perhaps we might compare the status of Cam in To the lighthouse to that of Kezia in ‘Prelude’.
