Articles & Essays Book Reviews

In his novel Howards End, E.M Forster offers a glimpse into a world in which characters attempt to "only connect" or come to understand one another on a level that would dispense with prejudice or difference (Forster, 2000, title page). Yet as the novel closes, one finds that the strongest connection made is that between the two Schlegel sisters, while to the contrary, Henry Wilcox appears a resigned figure who merely accepts his fate; Leonard Bast lies dead because of misunderstanding; and Charles Wilcox is imprisoned because of a violent moment of willful ignorance. What is interesting in the final portrait of the Wilcox/Schlegel family is that no men have been allowed to make a connection like that that binds the two sisters, a fact that seemingly undermines Forster's plea to connect. Written seventeen years later, Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse has what may be argued to be a similar motif of the effort to connect as Forster's novel, particularly discoverable in the novel's closing moments. Yet at the same time, Woolf appears to argue for more than mere "connection," something which this paper attempts to trace and discover as the novel builds towards the dialectical synthesis revealed in Lily's "vision" (Woolf, 2005, 211). To achieve an understanding of this synthesis, one must begin by turning to the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, for Lily's epiphany hinges upon her understanding of their positions in the traditional male/female binary. For as Ellen Carol Jones relates, Lily discovers in "the creative act…a movement towards androgyny, a process which entails a synthesizing of subject [Mr. Ramsay] and object [Mrs. Ramsay] into an artistic whole" (Jones, 1985, 229). Though some critics have argued that it is not until Orlando that "sexual boundaries are effaced[] and Woolf's reconciliatory fantasy of transcending sexual difference and reaching the neutralization of sex becomes manifest," I suggest that it occurs earlier in To The Lighthouse (González, 2004, 83). In addition, I hope to offer an alternative to critics such as Brenda Helt who have argued that "[c]ontrary to common scholarly assertion, in Orlando and A Room of One's Own [Woolf] takes up but ultimately rejects the prevalent notion that the gifted artist must have an androgynous mind" (Helt, 2010, 143).^{^[1]} For Lily (an artist) foregrounds the later development of Orlando into the bodily shape of androgyny, a detail highlighting the primacy Woolf gave to the androgynous mind over the androgynous body.

Tonya Krouse, who takes a similar stance to Jones (quoted above), finds that "Woolf sets up a[n]…opposition between Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsey," in which "Mrs. Ramsay actively takes on the role of 'other' in order to secure herself a position within a patriarchal aesthetic and social framework" (Krouse, 1998, 206). Attempting to achieve this position, Krouse finds that Mrs. Ramsay "must inscribe the antithesis of [the subject, Mr. Ramsay], the impulses of irrationality, nature and emotionality" to the effect that she "becomes the archetypal mother" (Krouse, 1998, 207). Evidence of the inscription Krouse alludes to is given by the narrator in Chapter VIII of "The Window." There, as Mrs. Ramsay is reading to James while thinking about her husband, the reader is told that she "did not like, even for a second, to feel finer than her husband," and it "discomposed her…[when] people said he depended on her, when they must know that of the two he was infinitely the more important, and what she gave the world, in comparison with what he gave, negligible" (Woolf, 2005, 42-3). Already one may see Mrs. Ramsay as opposite to Mr. Ramsay, but of particular interest in this scene is that, just before Mrs. Ramsay/the narrator describes the feelings quoted above, Mrs. Ramsay "heard dully, ominously, a wave fall" (Woolf, 2005, 42). In this instance, the sound of the wave counters the "pulse" Mrs. Ramsay feels after speaking to her husband and which "expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation" (Woolf, 2005, 42). Contrary to the "rapture" she felt moments before, and just before/during the sound of the wave, "there tinged her physical fatigue some faintly disagreeable sensation with another origin,…not that…she knew precisely what it came from; nor did she let herself put into words her dissatisfaction when she realized…how it came from…feel[ing] finer than her husband" (Woolf, 2005, 42). The sound of waves, continually heard by Mrs. Ramsay (or the narrator) in scenes that hold her at its center, affect one of the rhythms of the novel.

Interpreting Julia Kristeva in her article "Prefiguring the Psychoanalytic Subject", Brandy Brown Walker writes that "Kristeva insists that the semiotic/maternal [possess the] element of non-meaning---of rhythms and echolias," yet "women are not reducible to the semiotic any more than men are reducible to the symbolic" (Walker, 1997, 33). But in To the Lighthouse one finds that, at least in the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay (caricatures of heterosexual union), women and men are reducible to these languages, that is, until Lily has her vision and these separate languages are ruptured. In moments such as Chapter XVIII of "The Window," Mrs. Ramsay's effusion of the semiotic is actually framed against "the staircase window" which she has stopped in front of to "notice…the moon" (Woolf, 2005, 118). As Prue, Minta, Lily and Paul come upon this scene, Prue thinks "'That's my mother'…That is the thing itself, she felt, as if there were only one person like that in the world; her mother" (Woolf, 2005, 118). Seeing her mother framed against the lunar sphere, Prue is reduced to "a child again" (Woolf, 2005, 118). What is perhaps most interesting in this scene is that Mrs. Ramsay is once again connected to the waves; first in the lunar connection which suggests that, being a mother, Mrs. Ramsay is the creator of waves rather than solely subject to them, and second, Prue tells Mrs. Ramsay that the young people "'thought of going down to the beach to watch the waves'" (Woolf, 2005, 118). The reader does not know for certain if it was the young people's plan to go “watch the waves" before they came upon Mrs. Ramsay, but the fact remains that they feel compelled (specifically Prue) to go at the exact moment they encounter the beacon (or lighthouse) of their existence which sends out the pulse of life---Mrs. Ramsay (Woolf, 2005, 118).

In a more pointed moment of her alignment with the rhythmical pulse of the semiotic, and which clearly asks the reader to draw a comparison between her and the lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay sits alone near another window which opens onto a view of the lighthouse itself. Sitting there she/the narrator thinks:

Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet the stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at---that light, for example (Woolf, 2005, 66)

Kristeva, who identifies in Mallarmé's work an attempt to "call[] attention to the semiotic rhythm," writes that the semiotic is "[i]ndifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine, th[e] space underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation" (Kristeva, 1984, 29). As opposed to Mr. Ramsay who, as one will see follows a non-rhythmic, linear language (the symbolic), Mrs. Ramsay is approximated by Woolf rather than described---much like the early portrait of her and James composed as a purple triangle.

In the same scene quoted above, one finds Mrs. Ramsay struggling to cope with her children's entrance into the world and movement away from her. A prelude to Lily's memory of Mrs. Ramsay's commandment "'Life stand still here,'" Mrs. Ramsay pleads internally "'Children don't forget, children don't forget'" (Woolf, 2005, 164, 66). Yet she knows that "[their childhood] will end," and to find solace she thinks to herself "We are in the hands of the Lord" (Woolf, 2005, 66). But this thought disturbs her because she feels "she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean" (Woolf, 2005, 66). Undoubtedly it is in part because of the religious nature of the Ramsay family which one is led to believe is not religious at all. But another take on her "annoy[ance]" with the thought is that she realizes on a deeper level that Christianity is part of a larger phallologocentric discourse to which she is subject to and which de-emphasizes her arguably goddess-like status as creator (Woolf, 2005, 66). In the next moment

she looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke [of the lighthouse] and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light (Woolf, 2005, 66; emphasis added)

Mrs. Ramsay's ability to find in the lighthouse's stroke something which allows her to give praise to herself (as goddess) counters her knee-jerk reaction to call upon a Christian God moments before.

Read as a creative rhythm, the lighthouse's strokes also prefigure Lily's final scene in which she too is tapping into creation as she paints her final work:

[A]s if some juice necessary for the lubrication of her faculties were spontaneously squirted, she began precariously dipping among the blues and umbers, moving her hands hither and thither, but it was now heavier and went slower, as if it had fallen in with some rhythm which was dictated to her…by what she saw, so that while her hand quivered with life, this rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with it on its current (Woolf, 2005, 163; emphasis added)

While Lily will be discussed in more detail later in this paper, it is worth noting at this time one of Walker's discoveries about Mrs. Ramsay in each of Lily's paintings. In her first painting, Lily "marks her struggle with the jouissance that she has experienced as a pre-subject and that she recognizes in Mrs. Ramsay" (Walker, 1997, 34). Conversely, in her second painting Lily attempts to "reconcile on the one hand, her yearning for a reunion with the maternal figure that would take her out of speech and expression in the symbolic, and on the other hand, her need to take up a position with respect to the paternal law" (Walker, 1997, 34-5). The reason Walker's observations are important is because while Mrs. Ramsay stands as the central figure of semiotic expression, she is also caught up in the symbolic which relegates her to traditional female roles as wife, mother, and "beautiful" object (as she is described many times in the novel). As one will see, she takes on these roles not just willingly but with joy.

In one of the more direct insights into Mrs. Ramsay's views on the separate spheres of men and women, one is told that

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 treatises, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable (Woolf, 2005, 20)

Unlike Mrs. Ramsay, in A Room of One's Own Woolf questions the situation of women who have been put into a position of "reflect[ing]" back to men their purpose in life: "How is he to go on giving judgment, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?" (Woolf, 2005, 38). Inside her domestic sphere, Mrs. Ramsay has become subject to patriarchy's foremost institution: marriage. As well, her concerns about the fates of her children hinge upon their entrance into this institution which perpetuates the symbolic. In a particular scene, as Lily "tried to start the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head," she envisions Mrs. Ramsay "insist[ing] that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world whatever laurels might be tossed to her…or triumphs won by her…there could be no disputing this:…an unmarried woman has missed the best of life" (Woolf, 2005, 52-3). While Lily never marries and she appears set on an individual lifestyle, she cannot help but become "childlike" while thinking of Mrs. Ramsay, even as she thinks of Mrs. Ramsay calling her a "fool" for not marrying (Woolf, 2005, 53).

In what may be considered the antithesis of Lily's solitary life, Prue takes up her mother's role, but it is not without consequence. One is told that Mrs. Ramsay had particular expectations for her daughters (specifically that they live a life of servitude to men), 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!" (Woolf, 2005, 10). Christine Froula observes that

Prue...in the draft [of TTL] her mother's 'slave'---becomes a child again as the 'exhilarating' three-dimensional world collapses into the mother/child dyad. As this scene deflects onto Prue Lily's dangerous longing to lose herself in the idealized mother, 'Time Passes' records Prue's death (Froula, 2005, 132)

In light of Froula's observation, it may be argued that Woolf undermines Mrs. Ramsay's ideas of ideal womanhood in Prue's death. As one discovers in the 'Time Passes' section, Prue attempts to follow in her mother's footsteps by stepping into the maternal role, but instead she dies "in some illness connected with childbirth" (Woolf, 2005, 196).

Despite what Prue's death can symbolize about a certain kind of life for women, one is meant to view Mrs. Ramsay as the "prototypical mother" nonetheless (Love 190). As Jean O. Love writes:

the powers of the Lighthouse reside in…Mrs. Ramsay [and she] radiates her powers to dominate the disruptive force of her husband…Mrs. Ramsay and the Lighthouse are identical in the function of pacifying and unifying the world that is symbolized by the image of the house in the Hebrides (Woolf, 2005,190)

Perhaps the most "disruptive" scene to epitomize Mr. Ramsay comes early in the novel when James's hopes of traveling to the lighthouse are crushed (Woolf, 2005, 190). Once his father tells him that the weather "'won't be fine'" enough to go the lighthouse, James immediately imagines "an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him" (Woolf, 2005, 8). Having disrupted the harmonious opening of the novel, in which Mrs. Ramsay tells James he will be going to the lighthouse as she allows him to indulge himself, sitting before her, cutting up pictures, Mr. Ramsay "excited in his children's breasts by his mere presence" such "extremes of emotion" that James thinks Mr. Ramsay finds "pleasure…disillusioning" his own son (Woolf, 2005, 8). Indeed, it seems that Mr. Ramsay takes some pleasure in his contrariness because he repeats to James many times that there will be "'[n]o going to the Lighthouse'" (Woolf, 2005, 18). Yet with each of these declarations Mrs. Ramsay is nearby to counter her husband's undoing: "'Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow,' she said, smoothing [James's] hair" (Woolf, 2005, 19).

Love, in her work Worlds of Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of Virginia Woolf, goes on to say that:

Mrs. Ramsay and the Lighthouse have power to stave off or hold at bay the unhappiness and the chaos associated with Mr. Ramsay. Her intuitive and mythopoetic approach to truth opposes and surmounts his pedantic and often cruel emphasis on empirical reality as he schematizes it. Her giving opposes, in their children's experience, his grasping and greed (Love, 1970, 192)

While Love attaches the icon of the lighthouse to Mrs. Ramsay exclusively, and as it has been argued in this paper in similar terms thus far, other critics have been able to see the lighthouse as representative of both Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay. So it is at this point when readers must direct their attention towards Mr. Ramsay to discover how his character exemplifies the antithesis of Mrs. Ramsay.

In their essay "To the Lighthouse: Symbol and Vision," Sharon Kaehele and Howard German argue that the "Lighthouse…may be associated with Mr. Ramsay also" (Kaehele and Howard, 1982, 192). A key passage from To the Lighthouse which Kaehele and German note finds the narrator describing Mr. Ramsay in synonymous terms with the lighthouse: "'he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing'" (Woolf qtd. in Kaehele and German, 1982, 192). Turning to the passage from which Kaehele and German quote, one reads Mr. Ramsay's inner thoughts and concerns about his mortality and wish of immortality. At a certain point he asks himself how long his fame will last since he, admittedly, will not be the "one [man] in a generation" to reach "Z" (Woolf, 2005, 38). Mr. Ramsay equates those men who reach "Z" with genius, and because he resignedly knows he is not one of those elite few ("his own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two"), he reasons that even their immortality is but short-lived in the larger scheme of things: "The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare" (Woolf, 2005, 39). Unlike his wife, who shows no hint of concern about immortality and who is in fact firmly seated in the ritual of day-to-day mortality, Mr. Ramsay attempts to structure his life so that it will be "still standing" like the lighthouse, long after he has died.

If one characterizes Mrs. Ramsay as representative of semiotic language (as noted earlier), expressed through the rhythms of novel such as the waves and the lighthouse's pulse, Mr. Ramsay then stands as the representational figure of symbolic language. His linear movement from "A" to "R," down (or up) his conceptualized scale of genius which ends with "Z," epitomizes Kristeva's definition of symbolic language: "the symbolic---and therefore syntax and all linguistic categories---is a social effect of the relation to the other, established through the objective constraints of biological (including sexual) differences and concrete, historical family structures" (Woolf, 2005, 37-8; Kristeva, 1984, 29). Apropos Mr. Ramsay's inability to get to "R," one may refer back to Jacques Lacan's theory of the Law of the father. That Mr. Ramsay is unable to situate the letter that begins his own patronymic within the scale of genius perhaps reflects Walker's understanding that "a subject does not develop along a strictly linear progression, but [requires] a movement back and forth…between semiotic and symbolic" (Walker, 1997, 35). Mr. Ramsay (the subject), described in strictly linear, scientific and rational terms is symbolic of an extreme, just as is Mrs. Ramsay. Walker's suggestion that a subject must encompass both forms of language is what Lily's character is building towards, but until she can take up this new position, she must understand the two extremes.

One other interesting detail in Kristeva's definition of the semiotic is the term "other" which in To the Lighthouse comes to define Mrs. Ramsay (Kristeva, 1984, 29). With the two Ramsays juxtaposed in terms of subject and other, it is perhaps easier to recognize instances in the novel that erupt in aligning Mr. Ramsay with the symbolic and traditional patriarchy. As Prue's death arguably reflects the fate of women "locked" into a gender role, (mis)patterned on Mrs. Ramsay's life, so too does Andrew's fate reflect more about Mr. Ramsay and traditional roles taken up by men. Conversing with one another, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay both weigh in on the subject of their two children: "Andrew would be a better man than [Mr. Ramsay] had been. Prue would be a beauty, her mother said. They would stem the flood a bit" (Woolf, 2005, 72). Yet, as with Prue's entrance into motherhood, Andrew's fate is to take but a step into "manhood" before he dies. Having followed a traditional model of manhood in becoming a soldier, Andrew goes to fight in WWI, only there "[a] shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay" (Woolf, 2005, 137). Throughout the novel, soldier imagery and war are aligned with Mr. Ramsay himself, and though one is never told whether he was a soldier in his youth or not, one may surmise that his esteem of the soldier's life rubbed off on his son.

In one such moment that Woolf aligns Mr. Ramsay with the bellicose, she adapts Tennyson's poem "Charge of the Light Brigade" in order to describe him:

All his vanity, all his satisfaction in his own splendour, riding fell as a thunderbolt, fierce as a hawk at the head of his men through the valley of death, had been shattered, destroyed. Stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well…volleyed and thundered (Woolf, 2005, 34)

[w]ho…could blame the leader of that forlorn party which after all has climbed high enough to see the waste of years and the perishing of stars, if before death stiffens his limbs beyond the power of movement he does a little consciously raise his numbed fingers to his brow, and square his shoulders, so that when the search party comes they will find him dead at his post, the fine figure of a soldier (Woolf, 2005, 39; emphasis added)

This second passage connotes not only Mr. Ramsay's vision of himself as a soldier, but once again harkens back to the idea that he too is a/the lighthouse, emphasized by the fact that he alone stands from a vantage point to look back across the years and see what has become of his family and himself. Though dead, the "stiffen[ed]" soldier with "squared…shoulders" is not found lying down, but rather erect "at his post," like the lighthouse among the rocks (Woolf, 2005, 39).

In other ways as well does Mr. Ramsay come to symbolize a lighthouse. Much like the beacon figure of Mrs. Ramsay, who creates order and unity within the Ramsay household and therefore draws her family around her, Mr. Ramsay also attracts the company of others. The difference between the two, however, is that Mr. Ramsay's attraction extends to include those outside the Ramsay household. The narrator relates that Mr. Ramsay "inspired in William Bankes (intermittently) and in Charles Tansley (obsequiously)…profoundly, reverence, and pity, and gratitude too…gratitude for the duty it is taking upon itself of marking the channel out there in the floods alone" (Woolf, 2005, 47). Mr. Ramsay's work in philosophy allows him the ability to navigate out of the "feminine sphere" of the home where his wife holds dominion; in focusing on the subject of philosophy, using the language of the symbolic, Mr. Ramsay secures himself against potential intrusion into his world by his wife. Indeed, Mrs. Ramsey "did in her own heart infinitely prefer boobies to clever men who wrote dissertations" (Woolf, 2005, 58). Having written a "definite contribution to philosophy in one little book," yet unable to write another, Mr. Ramsay embodies a specific type of male writer that Woolf identifies in A Room of One's Own (Woolf, 2005, 27). Though writing about the novelists Kipling and Galsworthy, Woolf claims that "all their qualities seem to a woman, if one may generalize, crude and immature. They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hit's the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within" (Woolf, 2005, 101; emphasis added). What one may deduce from Woolf's comments, and by her characterization of Mr. Ramsay, is that unlike Lily who is able to create something new, Mr. Ramsay is stuck in one (male) mode of thinking that prevents him from moving forward in his pursuits (stuck at 'R') to create his next philosophical work.

During the dinner scene of "The Window" in which Mrs. Ramsay reflects upon her husband, one is able to discover some of Mr. Ramsay's most patriarchal beliefs. These beliefs erupt when, upon entering the room, Minta relates that she lost her grandmother's "brooch" as she takes a seat beside Mr. Ramsay whose "chivalry" is "roused" by Minta's "lamentation" (Woolf, 2005, 100). Mr. Ramsay, who "liked telling [Minta] she was a fool," nevertheless enjoys the girl's company as opposed to someone like Lily (Woolf, 2005, 100). Though he never verbalizes Charles Tansley's sentiments that "women can't paint, can't write," Mr. Ramsay has little to do with Lily until the end of the novel (Woolf, 2005, 163). Believing Lily to be "'skimpy'" and therefore unattractive when compared to a girl like Minta, Mr. Ramsay sets the value of the women in his world and they internalize it, as Mrs. Ramsay's thoughts relate (Woolf, 2005, 101). Keeping an eye on her husband and Minta, Mrs. Ramsay tells herself "she was not jealous, only, now and then, when she made herself look in her glass a little resentful that she had grown old, perhaps, by her own fault" (Woolf, 2005, 101). That Mrs. Ramsey believes it to be her own fault, or inability, to hold her husband's interest as Minta can clearly expresses how deep Mr. Ramsay's patriarchal views are embedded in the family. Krouse outlines how the views are at work in the Ramsay couple:

[I]f the subject [Mr. Ramsay], who stands as dominant within the society, represents the impulses of rationality, science, and the life of the mind, Mrs. Ramsay, in order to fit into the social structure, must inscribe…a gendered construction that limits her options and her power within the context of the novel (Krouse, 1998, 297)

When one learns of Mrs. Ramsay's death, it is not inconsequential to note that the family begins to break apart. For Mr. Ramsay, who has spent the greater part of his life in the intellectual sphere, cannot work the "magic" of his wife to keep his family together. The idea is emphasized by the growing deterioration of the Ramsay house during the ten years which separate their summer visits:

The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sand hill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long night seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. The saucepan had rusted and the mat decayed. Toads had nosed their way in…A thistle thrust itself between the tiles in the larder. The swallows nested in the drawing-room; the floor was strewn with straw; the plaster fell in shovelfuls; rafters were laid bare (Woolf, 2005, 141)

The description of the abandoned house continues until Mrs. Bast and her son clean it up in preparation for the family's return. Yet the fact that the house is once again restored to a livable nature is not as relevant as the image of the house in deterioration. For the house's crumbling state not only reflects the family's deterioration but represents in connection to Lily the breakdown of old modes of understanding the Ramsay couple.

As "The Window" unfolds mostly inside the house (and largely focuses on Mrs. Ramsay within it), and as the "Time Passes" section takes place far away in time and distance (symbolic of Mr. Ramsay's sphere), the third part of the novel takes place largely outside the house as Lily stands between the house (Mrs. Ramsay) and the voyage away from the house (Mr. Ramsay). Lily's physical proximity to both Ramsays reflects her newfound ability to mediate between the couple without becoming consumed by either. Yet early in the novel, Lily and Mrs. Ramsay's relationship reflects a mother/child dyadic relationship that effectively "binds" Lily, explicitly, to the language of the semiotic. Krouse writes that

Lily struggles to articulate her artistic vision without exploding the dialectical oppositions between masculine and feminine that patriarchally instituted gender roles entail. Additionally, by not exploding those gender roles, Lily continues to be defined by her essential feminine 'nature,' which denies women access to achieving sublimity in their own right (Krouse, 1998, 298)

As Woolf has shown in the Ramsay couple, explicit proscription to either language inhibits the subject/object from being able to function outside of the roles assigned to their positions. But Lily, perhaps because she is not Mrs. Ramsay's biological daughter and therefore some distance lies between them (unlike Cam, Prue or James), is able to pick up on Mrs. Ramsay's rhythms, follow them to the core of her true nature, then filter her vision through the artist's eye. At least this is what Lily attempts to do in "The Window."

While painting her first portrait of Mrs. Ramsay and James, Lily becomes "childlike" thinking about the mother (Woolf, 2005, 53). Remembering how "she had laid her head on Mrs. Ramsay's lap and laughed and laughed and laughed, laughed almost hysterically at the thought of Mrs. Ramsay presiding…over destinies which she completely failed to understand," Lily questions if it is "wisdom" or "knowledge" Mrs. Ramsay holds "secret" and that allows her to exude "calm" in her place of motherly power (Woolf, 2005, 53-4). Allowing her impression of Mrs. Ramsay to play over her mind's eye, Lily sees Mrs. Ramsay "clear as the space which the clouds at last uncover---the little space of sky which sleeps beside the moon" (Woolf, 2005, 53). Just as with Prue, who recognizes her mother framed against the stairway window with a view of the moon (and who in that instance becomes a child again), Lily equates Mrs. Ramsay with the lunar heaven. As stated above, but which bears repeating in this instance, Lily is not related to Mrs. Ramsey (unlike Prue), therefore she is able to look past the initial iconic form aligned with Mrs. Ramsey (the moon) and see that her true nature lies in the "little space of sky which sleeps beside the moon" (53). This observation becomes pertinent when considering Lily's initial rendering of Mrs. Ramsay in which she paints her "[b]y a shadow here and a light there" (Woolf, 2005, 56).

With the ability to read or decode the rhythms that pulse from Mrs. Ramsay, Lily does indeed see her true nature. In an intimate, isolated moment when Mrs. Ramsay is able to think through her own ideas of self, the narrator/Mrs. Ramsay relates that

it was so important what one said, and what one did…For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of---to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others (Woolf, 2005, 65)

In this scene Mrs. Ramsay folds in upon herself and is released, for just a moment, from the roles of mother and wife. But where she thinks that her true being is "invisible to others," one finds that her vision of herself as a "wedge-shaped core of darkness" echoes Lily's own impression of Mrs. Ramsay (Woolf, 2005, 65). Yet, despite her ability to see Mrs. Ramsay for who she truly is, Lily is unable to complete her first painting because she cannot "connect [the] mass on the right hand with that one the left" (Woolf, 2005, 57). Lily's aesthetic problem, Krouse argues, arises because "Lily seems to believe that she must achieve an organic whole and enter into the framework of the sublime through discourse previously determined by the masculinist tradition" (Krouse, 1998, 298). At this point in the novel Lily has not yet found a way to navigate a way around the patriarchal "road blocks" that hold her back from creation. However, one can find in "The Window" evidence of Lily's resistance to patriarchy that distinguishes her as unique among the other young women and in comparison to Mrs. Ramsay.

As she poses for Lily's painting, Mrs. Ramsay thinks about the young artist: "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" (Woolf, 2005, 21). Though she may have liked Lily for her independent nature, Mrs. Ramsay cannot imagine the young woman's art worthy of the same accolade and criticism as "masters" of the form: men. Interesting too is that Mrs. Ramsay does not append the label 'art' to Lily's work but thinks of it instead as the product of a mechanical process, "painting" (Woolf, 2005, 21). Arguably Mrs. Ramsay's comments about Lily hinge upon the fact that "she would never marry" (Woolf, 2005, 21). This scene reflects, in a Foucauldian way, the power structure of patriarchy at work. For Mrs. Ramsay, who has invested her entire being and worth in motherhood and wifely "duty," receives praise and solicitude from even the most critical characters of the novel, such as Charles Tansley. Lily, on the other hand, is effectively "written off" for her "failure" to be inscribed by the traditional female role; yet, like a "true" mother, Mrs. Ramsay loves her anyway, and because of this love, Lily will at times bend to Mrs. Ramsay's wishes even though they pit her against her true self.

During the dinner scene of "The Window," as Charles sits and waits for "somebody to give him a chance of asserting himself" in conversation, Lily perceives the young man's desire and at once takes pleasure in seeing him squirm (Woolf, 2005, 93). "Remembering how he sneered at women, 'can't paint, can't write,'" Lily does not wish to engage him in conversation that would force her to reflect back his high opinions of himself (Woolf, 2005, 93). This detail clearly illustrates Lacan's idea about what occurs in the subject/object positions. Lily even derisively calls this "duty" to reflect in social situations a "code of behavior…whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behooves the woman, whatever her own occupation may be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose…his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself" (Woolf, 2005, 93). Though Lily would be unwilling to engage Charles in conversation at any other time, the mere presence of Mrs. Ramsay in the room coerces Lily into "renounc[ing] the experiment" of leaving Charles to his own isolated corner of the table (Woolf, 2005, 94). Instead she engages Charles, "kindly" in conversation, to which Lily then "felt Mrs. Ramsay's gratitude" (Woolf, 2005, 94).

Despite Mrs. Ramsay's power to control and direct Lily's behavior towards a more traditional feminine role, she is powerless against Lily's mindset on marriage. In the same dinner scene, as the conversation and inner thoughts of the characters move towards the topic of marriage, Lily "said to herself, catching sight of the salt cellar on the pattern, she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation" (Woolf, 2005, 104). On some level Lily no doubt equates marriage with Charles's sentiment that women "'can't paint, can't write'"; the institution would effectively strip her of the freedom to do as she pleases and relegate her concerns to her husband's freedom, much like Mrs. Ramsay (Woolf, 2005, 93). But Lily has art. Indeed, to escape even the offensive thought of marriage, Lily's mind quickly turns back to her painting: "She would move the tree rather more to the middle" (Woolf, 2005, 104). While Lily's thought is a sign that she will not follow the traditional, patterned female role, it belies another aspect of thinking she will have to contend with in order to have her final vision: the masculine mind as represented by Mr. Ramsay.

At the same time that Lily attempts to negotiate her beliefs with those of her mother figure, she is also at pains to discover through Mr. Ramsay how she can negotiate the world of the symbolic. Scenes shared by the two characters in "The Window" are few, but this fact is as telling as if they shared more scenes. As mentioned above, Mr. Ramsay is drawn more to women figures who will reflect his "greatness," or who make him "[seem] a young man; a man very attractive to women, not burdened, not weighed down with the greatness of his labours" (Woolf, 2005, 101). In opposition to Lily, Minta has "some quality which [Lily] had not, some luster, some richness, which attracted him, amused him, led him to make favourites of girls like Minta," at least that's what Mr. Ramsay believes (Woolf, 2005, 101). For her part, Lily thinks of him in not so flattering terms as well: "Mr. Ramsay has [no greatness]. He is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical; he is spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears Mrs. Ramsay to death," yet she has a "profound respect for [his] mind" nonetheless (Woolf, 2005, 28). While Lily's characterization of Mr. Ramsay is negligibly more desirable than his of her, Lily does think of something that will get her beyond her feelings which interrupt her painting, something Woolf describes in A Room of One's Own as characteristic of an androgynous mind. In her essay, Woolf writes that one should "not dream of influencing other people…Think of things in themselves" (Woolf, 2005, 109). Lily, as seen above in conjunction with Mrs. Ramsay and the "wedge-shaped core of darkness," has the ability to do this very thing (Woolf, 2005, 65). Yet because she has not gown completely into her "androgynous" mind in "The Window," she still struggles to see past the opposite sex's faults. But just before one read's her sentiments on Mr. Ramsay, one finds that Lily echoes Woolf's own statement quoted above: "How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?" (Woolf, 2005, 28). At this point Lily is still struggling to think of some things "in themselves," but questioning how to get to a point of understanding is what is important to note (Woolf, 2005, 109).

Up to this point, this paper has tried to show how in the first two thirds of TTL oppositions have been set up that hinge upon gender differences, differences that explode in Lily's final vision. In this sense, Lily's vision may be viewed as a dialectical synthesis of the Ramsay couple. But how is it that she comes to this synthesis where she could not before? One explanation, offered by Elizabeth Abel, is that Lily had to "distanc[e] herself from Mrs. Ramsey" (Abel, 1989, 82). In fact, Lily herself concludes that "so much depends…upon distance: whether people are near us or far from us" (Woolf, 2005, 194). Having distance from Mrs. Ramsay affords Lily freedom from the mother/child dyad (which prevented her from accessing the symbolic mode of thinking expressed in Mr. Ramsay). Indeed, Walker suggests that "[i]t is the semiotic, that which is before sexual distinction, which [Lily] needs to bring life to her and her painting, but it is also the security and solidity of the symbolic that she needs to keep her 'firmly' pitched before her easel" (Walker, 1997, 37-8). Walker further states that

"Lily chooses…both [Ramsays], and then discards them…as insufficient options of a limiting binary. She moves, in her final mark, to recognize the heterogeneity within her as she chooses herself, paints her own androgynous vision, and attains her own subject position when she makes her mark" (Walker, 1997, 38)

Evidence of Lily's androgynous mind is found in her final interaction with Mr. Ramsay. In fact, it is the first time in the novel in which one finds the two speaking to one another (a fact that points to Lily's newfound sense of self). Carolyn Heilbrun discovers in the interaction between the two characters that Mr. Ramsay "had borne down upon her, threatening her sense of self, but she had not offered him submission, and he had been revived with what she did offer" (Heilbrun, 1968, 78). The interaction of the two characters in this moment highlights Lily's ability to tap into her androgynous mind (which is comprised of both masculine and feminine thinking) and navigate the waters of the masculine mind which Mr. Ramsay has exclusive access to. Heilbrun notes that Mr. Ramsay is pacified with Lily's comment about his shoes, and that out of this small gesture "a moment's understanding between a man and a woman may be enough: one of them need not offer her whole life, nor demand a major part of his," as opposed to the relationship of the Ramsay couple (Heilbrun, 1968, 78).

For Woolf, it is Lily's ability to access the "man's brain" and the "woman's brain" that frees her from the limitations of strict identification with one or the other (Woolf, 2005, 97). In her final act of connecting the two sides of her painting, Lily accesses both sides at the same time, for the first time, which is why it does not matter to her whether the finished piece will be "hung in attics" or "destroyed": Lily has learned to do something worth more than her painting could ever fetch, something which will allow her to go beyond Mr. Ramsay's 'R' (Woolf, 2005, 211). One interpretation of this movement beyond is that Lily, unlike Mr. Ramsay, has been able to overcome her own ego and recognize him and his wife for who they truly are---something Mr. Ramsay could never do and which hindered his further development towards "genius." In "Picture the World," Froula argues another interpretation of 'R' which finds that in the final moments of TTL Mr. Ramsay is moving towards "R, death's Reality" (Froula, 2005, 171). Froula further states that Lily is only at "L" at this point or "the Lighthouse" (Froula, 2005, 171). Yet this interpretation neglects the fact that Lily is the one who has had the moment of vision, been able "think of things in themselves," such as Mrs. Ramsay's wedge of darkness, or her ability to perceive Mr. Ramsay's need of a compliment in order to pacify him so she can return to her canvas (Woolf, 2005, 109).

In his analysis of Lily's final stroke, Paul Goring finds that it represents Lily's ability to "overcome the domineering presences of the household, and…she unites in her picture the 'factual' and 'visionary' ways of seeing with which Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay are shown to perceive" (Goring, 1994, 226). This analysis harkens back to the idea of the Ramsays as representative of two languages, the symbolic and semiotic, or to Woolf's own view of two different types of minds, the man's and the woman's. Because Lily is able to unite the two, she in effect expresses Woolf's idea of one who possesses the "woman-manly" mind (Woolf, 2005, 97). No longer will she allow Charles Tansley's assertion that women "can't paint, can't write" interrupt her from the act of creation (Woolf, 2005, 93). Indeed, in Lily Briscoe Woolf imagined the ideal mind necessary to raise Shakespeare's sister from her fate of oblivion:

[I]f we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality…if we face the fact…that our relation is to the world reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body she has so often laid down" (Woolf, 2005, 112)

While some critics, such as Esther Sánchez-Pardo González, attempt to argue that "Woolf's Orlando might...solve the enigma that the author raised in A Room of One's Own, when she resolved the feminist quest with her...ambiguous concept of androgyny," it is instead the final dash of Lily's painting, connecting the two sides of an image (the two separate and distinct modes of thinking/being) in which Woolf's "enigma" has been solved (González, 2004, 84). Unlike the Schlegel sisters, Lily has brought together in her androgynous mind a far more radical connection, one in which sexual difference has been transcended and the space for Orlando has been opened.

Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Print.

Froula, Christine. "Picture the World: The Quest for the Thing Itself in To the Lighthouse." Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity. By Froula. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. 128-73. Print.

González, Esther Sánchez-Pardo. "'What Phantasmagoria the Mind Is': Reading Virginia Woolf's Parody of Gender.'" Atlantis 26.2 (December 2004). 75-86. Web.

Goring, Paul. "The Shape of To the Lighthouse: Lily Briscoe's Painting and the Reader's Vision." Word & Image 10.3 (Jul-Sep 1994). 222-29. Print.

Heilbrun, Carolyn. "The Androgynous Vision in To the Lighthouse." Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. By Heilbrun. New York: Knopf, 1968. 73-8. Print.

Helt, Brenda S. "Passionate Debates on 'Odious Subjects': Bisexuality and Woolf's Opposition to Theories of Androgyny and Sexual Identity." Twentieth-Century Literature 56.2 (Summer 2010). 131-65. Web.

Jones, Ellen Carol. "Androgynous Vision and Artistic Process in Virgina Woolf's A Room of One's Own." Critical Essay on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Morris Beja. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1985. 227-239. Print.

Kaehele, Sharon and Howard German. "To the Lighthouse: Symbol and Vision." Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse. Ed. Morris Beja. London: MacMillan, 1982. 189-209. Print.

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Print.

Krouse, Tonya. Virginia Woolf and Her Influences: Selected Papers from the Seventh Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Laura Davis and Jeanette McVicker. New York: Pace UP, 1998. 294-301. Print.

Love, Jean O. Worlds of Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of Virginia Woolf. Berkley: U of California P. 1970. Print.

Walker, Brandy Brown. "Prefiguring the Psychoanalytic Subject." Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Selected Papers from the Sixth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diane F. Gillespie and Leslie K. Hankins. New York: Pace UP, 1997. 32-8. Print.

^{^[1]} More recent studies have tended to discuss androgyny in relation to Woolf's other works, particularly Orlando and A Room of One's Own. Unique among those is Lisa Rado's book The Modern Androgyne Imagination: A Failed Sublime (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2000), which discusses many of Woolf's major works in the context of other Modernists who also created androgynous figures. As well, Brenda Helt's article "Passionate Debates on 'Odious Subjects': Bisexuality and Woolf's Opposition to Theories of Androgyny and Sexual Identity" (Twentieth-Century Literature 56.2 (2010)), informatively contextualizes the contemporary "scientific" material about androgyny that was published before and during Woolf's lifetime.