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 UtahOne 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
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