NOVEL II Lecture 11

1. NOVEL IILecture 11

2. SYNOPSIS Character Analysis continues… 1. Lily Briscoe • Lily and Men: Specifically, Charles Tansley and William Bankes • First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage...? 2. James Ramsay

3. SYNOPSIS Themes • Time (How to present a theme…) • The Transience of Life and Work • Art as a Means of Preservation • The Subjective Nature of Reality • The Restorative Effects of Beauty • Memory and the Past • Love • Gender

4. SYNOPSIS Themes • Marriage • Manipulation • Admiration • Identity • Victory • Friendship • Laws and Order

5. SYNOPSIS • Motifs • The Differing Behaviors of Men and Women • Brackets Symbols • The Lighthouse • Lily’s painting • The Ramsay’s House • The Sea • The Boar’s Skull • The Fruit Basket

6. Lily Briscoe • Have you ever heard the term "Mary Sue"? It's an internet slang expression for a character in a story who seems like total wish fulfillment for the author – someone the author either 1) really identifies with, or 2) really wants to be6with. • A common marker of the Mary Sue is that she's really pretty. If she's physically flawed at all, it's a flaw that makes her even more appealing – like a single streak of silver hair in an otherwise flaming mane of beautiful red curls.

7. Another sign that a character might be a self-insertion is that she's really good at everything: she'll be the most caring, most talented character of the lot. • So if you run across a character in a fantasy novel who's too beautiful to be real, with almond-shaped violet eyes and a perfect, voluptuous-without-being-too-curvy figure, who turns out to be a half-elven daughter of Gandalf with magic beyond imagining and wisdom beyond her age – chances are, that's a Mary Sue.

8. And, in the best possible way, without all of those magic powers of the Faerie, Lily Briscoe is kind of Virginia Woolf's Mary Sue. • She's the person who most closely mirrors Woolf's own preoccupations with gender and art (and she's also intriguing looking – for an analysis of the significance of Lily's "Chinese eyes,”…

9. Consider the middle section of the book, in which Woolf uses words to sketch the essence of ten years of time's passage for the Ramsay family by focusing on the slow decline of their house in the Isle of Skye. • Woolf works obliquely (in other words, indirectly and in a wandering manner) to depict the decay of the Ramsay family without ever actually coming out and showing how the family has interacted over those ten years. • And this is really similar to the painting strategy that Lily uses in To the Lighthouse:

10. It was Mrs Ramsay reading to James, [Lily] said. She knew [William Bankes]'s objection— that no one could tell it for a human shape. • But she had made no attempt at likeness, she said. For what reason had she introduced them then? he asked. • Why indeed?—except that if there, in that corner, it was bright, here, in this, she felt the need of darkness. Simple, obvious, commonplace, as it was, MrBankes was interested. Mother and child then—objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was famous for her beauty—might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow without irreverence. (1.9.13)

11. Lily's painting of James and Mrs. Ramsay suggests Mrs. Ramsay's character with a few lines and a bit of purple shadowing: "she had made no attempt at likeness." • Lily attempts to capture something truthful in her portrait without being too picky about making the painting actually look like Mrs. Ramsay. • And in painting the essence of Mrs. Ramsay rather than her physical form, she's not trying to get only Mrs. Ramsay; she's also trying to represent something ineffable or inexpressible about "mother and child [...] objects of universal veneration" (by the way, veneration means admiration and respect).

12. Lily and Men: Specifically, Charles Tansley and William Bankes • Mrs. Ramsay can't stand for a woman of her acquaintance to stay unmarried. • She's a total matchmaker, and Lily isn't immune. The guy Mrs. Ramsay thinks Lily should marry is William Bankes, an older widower of Mr. Ramsay's acquaintance who becomes one of the greatest friends of Lily Briscoe's life. • What's really interesting about Lily's relationship with Mr. Bankes is the way that it models a totally non-sexual and mutually supportive relationship between a man and a woman – something that, as a woman artist in the 1920s, Lily seems cynical about.

13. This relationship stands in contrast to Mr. Ramsay's incredibly domineering, oppressive influence on Lily's painting. • Mr. Ramsay makes it impossible for Lily to paint as she chooses: "Let [Mr. Ramsay] be fifty feet away, let him not even speak to you, let him not even see you, he permeated, he prevailed, he imposed himself. • He changed everything" (3.1.10). Mr. Ramsay's intellectual and social authority as the Head of the Ramsay Family gives him an arrogance that squeezes the life out of his social subordinates: his children, his wife, and even Lily.

14. But where Mr. Ramsay stifles Lily's creativity, Mr. Bankes respects it – even if he doesn't entirely get what she's going for. Mr. Bankes's contrast with Mr. Ramsay underlined by his own internal monologue in Part One:He was anxious for the sake of this friendship [with Lily Briscoe] and perhaps too in order to clear himself in his own mind from the imputation of having dried and shrunk – for Ramsay lived in a welter of children, whereas Bankes was childless and a widower – he was anxious that Lily Briscoe should not disparage Ramsay (a great man in his own way) yet should understand how things stood between them. (1.4.9)

15. What Mr. Bankes wants from Lily is the recognition that yes, he belongs to Mr. Ramsay's generation (they knew each other as boys), but they have each developed along different tracks. • Mr. Ramsay has become a family man as well as a philosopher, but Mr. Bankes, who does not occupy the kind of traditional family structure Mr. Ramsay prizes (he's "childless and a widower"), can talk to Lily about her painting without becoming hostile, competitive, or patronizing. • And this degree of free-thinking reassures Lily that her painting can be meaningful across gender lines:

16. She remembered how William Bankes had been shocked by her neglect (in her painting) of the significance of mother and son. Did she not admire their beauty? he said. • But William, she remembered, had listened to her with his wise child's eyes when she explained how it was not irreverence [...] Thanks to his scientific mind he understood – a proof of disinterested intelligence which had pleased her and comforted her enormously. • One could talk of painting then seriously to a man. (3.5.17)

17. Bankes cares about the "significance" of mother and son (both as real people, such as James and Mrs. Ramsay, but also as social categories). • Still, he is capable of overcoming his own prejudices to admire Lily's work according to her own reasoning. • They can have a conversation about painting that would be impossible between Lily and Mr. Ramsay, with the latter's real caveman views on women.

18. As far as cavemen go, though, Charles Tansley is pretty far up there. He's the one who comes right out and says, repeatedly, that women can't paint and can't write. • The thing about Charles is that he's jockeying for position in a social world that he feels should be controlled by men – and specifically, by intellectual, philosophical men like Mr. Ramsay (and himself). • He doesn't feel that he should be forced to compete with Lily Briscoe in conversation, and he gets all frustrated during the dinner party when she doesn't play along with him at first.

19. The thing that prevents Lily from being oppressed by Tansley is that she has her work to fall back on:She had done the usual trick — been nice. [Lily] would never know [Charles Tansley]. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr. Bankes) were between men and women [...] And she remembered that next morning she would move the tree further towards the middle, and her spirits rose so high at the thought of painting tomorrow that she laughed out loud at what Mr. Tansley was saying. Let him talk all night if he liked it. (1.17.28)

20. Lily is feeling embarrassed because she's "done the usual trick": Tansley's being a total jerk at this party, but even so, Lily falls back onto her social training as a woman of the 1920s and smoothes everything over. • She submits to him socially so that he'll stop hating life, even though he's been a creep to Lily and everyone else around him. • But then Lily recalls that she has something of her own to fall back on – that painting with a tree that she'll be moving further towards the middle. • And even though she still has to deal with social hierarchy on a daily basis, it's a huge relief to Lily that she also has this private, emotionally meaningful place to speak her own mind.

21. So Lily doesn't care what Tansley is nattering on about at the dinner table: he has no power over her. Lily's work and Mr. Bankes are the two things that convince her that social relations between men and women aren't hopeless: there are decent men out there, and even when Lily happens not to be seated next to one of them at the dinner table, she's carved out an intellectual identity for herself that can protect her.

22. First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage...? • We've talked a little bit about Lily's difficult relationships with men, so it should come as no surprise that she doesn't want to get married. She seems to view marriage and personal creativity as incompatible. And she gives us plenty of evidence for this:For at any rate, [Lily] said to herself [...] she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution. She would move the tree rather more to the middle. (1.17.52)

23. Here's where Lily comes up against the character of Mrs. Ramsay, who has her own form of creativity. • Mrs. Ramsay is a social artist: she puts together dinner parties and holds together her family. • She adopts strays like Lily Briscoe and William Bankes, bringing them in to the sunny circle of the Ramsay family. • But Mrs. Ramsay is limited by her inability to imagine an identity outside of traditional society. • Lily Briscoe doesn't have that restriction. She makes a place for herself to express her own private understanding of what's going on around her. This space is her canvas.

24. What's interesting about Lily's painting (besides the fact that it's nonrepresentational and abstract, kind of like To the Lighthouse) is that Lily knows that perhaps no one will ever see it. • Her work gave her something to talk about with Mr. Bankes, but otherwise, it has no communicative function. Lily's basically resigned herself to the fact that her painting is going to wind up in someone's attic (3.13.3). But isn't art supposed to help you express yourself? How can it be meaningful if it's not public?

25. What Woolf is fighting against here is the notion that the only way that art is meaningful is if its creator is famous. • During the time in which this novel is set, fame favors men. After all, Mr. Ramsay is famous, and he uses his established reputation as an intellectual as another way of oppressing the people around him (think of all that out-of-context poetry he spouts, to the embarrassment of Mrs. Ramsay).

26. Lily, on the other hand, can muse on the same questions that face Mr. Ramsay – the meaning of life, etc. – without pushing anybody else down. • What's more, painting helps her gain perspective. Lily's thoughts about life and the universe aren't in the abstract, logical terms that Mr. Ramsay uses. • Lily paints the Ramsays and the Lighthouse in an attempt to make sense of her own lived experience. • Lily finds significance in fleeting scenes of daily life around her, a project that certainly resembles, say, Woolf's own Mrs. Dalloway. Painting, for Lily, is a means for personal revelation.

27. James Ramsay • James Ramsay is the youngest of the Ramsay family's eight children. He starts out the novel as a six-year-old and ends it as a melancholy, sullen sixteen-year-old. • James's entire character revolves around his desire to go to the Lighthouse: in Part One, he desperately wants to go but will not be allowed, and in the Part Three, his father makes him to sail there almost against his will.

28. James's obsession makes it obvious that this Lighthouse isn't just a lighthouse; it's in the title, so it's got to have huge symbolic significance. • Want to go and then refusing to go to the Lighthouse becomes one tool to show the reader James's shifting, difficult relationship with his father.

29. James is caught between his profound bond with his mother and his fiercely competitive relationship with his father. • Even at six, he's filled with apparent loathing for Mr. Ramsay and the place that he occupies in Mrs. Ramsay's life.

30. And James's fixation on Mrs. Ramsay is by no means one-sided; Mrs. Ramsay wishes that James (and his sister, Cam) would never grow up: "She would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters" (1.10.10). • Mrs. Ramsay, as mother of eight, derives much of her identity from being a Mother (with a capital M); her intense relationship with James (and, to a lesser extent, Cam) keeps that maternal identity alive.

31. Of course, the problem with maintaining Mrs. Ramsay as the ultimate Mother is that James doesn't just want to be her son. • He kind of wants to be his dad. He fantasizes about plunging a knife into Mr. Ramsay's heart – and because we have no evidence that James is actually a psychopath, we have to figure that this is symbolic of a more general desire to replace his dad, to prevent his father from interrupting James's special tie to Mrs. Ramsay. • And Mrs. Ramsay is, in a subtle way, complicit in this competition between these two men in her life:

32. "Perhaps you will wake up and find the sun shining and the birds singing," [Mrs. Ramsay] said compassionately, soothing the little boy's hair, for her husband, with his caustic saying that it would not be fine, had dashed his spirits she could see. This going to the Lighthouse was a passion of [James's], she saw. (1.3.1)

33. Mrs. Ramsay knows that James, in wanting to go to the Lighthouse, is thirsting after independence from his father's control. Mr. Ramsay's caustic (or, in other words, harsh) refusal is squashing little James's spirit. • Mrs. Ramsay sees the power struggle going on here, and does her best to soften the pain on both sides, but in the end, she's as invested as Mr. Ramsay in keeping things as they are. • So she's mad at Mr. Ramsay for being mean to James, but she also recognizes the necessity – after all, if the weather is bad, they can't sail to the Lighthouse. From Mrs. Ramsay's perspective, it's the natural order of things that Mr. Ramsay should be able to make James knuckle under. • After all, he's the father of the household.

34. Anyway, all of this kind of changes in Part Three, when Mrs. Ramsay has died and the Ramsay family is returning, for the first time in ten years, to that old house on the Isle of Skye. • The love triangle is gone: there's no more Mrs. Ramsay for James and Mr. Ramsay to compete over. So, why, after all this time, does Mr. Ramsay insist that the family sail to the Lighthouse? • Well, he's got a figurative torch to pass to the next generation. He compels James and Cam to accompany him, and in the process, there's a profound shift of power.

35. James starts out the trip all, "Resist him. Fight him [...] For [we] must fight tyranny to the death" (3.4.9). But the thing about tyranny is that it's all very well to fight it when you're one of the oppressed. • It's a lot more seductive when you get to be tyrant. And the thing that is perhaps going on in this final voyage is that Mr. Ramsay is exerting the last of his control over the family to pass on his authority to his children – and especially, to James. • Consider the moment when they finally arrive at the Lighthouse and James sees: "So it was like that [...] the Lighthouse one had seen across the bay all these years; it was a stark tower on a bare rock. It satisfied him. It confirmed some obscure feeling of his about his own character" (3.12.3, our italics).

36. What James finds in the Lighthouse is confirmation of his own character, of the character that he's inheriting from his father, who also loves the Lighthouse. • The sudden doubling between James and Mr. Ramsay is underscored at the end of this paragraph, when James reflects, "They shared that knowledge. 'We are driving before a gale – we must sink,' he began saying to himself, half aloud, exactly as his father said it" (3.12.3). • After all of his sullen resistance, James has been drawn in at last to the patriarchal power he's desired since he was six.

37. What "that knowledge" is, we the readers do not know. • It is something ineffable shared between James and Mr. Ramsay, something that Cam, the sister, witnesses but can't join in. • "But you've got it now" (3.12.15), Cam thinks, recognizing that James has finally inherited from Mr. Ramsay the praise that he has always wanted.

38. The thing about the Lighthouse, as we talk about in the "The Lighthouse" section of "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory," is that it's a symbol of both permanence and transience. • The foundation of the family remains intact, but the man who fill the position of Head of the Family must change over time. James's final arrival at the lighthouse represents a shift of power in the Ramsay family. • James has finally gotten what he wanted all those years (and pages) ago in Part One: James gets to be his dad.

39. THEMES

40. Theme of Time • Time is not experienced conventionally in To the Lighthouse (but seriously, what is?). • Instead, time is anchored in certain select moments, which completely distorts it from the way a clock experiences time. • Time is measured as it is experienced by certain people, which infuses select moments with incredible importance and duration. • In other parts of the novel, ten years is covered in about a dozen pages. Time is therefore both elongated and compressed.

41. Questions About Time • 1. What is the effect of compressing ten years into a dozen or so pages? Do you think Virginia Woolf did it successfully? • What are the differences and similarities in how Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay, and Lily view and approach time? • In a sense, To the Lighthouse takes place over the span of 24 hours. We begin with an afternoon and evening (part one), enter into a long night (part two, which also happens to be ten years), and then we end with the events of one morning. What is the effect of this? Could the author have done it differently?

42. In some parts of the novel, many pages are lavished on moments that last nanoseconds. In other parts, barely a word is given to the passing of years. • Does this distortion of time accurately reflect how humans perceive the world?

43. Quote #1To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy (1.1.2)

44. James Ramsay experiences time in extremely relative terms: great anticipation equals years of waiting, and the future is capable of infusing the present.

45. Quote #3They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity, excited by the moving waves; and then by the swift cutting race of a sailing boat, which, having sliced a curve in the bay, stopped; shivered; let its sails drop down; and then, with a natural instinct to complete the picture, after this swift movement, both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadness—because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest. (1.4.8)

46. Lily and Mr. Bankes are overcome as they feel the vastness of time as embodied by the distant views.

47. The Transience of Life and Work • Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay take completely different approaches to life: he relies on his intellect, while she depends on her emotions. • But they share the knowledge that the world around them is transient—that nothing lasts forever. • Mr. Ramsay reflects that even the most enduring of reputations, such as Shakespeare’s, are doomed to eventual oblivion. • This realization accounts for the bitter aspect of his character. Frustrated by the inevitable demise of his own body of work and envious of the few geniuses who will outlast him, he plots to found a school of philosophy that argues that the world is designed for the average, unadorned man, for the “liftman in the Tube” rather than for the rare immortal writer.

48. Mrs. Ramsay is as keenly aware as her husband of the passage of time and of mortality. She recoils, for instance, at the notion of James growing into an adult, registers the world’s many dangers, and knows that no one, not even her husband, can protect her from them. • Her reaction to this knowledge is markedly different from her husband’s. • Whereas Mr. Ramsay is bowed by the weight of his own demise, Mrs. Ramsay is fueled with the need to make precious and memorable whatever time she has on earth. • Such crafted moments, she reflects, offer the only hope of something that endures.

49. Art as a Means of Preservation • In the face of an existence that is inherently without order or meaning, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay employ different strategies for making their lives significant. • Mr. Ramsay devotes himself to his progression through the course of human thought, while Mrs. Ramsay cultivates memorable experiences from social interactions. Neither of these strategies, however, proves an adequate means of preserving one’s experience. • After all, Mr. Ramsay fails to obtain the philosophical understanding he so desperately desires, and Mrs. -Ramsay’s life, though filled with moments that have the shine and resilience of rubies, ends. • Only Lily Briscoe finds a way to preserve her experience, and that way is through her art.

50. As Lily begins her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay at the beginning of the novel, Woolf notes the scope of the project: Lily means to order and connect elements that have no necessary relation in the world—“hedges and houses and mothers and children.” • By the end of the novel, ten years later, Lily finishes the painting she started, which stands as a moment of clarity wrested from confusion. • Art is, perhaps, the only hope of surety in a world destined and determined to change: for, while mourning Mrs. Ramsay’s death and painting on the lawn, Lily reflects that “nothing stays, all changes; but not words, not paint.”