Abstracting Intimacy: Lily Briscoe’s Artistic Vision in To the Lighthouse.

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Name : Pipavat Gopi Y

Sem : 3 ( M.A. English)

Batch Year : 2015- 2017

Paper Name : 09 ( The Modernist Literature)

Topic:- Abstracting Intimacy:  Lily Briscoe’s Artistic Vision in To the Lighthouse.

Submitted  to :- Dr. Dilip Barad ,

Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University 

Introduction of novel :

To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel centers on the Ramsays and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.

Ø Virginia Woolf Biography 

English author Virginia Woolf wrote modernist classics including Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, as well as pioneering feminist texts, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas.

Born into a privileged English household in 1882, author Virginia Woolf was raised by free-thinking parents. She began writing as a young girl and published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. She wrote modernist classics including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, as well as pioneering feminist works, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. In her personal life, she suffered bouts of deep depression. She committed suicide in 1941, at the age of 59.

Ø Early Life

Born on January 25, 1882, Adeline Virginia Stephen was raised in a remarkable household. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a historian and author, as well as one of the most prominent figures in the golden age of mountaineering. Woolf’s mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson), had been born in India and later served as a model for several Pre-Raphaelite painters. She was also a nurse and wrote a book on the profession. Both of her parents had been married and widowed before marrying each other. Woolf had three full siblings — Thoby, Vanessa and Adrian — and four half-siblings — Laura Makepeace Stephen and George, Gerald and Stella Duckworth. The eight children lived under one roof at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington.

Following and extending the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, the plot of To the Lighthouse is secondary to its philosophical introspection. Cited as a key example of the literary technique of Multiple Focalization, the novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls childhood emotions and highlights adult relationships. Among the book's many tropes and themes are those of loss, subjectivity, the nature of art and the problem of perception.

Part I: The Window

The novel is set in the Ramsays' summer home in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye. The section begins with Mrs Ramsay assuring her son James that they should be able to visit the lighthouse on the next day. This prediction is denied by Mr Ramsay, who voices his certainty that the weather will not be clear, an opinion that forces a certain tension between Mr and Mrs Ramsay, and also between Mr Ramsay and James. This particular incident is referred to on various occasions throughout the section, especially in the context of Mr and Mrs Ramsay's relationship.

The Ramsays and their eight children have been joined at the house by a number of friends and colleagues. One of them, Lily Briscoe, begins the novel as a young, uncertain painter attempting a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay and James. Briscoe finds herself plagued by doubts throughout the novel, doubts largely fed by the claims of Charles Tansley, another guest, who asserts that women can neither paint nor write. Tansley himself is an admirer of Mr Ramsay, a philosophy professor, and his academic treatises.

The section closes with a large dinner party. When Augustus Carmichael, a visiting poet, asks for a second serving of soup, Mr Ramsay nearly snaps at him. Mrs Ramsay is herself out of sorts when Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle, two acquaintances whom she has brought together in engagement, arrive late to dinner, as Minta has lost her grandmother's brooch on the beach.

Part II: Time Passes

The second section gives a sense of time passing, absence, and death. Ten years pass, during which the First World War begins and ends. Mrs Ramsay dies, as do two of her children - Prue dies from complications of childbirth, and Andrew is killed in the war. Mr Ramsay is left adrift without his wife to praise and comfort him during his bouts of fear and anguish regarding the longevity of his philosophical work. This section is told from an omniscient point of view and occasionally from Mrs. McNab's point of view. Mrs. McNab worked in the Ramsay's house since the beginning, and thus provides a clear view of how things have changed in the time the summer house has been unoccupied.

Part III: The Lighthouse

In the final section, “The Lighthouse,” some of the remaining Ramsays and other guests return to their summer home ten years after the events of Part I. Mr Ramsay finally plans on taking the long-delayed trip to the lighthouse with daughter Cam(illa) and son James (the remaining Ramsay children are virtually unmentioned in the final section). The trip almost does not happen, as the children are not ready, but they eventually set off. As they travel, the children are silent in protest at their father for forcing them to come along. However, James keeps the sailing boat steady and rather than receiving the harsh words he has come to expect from his father, he hears praise, providing a rare moment of empathy between father and son; Cam's attitude towards her father changes also, from resentment to eventual admiration.

They are accompanied by the sailor Macalister and his son, who catches fish during the trip. The son cuts a piece of flesh from a fish he has caught to use for bait, throwing the injured fish back into the sea.

While they set sail for the lighthouse, Lily attempts to finally complete the painting she has held in her mind since the start of the novel. She reconsiders her memory of Mrs and Mr Ramsay, balancing the multitude of impressions from ten years ago in an effort to reach towards an objective truth about Mrs Ramsay and life itself. Upon finishing the painting (just as the sailing party reaches the lighthouse) and seeing that it satisfies her, she realises that the execution of her vision is more important to her than the idea of leaving some sort of legacy in her work.

The next generation of characters—Lily Briscoe, Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle, Charles Tansley, and Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s children—have some hope of breaking the necessity of choice between one’s creative self and companions him with the opposite sex. Their choices reflect the extent to which Victorian ideals of marriage mire not only the parental generation but the young, new, supposedly dynamic generation coming after Importantly, only Lily Briscoe resists the bonds of traditional marriage, judging it inadequate to meet her needs for intimacy. Paul, Minta, and the Ramsay’s daughter Prue all wed, and Woolf affords them nothing but disturbingly unsatisfactory ends. Prue dies in childbirth after being parenthetically given in marriage on her father’s arm during the middle section of the novel Paul and Minta marry and live, but become distant despite the new title Mrs. Ramsay feels bond them together: “the Rayleys,” in whose lives Mrs. Ramsay hopes for the revival even of her own parents’ lives.

While Paul and Minta marry, they nearly disappear from the last section of the novel in Woolf’s paring-down of  characters,significant only in Lily’s imagined narrative of their  marriage. Though ambiguous, Woolf leaves readers little doubt that the Rayley’s marriage did indeed “turn out rather badly,” as Lily envisions them arguing and thinks of Paul’s mistress  A cause of Lily’s discomfort and the recipient of an odd mix of revulsion and motherly concern from Mrs. Ramsay, Charles Tansley at first glance seems to join Lily in firmly resisting the bonds of traditional marriage. Upon closer examination, Charles Tansley’s mean-spirited jibes at Lily, Mrs. Ramsay, and the Ramsay children seem to stem from his thwarted desire for marriage and his awkward inability to attain an intimate relationship with a woman. At the very beginning of the novel, Charles Tansley reveals his longing or a wife as he accompanies Mrs. Ramsay on her errands. Finally taking Mrs. Ramsay’s bag in his hands, “for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; felt the wind and the cyclamen and the violets for he was walking with a beautiful woman. He had hold of her bag “Charles Tansley too disappears in the last section of the novel, present only in Lily’s memory. Thinking that their “squabbling, sparring had been silly and spiteful,” Lily absorbs his most hurtful words to her—“Women  can’t paint, can’t write”—as a distinct and useful memory

Though Charles Tansley “upset the proportions of one’s world,” he cannot upset the proportions of  traditional marriage like Lily. Lily imagines him married, happy, fulfilling his desires for a traditional man/wife relationship. As she paints at the end of the novel, Lily thinks of Charles Tansley as her foil—as a possibility for her life had her awkwardness become bitterness, had she chosen traditional relationships as her ideal instead of asking for an alternative

While the Ramsays’ lives and creativity suffers from the bonds of marriage,  influencing even younger characters to follow in their footsteps, Lily bends under different burdens. Faced with the choice of intimacy with a man or her art, Lily chooses painting  above any kind of human intimacy. The forms she first lays down with paint on canvas suggest her struggle with intimacy in all forms, even maternal, while her interactions with Mrs. Ramsay,William Bankes, and even Charles Tansley indicate her undeniable desire for intimacy. The Victorian template of womanhood, intimacy, and their consequences for artistry, exemplified by Mrs. Ramsay and her relationship with Mr. Ramsay denies Lily the fulfillment of all her desires. At first turning to abstract forms as a means of understanding and substituting for desired relationships, Lilybecomes frustrated with her nontraditional vision and actions. Choosing art above marriage, Lily rejects Mrs. Ramsay’s advice and the world Mrs. Ramsay has created around herself—but by the end of the novel, Lily establishes a more intimate connection with the dead Mrs. Ramsay than any other woman in the novel establishes with a man. While creating an abstract work of art, Lily works toward a deep understanding of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, other characters such as Paul and Minta, Charles Tansley, and William Bankes, and most importantly, herself. Instead of indicating the end or the impossibility of human intimacy, Lily becomes a symbol of the modernist artist who transcends the difficulties of Victorian traditional intimacy through abstraction. Lily’s quest for abstraction begins as a pure pursuit, impeded only by her desire for others’ approval and connection with the minds of others through her art. Woolf filters Lily’s internal thoughts with Mrs. Ramsay’s opinion of Lily: “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...” Lily cannot stand apart from Mrs. Ramsay’s indictment of smallness and oddness; throughout the novel the reader will hear Mrs. Ramsay’s fond,               unintentionally belittling opinion of Lily seeping through the narrative Lily’s determination and artistic theories. Shaded by other characters, Lily struggles for the “independence” Mrs. Ramsay laughingly allows her, and she does this by seeking a new kind of art that fully describes her own vision of what art ought to be Though determined to be independent, Mrs. Ramsay’s perception of Lily as childish  seems accurate. Lily seems flustered, nervous about her painting: as James Ramsay blusters past, “coming down upon her with his hands waving shouting out,” she panics, hoping the little boy will not see her painting, for “that was what Lily Briscoe could not have endured. Even while she looked at the mass, at the line, at the colour...she kept a feeler on her surroundings lest some one should creep up, and suddenly she should find her picture looked at”. Lily’s constant fear of discovery, of judgments of her unworthiness as an artist keeps her from fully immersing herself in her work. Fearful even of a little boy’s judgments, Lily isolates herself from the other characters, who look at her as though from a distance. Her view of the others shows in her paintings. Always watching silently from a distance, guarding herself from exchanges with other characters, especially about her painting, Lily can only see an abstracted view of human intimacy Observing the banality of intimate relationships from afar, Lily feels separate from the “unreal” universe of love in which nature celebrates the joyousness of love and marriage.

Turning her gaze from the married couple to her painting, she substitutes the hope of art for the hope and joy of marriage. The rapturous gaze William Bankes casts upon Mrs. Ramsay contrasts with the gaze of horror Lily casts on her painting. Hysterically, Lily “could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course...But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of  steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained” Lily describes her vision in vivid terms, equal to the manner in which she describes the Ramsay’s marriage. She can no more paint the vividness of “burning color on a framework of steel” than she can “the unreal but penetrating...universe” of “being in love”. The inadequacy of art as a substitute for the glow of marriage she observes from afar echoes the inadequacies of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s relationship. Independent and striving for her vision, Lily spurns traditional intimacy, but finds no comfort in her art. Woolf’s own observations of marriage echo Lily’s as she gazes on the Ramsays from a distance. Though neither Woolf nor her sister Vanessa spurned marriage, Woolf chooses to portray Lily as successful only because she does not “dilute” herself with a husband . Much like Lily, the young Stephen sisters struggled with themselves and each other about the concepts and meanings of marriage. In her extensive biography of Woolf, Hermione Lee details Woolf’s personal struggle with herself as well as her worries about her sister’s marriage to Clive Bell. Seeing her sister Vanessa Stephen’s engagement to Clive Bell as tantamount to death and “bereavement,” the young Virginia expressed worries about losing her sister . Virginia also explored the “oppositions between writing and marriage,” the ability to continue producing artistically despite a new, more domestic feminine role (Lee 234). However, young Virginia Stephen did marry Leonard Woolf, with whom she experienced close companionship—but with whom she never produced children. Her life with Leonard was intellectual, ‘automatic’ and filled with friendship, but it was not characterized by romantic passion Woolf’s worries about intimacy and the ability to produce art are echoed in her character Lily’s worries about life and art. Lily’s relationship with William Bankes seems to reflect Woolf’s relationship with Leonard; Lily compares herself to the domesticMrs. Ramsay as Woolf compares herself to her maternal sister Vanessa Bell; and both women’s worries about the validity and merit of their work plague them throughout their careers. Though commonly read as an image of Vanessa Bell, Lily seems more autobiographical, working through the same problems of creation, domesticity, and memory as Woolf.Instead of seeing art as inadequate to fill her emotional needs, Lily blames her lack of  talent for failing to provide forms that transcend the void left by the lack of marriage in her life. Worries about her womanhood fill her as they fill Mrs. Ramsay. Charles Tansley’s taunt “’Women can’t paint, women can’t write’” hauntsher, reminding Lily of the forced choice between art and traditional womanhood Mrs. Ramsay, reading poetry, “did not know at first what the words meant at all”; Lily worries that Charles Tansley’s damnation of woman in the arts hold nothing but truth . Lacking the fulfillment of her traditional role as a wife and mother, Lily feels she also lacks the talent to become an artist. Struggles with her inner desires for intimacy stemfrom her desire to cling to her femininity while still producing art of worth. At first believing Charles Tansley’s taunt, she counts her painting “little and virginal,” feeling as though womanhood and painting cannot combine Lily’s project combines a desire for a feminine art that refutes Charles Tansley’s judgements of women’s art with a desire to fill the void left by her lack of traditional intimacy. Lily fails at her first painting not because she believes Charles’s taunts, but because she strives so feverishly against them, losing sight of art’s true potential to express and to create intimacy in lieu of mere substitutes.

Lily paints because she cannot attain nor understand the human intimacy she deeply desires and admires so much in Mrs. Ramsay’s model relationships. Thinking of Mrs. Ramsay and of her own “virginal” painting, Lily questions the nature of true human intimacy.Though Lily sees her own painting as inadequate to achieve intimacy, she questions the ability of the human sexual relationship to do the same. Her own incapacity to love or to be the object of love haunts her, especially as she faces Mrs. Ramsay, loving and loved by many men. Lily wonders, “What art was there...by which one pressed through into those secret chambers?” Mingling art and sex in her mind, Lily wonders at the effectiveness of either to achieve sameness, “unity,” or “intimacy itself.” As unreal and abstract as the Ramsays’s “being in love,” Lily longs for and questions the possibility of true intimacyLily’s true desire for intimacy leads to “leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee” in an attempt for physical connection. She attains “Nothing! Nothing! as she leant her head against Mrs. Ramsay’s knee”  Lily defines “intimacy” not as sex but as knowledge—a deeper spiritual connection attained most efficiently by nonsexual means. Trying to mingle her mind with Mrs. Ramsay’s body, leaning bone against bone to attain “knowledge,” Lily attempts an intimacy without sexual penetration, but fails. Focused on her head and her mind as the site of knowledge, Lily overanalyzes the methods of achieving intimacy. Instead of passion and bodily contact, Lily seeks a more cerebral knowledge.

Ø Conclusion :

In the final section of the novel, called “TheLighthouse,” Lily takes up her paints for a final attempt to solve the problems of intimacy and abstraction in her work. Though the Ramsay’s changing lives are only parenthetically and generally described in “Time Passes,” Lily’s activity between “The Window” and “The Lighthouse” remains a mystery. Suddenly forty-four years old, Lily mourns the death of Mrs. Ramsay in the same setting in which she struggled with painting in the beginning of the novel. Decisively, Lily thinks, “She would paint that picture now,” knowing that her maturity and the death of Mrs. Lily’s disinterest in the enduring value of her art indicates the temporality of self-discovery and –definition. For Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, the key to self lies in marriage, in the enmeshing of one’s soul with one’s spouse. Rejecting this notion, Lily chooses to fulfill herself, seeking new models of femininity and intimacy that she reaches through her final painting. Knowledge of herself, an understanding of Mrs. Ramsay, and her vision remains more important than traditional marital intimacy, and the temporality of the product of Lily’s self-discovery reinforces the progressive nature of the human character. As she realizes her painting “would be destroyed,” she realizes the modernity and temporality of her artistic vision. Though it solves her current problems of intimacy and emotion, Lily’s painting cannot make claims for universality for differing times. Just as Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s model of function and “the meaning of life” could not satisfy the younger Lily existing in a post-Victorian modernity, Lily’s model of modernity through her abstract painting will not function for future generations . Lily’s discovery of self through painting, though begun as a substitute for traditional intimacy, transforms and redefines her own models of human relationships, allowing her life and her art validity in modern times. Woolf pushes her readers to modern visions of intimacy and art, dealing closely with the concerns of visual art but also structuring her fictional representations in new, innovative, even abstract ways. Lily’s personal vision establishes connection: with her self, with her past, with her viewer, and with Woolf’s reader, standing as an innovative intimacy in the conditions of modernity. 
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