Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury avant-garde : War, Civilization, Modernity

o the Lighthouse launches the modernist artist Lily Briscoe on a quest for what she calls “reality,” “the thing itself before it has been made anything” (TL 193). Impossible on the face of it, this quest ends with the simultaneous completion of Lily’s painting and the novel itself—each a portrait of “father & mother & child in the garden” (D 3:36, 20 July 1925). In what sense can these family portraits in paint and words fulfill a quest for reality, the thing itself? One answer lies in the way the narrative integrates the modernist aesthetics of painting and novel with the family history and “cosmogony” they capture and dramatize through Lily’s creative labor (TLhd 24–25). As time passes, the late-summer idyll that enraptures Lily proves to be a fragile world floating above an abyss. The daughter-artist’s unfinished painting of “Mrs. Ramsay reading to James” in “The Window” leads to a new struggle to grasp, through thought and memory, the “truth” about this now vanished world founded on loss (TL 52). In an abstract composition that mirrors the novel’s stark and lovely vision, Lily pictures the world’s vast emptiness defied by every creative “attempt”: Mr. Ramsay’s philosophy, William Bankes’s botany, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Scott’s novels, Augustus Carmichael’s poems, the enduring memories Mrs. Ramsay creates—with her servants’ help—in those around her, Mrs. McNab’s laborious rescue of the neglected house from ruin, the eight Ramsay children (“the best token,” their father reflects, “they could give—his wife & himself—that they did not damn the poor little universe entirely”), and Lily’s own “vision” (TL 147, 208, 80, TLhd 115).

In accord with the aesthetics of abstraction that transformed European art in the early twentieth century, Lily’s modernist painting aims to depict realities beneath appearances. In seeking such “truth,” painting and novel abstract the Western quest romance from the figures of gender that have historically shaped the genre. If Lily seems to be painting Mrs. Ramsay, her daughter’s madonna finally reveals neither a fetishized feminine object—a Penelope, Beatrice, Dulcinea, or Molly Bloom—nor a masculine counterpart. Beneath the sexual difference that drives the traditional quest romance, Lily’s creative process discloses the ontological difference—the difference of being—that impels her quest for “the thing itself.” “Time Passes” abstracts this poetics of loss into a formal “crystal of intensity” with affinities to Wilhelm Wörringer’s and others’ theories of abstract art; and “The Lighthouse” tracks Lily’s work of mourning and painting in quest of “revelation” alongside her inward apprehension of Mr. Ramsay’s sail to the lighthouse as a voyage to death (TL 132, 161). Before turning to the novel, let us consider its tacit critique of the traditional (sexualized, masculinized) oedipal paradigm of quest romance and the sources, in family documents, of its master metaphor, the voyage.

As Northrop Frye sums up the quest romance from Homer to Joyce, woman “achieves no quest herself, but … is clearly the kind of being who makes a quest possible.”¹ To the Lighthouse intervenes in this tradition that casts women as the quest’s object, not as questing subjects, but it neither reverses the masculine paradigm by casting men as the objects of female desire nor sacrifices Lily’s different perspective. In her art Lily Briscoe departs from Western culture’s pervasive masculinization of desire and symbolic creativity, figured in the Raphaelesque Madonnas revered by William Bankes and doubly enforced by Charles Tansley’s “Women can’t paint, women can’t write” and Mrs. Ramsay’s complementary admonition that an unmarried woman has “missed the best of life” (TL 48, 49). But even as she strikes out on her own, in violation of masculinized representations masquerading as universal, Lily rejects the word “feminist” in its hostile contemporary usages: as the ur-Lily puts it—feeling a fleeting “horror of masculinity,” then backtracking—“it was too difficult to know quite what one meant about all this”; “Oh but she was not a feminist! That was a silly thing to say. Think of Shakespeare” (TLhd 138–39). Difficult as it is to say “quite what one meant,” Lily’s pronoun “one” asserts her imaginative freedom from gender.²

Lily’s (and Woolf’s) art implicitly abandons the masculine model of quest romance, generalized in the psychoanalytic account of desire, language, and representation. Like Frye, Freud makes the quester presumptively male when he quips that women need not trouble about his query “what do women want?” since “you are yourselves the problem”; his bizarre answer—a baby symbolizing a penis—confines woman’s desire to maternity, narrowly conceived as symbolic compensation not for lack as such but for lack of the male anatomy.³ Lacan amplifies Freud’s rhetorical masculinization of desire and representation, even as he protests that his theoretical vocabulary (“the law represented by the father,” the “phallus,” “castration”) is merely figural. Positing the oedipal crisis as the origin of language and subjectivity, he overwrites the bodily mother/child origin with a symbolic paternal origin, the father’s name and law.⁴

Lily’s quest, by contrast, exposes gender as an “ontological impossibility,” a social construction that can only obscure the “reality” she seeks.⁵ To grapple with “this formidable ancient enemy … this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention,” Lily has to “subdu[e] all her impressions as a woman to something much more general” (TL 158, 53). Rather than fix her gaze along masculine sight lines, she seeks a perspective beyond limiting “impressions” as a woman or indeed a man. If “Mrs. Ramsay reading to James” is her ostensible subject, her search for a “truth … at the back of appearances” leads from the child’s wish to merge with the mother as “the thing itself” through a struggle to grasp difference and loss as the very condition of being toward a world-embracing “intimacy” mediated by art and, finally, to the convergence of desire’s object with the world as “the thing itself.”⁶

To the Lighthouse alters the “ideal order” of the quest romance’s “existing monuments,” as T. S. Eliot argues “really new” works do.⁷ Whereas Frye highlights the genre’s historic reliance upon figures of femininity, Lily’s quest makes sexual difference accidental to being and meaning. Against the psychoanalytic view that “there is no subjectivity without sexual difference,” To the Lighthouse makes ontological difference—the difference of being—the matrix of subjectivity and opens dynamics of maternal and paternal identification to both sexes.⁸ Like the son’s, this daughter’s quest begins with the mother’s loss. But whereas oedipal theory superimposes sexual difference on ontological difference, dictating that the son renounce the mother not as a mirror of himself but as the object of his love, the daughter loses the mother to the difference of being that intervenes at birth between the mother and the child of either sex. The traditional quest romance tracks the hero’s desire for an idealized feminine object—a symbolic stand-in for the maternal body—through theoretically endless adventures of displacement and substitution. By contrast, Lily’s (and Woolf’s) quest subsumes the mother’s loss within the difference intrinsic to being as such and leads through adventures of mourning and creativity past mere substitutes for the lost mother to things in themselves. Whereas in Ulysses the artist-hero’s aesthetic theory and practice symbolically mime female procreativity and fetishize femininity as the quest’s end, To the Lighthouse tracks a daughter’s quest from a symbolic attempt to merge with the mother (Lily’s first portrait of Mrs. Ramsay) to an abstract painting that figures “something much more general”: beneath sexual difference, a substrate of ontological difference.⁹

In this sense, Lily’s modernist quest challenges the oedipal psychodrama that prevails even in strong feminist criticism of the novel.¹⁰ If we blame the daughter’s independence for the mother’s death, limit feminist aesthetics to pre-oedipal murmuring, discount James’s bond with his mother in favor of Lily’s, do we not risk sustaining the fictions of gender that the novel critiques (and perhaps a sentimentality that Woolf was at pains to avoid)? Acknowledging the power of these readings, I suggest that the daughter-artist’s quest moves beyond its (accidental) feminine origins toward universality, for neither the difference of being that impels it nor the adventures of loss and creativity that comprise it nor the picture of the world that concludes it is specific to female desire. As Lily quests toward the thing itself—no “thing” at all but a work of art created in freedom—she forgets traditional Madonnas to paint from life. As she thinks of her picture while “pretending to comb her hair” before the looking glass, she paints autobiographically not her outward appearance but “what had been in her mind as a baby”; “the deposit of each day’s living mixed with something more secret than she had ever spoken or shown in the course of all those days”—“something” that belongs to her, to women, and to human consciousness (TLhd 255, 92, TL 52).

As Lily and James experience the loss of early plenitude, they contravene any claim that being is essentially bound up with sexual difference. The loss and desire that drive Lily’s quest—the difference that exiles her from the mother as from every other being—preexist any figural “father”’s intervention and any mother’s death, actual or symbolic. Seeking “the thing itself before it has been made anything,” Lily discovers loss as the very condition of being and art as a bridge between mind and mind, mind and world.¹¹ In quest of an intimacy that embraces the island world and the world beyond, Lily voyages beyond oedipal desire, sexual love, fetishized femininity, gender masquerade, and the nostalgic and limited truism that an “original lost object—the mother’s body” propels “the narrative of our lives, impelling us to pursue substitutes for this lost paradise in the endless metonymic movement of desire.”¹² Discovering that nothing can bridge the gap between the thing itself and any representation, she quests from loss and grief through regressive longing, anguished mourning, and near despair toward a “vision” of the immanent world, not as a substitute for maternal plenitude (in the sense that what is possessed is never as good as what is lost) but in and as itself (TL 209).

Woolf’s stories, diaries, letters, and memoirs document the rich autobiographical sources of To the Lighthouse. Drawn from her memory of childhood summers in Cornwall, it was to have “father’s character done complete in it; & mother’s; & St. Ives; & childhood; & all the usual things I try to put in—life, death, &c. But the centre is father’s character, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel.”¹³ James’s thwarted dream of sailing to the lighthouse and its long-deferred fulfillment have obvious roots in Woolf’s memories of those summers—a “perennial, invaluable” gift from her parents, “the best beginning to life conceivable.”¹⁴ That expedition embodies the novel’s shaping metaphor of life as a voyage toward death, a tremendous adventure fraught with peril, possibility, trial, failure, triumph, and discovery on the way to that absolute end.

The novel’s metaphor of life as a risky voyage was also a family legacy. Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth both had earlier families, and each lost a spouse in 1870. Family friends for years, and now fellow sufferers, they consoled each other as friends but did not marry until 1878. Left a widow with three small children at twenty-four, Julia was “numbed and petrified by her grief” and accepted “a life of sorrow … as her permanent portion.” Leslie, “though plunged into deep melancholy,” fought against grief’s “dominion”; still, only in February 1877, when he realized that he loved Julia, did he feel “something like joy and revival.”¹⁵ In an undated letter gently declining his first marriage proposal, Julia recalled the shock of losing her adored husband Herbert Duckworth, which plunged her into “abiding sadness”:

You see, dear, though I don’t feel as if life had been hard or as if I had not a great deal in it, still it has been different from yours and from most people’s. I was only 24 when it all seemed a shipwreck, and I knew that I had to live on and on, and the only thing to be done was to be as cheerful as I could and do as much as I could and think as little. And so I got deadened. I had all along felt that if it had been possible for me to be myself, it would have been better for me individually; and that I could have got more real life out of the wreck if I had broken down more. But there was Baby to be thought of and everyone around me urging me to keep up, and I could never be alone which sometimes was such torture. So that by degrees I felt that though I was more cheerful and content than most people, I was more changed. (MBk 40–41, my emphasis)

Like Macalister pointing out shipwreck sites to Mr. Ramsay, Julia points to the rocks where her vessel broke up, one man “drowned,” and she too as good as perished (“I got deadened”) (TL 206). Documenting the later Stephen family’s precarious origin in the catastrophe from which these two castaways salvaged a future at first unimaginable, her letter shows her hesitating before a new world voyage that needed strength, hope, and courage she felt were beyond her resources.¹⁶

When Julia “had saved a life from the deep waters,” Leslie wrote, borrowing her nautical metaphor to contrast their responses to grief, “she sought at once for another person to rescue, whereas I went off to take a glass with the escaped” (MBk 41). Elaborating her parents’ metaphor, Woolf shipwrecks the Ramsays in the storms of time and traces the survivors’ slow emergence from shock and grief to recreate their world. Danger and disaster do not wait until “Time Passes” to make themselves felt. In the first pages James’s hope of sailing to the lighthouse is summarily quashed by his father, “who was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact” for “any mortal being, least of all … his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness … one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure” (TL 4).

Like the Stephens, the Ramsays are sailors on life’s unpredictable, unmasterable seas. Mr. Ramsay not only possesses but cultivates in his children “qualities that would have saved a ship’s company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water—endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill” (TL 34). The tempest-tossed Mrs. Ramsay has suffered a sea change into something rich and strange, “a figure that had dredged the depths of the sea of bitterness & sorrow & had come to the surface again with eyes pearl encrusted with tears and brows starred with immortality … with stars in her eyes and purple veils about her hair” (TLhd 22–23). At dinner (where the company only seems safely moored) she resembles “a fading ship” nearly “sunk beneath the horizon” until she rouses herself—“as a sailor not without weariness sees the wind fill his sail and yet hardly wants to be off again and thinks how, had the ship sunk, he would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea”—to beam at Mr. Bankes “as if the ship had turned and the sun had struck its sails again”; later Lily remembers her “unable to surmount the tempest calmly” (TL 84, 199). She signals Lily that “life will run upon the rocks” unless Lily flatters Mr. Tansley; when Lily complies, asking whether he is “a good sailor,” his reply (“he had never been sick in his life”) conceals, “like gunpowder, that his grandfather was a fisherman … he had worked his way up entirely himself … he was Charles Tansley—a fact that nobody there seemed to realise” (TL 91–92).

In the draft Mrs. Ramsay turns back to Mr. Bankes to ask about mutual friends only to find the opportunity lost, that “island floated away” (TLhd 150). Beside Paul Rayley, newly engaged and “bound for adventure,” Lily feels “moored to the shore”; she longs to join “the sailors and adventurers” and ever after remembers the “flare” sent up by Paul’s engagement, his “glory” burning like “a signal fire on a desert island” (TL 101–2, 176, TLhd 299). After dinner the men confer as if “taking their bearings” on “the bridge of the ship”; then Mr. Ramsay reads chapter 29 of Scott’s Antiquary, in which news arrives of Steenie Mucklebackit’s death when his father’s boat is swamped at sea (TL 112). In “Time Passes” an “ashen-coloured ship” crosses the horizon when Andrew dies; Mrs. McNab “lurche[s]” and “roll[s] like a ship at sea”; the derelict house nearly “plung[es] to the depths to lie upon the sands of oblivion”; war losses stain the sea “purplish … as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath,” for “every one had lost some one these years” (TL 130–39). “The Lighthouse” abstracts life’s voyage into Mr. Ramsay’s sail with his children, “their heads … pressed down by some remorseless gale” this sunny day as they follow him down to the dock. Thus to Cam it seems “as if they were doing two things at once; … eating their lunch here in the sun and … making for safety in a great storm after a shipwreck. Would the water last?” (TL 163, 205). Lily goes with them in spirit as her painting draws her “Out and out … further and further” onto “a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over the sea” or forces her to plunge and leap through “steep gulfs, and foaming crests” (TL 172, 157). Nearby Mr. Carmichael “sail[s] serenely through a world which satisfied all his wants” (TL 179).

To Woolf, “writing a novel in London”—this novel—felt like “nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale” (D 3:64, 3 March, L 3:244, 2 March 1926). Blown and buffeted by distractions, she saw her work-in-progress “glowing like the island of the Blessed far far away over dismal wastes, and cant reach land” (L 3:276, 18 June 1926). More than an anchor for the book’s design, a mast to which to nail its story, the voyage to the lighthouse parlays a family legacy—a history and a metaphor—into a picture of the world. Herself and her vision born of shipwrecked survivors who salvaged life from the wreck and voyaged on together to create a new world, the daughter-artist launches her characters on their many courses toward a common destination.¹⁷

In Mrs. Ramsay’s “cosmogony,” the ur-narrator observes, “nature … had long supplanted … the hierarchy of Heaven” (TLhd 24, cf. TL 27–28). The doubting Mrs. Ramsay, who hears nature now murmuring, “I am guarding you,” now warning of life’s “quick passage … into the abyss, & the shattered race of risen waters afterwards,” is soul mate to a husband who ponders whether a table exists when no one is there.¹⁸ “He must have had his doubts about that table,” Lily speculates—whether it was “real,” or “worth the time he gave to it; whether he was able after all to find it” (TL 155). Of such skeptics Wittgenstein asks, “Couldn’t we let him quietly doubt, since it makes no difference at all?”¹⁹ Although Mr. Ramsay’s skepticism leaves everyday belief (as in the earwig in his soup plate) intact, doubt makes all the difference in To the Lighthouse. Doubt is the “truth” of a world founded on the void, in which “the only desirable thing was truth,” the “rock” to which he seeks, with a desire “consistent, inviolable, powerful beyond any other emotion,” to “anchor his childrens minds, in the waste & turmoil of life” (TLhd 286). James remembers his father in lecture halls “prov[ing] conclusively that there is no God”; Mr. Ramsay consults his wife on how the story that “Hume stuck in a bog & an old woman rescued him on condition he said the Lords Prayer” will “go down” with “the young men at Cardiff”: will Mrs. Bowley “be shocked (they were staying with the Bowleys …)”.²⁰

The narrator gently satirizes Mr. Ramsay’s muscular doubt as “his natural appetite for pleasure” clashes with his philosophical devotion to “the august theme of human fate” (TLhd 82). When he clucks “Pretty—pretty” over a hen with chicks, William Bankes foresees their friendship’s decline (TL 21). Even when he abandons “all trophies of nuts and roses” as he strains from Q toward R, finding at the furthest verge of thought only “a spit of land” edging “the dark of human ignorance,” he never ceases to crave the “reverence, and pity, and gratitude” of the watchers on the shore, especially women (TL 44). Still, the narrator asks, who

Mr. Ramsay’s doubt paradoxically anchors a faith of his own. In Mrs. Ramsay reading to James he sees “wife & child—the holiest heart of life—(& her divine worn beauty with the boy on her knee, her lips resting lightly on his head, her arm encircling him, & such an expression of tenderness on her that she looked like the profound spirit brooding over the waters of life”); “Robbed of all detail,” “this divinity,” this madonna inspires his “splendid mind” as it does Lily’s painting.²¹ For him, she—not God—has “gallantly created the whole world,” “braced herself” “to put forth” “that great venture,” their life with its “welter of children,” whom he loves without forgetting the vast ignorance no effort can enlighten (TLhd 71, 75, TL 21).

Like her husband, Mrs. Ramsay believes in the “truth” of this godless world. Despite recklessly encouraging James’s hope of fine weather, she too is “impatient when people trifled with the truth of things … & threw veils [of] plausibility & optimism over what was sheer as a cliff & black as the sea” (TLhd 59). She too feels life “pour[ing] terrifyingly over an abyss into unknown lands” (TLhd 150). Hearing herself murmur, “We are in the hands of the Lord,” she minds “saying something she did not mean,” letting an “insincerity slip[] in among the truths,” and disavows it: “Who had said it? Not she” (TL 63–64). While her Swiss maid’s father lies dying of cancer, she reflects that there is “no escape,” “No happiness lasted”; she says nothing of how “she too … had been ruined,” but her tragic aura makes people imagine a lover who has “blown his brains out or … died in India.”²² And, like Mr. Ramsay, she has her consolations: the children (“she would have liked always to have had a baby”); the dinner party, where she conjures “love” like “a smoke, an incense, or a fume.” “Of such moments,” she thinks, “the thing is made that endures”; at such times “The insincerity, the sentimentality of words was for her divinely satisfactory … & partook … of eternity … here tonight was the heaven for such as her” (TL 58, 105, TLhd 172).

When the Ramsay children call Charles Tansley “the little atheist,” what they mock is not that he does not believe in God (neither do they) but that he doesn’t believe in life, at least not theirs (TL 5). In his contempt for women, children, circuses, and “nonsense,” he doubts their very world, though even he falls under Mrs. Ramsay’s sway, feeling proud “for the first time in his life” to be “walking with a beautiful woman” (TL 14). Still, here tonight is not heaven for such as Tansley, who sits mentally composing satires on “‘staying with the Ramsays’” to be “read aloud, to one or two friends”: “It was worth while doing it once, he would say; but not again” (TL 90).

The skeptical creator-god Mrs. Ramsay strives to inculcate belief in the world she has made in her daughters. She directs remarks on the light-keeper’s lonely existence “particularly” to them, chides them for laughing at Tansley, and models the Victorian feminine ideal:

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 … 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! …

She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence … that her daughters, Prue, Nancy, Rose—could sport with infidel ideas … 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. (TL 6–7)

Mrs. Ramsay’s vehement sermon to her “infidel” daughters even in their absence (as here, where she knits and ruminates while James cuts out pictures) bears out Lily’s sense that she is a “prime force” “like a wave of the sea” that “took one up & flung one down.”²³ Yet the daughters doubt. Nancy “desires of all things freedom,” not “deference and chivalry,” and laughs at her father’s rage over Mr. Carmichael’s second helping of soup; “Cam the Wicked” refuses to give Mr. Bankes a flower—“No! no! no! she would not!” Minta’s torn stocking foretells her unraveling marital fidelity; Lily paints and does not marry.²⁴ And the narrator—that unseen daughter in the garden who ventriloquizes Mrs. Ramsay’s fierce defense of femininity and her daughters’ tacit demurrals—deftly portrays a mother-god who herself secretly harbors infidel doubts, hoping in an unguarded moment that her daughters will “find a way out of it all”—some “simpler,” “less laborious way.”²⁵

In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, which famously exemplifies modernist narrative by Mrs. Ramsay’s stocking-knitting scene, Erich Auerbach foregrounds this doubting daughter-narrator. With one foot in a nineteenth-century cosmogony, he notes that the “narrator of objective facts has almost completely vanished,” displaced by one “who doubts, wonders, hesitates, as though the truth about her characters were not better known to her than it is to them or to the reader.”²⁶ Measuring her against a conventional omniscient narrator who “ought to know how matters stand with her characters,” Auerbach momentarily misses the “objective fact” that, notwithstanding her practice of doubt, the narrator does, impossibly yet realistically, exactly render her characters’ thoughts and feelings, even as the novel’s twentieth-century cosmos founded on the void dispels illusions of objectivity.²⁷ Indeed his own hackneyed sketch of Mrs. Ramsay (“the wife of an eminent philosopher, … very beautiful and definitely no longer young”) reinstates an “objective” perspective that the narrator subjects to “mute questioning,” as his description of the narrator’s “feminine … irony, amorphous sadness, and doubt of life” (as well as “good and genuine love”) overlooks her comic, generous, joyful deployment of doubt’s emancipatory and creative powers (528, 552, 531).

Among the infidel daughters, the autobiographical Lily was slow to appear. Woolf’s first plan to portray her father in a boat reciting “We perished each alone” while crushing a dying mackerel soon led to a formal triptych: “father & mother & child in the garden: the death; the sail to the lighthouse,” which she hoped to “enrich” and “thicken” with “branches & roots which I do not perceive now” (D 3:36, 20 July 1925). Ten days later her “single & intense character of father” had broadened into “a far wider slower book”; by August 6 “Mrs. R’s character” was to be the “dominating impression” (D 3:37, TLhd 2). Only in the writing did the book’s actual center emerge: the child in the garden, first James, then Lily, canted away from childhood by her age (thirty-three) and from family life by her status as friend. Lily sidles belatedly into the draft as “Miss Sophie Briscoe,” “a kindly rosy lady who spent much of her life sketching” and is “glad, at 55,” to have refused all suitors and so “retained her right to view male eccentricity from a distance.”²⁸ Namesake of the goddess Wisdom, this eccentric and skeptical outsider morphs into the aspiring painter Lily, twenty-two years younger, whose battle to translate her vision into the language of form is all before her (TLhd 31). As Lily moves “the tree further in the middle,” Woolf eventually plants Lily at the center of the novel’s “roots” and “branches.”

Surprisingly, the ur-Lily is a Roman Catholic who sees “the Ramsay world shrewdly enough from her own corner, where, she worshipped God” (TLhd 34). While traveling in Sicily over Easter 1927, Woolf wrote Vanessa of her fascination with Catholic ritual, which seemed to her more art than religion:

I like the Roman Catholic religion. I say it is an attempt at art; … We burst into a service of little girls in white veils this morning which touched me greatly. It seems to me simply the desire to create gone slightly crooked, and no God in it at all. Then there are little boys brandishing palms tied in red ribbon and sugar lambs everywhere—surely rather sympathetic, and to me more attuned than those olive trees which the old gentlemen are for ever painting at street corners in Cassis. (L 3:360–61)

As Lily evolves into a secular painter, liturgical echoes solemnize her own “attempt at art” as well as Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party and Lily’s commemoration with Mr. Carmichael of Mr. Ramsay’s landing at the lighthouse. In fact art itself becomes for Lily an “august God” that summons her into the presence of “some apparition of truth behind appearances”—“whatever it is that rules the world & compels our allegiance; or exacts our submission.” “Intolerant of acquiescence,” this “old enemy” or “God—shape, form, mass bulk—unlike other Gods, roused her to perpetual combat” (TLhd 257). Not unlike the white-veiled girls, brides of the Church, Lily enters into an “awful marriage; forever” with this divine “lover” and “formidable enemy—space” with a devotion that subsumes and surpasses “bodily human love”: “their union, could it be achieved, was immortal” (TLhd 280).

Lily’s god of form, an absolute unmediated by any church, befits a world in which life pours terrifyingly over an abyss. To paint is to be called to witness “some apparition of truth behind appearances”; to see phenomenal “things” in “Everlasting & undeniable relationship,” as when the Ramsays seem to Lily of “gigantic stature—Crucified, & transcendent, blessing the world with symbolical meaning” (TLhd 257, 280, 120). The struggle to paint spirits Lily to a plane of existence beyond even doubt, a realm of freedom: “How could she doubt it? She was extended, & freed … cut loose from the ties of life” to experience the “intensity & freedom of life” (TLhd 280). Escaping everyday entanglements, she engages in “perpetual combat” to wrest enduring forms from nature’s flux, much as Mr. Ramsay perseveres from P and Q toward R[eality]. In defense against such contingent threats as Mrs. Ramsay’s Angel in the House and Tansley’s bogey (women “can’t paint, can’t write”; “man has Shakespeare … & women have not”), Lily possesses herself of “the whole secret of art”: “To care for the thing not for oneself: what does it matter whether I succeed or not?” (TL 91, TLhd 136).

As to paint is, for Lily, to quit trivial conflicts for “immortal” battle, caring only for “the thing,” so an early plan for To the Lighthouse lists under “Topics” “The great cleavages in to which the human race is split, through the Ramsays not liking Mr. Tansley”; and “How much more important divisions between people are than between countries. The source of all evil” (TLhd Appendix A/11–12). When her children mock the little atheist, Mrs. Ramsay laments that “Strife, divisions, difference of opinion, prejudices twisted into the very fibre of being … should begin so early. … such nonsense—inventing differences. … The real differences … are enough, quite enough” (TL 8–9). Among “real differences,” the novel seeks a common “truth”: though the dinner party is not heaven for Mr. Tansley, Lily, or Mr. Ramsay, each has a heaven—some “thing.” Art, moreover, seeks to bridge real differences by what Clive Bell calls “significant form”: “Art is the most universal and the most permanent of all forms of religious expression, because the significance of formal combinations can be appreciated by one race and one age as another, and because that significance is as independent as mathematical truth of human vicissitudes.”²⁹ With Bell’s proposition in mind, we turn to Lily’s combat with “the hidden apparition of truth” in the formal language of her first composition (TLhd 257).

When William Bankes and Lily turn from talking about the Ramsays to look at her picture, they zero in on the significant form at the heart of her work-in-progress. With disinterested curiosity William asks, “What did she wish to indicate by the triangular purple shape, ‘just there’?” (TL 52). Her vision almost eclipsed (“it was bad! … infinitely bad!”) a moment earlier by William’s worshipful gaze at Mrs. Ramsay, Lily invokes reference—“It was Mrs. Ramsay reading to James”—and so opens a dialogue on those rival gods realism and abstraction (TL 48, 52). William’s conventional realism presumes and values visible resemblance; Lily’s impromptu modernist manifesto links her composition’s formal abstraction to a psychic and metaphysical quest in a world founded on loss.

As William has a moment before gazed rapturously on Mrs. Ramsay, now he ponders how mother and child, “objects of universal veneration … might be reduced … to a purple shadow without irreverence.” In response Lily retreats from referential claims and deflects “reverence” from the object to that august god form:

She knew his objection—that no one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no attempt at likeness. … the picture was not of them. Or, not in his sense. There were other senses too in which one might reverence them. By a shadow here and a light there, for instance. Her tribute took that form if, as she vaguely supposed, a picture must be a tribute. A mother and child might be reduced to a shadow without irreverence. A light here required a shadow there. (TL 52–53)

As Lily looks at her apparent subject, Mrs. Ramsay and James, her thoughts turn to a hidden reality, primal and subjective: “what had been in her mind” from infancy, the “residue of her thirty-three years,” “something more secret than she had ever spoken or shown” (TLhd 92, TL 52). Not—or not only—“of them,” her picture is also a self-portrait that neither depicts her outward appearance nor eradicates the visible world but captures relations in the language of form. Behind the traditionally revered mother and son, Lily sees and paints a daughter’s madonna, which (like Lily herself) only gradually becomes visible. Her occlusion in her picture is reflected in her sidelong entrance into the narrative, not as subject and seer but as an object—almost knocked over by Mr. Ramsay, who “glare[s]” at her and William “without seeming to see them” as he gallops over the lawn shouting “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and patronized by Mrs. Ramsay when she looks up to see who has witnessed his “ridiculous” and “alarming” performance:³⁰

Only Lily Briscoe, she was glad to find; and that did not matter. … 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. …

Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over, coming down upon her with his hands waving shouting out, “Boldly we rode and well,” but, mercifully, he turned sharp, and rode off, to die gloriously she supposed upon the heights of Balaclava. (TL 17)

Mrs. Ramsay, supposedly the object of Lily’s gaze, dominates Lily’s own first appearance while Mr. Ramsay’s “merciful” near miss allegorizes Woolf’s conviction that her writing life required her father’s death: “He would have been [1928 1832] 96, 96, yes, today; & could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable” (D 3:208, 28 November 1928).

Like the Ramsays’ looks, William’s adoring gaze at Mrs. Ramsay almost annihilates Lily as subject. About to criticize Mrs. Ramsay, she stops as his gaze makes her comment “entirely unnecessary,” even makes her “forget entirely” what she wants to say (TL 47–48). William, who has viewed paintings all over Europe, reveres this flesh-and-blood mother and child with a “rapture” that Lily tries to find “helpful,” “exalting”: “nothing so solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised its burdens, as this sublime power, this heavenly gift, and one would no more disturb it, while it lasted, than break up the shaft of sunlight, lying level across the floor” (TL 47–48). But “no woman could worship another woman” as he does; and Lily pays a price in taking vicarious “shelter from the reverence which covered all women” as, acquiescing, she slips from seeing subject to feminized object. Turning to “steal a look at her picture” she finds it “infinitely bad!” and, involuntarily thinking of how Paunceforte would have done it, struggles to salvage her vision: “But … 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 … and there was Mr. Tansley whispering … ‘Women can’t paint, women can’t write’” (TL 48). To paint from life rather than follow Raphael or Paunceforte, Lily has to brave “demons” that make her “passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child”; “against terrific odds,” she must “maintain her courage,” fight “to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her”—among them, the “masses of pictures she had not seen,” though “perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one’s own work” (TL 19, 72).

Groping to recover her vision, Lily aligns her “different ray” with “William’s eyebeam. Wondering “why” and “how” her gaze differs from his, she seeks “the essential thing” about Mrs. Ramsay—the glove’s “twisted finger,” by which anyone would have known it “hers indisputably” (TL 49). Lily finds this essence in a memory of how Mrs. Ramsay used to come in late at night to talk, beguilingly insisting that “she must, Minta must, they all must marry,” while Lily “would urge her own exemption from the universal law; plead for it; she liked to be alone; she liked to be herself” (TL 49–50). At this memory’s crux, the indefinite past tense (“would urge”) modulates to past perfect, a singular event: “she had laid her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s lap and … laughed almost hysterically at the thought of Mrs. Ramsay presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand” (TL 50).

With this memory of clasping Mrs. Ramsay’s knees while laughing “almost hysterically,” Lily’s daughter’s madonna emerges. The triangular purple shape pictures not just James at Mrs. Ramsay’s knee but Lily too, though “not in his sense.” But we must pursue her sense further. Often framed as an oedipal triangle—in Abel’s words, one of those “abstractions that universalize masculinity”—the triangular purple shape also figures the ontological loneliness that Lily’s longing for Mrs. Ramsay dramatizes.³¹ Absorbing the son’s sexualized oedipal triangle within the daughter’s ontological triangle, the triangular purple shape abstracts separation and loss as every subject’s condition and expresses the universal necessity of triangulating desire so that, no longer bound within the mother/child dyad, it flows out toward the world. The triangular purple shape is “of them” not in his sense—mother and son—but in her more abstract sense: mother and child.

As Lily is the child in the garden, the purple triangular shape is the site of a human drama of separation and loss. Struggling to paint “what had been in her mind as a baby,” the “residue” of her days and years, Lily is torn between the indomitable Mrs. Ramsay (who “never did submit: did not find it easy to give way”) and her own desire.³² Even as she urges her exemption from the “universal” law of marriage, her “almost” hysterical laughter contradicts her regressive and impossible desire to merge with the adored mother with the simple fact that she is already “herself.” Capturing the glove’s twisted finger, Lily’s madonna expresses a daughterly worship as profound as William’s, but more dangerous and ambivalent. Pressing “close as she could get,” Lily imagines “treasures” hidden as in “the tombs of kings” “in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her,” “tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything” (TL 51). At the same time, she senses her fantasy’s fallacy—“the deceptiveness of beauty” that tangles “one’s perceptions, half-way to truth, … in a golden mesh”—and gropes toward some more effective “art” or “device”:

What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge.³³

William’s query about the triangular purple shape brings to light a hidden “truth”: at once a crucial difference between a daughter’s and son’s experiences of separation, loss, and growing up and (as her pronoun one asserts) a fundamental sameness. If, for the son, sexual difference overwrites ontological difference as the oedipal prohibition sharply separates him from his mother and frames heterosexual love as a consoling substitute, a purely ontological difference separates mother and daughter. Sexual difference drops out of the picture and, although sexual desire briefly remains, it too is soon abandoned, less in obeisance to taboos against same-sex love, it appears, than because even sexual love cannot “make her and Mrs. Ramsay one.” Indeed, Lily’s fantasy is hardly sexual at all, so urgently does it evoke an unbridgeable abyss: “Nothing happened. Nothing! … And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored up in Mrs. Ramsay’s heart.”³⁴ Even as it preserves the memory of the maternal within sexual love for every subject, Lily’s fleeting fantasy of union through “loving” overleaps oedipal dynamics to the ontological difference and desire that preexist sexual difference and desire.

While the abstract purple shape expressively merges mother and daughter, Lily is also struggling to “triangulate” her desire—to break the impasse between a self-annihilating longing to merge and the necessary pain and thrill of self-differentiation. Mrs. Ramsay remains Lily’s first object of desire, bearing “the sound of murmuring” about her “For days … as after a dream some subtle change is felt in the person one has dreamt of” and wearing an “august shape … of a dome” (TL 51). But already she is not the only object, or even the privileged one. Already Lily is ranging beelike through “wastes” of air and “countries of the world alone,” haunting “hives, which were people” (TL 51). As that august dome becomes multitudinous “hives,” Lily extends the originary mother/child relation out into the world in quest of an “intimacy” that is and is not “knowledge,” an art to bridge the gap between herself and every other being.

How does Lily’s art mediate this intimacy? Illuminated by her associations and memories, her semantically rich and elastic “purple triangular shape” expresses a complex reality: mother and child; the child merged with the mother; and the difference of being that unfolds in the triangulation of desire for every subject—including the mother, herself “a wedge-shaped core of darkness,” “invisible to others” (TL 62). This figure of Mrs. Ramsay foreshadows Woolf’s later remark that “It would be as difficult” to portray her mother’s personality “as it should be done, as to paint a Cézanne” (MB 85). As the abstract purple shape captures a psychic predicament—the solitariness of being and the desire for intimacy—in the language of form, so Lily’s difficulty is to solve the troubling emptiness at the center of her canvas. It is a question, she explains to William, of “how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left. She might do it by bringing the line of the branch across so; or break the vacancy in the foreground by an object (James perhaps) so. But the danger was that by doing that the unity of the whole might be broken” (TL 53). To introduce an “object” (“James perhaps,” or a “branch”) would banish vacancy but risks disrupting the “unity” or “whole” to which the triangle “reduce[s]” distinct bodies (Mrs. Ramsay, James, Lily). Yet as the triangle’s purple—color of mourning—acknowledges loss as the origin of consciousness, so Lily expresses ineluctable difference in painterly chiaroscuro: “A light here required a shadow there” (TL 53). The problem of connecting masses at left and right dramatizes any subject’s need to accept and mitigate separation and loss, while the branch, auguring extension and growth, suggests the “tree” Lily later resolves to center and finally abstracts into the “line … in the centre” that completes her vision (TL 209).

As Lily’s composition brings realist elements (Mrs. Ramsay, James, purple jacmanna, white wall) under the rule of abstract form, the narrative foregrounds her divergence from conventional realism. William considers, “scientifically in complete good faith,” how a “purple shadow” can represent that sacred cow of Western art, a madonna and child:

Picturesque, haloed in sentimental memory, appreciating in value, “William’s “largest painting” would have pleased the British public that derided Fry’s 1910 “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” exhibition, with its Cézannes, Gauguins, Van Goghs, Picassos, Signacs, and Derains. His Cherry Trees on the Kennet and Lily’s unfinished Daughter’s Madonna illustrate opposite poles of the aesthetic continuum described in Wilhelm Wörringer’s groundbreaking Abstraction and Empathy (1908): at William’s end, the aesthetics of empathy, the organic, naturalistic, mimetic realism of Western European art from the Hellenic period through the nineteenth century; at Lily’s end, the turn to abstraction in early twentieth-century European art, to a new formal language inspired by encounters with non-Western—Chinese, African, Ocean Island—abstract art.

Wörringer’s interpretation of these formal modes resonates with both Lily’s abstract form and the Ramsays’ austere “cosmogony.” For Wörringer, mimetic forms express human existence as at home in the natural world, whereas abstract forms express humanity’s fragile contingency in face of nature and time and its dread of nature’s arbitrariness. Abstraction (for Wörringer as for Bloomsbury a relative term, neither superficially mimetic nor purely nonrepresentational) arises from “great inner unrest at outward phenomena,” a “spiritual dread of space” that no science puts to rest, since even the most intense thought cannot grasp the “unfathomable entanglement of all the phenomena of life.”³⁵ Attuned to realities beyond reach of Western rationalism and positivist science—behind appearances and “above cognition”—an abstract aesthetics creates a tranquil refuge from unfathomable nature in forms felt as “necessary and irrefragable” (16–17). For Wörringer, both organic and abstract aesthetics seek deliverance from the self, the former from individual being, the latter from the arbitrariness and vulnerability of organic existence; but the “primal artistic impulse” tends to “pure abstraction,” which does not copy nature but creates an ontological realm independent and apart.

Wörringer posits abstract form as the “consummate”—even the “only”—expression of freedom from “contingency and temporality.” In contemplating an abstract form the spectator enjoys not “cognate-organic” resemblance but the form’s “independen[ce] both of the ambient external world and of the subject” (44). Both kinds of art rescue the object from time; but rather than copy nature, abstraction strives to evoke the (imperceptible, unrepresentable) “thing itself” as it exists beyond the organic world of time, death, and decay. Whereas mimetic art cultivates resemblance, abstraction seeks a reality behind appearances—the thing purged of its dependence on life and death, nature and time, and “approximate[d] to its absolute value” (17). Organic forms give “happiness” to their creators and spectators by mimesis; abstract forms, by evoking an invisible reality (13). Thus the “talisman” or “trophy” that protects Lily from “horror & despair; annihilation; nonentity” is that “things themselves matter, nothing else.” In painting she becomes “part of eternity,” attuned to an unseen “presence” awkwardly evoked in the draft: “the thing she felt pressing out upon her & out of the visible world, this messenger who seemed to wait starkly & calmly & … to assert its rights & recall her from her strayings into a world that was more terrible & more intense than the world of affections … where failures were more terribly punished but success … hard rock” (TLhd 138, 144, 268).

Neither Roger Fry (a prime influence on Woolf’s modernist art, to whom she thought of dedicating To the Lighthouse) nor Clive Bell directly cites Wörringer, but T. E. Hulme’s 1913–1914 lectures had introduced his ideas to London, where abstraction had been in the air since 1910.³⁶ Of Fry’s influence on modernist writers Woolf wrote in 1925, “Cézanne and Picasso had shown the way; writers should fling representation to the winds” or else seem “victims of the art of painting” who describe “apples, roses, china, pomegranates, tamarinds, and glass jars as well as words can paint them, which is, of course, not very well” (RF 172, “Pictures,” E 4:243). While To the Lighthouse paints the visible world—its blue and silver evenings with flamingo clouds—it does not copy appearances for their own sake but, like Lily, seeks a “truth behind appearances”: a wedge-shaped core of darkness, treasures hidden as in kings’ tombs beneath Mrs. Ramsay’s “deceptive” beauty, a white deal table suspended in a pear tree. “When Woolf later compares the difficulty of portraying her mother to that of painting a Cézanne, she emphasizes that she, like Lily, seeks something behind the visible world’s apples, roses, and glass jars. So does Mr. Ramsay in his “progress” from “nuts” and “roses” to “some turn on the road” where he “dismounted, tied his horse to a tree, & proceeded on foot alone” to face an apprehension like that which Wörringer finds expressed in abstract art:

that the problem of human existence remains insoluble: our ignorance is complete, we know nothing; we never shall know anything … all diversions & excursions having been made we have to face the fact of our ignorance, … our powerlessness in the face of the greatest problems of life. [W]e come out on to a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away & there we stand each alone, contemplating … lonely as a stake driven into the bed of a channel.³⁷

Through an abstract aesthetics that turns away from mimetic representation—from the Madonnas of Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian, Paunceforte’s translucent landscapes, William’s Cherry Trees on the Kennet—Lily (and Woolf) picture a hidden “truth” of the world. Like Mondrian with his progressively more abstract tree, Lily’s formal adventure from “branch” to “tree” to “line … in the centre” moves from copying nature to composing forms that express something invisible to the eye alone.

Lily’s abstract art has much in common with Mr. Ramsay’s progress from P to Q toward an ever elusive R[eality], despite a crucial difference. Whereas he “never look[s] at things,” Lily looks at and through them, seeking “a side of things … she looked at the jacmanna, the wall, the starlings—something spontaneous—immediate—which … these great men who saw kitchen tables in pear trees & lectured, worked & exhibited … neglected” (TL 71, TLhd 84). Indeed, he disparages art as if to assuage his class guilt for nuts, roses, “the pleasure he took in it all”—“as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes”; and he lectures on how “the arts are merely a decoration imposed” on life (TLhd 82, TL 43). Still, Lily shares his sense of nature’s unfathomable violence and mystery, and her artistic practice—a labor of thought and feeling, “love” and “cunning”—is in its own way a quest for subject (“the residue of her thirty-three years”), object (“Mrs. Ramsay reading to James”), and the nature of reality (“the glove’s twisted finger”). As Mr. Ramsay seeks truth in “angular essences,” Lily seeks formal revelations of “things in themselves” (TL 23).

In light of Wörringer’s theory, Lily’s picture that is not “of them” in Mr. Bankes’s sense condenses Mrs. Ramsay reading to James, Lily at Mrs. Ramsay’s knee, and the hiddenness of Mrs. Ramsay herself in an abstract form—the triangular purple shape—that seeks a truth behind appearances: the grief of a daughter still partly merged with the mother; the loss of “the whole” that is the sine qua non of birth, being, language, art; the mystery of the mother’s or anyone’s being; and any subject’s triangulated desire, reaching for the world. Her unfinished composition seems less a failure or false start than a statement of an existential problem that gestures toward its own solution, at once formal and developmental. For, seeking not “decoration” but “intimacy,” Lily is suddenly startled to find her longing provisionally fulfilled by William’s viewing of her work:

It had been seen; it had been taken from her. This man had shared with her something profoundly intimate. And, thanking Mr. Ramsay for it and Mrs. Ramsay for it and the hour and the place, crediting the world with a power which she had not suspected—that one could walk away down that long gallery not alone any more but arm in arm with somebody—the strangest feeling in the world, and the most exhilarating—she nicked the catch of her paint-box to … and the nick seemed to surround in a circle forever the paint-box, the lawn, Mr. Bankes, and that wild villain, Cam, dashing past. (TL 53–54, my emphasis)

As William’s critical, open-minded, curious scrutiny—“an agony” yet “immensely exciting”—takes Lily’s painting out into the world, her effort to “have” her vision and make it visible to another validates her existence in its difference and freedom (TL 52, 209). In this small way, her unfinished picture already mediates the intimacy she desires: through William—no sexual object but a friend loved in himself—her art does not merely substitute for the broken “unity of the whole” but turns loss into gain—the strangest, most exhilarating feeling in a world whose “power” she now begins to sense.

The dinner party that fortuitously celebrates Minta and Paul’s engagement intermingles domestic and fine arts and artists. Lily buffers Mrs. Ramsay’s voiceless call to feminine self-sacrifice, her manipulative threat to drown “in seas of fire” unless Lily is “nice” to Charles Tansley, by thinking of her painting (TL 92). Lily finds Charles not at all pitiable, since he has his work, then remembers “as if she had found a treasure, that she had her work”: “I shall put the tree further in the middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space. … She took up the salt cellar and put it down again on a flower … in the table-cloth, so as to remind herself to move the tree” (TL 84–85). As Lily outwardly complies, abandoning her experiment to see “what happens if one is not nice to that young man,” her plan for her autobiographical tree buoys her spirits and she “laugh[s] out loud at what Mr. Tansley was saying” (TL 92–93). Later, “scorched” by “the heat of love” radiating from Paul Rayley, “its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity,” she sees the salt cellar and rejoices, “she need not marry, thank Heaven … She would move the tree rather more to the middle” (TL 102).

The salt-cellar not only shields Lily from becoming one of those “victims” Mrs. Ramsay leads “to the altar” but frees her to “reverence” Mrs. Ramsay’s domestic art of orchestrating connections among people as Lily connects masses in her composition (TL 101, 52). Feeling her own life shrunk to an “infinitely long table and plates and knives” beside Minta and Paul’s open future, Mrs. Ramsay wonders, “But what have I done with my life?” and wearily faces her intractable medium of human relations: “Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. … if she did not do it nobody would” (TL 82–83). Mrs. Ramsay does it, gradually drawing these “scraps and fragments” all at cross-purposes into a candlelit “party round a table,” making “common cause” against the darkness outside, until “Everything seemed right,” joy ascending from

Priestess of a secular communion that consecrates ephemeral moments into an experience that survives time and loss, Mrs. Ramsay ladles out “Mildred’s masterpiece,” the boeuf en daube, while voices abstracted from identity and meaning seem to cry “Latin words of a service in some Roman Catholic cathedral … as if … they had come into existence of themselves” (TL 80, 110). Embodying the company’s “we” as the words, the music, the thing itself, these voices dissolve as if commingling separate lives in the fluid medium of sound: “And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves,” recites a voice that issues from her husband but seems “their own voice speaking.”³⁸ As Mrs. Ramsay creates through her domestic art the intimacy Lily adores, even Augustus Carmichael wakes from his poet’s dream to bow “as if he did her homage” (TL 111).

Yet this scene ends not with Mrs. Ramsay’s triumph but with her own hunger for art. A desire “so strong that she never even thought of asking herself what it was” impels her into the parlor, where her husband sits reading, “to get something she wanted” though she “could not think what it was” (TL 117). She picks up a book and, “not know[ing] at first what the words meant at all,” is soon “swinging” and “zigzagging” through Shakespeare’s sonnet 98 “as from one branch to another, from one red and white flower to another”: “‘Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose,’ she read. … she was ascending, she felt, on to the top, on to the summit. How satisfying! How restful! … And then there it was, suddenly entire; she held it in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here—the sonnet” (TL 119, 121). In The Mausoleum Book Leslie Stephen describes a photograph of himself and Julia reading in the parlor at St. Ives with young Virginia behind them, gazing at the camera.³⁹ Here Lily (whose work Mrs. Ramsay dismisses) and the daughter-narrator (who lays the Victorian mother’s ghost in order to write) seem invisible spectators of a scene that exalts art as life’s “essence.” In her unconscious thirst for art’s elixir, Mrs. Ramsay dispels Lily’s fantasy of her plenitude—her secret, sacred “tablets” inscribed with “everything”—and becomes herself a desiring, searching subject. Even as its words sound inconsolable depths, the sonnet’s exquisite music and form—rhythm, rhyme, imagery, the climbing, branching syntax of its enclosed garden, immune to time and change—lift her “to the top … the summit.” Demystifying the omnipotent maternal antagonist, the scene tacitly affirms both the daughter’s art and desire’s organic drive to branch out from originary “roots.”⁴⁰

The Shakespeare scene that endorses Lily’s artistic quest contrasts another daughter’s fate with Lily’s branching desire. Watching her mother come downstairs, Prue thinks,

On Wörringer’s continuum “The Window” tends toward empathy, “Time Passes” toward abstraction. “Time Passes” was “the most difficult abstract piece of writing” Woolf had ever attempted: “I have to give an empty house, no people’s characters, the passage of time, all eyeless & featureless with nothing to cling to” (D 3:76, 18 April 1926). The word “abstract” flags this ten-year “corridor of years” that her friends “dared” her to do as a Fry-inspired experiment in “fling[ing] representation to the winds.”⁴² Jettisoning the narrative conventions that “The Window” adapts to modernist psychological realism—event, plot, character, dialogue, and especially the empathic narrator who depicts the characters’ psychic dramas—“Time Passes” delivers a shock of loss even before we learn of the three deaths. The narrator’s new detachment marks the turn from empathy to abstraction. As if brutally heedless of our readerly investment in the characters’ fates, she brackets events that would rivet a conventional narrator’s attention. The sentences that float passing things into view and away on the river of time in “The Window”’s September idyll are here all but emptied of human forms. Faced with mindless nature’s fecundity, indifferent violence, and mysterious, solitary beauty, she quests for some such symbolic refuge from time and death such as Wörringer theorizes and “Time Passes” in its formal abstractness offers (TL 132).

Of course, “The Window” foretells the destruction “Time Passes” records. In the midst of their “gaily spinning world,” the Ramsays feel keenly the doomed stay human effort makes against inexorable time and death, he perched like a “desolate sea-bird” on “a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away,” she shedding secret tears, “bitter and black” (MB 84, TL 28, 44). “Time Passes”’ abstract narrator—a voice “all eyeless & featureless with nothing to cling to”—abandons sentiment and tragedy to trace the dissolution of a world that foreknows its own vanishing.⁴³ At the same time this voice echoes with the ghostly presence of the daughter-subject (Lily, Woolf, the earlier narrator), felt in the (historical) past tense (“slept”) that breaks through the fictional present in this early sketch:

The Seasons./The Skull/The gradual dissolution of everything/This is to be contrasted with the permanence of—what?/Sun, moon & stars./Hopeless gulfs of misery./Cruelty./The War./Change. Oblivion. Human vitality. Old woman/Cleaning up. The bobbed up, valorous, as of a principle/of human life projected/We are handed on by our children?/ Shawls & shooting caps. A green handled brush./The devouringness of nature./But all the time, this passes, accumulates./Darkness./The welter of winds & waves/What then is the medium through wh. we regard human beings?/Tears. [di?]/[Sleep th] Slept through life (TLhd Appendix B, my emphasis)

Even as this dark passage between two days and two versions of a painting evokes a world emptied of life, its abstract forms retain human shape (“Old woman,” “we,” “human beings”) and feeling (“Hopeless gulfs of misery,” “Human vitality”).⁴⁴ The narrator’s quest through a sleeping world spans the ten-year night—an oblivion of grief—between Lily’s falling asleep at the beginning and her waking at the end. Abstracted into a shattered seeker in a world lapsed out of meaning, a shadowy presence within the narrative voice, a daughter-subject undone by loss eyelessly watches the house fall into decrepitude and its slow restoration before awakening as Lily Briscoe in a recreated world. The eyeless, featureless quester for some diamond-hard stay against time and loss finds revelation not in any idea but in the organic vitality, will, and spirit of the aging caretakers who labor painfully to save the summer house from ruin.

The sleep that descends with “Time Passes” foreshadows death’s oblivion. The last spoken words of the day seem inconsequent yet portentous: “Well, we must wait for the future to show”; “One can hardly tell which is the sea and which is the land”; “Andrew, … just put out the light in the hall” (TL 125). Nightfall heralds death’s absolute destruction in the temporary unmaking of day by darkness, waking life by dreaming sleep, mimetic narrative replete with character and event by nature’s abstract force: “Nothing, it seemed, could survive” the “downpouring of immense darkness” that engulfs the house before the narrator’s eyes (TL 125). Sleep strips away identity and relation, leaving “scarcely anything … of body or mind by which one could say, ‘This is he’ or ‘This is she’”; a hand takes on a life of its own, rising “as if to clutch something or ward off something”; “somebody laugh[s] aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness” (TL 126). With the vivid life of “The Window” extinguished, the narrator imagines the house animated by “questioning” sea “airs” creeping among letters and books (TL 126). Seeing them waft upstairs where Mr. Carmichael blows out his candle, she would forbid them to “touch” or “destroy,” make them “cease”; but if she prevails, it is only for “one night.” A winter of ruinous nights follows, the trees like “tattered flags” signaling “death in battle,” “gold letters” flashing from the “marble pages” of cathedral tombs (TL 126–27). Helpless to slow this destruction, she quests for what remains.

“Time Passes” deepens “The Window”’s picture of a world founded on loss. Night anticipates death; death in the abstract preexists any particular death. The “changing leaves” painted by Lily, sung by the poet, and gazed on by Mrs. Ramsay are storm-tossed by lengthening autumn nights. As trees “plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter,” the bodiless floating subject who seeks a “sharer of … solitude” finds the world’s mirror shattered: “no image … comes … bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. … Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer” (TL 128). Rendered abstractly by the dispassionate narrator, the seeker briefly takes on flesh, identity—“[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms … remained empty]”—before human fatality again engulfs particularity.⁴⁵

As “great armies” follow the “advance guards” of sea airs into a house of unresisting things, the subject thins to nothingness (TL 128–29). Earlier, as we saw, Lily mirrors an inchoate self in an idealized mother, longing to merge with a fantasized plenitude that she knows to be an illusion. Now death shatters the mother’s mirror, and Mrs. Ramsay’s empty looking glass reflects the eyeless, featureless, imageless subject, precariously suspended over a void.⁴⁶ Whereas it once held “a face,” “a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again,” the looking glass is now a “pool” in which “light bent to its own image in adoration,” as if reflecting her ethereal afterimage: “So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted”; “the clammy sea airs … scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity” (TL 129–30). As Mrs. Ramsay earlier feels “sopped full” of other people’s emotions, now this silent “form” “w[eaves] into itself” bird cries, ships’ horns, “a dog’s bark, a man’s shout” (TL 32, 129–30). As she earlier looks up in fear because the children are late, now “one fold” of her green shawl loosens and falls “with a roar, with a rupture, as after centuries of quiescence, a rock rends itself from the mountain and hurtles crashing into the valley” (TL 130). Unbroken by any human form, light reflects light, emptiness emptiness, questions questions in dizzying infinity. Confronted with this radical ungrounding of being and meaning that precedes and is laid bare by the mother’s death, the subject loses substance, voice, identity: “Nothing it seemed could break that image, corrupt that innocence, or disturb the swaying mantle of silence.”⁴⁷

As if to interrupt this infinite regress, the effaced subject with nothing to cling to quests “hither and thither” for “some absolute good, some crystal of intensity, remote from the known pleasures and familiar virtues” of “domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand” that “would render the possessor secure” (TL 132). While the looking glass and the mirroring world hold out the promise of a “face,” the hope of an absolute ground is illusory: nothing can render the quester secure. But a treasure does materialize to rescue her from “Oblivion”: Mrs. McNab comes “tearing the veil of silence with hands that had stood in the wash-tub, grinding it with boots that had crunched the shingle … to open all the windows, and dust the bedrooms” (TL 130). A flesh-and-blood survivor of vicissitudes both natural and social, this “bobbed up” and “valorous” paragon of “Human vitality” embodies the very “principle/of human life” (TLhd Appendix B). A grotesque parody of Mrs. Ramsay (as is Lily in her littleness and insignificance), Mrs. McNab proves that the world that remains is enough to break the silence, to bring a house back from ruin or an effaced daughter from the edge of madness. Mrs. McNab rubs the looking glass and—her own face appearing where once was Mrs. Ramsay’s—performs a Marie Lloyd music-hall number for her own pleasure:

something that had been gay twenty years before on the stage … but now, coming from the toothless, bonneted, care-taking woman, was robbed of meaning, was like the voice of witlessness, humour, persistency itself, trodden down but springing up again. … [S]he seemed to say how it was one long sorrow and trouble. … How long, she asked, creaking and groaning on her knees under the bed, … shall it endure? but hobbled to her feet … and again with her sidelong leer which slipped … from her own face, and her own sorrows, stood and gaped in the glass, aimlessly smiling … as if, after all, she had her consolations, as if indeed there twined about her dirge some incorrigible hope. … some channel in the depths of obscurity through which light enough issued to … make her … mumble out the old music hall song. The mystic, the visionary, walking the beach on a fine night … asking … “What am I,” “What is this?” had suddenly an answer vouchsafed them (they could not say what it was) so that they were warm in the frost and had comfort in the desert.⁴⁸

Interrupting the mirror’s ricocheting reflections with her impromptu song, Mrs. McNab “vouchsafes” an “answer” to the disembodied seeker stranded on the shores of being.⁴⁹ This answer is all the more incontrovertible for being “robbed of meaning,” abstracted from signification like the grin that slips from her face. A lurching, leering survivor singing of pain and trouble and sorrow, Mrs. McNab kicks the stone in living proof that the world goes on, the matrix of meaning holds, the human world now again visible in the mirror remains and consoles, life, even toothless, creaking, groaning, is “enough” (TLhd 236).

With this answer the mother’s image is broken, multiplied, and scattered through the mirroring world in a profusion of metaphors that figure life inseparable from death, loss from meaning. Prue’s wedding in a springtime “bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity” stirs forebodings in the now “wakeful,” “hopeful” wanderer on the shore:

imaginations of the strangest kind—of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of cliff, sea, cloud, and sky brought purposely together to assemble outwardly the scattered parts of the vision within. In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, … dreams persisted, and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules. … softened and acquiescent, the spring … threw her cloak about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and … seemed to have taken upon her a knowledge of the sorrows of mankind. (TL 131–32)

Like an apotheosis of “The Window”’s madonna who foreknows Prue’s, Andrew’s, and her own death (“Never did anybody look so sad”), a nature veiled in maternal pathos binds beauty to destruction (TL 28). As Lily once longed to question Mrs. Ramsay, the restless seeker asks “sea and sky what message they reported or what vision they affirmed” and finds “among the usual tokens of divine bounty … something out of harmony with this jocundity and this serenity. … It was difficult … as one walked by the sea, to marvel how beauty outside mirrored beauty within” (TL 133–34). Peering into the abyss of language, she finds the “dream, of sharing, completing, of finding in solitude on the beach an answer, … but a reflection in a mirror, and the mirror itself … but the surface glassiness which forms in quiescence”; again “to pace the beach” is “impossible; contemplation … unendurable; the mirror … broken” (TL 134). Yet desire survives even war’s “gigantic chaos,” which hardly perturbs an “eyeless,” “terrible” nature (TL 134–35). Mr. Carmichael’s elegiac poems meet acclaim; Mrs. McNab picks flowers (“Thinking no harm, for the family would not come”) and stands before the glass remembering bygone days: “She could see her … she could see her. … Yes, she could see Mrs. Ramsay. … She could see her now” (TL 135–37).

Entering Mrs. McNab’s mind, the narrator is borne back toward empathy:

In equipoise between abstraction and empathy, the narrator and Mrs. McNab make stay against destruction and beckon the seeker back to a life that is enough, an art that arrests nature’s flux. Like Mrs. Ramsay’s looking glass, the narrator’s mirror, once animated with people, then stilled in inhuman loveliness, now reflects Mrs. McNab’s vitality and the new life her work brings to “rusty laborious birth” (TL 139). With the house on the verge of pitching forever “downwards to … darkness,” the narrator wonders, “What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature? Mrs. McNab’s dream of a lady, of a child, of a plate of milk soup?” (TL 138). Then a message announces the family’s return, and Mrs. McNab enlists her son and Mrs. Bast in a Herculean labor of deferred maintenance. Her humble arts suffice: the “power” of dream and memory stops the ruinous sea airs, guides the workers’ toil, and enlivens their respite as, in a homely replay of the dinner party, they regale each other with tales of the Ramsays over tea.

Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast throw the eyeless, featureless daughter-subject something to cling to. Arduously recreating the material world, they anticipate Lily’s own creative effort. Midwives to her rebirth at the end of “Time Passes,” they bring a lost world back through memory’s ordering power so that the “voice” of its “beauty” murmurs like a lullaby over the restored house, “too softly to hear exactly what it said—but what mattered if the meaning were plain?” (TL 142). An ethereal echo of the mother’s voice, the murmuring world entreats the sleeper to see “how … a child might look” in the sceptered night’s mirroring “eyes” and reawakens desire by “half-heard melody,” “intermittent music,” waves sounding “messages of peace” (TL 141–42). As a domesticated nature “sing[s] its song,” the rebirth accomplished by Mrs. McNab culminates in the abstract seeker’s fall back into organic body and identity: having “slept through life” all these years, “Lily Briscoe … clutched at her blankets as a faller clutches at the turf on the edge of a cliff. … Here she was again, she thought, sitting bolt upright in bed. Awake.”⁵⁰ Lily wakes with a shock, thrown into being in the lap of a world that recalls but exceeds the lost mother—a world that, for her, is not yet enough. Refusing its soothing murmur—“why not accept this, be content with this, acquiesce and resign?”—Lily quests on to make “Life stand still” in the mirror of her art, to forge a diamond from the sands of time (TL 142, 161).

Until I was in the forties … the presence of my mother obsessed me. … Then one day … I made up … To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush. … I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.

I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.

—Woolf, Moments of Being

I used to think of [father] & mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse, laid them in my mind. … (I believe this to be true—that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; & writing of them was a necessary act.) He comes back now more as a contemporary. I must read him some day. I wonder if I can feel again, I hear his voice, I know this by heart?

—Woolf, Diary, 28 November 1928

Just after To the Lighthouse bubbled up in her mind, Woolf sketched three stories of guests at Mrs. Dalloway’s party whose memories of lost childhoods resonate with her own expression of an old, deep emotion to dispel an “unhealthy” obsession.⁵¹ In “Ancestors,” a “trivial” party evokes Mrs. Vallance’s Scottish childhood, peopled by “really dignified simple men and women” like her parents (CSF 181). Prefiguring Cam, she recalls running “wild among the currant bushes” and hearing “the most wonderful talk of her time” from her father’s friends; later, her widowed mother sat “among her flowers by the hour,” seeming “more with ghosts than with them all, dreaming of the past … so much more real than the present” (181–82). Through tears that carry a lifetime’s sorrow (“she had suffered abominably … life was not what it had seemed then—it was like this party”), she sees herself, “that little girl who was to travel so far, picking Sweet Alice,” reading in the pine attic, reciting Shelley to her father (182). Only these people “had known … what she had it in her to be”; “with them she was so pure so good so gifted that she had it in her to be anything”; could she have stayed “for ever” in that garden, “always starlit, and always summer,” then “none of this” would exist, and “she would have been oh perfectly happy, perfectly good” (182–83). Charged with loss and failed hope, Mrs. Vallance’s melancholy nostalgia turns her present to dust.

In “The Introduction,” the aspiring writer Lily Everit (foreshadowing Lily Briscoe) remembers lost childhood freedoms on being pinned like a butterfly into the feminine role by Shakespeare’s presumptive heir Bob Brinsley. In “Together and Apart” two guests veer away from intimacy on discovering a mutual love of Canterbury: “To be asked if he knew Canterbury—when the best years of his life, all his memories, things he had never been able to tell anybody, but had tried to write (and he sighed) … it made [Mr. Serle] laugh” (CSF 190). As a stranger “touche[s] the spring,” releasing “silver drops” of memory like those in which Lily Briscoe dips her brush (“With such an image his poems often began”), he feels that he has “never done a tenth part of what he could have done, and had dreamed of doing as a boy in Canterbury” (190–91). Abruptly he departs, pained like Mrs. Vallance by his “untapped resources”; “dissatisfied with his life, with himself, yawning, empty, capricious” (192).

Mrs. Vallance and Mr. Serle set the stage for Lily’s struggle to recover the past’s lost plenitude in a work of art, freeing the present from its shadow. Through mourning made visible as painting/writing, Lily/Woolf lays the parents’ ghosts, stills their voices, transforms obsession into memory, and delivers herself to the present, as Mrs. Vallance and Mr. Serle are powerless to do. In this light, the object of Lily/Woolf’s quest for “the thing itself before it has been made anything” is a subject: herself, freed of the idealized mother who laughed at her desire to make art and the father whose long life would have made her work “inconceivable” (TL 193). If her picture/novel begins as an elegiac portrait of “father & mother & child in the garden,” its final brushstroke completes a portrait of the daughter-artist grown up and into powers that both carry on and make new the parents’ gifts—one who, by mourning and working through her memories of the past, wrests from her dead parents a vital inheritance (D 3:36).

The problem of getting beyond loss and substitution to the thing itself—from obsession with an irretrievable past to a present at once ordinary and miraculous—troubles Lily as she wakes, still questioning like the seeker of “Time Passes” in a “house full of unrelated passions”: “What does it mean then, what can it all mean? … what did she feel, come back after all these years and Mrs. Ramsay dead? Nothing, nothing—nothing that she could express at all” (TL 145, 148). The “beautiful still day” seems “unreal,” “as if the link that usually bound things together had been cut”; overhearing broken bits of Mr. Ramsay’s recitation of Cowper’s “The Castaway” as he passes the window (“Alone” and “Perished”) makes her want to mend the syntax in “some sentence” that gets at “the truth of things” (TL 146–47). The “early morning hour” seems “frightening” and “exciting”: “anything might happen” (TL 179, 191, 147, 146). As if “The Window”’s vanished paradise endows its “extraordinary unreality,” Lily remembers her unfinished picture, “borne … in her mind all these years,” with its “problem about a foreground. … Move the tree to the middle, she had said. … She would paint that picture now. … the solution had come to her: she knew now what she wanted to do” (TL 147–48).

Hardly has Lily picked up her brush when the Victorian parents loom into view, dead and alive. Mr. Ramsay descends on her demanding sympathy; Mrs. Ramsay rises up, an Angel on the Lawn modeling a “rapture of sympathy, of delight in the reward [women] had,” Lily thinks sourly, “evidently … the most supreme bliss of which human nature was capable” (TL 150). Lily obstinately withholds: “Giving, giving, giving, she had died—and had left all this. Really, she was angry with Mrs. Ramsay. … It was all Mrs. Ramsay’s doing” (TL 149). Facing off the Victorian father and the modernist daughter, the narrator sees them through to comic conciliation as Lily blurts out, “What beautiful boots!” then recoils in fear: “To praise his boots when he asked her to solace his soul; when he had shown her his bleeding hands, his lacerated heart, … then to say, cheerfully, ‘Ah, but what beautiful boots you wear!’ deserved, she knew, and she looked up expecting to get it, in one of his sudden roars of ill-temper, complete annihilation” (TL 153). Not at all: he forgets self-pity, shows off his magnificent footwear, praises their maker (England’s finest), and bends to knot and unknot Lily’s laces “three times” in a mock-epic rite that delivers them to the “blessed island of good boots” (TL 154). When Mr. Ramsay leaves her to go down to the boat, the sympathy he no longer demands wells up, “torment[ing] and “troubling her for expression” as he recedes out of range into “some other region,” “salut[ing]” her as he passes with James and Cam, whose morose bearing annoys Lily on his behalf (TL 154–56).

Through this unexpressed sympathy, “cast back on her, like a bramble sprung across her face,” Mr. Ramsay enters Lily’s picture (TL 156). As her brush flicks across the canvas, her mind moves between remembering Mrs. Ramsay in the garden and imagining Mr. Ramsay’s voyage. Her gaze out to sea introduces all the boat scenes, choreographing her inward voyage and his sail to the rhythmic dance of her brushstrokes. His voyage, further, is not the simple event it seems, for the force of Lily’s thought crystallizes the mimetic narrative of a long-deferred “great expedition” into an abstract figure of life as an adventurous voyage toward death (TL 10). Through a work of art that is also a work of mourning, Lily grapples with her “formidable ancient enemy … this truth, this reality” to grasp the “angular essences” of mother and father, past and present, self and world (TL 158).

With Mr. Ramsay launched, Lily rides a “current[]” of brushstrokes, her mind tossing up “scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modelled it with greens and blues” (TL 159). Amid the flotsam of associations, Tansley’s bogey bobs up, his monitory voice releasing a raft of memories that carry her past their old antagonism. Lost in thought and intent on “truth,” Lily recalls a windy morning when Mrs. Ramsay, writing “letters by a rock,” glimpsed something in the sea and asked, “‘is it a lobster pot? Is it an upturned boat?’” Suddenly Lily and Charles were skipping stones

and getting on very well. … That woman … resolved everything into simplicity; made these angers, irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together this and that and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite … something—this scene on the beach for example, this moment of friendship and liking—which survived, after all these years complete, so that she dipped into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and there it stayed in the mind affecting one almost like a work of art. (TL 160)

The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together … making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)—this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing … was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!” she repeated. She owed it all to her. (TL 161, my emphasis)

Putting aside Tansley’s misogyny and her equally “grotesque” abuse of him as a “whipping-boy,” Lily comes upon that “reality” she seeks, that “intimacy, which is knowledge”—something in “the nature of a revelation” (TL 197). Brushing on red and gray, she feels “as if a door had opened, and one went in and stood gazing silently about in a high cathedral-like place”—as if she has entered Mrs. Ramsay’s “sanctuary” and beholds her sacred “tablets.”⁵²

No worshipper like William, Lily modernizes this revelation in making it her own. As she dips her brush in memory’s silver drop to “illumine[] the darkness of the past,” the “shortsighted” Mrs. Ramsay (“Is it a boat? Is it a cork?” “Is it a cask?”) seems to defer to Lily’s “vision” (TL 160, 171–72). Her thoughts leap from Mrs. Ramsay’s “mania … for marriage” and vision of her life continuing in Paul and Minta’s to the actual Rayleys, deviant Ramsays who have sailed choppy seas to end as “excellent friends” in an open marriage (TL 175, 174). Lily imagines telling Mrs. Ramsay that their “marriage had not been a success,” feeling “a little triumphant” since she had only “escaped by the skin of her teeth” the scheme to make her marry William (TL 174, 176). Still, she has escaped:

Mrs. Ramsay has faded and gone, she thought. We can over-ride her wishes, improve away her limited, old-fashioned ideas. … Mockingly she seemed to see her there at the end of the corridor of years saying, of all incongruous things, “Marry, marry!” … And one would have to say to her, It has all gone against your wishes. They’re happy like that; I’m happy like this. Life has changed completely. At that all her being, even her beauty, became for a moment, dusty and out of date. For a moment Lily, standing there, with the sun hot on her back … triumphed over Mrs. Ramsay. (TL 174–75)

Lily now recalls her “enormous exultation” at the dinner party when it “flashed upon her that she would move the tree to the middle, and need never marry anybody. … She had felt, now she could stand up to Mrs. Ramsay—a tribute to the astonishing power that Mrs. Ramsay had over one. Do this, she said, and one did it. Even her shadow at the window with James was full of authority” (TL 176). She remembers too how William, “shocked by her neglect of the significance of mother and son,” pondered her original yet “not cynical” rendering of “a subject which, they agreed, Raphael had treated divinely,” his “disinterested intelligence” fortifying her in her struggle to paint what she sees (TL 176).

Seeing the empty step through William’s remembered gaze, Lily conjures his Raphaelesque Madonna, Mrs. Ramsay as fetishized mother in a symbolic economy ruled by masculine desire: “the shape of a woman, peaceful and silent, with downcast eyes. … She would never lift them.”⁵³ Under the spell of this endless tradition of feminine substitutes, Lily is momentarily overwhelmed by an “emotion[] of the body,” a longing so intense that it empties the world of substance, turning steps and chair and garden into mere “curves and arabesques flourishing round a centre of complete emptiness. ‘What does it mean? How do you explain it all?’” she wants to ask Mr. Carmichael (TL 178–79). Lily can no more bring Mrs. Ramsay back than she could possess her while she lived, but her desire for “truth,” “reality” carries her past substitutes and empty simulacra. Almost miraculously, the emptiness where once was the maternal plenitude with which she longed to merge “like waters poured into one jar” slowly fills to become “a pool of thought, a deep basin of reality” in which “the whole world seem[s] to have dissolved,” so that “had Mr. Carmichael spoken … a little tear would have rent the surface pool. … A hand would be shoved up, a blade would be flashed” (TL 179). Lily spells out his wisdom: art is a magic sword that cuts both ways. On the one hand, “‘you’ and ‘I’ and ‘she’ pass and vanish; nothing stays,” no art can capture the thing itself. On the other, “words” and “paint,” memory, imagination, and art, endure, so that, basking, “gorged with existence,” “sailing serenely through a world which satisfied all his wants,” he has “only to put down his hand where he lay on the lawn to fish up anything he wanted” (TL 178–79). Looking at her picture, Lily too feels something of this serenity: “it would be hung in the attics” yet one might say “even of a picture like that”—“of what it attempted” if not of the “actual picture”—“that it ‘remained for ever’” (TL 179). Art makes stay against time and death, not for the things it depicts but for the makers and beholders possessed of its double-edged sword.

Now, “without being aware of any unhappiness,” Lily feels her eyes overflow with “a hot liquid” she does not recognize as tears (TL 179–80). As if welling up from a source deeper than grief—that “pool of thought,” that “deep basin of reality” that is the world—this liquid seems at first about to drown her in irreparable loss, anguished grief, “bitter anger,” mourning and the ever receding mirage of mourning’s end (“to be called back, just as she thought she would never feel sorrow for Mrs. Ramsay again”) (TL 181). Floundering in these “waters of annihilation,” this “reality” in which she must now learn to breathe and swim, Lily momentarily resembles the mutilated fish Macalister’s boy throws back into the sea, interpolated just here in the text (TL 181). If only she and Mr. Carmichael “demanded an explanation,” she thinks, “those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loudly enough Mrs. Ramsay would return” (TL 180). Now, as if conjured by Lily’s longing, Mrs. Ramsay does “mysteriously” return only to depart, “staying lightly” by Lily’s side before being borne away on the flood of time: “raising to her forehead a wreath of white flowers … stepping with her usual quickness across fields among whose folds, purplish and soft, among whose flowers, hyacinths or lilies, she vanished” (TL 181).

As this apparition recedes in mourning’s fields of purple and white, revelation deepens. Feeling an “instinctive need of distance and blue,” Lily gazes over the bay toward what she imagines is the Ramsays’ boat, taking its course among signaling ships and cliffs while Cam “murmur[s], dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone” (TL 182, 191). This moment answers Lily’s earlier wish to join perished with alone in a sentence that captures the truth of things. Translating this sentence into her visual language, Lily surfaces from watery annihilation to find herself a little boat sailing among the others on the bay:

One glided, one shook one’s sails … between things, beyond things. Empty it was not, but full to the brim. She seemed to be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays’; the children’s; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washerwoman with her basket; a rook, a red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling held the whole. (TL 192)

This epiphany transforms and fulfills Lily’s old fantasy of merging like waters in one jar as she sees herself taking her course among the other boats—each separate, yet voyaging together through time’s unfathomable waters, the bay replete with “so many lives” and “things.” Afloat on being’s flowing “substance,” she finds the empty world suddenly “full.” The wound that loss has cut in her side is salved by Mr. Ramsay’s vision of life as a voyage each makes “Alone.” With everyone in the same boat, so to speak, these waters of life and death comprehend all beings, as in Cowper’s paradoxical refrain—“We perished, each alone”—in which aloneness is a “common feeling,” a predicate of “We,” and voices live to tell the tale of perishing.

Pondering this “common feeling,” Lily envisions artists as “lovers” who give nature’s “elements” “a wholeness not theirs in life,” composing “globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays” (TL 192). But her picture still eludes her, until she asks desperately, “if one can neither think nor feel … where is one?” only to reach a further epiphany. “Here on the grass, on the ground,” she suddenly understands: “Here sitting on the world,” she thinks, feeling “that everything this morning was happening for the first time. … The lawn was the world; they were up here together, on this exalted station … Mr. Carmichael … seemed … to share her thoughts” (TL 193–94, my emphasis). On the ground, on the world as if “for the first time,” Lily breaks the vise of the past and arrives “Here,” now, in a world teeming not with ghosts but with grass, ants, plantains, canvas, brush, so many lives—the everyday world of things in themselves.

Lily consecrates this arrival in unspoken communion with Augustus Carmichael, her silent mentor in how to live, what to do in a world in which everything perishes but words and paint. Now old and famous, said to have “lost all interest in life” when Andrew died, he too has made an elegist’s journey: his poems say “something about death,” “very little about love” (TL 194–95). Scarcely wanting “other people,” he “did not much like” Mrs. Ramsay, Lily remembers, thinking of her “masterfulness,” “positiveness,” reserve, “monotonous” beauty, and devotion to the poor and sick—“a little distressing to people” like themselves, who doubt the efficacy of action, believe in “the supremacy of thought,” and feel “the care of the world more truly theirs than hers”: “one could not imagine Mrs. Ramsay standing painting, lying reading, a whole morning on the lawn. … Her going was a reproach to them.”⁵⁴ Her defense of art steeled by Mr. Carmichael’s presence, Lily still longs for “some secret sense” by which “to steal through keyholes and surround” Mrs. Ramsay, “which took to itself and treasured up … her thoughts, her imaginations, her desires” (TL 198). But the shift of tense in the very articulation of this wish (not which might take and treasure but which took and treasured) registers her dawning recognition that what she desires she already possesses: “What did the hedge,” the garden, a wave breaking, mean to Mrs. Ramsay?—“(Lily looked up, as she had seen Mrs. Ramsay look up; she too heard a wave falling on the beach)” (TL 198). Without losing her critical difference, the modernist daughter at once continues and transforms the Victorian mother in body, spirit, gesture, art.

From her vantage “Here sitting on the world” Lily at last lets Mrs. Ramsay’s ghost go: “Down fields, across valleys, white, flower-strewn—that was how she would have painted it. … They went, the three of them together, Mrs. Ramsay walking rather fast in front, as if she expected to meet some one round the corner.”⁵⁵ Now things in themselves can appear, unclouded by obsession. Lily sees a flutter of white at the window as someone settles in a chair and throws “an odd-shaped triangular shadow over the step. It altered the composition of the picture a little. It was interesting. It might be useful” (TL 201). This fortuitous real shadow obviously recalls the “triangular purple shape” of the first painting, yet Lily does not think of that. Mourning’s purple has faded; obsession subsides, unveiling a new picture of the world. If this triangular shadow stands in for the now missing bodies in Lily’s composition, she apprehends it as a fresh discovery, something not seen before, “interesting,” possibly “useful.” It makes her feel that “the problem”—her longing “to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy”—“might be solved after all” (TL 202). Gazing at this shadow—an emblem of things in themselves in their hiddenness, their unseen reality, an intimation of miracle and ecstasy amid everyday tables and chairs—Lily glimpses a life no longer consumed by longing for a lost past. What she once felt only Mrs. Ramsay could give, the world now casually, prodigally, provides. The daughter’s madonna, that parable of triangulated desire, reveals itself in the white light of the everyday.

“With this central element of her abstract composition in place, Lily invokes Mrs. Ramsay one last time, then is finally released from unquiet obsession into ordinary experience:

Separation is accomplished. Subject and object exist distinct in space-time, Lily “here … on the world,” Mrs. Ramsay “There” in the past.⁵⁶ No daughter clasps her knees. The odd-shaped triangular shadow has shed the color of loss, of mutilating obsession, and signals everyday experience—a chair, a lawn, a shadow, a table—in all its mysterious possibility. With this revelation, “as if she had something she must share, yet could hardly leave her easel, so full her mind was of what she was thinking, of what she was seeing,” Lily, the lost mother safe within her, looks out to the great world in which Mr. Ramsay is voyaging from P to Q toward Reality: “Where was that boat now? And Mr. Ramsay? She wanted him” (TL 202).

“So much depends … upon distance,” Lily reflects, propelled to the lawn’s edge in search of the Ramsays’ boat; “whether people are near us or far from us; for her feeling for Mr. Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay” (TL 191). At last the novel approaches its original “centre,” her father’s character, memorably summed up by his reciting “We perished, each alone” while crushing a dying mackerel. The boat scenes—sections 4, 8, 10, and 12 of “The Lighthouse”—fill out this caricature, portraying Mr. Ramsay’s love for and gifts to his children along with his emotional tyranny. Having wrestled obsession to the “ground” of ordinary experience, Lily can paint him now because—distant in time and space, free of the rage that blinds his children—she can see him, not physically but with that “trick of the painter’s eye” that seeks reality, truth, the thing itself behind apparently random and contingent appearances (TL 181). The daughter’s portrait of the father pays homage to his legacy even as it bestows the sympathy he has ceased to compel.

Each framed by Lily’s gaze, the boat scenes refract the portrait of “father & mother & child in the garden” through a temporal prism, with effects not unlike cubism’s spatial simultaneity. Mr. Ramsay is seventy-one in “The Lighthouse,” just Leslie Stephen’s age at his death, which “mercifully” liberated his young daughters from those “Greek slave years” when his grief and self-pity engulfed them.⁵⁷ Transmuting two distinct phases of an autobiographical father/daughter relation into simultaneous events distant in space rather than time, “The Lighthouse” alternates self-portraits of the daughter-artist as she was and as she is: the seventeen-year-old Cam/Virginia, besieged by her father’s demands; and the adult Lily/Woolf, freed by “distance” (time become space) to paint the whole picture: the needy father who threatens to overwhelm her; her love and sympathy as he teaches her his failure-proof knot; the children’s bad grace as they troop down to the boat; her compassion for them too (“this was tragedy—not palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spirits subdued”); his arrival at the lighthouse, which she paints as the death that not only freed her but left her the priceless legacy of his “character,” no longer a burden but the very inspiration of her art.⁵⁸ Seen from Lily’s distant (and Woolf’s retrospective) vantage “here” on the world, the great expedition to the lighthouse transcends the belated fulfillment of James’s childhood dream to capture life’s adventure, a voyage—fraught with peril and loss, rich in possibility, pleasure, and discovery—toward death.

One “angular essence” Lily’s composition captures is Cam and James’s oppression under their father’s will. Their “great compact—to resist tyranny to the death”—bespeaks the pathos of their subjection (TL 163). Their only weapon, sullen silence, avails little, for his moods shadow their every thought: “He would be impatient in a moment,” they fear. “He hated hanging about … would never be content until they were flying along. … In their anger they hoped that the breeze would never rise … that he might be thwarted in every possible way, since he had forced them to come against their wills” (TL 162–63). Their subjection blots out the present, the thing itself; they see nothing clearly, least of all him. Cam feels involuntary pride in him as Macalister tells of three ships sunk in a storm: their father, “so brave,” “so adventurous, … would have launched the lifeboat,” “reached the wreck.” Then she guiltily remembers her pact with James: “Their grievance weighed them down. … He had borne them down once more with his gloom and his authority, making them … take part in these rites he went through for his own pleasure in memory of dead people, which they hated, so that they lagged after him, and all the pleasure of the day was spoilt” (TL 164–65). The father who crushes a dying mackerel in the diary here crushes his children. To James he seems an oblivious wheel rolling over “his foot,” “Cam’s foot,” “anybody’s foot”; Cam, paralyzed with love and hate, is metonymically linked with a “kicking,” suffocating fish:⁵⁹

For she thought … (and now Macalister’s boy had caught a mackerel, and it lay kicking on the floor, with blood on its gills) … looking at James … you’re not exposed to it, to this pressure and division of feeling. … For no one attracted her more; his hands … and his feet, and his voice, and his words, … and his saying straight out before every one, we perish, each alone, and his remoteness. … But what remained intolerable, she thought, … watching Macalister’s boy tug the hook out of the gills of another fish, was that crass blindness and tyranny of his which had poisoned her childhood and raised bitter storms, so that even now she woke in the night trembling with rage and remembered … his dominance: his “Submit to me.” (TL 169–70)

While Lily/Woolf quests alongside Mr. Ramsay toward “reality,” Cam/Virginia, who can’t tell north from south or find their house on the island, makes her father impatient with women’s “hopeless” “vagueness” (TL 167). While Lily/Woolf paints and writes, Cam/Virginia loses herself in daydreams and stories (“So we took a little boat”) of “adventure about escaping from a sinking ship. But … she did not want to tell herself seriously a story; it was the sense of adventure and escape that she wanted,” to make “her father’s anger about the points of the compass, James’s obstinacy about the compact, and her own anguish” all “stream[] away” (TL 188–89). Her “numbed and shrouded” mind wanders in a borderland between poetry and death, a watery “underworld … where the pearls stuck in clusters to white sprays, where in the green light a change came over one’s entire mind and one’s body shone half transparent enveloped in a green cloak” (TL 183). Looking “doggedly and sadly” at the shore where Lily and Mr. Carmichael engage in “immortal” battle with form, Cam sees only a “mantle of peace,” “as if the people there had fallen asleep, … were free like smoke … to come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought” (TL 170).

Even as the novel counterposes Cam/Virginia’s death-in-life to Lily/Woolf’s creative freedom, its temporal collage captures their autobiographical continuity. When Cam feels a “fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there),” she echoes Woolf’s early memory of waking in St. Ives in ecstatic wonder “that I should be here.”⁶⁰ When Cam remembers her father’s library where she can think what she likes and not “fall over a precipice or be drowned, for there he is, keeping his eye on me,” she recalls young Virginia, whose father “lugged home” from the London Library the Elizabethan travelogues that fired her imagination.⁶¹ That Lily/Woolf paints/writes “what had been in her mind since she was a baby” while Cam/Virginia’s visions dissipate in “shapes of a world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople” measures the adult Lily’s “distance” from—and young Cam’s subjection to—the father’s desire.⁶² If Cam/Virginia figures the life Woolf feared to have led had her father lived on (“no writing; no books; inconceivable”), Lily, Cam’s future self, pursues her quest in the freedom of her art.

So much, then, depends upon distance. In the family portrait that death and distance free Lily/Woolf to paint, these voyagers never return. “Distance had an extraordinary power; they had been swallowed up in it,” Lily thinks; “they were gone for ever, they had become part of the nature of things. … The steamer itself had vanished, but the great scroll of smoke still hung in the air and drooped like a flag mournfully in valediction” (TL 188, my emphasis). As the little party in the boat comes in to land—an event Lily witnesses in imagination—James’s vision of his father in “a waste of snow and rock very lonely and austere” recalls Mr. Ramsay’s own thoughts of his death: “now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain top is covered in mist … 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” (TL 184, 35). Approaching the lighthouse, he seems like “some old stone lying on the sand … as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds—that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things” (TL 202–03). Father and son share a “knowledge” of the “stark tower on a bare rock,” “glaring white and black” with “waves breaking in white splinters like smashed glass upon the rocks”; “‘We are driving before a gale—we must sink,’” says James, “exactly as his father said it” (TL 203). Like Lily, Cam, her rage quenched, tries to grasp her father’s spirit: “he escaped. … You might try to lay hands on him, but then like a bird, he spread his wings, he floated off to settle out of your reach somewhere far away on some desolate stump” (TL 203–04).

When they pass the place where Macalister says three men drowned (evoking Mrs. Ramsay, Andrew, Prue), Mr. Ramsay refrains, to his children’s surprise and relief, from bursting out, “But I beneath a rougher sea [/And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he],” “as if he thought … why make a fuss about that? Naturally men are drowned in a storm, but it is a perfectly straightforward affair, and the depths of the sea … are only water after all” (TL 206). Instead he praises James’s handling of the boat. The son he once sheltered against life’s all too real storms—while his wife, shocked at his “astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings,” “flew in the face of facts, made his children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies”—has possessed himself of his father’s legacy: courage, truth, endurance, the justice, foresight, devotion, skill to save a ship’s company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water.⁶³ As Cam, James, and Lily strain to watch, he reaches the lighthouse:

Mr. Ramsay buttoned his coat, and turned up his trousers. He took the large, badly packed, brown paper parcel which Nancy had got ready and sat with it on his knee. Thus in complete readiness to land he sat looking back at the island. … What could he see? Cam wondered. … What was he thinking now? … What was it he sought, so fixedly, so intently, so silently? They watched him. … What do you want? they both wanted to ask. They both wanted to say, Ask us anything and we will give it you. But he did not ask them anything. He sat and looked at the island and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone, or he might be thinking, I have reached it. I have found it; but he said nothing. … He rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying, “There is no God,” and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space, and they both rose to follow him as he sprang … on to the rock. (TL 207)

With Nancy’s awkward parcel on his knee, Mr. Ramsay sails in memory of his wife and in the wake of her death toward his own, as if drowning (or dying) were “a perfectly simple, straightforward affair; & we all come to it; & the depths of the sea … have no terror for me” (TLhd 362). Leaping onto the rock of death—the absolute ground of being, and the granite of art—Mr. Ramsay concludes an “extraordinary adventure,” the great expedition his children must take not because he forces them to but because it is life (TL 204).

Perishing alone as “We” must, Mr. Ramsay reaches the vanishing point of the revelation that separates subject from object, self from world.⁶⁴ But it is life that his adventure illuminates, not death. As he sets off Lily thinks, “There was no helping Mr. Ramsay on the journey he was going,” and her portrait commemorates his landing without pretending to divine his thoughts (TL 154). Through James and Cam, Lily/Woolf from her necessary “distance” bestows her sympathy as she accepts his legacy of her own life, a little boat voyaging “between things, beyond things” toward the same destination. As Mr. Ramsay reaches R, death’s Reality, Lily reaches L, the Lighthouse, revelation in the abstract:

Mourning’s purple and white return in the wreath he seems to lay upon the dead, but now they lie on the earth instead of dominating Lily’s picture. With the past laid to rest, her picture shimmers in “all its greens and blues,” colors of earth and sky and the bay brimming with things and lives, voyagers and sea-changed wrecks. Turning to her canvas with “sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second,” Lily paints “a line there, in the centre,” abstracting tree and lighthouse as Mondrian abstracts the organic tree: “It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision” (TL 208–09). With this final brushstroke Lily marks her place in this portrait of father and mother and child in the garden, “here” in the ordinary, miraculous present. Her picture of the world, and the novel that mirrors it from genesis to completion, connect abstraction and empathy in a vision and a theory (Greek theōrein: vision, contemplation) of subject, object, the nature of reality.

you have given a portrait of mother which is more like her to me than anything I could ever have conceived of as possible. It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead. … It was like meeting her again with oneself grown up and on equal terms and it seems to me the most astonishing feat of creation to have been able to see her in such a way. You have given father too I think as clearly … it seems to me to be the only thing about him which ever gave a true idea. So you see as far as portrait painting goes you seem to me to be a supreme artist and it is so shattering to find oneself face to face with those two again that I can hardly consider anything else. … I am excited and thrilled and taken into another world as one only is in a great work of art. (L 3:572–73; 11 May [1927], my emphasis)

Vanessa alights exactly on the work her sister’s art performs, its arduous quest—through a labor of mourning inseparable from growing up, though magnified and intensified by their mother’s death—not to recover a lost childhood but to see the past “face to face,” as one “grown up and on equal terms,” on a level with ordinary experience.⁶⁶ Recreating “The Window”’s fleeting idyll, its devastation in “Time Passes,” and the lives that open into the future in “The Lighthouse,” Lily/Woolf navigates past the nostalgia on which Mrs. Vallance and Mr. Serle run aground to depict the great expedition that is anyone’s life.

“By the way,” Vanessa continues, “surely Lily Briscoe must have been rather a good painter—before her time perhaps, but with great gifts really?”⁶⁷ Painting her modernist picture of the world, Lily abandons “Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases” to voyage with the “sailors and adventurers” (TL 193, 102). No longer “moored to the shore” but “up to the lips” in being and life, grappling in her art with “whatever it is that rules the world,” does she find the “risks” of her “perpetual combat” to capture “some apparition of truth behind appearances” rewarded by the “hard rock” of “success” (TL 101, 192, TLhd 257)? If the picture mirrors the novel, and if to bring the dead parents back to “life” is as difficult as to paint a Cézanne, has Lily too not created a masterpiece?

While Vanessa found herself face to face with her long-dead parents, Woolf reflected on her family inheritance. She felt “more like him than her, I think; and therefore more critical: but he was an adorable man, and somehow, tremendous” (L 3:374, 13 May 1927). Freeing desire from obsession and substitution, To the Lighthouse abstracts quest romance from gender and opens the genre’s economy of desire to things in themselves: “She did not want Mrs. Ramsay now” but people and things, in and for themselves, here and now—the world that holds “so many lives” and “things besides” (TL 195). As Woolf’s late “philosophy” that there is no Shakespeare, no Beethoven, no God, that “we” are the words, the music, the thing itself abstracts this revelation, so Lily, merging with a “we” who voyage and perish “alone” in the blue and green world, abstracts any voyager’s quest toward subject, object, the nature of reality (MB 72).