[In the following essay, Bassoff argues that in To the Lighthouse realism is centered on individual sight and experience.]

Toward the beginning of To the Lighthouse, young James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from an illustrated catalogue, endows one of the pictures with all the “heavenly bliss” he feels as his mother speaks.¹ As the child is father to the man, moments like these are the prototypes of the Woolfian epiphany or spot of time: the moment when some consciousness—either dramatized within the text or implied by the text—transcends its usual limitations by transcending the usual appearances of the world. Cézanne once made a famous remark that painting from nature is not copying the object but realizing one's sensations. For that reason, as Robert Hughes points out, Cézanne's goal became “presence, not illusion”: “The fruit in the great still-lives of Cézanne's late years … are so weighted with pictorial decision—their rosy surfaces filled, as it were, with thought—that they seem twice as solid as real fruit.² For Virginia Woolf, similarly, writing from nature is realizing certain psychological states—states of desire, dependency, and conflict—that may be particularly acute in the sensitized artist but that are common to others. To read Woolf is to realize how the res of traditional realism is weighted with individual needs and decisions—a kind of cross-hatching that is the “real” subject of Woolf's novels.

When Lily Briscoe, the amateur artist in To the Lighthouse, wants to understand what Mr. Ramsay's books are about, one of Mr. Ramsay's sons says, “Subject and object and the nature of reality.” He then illustrates this notion by instructing Lily, “Think of a table … when you’re not there” (p. 38). When Lily tries to imagine this reality, however, she imagines a kind of beached animal: the kitchen table stuck “in the fork of a pear tree … its four legs in air” (p. 38). In addition, as Avrom Fleishman points out, it is a dining table “that structures relationships in the major scene of part I.”³ Closer to Woolf's notion of realism, then, is the observation Lily makes about Charles Tansley, one of Mr. Ramsay's students: “His subject was now the influence of something upon somebody” (p. 22), or “the influence of somebody upon something” (pp. 101–02). That is, what Woolf constantly reveals in this book is that the crucial problem of “realism” is not the relation between subject and object but the relation between subject and mediator—the Other who mediates our relation to the world because he seems to have what we lack. “Something was lacking” is one refrain in the book, “someone had blundered”—a line from The Charge of the Light Brigade—another. As she does elsewhere, Woolf implies that civilization has blundered, that it has become synonymous with its discontents.

“Influence” is so important in modern fiction precisely because freedom is so important. To assert one's freedom, in Woolf's novels, is to see the world in one's own way—without the kinds of subtle or overt coercion that Mrs. Dalloway complains about after Septimus Smith's suicide. Making this difficult, however, is the illusion that the world is seen more fully and intensely by others—people whose glamour is both attractive and overwhelming: “Suddenly, as suddenly as a star slides in the sky, a reddish light seemed to burn in her mind, covering Paul Rayley, issuing from him. It rose like a fire sent up in token of some celebration by savages on a distant beach. She heard the roar and the crackle. The whole sea for miles round ran red and gold. Some winey smell mixed with it and intoxicated her [Lily Briscoe], for she felt again her own headlong desire to throw herself off the cliff and be drowned looking for a pearl brooch on a beach” (p. 261). We will come back to this destructive temptation, but for now perhaps we can look at two other passages that demonstrate “the influence of somebody upon something.” At one point Cam, one of Mr. Ramsay's daughters, wonders what her father sees: “With his long-sighted eyes perhaps he could see the dwindled leaf-like shape standing on end on a plate of gold quite clearly” (p. 307). The prestige attributed to this long-sighted vision is suggested by the iconic image. When Lily thinks about the short-sighted Mrs. Ramsay, whose short-sightedness is also different, but not inadequate, she asks, “What did the hedge mean to her, what did the garden mean to her, what did it mean to her when a wave broke?” (p. 294).

Lily aims at harmony, rather than point-by-point likeness (or realism). She aims at seeing things in relation to the whole: “If there, in that corner, it was bright, here, in this, she felt the need of darkness” (p. 81). The values of light and dark are compositional, are psychological, are metaphysical. Mrs. Ramsay, who is constantly aware of the effect her appearance has on others, thinks of the “real” self as a “wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others”: “Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience … but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir” (p. 96). Only in death, perhaps, can one become this wedge of darkness since in life it is only others who appear so still and self-sufficient. Mr. Carmichael is a shadow on the page of Mrs. Ramsay's book (p. 62); Lily Briscoe thinks of Mr. Bankes as extending a “shade” over himself and others (p. 75); Mrs. Ramsay experiences Mr. Ramsay's mind as a “raised hand shadowing her mind” (p. 184); Lily Briscoe, thinking about the way Mrs. Ramsay affected the design of her painting, speculates that “[t]here must have been a shadow” (p. 239). When James “blunders” into an imagined forest (p. 275), he confronts his father, who is both model and obstacle to him. Although James rejects his father's tyranny, which suppresses his own individuality, he models himself after his father, whose phrases he repeats (p. 302). That James in the “chequered” forest is so troubled by the optics of longing and frustration derives from the fact that he can neither accept his father's authority as absolute nor reject it as meaningless.

Light and shade, white and black, truth and untruth oscillate in the novel like the “pale blue censer” that swings across Lily's mind (p. 303). They signify “difference” in the way x and y do in an algebraic equation. The censer implies that this “difference” is religious: that Woolf's characters dispute the grace that is no longer God's to give but people's to command from one another. Its swinging reveals, moreover, that this grace alternates between people whom no stable differences, like clan or caste, separate. As Mr. Ramsay approaches Lily and Mr. Bankes, “swinging, careless, oblivious, remote” (p. 72), Woolf implies that those psychic currents that Nathalie Sarraute calls “tropisms” are previous to personality itself. To form and maintain an image of himself, Mr. Ramsay must command the sympathy and admiration of others—the current of their feelings. Mr. Ramsay's “personality”—his remoteness and carelessness—is a strategy, however unconscious, for commanding such feelings and for distinguishing himself. As Mitchell Leaska points out, moreover, Mrs. Ramsay uses a similar strategy: “Her shabbiness, we might suspect, is part of the trapping that belongs to her self-depreciating apparatus with which she plays out the larger drama of gaining sympathy, first; and getting people to do what she wished, second.”⁴ Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are brought together in this respect by Lily's expanding vision since the “something incongruous” she sees in the middle of the bay is both Mr. Ramsay's boat and the incongruous element always associated with Mrs. Ramsay (pp. 270, 47).

Although Mrs. Ramsay deprecates “differences,” she tries to believe in her beauty as others believe in it—as something absolute and uncompromised: “She praised herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light” (p. 97). In complementary fashion, she seems to pity the incompleteness of men (p. 129). But Mrs. Ramsay, who herself often knits, lets the “admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence” uphold her world “like iron girders” so that she can “trust herself to it utterly” (p. 159). She needs to believe in the essential difference between herself and her husband, and in the truthfulness of what he says. But “truth” is really “being” in this book—an illusion of metaphysical completeness; and it vacillates according to one's perspective. To James, it is his mother who speaks the truth (p. 278)—partly because he remembers her real qualities of kindness and sympathy but partly because he still idolizes her (and partly because he can thereby disavow the father whose acceptance he has never won). “Erect” and “severe” in her beauty, Mrs. Ramsay is related to the lighthouse, which is “stark and straight, glaring white and black” (p. 301). That description sums up much of what the lighthouse represents: a kind of ding an sich—stark and uncompromising—that people seek in one another: “the sternness at the heart of her beauty” (p. 98). “Glaring,” the lighthouse recalls the “glare” that desire solicits from its object: “One got nothing by soliciting urgently. One got only a glare in the eye from looking at the line of the wall, or from thinking—she [Mrs. Ramsay] wore a grey hat” (pp. 278–79). The glare that comes from “soliciting urgently” functions like the gloire in Racine's plays. Because the hero of those plays is the cynosure of many regards, he seems bathed in an aura that Racine calls la gloire. If one of the audience, however, turns away, as the young heroine does from Nero in Britannicus, then the hero is deprived of this aura. Lily must overcome the “uncompromising white stare” of her canvas in order to have her vision (p. 234).

The goal of desire is really a mystical one—union with the mediator who seems “to centre everything,” as Susan says of Jinny in The Waves, “like rays round the star in the middle of a smashed windowpane. She brings things to a point, to order.”⁵ In To the Lighthouse Lily asks of Mrs. Ramsay, who has the same charisma: “Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired” (p. 79). The child James has something like that unity with his mother, before it is disturbed by his father's intrusion. The sense of wonder he associated with the fairy tale his mother reads and with his mother's person is also associated with the beam of the lighthouse, “something wondering, pale, like the reflection of a light, which at once made him gaze and marvel” (p. 94). But that beam is really the beam of his own wondering regard. Similarly, when Mrs. Ramsay perceives the beam of the lighthouse, she seems to be meeting “her own eyes” (p. 97).

What many writers and critics now contemn as the “pathetic fallacy” may not be true to the positivism of science, but it is often true to the nature of desire, which finds in the world—the res of traditional realism—signs of its own hope and frustration: “It was odd,” Mrs. Ramsay thinks, “how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one. … There rose … there curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one's being, a mist, a bridge to meet her lover” (pp. 97–98). The “bride,” like the long-sought partner in Aristophanes' myth of androgynous man in The Symposium, is the Other who will complete us. Lily Briscoe, for example, compares the “abundance” of Mrs. Ramsay with her own “poverty of spirit” (p. 152). But Mrs. Ramsay, in turn, contrasts her own skimpiness (which she compares to Lily's) with the “lustre” or “richness” of girls like Minta Doyle (p. 149). Endowing the other with these ineffable qualities does not result, however, in unmitigated admiration. Despite Mrs. Ramsay's need to believe her husband, for example, she feels overshadowed by him and uses reticence as subtle retaliation: “She had triumphed again. She had not said it [that she loved him]: yet he knew” (p. 186). From another perspective, moreover, that reticence or remoteness becomes a sign of her transcendence—to Mr. Ramsay as well as to others—a kind of metaphysical chastity: “The spring [with whose personification Mrs. Ramsay is associated by the clothing each puts on] without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields wide-eyed and watchful and entirely careless of what was done or thought by the beholders” (p. 198).

Lily, from time to time, takes pleasure in triumphing over the (to her) transcendent Mrs. Ramsay: “For a moment Lily … triumphed over Mrs. Ramsay,” who would never know how awry her plans for people had gone (p. 260). Space, as Lily Briscoe recognizes, is the problem: “It was a question, she remembered, how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left” (pp. 82–83): how to fill up the emptiness that Woolf's characters dread—the solemn pause that accompanies the stroke of Big Ben in Mrs. Dalloway, the falling wave that accompanies Mrs. Ramsay's doubts about her husband (p. 61). Lily first attempts to fill the gap in her painting with a tree which symbolizes stability (“Her world was changing: they [the branches] were still” [p. 169]). That stability may be masculine and analytical—the “myriad layers of the leaves of a tree” to which Mrs. Ramsay entrusts herself like a child (p. 159)—or feminine and intuitive—the tree that settles “leaf by leaf, into quiet” to which Mrs. Ramsay is compared (p. 177). But the Other who provides this stability also becomes an obstruction: seeming always to sit “precisely in the middle of view” (p. 128), as Lily perceives about Charles Tansley. Similarly, Mr. Ramsay's children contemplate him sitting “in the middle of the boat” (p. 242), which Lily, struggling to complete her painting, sees “in the middle of the bay” (p. 271). In fact, since the Other's prestige is in great part tied in with the obstruction he seems to present, the stability of the tree is also associated with the complexity and the impenetrability of a hedge—and with the knots that the model-obstacle seems to be tying for one's perpetual undoing: “There was something … she remembered in the relations of those lines cutting across, slicing down, and in the mass of the hedge with its green cave of blues and browns, which had stayed in her mind; which had tied a knot in her mind” (p. 234). Mr. Ramsay ties knots (p. 230); Mrs. Ramsay knits. The images of “cutting” and “slicing,” moreover, like those of blades, knives, razors, scimitars, and knitting needles that pervade the novel, indicate the hostility that underlies these perplexing relationships since the Other with whom one identifies seems also to crowd one out.

Mrs. Ramsay's beauty, for example, has a “penalty”: “It came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life—froze it” (p. 264). If the models in Henry James's “Real Thing” thwart the artist-protagonist because they have the prestige of being absolutely real, absolutely themselves, Mrs. Ramsay thwarts Lily's efforts to paint her so long as Lily endows her with something like the secret of life (p. 78). It is only when beauty “roll[s] itself up” that the space will fill, the empty flourishes will “form into shape,” and Lily will be able to complete her creation (p. 268). Mr. Ramsay's severity is equally imposing: “To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so brutally, was to her [Mrs. Ramsay] so horrible an outrage of human decency that … dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked” (p. 51). But this brutality is what causes her to revere him: “There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him. … He said, Damn you. He said, It must rain. He said, It won’t rain; and instantly a Heaven of security opened before her” (p. 51). But that Godlike peremptoriness is undermined by Mr. Ramsay's all-too-human vanity and insecurity: “Such a gift he had for gesture. He looked like a king in exile” (p. 222). Similarly, Lily's love for Mrs. Ramsay is for the whole world that the latter seems able to create around her. But that world is equally precarious since time decreates what Mrs. Ramsay creates.

In the fairy tale Mrs. Ramsay reads to James, the exacerbated pride of the fisherman's wife causes a darkening storm. In the novel, Cam recalls the “bitter storms” Mr. Ramsay raised in her childhood, and Nancy imitates that formidable power: “Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down” (pp. 114–15). That movement of her hand anticipates the heiratic movement of Mr. Ramsay's hand (p. 279) and the creative gesture of Lily Briscoe's (p. 235). Immediately, however, Nancy sees “some fantastic leviathan,” which slips into “the vast fissures of the mountain side”: “And then … she became with all that power sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing, hypnotized, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever to nothingness” (p. 115). The energy that was once bound by God and channeled by cultural differences now sweeps in and out as each person plays God himself or contemplates God (or Leviathan) in others.⁶ Light and dark, vastness and tininess, everything and nothing convey the pulse that desire lends to the world. Everything (and nothing) is at stake in the conflict between oneself and others—a conflict in which to be God one must overcome the God in others.

Perhaps now we can understand why Woolf, in her famous essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” claims that human character has changed and that the materialism of writers like Arnold Bennett is inadequate to render that character: “All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.”⁷ These relations have “shifted” because the interdictions that surround them—what Shakespeare calls “degree”—have come to seem arbitrary. Consequently, in our middle-class court the king is both nowhere and everywhere. Since what is crucial in our relationships is not the objects that we valorize and covet but the prestige we attempt to wrest from one another—often by means of those objects—the materialism of the writers Woolf talks about is misguided. Woolf's own books often seem so abstract, despite their occasionally lyrical prose, because desire is abstract; because nothing material can satisfy it; and because the nothing that can satisfy it—call it kudos, mana, charisma, or what you will—vacillates constantly between antagonists.

Not only does Woolf render this movement dramatically—in the way characters view each other and themselves—but she also renders it cryptographically: “For her husband, with his caustic saying that it would not be fine, had dashed his spirits she could see. This going to the lighthouse was a passion of his, she saw” (p. 26, emphasis mine). “He would laugh at Minta, and she, Mrs. Ramsay saw, realizing his extreme anxiety about himself, would, in her own way, see that he was taken care of” (p. 162, emphasis mine). In addition to suggesting this seesaw movement by word and by rhythm, Woolf also sets up a semantic field by rhyming words like “he,” “she,” and “see,” to which elsewhere she adds “be”: “She was so short-sighted that she could not see, and then Charles Tansley became as nice as he could possibly be. He began playing ducks and drakes” (p. 239, emphasis mine). “Being” is at issue between these characters, who seem to regard it as something monopolized by one person or another—as it was once monopolized by God, in whom Sartre's pour soi and en soi coincided.

While Woolf's characters turn and turn in this widening gyre, the center does not hold: “The rock was rent asunder; another fold of the shawl loosened; there it hung, and swayed” (p. 200). The rock on which the lighthouse stands is “bare,” and the waves—symbolic of the “fluidity of life” (p. 237) but also of its destructive power—break against it “like smashed glass upon the rocks” (p. 301). Broken is the surface of the pools and mirrors that pervade the novel, which suggest the images of wholeness that characters create to still their agitation: “That dream, of sharing, completing, of finding in solitude on the beach an answer, was then but a reflection in a mirror, and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in quiescence when the nobler powers sleep beneath?” (p. 202). Just as the rock on which they try to found their existence is “rent asunder,” the “mirror” in which they regard this image is “broken” (p. 202). Looking to still life, Mrs. Ramsay and Lily make life appear more antagonistic: “A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her” (p. 92). Ultimately, life gets the better of Mrs. Ramsay in a manner that parodies her own effort to get the better of it: “Nothing it seemed could break that image, corrupt that innocence, or disturb the swaying mantle of silence [reminiscent of Mrs. Ramsay's shawl] which, week after week, in the empty room, wove into itself the falling cries of birds, ships hooting, the drone and hum of the fields, a dog's bark, a man's shout, and folded them round the house in silence” (p. 195). It is Mrs. Ramsay who once folded herself together (p. 60), and the combined sounds of “drone” and “hum” remind one of the “dome” that Lily imagines as Mrs. Ramsay's shape (p. 80).

Similarly, Lily tries to ward off Mr. Ramsay, whose demands on her are tantamount to “ruin” and “chaos” (p. 221), by using her easel as a barrier. But realizing soon that the sympathy she has withheld from him makes it impossible for her to paint, she attempts to achieve “that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces; Mr. Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary” (p. 287). To achieve “that razor edge” (the phrase seems to recall and to sublimate the images of weapons in the book), she must achieve not only a balance between Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay but also a balance between her differing views of each. Her reaction to Mr. Ramsay has, by and large, been either prudish disapproval—“his face had that touch of desperation, of exaggeration in it which alarmed her, and made her pull her skirts about her” (p. 233)—or frustration—“her feeling had come too late; there it was ready; but he no longer needed it” (p. 231). Her reaction to Mrs. Ramsay has been either intense idealization or amused disparagement: “Then, she remembered, she had laid her head on Mrs. Ramsay's lap and laughed and laughed and laughed, laughed almost hysterically at the thought of Mrs. Ramsay presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand” (p. 78). Lily's hysterical laughter is a defensive reaction to the union she seeks with Mrs. Ramsay—a union that can only suppress one person or discredit the other as all-too-human. Lily and James both come to understand the same thing: that “nothing was simply one thing” (p. 277). “So much depends,” Lily realizes, “upon distance: whether people are near us or far from us” (p. 284). For James both lighthouses are true: the lighthouse he sees as a young adult—“Stark and straight … barred with black and white” (pp. 276–77)—and the lighthouse he saw as a child—“a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening” (p. 276). Similarly, Lily wants “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” (p. 300). Through the work of art, Lily will be able to understand and accept both her need for transcendence and the humanity of those who seemed to point the way to it. The strokes of her brush are like the strokes of the lighthouse (pp. 236, 96) as she mimes the dynamics of longing.⁸

Lily's epiphany is a release from the Manichean values that pervade the book: “One need not speak at all. One glided, one shook one's sail … 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 the waters were unfathomably deep” (pp. 285–86). Unlike the drowning about which Mr. Ramsay declaims, which leaves each person alone, Lily's is a dissolution of fixed and rigid boundaries: “The sea was more important now than the shore” (p. 284). For Lily to have her vision, she must relinquish the idealized Mrs. Ramsay. For her to make life stand still in art, she must relinquish the idea that Mrs. Ramsay can make it stand still in life. Mrs. Ramsay herself is sometimes aware that her own terms for order are only clichés: “But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? Not she” (p. 97). But she never gives up those terms, which precipitate, momentarily, the waters of life into a “surface glassiness” or mirror that reflects her own need for order. “Did Nature supplement what man advanced?” asks the anonymous voice of the book. “Did she complete what he began?” Despite the consolations beauty offers, which allay momentarily the restlessness of the soul, beauty stills life and freezes it (p. 264). The “nobler powers” that are stilled by its lure (la promesse du bonheur) are the energy that can both destroy and create—the waves in which one can drown or on which one can pass exuberantly: “They had tacked, and they were sailing swiftly, bouyantly on long rocking waves which handed them on from one to another with an extraordinary lilt and exhilaration beside the reef” (p. 306). The “beak of brass” (the book's image for male sterility) has become the prow of a boat that kicks up water reminiscent of Mrs. Ramsay, who is able to “pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating” (p. 58). In this climactic moment the colors of rock and water are also reminiscent of Mrs. Ramsay—of the brown stocking she knits for the son of the lighthouse keeper, and of the green shawl she used to cover the skull of death. Although it is now only human—no longer that of an earth goddess—Mrs. Ramsay's sympathy survives in Cam, in James and in Lily, whose brush flickers “brown” over the white canvas, and whose three “strokes” remind one of the three strokes of the lighthouse (pp. 234–35).

Lily is distinguished from Mrs. Ramsay by her commitment to work, which links her to the male characters in the book. Her force combines that of Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay: “As she lost consciousness of outer things … her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space [her canvas], while she modelled it with greens and blues” (p. 238). The orgasmic qualities of this description remind us that Lily has sacrificed something in keeping her independence. Not on her canvas are the colors of red and gold, which are the colors of girls like Minta Doyle (p. 149) and of passions like Paul Rayley's (p. 261). But her sexual longings are sublimated in work. As she looks, toward the end, at the lighthouse, she sees it melt away “into a blue haze” (p. 308), which reminds one of the mist—“a bride to meet her lover”—that the lighthouse caused to curl up off the floor of Mrs. Ramsay's mind (p. 98); and of the sexual imagery associated elsewhere with the lighthouse.⁹ If one were unaffected by desire, one would have an “austere” vision of the world—abstracted from its “secondary qualities”: “The kitchen table was something visionary, austere; something bare, hard, not ornamental. There was no colour to it; it was all edges and angles; it was uncompromisingly plain” (p. 232). Mrs. Ramsay thinks that to be outside of things would be to see them “truly”: “robbed of colour” (p. 126). But to be outside of things is to be God, and the book reminds us of how all-too-human that ambition is. The tower of the lighthouse, which is “barred” with the extremes of black and white, is also the tower of man's hybris: “What did it mean? Could things thrust their hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the first grasp? Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air?” (p. 268) Christ resisted the temptation to show his divinity by leaping from the pinnacle of a temple. The self that aspires to be God, however, can seldom resist the temptation to flaunt its autonomy, especially when it is most dependent on others. Lily's own dependence sometimes takes reckless form: the desire to throw herself off a cliff, for example, to partake of Paul's and Minta's glamorous passion. But she realizes that at best they have achieved a kind of mutual toleration and acceptance once their inordinate expectations of one another have worn off: “They’re happy like that,” Lily thinks; “I’m happy like this” (p. 260). In a sense, Mrs. Ramsay's influence has been an unhappy one, for she has made people expect more of their relationships—something transfiguring—than they can deliver.

To see “truly,” then, is not to see the world like the scientist in The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, who sees the world as a skeleton. It is to see the world as it is colored by others: grey-green by the inscrutable Mr. Carmichael; red and gold by Paul and Minta; brown and green by Mrs. Ramsay; crepe black at times by Mr. Ramsay, intricacies of blue and green and brown at other times. It is then to compose those colors, or some of them, into a vision of one's own: “There it was—her picture. Yes, with all greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something” (p. 309).

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), p. 9. All subsequent page references will be included in the text.

2. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Knopf, 1981), p. 125.

3. Avrom Fleishman, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), p. 99.

4. Mitchell Leaska, Virginia Woolf's Lighthouse: A Study in Critical Method (London: Hogarth Press, 1970), p. 70.

5. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), p. 120.

6. Mr. Carmichael is “like some sea monster” (p. 284), and leviathans tumble “in brute confusion and wanton lust” as time passes (pp. 202-03).

7. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in Approaches to the Novel, ed. Robert Scholes (San Francisco: Chandler, 1961), p. 189.

8. See also Norman Friedman, “Double Vision in To the Lighthouse,” in To the Lighthouse: A Casebook, ed. Morris Beja (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 149-68.

9. It appears in “the gap between two clumps of red-hot pokers” (p. 104), and it strokes “some sealed vessel” in Mrs. Ramsay's brain “whose bursting would flood her with delight” (p. 99).