SOURCE: “‘To the Lighthouse’: Death, Mourning, and Transfiguration,” in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXI, No. 3, 1971, pp. 115–31.

[In the following essay, Corsa discusses the ways in which To the Lighthouse follows the typical psychological patterns of mourning and Woolf's own efforts to come to terms with the persistent presence of “death in life.”]

In this present year of 1970 Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse has had two interpretive studies that seem to me to have rather impressively explored two important levels of the novel: the conscious and the unconscious. Jean O. Love's Worlds in Consciousness¹ examines Mrs. Woolf's novels in the light of developmental cognitive psychology and devotes two chapters (11 and 12) to a close scrutiny of To The Lighthouse; Harvena Richter's The Inward Voyage² analyzes what she calls “subjective modes” in the novels making use of Freud and Lesser as well as of Piaget, Cassirer, and Langer. It will be sometime, I think, before either of these studies can be fully apprehended and utilized by readers seeking to understand the spell Mrs. Woolf's novels exerts over them. And though one suspects they do not “have the answer” one also suspects it will be a long while before their work is superseded. They have many too many insights to be other than serious roadblocks for others who have been following similar paths of investigation. To adapt the metaphor to the novel, like Mr. Ramsay they have effectively delayed my own voyage to the Lighthouse. What follows therefore is more like an extended footnote to a study I have had to abandon, its obsolescence apparent even before it had arrived at the end of the first draft. In recording my own reading of the novel it may add something to the more detailed readings of Miss Love and Miss Richter.

It is how the novel comes to grips with death that interests me—how some of the characters work through their mourning over the death of Mrs. Ramsay, and how the whole novel, in its pattern and movement evokes, recreates, and delineates the mourning process. The concern with death accompanied the inception of the novel. On Thursday, May 14, 1925, Virginia Woolf records in her Diary that the new novel she is thinking about will “have father's character done complete in it; and mother's; and St. Ives; and childhood; and all the usual things I try to put in—life, death, etc.”³ The writing of the novel and its revision which took about two years was as exhausting as the writing of each of her novels seems to have been, and seems to have been extraordinarily painful. “After Lighthouse I was, I remember, nearer suicide seriously than since 1913” she noted on October 16, 1934.⁴ It had been a matter of “getting down … to depths” and of “making shapes square up.” But she felt she had been successful. Her sister, Nessa, thought it an “amazing portrait of mother” and had found “the rising of the dead almost painful” and Leonard Woolf, she notes, had judged it “much” her best book, a “masterpiece,” something “entirely new—a ‘psychological poem.’”⁵ She herself had suggested “Elegy” as a word to describe what it was, and on November 28, 1928, entered an explicit acknowledgement of a therapeutic intention in the writing of it. “Father's birthday” she wrote:

He would have been 96, 96, yes, today; and could have been 96, like other people one has known; but wonderfully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable.

I used to think of him and mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse laid them in my mind—and now he comes back sometimes, but differently. (I believe this to be true—that I was obsessed by them both unhealthily; and writing of them was a necessary act).⁶

However personal and complete the revival of memories was, Mrs. Woolf did not, of course, write autobiography in To The Lighthouse. What she did do, it seems to me, was to create by character, by situation, by narrator's voice a symbolic reenactment of the work of mourning that corresponds in somewhat simplified terms to the pattern of mourning outlined by Freud and by others since then.⁷ The novel moves on two levels at once: the level of the action shows the characters enduring loss and bereavement, in grief withdrawing interest from the outside world, and finally arriving at ways of detaching themselves from the lost loved one, seem able to relinquish the object and so are freed from the regressive paralysis of mourning, the level of the narrator's voice reveals the primary process level that has been reactivated by the action taking place in the novel and that, indeed, is its generative force. As one feelingly recreates the action of the story one recreatively feels the preverbal psychic reality that underlies the whole novel. The novel is on two levels at once, abreactive for the reader.

Loss in many of its possible manifestations dominates the novel. As its essential subject the loss of Mrs. Ramsay in death is, of course, its focal concern. It is with the creation of her presence in life followed by the working through of the mourning for her death that the whole novel is involved. But other losses are attendant upon this central loss and act as thematic counterparts or as motif symbols, never ceasing to remind us of the presence of death-in-life. Minta's lost brooch is a case in point.

It was not until they had climbed right up on to the top of the cliff again that Minta cried out that she had lost her grandmother's brooch—her grandmother's brooch, the sole ornament she possessed—a weeping willow, it was (they must remember it) set in pearls. They must have seen it, she said, with the tears running down her cheeks, the brooch which her grandmother had fastened her cap with till the last day of her life. Now she had lost it. She would rather have lost anything than that! She would go back and look for it. They all went back. They poked and peered and looked. … The tide was coming in fast. The sea would cover the place where they had sat in a minute. There was not a ghost of a chance of their finding it now. … If the brooch was there, it would still be there in the morning, they assured her, but Minta still sobbed, all the way to the top of the cliff. It was her grandmother's brooch; she would rather have lost anything but that, and yet Nancy felt, it might be true that she minded losing her brooch, but she wasn’t crying only for that. She was crying for something else. We might all sit down and cry, she felt. But she did not know what for. (italics mine)⁸

Minta's loss, Nancy's grief, her awareness of the excessive distress for the lost brooch precede Mrs. Ramsay's death and occur in the middle of what is more or less a happy gathering of family and friends at the Ramsay summer home on an island in the Hebrides.⁹ Nancy's psychic weeping is an instance when the grieving and underlies the whole novel thrusts into consciousness.

Anxiety about loss is what initiates the action of the novel—loss in the form of experiencing a denial of one's desire, of suffering the abrupt and painful cutting off of one's hopes. Because the weather “will not be fine” and because his father pronounces it will not be, young James Ramsay must give up the trip to the Lighthouse his mother had promised him. The refusal of the object awakens the rage of the child even as it awakens disturbing “memories” in the reader of more primal, intrapsychic loss and starts the grieving that will be basic to the whole novel. In short, to adapt some of Freud's words to the present concern, the loss in death of Mrs. Ramsay (the reality loss) which will happen in the second of the three parts, is an occasion that extends back to the beginning of the novel to “include all those situations of being wounded, hurt, neglected, out of favor, or disappointed”¹⁰; the course of the novel is, in effect, a grieving which is finally “worked through” by the end—the Lighthouse is reached and the two focal characters, Lily Briscoe and James Ramsay seem, each in his own way, on the threshold of an adjustment to the reality of loss.

What it is James and Lily are mourning is, of course, clear since it is the explicit content of the novel. What the grief is that characterizes the voice of the narrator cannot really be defined but it can, perhaps, be seen to reflect its cause in an important nuclear fantasy. What I have somewhat clumsily called “the narrator's voice” corresponds to what Miss Richter calls “the voice of subjectivity”:

It is not the spoken voice of the character or the conventional narrator; it is the inner voice whose exact nature resists definition yet attempts, through language and rhythm, to articulate feeling. It is the tone of the internal monologue but it represents more than mere verbalized consciousness. It is verbalized being; giving voice to the total moment, transcending self and time, its vibrations strike the inner ear of the reader as a familiar voice. … It is not always certain from which direction the voice comes—it issues, at different times, from within, from above, or from the surrounding atmosphere.¹¹

This Narrator's voice creates a view of Mrs. Ramsay that none of the characters in the novel have of her. Sometimes it seems to come from Mrs. Ramsay's fantasies of herself, sometimes it seems to “issue from above, or from the surrounding atmosphere.” Wherever it has its origin, its dominant fantasy is partly that of the Phallic Mother. Mrs. Ramsay is as we shall see, both female and male. She is the Lighthouse in both its masculine and feminine associations, in its phallic and in its maternal role. After her death it is a reminder of her presence, continuing to guard and to protect, to thrust its light into the surrounding darkness, to stand for the wished-for end of the voyage. During her life it is, in Mrs. Ramsay's mind, herself. The narrator's voice records Mrs. Ramsay's translation of herself into the Lighthouse in language that can only be described by the ugly terms—autoerotic, narcissistic, polymorphous perverse. The language evokes disturbing primal fantasies in the reader, fantasies that suggest pre-oedipal rate and grief and hint at the deep-lying grieving permeating the novel. Imagining herself depersonalized as “a wedge of darkness,” freed thus of the “fret, the hurry, the stir” Mrs. Ramsay

looked out to meet the stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke was her stroke.

Her response to the “inanimate thing” is sensual and sexual and self-caressing. She “felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself. There rose, and she looked and looked with her needles suspended, there curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one's being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover.” (96–98)¹² Holding “the long reddish-brown stocking dangling in her hands a moment” she “looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her” and the response becomes almost an orgasm:

(the light) which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor) but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!

(99–100)

Mrs. Ramsay is projected as the fertilizing one, the creative one while Mr. Ramsay has the “splendid” but sterile mind. Both the mothering receptive one who sits “folding her son in her arms” she is also the impregnating one, sending in to Mr. Ramsay the sympathy he needs: she seemed “to raise herself with an effort

and at once 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 (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare.”

(58–59)

Passages such as these along with images and symbols that are traditionally female and maternal—the window, the house, the sea—create for the reader Mrs. Ramsay in terms of a primary fantasy: the omniscient, omnipotent, nourishing, creative, and protective one whose presence is both longed for and raged against, for whom attachment is both libidinal and aggressive. The fantasy of the Phallic Mother, the projection and introjection of that image, perhaps even the fantasy of parthenogenesis, seem never, in this novel, to be fully relinquished though the middle section seems to suggest the “voice of the narrator” comes to some acceptance of loss and to some relinquishment of grief. The voice becomes more and more depersonalized as it evokes the particular quality of emptiness present in the now deserted Ramsay summer home. It is a voice that creates the lament for felt loss in the desolateness of things unattended and forgotten in the house deserted now for some ten years. It is the corporate loss felt corporately by all the characters who are not there. This section of the novel can, perhaps, be said to record the fact of death (Mrs. Ramsay's, (p. 194), Prue Ramsay's in childbirth (p. 199), Andrew Ramsay's—blown up in France (p. 201)) while poetically (though in prose) creating alteration in the “inner world” (whose? the narrator's? the reader's?) that resembles a withdrawal of libido from the lost object that necessarily precedes the ending of mourning. Those phenomena attendant upon mourning—despondency, depression, detachment from the world, withdrawal of interest from reality, all are symbolically evoked in the details describing the deserted house. Until the last few pages of this section there are no persons present—only the house on the island, the lamps out, “a thin rain drumming on the roof,” surrounded by “an immense darkness.” The darkness is all consuming, the house inhabited by “little airs” mounting the stairs “wearily, ghostily.” In the natural forces that encompass the house are all the desolate rage and violence of grief:

The nights are now full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them. … Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself.

(190–192)

There are no consolations to be had, no answers to questions, nothing except “the stroke of the Lighthouse, which had laid itself with such authority upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern, coming now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight gliding gently as if it laid its caress and lingered steathily and looked and came lovingly again.” (199–200).¹³ The Lighthouse is perhaps now something like a transitional object—to use Winnicott's very useful phrase—a symbol that is important because it is not the object itself but one that stands for the object. It thus becomes an accepted stand-in for the lost and now renounced object, not as an internal image but as a real object and is a significant indication that the way to Reality is being found. In any case, “Reality” in the form of Mrs. McNabb enters. Life once more returns to the empty house with her abrupt busy-ness, “lurching about,” dusting, sweeping, scouring, “looking like a tropical fish oaring its way through sunlanced waters.” (200) Once more the house is inhabited; Lily, James, Cam, Mr. Ramsay, others of the earlier guests who are still alive, return and the voice of the narrator never again seems to hover over the happenings.

The resolution of grief and the acceptance of loss is now to be the work of the two focal characters, James Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. It is in them that the mourning of the narrator seems to arrive at some imagined working through, in them the freeing from the paralysis of uncompleted mourning is fictively projected. According to Helene Deutsch “as long as the early libidinal or aggressive attachments persist, the painful affect (of the real loss of a loved person) continues to flourish, and vice versa, the attachments are unresolved as long as the affective process of mourning has not been accomplished.”¹⁴ As the voice of the narrator conveyed the sense of Mrs. Ramsay in terms that are primarily pre-oedipal, in the characters of James and Lily oedipal, as well as pre-oedipal, fantasy relations to the mother are created whose “libidinal and aggressive” components are clear.

The aggressive component of “prolonged mourning” is most clearly seen in James Ramsay. The Lighthouse for James is the embodiment of his desire which is, he feels, deliberately and cruelly denied him by his father. “Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow” he shall be allowed to go there His mother promises and James, age 6, radiates joy at the prospect: “James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss.” (p. 9) Just so are objects endowed with affect—just so they become associated with many other objects, in this case, with Mr. Ramsay: “‘But,’ said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, ‘it won’t be fine.’” The aggressive rage James feels is intense:

Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children's breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgment.

(p. 10)

James' hatred of his father and his dependent clinging to his mother¹⁵ and her feeling that of all eight children he is her favorite (p. 89) is all we really know of him in the first part of the novel. It is in the third part that his old rage and castration anxiety are finally worked through as he arrives at the Lighthouse, ten years later, in the company of his father, and his sister Cam. James' voyage out is a voyage in. From intense hostility¹⁶ he moves to an awareness of his father's splendor and loneliness (a view Mrs. Ramsay had had) and to the beginning of an identification with him, a movement essential for his psychic growth as it is necessary for resolving the early and prolonged mourning.

He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked 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.

(301)

From his father “reading very quickly” James looks to the approaching Lighthouse, looming “up, stark and straight,” at its rock base full of “lines and creases,” at the windows, at the “little figure” of a man who had come out to look at them in the nearing boat.

So it was like that, James thought, the Lighthouse one had seen across the bay all these years; it was a stark tower on a bare rock. It satisfied him. It confirmed some obscure feeling of his about his own character.

That James is here resolving his fantasy of the phallic mother, his own rejection in rage of a phallic identity, and is beginning to move toward an acceptance of his masculine self seems to be suggested in the way “women” associate in his mind with this moment of approach to the Lighthouse:

The old ladies, he thought, thinking of the garden at home, went dragging their chairs about on the lawn. Old Mrs. Beckwith, for example, was always saying how nice it was and how sweet it was and how they ought to be so proud and they ought to be so happy, but as a matter of fact, James thought, looking at the Lighthouse stood there on the rock, it’s like that. He looked at his father reading fiercely with his legs curled tight. They shared that knowledge. “We are driving before a gale—we must sink,” he began saying, exactly as his father said it.

(302)

The moving quality of the passage lies in its very obscurity and ambiguity—one is made to feel that preverbal feelings, recalcitrant to clear exposition, are nevertheless, being conveyed.

James' arrival at the Lighthouse is, in a way, his attainment of his mother (since Mrs. Ramsay is the Lighthouse), but it is not, as in the early part of the novel, a fantasy possession. It is an acceptance of the phallic self that was once projected onto the mother, and a concomitant identification with the once-hated father. The “exchange” is a painful and a difficult one to make. James makes it reluctantly and sullenly, but he makes it; and thus he emerges freed of the past. His acceptance of his father and of his own masculine role is corroborated and climaxed by his father's rare words of praise for his navigation: “… having lighted his pipe he took out his watch. He looked at it attentively; he made, perhaps, some mathematical calculation. At last he said triumphantly: ‘Well done!’ James had steered them like a born sailor.” (306) It is Cam, James' sister, who observes his response to their father's approval:

There! Cam thought, addressing herself silently to James. You’ve got it at last. For she knew that was what James had been wanting and she knew that now he had got it he was so pleased that he would not look at her or at his father or at anyone. There he sat with hand on the tiller sitting bolt upright, looking rather sulky and frowning slightly. He was so pleased that he was not going to let anybody share a grain of his pleasure. They must think that he was perfectly indifferent. But you’ve got it now, Cam thought.

(306)

For James the voyage to the Lighthouse has been a process that has lessened his rage and his aggressive feelings (at his mother as well as his father), that has seen him relegate his mother to the past and to “women,” and that has allowed him finally to look upon his father with love. Or so I interpret the moments preceding his acceptance of his father. Sensing that Cam will yield to his father's hint she call her new puppy “Frisk,” he seems to put his mother away from him into the class of “them”:

She’ll give way, James thought, as he watched a look come upon her face, a look he remembered. They look down he thought, at their knitting or something. Then suddenly they look up.

A significant memory of his mother returns—“there was a flash of blue, he remembered, and then somebody sitting with him laughed, surrendered, and he was very angry.” (251) The anger and the mother are now identified. “It must have been his mother, he thought, sitting on a low chair, with his father standing over her.” All the while guiding the boat to the Lighthouse, James goes deeper into the self:

He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash of the sea, how a man had marched up and down and stopped dead, upright, over them.

(251–252)

From this, James' moment of deepest penetration into the memories and feelings of the past, his moment that is like a screen memory, the hostility that has been consciously acknowledged in the opening of the book is seen to have been made up of earlier, primal scene memories. The denial made him as a child is here undone; he arrives at the Lighthouse by his own skill in navigation—“they had tacked, and they were sailing swiftly, buoyantly on long rocking waves, which handed them on from one to another with an extraordinary lilt and exhilaration beside the reef.” (306) The language now works symbolically to capture James' sense of release from the island, from the land, from the past when the Lighthouse seemed far away, infinitely desirable, and sadly unobtainable:

On the left a row of rocks showed brown through the water which thinned and became greener and on one, a higher rock, a wave incessantly broke and spurted a little column of drops which fell down in a shower. One could hear the slap of the water and the patter of falling drops and a kind of hushing and hissing sound from the waves rolling and gambolling and slapping the rocks as if they were wild creatures who were perfectly free and tossed and tumbled and sported like this forever.

(306–307)

Like James, Lily Briscoe works through mourning in part three and achieves some measure of freedom from the past. Because she is a painter the mode of undoing and reconstituting the object loss is that of a painter: transforming grief and anger and love into “meaning” on the canvas Lily arrives at a way “to finish her painting”:

Quickly … she turned to her canvas. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there in the center. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

(309–310)

It is in Lily that the largely libidinal attachment to the lost mother is seen. Her love, infantile in its totality and in its idealizing force, dominates the first part of the novel. The grief at the real loss of Mrs. Ramsay that begins part three in Lily's grief: “What does it mean then, what can it all mean? … For really, what did she feel come back after all these years and Mrs. Ramsay dead? Nothing, nothing—nothing she could express at all.” (217)

Lily's struggle from the beginning of the book that summer day ten years ago had been to find how to put upon canvas “the shape.” Her story is a search for a way of finding form to contain and embody her deeply felt devotion to Mrs. Ramsay and all its complex associations. Her search is a search for the symbol—Mrs. Woolf's description of that search is, in effect, one account of how symbols and symbolic constructs accrue associations that makes them meaningful for the artist.¹⁷

From the beginning Lily had been severely blocked. Unable to transfer the inner vision to the canvas she found herself often on the “verge of tears” as she sought to find a way, a “passage from conception to work” finding it “as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child.” (32) According to Lawrence Kubie “block is the inhibiting unconscious ‘refusal’ (out of injury, fear and hate) to make the specific binding steps of any particular higher transformation and to hold those steps in the process of the challenging tasks of real and valid as opposed to neurotic competition—an inhibiting refusal and a refusing inhibition dedicated instead to the ‘escape downward’ into an infantile solution.¹⁸ Lily does indeed often feel like a child—helpless, inadequate, longing in spite of her 30 some years, to “fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at Mrs. Ramsay's knee and say to her—but what could one say to her? ‘I’m in love with you?’” The longing is to repossess the mother, to possess all that is around and associated with her—“No, that was not true. I’m in love with this all,’ waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children. It was absurd, it was impossible. So now she laid her brushes neatly in the box, side by side, and said to William Bankes: ‘It suddenly gets cold.’” (32–33)

Lily too responds to Mr. Ramsay as if he were despoiler and destroyer of happiness, paralyzed in her painting by him as he “bore down” on her, “shouting, gesticulating.” (31) According to Eidelberg the pre-oedipal attachment “to the mother is intense; she is the most important object in the child's life, an active, omnipotent, and all-giving figure; the father is regarded as an intruder and rival.”¹⁹ Lily's attempt to translate her intense feeling for Mrs. Ramsay, her sense of the hovering and intruding presence of Mr. Ramsay dominates the first part of the novel. In her drive to find verbal ways to define Mrs. Ramsay as she searches for ways to translate it all to the canvas Lily reveals what, in the rush of almost photographic, cinematographic detail, are the several memories and fantasies that lie, perhaps, at the heart of her blocking. Lily thinks “she opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. … Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one's bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that—hasty but apt), she would enact again whatever it might be. …” The memory of the near present activates earlier memories, creating in Mrs. Ramsay almost the maternal principle sensuous, fertile—“the house seemed full of children and Mrs. Ramsay listening; shaded lights and regular breathing.” (76–77) In the memory of her presence Lily feels “so little, so virginal.” Shrinking into herself, she pled for her own “exemption” from the law of marriage:

Then, she remembered, she 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.

(78)

Daughter and mother, small child against the knee of the loveliest of women, “as close as she could get” the vision Lily has moves ever inward and backward in time, and ever further away from objectification on canvas. “What art was there” Lily asks herself at a moment that seems close to regression:

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, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay's knee.

(79)

Lily's magic wish for re-incorporation brings her “Nothing! Nothing!” either at the time of the incident—“Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose. Mrs. Ramsay went”; nor at this, the time of her painting. There “hung about her” for days after the incident a sense of Mrs. Ramsay as “an august shape; the shape of a dome.” (80) The shape that is emerging in her painting, however, is not that of a dome, but of a triangle: “What did she wish to indicate by the triangular purple shape, ‘just there’?” Mr. Bankes asked. It was Mrs. Ramsay reading to James, she said. (81) But it is clearly not just James and his mother, but the whole concept of mother and child that refuses to take shape on the canvas. … “Mr. Bankes was interested. Mother and child then—objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was famous for her beauty—might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow without irreverance.” (81) Lily cannot “show him what she wished to make of it,” cannot find the way “to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left.” It is no use. “She stopped … she took the canvas lightly off the easel.”

It is possible to suggest that Lily's inability to paint this particular painting comes from anxieties roused by the intensity of the longing for reincorporation in and by the mother. For her the grief over the loss of the mother has long preceded the real loss of Mrs. Ramsay. Associated with the longing (which, according to Freud is more important in the female than in the male²⁰) is a conglomerate of affects: rage at the early and necessary separation from the beloved body—she cannot “connect this mass on the right with that on the left”; a fear of that longed for reincorporation—the “danger was” that by finding a way to connect the masses “the unity of the whole might be broken” (83); resentment at the father's presence, his intrusiveness, his possession of the longed for beloved for the triangle is a symbol of mother and child only if it also incorporates the figure of the father.

For Mr. Ramsay also figures in Lily's attempts to finish her painting. Her ambivalent attitude toward him is explicit from the beginning of the novel. Disturbed and irritated by his self-centered intrusiveness that seems to violate the privacy of her painting, she sees him as one who reduces life “to a large kitchen table.” (38) Yet she sees in him qualities she can admire, even love:

You have greatness, she continued, (looking at Mr. Bankes), but Mr. Ramsay has none of it. He is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical; he is spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears Mrs. Ramsay to death; but he has what you (she addressed Mr. Bankes) have not; a fiery unworldliness; he knows nothing about trifles; he loves dogs and his children. … All of this danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate, but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net—danced up and down in Lily's mind, in and about the branches of the pear tree, where still hung in effigy the scrubbed kitchen table, symbol of her profound respect for Mr. Ramsay's mind.

(40–41)

Mr. Ramsay, and the need to come to terms with him, corresponds to her need to come to terms with his relationship to Mrs. Ramsay. Their love she sees as “part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love.” Conscious of it, absorbed in and by it, Lily seems in a moment of inner vision to return to a state when one is still inextricably part of both parents.

And what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr. Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

(73)

But “it was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad” Lily thinks, as she looks at her painting and thoughts of “Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear, ‘Women can’t paint, women can’t write …’” reveal the deep fears of the male, the father figure.

However one delineates the many painful emotions that ebb and flow, that rise and subside in Lily Briscoe in the attempt to paint, they are clearly inhibiting—each one seeming to cancel out the other, to paralyze the creative understanding that makes for art forms. Lily is not “free” to create as long as she is in the presence of the longed-for mother. Clearly ambivalent toward Mr. Ramsay, her excessive idealization and adoration of Mrs. Ramsay also reveals an unacknowledged ambivalence. There are moments when she is critical of Mrs. Ramsay—she thinks of her occasional “highhandedness” (75), for instance—but the intensity and totality of her love hints at reaction formation. Since an act of creation can be thought to be “motivated by the simultaneous wish to destroy and to make restitution for the wish” according to Louis Fraiberg²¹ the anxiety roused by the wish to destroy in order to be able to create could be fiercely inhibiting. Old and long repressed anger long since transformed into excessive adoration might well threaten to erupt with all its attendant punishment and retaliation fantasies. Lily cannot finish her painting until real death removes from her the possibility of the unleashing of these early repressed fantasies. In the words of Daniel Schneider the “unconscious repressed can deform and inhibit the mastery of form in which … content is cast.”²² With Mrs. Ramsay gone she can be freed from the fear of being destroyed in the act of destroying in order to create; and the fantasy of the reincorporation in the mother can be transformed into an art object.

This, indeed, is what Lily does in Part Three. Once more taking up her painting, starting over with a clean canvas, she finds the old questions return—how to put all her memories and impressions together and perhaps get “at the truth of things, the question was of some relation between those masses.” (219) In this house “full of unrelated passions” the same blocking seems to threaten. Now at forty-four, Lily feels herself “wasting her time, unable to do a thing, standing there, playing at painting, playing at the one thing one did not play at, and it was all Mrs. Ramsay's fault. She was dead. The step where she used to sit was empty. She was dead.” (223–224) Mr. Ramsay, still “bearing down on her” now looms larger than ever, demanding from her the sympathy he once received so freely from Mrs. Ramsay. Lily cannot give it, will not give it to him. Feeling the intensity of “the pressure of his concentrated woe; his age; his frailty; his desolation” she rejects his need, displacing her response to his “immense self pity” onto his boots:

Remarkable boots they were too, Lily thought, looking down at them: sculptured; colossal; like everything that Mr. Ramsay wore. … “What beautiful boots!” she exclaimed. She was ashamed of herself. To praise his boots when he asked her to solace his soul. …

(229)

But Mr. Ramsay had smiled—“they had reached, she felt, a sunny island where peace dwelt … her heart warmed to him.” As he stoops over to tie her shoe she felt herself “tormented with sympathy for him … she felt her eyes swell and tingle with tears. …” (229–230) Though the feeling has “come too late,” for Cam and James interrupt, Lily has had it and has acknowledged it. The departure of the small family group, Cam, James, and Mr. Ramsay, leaves her feeling “curiously divided, as if one part of her were drawn out there—”One begins to sense that something is shifting position in Lily's inner world. Mr. Ramsay has become a real presence, the Lighthouse “looked this morning at an immense distance.” The self that does not accompany Mr. Ramsay seems “fixed … doggedly, solidly, here on the lawn.” Her canvas, empty, blank, uncompromisingly staring “seemed to rebuke her.” Lily, making herself “remember how she was such and such a person, had such and such relations to people … took her hand and raised her brush.” Pain, ecstasy, fear make for inner suspense that is almost unendurable—the great question once more seems unanswerable, how to begin—how to capture “the idea” which “seemed simple” but “became in practice immediately complex.” This time, however, Lily wills herself to “take the risk,” to make “the mark”:

With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at the same time must hold herself back, she made her first quick decisive stroke. The brush descended. It flickered brown over the white canvas; it left a running mark. A second time she did it—a third time.

(234–235)

The temptation not to go on is almost intolerable—the fear of the total yielding to “this formidable ancient enemy of hers—this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her” is almost paralyzing. The desire to paint and the desire not to paint engage in combat each seems equally threatening and equally destructive. Once more she feels naked, “like an unborn soul reft of body, hesitating on some windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all the blasts of doubt.” Language such as this in its insistent and exaggerated particularity verbalizes with intensity effects that seem to me to be deeply preverbal—fears of rejection and separation, of punishment, of deprivation, terror that the creative act will blot out the very thing she wishes to capture. In almost a trance she allows the brush to move, seemingly of its own volition; she, Lily Briscoe, seemed in turn to be “losing consciousness of outer things … and her name and her personality and her appearance … her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas—” the image is almost nightmarish—“like a fountain spurting over the glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modelled it with greens and blues.” The female castration anxiety crescendoes in intensity—over and over she hears the old words “women can’t paint, can’t write.” The echo of Charles Tansley's words bring back a memory of Mrs. Ramsay sitting on the beach one windy morning, writing letters, and of herself playing ducks and drakes with Charles—and all of it “seemed to depend somehow upon Mrs. Ramsay sitting under the rock, with a pad on her knee, writing letters.” Resurgence of pain rouses Lily to cry out “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay” even as once more she is driven to ask the old question “What is the meaning of life? … a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years.”

Lily's question though clearly verbalized and philosophically and historically universal has its deepest source in the primal experience of separation. In this, the climactic moment of her experience in the novel, Lily is about to move into what might be called regression from which she emerges to finish her painting. At this point I confess to my own feeling of inadequacy in summarizing what Virginia Woolf does here. Only a reading of the full text will really make compelling her artistic recreation of Lily's descent from the conscious and self-aware self to the inner posture of the infant folded in the arm of the mother. Her mind moves associatively from clear memories of scenes of the summer ten years before back to her painting toward which she is able to be analytical and critical; then back to Mrs. Ramsay alone, to her voice, her words, her movements; once more to the painting—“and as she dipped into the blue paint, she dipped too into the past there.” The memory of Mrs. Ramsay begins now to become almost entirely visual; Lily cannot now even understand what the memory figures seem to be saying—“something violent … a mutter.” The effect is to give one the sense that Lily from an upright position is now lying down, observing, hearing, cherishing the unarticulatable movements of the loved mother. “She went on tunnelling her way into her picture, into the past.” Though there are moments when she returns to the summer's scenes, and to a conscious acknowledgement that Mrs. Ramsay “was faded and gone … we can over-ride her wishes, improve away her limited, old-fashioned ideas. She recedes further and further from us,” each return to the present awareness seems but a momentary defense and preparation for a deeper plunge until the pain of wanting and not having—“to want and not to have—to want and want—” wrung from her the silent cry once more “Oh, Mrs. Ramsay.” The death, the loss that had seemed an intellectually graspable fact suddenly is apprehended as fully real: “Suddenly, the empty drawing-room steps, the frill of the chair inside, the puppy tumbling on the terrace, the whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques flourishing round a centre of complete emptiness.” Lily's eyes were “full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the firmness of her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks.” Life seems to her to be “startling, unexpected, unknown” and this time feeling that a sound might fill the empty space, … and “Mrs. Ramsay would return. ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ she said aloud, ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ The tears ran down her face.”

Lily's mourning, her old, old grief is now felt and recognized in all its pain. “That anguish could reduce one to such a pitch of imbecility, she thought!” It seems almost as if she entered “into the waters of annihilation.” But slowly the pain recedes and with its withdrawal a thought “that she would never feel sorrow for Mrs. Ramsay again.” There is now, “mysteriously, a sense of some one there, of Mrs. Ramsay, relieved for a moment of the weight that the world had put on her.” At no moment has Lily ceased to work on her painting but now she is innerly aware of all the ways she has sought to capture Mrs. Ramsay. “So much depends, she thought, upon distance.” And then comes the moment of full critical consciousness, once more surfacing from the inner depths to try to understand the “obscure distress” she feels as she looks at her painting. “For whatever reason she could not achieve that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces; Mr. Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary.” Puzzled, desperate, feeling the human apparatus “was a miserable machine … for painting or for feeling” she tries to force the solution.

And then, for the first time, Lily submits to the memory, perhaps more accurately, to the fantasy—memory: “Let it come, she thought, if it will come. For there are moments when one can neither think nor feel. And if one can neither think nor feel, she thought, where is one?” Passive now, Lily has a sense of birth and of death.

Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again.

Her inner observations of the lawn, of Mr. Carmichael there nearby, her pictorial memories of Mrs. Ramsay that move in and out of her mind kaleidoscopically seem those of the passive infant though her work at the painting never ceases. The need to possess all of Mrs. Ramsay comes upon her with an increased desperateness. The following passage must, I think, be quoted in full; the ways in which the need to possess is felt even as is the pain of non-possession, the way in which the intrusion of the father as responsible for some of the pain of separation is innerly reconstructed, the way in which the parental romance is imagined, resist paraphrase. The moment seems to me to be an important one, for in it Lily seems at her most “regressive” posture and, at the same time, seems to be in the act of coming to grips with the nuclear loss and all its accumulated painfulness that has blocked her all these years. From this deepest of moments she emerges knowing how to complete her picture.

One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought. Among them, must be one that was stone blind to her beauty. One wanted most some secret sense, fine as air, with which to steal through keyholes and surround her where she sat knitting, talking, sitting silent in the window alone; which took to itself and treasured up like the air which held the smoke of the steamer, her thoughts, her imaginations, her desires. What did the hedge mean to her, what did the garden mean to her, what did it mean to her when a wave broke? (Lily looked up, as she had seen Mrs. Ramsay look up; she too heard a wave falling on the beach.) And then what stirred and trembled in her mind when the children cried, “How's that? How's that?” cricketing? She would stop knitting for a second. She would look intent. Then she would lapse again, and suddenly Mr. Ramsay stopped dead in his pacing in front of her and some curious shock passed through her and seemed to rock her in profound agitation on its breast when stopping there he stood over her and looked down at her. Lily could see him.

He stretched out his hand and raised her from her chair. It seemed somehow as if he had done it before; as if he had once bent in the same way and raised her from a boat which, lying a few inches off some island, had required that the ladies should thus be helped on shore by the gentlemen. An old-fashioned scene that was, which required, very nearly, crinolines and peg-top trousers. Letting herself be helped by him, Mrs. Ramsay had thought (Lily supposed) the time has come now. Yes, she would say it now. Yes, she would marry him. And she stepped slowly, quietly on shore. Probably she said one word only, letting her hand rest still in his. I will marry you, she might have said, with her hand in his; but no more. Time after time the same thrill had passed between them—obviously it had, Lily thought. … She was not inventing; she was only trying to smooth out something she had been given years ago folded up; something she had seen. For in the rough and tumble of daily life, with all those children about, all those visitors, one had constantly a sense of repetition—of one thing falling where another had fallen, and so setting up an echo which chimed in the air and made it full of vibrations.

(294–295)

“Unfolding” thus and innerly verbalizing what is clearly an inextricable “something” she had seen, felt, imagined, fantasied about the parental figures Lily finds a way of objectifying “what it all meant”—once again she turns to the triangular shape as the one most full of the vibrations she is seeking to contain and to project. Even as in her inner mind she sees Mrs. Ramsay “walking rather fast in front, as if she expected to meet some one round the corner” she sees, in the real world, a movement, a figure, behind the window. “At last then somebody had come into the drawing-room; somebody was sitting in the chair”; praying that whoever it was would not “come floundering out to talk to her” Lily notices that the figure “by some stroke of luck” has thrown “an odd-shaped triangular shadow over the step.” Feeling her “mood … coming back to her” she works with deliberate attentiveness—“one must hold the scene”—The “problem might be solved after all,” the block might be broken, the creative force freed. At this moment there seems to come in one last terrible anguish the need for Mrs. Ramsay even as there seems to come the realization that indeed, she is dead, that there can be no reincorporation, that the separation and loss cannot be undone no matter how profound the desire.

Ah, but what had happened? Some wave of white went over the window pane. The air must have stirred some flounce in the room. Her heart leapt at her and seized her and tortured her. “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!” she cried, feeling the old horror come back—to want and want and not to have.

At this moment the extraordinary need for Mrs. Ramsay becomes ordinary, the unresolved anguish of loss and separation is resolved as it is accepted as “a part of ordinary experience,” as it is seen to be “on a level with the chair, with the table.” Lily has in this instant of acceptance and resignation and sorrow arrived at something approaching detachment and relinquishment of Mrs. Ramsay and can be said to have carried out the work of mourning. Turning from the inner fantasy of Mrs. Ramsay sitting “there quite simply, in the chair” Lily “went past Mr. Carmichael holding her brush to the edge of the lawn” to look out to sea for the boat carrying James, Cam, and Mr. Ramsay to the Lighthouse, “Where is that boat now? And Mr. Ramsay? She wanted him.” (300) To her, as she relegates the lost mother to the reality of death and as she turns to include the third and once resented figure in the triangular shadow, there comes a way to finish her painting:

Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

(309–310)

As James has arrived at his resolution of his inhibiting rage so Lily has achieved some freeing from libidinal attachment, so the work of mourning can become a creative rather than a destructive force. By finding a symbolic way of objectifying the lost object (the triangular form) and a way of representing “the meaning of it all” (“a line there, in the centre”) Lily has found a way of ensuring the presence of the lost and the decathexis necessary for giving up the magic wish for actual restitution can occur.²³ In the acceptance of Mrs. Ramsay's, and all life's, mortality Lily accepts her own and renounces much of her inhibiting omnipotence—for what does it matter if her painting is “put in attics or destroyed.” For outraged omnipotence is but another manifestation of separation anxiety and is one of the painful components of the blocking that stops the creative process. Once Lily has accepted the reality of Mrs. Ramsay's death, has, in a sense re-experienced and worked through her intense libidinal attachment and the long repressed rage, has, in effect, like James, seemed to “complete the work of mourning” she is released from her narcissistic and infantile fantasy fear of destroying and can psychically afford to create. To quote Louis Fraiberg:

Creation is accomplished by reconstituting the object according to the artist's aesthetic conception, and this means that the image of the object in its natural context must be destroyed. Thus gratification at partial satisfaction of the destructive impulse is achieved, guilt at the destructive wish is alleviated, and pleasure at the new creation is felt, all being experienced concomitantly, and the combined, complicated value of the whole is invested in the created object. To this is added the pleasure which the ego feels in solving artistic problems and in the operation of the psychic apparatus itself.²⁴

To the Lighthouse is a novel that is a complex symbol about the creation of a symbol. Both its central characters come to terms with infantile fantasies about the parental figures that must be resolved before either can move beyond psychic infancy. It is the actual loss in death of the beloved mother that reactivates earlier, primal loss and the long repressed grieving for that primal loss; in the acceptance of real loss in death real grieving revives the old grief and both are worked through in the “inner voyages” James and Lily make to the Lighthouse. I must here in the last paragraph return to the voice of the narrator. About its final peace it is impossible to assert anything. Clearly the voice of the novelist herself to suggest its success or non-success in the work of mourning is to move from a study of the novel into a conjecture about the writer. This I am in no sense prepared to do. But I would like to propose that the novel reveals how far Virginia Woolf could go in “regression in service of the ego”—far and deep and almost to the brink—and create, as her heroine Lily could, art from it. “Works of art” in the words of Paul Ricoeur, “are creations which, as such, are not simply projections of the artist's conflicts, but the sketch of their solution. Dreams look backward, toward infancy, the past; the work of art goes ahead of the artist; it is a prospective symbol of his personal synthesis and of man's future, rather than a regressive symbol of his unresolved conflicts.”²⁵ All we can know about Mrs. Woolf's resolution of mourning for the mother and the father who were in her mind when she wrote To the Lighthouse is in the resolution she sketches for her main characters, though the voice that narrates continues to haunt the reader with its lyrical and elegiac tones.

Notes

1. University of California Press, 1970

2. Princeton University Press, 1970

3. A Writer's Diary, edited by Leonard Woolf (London 1954), pp. 76-77.

4. P. 229.

5. P. 107.

6. P. 138.

7. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Collected Papers Vol. IV (New York 1959), pp. 152ff. See also “On Transcience,” Collected Papers Vol. V, pp. 79ff.; Helene Deutsch, Neuroses and Character Types (New York 1965), chapter 17; Margaret Mahler, “Notes on the Development of Basic Moods—the Depressive Affect” in Psychoanalysis—A General Psychology (New York 1966); Ella Freeman Sharpe, “The Impotence of Hamlet” in Collected Papers on Psychoanalysis (London 1968).

8. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York 1927) p. 117. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

9. A question of more or less minor import that has haunted me for sometime—since I persist in believing that “everything has a psychic cause”—has been “answered” by Miss Richter. Why, I have wondered, did Virginia Woolf change the locale from the proposed St. Ives in Cornwall to an island somewhere in the Hebrides? One possible reason is, of course, the need to translate autobiography into fiction—the selection of the locale almost at the other end of the map may have been inspired by Mrs. Woolf's work on her essay on Robinson Crusoe as well as by her interest in De Quincey's childhood. (Richter, p. 79 and p. 156, footnote 16). I’m still searching for “why the Hebrides.”

10. “Mourning and Melancholia,” p. 161.

11. Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage, p. 129-130.

12. For the fantasy of the Phallic Mother see especially Ludwig Eidelberg, editor, Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis (New York 1968).

13. D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, xxxiv, 2, 1953, p. 89ff.

14. Helene Deutsch, Neuroses and Character Types, p. 235.

15. See especially pp. 57 ff. “But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them, for stopping and looking down on them; he hated him for interrupting them; he hated him for the exaltation and sublimity of his gestures; for the magnificence of his head; for his exactingness and egotism … ; but most of all he hated the twang and twitter of his father's emotion which, vibrating round them, disturbed the perfect simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother.”

16. The change in James' view of his father begins on p. 242.

17. Lily's relationship to Mrs. Ramsay is far more psychologically complex than I have needed to discuss for the purposes of this essay. Indeed, had there been time and space I would be reluctant to “analyze” her since she is so symbiotically related to her creator. I recommend, however, Phyllis Greenacre's essay “Woman as Artist,” the Psychoanalytic Quarterly XXIX, 2, 1960, pp. 208-227, for some interesting ways of looking at both artists—Lily Briscoe and Virginia Woolf.

18. Lawrence S. Kubie, Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process (Lawrence, Kansas 1958), p. 104.

19. Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis. See also Freud, “Female Sexuality” Collected Papers, Vol. V, pp. 252ff.

20. “Female Sexuality,” p. 258.

21. Louis Fraiberg, “New Views of Art and the Creative Process in Psychoanalytical Ego Psychology,” in The Creative Imagination ed. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeck (Chicago 1965), p. 235.

22. Daniel E. Schneider, The Psychoanalyst and the Artist (Mentor Book, 1962), p. 104.

23. See an interesting essay on this process by Robert Furman “Death and the Young Child” in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child XIX, 1964, p. 326.

24. “New Views …,” p. 236.

25. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (New Haven 1970), p. 175.