SOURCE: “Vision Without Promise,” in Man in the Modern Novel, University of Washington Press, 1964, pp. 96–122.

[In the following essay, Hardy argues that Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay represent the “Masculine Principle and the Feminine Principle” and, as such, symbolize the tension between subject and object and their respective places in reality.]

It would seem impossible to construct the problem of human identity apart from consideration of the mysteries of sex and procreation. The sexual character of the human individual, however inevitably mixed, no one person purely male or purely female—and, indeed, this indecisiveness only serves to emphasize the importance of the dichotomy—is radical. Chiefly in being aware of this character in other persons, which is the procreative potentiality, whether affirmed or denied, deprived or richly endowed, the capacity to bring forth many out of the one, do we recognize the otherness of ourselves.

Virginia Woolf's novel [To The Lighthouse] has as its ultimate theme precisely what Andrew Ramsay defines, in answer to Lily Briscoe's question, as the burden of his father's philosophical preoccupation—“subject and object and the nature of reality.” But Lily is speaking both as woman and as artist when she replies that “Heavens, she had no notion what that meant,” and is instructed then by Andrew to “think of a kitchen table … when you’re not there.” The table of which she entertains a vision, “a scrubbed kitchen table … lodged now in the fork of a pear tree … its four legs in air,” a “white deal” table—“deal” is perhaps a pun on “ideal”—becomes the concrete symbol of the abstracting, rational intelligence, or of reality as seen by that intelligence. It is the first in a long series of things “thought of when no one is there,” in its initial, mere absurdity ironically anticipating the later terror—of the vision of the vacant house in the middle section “Time Passes,” where the eye of the lighthouse beam and the shadows of birds pass over the empty mirrors, and of Mr. Ramsay's and Lily Briscoe's bereavement in the final section, seeking communication with the invisible presence of the dead Mrs. Ramsay. But the matter of first importance to be noted about that table, as symbol of the abstracting intelligence, of one way, rendered manifestly absurd, in which things invisible (what is there when no one is there) may be dealt with—and, by the token of its absurdity, demanding the attempt to reveal, in the rest of the novel, presumably a better way—is its specific identification with the masculine mind.

The table as such, perhaps, is inevitably feminine. As such, it is, or truly represents, reality. But the positioning, so to speak, of the symbol, its awkward lodging in the pear tree, obviously renders it absurd, and makes it representative of the abstracting, i.e., masculine, intelligence—the kind of intelligence that, in Lily Briscoe's view, violates reality.

Now, one is tempted to start making qualifications, stating reservations, right away. Lily Briscoe, besides being an artist, is an old maid, which assuredly qualifies her character as woman. And, I might seem to have implied that her point of view, however we are to define it, is dominant throughout the novel; whereas, in any obvious way, it actually does not become so until the final section. Moreover, especially in the conclusion, her function is somewhat to mediate between the opposed claims of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, after a fashion to reconcile them, rather than unequivocally to champion the latter's cause in her absence. But, to whatever extent that sensibility is or is not finally identifiable with Lily's, not to speak yet of Mrs. Woolf's—and notwithstanding the force of such an argument as Glenn Pedersen's, which would make Mrs. Ramsay the villainess of the piece—the initial effect of the entire opening section “The Window,” by far the longest, is surely to glorify the feminine sensibility, in the person of Mrs. Ramsay, at the expense of the masculine, her husband's.

The pattern of a dialectic opposition is clear. These two are not simply a man and a woman—rather distressingly not that, indeed—a husband and a wife, but Man and Woman, the Masculine Principle and the Feminine Principle. They represent two, clearly opposed truths in competition for the world, for the future, as represented specifically in the proposed trip to the lighthouse but more generally in the future lives of their children, for truth.

Mr. Ramsay's is the truth of things as they are. He “never tampered with a fact.” Mrs. Ramsay's is the truth of perhaps, of things as they might be. They will go to the lighthouse tomorrow “if it’s fine.” “But it won’t be fine,” says Mr. Ramsay. “But it may be fine—I expect it will be fine,” says Mrs. Ramsay.

And, although we suspect from the first that Mr. Ramsay's judgment will be vindicated by the weather on the tomorrow—the set of the wind, the falling barometer, cannot be and must not be argued with—we are given clearly to understand that this does not mean he is right. For it is the “won’t be” that betrays the inadequacy of his kind of truth. He may pretend that it is only facts with which he is concerned, with things as they are, but actually he is radically discontent with present reality; he has no real interest in is except as the basis of will be. The supposed, uncomprising factuality, objectivity, of his mind is revealed as a pathetic egotism. Is, when pushed to will be—cannot, to must not be—becomes, obviously, the instrument of moral tyranny.

Hardly less even than his sycophant Charles Tansley, “the little atheist” whom the children so despise, Mr. Ramsay is a figure of ridicule in this first section of the book. It is only the element of pathos in his egotism, only the evident fact that he himself is the chief victim of his own tyranny of mind, that makes his antics in any way “funny,” and serves somewhat to redeem him as a sympathetic character. But the emphasis is derogatory. He is a disruptive presence, demanding, mean, indifferent to anyone's peace of mind except his own—repeatedly breaking in to destroy the serenity of the mother's communion with her child, abrupting with his wild, self-dramatizing declamations upon the field of Lily Briscoe's vision as she sits on the lawn trying to paint. And the meanness, the cruelty, the demanding relentlessness, is specifically identified again and again with his character as male. The sensibility of the woman, of Mrs. Ramsay, is the “fountain and spray of life,” a “delicious fecundity,” into which “the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare.” And again, “James felt all her strength flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, demanding sympathy.”

The very, shameless intensity of his need for sympathy is what most prevents its being, at least from the reader, elicited. And to the extent that Mrs. Ramsay is willing to provide it, despite his unworthiness, her charity serves only further to ennoble her. “There was nobody she reverenced as she reverenced him.” But this reverence, although it is wholly admirable in her, is at the same time one which Mrs. Woolf has made it plain would be very difficult for anyone else to understand or share.

To be sure, we get some few hints at a quality of nobility in him discoverable to others than his wife. Lily Briscoe, comparing him at first unfavorably to Mr. Bankes, remembers suddenly how he had “come down in two coats the other night and let Mrs. Ramsay trim his hair into a pudding basin,” and is filled for a moment with the recognition of “a fiery unworldliness” in the man which makes him seem then infinitely superior to the neat, scrubbed, bachelor botanist. And we catch something of the same in the story of the walk he had taken many years before with Bankes, when he stopped in the path to point his stick at the mother hen with her chickens and muttered “Pretty—pretty”—the gesture in which his friend had sensed “an odd illumination in to his heart,” and, admiring it, yet at the same time had foreseen the drying up of their friendship, what was to come about as the result of Ramsay's marriage and the encumbrances of “clucking domesticities.” The passage elicits a subtle variety of sympathies, for Bankes as well as for Ramsay. It has the true, high pathos, of an insight into one of the ineluctable sadnesses of life—how the love of man and woman always, inevitably, if it is to be fulfilled, destroys the love of man and man—which is momentarily beyond considerations merely of individual personality, and of the relative merits of character. But, in the end, the tendency of it is to confirm Lily Briscoe's intuition of Ramsay's superiority. The “glories of isolation and austerity which crowned him in youth,” which had made him, in the time of the flower of their friendship, most admirable to Bankes, we are led to feel have been worthily put off. Bankes “commiserated him, envied him,” in his having so divested himself. And it is the envy that is proper; the commiseration is the thinnest mask of Bankes's own, mere self-commiseration, in being deprived of the friendship. Ramsay's petty, eccentric vanities are nothing beside the botanist's settled habits of self-solicitude, with his valet and his objections to dogs on chairs.

But this can do little to offset the effect of the other episodes, of Ramsay's cruelty to his wife, and of his absurd, childish daydreams of self-dramatization, as the hero of Balaclava and what not. It is clear enough how pettiness and vanity, in the truly great, may be evidence of actual humility. But the question is, whether Ramsay really is a great man. Humility, especially when it so successfully disguises itself as vanity, requires so much charitable insight on the part of others to be discovered as humility, is not likely to seem much of a virtue unless there is reasonable cause for pride. What, in short, does Mr. Ramsay have to be humble about?

The crucial passage is the one describing his effort to run the “alphabet” of thought—to push on from Q, where he is stuck, to R. He does not make it, of course. And we see clearly the grounds of his fear about his status as professional philosopher. We are told repeatedly how he frets over the suspicion that “young men do not care for him,” that Charles Tansley's opinion of him as “the greatest metaphysician of the time” is pure sycophancy. But the final, ironic point is not just that he is a lesser thinker than someone who could, perhaps, go on to R, or even all the way to Z. Bernard Blackstone, without being able to make much of his insight, has observed that the “shutter,” “the leathern eyelid of a lizard,” which obscures Ramsay's vision of R, is the veil of his egotism. So, rather obviously, it is. Throughout the episode, in the midst of the intellectual struggle, he is so preoccupied with the pathos of his lonely heroism—daydreaming about himself as the leader of a party of shipwrecked seamen, of imperiled mountain-climbers—that he cannot keep to the discipline of his mental task. But the point is not that Mr. Ramsay, in particular, is so grossly self-infatuated that he cannot reach that goal of R. (I take it that R “stands for” Reality.) The point is, rather, that the entire system, the entire conception of thought as the “piano keyboard” or the “alphabet” is a construct of egotism—i.e., of the intelligence acting in the service of the ego—and therefore doomed to failure. No one who thinks in this way is going to reach R, for the simple reason that the Reality so conceived, so reduced, does not exist. R is an illusion.

“For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order …,” Mrs. Woolf says. But we could hardly be given more clearly to understand, than by that “if,” that thought is not like that.

But this, although it somehow universalizes Ramsay, does nothing to dignify him. No matter how universal the tendency of mind that he represents—and Mrs. Woolf pretty clearly regards it as the basic tendency of all, at the very least, English metaphysics—the tendency stands, in him, condemned. The “on to R” skit is a merciless caricature of rationalistic metaphysics, of the kind of thinking that would, precisely, be good enough for directing polar expeditions, rescuing shipwrecked seamen, governing India, any endeavor in which the object is simply to “get things done,” but which is utterly ineffectual when it comes to the fundamental problems of existence. (The farce is more than a little embarrassing, perhaps, in a way not intended by the author. Mrs. Woolf simply doesn’t know very much about the way philosophical investigations are conducted. Her philosopher is a straw man. But the intention is unmistakable.) There is, therefore, an irreducible element of condescension in the “respect” Lily Briscoe professes to feel for Mr. Ramsay's mind, in Mrs. Ramsay's “reverence” for him. He is pitiable, nothing more, in his humiliations; for his greatness, to which the willingness to suffer humiliation, the thoughtless simplicity, should attest, is revealed as monstrous self-delusion.

And, to repeat, that false tendency of mind which would push the processes of rationalism—i.e., the processes of ego-assertion, of practical intelligence—into realms where they do not and cannot apply—i.e., precisely into the realm of the metaphysical, properly so-called—Mrs. Woolf clearly identifies with the masculine intelligence.

The philosopher's wife, on the other hand, is perfection of beauty and wisdom. All (with Mr. Carmichael, to whom we shall come later, the notable exception) dance attendance upon her. She is mysterious, to be adored, at once completely self-contained and completely self-giving. Because she seeks nothing, all things come to her. Her beauty is indefinable; the “nonsense” of Charles Tansley's thoughts as he carries her bag, “stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets,” is in fact about as sensible as anyone's efforts to capture it could be. William Bankes is hardly more successful—“one must remember the quivering thing, the living thing …, and work it into the picture,” but “… he did not know, he did not know, … he must go to his work.” She is careless of it, “is no more aware of her beauty than a child,” thinks Mr. Bankes; “she clapped a deer-stalker's hat on her head, she ran across the lawn in galoshes to snatch a child from mischief,” so that “… one must endow her with some freak of idiosyncrasy—she did not like admiration—or suppose some latent desire to doff her royalty of form as if her beauty bored her and all that men say of beauty.” But its indefinability, and her unawareness, her carelessness, are of course to be understood just as the firmest proof of it.

Children, galoshes, and deer-stalker's hat notwithstanding, she is accorded, and accepts, the homage due a queen. Mrs. Woolf repeatedly invokes the metaphor of regality in the account of her presiding at dinner.

In her beauty, her grace of bearing, she is queenly. But in some as it were neo-Platonic conception, the beauty is but the outward light of an inner virtue. She is queenly in her roles of protectress and of giver. “She had the whole of the other sex under her protection”; that, of course, above all, and the passage implicitly states the metaphor of royal patronage—“for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance.” But, besides the children, her guests too are her subjects, and the poor people of the town whose sickbeds she visits, going about dispensing favors from the mysterious bag that Charles Tansley was permitted unworthily to carry for her. (The household, with the children and guests, the latter significantly divided into the two circles of those who are actually staying at the house and those who have taken rooms in town, contains her court; the town itself, and the lighthouse, are her realm.) She is queenly as molder of destinies—as if, not so much merely prompting, but decreeing the engagement of Paul and Minta, appointing in fancy her son to a seat on the Bench.

But the matter of final importance is the implicit identification of beauty, of the virtue that shines forth in the beauty, with wisdom. Lily Briscoe, to be sure, is uncertain of the term. “Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one's perceptions, half way to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh? or did she lock up within her some secret which certainly Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all?” “And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored up in Mrs. Ramsay's heart.” And the term, then, wisdom, will serve as well as another. The important thing, regardless of the precise term, is that she has a truth—or a source of truth, a way to truth—which is necessary “for the world to go on at all,” which is opposed to the way of her husband's thinking, and which is plainly “preferred” to his, or regarded as superior.

It is also plain that the area of her concern is precisely that defined as her husband's—“subject and object and the nature of reality”—or, in terms that perhaps more accurately suggest the character of her “approach,” existence and being. She is, in brief, albeit unwittingly, a metaphysician. Or, Mrs. Woolf has embodied in her, “symbolically,” the statement of a metaphysical doctrine.

One need not too long hesitate to attach labels—except with due caution to note that the doctrine is one which in itself expressly condemns the habit of attaching labels. The pseudo-Bergsonism is apparent, and has been often observed. (James Hafley, in his generally excellent book on Virginia Woolf, The Glass Roof, presents the most sensible account of this matter to date.) Mrs. Ramsay's experience of knowledge as unity—her identification with the third stroke of the beam from the lighthouse, “the last of the three, which was her stroke,” with “inanimate things, trees, streams, flowers,” how she “felt they expressed one, felt they became one, felt they knew one, in a sense were one”—is a variety of intuition. Her mind at rest, in the “core of darkness,” “when life sank down for a moment,” inhabits Bergsonian time, entertains the experience of self as pure flow of consciousness, the durée réelle, and is indifferent to the limitations of spatialized experience. “Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it.”

If the act of self-knowing or self-contemplation, Mrs. Ramsay's ecstatic composure in her momentary solitude when the household quiets down at the end of the day and she listens to the sea and watches for the stroke of the lighthouse beam, is vaguely “Bergsonian,” we must be careful to recognize that the explicit identification in the novel of the capacity of mind for such an act with the feminine, with something deriving from popular notions of woman's intuition, is Mrs. Woolf's own idea. She is also largely on her own in seeming to interpret, finally, the act of creative intuition as identical with the artist's creativity. When Lily Briscoe, in the last section of the novel, is made consciously and directly to draw the analogy between Mrs. Ramsay's composed and composing presence and herself at her easel—“that woman sitting there writing under the rock resolved everything into simplicity … brought together this and that and then this … made … something which survived after all these years complete, … stayed in the mind affecting one almost like a work of art,” and again, “Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)”—the novelist has exploited for her own purposes a notion that is nowhere more than implied in the writings of the philosopher. But, with these reservations duly made, with due recognition above all that we are dealing with a novel, not a work of formal philosophy, it is not unenlightening to recall Bergson when we attempt to define the issue of the conflict, contest indeed, between Mrs. Ramsay and her husband. I have so far deliberately avoided a terminology that smacks exclusively of the Bergsonian; but there is no harm in thinking of nearsighted Mrs. Ramsay as representative of “intuition,” of farsighted Mr. Ramsay as the “intellect,” so long as we do not suppose that everything in the book can or should be made to fit the formula. The reference will be most useful when we try to determine where Mrs. Woolf herself “stands” with regard to the conflict between the Ramsays.

About the fact of Mrs. Ramsay's triumph, at least in the first section of the novel, there can be little question. She is, we are given clearly to understand, made of far sterner stuff than her husband, is in truth far more of a realist than he. If one might have suspected at first that she is merely the sentimentalist in her opposition to his pretentiously uncompromising factuality—wanting to reassure James, that “it may be fine”—the suspicion is soon dispelled. When, in the course of her meditations as she sits knitting, the voice of an insincere, conventional faith momentarily asserts itself—“We are in the hands of the Lord”—she quickly and firmly rejects it. It is not her voice. “Who had said it? Not she.” “How could any Lord have made this world? she asked … there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that.” And her husband, passing by the window and seeing her, cannot “help noting the sternness at the heart of her beauty,” and is pained and baffled by it. Finally, indeed, he cannot bear it. He must, in defense of his own weakness, the failure of his own philosophical faith to sustain him, come in again and plead silently with her for sympathy, try to compel her to some show of compromising softness.

And when she does, finally, seem to yield—by admitting that she was wrong, that the stocking she is knitting will not be finished, and that, in any event, she knows the weather will not permit the trip to the lighthouse next day—we realize that it is, at the center of her being, no real yielding at all. She can afford to say she is wrong, because she is on another and higher plane so indubitably right. The discovery of self, in the “wedge-shaped core of darkness,” is a loss of self. (Specifically—Mrs. Woolf is very precise—it is a loss of personality. “Not as oneself did one find rest ever, … but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir. …”) Just so, when she surrenders to her husband, yields, admits he is right, the surrender is in truth a triumph.

“‘Yes, you were right. It’s going to be wet tomorrow. You won’t be able to go.’ And she looked again at him smiling. For she had triumphed again. She had not said it: yet he knew.”

These are the final lines of Part I, “The Window.”

The unfinished stocking, it is plain, is the web of Penelope. Insofar as, in remaining unfinished, it foretells Mrs. Ramsay's death, it is the thread of her fate, untimely cut off. But, most immediately, in the context of her admission that it cannot be finished, that the trip cannot be made, of her triumphant surrender, it is the web of her wifely fidelity—in which she draws Odysseus finally home.

And yet, I have so far deliberately overstated the case for Mrs. Ramsay as embodiment of the author's view. Not only have we the evidence of Mr. Carmichael's refusal, even to some extent Lily Briscoe's own hesitancy, to join in the dance of praise; but it might reasonably be questioned whether the effect of this final, living picture of Mrs. Ramsay, in triumph over her husband, is altogether flattering to her.

“Little question,” I said, about her triumph. But enough, perhaps. Is it, as I have suggested, altogether the same thing when in her solitude the loss of self becomes self-discovery, truest communion, and when in her confrontation with her husband her seeming surrender becomes a triumph? Cannot the latter be interpreted merely as a psychological maneuver on her part, which—however true-to-life it may be, familiar from our experience of the ways of women with their men, and as such to be appreciated among Mrs. Woolf's many discernings of the kind—is not meant further to exalt the character of Mrs. Ramsay at this crucial point, but rather to diminish it, subtly to reveal its one, fatal weakness, its “tragic flaw”?

As her husband has stood watching her, she has been aware that he would have her tell him she loves him. “Will you not tell me just for once that you love me? He was thinking that, for he was roused, what with Minta and his book … their having quarreled about going to the Lighthouse.” But she cannot. She smiles at him, anticipating her admission, the gesture of submission to his superior practical judgment, and reassures herself—that, “though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him.” But there is a mocking tone of anxiety in the very repetition of the assurances. “He could not deny it.” And when we come to the final words—“For she had triumphed again. She had not said it: yet he knew.”—although, at first glance we might suppose the “it” to be the same as before, supply unthinkingly the phrase “that she loved him” after “knew,” a second look might arouse some misgivings. Perhaps that is not it at all. Perhaps the only thing he really knows is that “she had triumphed again”—which, except from the viewpoint of a colossal egotism, is hardly the same thing as loving.

There is reason to suspect that Mrs. Ramsay is a colossal egotist. We have identified her husband's way of thinking with ego assertion. But does not the metaphysical certainty she secures in her experience of “losing personality”—what she gains through the via negativa (in the term of Blackstone's rather oppressively enthusiastic analysis) of her submergence in the “core of darkness”—become the weapon, consciously and deliberately used, of a purely personal victory in her conflict with her husband? In that victory, she is inevitably compromised; her queenliness is suspect of tyranny. And we have not far to search for other evidences of compromise.

Her vaunted realism—“there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor … there was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that”—is compromised over and over in her actions. In deference to James's wishes, she will not remove the memento mori of the pig's skull from the children's bedroom; but neither is she content to leave it there to frighten Cam, “branching at her all over the room,” but covers it with her shawl, as if, though she herself knows best of all it cannot, the mantle of her benevolent wishes might hide the shadow of death itself. In “Time Passes,” the wind, the slow decay of the fabric, have begun to unwrap the shawl. She has decreed the marriage of Minta and Paul, sent them out to walk beside the sea and become engaged. But the heirloom brooch (Minta's grandmother's), symbol of tradition, of the tie between past and present and future, is lost. And in “The Lighthouse” we learn that the marriage was not successful. It might have been foreseen that it would not be. But, whether it could have been or not, the point is plain that such considerations—i.e., in the ultimate interest of the parties concerned—rarely enter into Mrs. Ramsay's thinking, this, as Lily Briscoe sees it, “mania of hers for marriage.” She is concerned only to make the match, is all but totally irresponsible with regard to its probable outcome. Again, the benevolence is subtlest despotism—is betrayal, and not only of Paul and Minta, but self-betrayal, betrayal of the deepest certainties of her own self-knowledge. “No treachery too base for the world to commit”? But, of course, “she knew that”! She knows it, one begins to suspect, best of all from her own example.

The argument might be pursued primarily on the evidence of the second and third sections of the novel. Several critics have noted the implications of “Time Passes”—that time and decay, wind and water and sand, the birds and beasts and plants, seem to have conspired to defeat Mrs. Ramsay's design. Her children die, in childbirth, in war; the house deteriorates, in a few more seasons would fall into utter ruin; and the island, as island of human order or human time (planned time, projected, plotted time) in the undifferentiated sea-flow of Time, would be obliterated. And if one asserts that this obliteration is precisely what Mrs. Ramsay alone was capable of foreseeing, unflinchingly facing in the depths of her secret wisdom, in the “core of darkness”—and that, therefore, she would have been most vindicated by such an outcome—still, that only states the fact of her self-betrayal in another way. For, outside the core of darkness, she herself has planned, has projected, plotted, has sought to protect, to determine destinies. The design, however paradoxically, was hers. It is only a little more accurate to insist that the conspiracy of time and decay is a conspiracy with her, to the end of her self-defeat.

Further, in the final section, “The Lighthouse,” Lily Briscoe feels for some time a continuing resentment against Mrs. Ramsay. She, whose viewpoint becomes more and more the point of final reference for the reader, congratulates herself, and one feels with every right to do so, on having defied the tyranny of Mrs. Ramsay's matchmaking. (Mrs. Ramsay had tried to pair her off with Mr. Bankes.) She indulges, again righteously, a certain bitter joy of triumph over the tyrant in the knowledge that the marriage of the Rayleys has turned out badly. If the edge is taken off her triumph by the realization that Mrs. Ramsay herself is dead, safely beyond reproach, yet the effect is only to arouse further feelings of indignation against her—for having, as it were, escaped her responsibilities in death.

But all this is anticipated, actually, in the first section. Pedersen has indicated in part the importance of the recurrent references to the fairytale of “The Fisherman and His Wife” which Mrs. Ramsay is reading to James. It is apparent that the reader is expected to remember Grimm's story; and the “moral” of it serves covertly to define the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, the issue of their conflict over the proposed trip to the lighthouse. The philosopher—who keeps interrupting the reading of the story, who precisely does not believe in fairytales, who suspects as dangerous nonsense the kind of defiance of the facts of nature his wife practices in continuing to encourage James and to prepare for the trip in the face of the falling barometer and the set of the wind, but who lacks the courage of his convictions, so fears the woman's displeasure that he humbly offers to “step over and ask the Coastguards” on the chance that he might be wrong—has rather exactly the character of the Fisherman. And Mrs. Ramsay, at second glance, looks very much like Ilsabil. It is not simply that, living in a hovel, she would play the Queen. (Or “King,” as in the story. The theme of discontent with the limitations of sex is also involved.) In Grimm's story, the final outrage, which calls down the wrath of the wizard Fish upon the woman, to punish her pride and send her back to the poverty from which he had rescued her, is her demand for control over the movements of the sun and moon, i.e., she has demanded the power to interfere with the laws of external nature, specifically, to prohibit the passage of time. Just so, Mrs. Ramsay would make of the self-certitude that she has drawn from the sea-depths of her intuitional experience an instrument, in her personal relations, of her possessive will—and again, as we have seen, in a way that specifically involves a defiance of time, the “spatialized time” which is championed by her husband, with his watch on which he wears a compass as a fob.

The stylistic effects, or manifestations, of Mrs. Woolf's time consciousness in this book and others—the pattern of the development of her style, her narrative technique, from the earlier works to the later, in terms of a growing preoccupation with the time problem—have attracted sufficient critical attention. I am concerned here primarily with questions of another, although closely related order—namely, with the moral-psychological implications of the time-experience that she attributes to Mrs. Ramsay (the experience of the self, in Bergsonian terms, as, or as consciousness of, duration), and that, it would appear, is so nearly identical with her own, central, artistic vision.

That vision, that experience, provides a sufficient aesthetic order. The lives of the Ramsays and their friends are composed, rendered, in the novel. We “get the picture.” And it is not difficult to see what the peculiarly plotless character of the narration—the apparently aimless moving about, backward and forward in chronological time, from moment to self-contained moment of consciousness, the emphasis everywhere upon reaction rather than action, upon what the characters are seeing, thinking, feeling, rather than upon what they are doing, with an attendant reliance upon the structure of symbolic motif to provide thematic unity—has to do with our getting it so clearly as life-picture. The life-sense is inseparable from the time-sense, the new order of narrative. But the question is: whether the order provided is merely aesthetic. The novel itself, I think, clearly raises the question whether Mrs. Ramsay's vision has validity in the moral sphere—i.e., in the sphere of personal relationships wherein the persons are conceived, or conceive of themselves, as responsible, moral agents.

The drift of the observations we have been making, about Mrs. Ramsay as the Fisherman's wife, is to suggest that it has not. If, in the “core of darkness,” she can achieve self-realization through the loss of self, a self-communion, yet she cannot realize her husband, cannot lose herself in him. Although that night, of the end of Part I, “The Window,” is not the last night, we have no indication that the situation has changed before the day when, in “Time Passes,” “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty].” The word of love, which he required, apparently has remained unspoken to the end. The gesture of surrender remains suspect as mere gesture, tainted with egotism. “She had triumphed again.” Mrs. Woolf would seem to suggest that in the love relationship there is no true self-giving, but always a loss, a subduing, of one or the other. “Alone,” with “inanimate things,” it is possible; “they expressed one; … became one; … knew one, in a sense were one.” But not, it appears, with another person. Mrs. Ramsay can, to be sure, with her husband, “read his mind”; she knows what he is thinking, and why. But this penetration is nothing finally resembling that sympathetic intuition by which she becomes one with the trees and streams and flowers. It is an insight that enables her only to prepare an attitude, a strategy for her “triumph.” We are left, at the end of “The Window,” with something very like the Sartrean view of a permanent and inevitable state of conflict between human selves—that situation in which one or the other must be violated, must become object to the other's subject, a being-in-itself to the other's being-for-itself, and thus less than fully human.

We are presented, that is, with a view of man's essential loneliness. Death, the death of Mrs. Ramsay and of the others who follow her, merely confirms in an obvious way the estrangements of life. In the long view (God's view, except that there is no God), the state of things in “Time Passes” is the normal state. Even before the family have left the house, before the last candle (Mr. Carmichael's) is out, the forces of destruction are already at work, the winds tugging at the loosened wallpaper as the household falls asleep. We have been reminded over and over that the battle for order and stability is at best a desperate one, lost from the start. When they have finally gone, and the house is left unprotected, the ineluctable process is not essentially changed, but simply proceeds at a faster pace. The mirrors, symbol and instrument of the vanity of man's self-regarding desire, are simply presented in their true aspect when they are empty, reflecting only the beam from the lighthouse, the shadows of birds passing the windows. For—the root meaning of the word is instructive—vanity, of course, is emptiness.

And the image presented in this middle section—of the frailty of man's habitation, frailty of his hopes, his loneliness and loss and emptiness—is not to be redeemed. Even when the house has been precariously snatched back from oblivion, cleaned, restored, reopened—by the efforts of Mrs. McNabb and associates, the old creature herself ironically a looker in mirrors, whose mad cheerfulness, the croaking gaiety of her ancient music-hall songs, is a mockery of human hope, her mere, instinctive strength to endure an all but subhuman virtue, travesty of fortitude—we understand clearly that this does not imply a restoration of the family life that had inspirited the place in the years before. We understand, indeed, that only by the merest accident, not by any guarantee of fate, is anything at all saved. Just as easily, it is implied, it could have gone the other way, the house, the island itself, could have been obliterated. There is no reason to assume that man and his world should even endure, not to speak of surviving, in the fullest sense, of prevailing. And with the opening of Section III, “The Lighthouse,” there is an unremittingly enforced sense of a restriction and a narrowing, a depriving. The very tone of the prose is saddened, severe, more restrained. Few of the group introduced in “The Window” have returned. And even they have little to say to one another. Each has withdrawn all but entirely into himself.

The dominant impression, almost to the very end, is this one of a nearly unbearable loneliness—of pervading, unbearable silence, with undertones of panic. It is the absence of Mrs. Ramsay, of course, that has cast the spell.

Lily Briscoe cries out silently to her, once almost aloud, afraid that Mr. Carmichael has heard her; and, the cry going unanswered, it is for a moment as if the world were on the brink of annihilation. Here, and in the scene with Lily and Mr. Ramsay—when she feels his silent appeal to her, demand, rather, for the solace he would once have taken from his wife, and in outrage at the shamelessness of his desire, the proposal to use her, poor dry old maid that she is, as a substitute for the dead woman, mentally to rape her, she is unable to speak—the mood is something very near to madness. It is no accident that Mr. Ramsay's beautiful boots, which in the extremity of her desperation she seizes upon as a subject of conversation, pulling herself out of the insufferable silence, should be explicitly referred to as symbol of “sanity.” “They had reached, she felt, a sunny island where peace dwelt, sanity reigned and the sun for ever shone, the blessed island of good boots.” The sense of terror achieved here, I think, is more authentic in its kind than anything Virginia Woolf had done in Mrs. Dalloway, where in the characterization of Septimus Warren Smith she attempted directly to represent a state of insanity.

But, to repeat, we shall have missed the principal point if we interpret either the second or the third sections of the novel simply as contrasts to the first in situation and mood. The title of the long, first section, “The Window,” provides the dominant symbol of that, in opposition to the mirror of “Time Passes.” The window is symbol of perception and of intercourse. It is the aperture between the realms of subject and object, between the human consciousness and the world of external reality—and between the separate consciousnesses of different persons. Mrs. Ramsay sits at the window and looks out at her husband on the terrace, apprehending his state of mind; he, passing by, looks in at her and sees that “sternness at the heart of her beauty.” And so on. But we have observed the reasons for suspecting that the window may have been, all along, no better than a mirror, its transparency an illusion, that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Ramsay can really know, really “see,” the other.

The most appalling implication of the experience of bereavement Lily Briscoe suffers upon her return to the island, suffers only besides and not with Mr. Ramsay, is that Mrs. Ramsay, as her true self, never was really there, never was truly visible—that the loneliness, the self-imprisonment of consciousness, the impossibility of communication, are the permanent conditions of human existence. And there is, finally, the implicit, terrible reproach to Mrs. Ramsay, that if she cannot be charged with responsibility for these conditions, at least she had, and has failed, the responsibility of her knowledge. You knew, Lily Briscoe says in effect to the shade of Mrs. Ramsay, and you did not tell us. You could have forewarned us, but you did not.

But what I have said now would seem to be that both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are wrong—that neither provides a view of existence which can justify anything other than despair. Where, then, do we stand? Is there not some further design, something perhaps in the nature of a proposed synthesis of the contrary points of view, in the final section, that will yield a less melancholy interpretation of the novel's meaning.

There is, of course. We shall have still to defer the question of whether it is successful. But the intention is obvious.

Mr. Ramsay, with Cam and James, does in the end reach the lighthouse. In the course of the trip, his children's pact of enmity against him is dissolved. They come to know him, to recognize and acknowledge his fatherly authority; and by the same token they achieve self-recognition, are freed from the bondage of their childish hatred into mature awareness and acceptance of their own, each other's, and his separate identities. When, as they prepare to land, Mr. Ramsay says to James, “Well done,” in the classic phrase of paternal recognition, we realize that all three of them have grown up during the journey. And the growing up is nothing more or less than the simple realization by each of one's primary responsibility to the truth of one's own feelings. When this has been accomplished, then they are able to establish a true community of good will, inseparable from the sense of individual, personal independence.

Moreover, there is a tacit but unmistakable implication that the voyage, with all the attendant blessings of its accomplishment, has been undertaken by Mr. Ramsay in homage to the memory of his wife. It is a pilgrimage, a memorial ceremony. In winning the confidence and admiration, the recognition, of his children, he has not won them away from her, but rather for her. This, we are surely to understand, is but the completion of her own, original design, in the trip she had planned years before. To be sure, she is absent now. But we are not to forget that she had never intended to go along on the actual voyage. Then, too, the children were to have been sent out in his care alone. Now, at last, it is his day. James comes to his father's knowledge, sees the lighthouse, reality, the real situation of man in the universe, at this farthest outpost of human society, as his father would see it—looming up, “stark and straight, glaring black and white … a stark tower on a bare rock”—sternly rejecting the council of “old ladies … [who] went dragging their chairs about on the lawn … saying how nice it was and how sweet it was and how they ought to be so proud.” His father is right, rather: “as a matter of fact, James thought, looking at the Lighthouse standing there on its rock, it’s like that.” And yet (Cam, always looking back as they sail, watching the island disappear, but keeping it in her mind in the image of the censer, the hanging garden, which recalls the imagery of Mrs. Ramsay's comforting stories about the pig's skull, embodies the invisible presence of the mother—she is even shortsighted, like her mother), Mr. Ramsay is given his day and his due somehow only at his wife's behest. If it had not been for her, they would never have gone.

And, finally, at the same time that the boat makes its way across the water, Lily Briscoe is winning her struggle to fill the blank space of her canvas, pushing toward the resolution of her own conflict with Mrs. Ramsay, reconciliation to the fact of her absence, the betrayal of her death. The parallel is all but too strictly enforced; we are obviously to assume that Lily's intimation is correct, that the boat is landing, Mr. Ramsay is saying “Well done,” preparing to leap ashore, in the moment just before she makes the final stroke with her brush and utters again, with respect to her own struggle, the “consummatum est.” “‘He has landed,’ she said aloud [to Mr. Carmichael]. ‘It is finished.’” And on the next, and final, page: “… it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.” And much of the same paradox is involved in the two accomplishments, of the homage to Mrs. Ramsay which is identical with her rejection, of the acknowledgment of her presence which is identical with acceptance of her absence.

It is precisely when, realizing that the drawing-room step, where the shape of Mrs. Ramsay reading to James had once provided an essential mass of dark color in her intended painting, is empty now, she no longer cares—when she can say to herself, “she did not want Mrs. Ramsay now”—that she has her. In the conversation with Mr. Bankes in “The Window,” when she tries to explain her intention with the half-finished painting, a particular point is made of the “triangular purple shape … a purple shadow” to which she has “reduced … the mother and child.” Now, in “The Lighthouse,” when she has started the painting afresh (the old, unfinished canvas has been lost somewhere during the intervening years), someone comes to the drawing-room window while she is working and casts again “an odd-shaped triangular shadow over the steps.” There is a moment of obscure intensity in the account of Lily's mental reactions to this phenomenon when we might suppose she is seeing the ghost of the dead woman. But, actually, the final point is exactly and only that the shadow, not the shade, has reappeared—and that this, the shadow, now just as before, is all she really needs. For the purposes of her art, the completion of this “picture” which is identical for her with the reconstruction of the past and, in retrospect, penetration of its meaning, she requires only the mass of color—regardless of who, or what, has provided its counterpart in the actual scene before her. As I have suggested, this experience clearly parallels that of Mr. Ramsay, in Lily's intimation of his state of mind, when precisely by no longer demanding, needing, no longer taking thought of, the denied consolation of his wife's presence, he is enabled to start on the voyage which will do her greatest homage in his own self-fulfillment. But, further, Lily has also unwittingly reproduced, in the “triangular shadow,” exactly the image embodying Mrs. Ramsay's experience of self-intuition—the “wedge-shaped core of darkness.”

That shadow is, in the most profound sense, the very shape, the very presence, the very self as presence, of Mrs. Ramsay. It is not less but more real than the substantial, flesh-and-blood shape of her, in her maternal beauty, and than any apparition, ghost, of that. And we are to understand that the truth of this vision of reality—the reality, again, of the self—is attested principally by what would seem, according to our usual, ego-centered conception of time (Mr. Ramsay's time, as opposed to Mrs. Ramsay's), its brevity. “The great revelation,” Lily has reflected earlier, “had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. …” Lily's vision, her painting—“it would be hung in the attics … it would be destroyed. But what did that matter?”—is just such an illumination, a match struck in the dark. If it pretended to be otherwise, sought to be longer lasting, we should suspect its truth.

And yet, with this much by way of an account, I think reasonably sympathetic, of the book's attempt to resolve itself, we must ask again the question that I said seemed to be raised by the characterization of the central figure, Mrs. Ramsay—i.e., whether her vision of the self has validity in the moral sphere, the sphere of relationships among persons conceived, essentially, as moral agents. I think it has not, and that the reading of the conclusion we have undertaken, the paralleling of the experience of Mr. Ramsay and his children on the boat trip with that of Lily Briscoe at her painting, really only confirms rather than alters what might have been suspect as the result of oversimplification in the previous analysis—i.e., that the order provided by the vision is purely aesthetic, in a deliberately extramoral sense.

The issue indicated is, essentially, the same as that of the conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. And the way the conclusion of the book “resolves” it is by finally denying its reality.

Pedersen's study furnishes a useful corrective to the conventional readings of the novel which accepted Mrs. Ramsay as unqualified heroine, her point of view as identical with that of the author, and Mr. Ramsay as villain-fool. But it will hardly do simply to reverse the formula, to make Mrs. Ramsay, as I said, the villainess—she is, according to Pedersen, “a matriarch encouraging an Oedipus complex in her son, … deny[ing] the husband and negating the father”—and to present Mr. Ramsay, once the baneful influence of his wife is removed by her death, as hero. There is, I have indicated, an apparent intention on Mrs. Woolf's part to redeem Mr. Ramsay, and correspondingly to reveal the flaws in his wife's character. But it is an intention that falls far short of what Pedersen wants, and that, even in its own measure, is scarcely realized. Mr. Ramsay, with the philosophical attitude he represents, has been too effectively caricatured throughout not to appear somewhat fatally ridiculous even at the end. And too much essential sympathy, or admiration, for Mrs. Ramsay has been built up; her point of view is too closely identified, especially in the last section, with the finally dominant one of Lily Briscoe herself, to permit the interpretation that she is somehow simply routed in disgrace at the conclusion, to be replaced in the heroic role by her husband. The opening statement that Pedersen's article is designed to prove—“‘Someone had blundered.’ The vision of Lily Briscoe reveals that it was Mrs. Ramsay.”—is a vast oversimplification.

So too, although not so relentlessly pursued, is Hafley's contrary assertion: “Seven times in [the first] part of the novel, the phrase ‘Someone had blundered’ is repeated. Either Mr. Ramsay or Mrs. Ramsay is wrong, and the remainder of the novel shows that it is Mr. Ramsay who ‘had blundered.’” Pedersen and Hafley are both right, and they are both wrong.

But this still does not mean that any formula of synthesis or reconciliation of the two opposed points of view, Mrs. Ramsay's and her husband's, can accommodate the book's final effect. In his discussion of Orlando, Hafley quotes a statement of Bergson's:

Intuition and intellect represent two opposite directions of the work of consciousness: intuition goes in the very direction of life, intellect goes in the inverse direction, and thus finds itself naturally in accordance with the movement of matter. A complete and perfect humanity would be that in which these two forms of conscious activity should attain their full development.

I do not, as Hafley seems to, find even in Orlando anything resembling an image of such perfection. And, assuredly, it is not achieved in To the Lighthouse. In a sense, this is what Mrs. Woolf “pretends” to do—to show us Mrs. Ramsay's intuitive experience of “The Window,” wherein she becomes one with the beam of light, now as it were harmoniously “completing itself” in the actual (i.e., “material,” “intellectual”) voyage of her husband with the children to the lighthouse. Or, to put the matter another way: I said at the outset that the function of Lily Briscoe was “somewhat” to mediate between the two, “after a fashion” to reconcile them. But the qualifying phrases were deliberate. The pretended harmonization is a trick, a skillful manipulation of symbolic motifs; there is scarcely anything in the way of psychological realism to account for the strange sea-change of personality undergone by Mr. Ramsay and James and Cam in the brief time of the voyage; that sudden achievement of maturity, upon second examination, must seem little short of a miracle. And what Mrs. Woolf really and finally does, through Lily Briscoe, is to get rid of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay—of those troublesome married people, precisely, both of them, and of their offspring into the bargain.

The man and the children are abandoned somewhere out there in the haze, into which the lighthouse itself has finally disappeared from Lily's view. And the woman is reduced entirely to the symbol of the intuitive principle.

Whatever else might be said about her, it is surely no accident that Lily Briscoe is an artist, and that her viewpoint is the last one presented, the definitive and conclusive one. In effect, any questions of a seeming moral import left over from the scene of the family party's arrival at the lighthouse—questions, that is, of their probable capabilities for the future, the dimension of moral responsibility—are simply “referred” in the end to the aesthetic test, translated into aesthetic terms, out of time. Lily Briscoe, the last person we see, is the artist, and the artist, in the most literal sense, alone. There is nothing left but her and her painting. The human person, in what we are accustomed to calling his representational image in art, necessarily evokes a response which is in some part moral. This image, as we have seen, is deliberately excluded from Lily's painting. Mrs. Ramsay appears only as the triangle of shadow. Humanity, even in the guise of possible, future viewers of the work, has been pushed out of the picture; she doesn’t care if the picture is destroyed, hung in attics. And there can be little question but that that “picture” is, in some at least wishful sense, the novel.

But perhaps the most significant aspect of dehumanization in the final scene is the desexualization. In this we witness the final abandonment of the issue, the conflict of masculine and feminine—the problem, simply, of marriage and the family—which purported to be the book's central, dramatic concern. Lily Briscoe's only “companion” on the lawn at the end is Mr. Carmichael; and he is invisible then. The characterization of Carmichael, also an artist, the poet about the nature of whose poetry we are deliberately told nothing—Lily Briscoe has not read his work, but “thought that she knew how it went,” in a way designed simply to indicate that it does not matter what it is about, the subjects and themes, the character of its technique—is a device for reinforcing certain implications of Lily's experience which might otherwise remain obscure, or seem to have only particular validity.

His presence establishes the point that the order provided by the visual art, the painting, an order which is entirely self-justifying and is not required to render “life” intelligible, is essentially the same order in verbal art. Mr. Carmichael makes, in the penultimate paragraph of the novel, a gesture as Lily sees it of universal benediction—“spreading his hands over all the weakness and suffering of mankind …,” and then lowering one hand slowly, “as if she had seen him let fall from his great height a wreath of violets and asphodels which … lay at length upon the earth.” It is clear that his capacity for making such a gesture, his godlike character (Lily sees him as “looking like an old pagan god”), consists simply in his entire inscrutability. He is silent; to the repeated exasperation of Mrs. Ramsay in the first section of the book, he needs nothing; of all the persons surrounding her, he is the only one who seems, not in any simple sense to dislike her, but to be utterly indifferent to her. He and Lily, we are repeatedly told, communicate silently in this final scene on the lawn. “They had not needed to speak. They had been thinking the same things and he had answered her without her asking him anything.” But what they communicate would seem to be, at last, simply the truth of the impossibility of communication. And essential to this ineffable process of nonknowing, nonintercourse, between the two artists, is the character of the so-called “androgynous” in them that has become one of the central clichés of Woolf criticism.

Actually, despite the intent of Mrs. Woolf's own theorizing on the matter, “androgynous” is the wrong term, with reference to what we find either in this book or her others. She is not a feminist, certainly, in any usual, plain sense. Again, all that is left at the end of her sympathy for Mrs. Ramsay, the woman, as opposed to her husband, is the notion of the superiority of the intuition to the intellect. But neither, then, does she succeed in constructing characters in whom the male and the female are dynamically combined. She needed, as a counterpart to her female painter here, a male poet. But she needs him, finally, to prove that the sexual distinction is, in fact, of no importance—no more essentially meaningful, precisely, than the distinction between verbal and nonverbal art. Lily, the juiceless old maid, is a not-woman; and Mr. Carmichael, a kind of Tiresias figure who has ceased even to prophesy, surviving timelessly into a life simply beyond sex, is a not-man.

This implicit doctrine of the asexuality (not androgyny) of art may well be the one, necessary key to the final impression—it must be recorded, at last—of dryness, thinness, for all their surface richness of design and subtle nuance of feeling, the impression of morbid triviality, that the novels of Mrs. Woolf leave. We have noted now Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, from the very first, appear not so much as male and female, man and wife, but as embodiments of ideal principles, thesis and antithesis, of masculine and feminine. And this peculiar aridity of effect is felt more and more strongly in the final section. In a novel so bristling as this one with sexual symbolism—the lighthouse itself, the window, the red-hot pokers at the edge of the lawn, the stroking of the light beam which bursts “some sealed vessel” in Mrs. Ramsay's mind, the insistently triangular shadow, “wedge-shaped core of darkness” that she is, even Mr. Ramsay's beautiful boots, which poor Lily adores—it is astonishing to realize how little, primary sexuality there is.

It is impossible, I think, to escape the implication. For the purposes of art—and art is everything, the only ultimately dependable source of order, source of being, self-fulfillment, “the one thing that one [does] not play at,” art is directly and unequivocally represented, in Lily's painting, as the true perfection of Mrs. Ramsay's intuitive wisdom—Mrs. Woolf thought that sexuality must be reduced entirely to symbolic status. And this is at one with the denial of communication, the denial of the possibility of an intelligible moral order, the denial of concern with the moral dimension in human relationships, i.e., the dimension of potentiality, of the future. Mrs. Ramsay is, purely exists, only when she is dead, only in the past. We have communication, only with the dead. It is at one with the implicit equation, let us say, of the Crucifixion and Creation—of consummatum est, Lily Briscoe's “It is finished,” with fiat, the creative word—the equation of darkness, the triangular shadow, with the perfection of light, of vision. “… it was finished. … I have had my vision.” But, finally, it is at one with the total denial of value in the art work, as such. Because the art is seen as identical with the vision (process of execution and completion of vision are coterminous, in Lily's experience), the status of the finished work is indifferent. It literally and entirely does not matter that Lily is a poor painter, that the painting is a poor thing. No reliable criteria for critical judgment exist.

To the Lighthouse seems to me the high point of Mrs. Woolf's achievement as novelist; yet one can discover in it the pattern of the decline to follow. What she did here, in effect, was to theorize her craft out of existence. For it is questionable whether novels, in anything of the traditional sense, can be written on the basis of a conception of the human being as a purely aesthetic mechanism—mechanism of aesthetic response—whose life has no purposeful, moral continuity.

Beyond the joking escape fantasy of Orlando, which simply says that man, under the given conditions of his existence, sex and mortality, is impossible, The Waves is an exercise in sensibility completely detached from the concerns of human community. The other characters exist only in the mind of Bernard; and his mind is in no meaningful sense to be distinguished from that of the author. At least the facts of society and social institutions, and the frightful fact of sex, are acknowledged again in The Years and Between the Acts, but with an inevitable sense of despair, of hopeless confusion. For no outrage, even, no attack on society for its cruelties to the individual (The Years), conceived in the conviction that the individual truly lives only between the acts of his community performance, that his being is radically unrelated to fellow beings, can be clearly purposeful. Such a view, moreover, would seem to deny the possibility of a dramatic action, without which the novel as such is hardly conceivable.