SOURCE: “‘Robbed of Meaning’: The Work at the Center of ‘To The Lighthouse,’” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp.217–34.

[In the following essay, Emery examines patriarchal and colonialist elements in To the Lighthouse.]

I

Critiques of “Western feminism” have demonstrated convincingly that much of feminist discourse constructs its subject through processes of exclusion (see, for example, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Chandra T. Mohanty, Biddy Martin and Chandra T. Mohanty, and Gayatri C. Spivak's “Texts” and “Foreword”). A passage from Virginia Woolf's well-known essay “A Room of One's Own” exemplifies the dynamic: “It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her” (52). The sentence constitutes its subject—“woman” and “one”—as exclusively English and white. It excludes black women from the category “woman” and presumes to judge them as “very fine” in the same breath that it criticizes masculine imperialist habits of thought.

Woolf's sentence demonstrates the deconstructive dictum that, in opposing a system of power, “one” nevertheless becomes complicit in the system through the structures of language that oppose, exclude, and appropriate. The sentence also, however, enacts the dialogism Mikhail Bakhtin and Bakhtinian critics claim is inherent in language.¹ It swings between an assumption of one colonialist discourse, to which it replies, and another assumption—“high feminist” and also colonialist—to which it anticipates response.² The assumption to which Woolf's sentence responds opposes the English “civilized” subject to the colonized Other and desires simultaneously to claim the Other for England. To that discourse, this sentence replies ironically and critically by inserting the difference of gender in the construction of the English subject. It does so by differentiating between the desires (and their absence) of English male and English female subjects on the occasion of passing an already colonized Other. Thus it lends subjectivity to Englishwomen, who now may have desires of their own different from those of Englishmen, and it criticizes the expropriating actions of male-governed colonialism. But it also repeats the colonialist construction of womanhood as an identity created in the positioning of a “negress” who can be gazed upon and judged by an “Englishwoman.” To this second assumption—of womanhood as something characterizing the “one” of the speaker in contrast to the “negress” under the speaker's gaze—the sentence's irony anticipates critical reply. Particularly in the suggestion that something called an “Englishwoman” can be wished for and made by Englishmen resides an invitation to critical response, to the kind of critique that stresses the making of the “free,” “civilized,” female subject through colonialist discourses.

If we are concerned to criticize and transform the colonialist legacies within “Western feminism,” analysis that takes into account the discourses to which a feminist text responds and the ways in which it anticipates reply should help us to do so. If we can identify ideological turning points within especially influential writings by feminist authors in the English canon, for example, we may be able to reflect upon the turnings available to contemporary feminist writers and critics. The canonized status of To the Lighthouse as a classic in modernist narrative and the authorizing position of Virginia Woolf in much of contemporary feminist thought make this novel a particularly significant case study. Read dialogically, To the Lighthouse sets into motion a critique of English colonialist patriarchy that simultaneously repeats colonialist assumptions about “Englishwomen.” It also—by both including and suppressing them—represents the “mumblings” of a counter-discourse.³

II

A modernist female Künstlerroman, To the Lighthouse portrays an unmarried woman who paints and whose single unifying brush stroke at the novel's end announces her long-awaited achievement of artistic vision. Lily Briscoe's “line there, in the centre” represents as well the aesthetic vision of the novel. Her artistic triumph concludes the novel's passage beyond the requirements of heterosexual romance in Woolf's efforts to “write beyond the endings” of either marriage or death that conventional nineteenth-century novels require. Rachel Blau DuPlessis has argued that To the Lighthouse emphasizes brother-sister ties, male-female friendships, and a larger communal vision in which binary oppositions, especially that of masculine/feminine, are undone (96). The undoing of such oppositions, one might add, subverts the local patriarchal power buttressing the colonialist system of England in the beginnings of its twentieth-century decline.

The novel undoes these oppositions, however, not by simply joining them in Lily's painting but by first reversing the values traditionally accorded the binary opposition of masculine/feminine and then displacing them. One way in which Part One of To the Lighthouse reverses the hierarchical opposition of masculine/feminine is by removing the masculine “sphere” of activity from the novel. The public world of masculine activity—of business, “high” culture, and academic knowledge—in which Mr. Ramsay makes his living and upon which he founds his identity, is alluded to but absent from the novel. The novel narrows its world to the domestic wherein Mr. Ramsay's professional relationships, as with Charles Tansley, seem more like those of father and son. Within this domestic world, Mrs. Ramsay's creative, sympathetic, and maternal presence reigns supreme, whereas Mr. Ramsay appears at various times and from different points of view as child-like, violently patriarchal, absurdly ridiculous, or comically pathetic. In this way, masculine opposition to Mrs. Ramsay's domestic sovereignty cannot be taken seriously; rather the most significant challenge comes from within the household and from an Englishwoman, one not sufficiently “womanized,” however, in Mrs. Ramsay's eyes.

Through the increasing authority of Lily Briscoe's voice, the value and nature of Mrs. Ramsay's powers come under criticism. We see the self-effacement demanded by such middle-class femininity even as characters such as Mr. Bankes and Mr. Ramsay, whom it benefits, continue to idealize it. We sympathize, too, with Lily's inner protests, at the dinner table, for example, when against her wishes she must be nice to Charles Tansley. Mrs. Ramsay may hold court with her Boeuf en Daube, but at great cost to herself and others. We are allowed to see, through Lily's contrary thoughts, that Mrs. Ramsay's insistence upon conscripting Lily to the institution of marriage insists also on the construction of Lily as “civilized,” English, and a woman. Lily's marrying will alleviate the strangeness of her Chinese eyes and her eccentricities which make her not beautiful, according to Mrs. Ramsay, not to a man anyway. Within Part One, the question of marriage becomes a question of the making of “woman”; it also signals a novel straining against conventional narrative plotting. However, although it allows for inner dissension, the reversal of sex/gender values and powers afforded by the focus on domestic relations does not suffice to take Lily Briscoe beyond the conventional ending of marriage. For as long as Mrs. Ramsay's “femininity” resides in her loyalty to the institution, she will continue to construct moments of triumph based upon engagements to heterosexual marriage.

In Part Two the inner dialogues generated by Lily Briscoe's protests and the question of who will win in securing the novel's ending result in a narrative break. “Time Passes” breaks the pattern whereby Victorian sex/gender hierarchies are reversed and, in doing so, breaks the ground for Lily's reconfiguration as a Modern Woman. The break is only partially afforded by Mrs. Ramsay's death. Although this section of the novel seems distant from domestic or public or even human affairs, in it, the social violence of war, which Woolf often characterized as masculine, enters the novel and necessarily broadens its scope beyond the house and domestic values. The much larger scale of time and events in Part Two enables the passage from pre-war sensibilities to those of the modern post-war period. It allows also the violent and chaotic passage beyond the endings of nineteenth-century fictions.

The passage beyond demands more than the change in Lily's attitude toward Mr. Ramsay that DuPlessis and other critics describe as a turning point (DuPlessis 97, Ruotolo 138, and Zwerdling 199). It demands a theft. For the “we” of Woolf's emerging collective vision is not “all”; the “synthesis of polarities” through the portrayal of a Modern Woman requires, in fact, another “Other,” on whom the Otherness of two kinds of middle-class English womanhood is displaced. Although this figure becomes Other, it also, improbably, acts as subject of masculine violence, absorbing its threat and making post-war peace a possibility.

III

At the center of the novel's three-part structure enters a working-class woman named Mrs. McNab who, along with her coworker Mrs. Bast, is the only literally human presence in the main part of the middle section. However, the “airs” and “darkness” that invade the Ramsays' house in “Time Passes” are personified and militarized forces, “advance guards of destruction.” In the midst of trees like “tattered flags,” the airs ask, “Were they allies? Were they enemies?” Through figures of winter, night, darkness, and silence, interspersed with moments of light, summer, and warmth, World War I takes its turns and its toll.

In one of those turns, just at “that moment, that hesitation when dawn trembles and night pauses, when if a feather alight in the scale … the house … would have turned and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness” (TTL 208), Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast appear as a “force working”:

But there was a force working; something not highly conscious; something that leered, something that lurched; something not inspired to go about its work with dignified ritual or solemn chanting. Mrs. McNab groaned; Mrs. Bast creaked … they got to work … some rusty laborious birth seemed to be taking place. …

(TTL 209–210)

The negatives “not highly conscious” and “not inspired” cast the women as barely-human, incapable of giving meaning to their work. Yet they seem about to give birth.

Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast labor distinctly as females, but not as fully human females, rather as forces disassociated from Mrs. Ramsay's creative, harmonizing maternity. Because the natural becomes human in this section (the “airs” that ask questions), we might see the dehumanization of Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast as the other side of the inversion, a metaphorical naturalization of the cleaning women. The “force working” would then be one associated with nature and its indifference to human meaning. We might also read the metaphorical reversal as a displacement of Mrs. Ramsay's feminine Otherness—her procreative nature—onto the bodies of the colonized women. However, Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast are specifically associated, not with nature, but with creaking, rusting hardware; furthermore, they pit themselves against, rather than join, “the fertility, the insensibility of nature.” No simple inversions or reversals explain their metaphorical connotations. They seem to partake of the female, the inhuman, the natural, and the mechanical simultaneously and indeterminately.

Their indeterminancy is heightened when we consider Mrs. McNab's first appearance in the text at another moment in the downpour of darkness. She enters the Ramsays' house “tearing the veil of silence with hands that had stood in the wash-tub” (196). The image compares her movement to the violent gesture that exposes a hidden, veiled woman. Her wash-tub hands invade a house coded feminine and veiled by nature, as it were, with a personified silence. In this way, she becomes perhaps human once more, but not as a woman, rather as a violating masculine figure, “grinding [the veil] with boots” (195). Yet the gesture joins her with geological forces which similarly loosen the fold of a shawl “with a roar, with a rupture” (196). Mrs. McNab invades and occupies the house as did the airs and darkness, natural forces personified and masculinized, and she wins, in the end, a “magnificent conquest over taps and bath” (210).

Why all this metaphorical oscillation? Why does the figure of a cleaning woman inscribe so many contradictions in the coding of colonialist forces, gender, nature, and the human? Most obviously, she seems to embody the incredible chaos of the war, its annihilation of all distinctions previously thought essential to human civilization, including those between self and Other, masculine and feminine, public and private, culture and nature. If Mrs. McNab represents the war's battles and chaos, she also partakes of the violent masculine qualities earlier ascribed to Mr. Ramsay with his plunging brass beak. Her ridiculous lurchings and nonsensical mutterings resemble too his stumbling recitations of Tennyson, embarrassing because meaningless to his children. She labors and gives birth within the house, and she assaults it. Thus, in the midst of annihilated ideological distinctions, Mrs. McNab absorbs into her body the opposing gender qualities that shaped the Ramsays' characters and marriage. The old order, with its rigid sex/gender oppositions, is gone.

Yet the Ramsays' house and its objects remain; the human identity, meaning, and value of which they are traces must be reconstructed by fully human voices and wits. It is the task of the female artist to do so. Lily Briscoe cannot achieve her vision, however, unless she escapes the narrative requirements of marriage or death. And she cannot make her escape until “time passes,” until Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast have forcefully invaded, occupied, and given birth within the house. The ideological dialogue engaged by the novel now no longer concerns marriage but art and the making of “woman” as a creative being and force within the world. The struggle to represent creative womanhood has shifted from Mrs. Ramsay and Lily to Lily and Mrs. McNab. We might best understand the indeterminancy of Mrs. McNab and her coworker as directly related to the modernity of Lily Briscoe. I suggest that Lily's emergence as Modern Woman and artist turns upon the novel's efficacy in responding, not to the Victorian “Angel of the House” ideal of womanhood represented in Mrs. Ramsay, but to the more self-consciously modern discourses of sexology and their descriptions of the “nature” of women.

IV

The writings of the sexologists Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter offer a significant context in which to place the gender, colonialist, and class dynamics of the novel. By the 1920s and '30s, Ellis' work had become extraordinarily influential and popular. Woolf's library contained volumes by both Ellis and Carpenter; her audience would have been familiar with their ideas, if not their actual writings (Fassler). In defining woman's sexual “nature,” Ellis described it as inherently heterosexual, masochistic, and ultimately fulfilled in motherhood.⁴ The behavior of colonized women and those he called “savages,” studied “scientifically” by English anthropologists, served as evidence for his theories, allowing him to universalize some characteristics and prove others by distinction. For example, according to Ellis, because aboriginal women (as do European women) show signs of shocked modesty when an anthropologist comes upon them bathing, all women are, by nature, modest. All women fulfill themselves in motherhood, all women are capable of sexual desire, but only western European women supposedly suffer from frigidity. As part of a theory that glorifies women's sexual and maternal fulfillment, this last point cannot be read as merely descriptive; it labels pejoratively women who remain unmarried or prefer celibacy. Further, it suggests a model of “primitive,” “natural” female sexuality somehow desirable yet impossible for “civilized” women to experience fully if at all.

Ellis' writings express an ambivalent primitivism found in other modernist texts. In the paintings of Gauguin, Modigliani, and Picasso, among others, the “primitive” is admired, envied, and appropriated yet insistently differentiated from the “civilized” sensibility for which it provides simultaneously a critique and an Other. Women and “the primitive” are often presented as composite figures in the mask-like female faces of these painters' most compelling works.⁵ Primitivism and explorations of the feminine conjoin also, although in different ways, in the fictions of Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence. In spite of the differences between Lawrence and Woolf, he too was influenced by the sexologists, especially Carpenter; he devoted much of what he thought of as his primitive (nonlinear, repetitious) narratives to disclosing women's “natural” attractions to the moon and, very much unlike Woolf, to American Indians (“primitives”) and to forceful masculinity. As critics of Lawrence have noted, his works are also permeated with misogyny and an associated fear of the masses.⁶

The “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse refers to the threatening sources of such ambivalent modernist associations: “a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea” (201), “death in battle” (192), and the bones that “bleach and burn far away in Indian sands” (192) allude to the war and to the colonies and their increasing rebellions; they prophesy perhaps the post-war events of decolonization, events “difficult blandly to overlook” (201) and sufficient to break the mirror in which Mrs. McNab views herself, recalling songs of her youth. Her mumbling of “an old music hall song” alludes to the mass culture that so many bourgeois intellectuals of the time deplored, even as some of them, like Walter Benjamin, envisioned within it the potential for social democratic change. Not surprisingly, writers of the period often perceived the claims and activities of feminists as an assault by mobs of women, behaving savagely, on the universities, professions, and public streets.⁷ The emergence of the Modern Woman devolved upon the same events and ambivalences that, in “Time Passes,” break the mirror of the past.

The ambivalences surrounding and associating “the primitive,” “the feminine,” and “the masses” brought contradictory responses in sexology. For instance, Ellis' diagnosis of frigidity as an unfortunate consequence of civilization and the middle-class might have placed in a positive light the view of working-class sexuality as more natural, active, and forceful. Work for women of all classes might have been re-imagined along with concepts of their sexuality. Significantly, however, Ellis argued against women working in any occupation outside the home. Clearly, his prescriptions were written for middle-class women only and placed those compelled to work beyond the pale of “civilization.” In Love's Coming of Age, Carpenter more sympathetically distinguished three types of women: the lady, the “working-wife,” and the prostitute, all to be supplanted by labor-saving devices, communally shared housework, and the demands of “free women” for social equality with men. Although sympathetic to the sufferings of the second type whom he also describes as “the household drudge,” Carpenter portrays her as lacking “much conscious movement” and “too little illuminated by any knowledge, for her to rise of herself to any other conception of existence” (58). Carpenter sees her much as Woolf presents Mrs. McNab, without inspiration, idea, or imagination. In describing the “Modern Woman,” who he believed would change conditions for all women, Carpenter professed beliefs similar to Ellis':

The women of the new movement are naturally largely drawn from those in whom the maternal instinct is not especially strong; also from those in whom the sexual instinct is not preponderant. Such women do not altogether represent their sex; some are “homogenic,” that is, inclined to attachments to their own, rather than to the opposite, sex; some are ultra-rationalizing and brain-cultured; to many, children are more or less a bore; to others, man's sex-passion is a mere impertinence, which they do not understand, and whose place they consequently misjudge. … Perhaps the deficiency in maternal instinct would seem the most serious imputation.

(Carpenter 66–67)

As Lillian Faderman has pointed out, both Ellis and Carpenter acknowledged lesbianism, but Ellis' diagnosis of lesbianism as an “inversion” of the “normal” (Ellis) policed women's sexuality in a newly modern way, while Carpenter could not avoid associating lesbians with “mannish” women whose maternal instinct he assessed as undeveloped (Faderman). This last alleged characteristic troubled him particularly because, for him, motherhood was “woman's great and incomparable work” (Carpenter 54).

Nevertheless, the sexologists were and still are by some social historians considered progressive. Ellis and Carpenter argued for women's right to sexual pleasure, and Ellis campaigned against the Contagious Diseases Act and for women's suffrage. The writings of Carpenter, in particular, influenced Woolf and other members of Bloomsbury. His relative sympathy for homosexuality and “androgyny” made him less dedicated perhaps to classifying women within the constraints of heterosexuality; his views of ideal heterosexuality, moreover, appear more equitable and balanced than those of Ellis.

Thus, sexology puts Modern Women or even those sympathetic to feminism in a double bind: they might be heralds of a new age, but they were also abnormally nonmaternal and therefore unfulfilled, “victims” of frigidity or lesbianism. Their more “normal” sisters were distinguished by the potential for a “natural” orgasmic heterosexuality, most fulfilled in “innocent” sado-masochism and maternity. We might view sexology as a negotiating discourse. The frequent references in sexological tracts to “savage” colonial natives yoked with diagnoses of European women's sexuality and either disdain for the working-class or prognoses for a more socialist future for the masses negotiate between admiration for and fear of an overdetermined Other. Its Other is at once savage, female, and multiple. As its name implies, sexology also mediated a perceived gap between popular ideology and science, laying claim to objective methods of observation and classification and giving rise to a plethora of marriage manuals designed for the ordinary middle-class reader. It reinstitutionalized marriage while arguing for changes within marriage relations, and it recolonized women's sexuality while arguing for women's sexual pleasure.

V

Characterizing the “Modern Woman” in Lily Briscoe, Virginia Woolf wrought one compromise with the contradictions sexology presented to feminist thought. By linking Lily Briscoe's vision as a painter with her re-vision of the traditional wife and mother, Mrs. Ramsay, Woolf suggests the infusion of one woman's artistic creativity with that of another woman's more domestic activity. In Part Three Lily cries out, “Mrs. Ramsay!” and conjures the dead woman as she had once sat, “knit[ting] her brown stocking” (300); only after seeing Mrs. Ramsay knitting again and at a distance can Lily complete her painting.

But Lily cannot see Mrs. Ramsay with new eyes until Mrs. McNab has entered the house violently and occupied it in two apparently contradictory ways: as a natural and therefore dehumanized yet feminine force and as a militarized and therefore human, dehumanizing, and masculine force. Following Mrs. McNab's occupation of the house and of these contradictory metaphorical positions, the Modern Woman can have it all (or most of it): androgyny, or the dissolution of masculine/feminine oppositions; female bonding with the domestic, maternal woman; and artistic vision that may grant her public identity. What she still lacks, however, are the “maternal instinct” and “sexual instinct” of the women who “represent their sex” (Carpenter 66–67), and she risks classification as “not a woman, but a peevish, ill-tempered dried-up old maid, presumably” (TTL 226), as Lily describes herself. The qualifier “presumably” is important. I think that, textually, Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast labor to protect Lily from a sexological diagnosis of “homogenic” or “frigid” and to free her for a revised, more ambiguous modern womanhood. They do so by laboring with their bodies and, momentarily, with their imaginations. The value of their labors—the meanings their labors might have acquired—are, however, stolen from them. As a result of this theft, Lily Briscoe acquires her vision.

When Mrs. McNab's lurching body enters the house, her voice is “robbed of meaning”:

Rubbing the glass of the long looking-glass and leering sideways at her swinging figure a sound issued from her lips—something that had been gay twenty years before on the stage perhaps, had been hummed and danced to, but now, coming from the toothless, bonneted, care-taking woman, was robbed of meaning, was like the voice of witlessness, humour, persistency itself, trodden down but springing up again, so that as she lurched, dusting, wiping, she seemed to say how it was one long sorrow and trouble, how it was getting up and going to bed again, and bringing these things out and putting them away again.

(196–197)

The passage raises several questions. If the sound issuing from her lips once had meaning, it was a meaning realized “perhaps” in the realm of popular working-class culture; but how and why has it been robbed of this meaning? How can this witless, meaningless voice yet “seem to say” something about trouble? And, if it is “like the voice of witlessness,” how can such witlessness achieve self-reflexivity, as another passage suggests: “she was witless, she knew it” (196).

To answer the first question of how and why Mrs. McNab's voice is robbed of meaning, we must turn to another passage in Part Two. In this passage, Mrs. McNab occupies a more positively human position, as “one woman” or “one person” who, given voice momentarily, remembers Mrs. Ramsay, sees her repeatedly as she had been and hears her voice as she had spoken. She recalls Mrs. Ramsay in the terms of Carpenter's three “types,” as a lady:

Poor lady! … She was dead, they said. … She could see her, as she came up the drive with the washing, stooping over her flowers … she could see her with one of the children by her in that grey cloak. … Yes, she could see Mrs. Ramsay. …

(204–205)

The passage gives to Mrs. McNab creative, human memory for the purpose of recalling Mrs. Ramsay. She recalls her former employer as “she” carries a basket of washing; the ambiguity of the pronoun links the two women and their activities. In a structurally similar image, Lily later “sees” Mrs. Ramsay knitting, the act of making and connecting that Lily's final “vision” might be said to achieve in a new way. Thus does Mrs. McNab become human for a moment, connecting the past to the present as her rusty, mechanical labors give birth to something new. She becomes human, it seems, in order to labor with her imagination, and then to have the value of her labor appropriated. For it is precisely the act of seeing Mrs. Ramsay again that allows Lily Briscoe her epiphany:

“Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay! she cried. … Mrs. Ramsay—it was part of her perfect goodness—sat there quite simply. … There she sat.”

(300)

From this moment of vision, Lily's larger vision unfolds, and she completes her painting.

Admittedly, that both Mrs. McNab and Lily “see” Mrs. Ramsay does not, in itself, imply that the meaning of Mrs. McNab's earlier vision has been stolen in order to facilitate Lily's creativity. The theft becomes more conclusive when we examine the contexts in which both of their voices and visions might (or might not) gain meaning.

Now we can return to the question of how the “voice of witlessness,” “robbed of meaning,” can yet “seem to say” something. In spite of her meaningless sounds, Mrs. McNab “continued to drink and gossip as before” (198). Evidently, Mrs. Bast understands her gossip; it becomes meaningful to another old cleaning woman, working alongside her, giving birth metaphorically, conquering “taps and bath.” The meaning stolen from her voice then must be that which once made her sounds comprehensible (“gay”) in some other space—the public spaces of the music hall, the popular stage, or the pubs of her youth. This is a public space different from that occupied by Mr. Ramsay and might offer Lily Briscoe as she progresses in her painting career an alternative to the bourgeois masculine realm that in Part One is implicitly the only world, other than Mrs. Ramsay's domestic one, to which she might aspire. The vulnerability to ridicule of Mr. Ramsay, his academic mind, and his relations with students in Part One makes it clear that a place in his world cannot be Lily's aim. So what about the public spaces of Mrs. McNab's youth? Perhaps in ripping the “veil of silence,” Mrs. McNab does not violate the house, but ends its purdah and makes the appearance of women possible. Can she and Lily Briscoe forge an alliance, labor together, and create an alternative public sphere for women of diverse classes and nationalities?

I think this possibility recurs in Part Three, lingers as a question and possibility, but that finally it is rejected. The modernist female Künstlerroman requires instead the theft and the exclusion of Mrs. McNab. The theft is necessary to readers' perceptions of Lily Briscoe's “birth” as an artist and necessary to Woolf's achievement of aesthetic unity.

VI

Haunting the portrayal of women characters as either subsumed by marriage and motherhood or unnaturally independent of them is the “natural” heterosexuality imputed by the dominant masculine discourse to the colonized or working-class woman. It is thus important that Mrs. McNab thinks of her husband and her children. However, the narrative undercuts the “joy there must have been” with her children by inserting parenthetically “(yet two had been base-born and one had deserted her)” (197). If the working-class Scottish woman can appear in the text as natural to the point of witlessness, dehumanized, and dehumanizing, the “rusty,” creaking births for which she labors and her previous history of “base-born” children will hardly stand as joyful, fulfilling contrasts to the middle-class female artist, unmarried and without children. Such a contrast, as Mrs. Ramsay provided during her life, would give further evidence of “abnormal” lesbian tendencies or “unnatural” frigidity in the woman artist. With the metaphorically indeterminate representation of Mrs. McNab in Part Two, however, the dichotomy in Ellis' and Carpenter's writings collapses; natural desire and maternal plenitude no longer appear in opposition to overly cultured and therefore repressed and distorted femininity. If we read the image of “tearing the veil” as that of a rescue in which the silence of women is broken, albeit violently, we can find even further indication of the “force” with which Mrs. McNab assaults the house as one that makes possible the emergence of the Modern Woman. But most important, Lily Briscoe as that particular modern woman may now paint and achieve her vision without incurring the charge of unnatural or abnormal womanhood.

Further, Mrs. McNab's appearance as a violent, masculine force and as a creature in the act of giving painful birth can inoculate Part Three against Mr. Ramsay's aggressive brass beak and Mrs. Ramsay's self-effacing maternity, in effect curing the Ramsays' marriage of the sado-masochism that Ellis stated was natural in heterosexual relations. Mrs. McNab labors to release Lily from stigma and to free Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay to reform themselves and their marriage.

We see this second result of her labors in the formal narrative structure of Part Three. Just as Lily steps to the edge of the lawn in Part Three to gaze toward the lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay alights upon the shore, springing “lightly like a young man, holding his parcel” (308). The parcel comes from his daughter, Nancy, but was, ten years ago, to be from his wife, and so recalls Mrs. Ramsay and her gift. Immediately before disembarking, “in complete readiness to land he sat looking back at the island,” and Cam wonders “What could he see? … What was it he sought … ?” (307). Readers may guess that he seeks his wife, whom Lily's act of imagination, profiting by Mrs. McNab's labors, has brought to life again. The events of these last passages are narrated in a deliberately nonsequential pattern designed to give the effect of simultaneity, “so that one had the sense of reading the two things at the same time” (D III 106).⁸ The novel's shifting perspective in the final passages creates a discontinuous yet ultimately unified moment in which house and lighthouse, Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay are joined.

Lily's movement to the edge of the garden and the shift of her gaze from Mrs. Ramsay's resurrected presence to Mr. Ramsay's rejuvenated figure create this new order and its re-formed marriage; her brush stroke, “a line there, in the centre,” gives it finality and meaning. The resulting meaning for modernist narrative is creation of a formal shape wherein things are separate, even fragmented, yet simultaneously unified or reunified. This new narrative form and the woman artist emerge like twins in the novel's conclusion, and the simultaneity of the passages parallels Lily's assertion of an independence that is at once tied to the past. Moreover, her position as she paints in the garden, between the feminized house and masculinized lighthouse, suggests an androgynous space or perhaps a feminized public sphere. This potential for an alternative public space and the boundaries that ultimately restrict it are the contexts in which Lily's creativity acquires value. In them we also find another clue to the theft upon which that value depends.

The break in the pattern of reversal brought by Part Two with its annihilated dichotomies preempts a more simplistic feminist reversal in which women might occupy a previously masculine public sphere. Lily has moved outside the house and its domesticity, but not very far. She paints on the lawn of a summer house far from any urban center of culture and speculates that she will remain anonymous, that her painting will be hung “in the servants' bedrooms” (237). In this trope for anonymity, we find again the possibility of association between Lily and Mrs. McNab.

Will Lily's painting hang in Mrs. McNab's bedroom? What does such a definition of “anonymous” mean? Lily decides that even if her painting were to be flung under a sofa, “One might say, even of this scrawl, not of that actual picture, perhaps, but of what it attempted, that it ‘remained for ever’” (267). In this way she modifies Mr. Carmichael's philosophy of art as that which remains forever by ascribing permanence not to the “actual picture” but to “what it attempted.” Perhaps this revision opens her mind to the possibility that the staying power of her painting resides in an alliance with another class, of women and of servants, in whose bedrooms it might “invisibly” hang. Confronting the likelihood of her anonymity as an artist, and acting as “one” who can determine the meaning of that anonymity, even if uncertainly, Lily continues to paint and completes her picture.

This response to the hierarchy of values represented by Mr. Carmichael, now become a famous poet dozing in his lawn chair, makes Lily a potential candidate for the Outsiders Society Woolf describes in her later essay “Three Guineas.” In that essay, anonymity becomes feminine resistance to the overweening pride of the masculine public sphere and its tendencies toward acquisitiveness and war-making. To the Lighthouse makes similar associations, although more subtly, and in this light, Lily stands for Outsiders, for peace, and for the prevention of further war. The reference to servants' bedrooms might allude, then, to a possible future in which servants and women painters will form an alternative artistic community.

However, not only does Lily become the “one” who determines artistic value, but also she continues to construct her identity as artist through sharp class distinctions. Although it no longer matters to her that her painting may hang in an attic or be viewed by servants, it no longer matters because the product of her vision, the painting itself, no longer matters; rather the effort and its culminating vision take the place of the object as the thing that will remain forever. Her sensibilities as an artist are defined by contrasting them to those of servants and members of the working-class such as Charles Tansley whose misogyny is coupled in her mind with his cheap tobacco and inability “to know one picture from another” (292). A servant's viewing of Lily's painting attests only to the invisibility of the painting; ironically, this hypothetical anonymity becomes an opportunity for Lily then to redefine artistic value in terms of process, “scrawl,” and “attempt.” The future of Lily's painting and of Lily as meaning-giver depends on a servant unable to bestow meaning either through her voice or her gaze. Neither Mrs. McNab's bedroom nor the working-class public sphere where her voice once meant something will hold a meaningful audience for Lily's creativity. Rather, Lily makes her triumphant line “there, in the centre,” the space analogous to the center of the novel where Mrs. McNab has worked. Thus her “work” of art marks over and supplants the work performed by Mrs. McNab. Much more than Lily's painting, Mrs. McNab, her coworker, and their labors have become invisible, while Lily's “attempt” remains forever, and Lily is the “one” who decides it is so. The servant's central place in the novel has been reoccupied, and her gaze, as well as her voice, has been robbed of meaning.

VII

Although marking the passage beyond heterosexual marriage as a narrative ending, Lily Briscoe's rise as even an alternatively public woman and meaning-giver does not then fully dismantle the ideological dichotomy of public/private that To the Lighthouse encodes in Part One as masculine/feminine. A textually as well as more literally overworked figure, Mrs. McNab keys into the complex and contradictory associations of the feminine, the primitive, and, to the extent that she represents the classes of working and colonized people, the masses. She and Mrs. Bast work without “dignified ritual or solemn chanting,” as wild, savage, inarticulate forces. Their labor is “uninspired”; they, themselves, cannot give it meaning. They belong to a class of creatures the direct opposite in experience and consciousness to that of the artist; yet they make possible—give birth to—the individual artist's creativity. The metaphorical oscillations through which they are portrayed partake of war-time chaos but also prepare for the emergence of a new order, one in which middle-class English womanhood may connect with its traditional past while moving, exempt from stigma, beyond it.

Creating one kind of feminist vision, the text at its pivotal center preserves the distinction between private and public experience that depends upon a naturalized “Other.” The household remains the realm of necessity where labor those who in the classic Greek division of oikos and polis are unfree, deprived of citizenship and, in this case, virtually deprived of humanity. The novel may undo an opposition of masculine/feminine, but it does so by displacing the hierarchical relation to one of “Modern Woman”/“household drudge.” The displacement suggests that, in spite of Carpenter's prophecies, the Modern Woman would not transform the lives of all women with her claims to freedom. The theft from Mrs. McNab that renders her voice and her gaze meaningless is the condition for Lily's completed painting and for the positioning of the middle-class English woman as arbiter of artistic value and the individual owner of meaningful vision (“I have had my vision”).

The case of To the Lighthouse and my analysis suggest that modernist feminist women's writing may indeed become complicit in the constitution of a colonized Other at least in part because of its feminist aspirations to write beyond the ending. Such aspirations for public identity and meaning require complicated and creative acts of reenvisioning subjectivity, but they also involve dialogic response to discourses that compromise them.

Modernist European and Anglo-American women writers battled not only the past and its “Angel of the House” ideal of femininity. They also faced the “progressive” doublebinds of sexology's classifications and diagnoses of their sexuality—diagnoses that linked them to “savages” yet deplored their “civilized” repressions; that made “normal” women sexually masochistic yet found “free women” to be pathologically frigid, abnormally “mannish,” and nonmaternal; that made sexual passion women's natural right yet one “naturally” governed by husbands. These constraints, in the context of world war and of colonial, working-class, and feminist rebellion, shaped modernists' rejections of conventional realism as much as the desire to be rid of their Victorian past. New characterizations of women and characterizations of Modern Women draw on sexology's types while constructing complex strategies for displacing the Otherness of women's nature as sexology paradoxically defined it.

To the Lighthouse thus reconstructs in Part Three the public/private dichotomy encoded as masculine/feminine in Part One. However, it also reinscribes continually the dialogic qualities of Part One and thus questions its reconstituted dichotomy of Modern Woman/household drudge. Even as the novel moves toward representing the modern, independent, and creative Englishwoman, it questions the conditions upon which its own closure and “vision” are founded. If Mrs. McNab is “witless, and she knew it,” by what methods does she know it? What else does she know? The narrator informs us of the theft she has suffered and thus suggests possible meanings simply unavailable to us, exacted as the price for the meanings we are in the process of discovering. Lily's line at the center draws our attention as readers to other centers and thereby away from the novel's conclusion to its middle where, once again, we encounter the indeterminancy of Mrs. McNab. In this way, the novel's closure invites a return to the chaos it recuperates, and it displaces its own center. Lily's revised aesthetic philosophy values art “work” as creative activity and process, rather than as final result, and thus links the “work” of making art to other labors. In this suggestion of a counter-discourse, To the Lighthouse acquires much of its richness and dynamic beauty. If the novel's response to the Victorian marriage plot is the modern female Künstlerroman, it is also and simultaneously an anticipation of another question and challenge to the “high feminist” subject it creates.

VIII

It should be clear by now that my point in this essay is not to question the moral intentions and purposes of Virginia Woolf's writing nor simply to indict “Western feminism” once again. Rather, by reading the modernist narrative strategies of To the Lighthouse as responding dialogically to the discourses of sexology, I wish to suggest ways of examining feminist processes of self-representation and exclusion in historically specific ways.

In To the Lighthouse, we see a stereotype constructed in the sense defined by Homi K. Bhabha—not a false image or a scapegoat, but “an ambivalent text of projection and introjection, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement, overdetermination, guilt, aggressivity …” (34). Mrs. McNab as stereotype is not a character but a process of subject-positioning. She “works” structurally at the center of the novel to reposition an ideological dichotomy of private and public so that a new female subject may be negotiated in contest but also in compromise with dominant representations of women's “nature.” Those who call themselves feminist critics inherit this model of subject-positioning, but we have acquired also the distance to re-envision it once again. With what dominant representations of womanhood does feminist theory conduct its current negotiations and to the exclusion of whom? What shift or, perhaps, relinquishing of the gaze is called for now to envision a new subjectivity other than that of the reformed middle-class family and its psychologies of “one” individual consciousness? What social relationships, what kind of womanhood, what kind of beauty would Mrs. McNab's knowing “mumblings” disclose were she to tell the story and decide its meaning?

Notes

1. See Mikhail Bakhtin. Graham Pechey's “On the Borders of Bakhtin” has informed my use of Bakhtinian concepts in this essay.

2. Gayatri Spivak refers to “the language of high feminism within English literature” as that of feminist individualism. (“Texts” 273).

3. Helen Tiffin explains and extends the concept of “counter-discourse.” According to Tiffin, counter-discursive strategies “invoke an ongoing dialectic between hegemonic centrist systems and peripheral subversion of them; between European or British discourses and their post-colonial dis/mantling” (17). I am not suggesting that To the Lighthouse is a postcolonial text, but that, following Graham Pechey's description of “dialogical leakage” in the English novel, it allows for the dialogizing of “at least one side of the imperial relationship”—the colonizer questioning colonization—and thus anticipates its own counter-discourse. See Pechey 54-55.

4. See Ellis. For discussions of Ellis' work in the contexts of feminism and the New Woman, see Margaret Jackson and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg.

5. For a recent exploration of ways in which “the feminine” and “the primitive” conjoin in English modernism, see Marianna Torgovnick.

6. See, for example, Cornelia Nixon.

7. Andreas Huyssen describes a discourse of modernism that associates “the feminine” with the perceived threat of the masses and mass culture. See also Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Volume One. In Volume Two, Gilbert and Gubar describe the sexualized language of colonialism and its decline, an association of “the feminine” and “the primitive” that Anne McClintock has explored in her reading of H. Rider Haggard's novels.

8. My interpretation of the concluding passages agrees to a certain extent with that of Alex Zwerdling who describes them as striving “to create the effect of harmony and reconciliation” (208) and acquiring an “apparent poise and decisive finality” (209). However, Zwerdling states that the novel cannot be described as a liberation narrative because Lily clings to the old order and “is not a confident or successful artist.” On this last point, I agree with Lucio P. Ruotolo that the kind of liberation suggested in the final scenes of To the Lighthouse requires that Lily not achieve what would be for Woolf a questionable public success. But I differ from Ruotolo in my view that, although Lily achieves a certain kind of feminist liberation, she does so through a modernist closure that invokes class and colonialist hierarchies.

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