SOURCE: “Language, Subject, Self: Reading the Style of ‘To the Lighthouse,’” in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 2, Winter, 1993, pp. 192–213.

[In the following essay, Saunders discusses Woolf's style in To the Lighthouse and its relation to the notion of self that she constructs.]

I. PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS

The project of this paper is to investigate the relationship of Virginia Woolf's style in To the Lighthouse to concepts of the self—both to establish the significance of this style to the individual “selves” within the novel and to investigate the notion of self in abstracto that is constructed by way of this style. I would emphasize two things from the outset: first, that this is not a paper about how style “parallels” meaning, but about how style itself means and, second, that Woolf's style, like a garden of forking paths, will lead us in various and suggestive directions which cannot be entirely explored within this paper; indeed, many of the notions about the self posited by Woolf's style are of a complexity which should not, in my view, be wrenched into facile resolutions or determinate “statements” about the self. While numerous studies have treated concepts of the self in Woolf's work thematically, and several have made tenuous connections between the affective, non-semantic qualities of language and the self,¹ my focus will be on three specific constituents of Woolf's style: first, a phenomenon I will term “unclaimed consciousness,” second, passive constructions, and third, the use of the pronoun “one.”²

However, we must note before proceeding further that the term “self” (a word, appropriately, of obscure origin) carries multifarious and in fact contradictory meanings. Paul Smith, for example, in his book Discerning the Subject, distinguishes between subject, human agent and individual—all more specific concepts subsumed by the general term “self.”³ Further, a single rendering of “self” such as the term “subject”—a term which I have intentionally exploited in this paper precisely for the implicit association that it makes between language (or grammar) and the self—can, for example, alternately signify (any or all of) the following:

a) a bearer of consciousness by and/or against which the phenomenological world is posited;

b) one who is “sub-jected,” particularly by political domination (as in a “British subject”) or by determinant economic forces (as in Marxist thought);

c) a part of speech; or

d) the object of study in psychological or phenomenological discourse.

It is readily apparent, then, that our notion of the “subject” (and, by contagion, our notion of “self”) is oxymoronic, that it inherently sets up a debate, for example, between the active agent of German classical philosophy (the bearer of consciousness and agent of action) and the acted-upon, even oppressed, being without agency of radical materialist thought. The word “subject” itself then is concerned with issues of power and oppression, with the relationship of individual to community, with the possibility and the consequences of distinguishing self from other, all issues which are, of course, of vital concern to Woolf and to her readers.

Hence, it is not out of imprecision that I appropriate terms as ambiguous as “self” and “subject” (and occasionally conflate them), but precisely because their syncretic and problematic nature makes them, it seems to me, particularly germane to a discussion of Virginia Woolf. That is to say, then, that rather than measuring the suggestions made by Woolf's style against a preconceived and rigidly delineated decision about what the self is, I will take her style, like the notion of “self” itself, as a receptacle of tentative formulations about being and knowing and doing, a matrix of problems, perhaps indeterminate, but inherently and necessarily the site of debate. So if in speaking of Woolf's style and of the “self” we seem to be speaking about many things at once it is because that notion is something like the Trojan horse—ostensibly of a piece, but teeming inwardly with an activity that is deceptively silent and decidedly contentious.

We must begin by distinguishing between two sorts of subjects in a text: while characters within a text are constructs of language and do not exist outside of language, the text at the same time lays claim to representation of “real identities” such as Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe and Charles Tansley. There exist, then, two different kinds of subject in the text—the grammatical subject (the subject implied by predication) and the subject of representation (character). Hence we have both Mrs. Ramsay as a part of speech (as a noun), and Mrs. Ramsay as the representation—of a beautiful woman who knits, reads to her son and serves Boeuf en Daube. Both of these subjects then—the grammatical subject and the subject of representation—are ostensibly unitary, clearly delineated and identifiable entities. We can distinguish “Mrs. Ramsay” from “to her son” or “conveyed” grammatically (as the distinction between noun, prepositional phrase and verb), and we can distinguish Mrs. Ramsay from Mr. Ramsay as the distinction between a beautiful woman who knits, reads to her son and serves Boeuf en Daube, and a not particularly handsome middle-aged man who broods over his intellectual capacities and is outraged by guests so indecorous as to ask for another plate of soup.

However, once we have provisionally established these two kinds of unitary subjects within the text, we will find (as one would suspect from the very multifariousness of the linguistic designation) that the selves of To the Lighthouse do not remain settled: beneath them lurk polymorphous experiences of the self—anterior to language and associated with instinctual drives—the “wedge-shaped core of darkness,” for example, which exists beneath the Mrs. Ramsay who appears at dinner, wears amethysts, laughs, gesticulates and serves the Boeuf en Daube. Julia Kristeva has taught us to regard the subject, and specifically the subject posited by language, as a “sujet-en-procès” constituted by an inherent dialectic between two signifying dispositions in language—the “semiotic” and the “symbolic.”⁴ In psychoanalytic terms, the “semiotic” is the trace of a phase which precedes both the “mirror stage” and the entrance into language, “the operation that logically and chronologically precedes the establishment of the symbolic and its subject” (Revolution 41).⁵ In texts, the semiotic appears as “a heterogeneousness to meaning and signification” or as “a mark of the workings of drives” (Identity 136).

While Kristeva asserts that the realm of the symbolic does not obliterate or replace the semiotic, but rather, hides it—that all social language “presupposes these two dispositions” (Identity 134)—her own textual analyses have focused on texts in which “semiotic constraints,” subliminal, rhythmic and musical effects, disrupt syntax and meaning. Indeed, she claims that “starting with the Renaissance and the brief Romantic celebration of the sacrifices made in the French Revolution, poetry had become mere rhetoric, linguistic formalism, a fetishization, a surrogate for the thetic” (Revolution 83), and that:

it has only been in very recent years or in revolutionary periods that signifying practice has inscribed within the phenotext [language that serves to communicate] the plural, heterogenous, and contradictory process of signification encompassing the flow of drives, material discontinuity, political struggle, and the pulverization of language.⁶

(88)

I note Kristeva's association of “linguistic formalism” with the thetic consciousness and her emphasis on avant-garde texts because the focus of this study is on a prose style comprised of syntactically intact sentences that are in salient contrast to the ellipses, detached sentential rhythms and profanity of, for example, Ferdinand Céline, or the “polylogue” of Phillipe Sollers. While a close reading of Woolf's style would seem to corroborate the concept(s) of subjectivity theorized by Kristeva, the very fact that these concepts are constructed in Woolf's text within conventional syntax—the “guarantee of the thetic consciousness” according to Kristeva (Identity 133)—calls into question, I will argue below, Kristeva's contentions about revolutionary language, syntax and the constitution of the subject posited by language.

II. UNCLAIMED CONSCIOUSNESS

There exist in To the Lighthouse portions of text that can not be positively designated as the consciousness of any single character, passages that I will term “unclaimed consciousness.” Such passages are a function of point of view, rather than voice, though To the Lighthouse, which is told almost entirely from the point of view of the characters (with a few exceptions of dialogue and narrated action), might seem to be a kind of direct enactment of consciousness or pure mimesis.⁷ On the one hand, critics such as Erich Auerbach contend that “the writer as narrator of objective facts has almost completely vanished; almost everything stated appears by way of reflection in the consciousness of the dramatis personae” (534). And Woolf herself in “Modern Fiction,” wishing to distinguish the techniques of her own generation from the “materialists” of the previous generation, suggests (in a much quoted passage), “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness” (155). On the other hand, it becomes readily apparent that we do not, in fact, in the case of To the Lighthouse, get “the atoms as they fall upon the [average] mind” in a “disconnected and incoherent” manner, but a highly stylized and metaphorical text comprised of grammatically precise sentences; we do not, in fact, get a pure enactment of consciousness (as we seem to, for example, in the “Penelope” chapter of Ulysses), but rather a narratized, stylized, literary representation of consciousness.⁸ For example, when Mr. Bankes feels “rigid and barren, like a pair of boots that has been soaked and gone dry so that you can hardly force your feet into them” (84), it would appear that this is a creative narrator's figural representation of the way Mr. Bankes feels, rather than a portrayal of Mr. Bankes' thought, and that indeed Mr. Bankes has thought nothing whatsoever of boots. There exists, then, in To the Lighthouse, the presence of what Seymour Chatman calls “covert narration” by way of which “some interpreting person must be converting the characters' thoughts into indirect expression” (197).

By asserting the presence of a covert narrator, we are tacitly distinguishing between “voice” and “point of view,” between whose voice is speaking in a given passage of text, and whose consciousness is being portrayed. In the example above, then, the voice is the covert narrator's, but the consciousness or point of view is Mr. Bankes.’⁹ This observation in itself is significant to the novel's formulations of self, as we are suggesting by distinguishing “voice” from “point of view” that voice and consciousness do not necessarily coincide. The subject of representation is, as it were, silenced or disallowed from speaking for him/her self. While the mediating narrator has almost entirely given up his/her more traditional task of external reportage and informed commentary, s/he has usurped the discourse from the characters, speaking, ostensibly, as the plenipotentiary of their consciousness.¹⁰ And it should not be overlooked that we are using terms here that connote an ethics of power relations—to speak of “usurping” the discourse is to imply that it rightly belonged to someone (presumably the bearer of consciousness) in the first place, and even a term like “covert narration” has the air of something deceptive about it, something of dubious ethicality. Such a rhetoric then seems to pose the question—who has the right to speak for whom?—a question which I would hasten to point out was of utmost concern to Woolf who returned throughout her life to the issue of the ethical responsibilities of “daughters of educated men” and their relation to women of the underclass.¹¹ And such questions of the ethics of discourse are, of course, presupposed by much of the feminist criticism which invokes Woolf as its spiritual mother: a title like Jane Marcus’ Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, for example, implies a struggle over the possession of discourse, while Rachel Blau DuPlessis explicitly issues the imperative that “women must become speaking subjects of their own discourses.”¹²

We must examine further, then, the consequences of this alleged “usurpation” of voice. The narrating voice, by speaking for characters, formulates their amorphous thoughts and inarticulate feelings into language, even when the characters themselves are unable to do so, as for example, in the following passage:

What does it mean then, what can it all mean? … for she could not, this first morning with the Ramsays, contract her feelings, could only make a phrase resound to cover the blankness of her mind until these vapours had shrunk. For really, what did she feel, come back after all these years and Mrs Ramsay dead? nothing, nothing—nothing that she could express at all.

(137)

Hence the narrator expresses that which Lily is unable to; that is to say, s/he establishes the possibility of communication. On the other hand, achieving this act of communication has its price: to speak the unspeakable is, it would seem, at best to approximate the experience and at worst to falsify it entirely, as Lily suggests in the following passage—a passage which is itself a most ironic debate between style and semantics, a passage in which the narrator speaks for Lily's consciousness, which is in the act of speaking for Mrs. Ramsay's consciousness, which is ruminating on the incommunicability of consciousness:

She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren't things spoilt then, Mrs Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her side) by saying them?

(159–60)

Speaking, then, allows for communication, while speaking for another—or even for the self—may falsify. But to speak of speech as “falsifying” consciousness or the self is, of course, to imply that in some other form consciousness or self is more “true,” and this notion of a “more true” and “less true” self is, it seems to me, a presupposition of the kind of ethical feminist criticism discussed previously. Marcus, for example, maintains that the drafts and unpublished versions of Woolf's work often seem to be the “truer” text and that this is perhaps true of all women writers, perhaps “true of all oppressed people's writings” (xii). Aside, then, from deciding who has the right to speak for whom, such ethical criticism must address the question of whether it is a “true” self that is being spoken; the “usurpation of voice” that characterizes Woolf's style would seem to suggest that indeed the narrator's articulation of Lily's (hypothetical) consciousness may be “more true” than the amorphousness of her feelings, in the way that Mrs. Ramsay, reading poetry, feels that “the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self, [but] saying quite easily and naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said different things” (102)—a proposition which, of course, problematizes the kind of imperative made by DuPlessis.¹³ This notion of a “more true” and “less true” self is also a fundamental presupposition of psychoanalysis, which contends that the conscious self knows the self but imperfectly, that selves often need assistance in articulating, or even knowing, the “truth” of the self.

The phenomenon of “unclaimed consciousness,” then, is a function of point of view; while “the whole book is the product of one voice which at times assumes the role of a given character and approximates his patterns of thought” (Naremore 123), the point of view is not only constantly shifting, but is often indeterminate. While direct narratorial statement, instances of narrated action and context are all, to be sure, indicators of point of view, these aspects of the text designate point of view with varying degrees of determinacy. For example, the phrase, “What damned rot they talk, thought Charles Tansley” (80) indicates definitively that this is Mr. Tansley's consciousness, whereas the following passage merely suggests (by proximity to identified speech) that the phrase “She was a wonderful woman” is most likely Mr. Bankes' consciousness:

How did she manage these things in the depth of the country? he [Mr Bankes] asked her. She was a wonderful woman. All his love, all his reverence had returned and she knew it.

(93)

However, in light of the end of the paragraph, where point of view has shifted to Mrs. Ramsay's consciousness, the phrase could in fact be Mrs. Ramsay's perception of Mr. Bankes' sentiments.

The following passage is almost entirely comprised of phrases which, rather than being neatly designated and clearly delineated thoughts attributed to individual characters, are a set of point of view possibilities, or more precisely a set of ultimately indeterminable probabilities vis-à-vis the ownership of consciousness:

[1] But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them, for stopping and looking down on them; he hated him for interrupting them; he hated him for the exaltation and sublimity of his gestures; for the magnificence of his head; for his exactingness and egotism [2] (for there he stood, commanding them to attend to him); [3] but most of all he hated the twang and twitter of his father's emotion which, vibrating round them, disturbed the perfect simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother. [4] By looking fixedly at the page, he hoped to make him move on; by pointing his finger at a word, he hoped to recall his mother's attention, which, he knew angrily, wavered instantly his father stopped. [5] But no. Nothing would make Mr Ramsay move on. [6] There he stood, demanding sympathy. … It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life. …

[7] Charles Tansley thought him the greatest metaphysician of the time, she said. [8] But he must have more than that. He must have sympathy. He must be assured that he too lived in the heart of life; was needed; not here only, but all over the world.

(38–39)

In the first portion of the passage [1], we are probably within James' consciousness, although I emphasize again that this is most certainly not James' voice; even the most precocious of four-year-olds would rarely think in terms of “the exaltation and sublimity” of gesture. However, it is also possible that this portion of text is Mr. Ramsay's perception, although it is less likely that Mr. Ramsay would think, for example, of the magnificence of his own head or of his own egotism. Likewise, this portion of text could be Mrs. Ramsay's perception, although again, it is less likely that she would think of James as “his” (Mr. Ramsay's) son, instead of as “her” son. Further, there exists the improbable possibility that these are the thoughts of one of the household guests such as Mr. Tansley, Mr. Carmichael or Lily Briscoe, although we have not been specifically told that any of these characters is present. In the section that follows [2], the fact of the parentheses seems to suggest an “aside” of the narrative voice or an editorial comment, although it is also possible that this is James' consciousness, Mr. Ramsay's or Mrs. Ramsay's, although it is least likely that Mr. Ramsay would think of himself in the third person. In section [3], it is probable that we are again inside of James' consciousness, as the terms “his father” and “his mother” would be designations made by James, although again, it is possible that this passage is thought by Mrs. Ramsay (who is characteristically sensitive to these kinds of emotions), by Mr. Ramsay, by a household witness or by the narrator. Section [4] is even more indeterminate: although it would at first seem probable that this passage is from James' point of view, it is questionable whether a four-year-old would be conscious of looking fixedly and pointing at a word for such specific purposes. While Mrs. Ramsay would be more likely to be aware of the significance of such gestures, she would not be likely to think of herself as “his mother,” nor would Mr. Ramsay, who might also think this passage, be likely to think of himself as “his father.” The following section [5] seems to be the narrator's consciousness, or conceivably a household witness, as the three family members (with the possible exception of Mrs. Ramsay) would be less likely to think of Mr. Ramsay as “Mr. Ramsay.” In section [6] similar point of view possibilities exist, although it is probable that this is Mrs. Ramsay's consciousness as it is the sort of perception for which she has an instinct and it is unlikely that James would recognize such subtleties of emotion or that Mr. Ramsay would refer to himself in the third person or even be self-aware enough to know what it is he is asking for. The following sentence [7] is an instance of pure mimesis followed by direct narratorial statement (“she said”), while the final sentences [8] could be the thoughts of either Mr. or Mrs. Ramsay, or both of them together, although Mrs. Ramsay, being the more emotionally sensitive of the two, is perhaps most likely to consciously “register” these thoughts. Again, it is possible, although less probable, that these sentences are thought by James, a household witness, or by the narrator.

The first thing to be noted here is that we are speaking in terms of probability and that whatever the degree of probability that an unassigned phrase “belongs” to the consciousness of a specific character, and whatever one does to determine that degree of probability, when all is said and done, it is not possible to make such assignations positively; the point of view remains indeterminate and indeterminable. Critics such as Mitchell Leaska have tended to view this as a “problem” in the text and hence by way of solution have attempted to determine methods for parcelling out these fragments of unclaimed consciousness to the “appropriate” character in the text. Stating that “one major problem of the multiple-point-of-view novel is determining the consciousness presenting the material at any given point” (45), Leaska subsequently contends that in order to read the multiple points of view correctly, in order to determine in whose consciousness the text resides at any given moment, one must pay attention to “verbal signals” in the text, and that failure to do so has, in the past, resulted in “numerous misjudgments of character and misinterpretations of thematic material” (14). I would argue, on the contrary, that rather than being a hindrance to “getting the point” of such passages, this indeterminacy is itself “the point.”

What then, does this indeterminacy of point of view and this phenomenon of unclaimed consciousness have to do with notions of the self? First, it is crucial to recognize that even in the case of such unassigned and indeterminate phrases, there exists, grammatically speaking, an implied predication and hence an implied subject—a “s/he thought” or “s/he said.” However, while there exists, in such phrases, an implied grammatical subject and while there exists, in the novel, a pool of potentially correlative subjects of representation (Mr. Ramsay, Lily, James, et. al.), it is impossible to definitively associate the implied grammatical subject with a corresponding character. Not only then has consciousness been severed from voice, but consciousness has been severed from the very self. It is as if these implied grammatical subjects—discrete, but generic and disincarnate—are the form of a self without the content of an identity, ontological receptacles waiting to be filled by the phenomenon of a character. Woolf's style then, it seems to me, theorizes something like an absolute subject, a self emptied of objective phenomena, the self not of “I think therefore I am” but “I am that I am”—a self in which phenomena (and most fundamentally the phenomenon of consciousness) are only loosely tied to being, and not by any means definitive of it.

Second, these portions of consciousness which do not seem to be authoritatively “owned” by any one character suggest a dissolution of the boundaries of the ego, or an ability to coalesce both with the consciousness of others and with the external world, an experience similar, then, to the one described by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents in which “an infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world” (13), or by Nancy Chodorow, who (in The Reproduction of Mothering) describes this “primary identification” as follows:

At birth, the infant is not only totally dependent but does not differentiate itself cognitively from its environment. It does not differentiate between subject/self and object/other. … The infant experiences itself as merged or continuous with the world generally, and with its mother or caretakers in particular. Its demands and expectations (not expressed as conscious wants but unconscious and preverbal) flow from this feeling of merging.

(61)

This breakdown in ego boundaries then, suggested stylistically in Woolf, is analogous to the “uncertain and indeterminate articulation” (Revolution 25) of the “chora,” the traces of which appear in the semiotic disposition of language, and as a mode of consciousness is similar to that of Mrs. Ramsay who feels, “with her hand on the nursery door, that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream” (105). It is a phenomenon, then, which allows characters to “think the same thoughts without need of speech,” as Lily and Mr. Bankes both feel “a common hilarity, excited by the moving waves” or as Cam and James know simultaneously, on the way to the Lighthouse, that their father “[will] never be content until they were flying along,” and hope simultaneously “that the breeze [will] never rise, that he might be thwarted in every possible way, since he had forced them to come against their wills” (152).

Feminist criticism has often claimed this phenomenon of the permeable ego boundary to be peculiarly feminine. Jean Wyatt, for example, in her reading of Mrs. Dalloway contends that protagonists in the fiction of twentieth-century women often reject a sense of self as a contained ego, affirming instead the inchoate nature of the self, a sense of a diffused self, and/or a sense of self in flux.¹⁴ Chodorow, in perhaps the most rigorous and convincing attempt to link permeable ego boundaries to the feminine consciousness, traces this allegedly feminine prerogative to gender differences in the preoedipal period, arguing that “the preoedipal attachment of daughter to mother … sustains [for a longer period than most mother-son attachments] the mother-infant exclusivity and the intensity, ambivalence and boundary confusion of the child still preoccupied with issues of dependence and individuation” (97). Further, she argues that the preoedipal period is often not only longer for girls, but more complex, that girls retain pre-oedipal attachments to the mother and hence “come to define and experience themselves as continuous with others; their experience of self contains more flexible or permeable ego boundaries” (169).¹⁵ In adult life, according to Chodrow, “regression to these modes tends not to feel as much a basic threat to their ego” (167).¹⁶

However, designating such an experience “feminine” has its consequences. For this experience heterogenous to the allegedly fixed subject of symbolic discourse is figured in Woolf's text neither by way of a portrayal or description—this passage is not about permeable ego boundaries—nor by mimesis of asymbolic discourse or preverbal utterances, but by and through syntactically intact sentences. Hence it would follow, it seems to me, that language—and particularly the symbolic register of language—is neither as gender marked (i.e. masculine), nor as intrinsically “patriarchal,” as many works of feminist theory and criticism have contended. Further, it would follow that syntax is not, as Kristeva has argued, any guarantee at all of the thetic consciousness (see Identity 133); rather, it would seem that the symbolic, as well as the subject it posits, is disrupted not only by the kind of revolutionary language, grammatical transgression and semiotic constraints described by Kristeva, but by the instrument of its own (symbolic) functioning. Finally, it would follow that linguistic formalism—the ornate, if not precious, style of Woolf for example—can not be read, as Kristeva has contended, merely as a “surrogate for the thetic” (Revolution 83).

This breakdown in ego boundaries also seems, in the long passage quoted above or in the dinner scene, for example, to result in a kind of communal ownership of consciousness. In such passages, the form of unitary selves exist (as we have noted above), but identity seems to exist only as a kind of atmosphere of consciousness that characters inhale and exhale, only provisionally laying claim to a particular part of it as theirs and theirs alone. To state things this way at first seems contradictory, as identity ordinarily implies identifiability or an entity clearly distinguished from other entities. However, because individuated, named identities do in fact emerge in the novel and “claimed consciousness” exists as well, this communal reservoir of consciousness seems to serve as a backdrop or anteriority to individuated identity. Hence “individual” identities seem to be intersubjectively determined,¹⁷ a construct of the community—a group effort, albeit perhaps an unconscious one. Stylistically then (and I emphasize that the passage is not semantically “about” breakdown in ego boundaries), we get a foreshadowing of the sort of “choral protagonist” of Woolf's later novels, which “[makes] the group, not the individual, the central character” (DuPlessis 164). Indeed, the notion of “community” has been valorized by Woolf critics: DuPlessis argues that dissolutions of ego boundaries “are not simply or only statements about personal psychology” but are “‘deeply political’” (167), and Melba Cuddy-Keane has suggested that this “choral protagonist” decenters authority and “celebrates an irreversible dismantling of order and actually advocates a permanent instability” (280).¹⁸ Yet communities as well as individuals can, of course, be hegemonic, and this phenomenon, which figures characters inhaling a consciousness that does not necessarily originate in or by them, could also be read as positing subjects who, without agency, invoke discourses or consciousness itself from an always already existent social or political structure, a structure that is, of course, potentially oppressive.¹⁹

Finally, even in solitude, this dissolution of the boundaries of the ego allows characters to merge with the external world, in the way that Mrs. Ramsay does:

… [looking] out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at—that light for example.

(61)

III. PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS

A second constitutive element of Woolf's style is the use of passive constructions, two types of which occur in the novel: constructions in which the grammatical subject appears as the object of a preposition and constructions in which the grammatical subject is elided altogether. In the first instance, the subject implied by predication is identified but is not the subject of the sentence, as in the following example:

Now all the candles were lit, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass. … Now the same effect was got by the many candles in the sparely furnished room. …

(91, emphasis mine)

Here then, the subjects implied by predication—candle light, panes of glass, the many candles—have become objects of a preposition (“by”), “demoted” in discourse from active, predicating subjects to passive objects of prepositions, following hesitantly behind the effects of their predication. There is a concomitant shift in emphasis then: the passage is “about” faces, the night, the effect, more than it is “about” candles and glass. Further, our awareness as readers—a sequential revelation—is first of effects and only secondarily of causes, hence the passage is imbued with a sense of mystery, with a consciousness which seems to be only casually aware of the physical world and vaguely cognizant of the logical order of things.

But beyond these semantic implications, there exist in such passive constructions rival subjects so to speak (and we are talking specifically about grammatical subjects here): there is a subject which is, grammatically speaking, the subject of the sentence or phrase, and there is a subject implied by predication. For example, in the phrase, “the mournful words were heard quite clearly by them all” (155), “the mournful words” is the subject of the phrase while “them” (or “they”) is the subject implied by predication. The subject of predication (“them”), therefore—has been displaced by Mr. Ramsay's “mournful words”—

But I beneath a rougher sea
Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

And it is significant that this displacement is accomplished not by Mr. Ramsay himself, but by the words that embody the heroic image he wishes to project—words that displace the others in the boat (“them all”), grammatically privileging then, his sorrow and his plea for sympathy, as do the semantics of the “mournful words” themselves.²⁰ Further, the subject in these instances remains implied but indeterminate for a time when reading the sentence, such that the subject, implied by predication before being named, is held momentarily in abeyance before being formed into a symbolic designation (“them”); we are witness, so to speak, to the entrance of the subject into language—the transition from the self as indeterminate to the self as symbolically determined, from the preoedipal self, in psychoanalytic terms, to the self of the thetic consciousness, from the self as portent to the self as phenomenon. Finally, in such passive constructions, it should be noted that the phenomena of the self precede the subject, as if the sentence itself confirms a sort of Cartesian deduction: something was heard, ergo, someone must be.

The second type of passive construction found in the novel is a kind of “anonymous predication,” in which the subject implied by predication is entirely absent, or remains anonymous as, for example, in the phrase, “she had been seen sitting thinking” (65). The subject of the phrase (or “false subject” as it is sometimes called), the pronoun “she,” distinct from the implied subject of predication), does not “predicate” but is an object posited by the implied but absent subject of predication; “she” then, is predicated or acted upon (which is to say, passive). The passive subject “she,” then, has been acted upon without her consent so to speak—violated perhaps—and we know contextually in this instance that in fact “[Mrs. Ramsay] disliked anything that reminded her that she had been seen sitting thinking” (65). What emerges from such a grammatical construct then (and we note such words as “passivity” and “violation”) is an issue of power relations; we seem to get, by way of this grammatical construct, a subject whose very subjectivity is formulated by the act of being predicated upon, a subject who is logically preceded by predication, a subject theorized or constructed out of what is “really” the object of predication. And such a subject, grammatically speaking, is, of course, not allowed to act, is ostensibly without agency, potentially oppressed.²¹

On the other hand, the ostensibly passive “she” of the phrase “she had been seen sitting thinking” has, in a sense, subsumed or consumed the implied subject of predication: because this is Mrs. Ramsay's thought, the seeing subject (the implied subject of predication) is a function of her consciousness (although not, like the passive construction itself, of her voice). It is as if the sentence itself were an equivocation—or rivalry, one might say—between a thinking subject (in whose consciousness the active subject is implied) and an active subject (by way of whose predication the thinking subject is posited). This rivalry for possession or control of the self is, it seems to me, left unresolved, sustained in equivocation, much perhaps, like that equivocation between a self like Mr. Ramsay, whose “activity”—“Boldly we rode and well” (21)—is for the most part a function of thought, and a self like Mrs. Ramsay, who desires to convert her activity into thought “in the hope that thus she would cease to be a private woman whose charity was half a sop to her own indignation, half a relief to her own curiosity, and become, what with her untrained mind she greatly admired, an investigator elucidating the social problem” (14).

Further, in the same phrase (“she had been seen sitting thinking”), a hypothetical subject of prediction—Mr. Ramsay—is posited by context: Mr. Ramsay, wishing to apologize for having said “Damn you” to his wife, has said instead that he does not like to see her so sad, and Mrs. Ramsay, in response, has protested, “flushing a little.” This subject, then, which is not named, might, on the one hand, be read as the effacement or negation of the self, a figuration in which Mr. Ramsay is grammatically eradicated and in which Mrs. Ramsay's thought is privileged over Mr. Ramsay's presence (which might suggest that the “thinking subject” is, in fact, valorized over the “active” one). On the other hand, one could also view this (and other) “unnaming(s)” as the figuration of a self in the form of a radical absence that is stripped of the things that conceal the self, of mendacious and approximate signs. Hence, this resistance to symbolic designation, this construction that refers without naming, without the messiness of the notoriously slippery signifying process, constructs a form of the self that is, perhaps, a counterargument to the ontological receptacle implied by the phenomenon of “unclaimed consciousness”—a self whose existence can be deduced by way of its phenomena, but which remains nevertheless both uncontained and without presence.

There exist numerous variations of anonymous predication in the novel, instances, for example, in which the implied but anonymous subject of predication is plural, as in the phrase, “from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses,” in which the implied subject is a community of selves, if not the entire human race. In this phrase, Lily Briscoe, arguing with herself over the nature of love—“so beautiful, so exciting” and at the same time “the stupidest and most barbaric of passions”—seems to invoke the authority of a hypothetical community, presumably to stack the deck for the beautiful and exciting side of love, which has prompted her “to offer, quite out of [her] own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach” (95). However, at the same time that Lily invokes the reinforcement of this “hypothetical community,” she refuses to name or define it, resisting symbolization and holding it in indeterminacy—as if, in fact, the existence of such an entity were suspect. For there is something decidedly ambivalent about a self “relating” to a community when the community is a function of the self (as this community is a function of Lily's consciousness)—an ambivalence, incidentally, rather like Woolf's oxymoronic “society of outsiders” in Three Guineas, a notion that wants to be inside and outside at the same time, or like Lily, both “undiluted” and “like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored” (50). Hence, such anonymous predications seem to call into question the notion of “communal consciousness” considered above; they seem, that is to say, to question whether community is not an imaginative illusion—a wish realized by the self for the self—to question how in fact one knows whether the community exists or not and how one knows where the self ends and that community begins. Similarly, Mr. Ramsay's preoccupation—“How long would he be read?” (99)—is (like Lily's thought) an instance of an implied but anonymous subject that is plural, in this case, a hypothetical intellectual community or reading public. In addition, this phrase contains a kind of inverted metonym, such that “Mr. Ramsay” has simultaneously become a function of his own work (a metonym) and an object posited by the intellectual community, a construction singularly, and perhaps tragically, apposite to a character whose lifework is all about “subject and object and the nature of reality” (26).

Finally, there is a form of passive construction in the novel, which I will call “miraculous predication,” in which context does not supply us with a (hypothetical) subject of predication, as in the phrase, “even the fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for eternity” (27) or “some weight was taken off them” (91). While an implied subject of predication still exists in these constructions, it is radically anonymous; it is a mysterious, inscrutable, unnameable presence, only the signs or predications of which are seen, a mystical thing that can only be known by its approximations. The implied subject of these miraculous predications, then, seems by implication to be “something more” than that constituted by the immediate predication itself, particularly in passages such as the following, which provisionally, synecdochically, name and rename—“this other thing, this truth, this reality”—before abandoning naming altogether by way of passive constructions:

Here she was again, she [Lily] thought, stepping back to look at it [her canvas], drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people into the presence of this formidable ancient enemy of hers—this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention. She was half unwilling, half reluctant. Why always be drawn out and haled away? Why not left in peace, to talk to Mr Carmichael on the lawn?

(148)

This self, then, that draws one out of things, perhaps the most enigmatic and fascinating self of the novel, is both absent and pervasively present; it is Being that is no one and can not be named, a potentially omnipotent but radically unknowable signifier.

IV. THE PRONOUN “ONE”

One of the most repeated devices in To the Lighthouse is the use of the pronoun “one,” which aside from being a convention of British upper-class parlance, is a kind of trompe-l'oeil: while constructing a single, symbolic subject grammatically, it does not necessarily do so semantically—“one” can mean anything from everyone to this particular one, to no one (in particular). While on the grammatical level it is singular, on the semantic level it resists numerical formulation and positive particularity.

Naremore cites the following passage as the locus classicus “for a kind of experience which had an extraordinarily powerful hold on Virginia Woolf's imagination … [which] involves a loss of personality and an intimation of death and eternity.” He suggests that in this passage, “Mrs. Ramsay feels she has drawn closer to an essential self which can only be defined negatively, as a vast dark realm which everyone has in common, apart from the external personality, ‘what you see us by’” (139), a passage which I note because of the repeated use of the pronoun “one”:

Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience … but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir. … One could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw. … It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to things, inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.

(61)

Semantically contextualized, the “one” of this passage seems, of course, to be Mrs. Ramsay herself, her own experience of the self: she could not help attaching herself to one thing. Hence Mrs. Ramsay, referring to herself as “one,” has expanded the boundaries of the self (like Lily with her hypothetical community) to include a reinforcing companionship. She has tacitly posited that there are others who feel this way as well, and has defined this hypothetical community in terms of her own consciousness, formed a community out of the material of her self.

Further, she has replaced the concept of her determinate, symbolic self with an indeterminacy, with the kind of disintegration of unicity that takes place repeatedly in this novel, as, for example, when Lily Briscoe feels that “that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy” (180) or when James, having seen the lighthouse from two perspectives, concludes that “nothing was simply one thing” (172). Similarly, Mrs. Ramsay, who seems herself to have the ability like the pronoun “one” to be both no one and everyone, is able, with a toss of her shawl, to make the boar's skull in her children's bedroom appear both as the skull itself (for James) and as “a mountain, a bird's nest, a garden” (for Cam) (106).

Even more significantly (and ironically), Mrs. Ramsay, thinking of herself as “one,” has set up a kind of distancing mechanism from the self, an other that, while not the self, is a close enough representation of it to facilitate self-reflection. This thing that is “other” than Mrs. Ramsay though is not the fixed imago of Lacanian psychoanalysis that allows the child to constitute him/herself as a unified subject, but, as we have already noted, is an indeterminacy. If this self-reflection implies a metaphorical mirror, it is to be sure of the sort found in circus funhouses. The thetic phase has, in a sense, failed to occur: the preparation for entrance into the symbolic order has gotten muddled; the reflected imago has not constituted the subject into the fixed, unitary subject that is the precondition for signification, but rather, has thrown the subject back into indeterminacy, into the amorphousness of a stage anterior to language. The consequence of this disruption of the thetic process is two-fold: it allows for a kind of self-experience (or self-knowledge) undistorted by Lacanian méconnaissance; yet, at the same time, it produces a self that cannot be communicated as it does not meet the precondition for signification—the thetic phase, the positing of the symbolic imago.²²

It is not, however, only Mrs. Ramsay who refers to herself as “one.” Mr. Bankes, for example, ruminates in a similar manner:

It was in this sort of state that one asked oneself, What does one live for? Why, one asked oneself, does one take all these pains for the human race to go on? … Foolish questions, vain questions, questions one never asked if one was occupied. Is human life this? Is human life that? One never had time to think about it.

(84)

One has the impression, then, that it is Mr. Bankes asking himself these questions, but that, like Mrs. Ramsay, he is doing so in a manner that has dissolved the symbolic self and created an indeterminate representation of the self that becomes a self-interrogating subject. Again it is significant that this self-interrogating subject, the imago necessary for self-reflection, is indeterminate, that the characters take themselves outside of the symbolic order to contemplate such things as life and the human race, a thing that would no doubt appall Mr. Ramsay who is portrayed as thinking with the symbolic precision of the alphabet itself, but who, on the other hand, can never “get to R,” which is perhaps to say, that he can never get to Ramsay, to the self.

When Lily Briscoe refers to herself as “one,” as she appears to do in the following passage, she often seems to do so not so much for the point of self-reflection as (again) for self-support: “She would have snatched her picture off the easel, but she said to herself, One must. She braced herself to stand the awful trial of someone looking at her picture. One must, she said, one must” (51). It is of course she, Lily, who must allow someone to look at her picture, but by referring to herself as “one” she seems to be “trading in” her self in the hope that the “one” she gets in return will have greater strength, or greater endurance than she has “alone” and isolated in a unitary self.

In other instances, the pronoun “one” seems, rather than replacing the thinking subject, to refer to another, albeit specific person, as, for example, in the following passage:

One seemed to hear doors slamming and voices calling … “What does one send to the Lighthouse?” as if she were forcing herself to do what she despaired of ever being able to do. … What does one send to the Lighthouse?—opened doors in one's mind that went banging and swinging to and fro and made one keep asking, in a stupefied gape, What does one send? What does one do? Why is one sitting here after all?

(137–38)

Again, thematically contextualized, the question “What does one send to the Lighthouse?” seems not to be asking what any one would send, but what Mrs. Ramsay, the pervasive absence of the final section of the novel, would have sent. This permutation of Mrs. Ramsay into an indeterminate pronoun seems simultaneously to evade the painful presupposition of the question—that Mrs. Ramsay is dead—and to reaffirm that a vacancy has been left in the community of being that no specific “one” dare try and fill. Further, the indeterminate pronoun seems to describe the very essence of her being in the final section of the novel: a presence that is both nowhere and everywhere, of the nature, perhaps, of the self of miraculous predication.

Finally, the pronoun “one” functions, at times, as a kind of double entendre. In the long passage cited above, for example, when Mrs. Ramsay feels that things “knew one, in a sense were one,” the final “one” of this passage could mean alternately that these phenomena were her, or that they were one and the same, a unity. Similarly, Cam, in the boat, on the way to the lighthouse senses that “one heard the waves breaking and flapping against the side of the boat as if they were anchored in harbour. Everything became very close to one” (169), which could indicate either that everything became close to her, or that everything became so indistinguishable as to seem a single entity. Cam then, by way of this double entendre has taken on the conventions of her mother's self-reflection, both referring to herself as “one” in a way that bifurcates the self and holds it in indeterminacy and inheriting her mother's sense of fusion with the external world.²³ “One,” then, is a self that can not only multiply, but can unify, can assimilate, that is to say, the non-self, the Other, the phenomenological world, and make it self, if in fact it was ever anything else.

V. A FINAL COMMENT

In lieu of concluding—and in a deliberate effort to resist reducing the complexity of Woolf's style to an axiomatic meaning or a determinate definition of self—I will close by overtly signalling two assumptions that have been implicit throughout the preceding discussion.

First, I would contend, in opposition to a large body of feminist and materialist criticism, that style and Woolf's “lyrical formalism” in particular, is neither a seductive disguise of the “real” project nor a self-indulgent lapse into bourgeois aestheticism; neither are considerations of Woolf's style, in my view, an “avoidance” of her ideas as Marcus, for example, maintains.²⁴ On the contrary, I would suggest that Woolf's style is as much her thought as anything else, and that the ideas posited by her style should be taken as seriously and thought through as rigorously as anything else in or about her work.

Second, I would note that critics have often been frustrated with attempts to reconcile the equivocations and contradictions in Woolf's life and thought, with efforts to reconcile the Woolf of To the Lighthouse and The Waves with the Woolf of A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas—the introspective, aesthetically preoccupied Woolf, with Woolf, the political and feminist thinker. I would read such “equivocations”—and specifically, the unresolved arguments with and about the self that we have located in Woolf's style—as an impressively rigorous form of uncertainty, one that indicts deceptively facile resolutions, and insists that this thing we call the “self,” in its complex and collusive relations to language, gender, community and being, is a subject to be thought about at length and in detail.

Notes

1. The classic study of self in Woolf is James Naremore's The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel. Some more recent studies which explore concepts of self in Woolf are Makiko Minow-Pinkney's excellent book, Virginia Woolf & the Problem of the Subject, Daniel Albright's Personality and Impersonality: Lawrence, Woolf and Mann, and Louise Poresky's The Elusive Self: Psyche and Spirit in Virginia Woolf's Novels. Bette London's provocative investigation of voice in The Appropriated Voice: Narrative Authority in Conrad, Forster and Woolf explores ways “postmodern” reading strategies interrogate the authentic voice of self-identity through which modernism (allegedly) constituted itself. Jean Wyatt's “Avoiding self-definition: In defense of women's right to merge (Julia Kristeva and Mrs. Dalloway)” discusses non-semantic aspects of Woolf's language and its relation to self-definition. Toril Moi, in her introduction to Sexual/Textual Politics, critiques feminist proponents of the “male-humanist concept of an essential human identity” (9), and briefly, via Julia Kristeva, suggests relationships between narrative technique, identity and gender.

2. One might also profitably investigate instances of delayed identification, the use of indefinite subjects such as “someone” and “something,” the reliance on the conjunction “for,” or the “yes … but” and “So … so” sequences that Thomas Matro has signalled in “Only Relations: Vision and Achievement in To the Lighthouse.”

3. Smith defines “subject,” “human agent” and “individual” respectively as a “term inaccurately used to describe what is actually the series or the conglomeration of positions,” “the place from which resistance to the ideological is produced or played out” and “the illusion of whole and coherent personal organization” (xxxv). Smith endeavors, under an imperative of political contestation, to elucidate a notion of the subject that is neither the subject of humanist thought nor the “decentered” subject of poststructuralist thought.

4. The French term “sujet-in-procès” has a dual meaning—both a “subject-in-process” and “a subject-on-trial.” The semiotic, according to Kristeva, designates:

   according to the etymology of the Greek semeion, a distinctive mark, trace, index, the premonitory sign, the proof, engraved mark, imprint—in short, a distinctiveness admitting of an uncertain and indeterminate articulation because it does not yet refer (for young children) or no longer refers in psychotic discourse to a signified object for a thetic consciousness.

   (Identity 133)

5. Kristeva terms this phase which is anterior to language “the semantic chora,” borrowing the word from Plato's Timaeus to denote an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases” (Revolution 25). In order for signification to take place, according to Kristeva, language must pass from the semiotic chora through what she terms the “thetic” phase, a phase analogous to Lacan's “mirror stage” in which the child identifies his/her image in a mirror, associates the unified image with his/her “self” (a “meconnaissance” according to Lacan), and assumes the “alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development” (Lacan, Ecrits 4). It is this experience of the other that prepares the child for entrance into the symbolic realm of language where s/he will be expected to formulate the previously “semiotic” and polymorphous self of instinctual drives into a unitary and symbolic part of speech—a grammatical subject. Kristeva views this thetic phase then, like Lacan's mirror stage, “as a place of the Other, as the precondition for signification i.e., the precondition for the positing of language.” It is this phase that “marks a threshold between [the] two heterogeneous realms: the semiotic and the symbolic” (Revolution 48).

6. Kristeva cites Lautreamont, Mallarmé, Joyce and Artaud as authors that exemplify this “revolution.” Smith contends that in Kristeva's recent work her “championing of avant-garde textuality” has functioned to “turn her emphasis away from the mutually constraining dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic, and toward a revindication of a putative priority and primacy of the semiotic” (126).

7. There has been intense critical disagreement over what to call Woolf's prose method—interior monologue? indirect interior monologue? style indirect libre? stream of consciousness?—a controversy arising perhaps out of the fact that hers is not one method, but a combination and/or palimpsest of techniques. See Naremore (65 ff.) or McLaurin (30 ff.).

8. In fact, as Gerard Genette points out, “The truth is that mimesis in words can only be mimesis of words. Other than that, all we have and can have is degrees of diegesis” (164).

9. In Genette's view, the term “point of view” includes both voice and “perspective.” Hence he christens the term “focalization” to describe that for which we have used the more traditional term “point of view.” His more precise term for Auerbach's “multipersonal representation of consciousness” would be “multiple internal focalization” (189 ff.).

10. London's provocative and important study (which appeared after this article was completed), explores voice and its appropriation in “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown,” signalling consequences similar to those explored below. (See chapter 5 of The Appropriated Voice.)

11. The interrogatory strategies of “Professions for Women,” for example, seems to suggest both the desire to articulate that which women entering the professions might not be able to articulate for themselves, and the fear that one is presumptuous in the extreme to claim to express the sentiments of another.

12. This imperative of DuPlessis' is part of her reading of The Voyage Out and a paraphrase (and perhaps misappropriation) of Woolf's own phrase in A Room of One's Own: “To break even the sympathetic male sentences, women must become speaking subjects of their own discourses” (51).

13. Indeed, London asserts “a voice of one's own” to be the central fiction that Woolf's narrative strategies deconstruct. Moi summarizes and criticizes feminist scholars (particularly Elaine Showalter and Patricia Stubbs) who have chided Woolf for not speaking in a more straightforward, unified or “authentic” voice. She asserts, for example, that Woolf's prose “becomes incantation” and [persuades] the reader too, to give up the burden of structures of the symbolic self,” (122) (although I would contend that neither the author nor the narrator has “given up” anything symbolic here).

14. Although Wyatt discusses potential drawbacks to this “feminine” experience of the self, she nevertheless valorizes it (in a way that Chodorow does not).

15. She argues, for example, that “mothers of daughters tend not to experience these infant daughters as separate from them in the same way as do mothers of infant sons” (109). By contrast, she contends that a mother's attachment to a boy “expresses his sense of difference from and masculine oppositeness to her” (97). Chodorow's project is to investigate “the reproduction of mothering as a central and constituting element in the social organization and reproduction of gender” (7). She argues that gender is “neither a product of biology nor of intentional role-training” (7), but a function of the asymmetrical organization of parenting. In addition to her revisions of the pre-oedipal and oedipal paradigms vis-à-vis girls, Chodorow reinterprets penis envy, relates the reproduction of gender to the structures of capitalism and explicitly calls for a reorganization of parenting.

16. Again, by contrast, “boys come to define themselves as more separate and distinct, with a greater sense of rigid ego boundaries and differentiation. The basic feminine sense of self is connected to the world, the basic masculine sense of self is separate” (169). Freud on the other hand, deems this experience “in which the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly” (13) to be, in most cases, pathological when it occurs in adulthood.

17. See Lacan (See Ecrits 49 ff.).

18. Specifically, DuPlessis, in her discussion of The Years, suggests that the choral protagonist, because it is “not based on individual Bildung or romance, but rather on a collective Bildung and communal affect” is a strategy for what she terms “‘writing beyond the ending,’” a strategy, that is to say, that “sever[s] the narrative from formerly conventional structures of fiction and consciousness about women” (x). She suggests that “the communal protagonist” operates “as a critique both of the hierarchies and authoritarian practice of gender and of the narrative practice that selects and honors only major figures” (164). Along similar lines, Cuddy-Keane has argued, in her reading of “The leaderless and fragmented community” of Between the Acts, that “Woolf's choric voice” (275), by “subtle manipulation and transformation” (276) of comic modes, fragments the leader-centered group of Freudian theory and epic narratives, that it not “so much retrieves meaning from fragmentation as discovers how fragmentation is meaningful” (282) and that this strategy is “not merely an attack on patriarchal politics but a new apprehension of the nature of community” (283–84).

19. London explores ways in which the characters of To the Lighthouse appropriate voice, which seems, in her work on To the Lighthouse, to have become a metaphor for consciousness, from more authoritative voices, such as literary convention. (See Chapter 6 of The Appropriated Voice.)

20. This movement into the passive is even more salient within the context of the paragraph in which the active subject “he” is repeated eight times before the phrase “there was given him in abundance women's sympathy”—which effectively (and safely) detaches this sympathy from any “real” woman in the novel and replaces “her” with the impersonal subject “there”—and twice again before the phrase “the mournful words were heard quite clearly by them all” (in which he is himself displaced):

    He had found the house and so seeing it, he had also seen himself there; he had seen himself walking on the terrace, alone. He was walking up and down between the urns; and he seemed to himself very old, and bowed. Sitting in the boat he bowed, he crouched himself, acting instantly his part—the part of a desolate man, widowed, bereft; and so called up before him in hosts people sympathizing with him; staged for himself as he sat in the boat, a little drama; which required of him decrepitude and exhaustion and sorrow (he raised his hands and looked at the thinness of them, to confirm his dream) and then there was given him in abundance women's sympathy, and he imagined how they would soothe him and sympathize with him, and so getting in his dream some reflection of the exquisite pleasure women's sympathy was to him, he sighed and said gently and mournfully,

    But I beneath a rougher sea
    Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he,

    so that the mournful words here heard quite clearly by them all.

    (155, emphasis mine).

21. A critic such as Marcus, who views “all of Virginia Woolf's work [as] an attack on the patriarchal family” (4) might want to read this grammatical construction as a further formulation of this alleged “attack.” According to Marcus, “female heterosexuality is most often represented in Woolf's fiction as victimization or colonization. Those women who accept the ideology of female submission in patriarchal marriage,” she claims, “are silently condemned” (77). However, while issues such as tyranny and submission are certainly central concerns of To the Lighthouse, I would argue that the novel is far more ambivalent than Marcus suggests: even semantically, it seems to me to be the exploitation, rather than the existence of family relations (or authority) which is indicted—James realizes that it is not the “old man reading” whom he hates, but the “tyranny, despotism, he called it—making people do what they did not want to do, cutting off their right to speak” (170), and the novel is, in addition, full of images of benign and desirable authority or protection—the Lighthouse itself or the hen “straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping, pointed his stick and said ‘Pretty—pretty,’ an odd illumination into his heart” (24). And of course even Mrs. Ramsay, the ostensible “victim” of female heterosexuality is quite capable, according to Minta, of “dominat[ing], wishing to interfere, making people do what she wished” (56).

22. This is apparently a mode of experience over which Woolf felt tremendous ambivalence. On the one hand, even in an early text like “An Unwritten Novel,” she valorizes its aesthetic beauty, while questioning, cryptically, its ethic:

    But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world—a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

    (24)

    On the other hand, it is mode of experience ostensibly associated in Woolf's mind with madness. Tori Haring-Smith contends, for example, in her examination of private and public consiousness in To the Lighthouse, that for Woolf “the isolation of the private consciousness is terrifying” (155). Marcus quotes a fascinating passage from the diary of James Stephen (Woolf's “mad” uncle), in which he describes feeling as if he were “‘two persons in one and were compelled to hold a discourse in which soliloquy and colloquy mingled oddly and even awfully’” (Marcus, 99)—a description that bears striking resemblance to the sense of “self” suggested by the pronoun “one.”

23. This passage is followed, significantly, by one in which James takes on identification with his father, such that the familial roles are repeated, it would seem, in the next generation:

    and there he had come to feel, quite often lately, when his father said something which surprised the others, were two pairs of footprints only; his own and his father's. They alone knew each other.

    (171)

24. Marcus suggests vis-à-vis A Room of One's Own, for example, that:

    the author tries to hide her feminist impulses behind the skirts of several narrators and plants her darts at the patriarchy in between passages of fine writing, meant to seduce and solace the male reader. E. M. Forster and his ilk could then, by avoiding her ideas, praise passages of description and create Virginia Woolf the lyrical formalist, minor mandarin, for generations of critics to analyze.

    (78)

    Showalter, Stubbs, and Marcia Holly are all critics who have taken even less indulgent positions towards Woolf's style and towards formalist criticism. A summary and critique of their positions can be found in Moi's introduction. Showalter, for example, criticizes Woolf's “strenuous charm” and “stylistic tricks” and urges feminist readers to remain “detached from [a text's] narrative strategies” (quoted by Moi 2–3, 7). Holly contrasts “formalist criticism” to “standards of authenticity” (quoted by Moi 7). Moi takes issue with these critics as well as with Marcus’ “emotionalist argument” (17) and insists that Showalter's recommendation to remain “detached from the narrative strategies of the text is equivalent to not reading it at all” (10).

Works Cited

Albright, Daniel. Personality and Impersonality: Lawrence, Woolf and Mann. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Tr. Willard R. Trask. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1953.

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