SOURCE: “Art in ‘To the Lighthouse,’” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. VIII, No. 2, Summer, 1962, pp. 127–36.

[In the following essay, Cohn describes Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe as “magnetic poles,” representing, respectively, the forces of life and art.]

When Mr. Ramsay lands on the lighthouse rock, Lily Briscoe finishes her painting. All critics agree on the intimate and essential relation between these final events of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse.¹ Several critics have commented, too, on how Lily Briscoe's painting structures the book.² But there has not been adequate appreciation of the way in which the theme of art functions in To The Lighthouse. Neither Leonard Woolf's term “psychological poem” nor Virginia Woolf's own hesitant suggestion of “elegy” succeeds in classifying the book, for, in part at least, it is a work of art about art—as are Hamlet and Don Quixote; as is much of the creation of artists so various as Yeats, Braque, Pirandello, Mann.

To The Lighthouse, serving to exorcise her parents' dominance,³ absorbing her by the opportunities it provided for perfecting her “method,” astonished its author by the spontaneous fluidity of its composition. In her diary Virginia Woolf comments on the “quick and flourishing attack on To The Lighthouse,” on her “dashing fluency,” on writing “as fast and freely as I have written in the whole of my life.”

The first notes on the novel appear May 14, 1925:

This is going to be fairly short; to have father's character done complete in it; and mother's; and St. Ives; and childhood; and all the usual things I try to put in—life, death, etc. But the centre is father's character, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel.

On July 20, 1925, when she had meditated on the novel for at least two months, but had not yet begun writing, Virginia Woolf summarized it: “Father and mother and child in the garden; the death; the sail to the Lighthouse … (I conceive the book in 3 parts: 1. at the drawing room window; 2. seven years passed; 3. the voyage.)”

There is no published record of when or why she modified the plot, if not the basic design, to include Lily Briscoe and her art; perhaps the very rapidity and verve of composition precluded an awareness of the new theme in the novel. Only when To The Lighthouse was nearly completed does the diary make its first mention of Lily. On September 3, 1926, Virginia Woolf noted:

The novel is now easily within sight of the end, but this, mysteriously, comes no nearer. [It was actually completed January, 1927.] I am doing Lily on the lawn; but whether it’s her last lap, I don’t know. … The problem is how to bring Lily and Mr. R. together and make a combination of interest at the end … I had meant to end with R. climbing on to the rock. If so, what becomes of Lily and her picture? Should there be a final page about her and Carmichael looking at the picture and summing up R.'s character? In that case I lose the intensity of the moment. If this intervenes between R. and the lighthouse, there’s too much chop and change, I think. Could I do it in a parenthesis? So that one had the sense of reading the two things at the same time?

Ending on Lily and her vision rather than Mr. Ramsay on the rock, Virginia Woolf nevertheless did—it is generally agreed—achieve the desired effect of simultaneity. Critical disagreement begins with the interpretation of that simultaneity.

During the time she wrote To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf made the usual miscellaneous entries in her diary—reactions to reception of The Common Reader and Mrs. Dalloway (both published in 1925); remarks on landscapes, books, moods, and friends; descriptions of meeting George Moore, of visiting Thomas Hardy; some sketchy reflections on life and art. Nothing notably different from the diary entries of other years; nothing that yields a clue as to why the theme of art should have been woven into the very fabric of her fiction, instead of remaining confined to journal, lecture, and essay, as in former years. But art is central to this novel; in Part I there are ubiquitous if disparate references, and in Part III art emerges as a major motif.

If, as our first approximation, life and art are viewed as polar opposites in To The Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe may be regarded as their respective exponents. The former opens the novel, and the latter closes it, as the stuff of life may be converted, through a particular medium, to a work of art. And indeed, in our first view of her, Mrs. Ramsay is already the subject of Lily's painting. As personification or as abstraction, life is larger than art; thus, Mrs. Ramsay, and not Lily Briscoe, is the main character of the novel; Mrs. Ramsay's tendency to exaggerate is in marked contrast to Lily's diffidence; Part I, in which Life dominates, is almost twice the length of Part III, in which Art is the focal center.

Whereas art needs life to nourish it, life is often unaware of the power of art to give it permanence. Thus, although Lily the painter is in love with Mrs. Ramsay (and, by extension, with all her family and their diverse doings), the latter cannot take Lily's painting seriously. Thus, too, Mrs. Ramsay's quite literal short-sightedness is played against Lily's “vision.” Lily finds it ironic that “Mrs. Ramsay presid[ed] with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand.” More subtly, Virginia Woolf suggests that life may be its own worst enemy, even as the artist may rebel against art's strict exigencies. Although it is only momentary, Mrs. Ramsay “felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist life.” In Part III, staring at her canvas, Lily is “drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people into the presence of this formidable ancient enemy of hers … this form … roused one to perpetual combat.”

Even as a first approximation, however, the two women are not monolithic symbols, but reveal vivid personalities behind their major meaning.⁴ It is not “artistic” Lily but “living” Mrs. Ramsay who is endowed with rare beauty, for all her incongruous deer-stalker's hat and galoshes. Both women have a slightly exotic quality—Lily her Chinese eyes, and Mrs. Ramsay a Hellenic face. Both women dress soberly in grey. In spite of her easy, direct spontaneity, we never become familiar enough with Mrs. Ramsay to learn her first name, but Mrs. Ramsay calls Lily by her Christian name, suggesting the pure virgin which, by Part III, when she is forty-four (Virginia Woolf's own age when she wrote the novel), becomes “a skimpy old maid, holding a paintbrush.” These humanizing details root the character to a literal ground, so that they never become figures of allegory, but rather magnetic poles for particular lines of force.

In Part I, Mrs. Ramsay is at the heart of all the busy, indiscriminate activities of her large family and her too numerous summer guests. “Her masterfulness, her positiveness, something matter-of-fact in her” lead her to manage other people's lives, from trivial to important aspects. Lily, in contrast, can barely manage to manipulate her paint-brushes, and shrinks from any strange eye on her canvas. By Part III, Lily has become aware of a fundamental difference between herself and Mrs. Ramsay. The latter, though falling occasionally into meditation, “disliked anything that reminded her that she had been seen sitting thinking.” But “Some notion was in both of them [Lily the painter and Mr. Carmichael the poet] about the ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought.”

Mrs. Ramsay, to be sure, bends all efforts to render her actions effective: first and foremost, she supplies emotional sustenance for her husband and children (when she dies, they are left in the chaotic confusion of the opening of Part III); she is an irrepressible matchmaker; she feels protective towards the whole male sex; she helps the poor and the sick; she strives for the unity and integrity of social scenes such as her dinner party. Quite explicitly, Lily Briscoe acknowledges Mrs. Ramsay's manipulation of life: “Mrs. Ramsay saying, ‘Life stand still here’; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent).” Ironically, Mrs. Ramsay is seen “making” while Lily merely “tried.” But Mrs. Ramsay's efforts are doomed from the start; life can not stand still; time must pass; only “in another sphere” can moments be given permanence. Mrs. Ramsay has the rare faculty of ordering a scene so that it is “like a work of art,” but Lily Briscoe creates the concrete work of art.

From our first view of Lily, “standing on the edge of the lawn painting,” to the significant final view, “Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision”—the insistence is upon her art. Although fearful lest anyone look at her canvas, she paints with stubborn integrity to her vision, in the bright colors which Mr. Paunceforte's pastels have rendered unfashionable. It is the resolution to move her tree to the center of the canvas that sustains her through the dinner party, protects her against Charles Tansley's pronouncement that women cannot paint or write, and enables her to resist Mrs. Ramsay's determination to marry her to William Bankes. By Part III, Lily's paint-brush has become for her “the one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos.” She seems more sure of her technique: the lines are nervous, but her brush-strokes are decisive. It is she who imagines the artistic credo of Mr. Carmichael: “how ‘you’ and ‘I’ and ‘she’ pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint.” Yet even then, even to the final brush-stroke that brings the novel to a close, she continues to be haunted by the problematical and shifting relationship of art and life.

Lacking the self-sufficient absorption of Mr. Bankes in his science, of Mr. Carmichael in his poetry, Lily is constantly attracted or repelled by—never indifferent to—the life that surrounds her, and her art is intimately related to that life. Unlike the tourist painters who set their easels facing the bay, so as to paint the evanescent lighthouse, Lily turns her gaze on house and hedge, mother and child; she absorbs all the unpredictable storm and calm of Ramsay life; she is in love with the Ramsays precisely because they abound in life, as does the sea that surrounds their island:

The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through them. And, what was even more exciting … how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, becomes curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

The very redundancy of “ones” emphasizes the basic unity of life through all its diverse manifestations. Thus, in her painting of Part I, Lily converts Mrs. Ramsay and James to a single purple triangle. During the dinner party, Lily comes to see that the tree (with which Mrs. Ramsay has earlier identified herself) must be placed at the center of the canvas. By Part III, Mrs. Ramsay herself does not figure in Lily's second painting, and yet that painting is even more directly dependent upon Mrs. Ramsay's life, and upon that larger, more profound and tragic vision of life, that includes death. When Lily surprises herself by uttering Mrs. Ramsay's name aloud, it is a desperate cry that climaxes her violent need to know why life is so short and inexplicable. In this need, Lily views Augustus Carmichael, the poet, as her partner. Together they probe for the meaning of life, and convert its pain to form, beauty, and permanence: “if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return.” Poet and painter are joined in defiance of death, in defense of life through art.

It is significant that Mr. Carmichael, poet of death, should share in Lily's vision of Mrs. Ramsay's resurrection. In Part I, he is the only character who is unresponsive to Mrs. Ramsay's beauty, who seems at times to dislike her. His opium-induced trances rebuke Mrs. Ramsay's incessant activities; the dryness of his poetic imagery is opposed to Mrs. Ramsay's immersion in sea-rhythms (and the sea is, of course, an age-old metaphor for life); his dealings with death (his poetry becomes popular only during the war) outlast Mrs. Ramsay's life-force. At the last, however, life and death are joined as a larger life; the painter of life and the poet of death are at once and together aware of life's final achievement, the landing at the lighthouse.

Although Mr. and particularly Mrs. Ramsay may be viewed as life-symbols, their life is opposed to art only in certain aspects. At the literal level both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are sensitive to art, and they are variously involved with the art of literature. In Mrs. Ramsay's busy day, art is reduced to craft: knitting, cutting out pictures from magazines, tossing a shawl over a Michelangelo, reading aloud Grimm's “Fisherman's Wife,” and leafing through a poetry anthology are all in the day's doings. As for full-length books, “she never had time to read them.” Indiscriminately, Mrs. Ramsay envisions her son James as a judge, a statesman, an artist. While she reads Grimm's fairy tale to her son—oblivious to its sea of life that parallels the sea of life surrounding her—she is able to watch her husband and daughter outside, to meditate on her match of Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley, to daydream about her children, defying for them the life she cannot quite define.

At night, when the dinner party is over and the children are in bed, Mrs. Ramsay joins her husband as he sits reading Scott's Antiquary. She repeats the verses recited at dinner, lulls herself by reading from William Browne's “Siren's Song,” scarcely aware of a meaning beyond the music. She bends the final couplet of Shakespeare's Sonnet 98 to her own life, suddenly finding insubstantial the full, active hours that separate husband and wife from morning to night:

Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.

But in our intermittent glimpses of Mr. Ramsay during the day, he storms about like a batallion rather than a shadow, and, appropriately, Tennyson's “Charge of the Light Brigade” is the poem he quotes, indulging his penchant for reciting poetry without preamble or provocation.⁵ Suiting gesture to bombast, he lays special stress on “Some one had blundered.” First uttered when Jasper Ramsay shoots at the helpless birds, the line refers more specifically to Mr. Ramsay's blundering insistence that it will not be fine enough for James to make the trip to the ligfhthouse; more generally, Mr. Ramsay blunders by his egotistical demands upon his family, without in turn expressing his love for them. But close upon the end of the book, Mr. Ramsay is able to rectify his blunder; spontaneously, he praises his son with a “Well done” when James steers the sailboat skillfully into the lighthouse harbor. Father and son arrive together at the lighthouse.

In another significant instance, Mr. Ramsay's literary reference in Part I becomes part of the texture of his life in Part III. During Mrs. Ramsay's dinner party, Charles Tansley insists that no one reads Scott any more. After dinner, in solitary protest, Mr. Ramsay dips into the Antiquary (Scott's own favorite among his novels). Disdaining the major plot, Mr. Ramsay chooses the chapter which describes the sorrow in the fisherman's hut when Steenie, the fisherman, is drowned. In Part III of To The Lighthouse, the voyage to the lighthouse is made under the guidance of a fisherman who points out the treacherous places where other fishermen were drowned. Mr. Ramsay is equally able to respond to the humble scenes in Scott's novel, and to the real fishermen who guide him to the lighthouse. Professor though he is, his intellectuality relates to reality. Less intuitive than his wife, he nevertheless complements her in a vital rapport with, in a virtual representation of, life.

Mr. Ramsay considers his wife unlearned, but she is capable of some literary reference, and shrewdly guesses that the self-made Charles Tansley “would have liked … to say how he had gone not to the circus but to Ibsen with the Ramsays.” When her “booby” Paul Rayley remembers the name of Vronsky “because he always thought it such a good name for a villain,” she is instantly able to recognize it as coming from Anna Karenina. (The irony of Paul's “villain” emerges in Part III, when Paul himself, like Vronsky, takes a mistress.)

Other minor characters also display their literary culture: Mr. Bankes, the scientist, shares Mr. Ramsay's taste for Scott, and thinks it a shame that the young no longer read Carlyle. Mr. Carmichael, a poet himself, has such catholic taste in poetry that he lies awake nights reading Virgil, and is also able to complete Mr. Ramsay's quotation from “Luriana Lurilee.”⁶

Insistent as these literary strands are, they do no more in Part I than establish art as one aspect of Ramsay life. In Part III, however, when death has attacked the Ramsays, and art itself becomes a major theme, literary reference all but disappears. The single exception is Mr. Ramsay's reiterated quotation from the last stanza of Cowper's “Castaway”:

We perished, each alone.
But I beneath a rougher sea
Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

The very isolation of the quotation in the final section of the novel calls attention to its importance. From her earliest conception of To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf associated the first of these lines with Mr. Ramsay⁷ Just before Mr. Ramsay jumps ashore at the lighthouse, he is silent: “He might be thinking, We perish, each alone, or he might be thinking, I have reached it. I have found it.”

Written in the last year of Cowper's life, the description of the drowning of the castaway is turned by the poet into a personal lamentation over his own fate. Similarly, Mr. Ramsay, after the death of his wife, pleads for Lily Briscoe's sympathy, and for that of his children, James and Cam. Although he is presumably concerned with “subject and object and the nature of reality,” he is intensely subjective in attitude and demand. A solitary hero in both his own and his daughter's eyes, he is also a voluble sufferer, violently calling attention to himself. But his fate, finally, is gentler than that of the castaway (or of Cowper): because he is able to verbalize his love for his son, to utter the “Well done” of praise, he is spared from the “deeper gulfs.” Even if each must perish alone, Mr. Ramsay first reaches the haven of the lighthouse.

Other than the repetitions of the “Castaway” lines, Part III of To The Lighthouse is barren of literary reference. Although Mr. Carmichael is by that time a celebrated poet, and Lily Briscoe indulges in speculation about the kind of poetry he writes, direct quotation from his work is carefully withheld. Even more important, although Mr. Ramsay reads throughout his trip to the lighthouse, neither title nor contents of his book is ever revealed. Three times, however, attention is called to its cover “mottled like a plover's egg.” There may well be a suggestion that Mr. Ramsay's intellectualism, now that he is about to express his love for his son, becomes an embryonic form of life. All Mr. Ramsay's intellectual interests of Part I—metaphysics, reciting verse, and books in general—are converted in Part III into more vital action. No longer can art be a mere miscellaneous Ramsay energy; now that death has attacked the Ramsays, they are more fiercely alive than ever. And it is this realization that enables Lily to complete her painting.

The crucial final sentences of the novel, in which Lily Briscoe paints one clean line to finish the picture that is blurred to her sight, establishes form and synthesis through art. But form and synthesis were not present from the start; they had to be earned by the artist, in the passage of time, through suffering and love. In Part I, Lily Briscoe stays not with the Ramsays, but at a village inn. By the end of Part II, she is invited to stay at the house. In the short middle section of the novel, the very use of a lyric mode suggests the ordering action of art, while time erodes the scenes of the life conveyed in Part I. Exterior events are tersely reported within brackets, and three out of the six bracketed passages are announcements of death. Both life and death are bracketed within the large, impersonal movements of time.

Brackets also enclose a single passage in Part III; in the sections that alternate between Lily on the shore and the Ramsays on the sea, in the heart of Lily Briscoe's vision of Mrs. Ramsay, we read: [“Macalister's boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still) was thrown back into the sea.”]⁸

Punctuation and position relate the destruction of the fish to the destruction in Part II of Prue, Andrew, and Mrs. Ramsay. Before the bracketed section, Lily dissolves into tears for Mrs. Ramsay and the life she represents. After this section, Lily, controlling her anguish, returns to her picture. It is perhaps not too fanciful to relate Lily and the fish, each suffering anguish and loss, and each being thrown back into the sea of life.

When the voyage to the lighthouse is over, Mr. Carmichael, poet, holding his French novel like a trident (the sceptre of a sea-god), establishes communion with Lily Briscoe, artist, by announcing, “They will have landed.” About the voyage, Lily says, “He has landed. … It is finished.” About her picture, “It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”

During the course of the novel, there are several uses of the word “vision.”⁹ Very early in Part I, Lily seeks to translate “some miserable remnant of her vision” into her painting. Later, in her conversation with Mr. Bankes, when he attempts to understand what she is doing, she finds herself unable to express herself without a brush in her hand.

She took up once more her old painting position with the dim eyes and the absent-minded manner, subduing all her impressions as a woman to something much more general; becoming once more under the power of that vision which she had seen clearly once and must now grope for among hedges and houses and mothers and children—her picture. (Italics added.)

Years later, in Part III, just before Lily sights the boat on its way to the lighthouse, there are three separate uses of the word on a single page (270). From the time she learned of Mrs. Ramsay's death, Lily has been haunted by a vision of Mrs. Ramsay moving swiftly, surrounded by flowers.¹⁰

The closing words of the book—Lily's “I have had my vision”—follow her final brush-stroke, and link the painting both to her vision of Mrs. Ramsay, and to the arrival at the lighthouse of Mr. Ramsay and the children. Early in Part I, Mrs. Ramsay had identified herself with the third long stroke of the lighthouse. By the end of the book, her husband reaches the lighthouse only when he is capable of her own loving spontaneity towards their son. With the words “Well done” Mr. Ramsay moves from his metaphysics and literature to his wife's living relationship with the children. Art has led to life.

On the shore, Lily Briscoe, painter of life, and Augustus Carmichael, poet of death, are joined in their awareness of the landing at the lighthouse. Exhausted by her feeling of having helped Mr. Ramsay, exquisitely conscious of the empty drawing-room steps where Mrs. Ramsay sat in the earlier picture, finding that her painting is as blurred as her last view of the lighthouse, Lily Briscoe wields her brush in the line that unites them all, that translates vision to art. At the lighthouse from which Mrs. Ramsay is absent, in the painting from which Mrs. Ramsay is absent, her life nevertheless endures. Life has given birth to both art and life.

Notes

1. Quotations from To The Lighthouse are from the Harbrace Modern Classics edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927).

2. For example:

   Bernard Blackstone, Virginia Woolf (London, 1949), pp. 99-130.

   David Daiches, Virginia Woolf (Norfolk, 1942), pp. 79-96.

   S. H. Derbyshire, “An Analysis of Mrs. Woolf's To The Lighthouse,” College English III (January, 1942), 353-360.

   Norman Friedman, “The Waters of Annihilation: Double Vision in To The Lighthouse,” ELH XXII (March, 1955), 61-79.

   James Hafley, The Glass Roof (Berkeley, 1954), pp. 77-92.

   Dorothy Hoare, Some Studies in the Modern Novel (London, 1938), pp. 53-62.

   Charles Hoffman, “To The Lighthouse,” Explicator X (November, 1951), 13.

   Jean-Jacques Mayoux, Vivants Piliers (Paris, 1960), pp. 201-228.

   Glenn Pedersen, “Vision in To The Lighthouse, ” PMLA LXXXIII (December, 1958), 585-600.

   John Hawley Roberts, “‘Vision and Design’ in Virginia Woolf,” PMLA, LXI (September, 1946), 842-847.

3. See Virginia Woolf's journal entries published in A Writer's Diary (New York, 1954). Also, Frank Baldanza, “To The Lighthouse Again,” PMLA, LXX (June, 1955), 548-552.

4. My interpretation does not preclude others, and I particularly admire those of Friedman and Mayoux.

5. Hafley also discusses the significance of the Tennyson poem.

6. I have been unable to identify these verses.

7. See the first quotation of this article.

8. Originally, it was Mr. Ramsay who “crushes a dying mackerel,” but probably in more careful preparation for his praise of his son, the fish is finally transferred to the fisherman's son.

9. “Vision” is a favorite word of Virginia Woolf; Roberts discusses this aspect in some detail.

10. Lily Briscoe's vision of Mrs. Ramsay is curiously like that of Charles Tansley, early in Part I.