[In the following essay, Proudfit contends that the meaning of To the Lighthouse, and particularly the figure of Mrs. Ramsay, is largely contained in the post-Impressionistic quality of Lily Briscoe's painting and in Lily's ambiguous relationship to Mrs. Ramsay.]

It has become almost commonplace among critics of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse to regard Mrs. Ramsay, unquestionably one of the most perfect statements of feminine sensibility, intuition, and maternal comfort in literature, as a magnetic life force, entering and irradiating the lives of those around her, which must somehow be fulfilled and immortalized through the Ramsay family's final pilgrimage to the lighthouse. Even Jean Guiguet, author of the most recent and certainly the best full-scale work on Mrs. Woolf's writings to date, Virginia Woolf and Her Works, sees the voyage of Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James as a validation of Mrs. Ramsay's victory over death, as a validation of her ability to haunt the pages of the novel “with a presence that echoes the material permanence of the lighthouse.”¹ The counter-interpretation of Mrs. Ramsay, that offered in 1958 by Glenn Pedersen,² regarding Mrs. Ramsay as a dominating, selfish, suffocating power which must be overcome by the remaining Ramsays through a trip to the lighthouse, symbolically freeing them from the chains imposed by Mrs. Ramsay, has never gained established acceptance. This is surprising in the light of the close readings to which the novel has been subjected, particularly when one considers previous insights and discoveries which lend support to Pedersen's interpretation.

Pre-eminent in this respect is the crucial acknowledgment that Lily Briscoe's painting is both structurally and thematically linked with the voyage to the lighthouse. This becomes central to Pedersen's argument, for it is his contention that the entire action of the novel is unfolded symbolically in Lily Briscoe's painting. He elaborates in detail upon this, interpreting the final line in Lily's painting as a symbol of masculine achievement, the line integrating the painting, just as Mr. Ramsay's success in toppling Mrs. Ramsay's matriarchy brings about the integration of the family. Although Pedersen's argument as it stands is tenable for this reader, two crucial aspects concerning Lily and her painting which would support his interpretation of Mrs. Ramsay and increase its credibility have not received sufficient attention: (1) the Post-Impressionist nature of Lily's painting and (2) the nature of the relationship between Lily and Mrs. Ramsay.

Neither the importance of Lily's final stroke on her painting nor the idea that the painting is Post-Impressionist is new. As early as 1946 John Hawley Roberts did a brief exploratory study of the influence of Roger Fry and Post-Impressionism upon Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.³ Yet Hawley's observations that Lily's final stroke achieves the proper formal relations in the picture, that Lily accompanies her final stroke with a statement echoing Fry in terms of vision and design, “I have had my vision,” while important, function even more effectively in suggesting new levels of interpretation. Since Lily's picture is thematically and structurally integral to the novel, the development of that picture, both as a work of art and as a reflection of Lily's relationship with the Ramsay family, in particular with Mrs. Ramsay, demands close scrutiny. For it is within the process of completing her painting, a process which occupies the full ten-year time span of the novel, that one discovers the interpretive insight which lends its weight in favor of Mr. Pedersen's appraisal of Mrs. Ramsay. It is my purpose in this essay to explore this process in terms of the Post-Impressionist nature of Lily's painting and the nature of the relationship between Lily and Mrs. Ramsay as a key to increasing our understanding of Mrs. Ramsay and her effect upon those close to her.

When one labels a work “Post-Impressionist,” one is essentially placing it within a “movement” introduced into England by Roger Fry in November, 1910, when he brought the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition to London's Grafton Galleries. As Guiguet asserts, it is true that today one can regard Impressionism and Post-Impressionism as “only modalities of style, all directed toward a single goal: the integral expression of the artist's vision, of his impression.”⁴ Roger Fry, however, considered the two movements as distinguishable, one from the other, and developed a body of aesthetic theory around the Post-Impressionist painters, popularizing both his theories and the work of such artists as Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Derain, and in the process establishing the trends in England in the plastic arts for twenty years.⁵

The context of this essay is not the proper place for a synopsis of all of Fry's aesthetic theories,⁶ yet those particularly suggestive of the procedure followed by Lily in her painting are relevant. Fry believes, primarily, that the artist, before he begins to paint his picture, is struck by some scene or object, not necessarily because it is beautiful, but because the arrangement of the scene, its formal relations and his vision of them, engender in him an emotional response⁷ valued for its own sake and independent of any requirement of everyday life.⁸ In the contemplation of this design, of the formal relations and harmonies into which the vision is dissolved, the artist is overwhelmed by a glimpse of the reality beneath appearance and is consequently enveloped by the “aesthetic emotion,”⁹ by an “idea,”¹⁰ which he feels compelled to transmit and to make concrete through his art form.

The artist expresses his “idea” in his painting, transferring the design he sees to his art work by recreating the formal relations and harmonies, by putting down on his canvas the “significant form” he has discovered. As he does this, the artist is caught up in the rhythm of the aesthetic emotion, a rhythm experienced almost unconsciously, but expressed through the consciousness of the artist,¹¹ a rhythm which holds the artist completely in its grasp:

Almost any turn of the kaleidoscope of nature may set up in the artist this detached and impassioned vision, and, as he contemplates the particular field of vision, the (aesthetically) chaotic and accidental conjunction of forms and colours begins to crystalise into a harmony; and as this harmony becomes clear to the artist, his actual vision becomes distorted by the emphasis of the rhythm which has been set up within him. Certain relations of directions of line become for him full of meaning; he apprehends them no longer casually or merely curiously, but passionately, and these lines begin to be so stressed and stand out so clearly from the rest that he sees them far more distinctly than he did at first. … In such a creative vision the objects as such tend to disappear, to lose their separate unities, and to take their places as so many bits in the whole mosaic of vision.¹²

This, according to Fry, is essentially what happens within the visual artist in the process of creation. In essence, Fry is trying to describe the procedure by which a Post-Impressionist painting is created.

Roger Fry's response to the Post-Impressionists was both elicited and sustained in great part by his enthusiasm for Cézanne. Indeed, a close analysis of Fry's aesthetic theories reveals that, as his ideas develop, they form increasingly an aesthetic developed to understand and appreciate Cézanne as a painter, an effort toward understanding which culminates in Fry's book-length study, Cézanne: A Study of His Development, first published in 1927, the year in which To the Lighthouse was published. It is perhaps not at all accidental, given Mrs. Woolf's close friendship with Roger Fry,¹³ her personal acknowledgment of her indebtedness to him,¹⁴ and the assertion of such critics as Guiguet of the “profound influence of … [Fry's] theories on Virginia Woolf's development,”¹⁵ that the steps followed by Lily Briscoe in the completion of her picture are so similar to those accorded by Fry to Cézanne in the execution of Provençal Mas:

We may describe the process by which such a picture is arrived at in some such way as this:—the actual objects presented to the artist's vision are first deprived of all those specific characters by which we ordinarily apprehend their concrete existence—they are reduced to pure elements of space and volume. In this abstract world these elements are perfectly co-ordinated and organized by the artist's sensual intelligence, they attain logical consistency. These abstractions are then brought back into the concrete world of real things, not by giving them back their specific peculiarities, but by expressing them in an incessantly varying and shifting texture. They retain their abstract intelligibility, their amenity to the human mind, and regain that reality of actual things which is absent from all abstractions.

Of course in laying all this out one is falsifying the actual processes of the artist's mind. In reality, the processes go on simultaneously and unconsciously—indeed the unconsciousness is essential to the nervous vitality of the texture.¹⁶

As much as such a statement is a falsification, it is just such a process which Lily attempts to explain to Mr. Bankes; it is just such a process which she attempts to carry out in her own picture. Further, it is precisely in her inability to deprive Mrs. Ramsay “of all those specific characters” by which she ordinarily apprehends her “concrete existence” that poses an obstacle to the completion of the picture until the end of the novel. To overcome this obstacle, Lily must first come to grips with the personal relations enveloping her. This then frees her to pursue unhampered her creative task.

We first come to know Lily Briscoe within the novel through the responses of others toward her. Mrs. Ramsay reflects that “with her little Chinese eyes and her puckered-up face, she [Lily] would never marry; one could not take her painting very seriously; she was an independent little creature.”¹⁷ Mr. Bankes observes Lily's sensible shoes, her orderly life, her good sense, which compensates for her being “poor, presumably, and without the complexion or the allurement of Miss Doyle” (31). Although this prepares the reader for Lily's attitude toward herself, her sense of “her own inadequacy, her insignificance” (32), it does not prepare him for her adoration of Mrs. Ramsay, her “impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at Mrs. Ramsay's knee and say to her—but what could one say to her? ‘I’m in love with you?’ No, that was not true. ‘I’m in love with this all,” waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children. It was absurd, it was impossible” (32–33). Absurd and impossible as it may seem to Lily, the reader soon discerns that Lily is ambivalent in her attitude toward Mrs. Ramsay. As much as she can exult in the rapture of Mr. Bankes's “silent stare” of love for Mrs. Ramsay (74), as much as she considers Mrs. Ramsay “unquestionably the loveliest of people” (76), as much as Lily is attracted to her, Lily also recognizes that about Mrs. Ramsay there is a certain “highhandedness” (75), that “she was wilful; she was commanding” (76); and that “Mrs. Ramsay cared not a fig for her [Lily's] painting, or triumphs won by her, … an unmarried woman has missed the best of life” (77).

Her thoughts of Mrs. Ramsay's dominating ways are mixed with reminiscences of Mrs. Ramsay's obsession to control what she cannot comprehend, of an evening when Lily “had laid her head on Mrs. Ramsay's lap and laughed and laughed and laughed, laughed almost hysterically at the thought of Mrs. Ramsay presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand” (78). Yet for all of her acknowledgment of Mrs. Ramsay's faults, Lily is attracted to her physically, “sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs. Ramsay's knees, close as she could get” (78), and desires a more permanent union with her, one that will open the mind and heart of Mrs. Ramsay to Lily: “What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passage of the brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that would be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay's knee” (79).

Lily's attraction to Mrs. Ramsay raises once more the interest in the relationships possible between women shown by Mrs. Woolf and expressed in her diary where she writes: “If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure—the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it? Truthfully?”¹⁸ While Lily's expressed longing suggests Lesbian tendencies on her part, it is likewise true that the attraction and repulsion which she feels simultaneously, her desire for union accompanied by her recognition of Mrs. Ramsay's wilfullness, is not unlike Mr. Ramsay's response to his wife. Neither for Mr. Ramsay nor for Lily is that which they find beautiful and tempting what is best for them. While Mrs. Ramsay lives, while the desire to be sheltered in the cradle of Mrs. Ramsay's arms and warmth is sustained, Lily cannot finish her picture and Mr. Ramsay cannot reach “R.” This stifling attraction of Mrs. Ramsay, significantly enough, affects only those adults within the novel who are truly creative yet susceptible to Mrs. Ramsay—Lily and Mr. Ramsay. Charles Tansley is a pedant, Mr. Bankes doesn’t create, and Mr. Carmichael, who might come under her shadow, abhors and avoids the charms of Mrs. Ramsay. Both Lily and Mr. Ramsay overcome Mrs. Ramsay—Lily by completing her picture, even though Mrs. Ramsay never took her painting seriously, and Mr. Ramsay by reaching the lighthouse, a symbolic achievement of “R,” although Mrs. Ramsay had made her final pronouncement upon that subject prior to her death, “Yes, you were right. It’s going to be wet tomorrow. You won’t be able to go” (186).

Lily's picture provides the key to this, for Lily is painting a picture in which Mrs. Ramsay is one of the objects being painted. For the picture to be completed along Post-Impressionist lines, Mrs. Ramsay must become merely a part of the system of formal relations; and in order to accomplish this, Lily must overcome Mrs. Ramsay's ability to dominate her emotionally. By having Lily paint a Post-Impressionist picture, one in which she sacrifices nothing “of those formal relations to the arousing of emotions connected with the outer world,”¹⁹ Mrs. Woolf offers a means for understanding the significance which Mrs. Ramsay has for the other characters within the novel.

We begin to realize that Lily's picture is Post-Impressionist as she attempts to explain her picture to Mr. Bankes, to show him that the purple triangle represents Mrs. Ramsay and James, that “if there, in that corner, it was bright, here, in this, she felt the need of darkness” (81). She elaborates upon her disregard for human likeness, upon the idea that what is important is “relations of masses, … lights and shadows” (82). As Lily talks to Mr. Bankes, she attempts to rediscover her vision, “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” (82). She remembers the problem is connecting the “mass on the right hand with that on the left,” perhaps by “bringing the line of the branch across so; or break the vacancy in the foreground by an object” (83). But Lily does not want to break the unity as a whole. Lily's demonstration, her explanation, her concern with color, with shapes, with lines, masses, space, light and shadow arranged in the right relation, mark her as a Post-Impressionist. To emphasize this, Mrs. Woolf invents Pauncefort whose ideas Lily rejects, Pauncefort who sees “everything pale, elegant, semitransparent” (32), who sees things with the color “thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised” (75).

That evening during dinner Lily's picture becomes her means of escape from the dominance of Mrs. Ramsay; for although Mrs. Ramsay wills Lily to be nice to Charles Tansley, introducing and dropping tidbits of conversation, finally bringing them all together in serene relations with the lighting of the candles, Lily's mind and emotions are never completely integrated into the scene. Somehow she periodically escapes, planning and explaining her picture, using a sprig on the tablecloth to remind her, moving the salt cellar, until her picture becomes her means of avoiding Mrs. Ramsay's will asserting itself, attempting to force her to marry: “For at any rate, she said to herself, catching sight of the salt cellar on the pattern, she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution. She would move the tree rather more to the middle” (154).

When Lily returns ten years later, she is reminded of her picture as she sits once more in the same dining room, at the same table, amidst coffee cups, but without Mrs. Ramsay: “When she had sat there last ten years ago there had been a little sprig or leaf pattern on the tablecloth, which she had looked at in a moment of revelation. There had been a problem about a foreground of a picture. Move the tree to the middle, she had said. She had never finished that picture. It had been knocking about in her mind all these years” (220). Lily sets up her easel, recalls the problem of relations of masses, feels “she knew now what she wanted to do” (221). As she stands on the lawn, worrying about Mr. Ramsay “bearing down on her,” she remembers her arrival, recalls her feeling that “it was a house full of unrelated passions” (221). This is the day that those passions are to be related, as are the relations in Lily's picture.

Lily finds she is unable to paint with Mr. Ramsay around, with him begging for sympathy she cannot give. She takes her work seriously. “She hated playing at painting. A brush, the one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos—that one should not play with, knowingly even: she detested it” (224). When finally Lily has praised Mr. Ramsay's boots, when he has been appeased, and the Ramsays are ready to depart, Lily observes, “There was no helping Mr. Ramsay on the journey he was going” (230), and she confronts herself with her white canvas. She rethinks the problems of the “relations of those lines cutting across, slicing down, and in the mass of the hedge with its green cave of blues and browns, which had stayed in her mind” (234). These problems, indeed, have “tied a knot in her mind so that at odds and ends of time, involuntarily, as she walked along the Brompton Road, as she brushed her hair, she found herself painting that picture, passing her eye over it, and untying the knot in imagination” (234). With these reflections Mrs. Woolf has covered ten years, has unified the novel, linking “The Window” chapter with “The Lighthouse.” Lily worries over her first mark, knowing that “one line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions” (235). She makes her first mark; it runs; she makes another; and she find herself in the grasp of Fry's aesthetic emotion: “Here she was again, she thought, stepping back to look at it, 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” (236). She begins dipping her brush, moving it, as the rhythm of the creative vision takes over:

Then, as if some juice necessary for the lubrication of her faculties were spontaneously spirited, she began, … but it was now heavier and went slower, as if it had fallen in with some rhythm which was dictated to her (she kept looking at the hedge, at the canvas) by what she saw, so that while her hand quivered with life, this rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with it on its current. Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or not, her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modelled it with greens and blues.

(237–38)

Lily pauses, muses about Mrs. Ramsay, thinks of the “great revelation” that never comes and of Mrs. Ramsay's ability to make “of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)” (241). This is a revelation for Lily: “In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. ‘Mrs. Ramsay! … She owed it all to her,’” (241). At this moment Lily realizes that she, too, can create as did Mrs. Ramsay; that she, too, can make “of the moment something permanent.” At this point Lily becomes one with Mrs. Ramsay, is identified with Mrs. Ramsay as ten years before she had desired to be. Mrs. Ramsay is no longer the dominant figure in the relationship; they share a gift; only the results are different.

After Lily's great revelation, her work becomes easier for her:

Heaven be praised for it, the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses. … And she began to model her way into the hollow there. At the same time, she seemed to be sitting beside Mrs. Ramsay on the beach.

(255)

As Lily paints, she recalls the last September with the Ramsays, Mr. Bankes, the Rayleys, the failure of the Rayley marriage so carefully pushed by Mrs. Ramsay. And then, engulfed by emotions from the outer world, Lily encounters “some obstacle in her design” (260), and as she pauses, remembers Mrs. Ramsay always urging her to marry, the Rayleys to marry: “For a moment Lily, standing there, with the sun hot on her back, summing up the Rayleys, triumphed over Mrs. Ramsay, who would never know how Paul went to coffeehouses and had a mistress; … how she stood here painting, had never married, not even William Bankes” (260).

Lily has now not only identified herself with Mrs. Ramsay, but also she has triumphed over her. She recalls how, by gazing at the table cloth, she had barely escaped Mrs. Ramsay's insistence that she marry William Bankes. She thinks of her friendship with William Bankes, then of how William responded to Mrs. Ramsay's beauty, and then of Mrs. Ramsay's beauty generally. Gradually she finds herself “half out of the picture, looking, a little dazedly, as if at unreal things, at Mr. Carmichael” (265). Wondering what it all means, these thoughts and emotions about Mrs. Ramsay, “the whole world seemed to have dissolved in this early morning hour into a pool of thought, a deep basin of reality” (266). Looking at her picture she thinks that if Mr. Carmichael would talk to her, would answer her unanswered questions, that he would say “how ‘you’ and ‘I’ and ‘she’ pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint” (267). Lily's pain, her desire for Mrs. Ramsay, begin to subside; she recalls the visions of Mrs. Ramsay which kept recurring for days after Mrs. Ramsay's death, so that “wherever she happened to be, painting, here, in the country or in London, the vision would come to her, and her eyes, half closing, sought something to base her vision on” (270). Then “moved as she was by some instinctive need of distance and blue” (270), Lily looks out and sees the boat. She looks again, and then again, and she thinks about how “so much depends … upon distance: whether people are near us or far from us” (284). She surmises that the Ramsays will arrive at the lighthouse at lunch time, and then looks again at her picture: “There was something perhaps wrong with the design? Was it, she wondered, that the line of the wall wanted breaking, was it that the mass of the trees was too heavy?” (287) Trying to understand what is wrong, she realizes that it “evaded her when she thought of Mrs. Ramsay. … Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything” (287). Lily sits down; she rests; she looks at Mr. Carmichael and she thinks that one way to know people is “to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather” (289). Then she remembers Mrs. Ramsay, that Mr. Carmichael never liked her, how “half one's notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one's own” (293). And then she thinks again of Mrs. Ramsay, of the repetition of the life of the Ramsays, how they would quarrel and then come back together, how Mrs. Ramsay would smooth things over. While Lily thinks, recalls, she continues to gaze at the window: “One must keep on looking without for a second relaxing the intensity of emotion, the determination not to be put off, not to be bamboozled. One must hold the scene—so—in a vise and let nothing come in and spoil it. One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on the level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy” (299–300).

Something happens at the window, something white waves while Lily looks: “‘Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!’ she cried, feeling the old horror come back—to want and want and not to have. Could she inflict that still? And then, quietly, as if she refrained, that too became part of ordinary experience, was on a level with the chair, with the table” (300). Mrs. Ramsay has lost her dominance over Lily. Lily looks out over the water for the boat, for Mr. Ramsay. “She wanted him” (300).

Looking out toward the lighthouse which is almost invisible, Lily feels “suddenly completely tired out” (308), and surmises that Mr. Ramsay has reached his destination: “Ah, but she was relieved. Whatever she had wanted to give him, when he left her that morning, she had given him at last” (308–309). Mr. Carmichael, who never liked Mrs. Ramsay, gets up, joins her in looking out over the water, and she realizes he has shared her thoughts the whole morning: “He stood there as if he were spreading his hands over all the weakness and suffering of mankind; she thought he was surveying, tolerantly and compassionately, their final destiny. Now he has crowned the occasion, she thought, when his hand slowly fell, as if she had seen him let fall from his great height a wreath of violets and asphodels which, fluttering slowly, lay at length upon the earth” (309). Lily remembers her picture, its lines, its colors, and she looks again at the steps which are now empty. “With a sudden intensity as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision” (310).

At last, Mrs. Woolf is saying, the proper relations have been achieved. Lily has spent her morning on the lawn slaying the ghost of Mrs. Ramsay, dissecting it, analyzing it, realizing at one time that she too can create like Mrs. Ramsay, can make a moment permanent through her art; realizing at another time that Mrs. Ramsay's will was often misdirected, as with the Rayleys, that in her escape from that will, Lily has triumphed. Lily has struggled, Lily has wrestled, Lily has wept, and finally Mrs. Ramsay has lost her dominance; Mrs. Ramsay has become like all other objects, and Lily can now grasp the formal relations in her picture. One of the masses, the dark triangle, the wedge of darkness with which Mrs. Ramsay identifies herself, is no longer bound up with emotions outside the formal relations of the picture. Lily has overcome these emotions and can finish her picture. Mrs. Ramsay, who could not really take Lily's painting seriously, no longer controls Lily. This is what Lily has given Mr. Ramsay.

With his new freedom Mr. Ramsay no longer needs the kind of sympathy Mrs. Ramsay gave him; Mr. Ramsay can reach the lighthouse on his own, in spite of Mrs. Ramsay's last word on the subject. Mr. Ramsay no longer needs to be coddled and cajoled, to be humored and made to think he is the master of the family, that his tyranny is real. The Mr. Ramsay who arrives at the lighthouse truly is the master of the family; he knows it; his children know it. Assertive, controlling the situation, he will now be able to get beyond “Q.” Sensing this, James can overcome his Oedipal hatred and begin to identify himself with his father, and Cam can look at her father with open respect from the perspective of a young girl in whom her mother's sympathy is balanced by her father's reason. The relations of the family have been properly adjusted, the emotions have been re-arranged and placed in order; and Lily on the lawn, having at last achieved a right relationship with Mrs. Ramsay, and knowing that Mr. Ramsay, in reaching the lighthouse, has attained a similar achievement, can finish her painting, has had her vision.

Notes

1. Trans. Jean Stewart (London, 1965), p. 253.

2. Glenn Pedersen, “Vision in To the Lighthouse,” PMLA, LXXIII (December 1958), 585-600.

3. John Hawley Roberts, “‘Vision and Design’ in Virginia Woolf,” PMLA, LXI (September 1946), 835-47.

4. Guiguet, p. 31.

5. See Douglas Cooper, The Courtauld Collection, A Catalogue and Introduction (London, 1954), p. 52.

6. They have been well summarized chronologically in Solomen Fishman's The Interpretation of Art (Berkeley, 1963), pp. 101-42, and considered analytically in my unpublished doctoral dissertation, “The Fact and the Vision: Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist Aesthetic” (University of Michigan, 1967).

7. This is Fry's “creative vision” which he describes in detail in “The Artist's Vision,” Vision and Design (London, 1923), pp. 51-52.

8. Fry distinguishes between the aesthetic experience and everyday experience in “An Essay in Aesthetics,” Vision and Design, p. 18.

9. The term “aesthetic emotion” is first defined and used by Clive Bell in Art (New York, 1913), pp. 6-7. Fry uses it interchangeably with “aesthetic state of mind” to distinguish the response which one experiences before works of art from our “mental attitude in other experiences.” See Roger Fry, “Some Questions in Esthetics,” Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art (London, 1926), pp. 1-2.

10. Fry borrows the term “idea” from Flaubert and uses it in his attempt to define “significant form”:

    I think we are all agreed that we mean by significant form something other than agreeable arrangements of form, harmonious patterns, and the like. We feel that a work which possesses it is the outcome of an endeavour to express an idea rather than to create a pleasing object. Personally, at least, I always feel that it implies the effort on the part of the artist to bend to our emotional understanding by means of his passionate conviction some intractable material which is alien to our spirit.

    I seem unable at present to get beyond this vague adumbration of the nature of significant form. Flaubert's ‘expression of the idea’ seems to me to correspond exactly to what I mean, but, alas! he never explained, and probably could not, what he meant by the ‘ideas.’ (“Retrospect,” Vision and Design, p. 302)

11. See Roger Fry, Last Lectures (Boston, 1962), pp. 27-28.

12. Fry, “The Artist's Vision,” Vision and Design, pp. 51-52.

13. The seriousness with which Virginia Woolf regarded Roger Fry's criticism and her devotion to him as a personal friend are expressed in her A Writer's Diary (London, 1959), pp. 27, 32, 33, 104, 148, 176-77, 223-25, 233, 235, 262, 303, 311, 325-26, 339.

14. In the “Preface” to Orlando, written the year after To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf asserts that “to the unrivalled sympathy and imagination of Mr. Roger Fry I owe whatever understanding of the art of painting I may possess.” Orlando: A Biography (New York, 1928), p. vii. She makes a similar expression of her indebtedness to him in “Roger Fry,” The Moment and Other Essays (London, 1964), p. 83.

15. Guiguet, p. 31.

16. Roger Fry, Cézanne: A Study of His Development (New York, 1958), pp. 58-59.

17. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York, 1927), p. 29. All page references to this novel in the text will hereafter appear in parenthetic numerals.

18. A Writer's Diary, p. 69. Mrs. Woolf's interest in Lesbianism has been treated by Ruth Gruber in Virginia Woolf: A Study (Leipzig, 1935). Quoted by Irma Rantavaara, Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury (Helsinki, 1953), p. 148. Guiguet also deals with this in Virginia Woolf and Her Works, pp. 257-59.

19. Roger Fry, The Artist and Psychoanalysis, The Hogarth Essays, II (London, 1924), p. 9.