Student Question
What is the relationship between life and art in To The Lighthouse?
Quick answer:
In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf examines the relationship between life and art through Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. Mrs. Ramsay, though not formally an artist, arranges her life and social gatherings artistically, creating beauty in everyday moments. Lily Briscoe, a painter, uses art to understand and connect with others, despite doubts about her work's value. Woolf highlights how even "ordinary" women create meaningful art from their lives.
Woolf explores the relationship between life and art in womens' lives In To the Lighthouse through the consciousnesses of Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. While Mrs. Ramsay is a housewife who nobody in her culture would think of as an artist, Woolf is at pains to show that she arranges her life as an artist would a work of art. She doesn't just host people at her summer home but tries to arrange her guests artistically. Art infuses her sensibilities, as when she quotes to herself lines from the poem "Luriana Lurilee":
Come out and climb the garden path, Luriana Lurilee. The China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the yellow bee.
This sense of the aesthetic, of a desire to surround life with beauty, especially suffuses the dinner scene in the first part of the novel, from the carefully assembled centerpiece with its Neptune and bananas, to Mrs....
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Ramsay's orchestrating the conversation around the table as if she's conducting an orchestra.
Lily Briscoe is actually an artist, a painter, though she has to put aside the doubts that dog her that she is just playing and that her work will end rolled away under a sofa. Yet, significantly, she persists. For her, art is a way of trying to understand other people, even if in a highly flawed way, and of establishing a connection with them and with the past. She thinks as she paints that the narrative she has constructed is wrong, but nevertheless it creates a relationship:
Not a word of it was true; she had made it up; but it was what she knew them by all the same. She went on tunnelling her way into her picture, into the past.
Woolf attempts to show that even "ordinary" women create art out of their lives and that this is valuable. Lily is fortunate in living in a time when she can pursue her art openly and doesn't have to marry, unlike the very Victorian Mrs. Ramsay.