Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all around them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to an especially tender piece of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change . . . so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.
There’s the phrase that had such an impact on me—“the thing is made that endures.” Because Mrs. Ramsay “makes” such moments, I have called her an artist. But, of course, if an artist is ultimately someone who creates artwork, that she is not—this woman whom marriage and motherhood have absorbed so entirely that it’s hard even to imagine what she might have been or done, had she not become Mrs. Ramsay. The actual working artist of the novel is Lily Briscoe struggling to complete her painting, a character completely without glamour and to me perhaps most interesting for that reason.
Like Tonio Kröger, like Stephen Daedalus, Lily Briscoe is more onlooker than participant in life’s feast. She compares the act of painting to “walking . . . out and out, . . . further and further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone over the sea.” This image reminds me of Stephen in Portrait, walking out of the city and seeing the wading girl on the beach, whom he takes as his muse and inspiration when he decides to devote himself to art and beauty. To paint, whether she paints well or badly, Lily must remain apart.
But Lily Briscoe is not just an artist; she’s also a woman, and an “odd” one at that—the spinster with her Chinese eyes and puckered-up face, “keeping house for her father off the Brompton Road.” Mrs. Ramsay views her with some pity and thinks she should marry the widowed William Bankes. We as readers know she probably shouldn’t since her friendship with him is described as “without any sexual feeling.” Yet Lily doesn’t escape the marriage plot for anything grand. We don’t see her opting for “silence, exile, and cunning” or pronouncing herself the great artificer of her race. Rather, as she catches sight of the salt cellar on the patterned table cloth at dinner, she thinks, “at any rate . . . she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution. She would move the tree [in her painting] rather more to the middle.”
Both as a woman and as an artist Lily’s ambitions appear modest. She returns to the Ramsay summer house after the war, ten years older and seeming, to Mr. Ramsay, “to have shriveled slightly.” She is terrified of the demands the bereft widower will make of her as the only adult woman at hand, and she is uncertain, as well, about the enduring value of her art—“it would be hung in attics, she thought.” But she is still the frail vessel chosen by Virginia Woolf to penetrate to the heart of things and have a “vision.”
I ask why Virginia Woolf didn’t choose a grander figure for this task. Perhaps she needed to contain Lily Briscoe in order to keep Mrs. Ramsay at the heart of the novel. No one looks longingly at Lily Briscoe; no one is mesmerized by her presence. Lily serves not to rival Mrs. Ramsay but to see, love, and paint her. Or rather, in keeping with the tenets of Woolf’s art critic friend Roger Fry, to paint a “significant form” created by a relation of parts, one of which is the figure of Mrs. Ramsay. And why not make her a bolder artist? I think Lily dramatizes the difficulty and uncertainty of being any artist at all and especially of being a woman artist. Her painting, she feels “would never be seen, never be hung even, and there was Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear, ‘Women can’t paint, women can’t write.’” Lily struggles against great odds to hold her ground—figuratively and even literally—as men bear down upon her.
It’s hard for me, raised by a mother who had little time for doubts, or whose reflex in the face of them was always to charge full steam ahead, to yield myself as a reader to Lily’s lacks and insecurities. In a way I’m back to the kind of choice I set up between Becky Sharp and Jane Eyre, between defying constrictions and feeling their pain. And Lily is constricted not just as a spinster and a woman artist unsupported by the culture, but also as a woman silently in love with another woman. Though “in love with them all, in love with this world,” her especial object of desire is Mrs. Ramsay.
Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on tablets, nothing that could 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.
It’s not surprising that critics and writers of the last twenty or so years have reclaimed Lily Briscoe as a lesbian, part of the interest in seeing Woolf as one and exploring the extent to which her Sapphic life imbues her fiction. I think this is important work, especially given the powerful resistance it has met with and continues to encounter. If I
