To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again! Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! She called out silently to that essence which sat by the boat, that abstract one made of her, that woman in grey, as if to abuse her for having gone, and then having gone, come back again. . . . Suddenly the empty drawing-room steps, the frill of the chair inside, the puppy tumbling on the terrace, the whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques flourishing round a center of complete emptiness.
That Lily, experiencing all this pain, can persevere and make art out of her yearning is really quite extraordinary. It brings me back to the importance in my own life of pushing on with work but also to the way that work can relieve pain when it carries you out of yourself to receive the gift of inspiration. One thing, interestingly, that helps Lily in this process is the way her concentration relieves her of the shackles of gender. There’s a telling moment in Part I when she allows William Bankes to look at her unfinished painting and Woolf describes how
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 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.
So many words intervene between “becoming” and “her picture” that the reader might easily miss the astonishing assertion that Lily becomes her picture. Yes, Lily becomes her picture, and to do this she goes beyond gender, just as Mrs. Ramsay does in merging with the lighthouse beam.
I think I understand this state of being. Intense concentration has never seemed gendered to me. I never think I’m female when, say, writing a thesis or playing a match of tennis. Even loving people, though expressed through a gendered body, seems to me to dissolve gender’s bounds. If Lily Briscoe is less magnetic than Mrs. Ramsay, it’s because there is nothing alluring about her as a woman. But Lily’s androgynous sensibility grows more interesting the closer attention one pays to it. When she returns to her painting in “The Lighthouse,” again she loses consciousness of “outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael, the poet sleeping on the lawn, was there or not” as her mind from its depths throws up images and memories “like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space while she modeled it with greens and blues.” Yes, Mrs. Ramsay seems crushingly gone. But then she imagines what Mr. Carmichael might say: “How ‘you’ and ‘I’ and ‘she’ pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes, but not words, not paint.” And if the painting itself—“this scrawl,” Lily calls it—might “be hung in attics,” it’s “what it attempted” that “remain[s] forever.” To paint, though, she must leave all vestiges of safety behind. It’s not enough to be metaphorically on a plank overlooking the sea. She must “step off her strip of board into the waters of annihilation” or “leap from the pinnacle of a tower.” And she must also incorporate both genders into her psyche. Imagining what the impenetrable Mr. Carmichael would say about art is as if he and she are making a joint statement.
Then connecting with Mr. Ramsay must happen, too. She is able to finish the painting not merely because someone inside the house throws “an added shaped triangular shadow over the steps” that brings the composition back to more of its original mood in which a triangle represented Mrs. Ramsay reading to James; it’s also necessary to achieve a “razor edge of balance” between the picture and Mr. Ramsay, whom she imagines arriving in his boat with James and Cam at the lighthouse and opens her heart to him. Only then can she turn back to the painting and draw the final line in its center. She completes the painting only when she has drawn both Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay into herself—male and female, mother and father, the man and the woman getting into the cab of the self.
I admire Lily’s achievement all the more because of how hard it has been for me to keep always in sight that Mr. Ramsay goes with Mrs. Ramsay. I never had a father who went with a mother, and I have spent my adult life ricocheting between men and women in my attachments, struggling to achieve a “razor edge of balance” between gendered forces but deeply craving a vision in which these seeming opposites can be reconciled. Lily Briscoe,
