The housemaid and the kitchen table: incorporating the frame in 'To the Lighthouse.' - book by Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1994 by William R. Handley

One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth. Down there I cant write or read; I exist however. I am. Then I ask myself what I am? . . .

It is not oneself but something in the universe that one's left with. . . . One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none I think. . . . I used to feel this as a child--couldn't step across a puddle once I remember, for thinking, how strange--what am I &c. But by writing I don't reach anything.

(Virginia Woolf, Diary 3: 112-13)

The story is that Thales, while occupied in studying the heavens above and looking up, fell into a well. A good-looking and whimsical maid from Thrace laughed at him and told him that while he might passionately want to know all things in the universe, the things in front of his very nose and feet were unseen by him. This jest also fits all those who become involved in philosophy.

(Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 3)

In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse James Ramsay tries to illustrate his father's philosophical concerns about "subject, object, and the nature of reality" for the artist Lily Briscoe: "'Think of a kitchen table then,' he told her, 'when you're not there'" (23). Lily imagines that "thinking, night after night . . . about the reality of kitchen tables" makes Mr. Ramsay's face what it is (154). It would seem that Woolf, like Plato's maid in Heidegger's transcription, is laughing in To the Lighthouse at Mr. Ramsay as a philosopher who cannot see the objects in front of him, paradoxically including his wife, who, although she is a being and not a thing, is often perceived more in her "objective" beauty than as a subject. To Mrs. Ramsay her husband sometimes seemed as if he were "born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle's. . . . But did he notice the flowers? No. . . . Did he even notice . . . whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef? He would sit at a table with them like a person in a dream" (70). Woolf and Lily want to incorporate what Mr. Ramsay's view leaves out, yet they are each in the position both of Plato's maid and of the philosopher, laughing at the blindly judgmental subject-object philosopher but in danger of falling into that well in their comparable attempts to know and represent the whole "truth" of things or people, burdened by their frames' limits and not blessed with fifty eyes.

While Woolf's eagle eye looks energetically in "Time Passes" at things in the Ramsay household when no one is there--things that no human being can know in their "thingness"--her eye seems weak in this section when she looks at working-class women, ordinary people whom Woolf often seems as deaf and blind to as Mr. Ramsay is to the food on his plate. Though we are not given to see it, the Great War, like Mrs. Ramsay's death, also slices through this section, disrupting briefly but starkly the ruminative flow of some of Woolf's most poetic writing. Given that Woolf's universe is insistently relational, "Time Passes," and the first and last sections that it bridges, pointedly challenge the reader to weave together Woolf's philosophy, art, and politics, especially since that section disturbingly does not represent what are for the novel's domestic narrative as for Woolf's life arguably its most significant events: the death of the mother and the Great War. Yet through her mourning of Mrs. Ramsay and her attempt to represent and incorporate Mrs. Ramsay's presence as well as her absence, Lily encounters things that remain from Mrs. Ramsay's life, things through which Lily approaches the problem of the thing itself. The thing-in-itself knows no frame and cannot be incorporated into any social, aesthetic, political, or at all human perceptual context without losing its "thingness." For this reason, paradoxically, the philosophical problem of the thing itself--bottomless though it is--provides a sufficiently broad frame through which to interpret the relationships among Woolf's contexts and concerns in To the Lighthouse.

By reading Woolf's economic distance from the servant Mrs. McNab in the light of her aesthetic struggle, like Lily's, to get near to "the thing itself," this paper argues that these two epistemological gulfs are related in Woolf's novel through the problem of the frame or of judgment. The frame helps us to interpret not only the relation between these economic and philosophical gulfs, but also their relation to the problem of violence and war. While the cognitive or aesthetic operation of framing and the act of war are obviously not the same, they exist for Woolf on a continuum made logical and compelling by the assumption that one's view can be universalized, a view that Woolf's art reveals as a false, distorting, and potentially violent construct.(1) Throughout her work, especially after Jacob's Room, Woolf is suspicious of all forms of objectification, especially of the manner in which human subjects frame other subjects as objects for political ends. These epistemological and political problems are frequently organized and dramatized in Woolf's work around point of view. To the Lighthouse attempts to incorporate disparate aspects of human existence -- from the politics of class and gender to phenomenology -- within a vast, nontotalizing weave of alternating points of view, a textual economy of incorporating and incorporated frames. By framing the act of framing, and by creating a dialogue among various frames of judgment or perception, Woolf aims to deconstruct traditional and presumptively natural or universally determining frames, be they social or aesthetic. Only by revealing these frames as reifications of relative, nonuniversal presumptions, her novel suggests, can a society begin to approach the problem of war. Throughout her life's work, Woolf wants to reveal constructively and optimistically what war reveals destructively and negatively: the mutability of the socially and politically given. She does so by calling into question, through her alternating and mutually determining points of view, any perspective that excludes an awareness of the exclusion inherent in the incorporating operation of its own frame. While Lily's desire to approach the thing itself is like Mr. Ramsay's philosophical concern, Lily, unlike Mr. Ramsay, is aware of the limits of her own eyes. Minta's song, "Damn your eyes," suggests the precariously enabled limit of any one person's judgment: the other's gaze.