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

Woolf's work of incorporating the memory of her mother in order to lay it to rest, of making it extrinsic to herself by making it intrinsic to her art, involves a sacrificial violence witnessed at Mrs. Ramsay's dinner. Lily feels Mrs. Ramsay "somehow laughed, led her victims [Paul and Minta] to the altar" (101) of marriage that she worships and to the altar of the dinner table itself. The Boeuf en Daube dinner is Mrs. Ramsay's attempt, both metaphorically and literally, to have everyone incorporate and reproduce the frame of her own life, especially by "framing" Paul and Minta into marrying. Given that eating is the most graphic sign of incorporation, Woolf's framing of a world within the parameters of a dinner table is one of the novel's most compelling achievements. The frame eats, one could say, at the thingness of the thing; it violates, digests, assimilates, and interiorizes it. Depending on which stage of the eating process is framed, the eaten or incorporated thing transverses every category of being and disrupts the philosopher's subject-object dyad. Mr. Ramsay cannot talk about or even see the food on the table that he contemplates -- although, as Leslie Stephen's biographer points out, Mr. Ramsay flings a bowl through the window at breakfast when he notices there is an earwig in the milk (Annan 126). Whereas Mrs. Ramsay wants others to incorporate her frame through reproduction, Mr. Ramsay cannot stomach any consumption but his own. Old Augustus asks for another bowl of soup at the dinner table and Mr. Ramsay signals to his wife that "it was unthinkable, destestable . . . he loathed people eating when he had finished. She saw his anger fly like a pack of hounds into his eyes, his brow, and she knew that in a moment something violent would explode" (95). Mr. Ramsay's violent repulsion toward particular acts of incorporation and toward eating beings is nevertheless inevitably a desire to include those other subjects only by devouring them as objects. In "The Lighthouse" Lily thinks that "now he had nobody to talk to about that table . . . and he was like a lion seeking whom he could devour" (156).

The naturalized frames of domesticity and social arrangement efface their own incorporating economies and determinations. Though their violence can seem naturally ever-inclusive in "Time Passes," both nature and culture in that section ultimately swallow, devour, and violate the boundaries of the home. Woolf suggests the effective limits of this desire to coerce or even devour other beings through Lily's impossible mourning of Mrs. Ramsay, a mourning that would seek to violate both nature and the culturally produced distance between the name and the named. Lily imagines that if she and Mr. Carmichael demanded aloud why life is so short and "said it with violence . . . then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. 'Mrs. Ramsay!' she said aloud, 'Mrs. Ramsay!'" But no one, nothing answers; "nothing happened" (180). By calling the dead, by encountering nobody and nothing, Lily fills her mouth with the words that name the absence she mourns; the name in her mouth suggests her desire to incorporate Mrs. Ramsay. The impossible and violent call finds no answer in the intractability of things that make the call possible, that free the name as a name, severed from that which it insufficiently represents even when its referent is living. The call is as insufficient a means to incorporate the mourned and named as the name is insufficient to the being it marks. Yet the name and the call make possible the work of mourning and the labor of Woolf's art. Woolf denaturalizes rather than effaces the basic frame of her own art: language. The name that lacks what it names, like mourning itself, is both necessary and yet impossible in its task of signification.