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

How can we know or represent the "truth" of something not only if we are subjectively positioned in space and time, but if the social frame we want to criticize or evaluate is the one that determines the limits of our vision? Such determinations may only speak about our frames, not about the thing itself that is framed. While Woolf criticizes Mr. Ramsay's presumption to know and to judge others, the cognitive operation of judgment is still involved in such a critique; indeed, it stands under Woolf's project of understanding and portraying her parents. As Lily wonders, "How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking? And to those words, what meaning attached, after all?" (24).(2) Woolf's novel examines the cognitive and aesthetic operations that obscure as much as they illuminate people, objects, and things, and reveals the limits of aesthetic representation in allowing a reader or viewer to see things that do not depend for their existence on frames that express only "our" truth about "that" thing or "this" person. Our distance from everything and everyone else is what we seek to overcome when we attempt to know things or people outside ourselves. But, as the kitchen table in Lily's mind illustrates, whenever we bring something into our understanding, we have objectified it within subject-object relations. Lily paradoxically paints within delineated borders in order to approach the thing itself, the oldest problem of philosophy because the thing eludes all subjective, human frames, and for that reason, as Heidegger observes, it is also the problem with which philosophy cannot get started: the instant we try to "make" something of the thing itself, we have deformed or misrepresented the thing that cannot be represented or known in its thingness. In Kantian terms, it is no longer the thing-in-itself but the thing-for-us.

To the Lighthouse frames the act of framing by distinguishing between the portrait and the act or process of portraiture itself. Uniquely in her work, Woolf partitions her novel into three named sections, the first of which, "The Window," acts as a frame that through the passing of time approaches "The Lighthouse." Her table of contents serves to bring the novel's frames to the attention of the reader before the novel begins. Any frame or judgment that does not incorporate a vision of its own limits and that, in its blindness, presumes universality or becomes institutionalized, risks presuming that "reality" must inevitably and invariably reflect the frame's artful violence. Woolf's argument with the Edwardian realists is that they presume, with no acknowledgment of their limitations, that they have given us "reality" by looking in from the outside, failing to examine the subject-object relation that constructs the nature of that reality. By reversing the direction of vision, as Erich Auerbach has observed, Woolf's alternative realism deconstructs the internal/external border and reveals how the frame constructs, rather than records, "external" reality (525-53). While one can, on the one hand, discuss the politics within Woolf's domestic portrait and on the other hand the novel's mimetic implications, this paper examines the politics of seeing, of separating parts and making a whole, that occurs in the process of framing that is neither external nor internal to the object of the artist's eye but rather constitutive of the artist's work, that allows the work to "take place." That which externally makes such judgments possible may also blind us to their effective limits if we presume them to be natural to the thing within the frame.