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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
What does it mean, in the first place, to make a portrait, to frame someone? Until she wrote To the Lighthouse, Woolf was "obsessed" by the presence of her mother, who had died thirty-three years earlier. She wrote the book "very quickly; and when it was written," she writes in "A Sketch of the Past," "I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her" (Moments 81). As a family portrait, Woolf's novel had an astonishing impact on her sister, Vanessa Bell. Whereas the novel "laid . . . to rest" Virginia's feelings about her mother, Vanessa wrote to her sister that, although she felt herself "more incapable than anyone else in the world of making an aesthetic judgment on it,"
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you have given a portrait of mother which is more like her to me than anything I could ever have conceived of as possible. It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead. You have made one feel the extraordinary beauty of her character, which must be the most difficult thing in the world to do. It was like meeting her again with oneself grown up and on equal terms and it seems to me the most astonishing feat of creation to have been able to see her in such a way. You have given father too I think as clearly but perhaps, I may be wrong, that isn't quite so difficult. There is more to catch hold of. Still it seems to me to be the only thing about him which ever gave a true idea. So you see as far as portrait painting goes you seem to me to be a supreme artist and it is so shattering to find oneself face to face with those two again that I can hardly consider anything else. (Woolf, Letters 3:572.)
Between the two sisters' responses to this novel, their mother is both laid to rest and raised from the dead; the portrait puts Julia Stephen both near and far from the viewers. While Vanessa is face to face with her mother, Virginia no longer sees her. In both cases, the experience is dis-integrating for either the viewer or the viewed; Vanessa's self is not whole but shattered, and the presence of Julia Stephen is for Woolf dispelled through the integration of her art. To paint a portrait is to be a judge, to account for a whole of a life by separating and combining its parts. A life is arguably most "whole" and able to be brought nearest in that wholeness once it has been completed and framed by death.
The novel's title suggests this attempt to overcome the distance of time or space, to reach that thing called the lighthouse that is both near and far at the novel's end. Many characters seem both near and far from the mark in the novel, which is framed by delineating judgments about whether distance will be or has been overcome: specifically, the Ramsay parents' contradictory evaluations as to whether James will get to the lighthouse and Lily's declaration that her painting is finished. The journey to the lighthouse is also an attempt to overcome the gulf of class between the Ramsays and the Macalisters. Other attempts to overcome distance include Lily's desire to feel one with Mrs. Ramsay and to capture her in her painting, Mr. Ramsay's impossible quest for R in his struggle to understand that distant kitchen table when no one is there, Mrs. Ramsay's attempts to ease the uncomfortable gulf of class, James's desire to reach the lighthouse, and Woolf's own attempt to bring her parents near within an artistic representation made possible by the distance of time. Each attempt to overcome distance involves the cognitive operation of judgment that both separates and brings together things in order to create a whole. Yet all these philosophical, political, and artistic quests prove as futile as they are necessary, just as, paradoxically, Woolf's own aesthetic project brings her parents into sharp focus for her sister but dispels their ghosts for herself.
