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

The German word for judgment, Urteil, suggests partitioning, a separation of a part from the whole. Pervading To the Lighthouse are individual acts and literary figures of cutting one thing off from another, of framing and partitioning. In a novel in which the sentences range from the eerily isolated and bracketed to the long, inclusive, flowing sentences of much of her style, Woolf frames the problem of the part's relation to the whole, of judgment's relation to partitioning and sense-making. She does so within a tripartite structure: "The Window" (itself a framing device), "Time Passes" (that which unravels the spatially frozen, immobilizing quality of the frame), and "The Lighthouse" (the thing which our subjective positions in space and time can only approach but never reach, can judge indeterminately but never know). The novel opens with a judgment about the question that has already been asked as to whether James Ramsay will get to the lighthouse: "'Yes, . . . if it's fine tomorrow,' said Mrs. Ramsay" (3). This assessment, in turn, is contradicted by Mr. Ramsay: "'But,' said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, 'it won't be fine'" (4). Pronounced within the immobilizing frame of a "drawing"-room window, Mr. Ramsay's firm judgment cuts James off from easy optimism and divides him. (Similarly, Cam later fears that her father might "say something sharp" [187]). The "extreme emotions" that Mr. Ramsay excites in his children cause a sharp reaction in James: "Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it" (4). James's response to his father's implacable point of view is to take a sharp object and freeze him "there and then," in that drawing-room window, in the position in space and time that fixes his own view. Mr. Ramsay stands "lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one . . . with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement. What he said was true. It was always true" (4). Framed by the window, however, Mr. Ramsay is a man whose judgments are not immutable and transcendent but arbitrary and incipiently violent.

Previous to Mr. Ramsay's judgment, his son is seen "cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores," including one of a refrigerator (3). Belonging "to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that," James endows this picture, framed by Woolf's syntax and his mother's optimism, "with heavenly bliss." Woolf writes that "to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests" (3). Framed by two very long sentences in one paragraph, one short sentence states that, as a result, the picture "was fringed with joy" (3). Lacking sharply delineated borders, the "yes" is incapable of settling the matter. James attempts to cut the refrigerator -- a domestic commodity -- out from a military context that foreshadows how his brother's life will be cut off in the Great War; Woolf's novel suggests, in contrast, that the domestic frame is inseparable from public acts and the furthest extremes of violence. James's mother sees him as a judge with his "stark and uncompromising severity" as he guides his scissors "neatly round the refrigerator" and she "imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs" (4). Mrs. Ramsay's representation of her son as a judge suggests a gendering of judgment as an essentially masculine, public enterprise cut off from the private, domestic world of women; yet, by bringing such an image together with the young boy before her Mrs. Ramsay enacts the intimate relationship between the private and the public, divided realms that Woolf's art insistently brings together within a common frame.