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

James's gendered tendency to cut out and separate and even further to react with violence to the severity of his father's judgments contrasts with Mrs. Ramsay's knitting of a stocking and her mediating role in blunting the edge of James's pain and his father's authority. Mrs. Ramsay is knitting the stocking for the lighthouse keeper's little boy, who is threatened with a tuberculous hip. She brings things together in giving the distant family whatever was "lying about" and "littering the room," "whatever comforts one can." As she knits, bringing the threads together, she imagines the dreary life of the lighthouse keeper's family. While her depiction reveals her class's distance from such a family, her activity of knitting nevertheless brings her portrait of them near, and it is important to observe how Woolf metonymically connects this question of class with the question of reaching the lighthouse. Mrs. Ramsay "admires" the refrigerator James has cut out and encourages James's labor by turning the pages "of the stores list in the hope that she might come upon something like a rake, or a mowing-machine, which, with its prongs and its handles, would need the greatest skill in cutting out" (15). The pictures of sharp commodities available for James to cut out of the Army and Navy catalogue suggestively limit Mrs. Ramsay's attempt to smooth a tendentious and delineated situation. Trapped within the implied male boundaries of the military, the academy, and a commodity culture, Mrs. Ramsay's judgments are limited by what there is to see and hear around her. "Looking down at the book on her knee," she "found the picture of a pocket knife with six blades which could only be cut out if James was very careful" (16). These sharp, catalogued commodities incur a cost to the working class cut off from this leisured consumerism: while walking, Mrs. Ramsay sees a man whose "left arm had been cut off in a reaping machine two years ago" posting an advertisement for a circus (11).

The implicit violence of a child's activity within this late Victorian domestic scene is further emphasized:

Suddenly a loud cry, as of a sleep-walker, half roused, something about

Stormed at with shot and shell

sung out with the utmost intensity in her ear, made her turn apprehensively to see if any one heard him. Only Lily Briscoe, she was glad to find; and that did not matter. But the sight of the girl standing on the edge of the lawn painting reminded her; she was supposed to be keeping her head as much in the same position as possible for Lily's picture. Lily's picture! Mrs. Ramsay smiled. With her little Chinese eyes and her puckered-up face, she would never marry; one could not take her painting very seriously; she was an independent little creature, and Mrs. Ramsay liked her for it; so, remembering her promise, she bent her head. (17)

Mrs. Ramsay judges that Lily's judgments do not matter from her position on the edge of this domestic scene; she is an independent woman on the edge of the Victorian frame.(3) The inconsequence of Lily's views is like the inconsequence of her art to Mrs. Ramsay, who feels somewhat dismissive of Lily's judgment possibly due to her own need not to examine the personal and domestic limits that Lily's personal frame reveals. In contrast to Mrs. Ramsay's comfortable judgment of Lily's gaze, Lily is aware of her frame's limits and is threatened by them: "Even while she looked at the mass, at the line, at the colour, at Mrs. Ramsay sitting in the window with James, she kept a feeler on her surroundings lest some one should creep up, and suddenly she should find her picture looked at" (17). Lily is able to see, outside the naturalized patriarchal frame, what the Ramsays cannot see from within: her own relation to that frame and its arbitrariness. Considering the kitchen table that she thinks Mr. Ramsay contemplates, Lily ponders, "Naturally, if one's days were passed in this seeing of angular essences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table (and it was a mark of the finest minds so to do), naturally one could not be judged like an ordinary person" (23). Within Woolf's framing parentheses, we sense how Lily's judgment is merely framed by an ironically imported and predetermined assumption about "fine" minds.