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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
Moments of apparent transcendence in Woolf's work are always provisional and momentary, unlike the reified, unifying, and universally enforced values and truth claims in the world she represents. At the novel's end, James and Cam are with their father years later in a boat approaching the lighthouse. Mr. Ramsay "sat and looked at the island," Woolf writes, "and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone, or he might be thinking, I have reached it. I have found it; but he said nothing. . . . He rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying, 'There is no God,' and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space, and they both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock" (207). Framed by speculations on finitude and groundlessness, like the groundlessness of the frame that Derrida describes, the arrival only seems secure; Woolf does not represent it. In the novel's last pages, Lily views them from the mainland while working on her painting of Mrs. Ramsay and says, "He must have reached it" (208). But the lighthouse "had become almost invisible, had melted away into a blue haze, and the effort of looking at it and the effort of thinking of him landing there, which both seemed to be one and the same effort, had stretched her body and mind to the utmost" (208). In the end, it seems, the Ramsays have neither reached the lighthouse nor failed to reach it; as soon as Mr. Ramsay springs onto the rock, we can't see them anymore. Woolf draws out the failure of the frame's supposed transcendentality: Mr. Ramsay stands as if there were no God, but only space, to stand on.
By placing in her mind the image of Mr. Ramsay landing and by looking from a distance, Lily is both near and far from from the mark. As the object of a journey, the truth of the lighthouse available to human subjectivity is not a matter of "either/or" but of "both/and." In Woolf's use of the word "effort" is the sense of something already past before it had seemed to arrive. This stretching of the body and mind to the utmost is seen in Lily's fatigue when she draws a line on her painting at the novel's end and achieves an aesthetic arrival that is at the same time infinitely remote: "She looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision" (209). It is only "as if" she "saw it clear" for a second. She draws a line in the center, delimiting a thing within a frame, a mark, no object or word, perhaps paint as thing. The moment causes her fatigue and her vision is immediately past before it had even seemed to have started. By painting a missing person, Lily demonstrates how mourning and representation are both founded upon a lack, and how both processes are a labor. The frame is work in that it works on things intrinsically unavailable to it: the thing itself.(4)
