The housemaid and the kitchen table: incorporating the frame in 'To the Lighthouse.' - book by Virginia Woolf

William R. Handley

One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth. Down there I cant write or read; I exist however. I am. Then I ask myself what I am? . . .

It is not oneself but something in the universe that one's left with. . . . One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none I think. . . . I used to feel this as a child--couldn't step across a puddle once I remember, for thinking, how strange--what am I &c. But by writing I don't reach anything.

(Virginia Woolf, Diary 3: 112-13)

The story is that Thales, while occupied in studying the heavens above and looking up, fell into a well. A good-looking and whimsical maid from Thrace laughed at him and told him that while he might passionately want to know all things in the universe, the things in front of his very nose and feet were unseen by him. This jest also fits all those who become involved in philosophy.

(Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 3)

In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse James Ramsay tries to illustrate his father's philosophical concerns about "subject, object, and the nature of reality" for the artist Lily Briscoe: "'Think of a kitchen table then,' he told her, 'when you're not there'" (23). Lily imagines that "thinking, night after night . . . about the reality of kitchen tables" makes Mr. Ramsay's face what it is (154). It would seem that Woolf, like Plato's maid in Heidegger's transcription, is laughing in To the Lighthouse at Mr. Ramsay as a philosopher who cannot see the objects in front of him, paradoxically including his wife, who, although she is a being and not a thing, is often perceived more in her "objective" beauty than as a subject. To Mrs. Ramsay her husband sometimes seemed as if he were "born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle's. . . . But did he notice the flowers? No. . . . Did he even notice . . . whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef? He would sit at a table with them like a person in a dream" (70). Woolf and Lily want to incorporate what Mr. Ramsay's view leaves out, yet they are each in the position both of Plato's maid and of the philosopher, laughing at the blindly judgmental subject-object philosopher but in danger of falling into that well in their comparable attempts to know and represent the whole "truth" of things or people, burdened by their frames' limits and not blessed with fifty eyes.

While Woolf's eagle eye looks energetically in "Time Passes" at things in the Ramsay household when no one is there--things that no human being can know in their "thingness"--her eye seems weak in this section when she looks at working-class women, ordinary people whom Woolf often seems as deaf and blind to as Mr. Ramsay is to the food on his plate. Though we are not given to see it, the Great War, like Mrs. Ramsay's death, also slices through this section, disrupting briefly but starkly the ruminative flow of some of Woolf's most poetic writing. Given that Woolf's universe is insistently relational, "Time Passes," and the first and last sections that it bridges, pointedly challenge the reader to weave together Woolf's philosophy, art, and politics, especially since that section disturbingly does not represent what are for the novel's domestic narrative as for Woolf's life arguably its most significant events: the death of the mother and the Great War. Yet through her mourning of Mrs. Ramsay and her attempt to represent and incorporate Mrs. Ramsay's presence as well as her absence, Lily encounters things that remain from Mrs. Ramsay's life, things through which Lily approaches the problem of the thing itself. The thing-in-itself knows no frame and cannot be incorporated into any social, aesthetic, political, or at all human perceptual context without losing its "thingness." For this reason, paradoxically, the philosophical problem of the thing itself--bottomless though it is--provides a sufficiently broad frame through which to interpret the relationships among Woolf's contexts and concerns in To the Lighthouse.

By reading Woolf's economic distance from the servant Mrs. McNab in the light of her aesthetic struggle, like Lily's, to get near to "the thing itself," this paper argues that these two epistemological gulfs are related in Woolf's novel through the problem of the frame or of judgment. The frame helps us to interpret not only the relation between these economic and philosophical gulfs, but also their relation to the problem of violence and war. While the cognitive or aesthetic operation of framing and the act of war are obviously not the same, they exist for Woolf on a continuum made logical and compelling by the assumption that one's view can be universalized, a view that Woolf's art reveals as a false, distorting, and potentially violent construct.(1) Throughout her work, especially after Jacob's Room, Woolf is suspicious of all forms of objectification, especially of the manner in which human subjects frame other subjects as objects for political ends. These epistemological and political problems are frequently organized and dramatized in Woolf's work around point of view. To the Lighthouse attempts to incorporate disparate aspects of human existence -- from the politics of class and gender to phenomenology -- within a vast, nontotalizing weave of alternating points of view, a textual economy of incorporating and incorporated frames. By framing the act of framing, and by creating a dialogue among various frames of judgment or perception, Woolf aims to deconstruct traditional and presumptively natural or universally determining frames, be they social or aesthetic. Only by revealing these frames as reifications of relative, nonuniversal presumptions, her novel suggests, can a society begin to approach the problem of war. Throughout her life's work, Woolf wants to reveal constructively and optimistically what war reveals destructively and negatively: the mutability of the socially and politically given. She does so by calling into question, through her alternating and mutually determining points of view, any perspective that excludes an awareness of the exclusion inherent in the incorporating operation of its own frame. While Lily's desire to approach the thing itself is like Mr. Ramsay's philosophical concern, Lily, unlike Mr. Ramsay, is aware of the limits of her own eyes. Minta's song, "Damn your eyes," suggests the precariously enabled limit of any one person's judgment: the other's gaze.

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.

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,"

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.

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.

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.

Woolf's sardonic repetition of the word "naturally" betrays how the philosopher's presumedly "natural" frame is precisely not natural but constructed. Charles Tansley exemplifies this blindness and naturalizes his beautiful picture of Mrs. Ramsay, in whose eyes he sees stars and with whom "he felt the wind and the cyclamen and the violets for he was walking with a beautiful woman." Charles Tansley sees Mrs. Ramsay as she "stood quite motionless for a moment against a picture of Queen Victoria wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter; when all at once he realised it was this:--she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen" (14). Framed by a framed image of the decorated queen, whose ribbon represents the highest order of British knighthood, Mrs. Ramsay is frozen within the hierarchy of values her Victorian beauty implies. Tansley later feels "an extraordinary pride" (14) as men stop and look at her. But while he feels privileged to be so framed, it is he who is framing Mrs. Ramsay as a beautiful, decorative object he can get a hold on in order to elevate his pride. In contrast to the singularity of the male gaze that sees Mrs. Ramsay as beautiful for its own purposes, Lily thinks, "Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with. . . . Among them, must be one that was stone blind to her beauty" (198). To be blind to Mrs. Ramsay's "natural" feminine beauty would be to see what masculinist assumptions frame the category of beauty and for what purposes. The male gaze frames not only Mrs. Ramsay but also her view of the beautiful, determining in advance an aesthetic judgment about nature that seems as natural as the scene itself. Surveying with Tansley an expanse of ocean, Mrs. Ramsay "could not help exclaiming, 'Oh, how beautiful!' For the great plateful of blue water was before her. . . . That was the view, she said, . . . that her husband loved" (12). To be blind to Mrs. Ramsay's beauty is to begin to denaturalize it, to see how her beauty participates in the masculinist gaze that constructs both how she is seen and how she sees, a gaze that is both within and without her.

In The Truth in Painting, a reading of Kant's Critique of judgment, Jacques Derrida observes the quality of the frame that is both without and with the portrait at the same time, insufficient to the thing it represents but constitutive of that representation. To efface the frame's effects, Derrida argues, is to presume the possibility -- and desirability -- of transcending the frame:

A frame is essentially constructed and therefore fragile: such would be the essence or truth of the frame. If it had any. But this "truth" can no longer be a "truth," it no more defines the transcendentality than it does the accidentality of the frame. . . . Philosophy wants to arraign it and can't manage. But what has produced and manipulated the frame puts everything to work in order to efface the frame effect, most often by naturalizing it to infinity, in the hands of God (one can verify this in Kant). Deconstruction must neither reframe nor dream of the pure and simple absence of the frame. (73)

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)

By the end of the novel, nothing seems to have been done with this question of the thing itself, which Lily sees as her "problem":

She must try to get hold of something that evaded her. It evaded her when she thought of Mrs. Ramsay; it evaded her now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything. (193)

Lily cannot get hold of the thing if it has already been made a "jar on the nerves," if it has already been made aesthetic. How does one hold on to something, touch something, without feeling it? "Aesthetic," it is worth noting, derives from the Greek for "perceptible by the senses." This is one way of defining "feeling," which derives from Old High German and Old High Norse "to grope" and from the Latin for "palm." "As we ask 'What is a thing?'" Heidegger writes, "we now mean the things around us. We take in view what is most immediate, most capable of being grasped by the hand" (What Is 7) But something, even if our own skin, mediates between us and immediate things. Heidegger uses a piece of chalk as an example of a specific thing we can take in hand but not know intrinsically either through eliminating frames or rearranging them. When he wants to understand the thingness of the chalk, Heidegger observes that "The moment we wanted to open the chalk by breaking it, to grasp the interior, it had enclosed itself again" (19).

The elusiveness of the thing itself is for Lily closely aligned with her impossible yet necessary mourning of Mrs. Ramsay. The Thing in its psychoanalytic sense is that nonrepresentable, elusive sense of completeness formed retroactively within language after the subject's separation from the mother; the Thing is necessarily lost so that the subject, separated from the object, might become a speaking being (Kristeva 145). Lily ultimately identifies with the severance that actuated her desires, but before she paints that mark on her painting into which the frame folds identity and difference, she desires a unity with the lost maternal Thing. Leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay's knee, touching the living object of her painting, Lily wonders, "What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? . . . Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! as she leant her head against Mrs. Ramsay's knee" (51). "Jar" resonates with that "jar on the nerves;" the jar is a thing that holds the representation of this unattained unity between Lily and Mrs. Ramsay. Heidegger ruminates in "The Thing" that unity with the thingness of a jug can only be accomplished through libation, a gift and sacrifice. Lily knows unity with Mrs. Ramsay when her life is sacrificed; the Boeuf en Daube scene can be read as a Last Supper in which her memory will be insured. Lily's art is her own offering toward this unity in the labor of mourning and representation. The gift of her outpouring -- the waters in the jar -- would seek to stay mortality by entering the interior of a thing, creating a Heideggerian "onefoldness" in which there is no interiority or exteriority by virtue of the pouring. Unlike Heidegger's piece of chalk, whose interior encloses on itself, the jug or jar as a vessel does not stand forth or over against as an object. Heidegger writes, "The vessel's thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds" (Poetry 169).

Only with the absence of Mrs. Ramsay, suggested by the empty holding arms of Mr. Ramsay, does Lily manage to represent her not as an object or being, but with a line that holds her painting together. Once she is no longer available to phenomenal experience, what remains from Mrs. Ramsay's being or presence is simply the thing as thing, or the jar known only through its being as vessel. Only through her encounter with the empty chair that remains when Mrs. Ramsay dies can Lily approach things. The thing is encountered through mourning and severance, through the interiorization of an other who has left things behind, things that cannot be incorporated, simply, in the mourning process:

One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table. . . . "Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!" she cried, feeling the old horror come back -- to want and want and not to have. Could she inflict that still? And then, quietly, as if she refrained, that too became part of ordinary experience, was on a level with the chair, with the table. Mrs. Ramsay . . . sat there quite simply, in the chair. (202)

To see Mrs. Ramsay is paradoxically to see everything apparently extrinsic to her, to know her in her social and domestic situation. To know Mrs. Ramsay's presence on the level of ordinary experience it is necessary to encounter those things that Victorian experience left out as unimportant in framing its version of feminine identity. A woman artist's modernist understanding of that world is possible only through its passing; like Mrs. Ramsay herself, that world dies when one is not looking, and yet one can see it, especially its humanity, only in its absence. Lily has seen Mrs. Ramsay in the chair that held her, on the level of ordinary experience, through the fact of her severance from it.

Woolf suggests the sacrificial violence that this female phantom exacted on Victorian women and on the woman artist severed from that world in "Professions for Women," her address to the Women's Service League, in which she describes the Angel in the House as a woman who "sacrificed herself daily" (Death 237). Woolf stresses repeatedly the necessity to kill this unselfish, sympathetic phantom in order for a woman to write. "I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me" (237-38). Woolf's angel is a vessel with no "mind or wish of her own" who "preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others" (237). Phyllis Rose points out that, as the Victorian angel in the house, a woman was expected "to live out an imitation of Christ, sacrificing her own desires to the needs of her husband and children" (157). Woolf describes in "Professions for Women" how the Angel in the House left herself out in the cold and took in what others did not incorporate: "If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught, she sat in it" (237).

Woolf's work of incorporating the memory of her mother in order to lay it to rest, of making it extrinsic to herself by making it intrinsic to her art, involves a sacrificial violence witnessed at Mrs. Ramsay's dinner. Lily feels Mrs. Ramsay "somehow laughed, led her victims [Paul and Minta] to the altar" (101) of marriage that she worships and to the altar of the dinner table itself. The Boeuf en Daube dinner is Mrs. Ramsay's attempt, both metaphorically and literally, to have everyone incorporate and reproduce the frame of her own life, especially by "framing" Paul and Minta into marrying. Given that eating is the most graphic sign of incorporation, Woolf's framing of a world within the parameters of a dinner table is one of the novel's most compelling achievements. The frame eats, one could say, at the thingness of the thing; it violates, digests, assimilates, and interiorizes it. Depending on which stage of the eating process is framed, the eaten or incorporated thing transverses every category of being and disrupts the philosopher's subject-object dyad. Mr. Ramsay cannot talk about or even see the food on the table that he contemplates -- although, as Leslie Stephen's biographer points out, Mr. Ramsay flings a bowl through the window at breakfast when he notices there is an earwig in the milk (Annan 126). Whereas Mrs. Ramsay wants others to incorporate her frame through reproduction, Mr. Ramsay cannot stomach any consumption but his own. Old Augustus asks for another bowl of soup at the dinner table and Mr. Ramsay signals to his wife that "it was unthinkable, destestable . . . he loathed people eating when he had finished. She saw his anger fly like a pack of hounds into his eyes, his brow, and she knew that in a moment something violent would explode" (95). Mr. Ramsay's violent repulsion toward particular acts of incorporation and toward eating beings is nevertheless inevitably a desire to include those other subjects only by devouring them as objects. In "The Lighthouse" Lily thinks that "now he had nobody to talk to about that table . . . and he was like a lion seeking whom he could devour" (156).

The naturalized frames of domesticity and social arrangement efface their own incorporating economies and determinations. Though their violence can seem naturally ever-inclusive in "Time Passes," both nature and culture in that section ultimately swallow, devour, and violate the boundaries of the home. Woolf suggests the effective limits of this desire to coerce or even devour other beings through Lily's impossible mourning of Mrs. Ramsay, a mourning that would seek to violate both nature and the culturally produced distance between the name and the named. Lily imagines that if she and Mr. Carmichael demanded aloud why life is so short and "said it with violence . . . then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. 'Mrs. Ramsay!' she said aloud, 'Mrs. Ramsay!'" But no one, nothing answers; "nothing happened" (180). By calling the dead, by encountering nobody and nothing, Lily fills her mouth with the words that name the absence she mourns; the name in her mouth suggests her desire to incorporate Mrs. Ramsay. The impossible and violent call finds no answer in the intractability of things that make the call possible, that free the name as a name, severed from that which it insufficiently represents even when its referent is living. The call is as insufficient a means to incorporate the mourned and named as the name is insufficient to the being it marks. Yet the name and the call make possible the work of mourning and the labor of Woolf's art. Woolf denaturalizes rather than effaces the basic frame of her own art: language. The name that lacks what it names, like mourning itself, is both necessary and yet impossible in its task of signification.

In contrast to this violation of language, physical violence is unnecessary, is possible, and silences speech. Immediately following Lily's mourning call, Woolf inserts a bracketed passage: "[Macalister's boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still) was thrown back into the sea]" (180). Woolf's image suggests how the flesh left over is the thing that it is possible and impossible to eat: its own kind; on this small scale, the result is suicide. If we think of the upper classes as feeding on the labor of the lower classes, we find a special irony in the Ramsays' bringing sandwiches to the lighthouse keeper's family. Given the fact, too, that Macalister and his boy work to bring the Ramsays to that lighthouse, the orthographic similarity between "Macalister" and the mackerel obliquely suggests that those left out of the body politic, like the piece of fish, are used to feed their own kind. By having Mrs. Ramsay read James "The Fisherman and His Wife," in which the wife uses a magic fish to dominate others, Woolf adds to the nexus of social and political meanings involved in this odd, starkly bracketed fishing incident. The scene's importance is also suggested by Woolf's early idea about the novel: "But the centre is father's character, sitting in a boat, reciting, We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel" (Diary 3: 18-19).

Woolf's "philosophy" frames an economy in which things get both eaten and made; it is suggestive, in this light, that the image of the kitchen table chosen to represent Mr. Ramsay's philosophy is inseparable from the frames of class and gender that determine who eats, who cooks, and who gets "eaten." Woolf represents coextensively the Ramsays' epistemological and economic distance from the lighthouse and the lighthouse keeper's family, or Mr. Ramsay's distance from the kitchen table, in order to frame the interrelated issues of class and gender that both make possible and limit Woolf's own vision. Woolf frames Mr. Ramsay's philosophy -- and her own art -- by the working classes whom the family is fed by but excludes from the dinner table. Whenever Lily thinks of Mr. Ramsay's philosophical work, "she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew's doing. She asked him what his father's books were about." Andrew offers the digest already cited: "'Subject and object and the nature of reality.' . . . And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant. 'Think of a kitchen table then,' he told her, 'when you're not there.'" Lily does work on this elusive table early in the novel and brings it within the subjective grasp of understanding:

So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsay's work, a scrubbed kitchen table. It lodged now m the fork of a pear tree. . . . And with a painful effort of concentration, she focused her mind . . . upon a phantom kitchen table, one of those scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to have been laid bare by years of muscular integrity, which stuck there, its four legs in air. (23)

While Mr. Ramsay's table is presumably -- within Woolf's frame -- dissociated from the labor conventionally done on it by women, Lily's is a "scrubbed" table to which much work has been done. The moment Lily starts to think of Mr. Ramsay's philosophy, representation has already done tiring work on it. But the table that the philosopher writes on has lost its ground when Lily places it in her artistic mind; no longer is it an object as the "subject" of subject-object philosophy but rather a thing with legs that have no purpose, an absurd phantom that laughs in a pear tree. The philosopher cannot write "on" the table impossibly lodged there, its legs in air.

Mr. Ramsay's subject-object philosophy cognitively feeds on that kitchen table and Lily feeds on it in representing his philosophy. In the domestic economy of the Ramsay household, we might say that Mr. Ramsay's philosophy puts food on that kitchen table. But who really puts the food on the table in the Boeuf en Daube scene? Although it is her offering, Mrs. Ramsay does not cook the food, since this is an upper-middle-class household. She does call everyone "authoritatively" to the meal she has organized, such that all those in the house "must leave all that," all that they are doing, "and the little odds and ends on their washing-tables" to assemble around the dining table (82). Her meal thus works on everyone as a frame works on what it encloses, or as the pot works on the braised beef "en Daube." A domestic servant works to cook the meal that Mr. Ramsay's philosophy helps to pay for just as it pays for the cooking. And those who eat the "scimitar shapes" of meat must do as Mrs. Ramsay wishes; they owe an unspoken debt to her, whose offering, within this late Victorian household, returns the debt to Mr. Ramsay's subject-object philosophy.(5) The economy of the dinner seems neatly enclosed; there do not seem to be any immediate left-overs or remains. Nothing is wasted -- or so it seems until time goes to work in "Time Passes" and the entire house consists of remains. The company expostulates to Mrs. Ramsay on her grandmother's French recipe:

Of course it was French. What passes for cookery in England is an abomination (they agreed). . . . It is cutting off the delicious skins of vegetables. "In which," said Mr. Bankes, "all the virtue of the vegetable is contained." And the waste, said Mrs. Ramsay. A whole French family could live on what an English cook throws away. (100-01)

The rest of the vegetable that English cooks throw away as unimportant -- the outer edges -- is the most important part of the vegetable for Bankes; the extrinsic is the location of intrinsic virtue. Mr. Bankes knows the value of waste. His name and desired presence at the table suggest that the domestic economy of the Ramsay household is spare enough not to suffer any debts; the rest is reinvested, reproduced.

Woolf's seemingly slight discussion about English and French cuisine states that beyond the borders of England, in France, whole families can live on what England leaves out. It is important to note that in the pastoral soil of France will be buried during the years of "Time Passes" the remains of hundreds of thousands of young English men. This fact, suggesting that Mrs. Ramsay's domestic economy is inseparable from the economy of war, lies beyond the frame of Woolf's domestic portrait and is yet intrinsic, like the frame itself, to her subject, not simply in the fact that Andrew Ramsay is killed in the war in France, but in the way in which the war's terrible waste frames Woolf's modernist critique of the social and political traditions that allowed for mass violence. Manuscript evidence suggests that Woolf cut out many allusions to the war, especially in "Time Passes," such that war seems to be the cause of all the waste in the empty house, the real subject of this section haunted by things left behind.(6) By cutting many of them out, Woolf heightens the sense in which the conventionally delineated external and internal are implicated in each other. Lyndall Gordon has argued that in "Time Passes" "what is left out -- blurred emotions, battles, gore, and political justification -- is by that deliberate omission acutely judged" (161). Such a method is consonant with Woolf's view of history, especially in A Room of One's Own, Orlando, The Years, and Between the Acts. Rather than consisting in the lives of great men, Woolf's view heightens what is left out by traditional patriarchal frames in order to show both the limits of masculinist understanding and the ways in which such categorizing judgments about human value are implicated in the most destructive forms of masculine violence.

The Boeuf en Daube scene is a framing device not only for the domestic economy but for the economy of international violence that ensues during "Time Passes." As Woolf makes clear in Three Guineas, which disturbed readers at the time by its suggestion that English domestic patriarchy and German fascism are related, one cannot simply cut off the seemingly most insignificant domestic acts from the most consequential historical events; the public and the private are not simply external to each other. At this dinner Mrs. Ramsay has succeeded in getting Paul and Minta to marry, to reproduce: "always she got her own way in the end, Lily thought," and "having brought it all about, somehow laughed" (101). Lily contrasts this "abundance" in Mrs. Ramsay with her own "poverty of spirit" and feels "left out" (101). Feeling "solitary," Lily turns to Paul and asks him when Minta lost her brooch. We learn that it was lost on the beach, apparently where they became engaged: something of value is separated from them at their union. Lily does not fit into Mrs. Ramsay's reproductive scheme, does not marry, and feels left out of the patriarchal household's economy, that which such a household cannot assimilate: an independent, working woman. As Woolf often observes, the Victorian household excluded the possibility of combining work and family life for women. If we look at the novel's structure and the schedule of her labor, "Time Passes" acts as a gestation period for Lily's work; in a historical sense, the war that occurs during that time pushed more women into the work force and furthered change in attitudes about women's roles. Just as Mrs. Ramsay's work, her Boeuf en Daube, takes three days, so does Lily's vision not arrive until the end of the novel's third section. But Lily, who often thinks that her work will remain unframed in the attic collecting dust, can accommodate the idea of waste that Mrs. Ramsay cannot incorporate in her need to foster a domestic economy of reproduction. That domestic economy is eventually destroyed, in part by the international forces that lie far beyond the dining table's edge, yet Mrs. Ramsay's humanity is preserved by Woolf's modernist vision, a vision made possible by the loss of this domestic world.

Mrs. Ramsay is the framer of the dinner scene, its artist. Framed, however, by the social world it feeds, her art is implicated in that world. Her relation to that world is thus precarious; if it changes, it will unravel her. This is perhaps the more symbolic cause of Mrs. Ramsay's death: the demise of the Victorian family. At the same time, Woolf implies that the death of the angel in the house, the embodiment of Victorian femininity, gave birth to a modernist, feminist vision. After the dinner is over, "directly [Mrs. Ramsay] went a sort of disintegration set in; they wavered about, went different ways" (112); things fall apart that were once held together by the decorative and decorous Victorian mother. Walking up the stairs, Mrs. Ramsay seems to perceive her life, her work, as a frame that cannot understand or alter its limiting dependence on determinations external to it:

She felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all that chatter, and pick out one particular thing; the thing that mattered; to detach it; separate it off; clean it of all the emotions and odds and ends of things, and so hold it before her, and bring it to the tribunal where, ranged about in conclave, sat the judges she had set up to decide these things. Is it good, is it bad, is it right or wrong? Where are we all going to? and so on. So she righted herself after the shock of the event, and quite unconsciously and incongruously, used the branches of the elm trees outside to help her to stabilise her position. Her world was changing: they were still. The event had given her a sense of movement. All must be in order. (112-13)

The thing that mattered, detached and separate, is subjected to an already determined tribunal of judges; as a result, it is no longer particular but subsumed in that conclave. The elm trees outside the house help Mrs. Ramsay to survive the shock of this momentary sensation that there is no independent thing, no independent form for her own life, detached from the judges who determine its value. That she uses the elm trees for the purpose of stability "unconsciously and incongruously" suggests an incipient capacity of her eyes to see the things that lie beyond her frame, to see how those things suggest the relativity and mutability of her domestic world.

But shortly after she has this shock and restoration, she thinks "how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven; and this, and this, and this, she thought, going upstairs, laughing, but affectionately, at the sofa on the landing (her mother's); at the rocking-chair (her father's); at the map of the Hebrides. All that would be revived again in the lives of Paul and Minta. . . . It was all one stream, and chairs, tables, maps, were hers, were theirs . . . and Paul and Minta would carry it on when she was dead" (113-14). The things she imagines will remain in the household are in fact not things in themselves but her things, their things, things framed by a map and a domestic life determined to perpetuate itself through property, marriage, and inheritance--though in "Time Passes" Paul and Minta's marriage falls apart. Mrs. Ramsay is too firmly woven into the aesthetic weave of the traditional patriarchal family truly to detach anything that might bring to her an effectual realization of the externally determined, limited, and fragile frame of her life. Yet her problem, like Lily's, like Mr. Ramsay's, like Plato's laughing maid's, is also to understand the things in front of her that make her laugh "affectionately." Her embrace weaves these things she stands over into the given pattern in order to steady her precarious stand on the top of her home's stairs.

Mrs. Ramsay, of course, is the first fatality in this novel, along with her domestic economy. Her death is followed in the "Time Passes" section by her daughter Prue's during childbirth and her son's in the Great War. These deaths and other brief passages are included but pointedly excluded in "Time Passes" by means of their enclosure in brackets. All the framed, bracketed passages in "Time Passes" share associations with patriarchally instituted or regulated social modes and practices. The sharply abrupt brackets suggest typographically the violent ways in which masculine social forces frame what these sentences describe in their attempts to limit lives. The typographical frames cut off these passages from longer descriptions of the way time nibbles at the coast in the Hebrides, on the outer extremities of the British Isles. Just as representation, like mourning, is a process, the passing of time changes things, or as Heidegger writes, "That things are changing in the passing of time is not to be denied. But did anyone ever observe how time nibbles at things, that is generally speaking, how time goes to work on things?" (What Is 22). The only people who work on things in "Time Passes" and who witness change, the house servants Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast, are permanently excluded from upper-middle-class life. Mrs. McNab passes "aimlessly smiling" and singing a gay tune with a voice "robbed of meaning . . . like the voice of witlessness, humour, persistency itself" among the things "people had shed and left--a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes" (129). That Woolf's portrait of Mrs. McNab is framed by Woolf's own class position is not to be denied, but one wonders: what is she doing on the scene? Why, in the midst of tragic events in the Ramsay household that we never witness, does Woolf want us to see instead the jocund and witless domestic servant she clearly does not understand? In "Time Passes" Woolf begins to unhinge the domestic economy she has framed. Here Woolf reveals obliquely the waste of war and its relation to this Victorian home precisely by framing those things that elude philosophers and the working class that eludes the upper classes, including Woolf herself. Wolf reveals the limits of her own vision as a critique of judgment, especially of the kind of patriarchal judgment that violently separates and hierarchically structures human lives.

As Woolf well knew, her vision was shaped by the frames that shaped her. In an extended discussion of her relation to class and money, Alex Zwerdling observes that Woolf "stresses the experiential basis of the literary imagination and insists that its limits are determined by class identity" (117). In her narrative essay "Three Pictures," Woolf writes, "If my father was a blacksmith and yours was a peer of the realm, we must needs be pictures to each other" (Death 12). Woolf was clearly uncomfortable with these "screens" that "shut me out." She admonishes herself in her diary, after a summary judgment of two girls, to "have no screens, for screens are made out of our own integument; & get at the thing itself, which has nothing whatever in common with a screen. The screen making habit, though, is so universal, that probably it preserves our sanity. If we had not this device for shutting people off from our sympathies, we might, perhaps, dissolve utterly. Separateness would be impossible. But the screens are in the excess; not the sympathy" (Diary 3: 104). In "Time Passes" the people left out--or cut out--of the socially determining frame seem to have a less mediated or "screened" relationship to things than those who know these things as property and who know Mrs. McNab as their caretaker. Amid these things left behind walks the persistent maid who worries over them. Her "witlessness" would never grasp the problems of Mr. Ramsay's subject-object philosophy, and yet that philosophy cannot understand the kitchen table that stands under it, the table that Mrs. McNab (or many of those in her class), who works for the philosopher, sees every day in its dusty nakedness. While both Mrs. McNab and Mr. Ramsay "work" on the kitchen table, only Mr. Ramsay is subjected to it, haunted by it as a phantom.

The determining remains, the ghosts of things, become the subjects of the narrative in "Time Passes." Darkness causes these things to lose their phenomenality, such that they lose the spatial, external shape that allows a human being to identify them. Darkness, Woolf writes, "came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, 'This is he' or 'This is she.' Sometimes . . . somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness" (126). Like the kitchen table when no one is there, these things exist in their thingness beyond spatial and temporal categories without body or mind to identify or point--but only in the imagination of Woolf's language. As in Plato's story, there is always someone to point to the things in themselves, to laugh at the well of nothingness that lies beneath or just a step beyond the limits of language and perception. Like the storyteller Bernard in The Waves, art defeats itself in wanting to pull all things together, as if it had that transcendent, godlike power to give a meaning or truth to things that are not lent to human, mortal subjectivity: "But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth" (128).

Woolf approaches the things in an empty house at a time of mass destruction, and yet some critics of the novel have left out the war in their reading, failing to account for those myriad "whos" within this house of "whats" that they find it difficult to care for beyond the observation that no one is there. Mrs. McNab allows herself to pick flowers to take home with her, for

It was a pity to let them waste. Suppose the house were sold (she stood arms akimbo in front of the looking-glass) it would want seeing to--it would. There it had stood all these years without a soul in it. The books and things were mouldy, for, what with the war and help being hard to get, the house had not been cleaned as she could have wished. It was beyond one person's strength to get it straight now. (135)

The servant who does not sit down at the upper-middle-class dinner table, Mrs. McNab remains in the house that inheritance and philosophy paid for, as they pay for her. But with no one at home she has no great debt to pay and is well suited to have company with things and to care for them once the disruptive economy of waste and war makes help hard to get. "Time Passes" was written "in the gloom of the [General] Strike" (Letters 3: 374), proclaimed by the Trades Union Congress on the evening of May 2, 1926, in support of mine workers who had gone on strike the day before. In relation to "Time Passes," it is interesting that Woolf parenthetically comments in her diary that "(one of the curious effects of the Strike is that it is difficult to remember the day of the week)" (Diary 3: 77). The Woolfs were on the side of the strikers and the strike appears frequently in Virginia's diary; three days after it had begun, she expresses an interest in an exact record of it. But while Britain seemed to many on the brink of civil war, Woolf wanted a peaceful solution (Zwerdling 273). As she makes explicit a decade later in Three Guineas, the problem of war is indissociable from the economic and social status of women and the problem of private property. Patriarchy and capitalism are for Woolf the divisive framers of women's lives; her advice to women, disagreeable to most of her closest friends, is to resist uncompromisingly inclusion in either of those frames.

Throughout her work, and particularly in To the Lighthouse, what has often been called Woolf's "mysticism," but which could more accurately be labeled her philosophical concern about the thing itself, is an integral way of getting at the cognitive operations that stand under these more concretely political problems she wants to understand and criticize. The gulf between her own economic status that enabled and framed these visionary concerns and the plain facts of political and social life was for Woolf perpetually unsettling. Her task of describing the violence of the masculine frame without repeating it was made difficult by her own relation to that frame. The self-conscious gap between what her art sees and what it does not suggests a negative aesthetic that does not fall prey to the essentializing optimism of the Edwardian realists whose soulless house is trapped in the mimetic assumptions of the subject-object dyad. It is an interesting, if explicable, paradox that Woolf is praised for that self-conscious distance between her female personal narrator and Jacob Flanders in Jacob's Room, but criticized for her self-conscious distance from the lower classes. For better or worse, Woolf spoke for the daughters of educated men because she had been framed as such: even to speak universally for all women did not come naturally to her.

"The mystic, the visionary," Woolf writes, "walking the beach on a fine night, stirring a puddle, looking at a stone, asking themselves 'What am I,' 'What is this?' had suddenly an answer vouchsafed them: (they could not say what it was). . . . But Mrs. McNab continued to drink and gossip as before" (131). Woolf cut out passages in which the maids see Mrs. Ramsay and which suggest that although Mrs. McNab was "nothing but a mat for kings & kaisers to tread on," she "understood what, in moments of high great emotion great poets have said" (qtd. in Hussey 169-70). She may have made these cuts because of the implication that some surplus of vision is gained through women's subordination, even if the passages suggest more directly a contrast between female community and war. "Ask them what the war had been about--did they know?" Woolf writes in the holograph's margins next to a passage about women's labor (Hussey 172). Rather than completely romanticize the working woman's position, Woolf leaves the reader with the unresolved gap between the mystic's vision and Mrs. McNab's gossip, critically repeating the pointed epistemological gulf opened up by the category of class. The inability of the mystic to articulate an answer to her fundamental questions is contiguous with the class difference of the working woman. Despite the bond of gender, through which women can collectively laugh at the male gaze, Woolf suggests that women have yet to cross the gulf of class, a categorical gulf that is for Woolf implicated in and enforced by patriarchy.

So we might return to Heidegger's laughing housemaids, who haunt his exploration of the thing: "Where are we to get a foothold? The ground slips away under us. Perhaps we are already close to falling into the well. At any rate the housemaids are already laughing. And what if only we ourselves are these housemaids, i.e., if we have secretly discovered that all this talk of the 'this,' as well as similar discussions, is fantasy and empty!" (27) Plato's maid, significantly, is described by the philosopher as "good-looking," ambiguously (at best) suggesting her perceptiveness and yet, more to the point, a male gaze that frames her in advance as attractive decoration for its own (doubtful) purposes. The judgment that chases Lily is Charles Tansley's that "Women can't paint, can't write" (48). Although Tansley sees women, such as Mrs. Ramsay, as good-looking, he believes they are not good at looking; Woolf's work reveals what that male gaze does not see. For Woolf, given the historical status of women, their ontological no less than their economic and political status, the housemaid's perspective is not entirely a laughing matter. While women have long been aesthetically represented, Woolf suggests in her work, they have rarely been seen. Lily's fleeting vision of Mrs. Ramsay points toward that work of restitution.

NOTES

1 In interpreting Woolf's novel it is crucial to frame both the fact of physical violence and the potential for such violence inherent in any act of framing that simultaneously forms and deforms that which it contains and constitutes. To frame "violence" as only an act of physical aggression is to do a conceptual violence to the term and to exclude other forms of violence that may help illuminate the causes and nature of physical aggression.

2 In an unpublished manuscript Woolf describes her father Leslie Stephen as having "an impatient, limited mind; a conventional mind entirely accepting his own standard of what is honest, what is moral, without a shadow of a doubt accepting this is a good man; that is a good woman . . . obvious things to be destroyed--headed humbug; obvious things to be preserved--headed domestic virtues" (qtd. in Annan 133). Stephen's work on the Dictionary of National Biography is a suggestive counterpoint to Woolf's artistic project; the short thumbnail biography that sums up a life illustrates what Woolf's art refuses to do. Yet Woolf, not surprisingly, often represented her father's summary judgments, as in the quote above, in just such a dismissive, cursory way.

3 As much as they may suggest a Western fascination with exotic Orientalism, Lily's artistic "Chinese eyes" also suggest an art form radically different from spatially fixed Western frames. The Chinese landscape on a scroll is not experienced as bounded and circumscribed but is revealed to the viewer as a gradual process. Similarly, Lily's painting of Mrs. Ramsay develops over a ten-year period and is thus never seen as a single, isolatable entity.

4 The difference between Lily's painting of Mrs. Ramsay and her vision of the lighthouse is analogous to the difference between Kant's ideas of the beautiful and the sublime, Terry Eagleton's description of them would seem to explain how Lily's mind is stretched to the utmost in looking at the lighthouse and why she then finishes the painting of Mrs. Ramsay: "In the presence of beauty, we experience an exquisite sense of adaptation of the mind to reality; but in the turbulent presence of the sublime we are forcibly reminded of the limits of our dwarfish imaginations and admonished that the world as infinite totality is not ours to know. It is as though in the sublime the 'real' itself--the eternal, ungraspable totality of things--inscribes itself as the cautionary limit of all mere ideology, of all complacent subject-centredness, causing us to feel the pain of incompletion, and unassuaged desire" (89).

Eagleton, like Woolf, draws out the historically gendered quality of the beautiful and the sublime. Just as Mrs. Ramsay is beautiful, so is Mr. Carmichael and the nature of Mr. Ramsay's quest conceived as sublime. One could argue that Lily's aesthetic negotiates between these Kantian positions, collapsing them by the central, abstract mark in which the frame folds in on itself, like Heidegger's notion of the Rib, a tear or deft that allows the beautiful and the sublime to "take place" and that frames them as categories. Woolf's mystical vision of the "fin passing far out" that pierces the surface of the sea is like the mystically unplaceable, unrepresentable thing as understood in both phenomenology and Lacanian psychoanalysis that disrupts metaphysical hierarchies of subject/object, identity/difference, either/or, inclusion/exclusion, etc., and that de-reifies the object. ("What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none I think" writes Woolf in her diary about the fin.) Not only is Lily's final mark (conventionally) nonrepresentational, but her paintings will, she thinks, find no place, become no one's possession, go unseen.

The mise en abime of the central brackets of Mr. Ramsay's arms enfolding nothingness in a dark corridor is arguably the place in the novel, like the mark on Lily's painting, in which the thing--or the dark core of Mrs. Ramsay--escapes any objectified place and the outer limits of representation fold back into the inside of the frame.

5 Woolf imagistically weaves Victorian domesticity, war, and Mr. Ramsay's judgments into one economy through her repetition of the "scimitar" shape that characterizes the beef. Recalling the stillness of the nights of his childhood and the things in the kitchen, James thinks in "The Lighthouse" that "something flourished up in the air, something arid and sharp descended even there, like a blade, a scimitar, smiting through the leaves and flowers even of that happy world and making it shrivel and fall. 'It will rain,' he remembered his father saying. 'You won't be able to go to the Lighthouse'" (185-86). In "Time Passes" Mrs. Bast's son is seen scything in the yard. In the holograph of the novel, the scimitar-shaped scythe "laid low the wilderness" and "advanced like the sweep of an invincible army" (183.05, 183.11).

6 James Haule, in "To the Lighthouse and the Great War: The Evidence of Virginia Woolf's Revisions of 'Time Passes,'" demonstrates, for example, that the forces of night are clearly identified in the holograph with military deception and intrigue: "the work of spies, detached from army to bring news of the enemies disposition, where to attack" (Hussey 168). Next to her line in the holograph "Nothing stirred in the drawing room, or in the dining room," Woolf compares in her margins the forces of destruction to "the mindless warfare, the soulless bludgeoning" (167).

A shorter version of this paper appears in Vara Neverow-Turk and Mark Hussey, eds., Virginia Woolf: Themes and Variations. Selected Papers from the Second Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf: New York: Pace UP, 1993. I would like to thank Calvin Bedient, Jacques Derrida, Vincent Pecora, David Phillips, and Ruth Yeazell for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper; they are, however, in no way responsible for its errors.

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