"These Emotions of the Body": intercorporeal narrative in 'To the Lighthouse.' - book by Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1994 by Laura Doyle

Hence even those images which, for the characters, express their aloneness or distance from each other harbor within them that very physical world that nonetheless connects the characters to each other: the image of the table in the pear tree connects Woolf's two most "autonomous" characters, Lily and Mr. Ramsay. Lily thinks of Mr. Ramsay "through" the pear tree even if only to name or represent the distance between them. As in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, in Lily's world things such as tables and pear trees both mark and occupy, span and fill, open and displace, the distance between things or bodies. Analogously, on a structural level in the narrative, Woolf's narrator uses the objects on which the characters focus in common--such as the urn of geraniums or the break in the hedge--as vehicles for demarcating and connecting, for moving across the separateness between one consciousness and another and from one time frame to another. Objects in the world literally serve as the points of intersection carrying the narrator between character and character or past, present, and future. These points of intersection are also the sources of irony in the narrative. A few extended examples will serve to demonstrate that the objects in Woolf's fictional worlds bear all of these intercorporeal complexities.

Woolf's bodily oriented narrative maneuvers are fully dramatized in the well-known passage spelling out Lily's feelings for Mrs. Ramsay. In "The Window," as she stands before her canvas, Lily recalls one of her late-night conversations with Mrs. Ramsay. They are discussing marriage, and Lily urges "her own exemption from the universal law," until finally Mrs. Ramsay falls silent "with every trace of wilfulness abolished, and in its stead, something clear as the space which the clouds at last uncover--the little space of sky which sleeps beside the moon" (78). Here is an accepting space opened by the momentary communion of mother and other. It is, however, a space so fragile in this cloudy world with a silent moon that it leaves Lily unsatisfied. With her head in Mrs. Ramsay's lap, "close as she could get," she longs to enter more completely into Mrs. Ramsay's feelings. In the famous passage she pleads for the "device for becoming one with the object one adored." But on that night, of course, "Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing!"

And yet, as they stand on the lawn, something happens in the "present tense" of the text between Lily and William Bankes. Even as Lily fails to enter Mrs. Ramsay's heart in this remembered moment, Bankes has been studying her painting and has entered hers in the present. Lily realizes suddenly that "it had been seen; it had been taken from her. This man had shared with her something profoundly intimate." Lily's immersion in this past memory and her despair about intimacy with Mrs. Ramsay leave her vulnerable to this sudden, unexpected intimacy with Bankes in the present. In a mirroring of Woolf's own narrative methods, Lily's "objet d'art" has been the vehicle of that transition. The narrative "joke" is on Lily, and Woolf has made this irony emerge from the collision of past reverie with present moment, a collision caused by the visible object (the painting) in the material world. Such effects in Woolf's text deserve special notice in light of Woolfian and feminist criticism that emphasizes the fusion of narrators with characters.(5) On the contrary, at least in Woolf's case the narrator stations herself between characters, within the materiality they share however unexpectedly or unwillingly, so as to capture the interdependent play of distance, difference, and dialogue.