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"These Emotions of the Body": intercorporeal narrative in 'To the Lighthouse.' - book by Virginia Woolf
Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1994 by Laura Doyle
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.
The ironies of this unexpected, even uncomfortable connection between Lily and Bankes are, moreover, doubled by the content of the object these two share. Lily's painting, her objective correlative of mother and child, provides the basis for an intimacy which surpasses that achieved by the traditional mother and child in a patriarchal culture, just as Woolf's story about a very traditional mother extends and radicalizes that which English narrative has been able to say about mothers and children, about self and other. Thus, through Lily, Woolf reveals the limits historically enclosing the mother even as she makes the mother the catalyst for Lily's surpassing of those limits.(6) Lily, too, now feels a hint of that incredibly complex "common feeling [that] held the whole."
And, thanking Mr. Ramsay for it and Mrs. Ramsay for it and the hour and the place, crediting the world with a power which she had not suspected--that one could walk away down that long gallery not alone any more but arm in arm with somebody--the strangest feeling in the world, and the most exhilarating--she nicked the catch of her paint-box to, more firmly than was necessary, and the nick seemed to surround in a circle forever the paint-box, the lawn, Mr. Bankes, and that wild villain, Cam, dashing past. (83)
Lily thanks the man and the woman, the problematic heterosexual pair that has nonetheless spawned the subject of her painting and, in turn, catalyzed her relationship with Bankes. And she also thanks "the hour and the place"--that is, the temporal and spatial realms structuring both the ironies and the intimacies of same-sex and mixed-sex intercorporeality. These elements define the "whole" or the "circle" surrounding the paint-box, the lawn, Mr. Bankes, and the dashing Cam. In a similar way, Woolf's narrative "nicks to" her character's dissonances and contradictions and makes inclusive the material atmosphere enclosing them.
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