Featured White Papers
- Hosted CRM buyer's guide (Inside CRM)
- Enterprise PBX buyer's guide (VoIP-News)
- Aug. 13th: Saving Time, Money & the Environment with Web Conferencing (BNET)
Content provided in partnership with
"These Emotions of the Body": intercorporeal narrative in 'To the Lighthouse.' - book by Virginia Woolf
Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1994 by Laura Doyle
Additionally, Woolf pushes her narrative yet another step beyond the metaphysical hierarchies of patriarchal language when she makes words themselves act as objects in the world. Words are not simply names for things that fix those things within a logical system, or even that sacrifice those things to the coded system. Words are themselves things, as palpable and as open to material struggle as things themselves. In To the Lighthouse, as in Merleau-Ponty's writings and as North feels it in The Years, "The words going out into the room seemed like actual presences" (339). Language often serves in Woolf's fiction not to remove us from "reality" but to extend and multiply the intersections of corporeality. For example, Mr. Ramsay's repeated exclamation, "Some one had blundered," at different moments interrupts the thoughts of Mrs. Ramsay, Lily, and Bankes; but by the same token it makes felt the auditory space they share and draws them each out of their musings into physical consciousness of one another. Furthermore, it binds together separate moments in the text so that on this narrative level words again serve as concrete instruments of coherence. Mr. Ramsay's words become a physical presence to which Lily and Bankes respond. Woolf uses this technique again and again, as in the dialogue about the weather or the phrases of the fairy tale which surface now and then. These phrases serve as "objects" heard in common by the characters which externalize, ironize, and move forward the "struggles" not only between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay but between this text and the romantic narrative traditions it transforms.
Like material objects, these phrases also serve as points at which past, present, and future converge to reveal ironies in the characters' connections and, more broadly, to raise the issue of how the interactions of time and space, solidity and flux, order our existences. First of all, as we saw with objects like Lily's painting, they draw the characters and especially the reader back from the past into which the characters' thought has plunged, resituate them in the present of the text and the world, and therein reorient them to the future toward which both text and world are moving. Just as the characters will "come back to this night; this moon; this house" so too is the reader made to "come back" to the narrative present through these spoken phrases that operate as our main points of orientation in the text. Thus when Mrs. Ramsay says irritably "It's too short" as she ends her silent recollection of the Swiss maid's dying father (45), this phrase not only carries the narrator from "inner" to "outer" worlds by referring to both "life" and the brown stocking; nor does it only act as an object by intruding into James's world with its impatient tone; it also strenuously pulls the reader out of Mrs. Ramsay's past reverie and into the present moment in which she measures the stocking against James's leg as well as propelling us forward toward the end of Mrs. Ramsay's "too short" life.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Business
- Academy of Marketing Science Review
- Accounting Historians Journal, The
- Accounting History
- AgExporter
- Agricultural Research
- Agricultural and Resource Economics Review
- Air Force Comptroller
- Air Safety Week
- Airline Industry Information
- American Demographics
- American Journal of Potato Research
- Architectural Review, The
- Asian Economic News
- Entrepreneur