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
One might say, even of this scrawl, not of that actual picture, perhaps, but of what it attempted, that it "remained for ever," she was going to say . . . when, looking at the picture, she was surprised to find that she could not see it. Her eyes were full of a hot liquid. . . . She addressed old Mr. Carmichael again. What was it then? What did it mean? Could things thrust up their hands and grip one . . . ? For one moment she felt if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable . . . then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape. (267-68)
As she did earlier, Lily appeals to the spatial and temporal dimensions of the present--"here, now on the lawn"--for an understanding of the past and its ability to act like the "things" that "thrust up their hands and grip one." At first, as earlier, "nothing happened," but in the next moment Lily feels stirred by "a sense of some one there, of Mrs. Ramsay, relieved for a moment of the weight the world had put on her, staying lightly by her side . . . raising to her forehead a wreath of white flowers" (269). With this inkling of a present past, of Mrs. Ramsay returned without her "willfulness" because she is "relieved for a moment of the weight the world had put on her," Lily pauses in her rhythm of painting and walks out to look at the bay -- "moved as she was by some instinctive need of distance and blue" (270).
In creating her painting, Lily paces the space between the bay and her easel, creating a measure of distance that will enable her to fill in, on her own terms, the space in her painting: to see Mr. Ramsay's boat as one among others and make her own separate voyage out. Like the "space" of sky beside the moon which the absence of Mrs. Ramsay's willfulness earlier made accessible for a moment, so this return, provoked by Lily's painting, of an unwillful Mrs. Ramsay, makes possible Lily's filling in of the "glaring" space in her picture.
Lily repeatedly comments on the "extraordinary power" (279) of distance: "So much depends, she thought, upon distance: whether people are near or far from us; for her feeling for Mr. Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay" (284). Her involvement with Mr. Ramsay is changed but not dissolved by distance. As far as he might go, the distance always spins out her feelings for him and those feelings exert their pressure on what she creates. In other words, it is not the case that distance, of time or of space, drains away the power of feeling, but rather that the spaces and objects filling the distance define the contours of our "bodily emotions." Distance is the space between us opened not only by the three-dimensionality of our world but also by our movement through time into the future, a movement in turn guided and sustained by the objects that endure in the future. In grappling with these meanings of temporality and spatiality, Lily finally reflects on how "one glided, one shook one's sails (there was a good deal of movement in the bay, boats were starting off) between things, beyond things. Empty it was not, but full to the brim" (285). Likewise does Cam comment on the power and fullness of distance (272); and the very overlap of Cam's and Lily's reciprocal distances suggests that distance is the space "in between" two bodies, which arises out of those bodies' positions in the world, and allows them to move forward into a future which both "carries on" the struggles and keeps open the possibility of transforming those struggles. The "distance" between is thus the "half-transparent envelope" which "holds the whole," a distance across which things manifest their co-adaptation to each other. Distance is the net of intimacy, thrown wide. It is the space of imagination, of "nonsense," of the leap "from the pinnacle of a tower into the air" (268), into the world of the other: onto the shore of the lighthouse island.
